We've been "using up the topsoil" for hundreds of years, thousands in Europe... I question what will happen when cheap phosphate is gone, but there will be "dirt farming" for some time to come, whether or not some of the output is used for fuel.
Personally, I thought the time to get off fossil fuel was when tar-sands became economically feasible, whether that's transition to sugar beets, rapeseed oils, or algae... We'd probably be best off developing a mix, instead of a single dominant tech selected based on current economics.
Well, what I read that I like is over 1000 gallons of ethanol produced per acre-year. Since my family ethanol/gasoline needs are approximately 1000 gallons per year, that means that even evil energy beet fuel production only needs one acre of farm land to produce our energy needs, half that if we update our vehicles to higher efficiency ones. This is, of course, ignoring the cost of production issues.
Now, with nearly 100 million families of four (equivalent, also consider that we might be below average in our fuel consumption) in the U.S. - 100 million acres is a lot of farmland - a bit over 10%, but it wouldn't be a bad transition from oil.
Maybe algae energy is better, certainly is if it can be done on marginal lands, but either way, I'm liking the biofuel implications here.
This is how they are trying to fix the gambling statutes... there's a "sweepstakes" loophole in most states' laws that these internet cafe' operations have used to end-run traditional gambling bans.
These places aren't about internet access at all, they are plain and simple gambling establishments.
If you want to legalize gambling, fine, do it. But, letting it happen this way just leads to sad little strip-mall locations where poor people gather to lose what little money they have in the name of "entertainment."
I've always though that plastics were a by-product of petroleum fuel - all this cheap plastic furniture is basically cast-off from the fractioning process, sure it could be used as fuel, but why not just sell it cheap to Little Tykes to make disposable backyard junk?
Ummmm.... the ocean is big, really big, and whatever water a major city needs is a small consideration compared to evaporation. You could tap a supply for all of south Florida from a single point and still dilute it to harmless levels just by mixing your 200% brine solution with 10 parts of straight seawater before discharge. I suspect industrial scale desalination would discharge much more dilute brine than 200%, unless they were attempting to also harvest sea salts, anyway...
When phones do cook and make your bed, you'll definitely want that too...
All I want is a decent smartphone with a battery life comparable to my "dumbphones" that I have been carrying for the last 7 years - I can charge on Sunday and go until Thursday with heavy (3 hours a day talktime) usage without needing a charge - they will go over a week with light talktime - and these "dumbphones" have video recorders, voice recognition, bluetooth, etc.
I did interview for a $60/hr work from home gig, but the competition is outrageous, and I see signs on the job boards that whoever they hired didn't last even a month.
It only makes sense that those with face-time with management would get preferential treatment and promotions.
However, if you've achieved a comfortable level in your career and just want to maintain that level for the next decade or two, who cares about promotions?
Normally, I would agree with the one good device trumps four pieces of junk approach, but in the case of 7" tablets, there's a great deal of power in junk. There are a lot of dedicated use scenarios (such as OP's music station) where a junker tablet will do that job quite well, and with the cash you saved from buying a "great" tablet, you can get a Kindle Fire HD for handheld media consumption - still not the ultimate tablet, but great at what it does, and I thought it was a pretty good buy at $249...
Totally concur with this... when you freelance, you're not just coding, you're the whole business, including marketing, sales, accounting, collections, spec capture, coding, testing, customer service, etc.
If you make $x/hr coding at your day job, you'll probably need to make $2x/hr for your coding time to cover all the other stuff doing little freelance jobs - if you're looking to make a similar overall hourly rate.
It can be a lot of fun, it can also help you appreciate all the stuff your day job does for you.
I thought I was going to hate the OS and want to cyanogen my KFHD, but I'm actually learning to accept and enjoy it - depends on what you use it for. For me, it's an alarm clock and web browser, with special focus on Gmail usage, sometimes to view security camera feeds, and occasionally play Angry Birds Rio.... I suppose if I were trying to make my tablet be all it can be, I'd be upset about the Amazon stranglehold on the OS, but it's not an issue for my use cases.
I have a 10" tablet (iPad) and I actually prefer the 8.9" form factor, it's easier to handle - 7" is even more convenient to carry, but around the house, 8.9" is my personal sweet spot - so, no bonus assigned for a bigger screen that makes the device unwieldy to use.
Resolution: do I really care if my tablet has more pixels than my 42" TV? Personally, 1920x1080 is good enough for me - and well worth having as compared to the first generation iPad, it is much easier to read.
$85 more? Well, let's just say I don't care about ads on my lock screen and compare $399 to the $249 I paid for my Kindle Fire HD on pre-Christmas sale. That's a 60% premium you're paying to get your software ecosystem of choice, and I'm willing to bet the Nexus device also has waiting list / delivery time issues that the Kindle does not.
Choice is the key here - I'm learning to love the Amazon ecosystem model, they're much better about auto-configuring the device than Apple has been: all my previously purchased apps were installed "out of the box," MP3s of my CD purchases instantly available for free. Yes, it ticks me off that they're always trying to sell me a TV show or movie for $3, or a book for $9 (where does that pricing model come from?), but mostly I find it easier to use than the iPad/iTunes model - does what I want without me burning a lot of time configuring it all.
Seems to me, if you want to spend a lot of your time to configure it all, you should be paying less for your device, not more, but that's just an opinion.
I unplugged from Cable TV 22 years ago, dropped the antenna 12 years ago, no ill effects. Similarly, cut the land-line phone about 5 years back.
Some people drop electricity, it's all a lifestyle choice, none of these things are truly necessities - your Great-great-great-grandparents and all of their ancestors for the 10,000 years before them didn't have any of these things, and yet they still managed to procreate.
-------
What if the hoky-poky really is what it's all about?
No job worth having will be threatened by this kind of thing.
On the other hand, I have seen "work from home" offers requiring a test to be executed and e-mailed in that would take several hours to complete, often using some esoteric knowledge not readily available in ordinary documentation. The one in particular I encountered came from the Philippines.
1. Overview
1.1 What is Menuet/CPP.
Menuet/CPP is the third generation in Graphical User Interface
packages from Autumn Hill Software. Menuet/CPP is implemented
in the C++ language which is clear and intuitive for GUI programming.
Many of the features included with Menuet/CPP are discussed in later
sections of this FAQ.
1.2 Version.
Autumn Hill is currently shipping version 2.0a of Menuet/CPP.
1.3 Supported Operating Systems.
Menuet/CPP supports MS-DOS 3.3, 5.0, and 6.0. Other versions of DOS such
as PC-DOS, DR-DOS, Novell DOS, and CompaqDOS may also work, but are not
explicitly supported by Autumn Hill Software.
1.4 Supported Graphics Packages.
Menuet/CPP supports several graphics packages for a wide variety of needs.
MetaWINDOW by Metagraphics Corporation, BGI from Borland International,
and the Microsoft Graphics Library are all supported. Section 1.5
lists the compatability between compiler, extenders, and these graphics
toolkits.
1.5 Supported Compilers and extenders.
See the file COMPILER.DOC for a description of supported compiler, extender,
and graphics package combinations.
1.6 Autumn Hill's development environments.
Autumn Hill prefers two development environments for Menuet/CPP.
The first includes the Borland C++ 3.1 compiler with all of the
graphics packages. The Borland compiler is an excellent compiler,
it is fast, creates compact code, and has the best debugger on the
market. The Zortech C++ 3.1 compiler with Flash Tek's X32-VM extender
is also used in development. The X32-VM is a
great extender, it is royalty free, and works well with the Zortech
compiler. Programming in protected mode is excellent for debugging
purposes since many "bugs" in programs can be found as they will cause
a program to crash when the "bugs" are encountered. For instance,
in real mode a reference outside of an array will return bogus
information. In protected mode a reference outside of an array will
cause a protection viloation and the program will halt at that point
of execution.
1.7 CUA compliancy.
IBM developed the Common User Access(CUA) paradigm to unify the many
user interfaces in the world. OS/2 and MS-Windows are the major
user interfaces that are CUA compiant. The full CUA documentation
sets are available through IBM. Most of Menuet/CPP is CUA compliant.
For instance, The ALT-F4 key combination will close a window. But
There is no idea of a currently active control that can be changed
by pressing the TAB key to move to the next control.
1.8 Memory requirements.
See the file MNSAMP1.DOC for a list of executable sizes for the "Hello,
World" example program.
Nothing forces anything - the non-license option is a more realistic embrace of "the way things are" than either closed, or FOSS.
Seriously, what percentage of FOSS using companies do you think actually comply with the license, anyway? I'm not saying they shouldn't bother, they definitely should, those were the terms and conditions of using the FOSS, but what if you just want to develop something and you don't care about putting the color of license on it - it can still be open source developed, and if someone wants to use it in their own way, they can without any problems about it. If they want to contribute back, or not, that's their choice.
So many FOSS projects lack the resources to enforce a license like GPL(x) that it makes a mockery of it.
You know, the main problem I see with calling it "government oversight" is the knee-jerk response from libertarian circles. Maybe we could call it "public oversight" or "transparency"?
Slashdot Mirror
>better educate people on budgeting, personal finance, and loan structure.
Some of these people know clearly what is happening, and yet they continue to put the screws to themselves by engaging with the sharks.
Take, for example, paying for healthcare insurance in the U.S.
We've been "using up the topsoil" for hundreds of years, thousands in Europe... I question what will happen when cheap phosphate is gone, but there will be "dirt farming" for some time to come, whether or not some of the output is used for fuel.
Personally, I thought the time to get off fossil fuel was when tar-sands became economically feasible, whether that's transition to sugar beets, rapeseed oils, or algae... We'd probably be best off developing a mix, instead of a single dominant tech selected based on current economics.
Well, what I read that I like is over 1000 gallons of ethanol produced per acre-year. Since my family ethanol/gasoline needs are approximately 1000 gallons per year, that means that even evil energy beet fuel production only needs one acre of farm land to produce our energy needs, half that if we update our vehicles to higher efficiency ones. This is, of course, ignoring the cost of production issues.
Now, with nearly 100 million families of four (equivalent, also consider that we might be below average in our fuel consumption) in the U.S. - 100 million acres is a lot of farmland - a bit over 10%, but it wouldn't be a bad transition from oil.
Maybe algae energy is better, certainly is if it can be done on marginal lands, but either way, I'm liking the biofuel implications here.
This is how they are trying to fix the gambling statutes... there's a "sweepstakes" loophole in most states' laws that these internet cafe' operations have used to end-run traditional gambling bans.
These places aren't about internet access at all, they are plain and simple gambling establishments.
If you want to legalize gambling, fine, do it. But, letting it happen this way just leads to sad little strip-mall locations where poor people gather to lose what little money they have in the name of "entertainment."
I've always though that plastics were a by-product of petroleum fuel - all this cheap plastic furniture is basically cast-off from the fractioning process, sure it could be used as fuel, but why not just sell it cheap to Little Tykes to make disposable backyard junk?
Ummmm.... the ocean is big, really big, and whatever water a major city needs is a small consideration compared to evaporation. You could tap a supply for all of south Florida from a single point and still dilute it to harmless levels just by mixing your 200% brine solution with 10 parts of straight seawater before discharge. I suspect industrial scale desalination would discharge much more dilute brine than 200%, unless they were attempting to also harvest sea salts, anyway...
Did you miss the part where they said this was at Oak Ridge?
I.E. bombs!
I.E. unlimted budget for better nukes now!
zactly! They probably forgot the lessons of excessive gold plating and just relearned them.
Your pocket isn't that big? Sounds like a personal problem. I can fit a 7" tablet in my pockets.
When phones do cook and make your bed, you'll definitely want that too...
All I want is a decent smartphone with a battery life comparable to my "dumbphones" that I have been carrying for the last 7 years - I can charge on Sunday and go until Thursday with heavy (3 hours a day talktime) usage without needing a charge - they will go over a week with light talktime - and these "dumbphones" have video recorders, voice recognition, bluetooth, etc.
Planet: I want to make more than $16 per hour.
I did interview for a $60/hr work from home gig, but the competition is outrageous, and I see signs on the job boards that whoever they hired didn't last even a month.
It only makes sense that those with face-time with management would get preferential treatment and promotions.
However, if you've achieved a comfortable level in your career and just want to maintain that level for the next decade or two, who cares about promotions?
Normally, I would agree with the one good device trumps four pieces of junk approach, but in the case of 7" tablets, there's a great deal of power in junk. There are a lot of dedicated use scenarios (such as OP's music station) where a junker tablet will do that job quite well, and with the cash you saved from buying a "great" tablet, you can get a Kindle Fire HD for handheld media consumption - still not the ultimate tablet, but great at what it does, and I thought it was a pretty good buy at $249...
I have a couple of these, they make great security camera monitors.
Totally concur with this... when you freelance, you're not just coding, you're the whole business, including marketing, sales, accounting, collections, spec capture, coding, testing, customer service, etc.
If you make $x/hr coding at your day job, you'll probably need to make $2x/hr for your coding time to cover all the other stuff doing little freelance jobs - if you're looking to make a similar overall hourly rate.
It can be a lot of fun, it can also help you appreciate all the stuff your day job does for you.
I thought I was going to hate the OS and want to cyanogen my KFHD, but I'm actually learning to accept and enjoy it - depends on what you use it for. For me, it's an alarm clock and web browser, with special focus on Gmail usage, sometimes to view security camera feeds, and occasionally play Angry Birds Rio.... I suppose if I were trying to make my tablet be all it can be, I'd be upset about the Amazon stranglehold on the OS, but it's not an issue for my use cases.
I have a 10" tablet (iPad) and I actually prefer the 8.9" form factor, it's easier to handle - 7" is even more convenient to carry, but around the house, 8.9" is my personal sweet spot - so, no bonus assigned for a bigger screen that makes the device unwieldy to use.
Resolution: do I really care if my tablet has more pixels than my 42" TV? Personally, 1920x1080 is good enough for me - and well worth having as compared to the first generation iPad, it is much easier to read.
$85 more? Well, let's just say I don't care about ads on my lock screen and compare $399 to the $249 I paid for my Kindle Fire HD on pre-Christmas sale. That's a 60% premium you're paying to get your software ecosystem of choice, and I'm willing to bet the Nexus device also has waiting list / delivery time issues that the Kindle does not.
Choice is the key here - I'm learning to love the Amazon ecosystem model, they're much better about auto-configuring the device than Apple has been: all my previously purchased apps were installed "out of the box," MP3s of my CD purchases instantly available for free. Yes, it ticks me off that they're always trying to sell me a TV show or movie for $3, or a book for $9 (where does that pricing model come from?), but mostly I find it easier to use than the iPad/iTunes model - does what I want without me burning a lot of time configuring it all.
Seems to me, if you want to spend a lot of your time to configure it all, you should be paying less for your device, not more, but that's just an opinion.
I unplugged from Cable TV 22 years ago, dropped the antenna 12 years ago, no ill effects. Similarly, cut the land-line phone about 5 years back.
Some people drop electricity, it's all a lifestyle choice, none of these things are truly necessities - your Great-great-great-grandparents and all of their ancestors for the 10,000 years before them didn't have any of these things, and yet they still managed to procreate.
-------
What if the hoky-poky really is what it's all about?
Check the source, of course it's twisted to be laughable.
Some local police departments pay for drone services as needed, like during big SWAT raids... they don't just have them on hand to play with, yet.
There's a Dilbert strip about this (Boss asks Dilbert to interview consultants as research...)
No job worth having will be threatened by this kind of thing.
On the other hand, I have seen "work from home" offers requiring a test to be executed and e-mailed in that would take several hours to complete, often using some esoteric knowledge not readily available in ordinary documentation. The one in particular I encountered came from the Philippines.
http://www.metagraphics.com/metawindow/gui/mncppfaq.txt
1. Overview
1.1 What is Menuet/CPP.
Menuet/CPP is the third generation in Graphical User Interface
packages from Autumn Hill Software. Menuet/CPP is implemented
in the C++ language which is clear and intuitive for GUI programming.
Many of the features included with Menuet/CPP are discussed in later
sections of this FAQ.
1.2 Version.
Autumn Hill is currently shipping version 2.0a of Menuet/CPP.
1.3 Supported Operating Systems.
Menuet/CPP supports MS-DOS 3.3, 5.0, and 6.0. Other versions of DOS such
as PC-DOS, DR-DOS, Novell DOS, and CompaqDOS may also work, but are not
explicitly supported by Autumn Hill Software.
1.4 Supported Graphics Packages.
Menuet/CPP supports several graphics packages for a wide variety of needs.
MetaWINDOW by Metagraphics Corporation, BGI from Borland International,
and the Microsoft Graphics Library are all supported. Section 1.5
lists the compatability between compiler, extenders, and these graphics
toolkits.
1.5 Supported Compilers and extenders.
See the file COMPILER.DOC for a description of supported compiler, extender,
and graphics package combinations.
1.6 Autumn Hill's development environments.
Autumn Hill prefers two development environments for Menuet/CPP.
The first includes the Borland C++ 3.1 compiler with all of the
graphics packages. The Borland compiler is an excellent compiler,
it is fast, creates compact code, and has the best debugger on the
market. The Zortech C++ 3.1 compiler with Flash Tek's X32-VM extender
is also used in development. The X32-VM is a
great extender, it is royalty free, and works well with the Zortech
compiler. Programming in protected mode is excellent for debugging
purposes since many "bugs" in programs can be found as they will cause
a program to crash when the "bugs" are encountered. For instance,
in real mode a reference outside of an array will return bogus
information. In protected mode a reference outside of an array will
cause a protection viloation and the program will halt at that point
of execution.
1.7 CUA compliancy.
IBM developed the Common User Access(CUA) paradigm to unify the many
user interfaces in the world. OS/2 and MS-Windows are the major
user interfaces that are CUA compiant. The full CUA documentation
sets are available through IBM. Most of Menuet/CPP is CUA compliant.
For instance, The ALT-F4 key combination will close a window. But
There is no idea of a currently active control that can be changed
by pressing the TAB key to move to the next control.
1.8 Memory requirements.
See the file MNSAMP1.DOC for a list of executable sizes for the "Hello,
World" example program.
Nothing forces anything - the non-license option is a more realistic embrace of "the way things are" than either closed, or FOSS.
Seriously, what percentage of FOSS using companies do you think actually comply with the license, anyway? I'm not saying they shouldn't bother, they definitely should, those were the terms and conditions of using the FOSS, but what if you just want to develop something and you don't care about putting the color of license on it - it can still be open source developed, and if someone wants to use it in their own way, they can without any problems about it. If they want to contribute back, or not, that's their choice.
So many FOSS projects lack the resources to enforce a license like GPL(x) that it makes a mockery of it.
You know, the main problem I see with calling it "government oversight" is the knee-jerk response from libertarian circles. Maybe we could call it "public oversight" or "transparency"?