Thirty bucks per month (2 accounts) does a lot less damage to the budget than 100+ bucks a month for games that may have no more than a few hours of enjoyable playtime in it. Since I started playing MMOs regularly, I may buy only a handful of "regular" games per year instead of 2-3 per month.
Since my girlfriend likes WoW, that has become the mainstay, but I have discovered that I am more interested in MMOs than stand-alone games.
Well, consider that a CRT (TV Picture tube) is among other things, a giant fricken capacitor. And it can hold a charge of 18-25 kilovolts for many years. (Go ask anyone who worked on those puppies back in the day when there were television repair shops about the precautions they would take when handling a old picture tube.)
Now, consider that the recharge time for capacitors can be measured in seconds or less - after all all you need to do is stuff electricty in there for storage. Trying to fully charge a battery in seconds will result in an explosion because you are not storing electricity - you are reversing the chemical reaction that the battery uses to provide electrons.
Here is a better question:
Assuming that 50% of the volume of the nanotube capacitor will be taken up with voltage regulators etc. , then what would be the capacity in mAH of a direct replacement for an "AA" battery?
Well, fence sitting is a nice approach when you don't want to commit. And, given the current legeslative climate it is probably the best approach.
If this foramt fracas were going to be resolved in the marketplace, the winner would be the player that got the most drives out there and in use. Don't try and even remotely recover costs on the first million units, but make darn sure you have a million units out there at 50-100 bucks a pop before the other camp ever knows what steamrollered them. Do what it takes, waive licemsing fees on the first million units and the first 50 million pieces of media, etc. For content, approach the studios about releasing 1 season per disc of old series.
But, if either camp tried that tactic, the other camp would just make darn sure that massively released format would wind up incompatible with some legeslated requirement that has not yet been written.
Excuse me, but do you mean to imply that your auditory abilities have been in some way negatively affected by exposure to copyrighted materials?
Please begin documenting this immediatly for future litigation against the copyright cartels. Although these are early days in this field, we at DC&H recognize that the battles against the harmful effects of copyrighted materials will be fought and progress in Internet Time as opposed to the multigeneration struggle to bring the murderous machinations of the Nicotine Pushers to light. What took fifty years to do to the Cigarette Crimelords will be accomplished in mere months against the "Associations".
Right now are the early days, and the "Associations" are going to vilify those who claim that copyrighted music can be harmful to your hearing and visual materials may be harmful to your eyesight. What the "Associations" have failed to realize is that this is a war they can never win. Even before they began trying to cover up the known dangers of "CM", warning lables were already being mandated for their harmful fare. Even back in the 70's motion pictures were being slapped with "ratings", and the music industry know has to place "parental advisory" labels on particularly toxic music.
So document your hearing loss, and every drop of blood that comes from your eyes, then contact your local Dewey Cheatham & Howe affiliate. Our track record against the Cancer Stick Cosa Nostra, the Asbestos Amalgamation, and of course the Silicone Syndicate tells you just what sort of settlement we can get you from the DRM Dumbasses. (a coupon good for fifty cents off your next purchase)
King Canute solved a lot.
on
Death By DMCA
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· Score: 3, Interesting
He got rid of a bunch of very obnoxious yes-men in a very satisfying way.
You seem to remember that Canute commanded the tides to stop and have taken that as an example of a ruler out of touch with reality. The folks who think it is their job to stifle technological progress in order to preserve their employer's profits may be disconnected from reality. (However there is more than one reality - I cite the leadership of North Korea, Iran, and Cuba as examples)
But back to the misremembered monarch. In a nutshell, Canute had a bunch of fawning sycophants that irritated the hell out of him. He manuvered them into asserting that he was such a powerful King that he could command the tides to stop and the tides wouild obey him. In the time it takes you to say "Beach Blanket Bondage", he had those little twits staked out on the beach at low tide. He commanded the tides to stop. I do not recall if he sent condolences to the surviving family members or not. More likely he would have had them removed from the gene pool as well - it would be the only prudent thing to do.
That is what Indy really said when he looked into the tomb. That bit about snakes was just Lucas and Spielberg practising for what they were going to do to Star Wars and ET when they re-released them later.
In other words: turn your fricken silliness detector back on. I recommend a brief application of a Sequoia class cluebat to jump-start it.
It is a long ways in terms of distance, but negligible in terms of energy.
And if you are worrying about how to get the "loads of titanium" down to Earth, just shape them like big honking lifting bodies (low overall density so they will slow down fast on hitting the atmosphere) add fins and the a primitive GPS based autopilot (something like the system retrofitted on "iron" bombs that were used in Afghanistan). Then they can guide themselves into a "gentle" landing with a very great degree of preceision.
I haven't studied this either, but I know some smart folks have studied the matter of using low density spaecraft to handle re-entry better than the current refugees from a deranged potter's kiln.
The console that printed an abbreviated EULA on the console box that informed the prospective customer that
1> They could only play games they purchased NEW from authorized retailers 2> In case you did not understand Rule #1, you may not RENT games to play on the console 3> If you are still uncertain about Rule #1, you may not buy USED games to play on the console 4> Since your parents are memebers of different non-sapient species, you may also not play games your friends purchased on your console.
In short, if you did not pay full retail price for a game, then Atari forbid you from playing it on your console. I remember reading that little bit of legalease while waiting in line to buy one. I was able to change my purchase decision very quickly.
Is that the spectacular flameout you refer to?
Obviously, the problem was just that Atari was ahead of its time. Sony has much better market timing - after all they never had a CEO whose name included the international symbol for "idiot" (Nolan BUSHnell anyone?)
(if you are sarcasm impaired, disregar the above sentence and ask yourself if Rule #4 contains a description of your family tree)
It's a lot easier to do that on the moon than on earth as the energy requirements to make lunar escape velocity are only 5% of what it takes from Earth.
Plus friction from the Lunar atmosphere is negligible
"We were very pleased to find out that we can actually use fairly small currents in these coils"
Yes, but we need more current. And we need to install the coils under the seat of every Congresscritter. After all, if these coils can handle the heat produced in a fusion reactor, they ought to be able to prevent the damage done by 536 hot air windbags.
Technically you can fuse iron - ask an astrophysicist for the gory details.
But it takes more energy to fuse than is released. So iron fusion is pretty much the last fusion reaction to be expected from an end-of-life reactor (of the thermostellar variety)
QNX is not entirely immune to code bloat, so I doubt they manage the 3K you are thinking of. But back in the day when the on-board cache of certain Intel processors was only 64K, they were claiming that their entire microkernal would fit in that with room left over. Of course back in the mid 80's I came to QNX (8086 version) from a mainframe environment. The first time I ran "tsk" I said "Damn, this is just like a real computer". (Something about being able to change the priority of a task, or just kill it as compared to DOS was truly impressive especially for a complete OS that fit on a single 1.44 meg floppy)
I wonder if they still have the "tsk tsk" easter egg in there as well as the "find and fix bugs" command in the debugger.
Well of course, he just breaks the disk and he has a sharp pointy edge that he could put an eye out with.
Of course, if you want to get more creative example, (since nail clippers are "legal" again), Jack just takes his clippers and the DVD into the lavatory and files out a passable shiv.
Not only does the "Q" stand for "Quick", but when Quantum Software Systems Ltd (now know as QNX) first released their "microkernal", 'message passing", "real time" OS for the 8086 processor in the early 80's they called it "QUNIX". After a brief discussion with AT&T's legal staff, they determined that the vowels were way too expensive and renamed it to "QNX". The microkernal took up less than 64K.
Unlike certain other OS's, QNX is used in control applications with life and death implications. (nuclear reactors and medical equipment for example)
QNX has been through a lot of changes since then. And I have not kept up with most of them. I do know that as of a few years ago they did make a "free for personal use" release that included their development system. And a few years before that, they had a 1.44meg demo disk that had their entire OS, GUI and web browser on it.
But don't take my word for it go check out their website.
Hmm.. just how much do those rich folks pay in property taxes on their compounds anyways? Now how much would a wind farm have to pay? I thik this would be an excellent use of the Kelo decision to sieze the property of the anti-wind protestors and build the wind farms so the local authorities would reap the benefits of the overal economic improvement.
Yes I know the protestors are not sitting on the prime site for the windfarms, but obviously they constitute a "blight" preventing economic development.
respirable asbestos fibers are three to twenty METERS in diameter?
0.01 meters = 1 centimeter, not 10 namometers.
I'm guessing you were referring to micrometers, but if you had previewed you might have realized your mistake (7-10 orders of magnitude?) in trying to use formatting commands.
Your point and others about this spray not being nanotech is absolutley correct.
As for those who dismiss the idea that the problem may be related to the aerosol even though no problems were reported with the pump version, your blind faith in Ludd has been recopgnized. I hereby grant you the rank of Private in the Barbie Brigade ("Math is hard" platoon). If you will state a conclusion in direct opposition to facts plain enough for even you to state them clearly, then you will continue to allow your betters to think for you.("betters" in the purely feudal sense by the way).
Now, if you had instead said something like:
Although all of the reports have been from users of the aerosol product and none yet from the pump product, there should be further study to make sure that the problem is caused by the aerosol. If the actual problem does turn out to be inhaled nano particles, then the aerosol delivery system may be accelerating the onset of symptoms by increasing the concentration of inhalable nanoparticles when they are applied. Once applied, nanoparticles may be released back into the air over time. One possible delayed release method would be shockwaves propogated through the material the product is sprayed on. Such as a door closing. A good experiment would be to lock the marketers of the "nano spray" in a room liberally treated with their product and then subject the walls of that room to multiple shockwave effects (beating on the walls, slamming the doors repeatedly, and maybe playing loud music with a very heavy bass component).
One might also repeat the experiment with the manufacturers of the spray. To determine the "placebo" effect, run two more blind tests with nano-protestors - one group exposed to the nano spray and one group exposed to pine-scented air freshener.
Sure you can, get all of the government fax numbers you can find and send em to junk faxers along with links to apporpriate.gov websites so the faxers can create that all important relationship.
You would then expect that the FCC will reconsider the regulations. BZZT!
1> The government, hit by increased communications would determine the need for a lot more fax machines, and clerks to feed them paper and file the vital communications being received.
2> Certain specific government entities (congresscritters) would however dislike the increased demands on their time and on pain of budget cuts, force the FCC to rewrite those regs so that government agencies and officials can individually declare faxes to THEIR fax lines are illegal.
3>Certain specific entities that think they are government organizations (lobbyists, PACs and re-election committees) would contact the junk faxers directly and explain why the faxers need to immediately donate to the cause - or face the possibility of restrictive legislation.
Anyone fueling their car on biodiesel is doing the right thing (TM).
Prove it. Why is it the right thing? Is it the wrong thing to use anything other than biodiesel? If so, why is it wrong? I will accept that it might be nice if we used biodiesel rather than fossil fuels. I do not accept your emotional judgement that biodiesel is the right thing now or ever. It may be that it is a better thing than burning fossil fuels. It may be that it is not better than fossil fuels at this time, but it may become better as fossil fuels become scarcer.
Now, it is true that you could remove CO2 from the air by growing crops and putting them in mines. But I don't see anyone pay 2$ a gallon for burrying crops into the ground. Any other use of the crops (food, fertilizer, etc) will eventually make its way back into the air.
I am assuming the first source for biodiesel (or ethanol) will be from the "leftovers" of current crops. Additional costs will be from gathering them and turning them into fuel. Since they are already grown for other purposes, we do not have to factor in the costs of growing them in the first place. But that means these "leftovers" will now be releasing the trapped carbon rather than keeping it sequestered.
Incidentally, I am not sure if you think I am against the idea of alternative fuels. I am not, but I am against a top down policy decision made on the basis of "feel good" quasi-religious/eco faith rather than decisions reached on the basis of facts. And speaking of facts...
The only important question is how much space you need to use to grow all the crops, and where you'd get it from.
Here I disagree. Your important questions are too general (The devil is in the details). They also reveal a built in bias towards a command economy. How much space is not important. If the crops are able to produce a decent profit for farmers - and if the farmers know this, they will decide if they want to plant fuel crops rather than what they are planting now. That answers at least part of the question of where the space to grow the crops will come from. And if the new crops are competetive with fossil fuels, then it is quite likely that even more land will be developed for producing fuel stocks. What we need to know is what crops wopuld work best in what kind of land. This will be a function of yields and crop yields can be highly variable. Once again we need standard measurements. I'm going to make some up, but I am not married to them.
Lets pick a dozen candidates for fuel crops. Ideally they will be planted in widely differeing kinds of land (deserts and swamps as well as "conventional" farmland). Plant a hundred acres of each. Fully document all costs invloved in the crop from preparing the field through putting the finished fuel into a storage tank.
How many BTUs per acre do we get if we convert the crop to biodiesel?
How many BTUs per acre for ethanol?
Can we use the same crop to produce both? If so what is the combined BTU/acre?
How many grams of carbon per acre will be pulled into the crop (just for grins)
How many grams of carbon per acre will be in the fuel produced?
How much does it cost per BTU for each of those crops?
What are the costs per BTU of various fossil fuels?
With that kind of information, we can begin to make semi-intelligent decisions about when it makes economic sense to make such a change in our energy sources. We would know what crops would be most effective for producing fuels.
It also begins to address the question of where to get the land. If we cut down forests, we are eliminating a massive carbon sink. Or perhaps fast growing trees might be a better fuel crop? Did we consider any such trees in our experiment? Do we have enough cleared land not otherwise being used that would be suitable? Or maybe aquatic plants might be a good choice?
And as for "getting" the land, once it makes economic sense, let market forces d
They shopped for a venue where juries find in favor of the plaintiff in patent cases 80% of the time.
They are given only a 70% chance of winning their case.
Reading between the lines and looking at the odds implies much about their case which will never be explicitly stated.
Digital video goes back to at least the 1960s. What about the Tivo was truly unobvious by the 1990's? Of course, obviousness of the material being patented is not a problem limited to Tivo...
The source of the carbon is not as relevant as you think?
What happens to the materials used to make ethanol/biodiesel if they are not used for that purpose? They have already removed that CO2 from the atmosphere. By turning them back into fuel we may be pumping more CO2 back into the air(depending on effieciency vs fossil fuel) than if we plowed them back under (or whatever else we are doing with them now)
If you posit that more crops will be planted solely for the purpose of feedstock for fuel production, then remember the energy costs involved in dealing with these new crops (additional tractors, harvesters, etc). At what point would it become cost effective to raise "crops" of biodiesel and ethanol?
So, your gallon is 160 ounces as opposed to 128 ounces for the US gallon. As the earlier poster pointed out, an english (Imperial?) gallon is larger than a US gallon (5 US quarts = 1 Imperial gallon).
There are also implications for the cost per gallon of fuel there.
But, I detect the not-so-subtle hand of the would-be tyrant in the OP.
Would anyone care to explain to what extent using:
biodiesel (how does this compare to regular diesel in terms of emissions?)
ethanol (less effiecient fuel so you burn more of it - how much CO2 per mile?)
hybrids (big hype, but does it actually do anything other than make people feel good?)
will actually reduce greenhouse gases and exactly how much impact the changes will have on global warming?
Back up your answer with facts. All of the scientific consensus in the world has yet to produce a climate model that can *predict* the climate for *any* century in the past - so I don't think that you can actually state how much impact (for example) switching every auto in the entire world to ethanol would have on global warming. But the OP wants to mandate a switch to these alternatives without providing any evidence that it would reduce greenhouse emissions. (much less any evidence that it would measurably affect global warming).
But is important to get some real facts to play with - and those facts should be stated in a standardized nomenclature (avoiding problems like mileage measured in US vs Imperial gallons) I propose the following measures.
grams of CO2 per kilometer of travel.
grams of CO2 per kg of fuel consumed
grams of H2O per kilometer of travel. (hydrogen enthusiasts, water vapor is a greenhouse gas too)
grams of H2O per kg of fuel consumed
Set up identical vehicles differing only in powerplant and fuel. Run each of them for 5000 km at 100km/hr while measuring and recording the emissions. This is what real scientists call an "experiment".
Publish the results (the data) so everyone can see the methodolgy employed and what the results are. Also publish your conclusions.
Let other people run the same experiment - they may pick different powerplants (maybe you thought a 12 liter V16 engine for the regular gas burner was the equivalent to an 800cc gasburner in a hybrid) But since you published your methodology everyone knows what you did.
Now a "consensus scientist" starts out with a single fact.
Fact: "There is money available for producing papers that conclude X" Everything the consensus scientist does can be derived from that fact. His experiments (if he does any) will be designed to support "X" Data which does not support "X" is flawed and must be ignored If the experiment produces too much contradicory data, then he will claim ownership of the methodology and refuse to publish it. ("hockey stick" curve anyone?)
"Scientific consensus" is to science as the fur indutry is to baby seals. (hmm my new sig)
No it does not mean 1 baby per month. 1> The design spec only called for a production run of one baby. 2> You had to pay for 9 mommies for nine months. That is 81 "mommy months". It still works out to 9 "mommy months" per baby. 3> Surplus inventory has extremely high carrying costs - you can't just stick the extras in a warehouse.(no profit)
Or to put it another way, there is zero parallelism on the mommy side of the baby development process. (except in the case of twins, triplets, etc but once again that was not what the original design spec called for)
At the next meeting of the local Teacher's Union "Okay people, lets have your vote ID so we can make sure you voted for the right candidates"
Right outside the polling place: "Okay give me your vote ID, if you voted the right way, we will have your payment mailed to you after verification"
In a dark alley: "Hey a vote ID - if our victim voted for the right person, we let em go less their money, but if they voted wrong, we express our opinion foreceully and in a permanemt fashion"
Lose the obsession on using software to vote. When you have to keep complicating the system (multiple remote logs etc) you are actually emphasizing the perceived insecurity of your paperless system. The voting machine itself is the single point of failure. If the feed from that machine is corrupt, your "neutral party logs" are also corrupt. The added layers of complexity do NOT make voters feel more confident that their vote will be accurately counted - it has the exact opposite effect. Because the problem here is one of emotional investment it will not be resolved through "reasoned argument".
Seriously, Paper ballots that are marked on - not punched through. Use a machine and human countable (scantron) format. It is not bright, it is not shiny, it is not new. Howevere it works, and the methods of corrupting it are well understood by all involved - the same is not true of voting machines which will never be perceived as anything other than an opaque black box.
Now if you are just suffering from a common desire to complicate things, why not complicate the democratic process, not the actual act of voting?
For example, elections cost money, lets bring back a poll tax to pay for it. Say two bucks - and allow charities or political party reps to hand out two dollar bills to anyone who asks for one (but at least 100 feet from the polling place)
Runoff elections are expensive too - eliminate them and use an IRV system.
Straight Party Line voting is a pain to count - lets not allow it. If the voter won't explicitly vote for a specific candidate, then that candidate is undeserving of a vote.
Ballots are getting unwieldly, have separate ballots for each jurisdiction (federal, state, county, city, precint, etc). There are never more than 3 races on the federal ballot. Why confuse those races with the JP and Sheriff's races?
It's hard to get on a ballot especially with laws set to favor the major parties. Let anyone get on the ballot if they can pony up a "ballot placement fee". Let's say 1 penny per registered voter in the jurisdiction, but triple that to have party affiliation listed. (It would cost about a million bucks to get on the Presidential ballot, but triple that to run as a Republican, Green, Democrat, Libertarian) It would cost a lot less to get on the ballot where there are fewer potential voters - 5 bucks to run for Mayor of Cut-n-shoot TX for example.
Just a thought or two on how to complicate things.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes,
Thirty bucks per month (2 accounts) does a lot less damage to the budget than 100+ bucks a month for games that may have no more than a few hours of enjoyable playtime in it. Since I started playing MMOs regularly, I may buy only a handful of "regular" games per year instead of 2-3 per month.
Since my girlfriend likes WoW, that has become the mainstay, but I have discovered that I am more interested in MMOs than stand-alone games.
Well, consider that a CRT (TV Picture tube) is among other things, a giant fricken capacitor. And it can hold a charge of 18-25 kilovolts for many years. (Go ask anyone who worked on those puppies back in the day when there were television repair shops about the precautions they would take when handling a old picture tube.)
Now, consider that the recharge time for capacitors can be measured in seconds or less - after all all you need to do is stuff electricty in there for storage. Trying to fully charge a battery in seconds will result in an explosion because you are not storing electricity - you are reversing the chemical reaction that the battery uses to provide electrons.
Here is a better question:
Assuming that 50% of the volume of the nanotube capacitor will be taken up with voltage regulators etc. , then what would be the capacity in mAH of a direct replacement for an "AA" battery?
Well, fence sitting is a nice approach when you don't want to commit. And, given the current legeslative climate it is probably the best approach.
If this foramt fracas were going to be resolved in the marketplace, the winner would be the player that got the most drives out there and in use. Don't try and even remotely recover costs on the first million units, but make darn sure you have a million units out there at 50-100 bucks a pop before the other camp ever knows what steamrollered them. Do what it takes, waive licemsing fees on the first million units and the first 50 million pieces of media, etc. For content, approach the studios about releasing 1 season per disc of old series.
But, if either camp tried that tactic, the other camp would just make darn sure that massively released format would wind up incompatible with some legeslated requirement that has not yet been written.
Excuse me, but do you mean to imply that your auditory abilities have been in some way negatively affected by exposure to copyrighted materials?
Please begin documenting this immediatly for future litigation against the copyright cartels. Although these are early days in this field, we at DC&H recognize that the battles against the harmful effects of copyrighted materials will be fought and progress in Internet Time as opposed to the multigeneration struggle to bring the murderous machinations of the Nicotine Pushers to light. What took fifty years to do to the Cigarette Crimelords will be accomplished in mere months against the "Associations".
Right now are the early days, and the "Associations" are going to vilify those who claim that copyrighted music can be harmful to your hearing and visual materials may be harmful to your eyesight. What the "Associations" have failed to realize is that this is a war they can never win. Even before they began trying to cover up the known dangers of "CM", warning lables were already being mandated for their harmful fare. Even back in the 70's motion pictures were being slapped with "ratings", and the music industry know has to place "parental advisory" labels on particularly toxic music.
So document your hearing loss, and every drop of blood that comes from your eyes, then contact your local Dewey Cheatham & Howe affiliate. Our track record against the Cancer Stick Cosa Nostra, the Asbestos Amalgamation, and of course the Silicone Syndicate tells you just what sort of settlement we can get you from the DRM Dumbasses. (a coupon good for fifty cents off your next purchase)
He got rid of a bunch of very obnoxious yes-men in a very satisfying way.
You seem to remember that Canute commanded the tides to stop and have taken that as an example of a ruler out of touch with reality. The folks who think it is their job to stifle technological progress in order to preserve their employer's profits may be disconnected from reality. (However there is more than one reality - I cite the leadership of North Korea, Iran, and Cuba as examples)
But back to the misremembered monarch. In a nutshell, Canute had a bunch of fawning sycophants that irritated the hell out of him. He manuvered them into asserting that he was such a powerful King that he could command the tides to stop and the tides wouild obey him. In the time it takes you to say "Beach Blanket Bondage", he had those little twits staked out on the beach at low tide. He commanded the tides to stop. I do not recall if he sent condolences to the surviving family members or not. More likely he would have had them removed from the gene pool as well - it would be the only prudent thing to do.
That is what Indy really said when he looked into the tomb. That bit about snakes was just Lucas and Spielberg practising for what they were going to do to Star Wars and ET when they re-released them later.
In other words: turn your fricken silliness detector back on. I recommend a brief application of a Sequoia class cluebat to jump-start it.
It is a long ways in terms of distance, but negligible in terms of energy.
And if you are worrying about how to get the "loads of titanium" down to Earth, just shape them like big honking lifting bodies (low overall density so they will slow down fast on hitting the atmosphere) add fins and the a primitive GPS based autopilot (something like the system retrofitted on "iron" bombs that were used in Afghanistan). Then they can guide themselves into a "gentle" landing with a very great degree of preceision.
I haven't studied this either, but I know some smart folks have studied the matter of using low density spaecraft to handle re-entry better than the current refugees from a deranged potter's kiln.
Is that the Atari Lynx you are referring to?
The console that printed an abbreviated EULA on the console box that informed the prospective customer that
1> They could only play games they purchased NEW from authorized retailers
2> In case you did not understand Rule #1, you may not RENT games to play on the console
3> If you are still uncertain about Rule #1, you may not buy USED games to play on the console
4> Since your parents are memebers of different non-sapient species, you may also not play games your friends purchased on your console.
In short, if you did not pay full retail price for a game, then Atari forbid you from playing it on your console. I remember reading that little bit of legalease while waiting in line to buy one. I was able to change my purchase decision very quickly.
Is that the spectacular flameout you refer to?
Obviously, the problem was just that Atari was ahead of its time. Sony has much better market timing - after all they never had a CEO whose name included the international symbol for "idiot" (Nolan BUSHnell anyone?)
(if you are sarcasm impaired, disregar the above sentence and ask yourself if Rule #4 contains a description of your family tree)
Go read "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress".
It's a lot easier to do that on the moon than on earth as the energy requirements to make lunar escape velocity are only 5% of what it takes from Earth.
Plus friction from the Lunar atmosphere is negligible
From TFA
"We were very pleased to find out that we can actually use fairly small currents in these coils"
Yes, but we need more current.
And we need to install the coils under the seat of every Congresscritter.
After all, if these coils can handle the heat produced in a fusion reactor, they ought to be able to prevent the damage done by 536 hot air windbags.
Then we will save Trillions
Technically you can fuse iron - ask an astrophysicist for the gory details.
But it takes more energy to fuse than is released. So iron fusion is pretty much the last fusion reaction to be expected from an end-of-life reactor (of the thermostellar variety)
QNX is not entirely immune to code bloat, so I doubt they manage the 3K you are thinking of. But back in the day when the on-board cache of certain Intel processors was only 64K, they were claiming that their entire microkernal would fit in that with room left over. Of course back in the mid 80's I came to QNX (8086 version) from a mainframe environment. The first time I ran "tsk" I said "Damn, this is just like a real computer". (Something about being able to change the priority of a task, or just kill it as compared to DOS was truly impressive especially for a complete OS that fit on a single 1.44 meg floppy)
I wonder if they still have the "tsk tsk" easter egg in there as well as the "find and fix bugs" command in the debugger.
Well of course, he just breaks the disk and he has a sharp pointy edge that he could put an eye out with.
Of course, if you want to get more creative example, (since nail clippers are "legal" again), Jack just takes his clippers and the DVD into the lavatory and files out a passable shiv.
But since its Jack Bauer, its all good right?
Not only does the "Q" stand for "Quick", but when Quantum Software Systems Ltd (now know as QNX) first released their "microkernal", 'message passing", "real time" OS for the 8086 processor in the early 80's they called it "QUNIX". After a brief discussion with AT&T's legal staff, they determined that the vowels were way too expensive and renamed it to "QNX". The microkernal took up less than 64K.
Unlike certain other OS's, QNX is used in control applications with life and death implications. (nuclear reactors and medical equipment for example)
QNX has been through a lot of changes since then. And I have not kept up with most of them. I do know that as of a few years ago they did make a "free for personal use" release that included their development system. And a few years before that, they had a 1.44meg demo disk that had their entire OS, GUI and web browser on it.
But don't take my word for it go check out their website.
Hmm.. just how much do those rich folks pay in property taxes on their compounds anyways? Now how much would a wind farm have to pay? I thik this would be an excellent use of the Kelo decision to sieze the property of the anti-wind protestors and build the wind farms so the local authorities would reap the benefits of the overal economic improvement.
Yes I know the protestors are not sitting on the prime site for the windfarms, but obviously they constitute a "blight" preventing economic development.
respirable asbestos fibers are three to twenty METERS in diameter?
0.01 meters = 1 centimeter, not 10 namometers.
I'm guessing you were referring to micrometers, but if you had previewed you might have realized your mistake (7-10 orders of magnitude?) in trying to use formatting commands.
Your point and others about this spray not being nanotech is absolutley correct.
As for those who dismiss the idea that the problem may be related to the aerosol even though no problems were reported with the pump version, your blind faith in Ludd has been recopgnized. I hereby grant you the rank of Private in the Barbie Brigade ("Math is hard" platoon). If you will state a conclusion in direct opposition to facts plain enough for even you to state them clearly, then you will continue to allow your betters to think for you.("betters" in the purely feudal sense by the way).
Now, if you had instead said something like:
Although all of the reports have been from users of the aerosol product and none yet from the pump product, there should be further study to make sure that the problem is caused by the aerosol. If the actual problem does turn out to be inhaled nano particles, then the aerosol delivery system may be accelerating the onset of symptoms by increasing the concentration of inhalable nanoparticles when they are applied. Once applied, nanoparticles may be released back into the air over time. One possible delayed release method would be shockwaves propogated through the material the product is sprayed on. Such as a door closing. A good experiment would be to lock the marketers of the "nano spray" in a room liberally treated with their product and then subject the walls of that room to multiple shockwave effects (beating on the walls, slamming the doors repeatedly, and maybe playing loud music with a very heavy bass component).
One might also repeat the experiment with the manufacturers of the spray. To determine the "placebo" effect, run two more blind tests with nano-protestors - one group exposed to the nano spray and one group exposed to pine-scented air freshener.
Well, actually, I considered that too obvious to mention. It is not mutually exclusive with the other outcomes I mentioned.
Sure you can, get all of the government fax numbers you can find and send em to junk faxers along with links to apporpriate .gov websites so the faxers can create that all important relationship.
You would then expect that the FCC will reconsider the regulations.
BZZT!
1> The government, hit by increased communications would determine the need for a lot more fax machines, and clerks to feed them paper and file the vital communications being received.
2> Certain specific government entities (congresscritters) would however dislike the increased demands on their time and on pain of budget cuts, force the FCC to rewrite those regs so that government agencies and officials can individually declare faxes to THEIR fax lines are illegal.
3>Certain specific entities that think they are government organizations (lobbyists, PACs and re-election committees) would contact the junk faxers directly and explain why the faxers need to immediately donate to the cause - or face the possibility of restrictive legislation.
Prove it. Why is it the right thing? Is it the wrong thing to use anything other than biodiesel? If so, why is it wrong? I will accept that it might be nice if we used biodiesel rather than fossil fuels. I do not accept your emotional judgement that biodiesel is the right thing now or ever. It may be that it is a better thing than burning fossil fuels. It may be that it is not better than fossil fuels at this time, but it may become better as fossil fuels become scarcer.
Now, it is true that you could remove CO2 from the air by growing crops and putting them in mines. But I don't see anyone pay 2$ a gallon for burrying crops into the ground. Any other use of the crops (food, fertilizer, etc) will eventually make its way back into the air.
I am assuming the first source for biodiesel (or ethanol) will be from the "leftovers" of current crops. Additional costs will be from gathering them and turning them into fuel. Since they are already grown for other purposes, we do not have to factor in the costs of growing them in the first place. But that means these "leftovers" will now be releasing the trapped carbon rather than keeping it sequestered.
Incidentally, I am not sure if you think I am against the idea of alternative fuels. I am not, but I am against a top down policy decision made on the basis of "feel good" quasi-religious/eco faith rather than decisions reached on the basis of facts. And speaking of facts...
The only important question is how much space you need to use to grow all the crops, and where you'd get it from.
Here I disagree. Your important questions are too general (The devil is in the details). They also reveal a built in bias towards a command economy. How much space is not important. If the crops are able to produce a decent profit for farmers - and if the farmers know this, they will decide if they want to plant fuel crops rather than what they are planting now. That answers at least part of the question of where the space to grow the crops will come from. And if the new crops are competetive with fossil fuels, then it is quite likely that even more land will be developed for producing fuel stocks. What we need to know is what crops wopuld work best in what kind of land. This will be a function of yields and crop yields can be highly variable. Once again we need standard measurements. I'm going to make some up, but I am not married to them.
Lets pick a dozen candidates for fuel crops. Ideally they will be planted in widely differeing kinds of land (deserts and swamps as well as "conventional" farmland). Plant a hundred acres of each. Fully document all costs invloved in the crop from preparing the field through putting the finished fuel into a storage tank.
How much does it cost per BTU for each of those crops?
What are the costs per BTU of various fossil fuels?
With that kind of information, we can begin to make semi-intelligent decisions about when it makes economic sense to make such a change in our energy sources. We would know what crops would be most effective for producing fuels.
It also begins to address the question of where to get the land. If we cut down forests, we are eliminating a massive carbon sink. Or perhaps fast growing trees might be a better fuel crop? Did we consider any such trees in our experiment? Do we have enough cleared land not otherwise being used that would be suitable? Or maybe aquatic plants might be a good choice?
And as for "getting" the land, once it makes economic sense, let market forces d
In legalese, their suit has no merit.
They shopped for a venue where juries find in favor of the plaintiff in patent cases 80% of the time.
They are given only a 70% chance of winning their case.
Reading between the lines and looking at the odds implies much about their case which will never be explicitly stated.
Digital video goes back to at least the 1960s. What about the Tivo was truly unobvious by the 1990's? Of course, obviousness of the material being patented is not a problem limited to Tivo...
The source of the carbon is not as relevant as you think?
What happens to the materials used to make ethanol/biodiesel if they are not used for that purpose? They have already removed that CO2 from the atmosphere. By turning them back into fuel we may be pumping more CO2 back into the air(depending on effieciency vs fossil fuel) than if we plowed them back under (or whatever else we are doing with them now)
If you posit that more crops will be planted solely for the purpose of feedstock for fuel production, then remember the energy costs involved in dealing with these new crops (additional tractors, harvesters, etc). At what point would it become cost effective to raise "crops" of biodiesel and ethanol?
So, your gallon is 160 ounces as opposed to 128 ounces for the US gallon.
As the earlier poster pointed out, an english (Imperial?) gallon is larger than a US gallon (5 US quarts = 1 Imperial gallon).
There are also implications for the cost per gallon of fuel there.
But, I detect the not-so-subtle hand of the would-be tyrant in the OP.
Would anyone care to explain to what extent using:
biodiesel (how does this compare to regular diesel in terms of emissions?)
ethanol (less effiecient fuel so you burn more of it - how much CO2 per mile?)
hybrids (big hype, but does it actually do anything other than make people feel good?)
will actually reduce greenhouse gases and exactly how much impact the changes will have on global warming?
Back up your answer with facts. All of the scientific consensus in the world has yet to produce a climate model that can *predict* the climate for *any* century in the past - so I don't think that you can actually state how much impact (for example) switching every auto in the entire world to ethanol would have on global warming. But the OP wants to mandate a switch to these alternatives without providing any evidence that it would reduce greenhouse emissions. (much less any evidence that it would measurably affect global warming).
But is important to get some real facts to play with - and those facts should be stated in a standardized nomenclature (avoiding problems like mileage measured in US vs Imperial gallons) I propose the following measures.
grams of CO2 per kilometer of travel.
grams of CO2 per kg of fuel consumed
grams of H2O per kilometer of travel. (hydrogen enthusiasts, water vapor is a greenhouse gas too)
grams of H2O per kg of fuel consumed
Set up identical vehicles differing only in powerplant and fuel.
Run each of them for 5000 km at 100km/hr while measuring and recording the emissions. This is what real scientists call an "experiment".
Publish the results (the data) so everyone can see the methodolgy employed and what the results are. Also publish your conclusions.
Let other people run the same experiment - they may pick different powerplants (maybe you thought a 12 liter V16 engine for the regular gas burner was the equivalent to an 800cc gasburner in a hybrid) But since you published your methodology everyone knows what you did.
Now a "consensus scientist" starts out with a single fact.
Fact: "There is money available for producing papers that conclude X"
Everything the consensus scientist does can be derived from that fact.
His experiments (if he does any) will be designed to support "X"
Data which does not support "X" is flawed and must be ignored
If the experiment produces too much contradicory data, then he will claim
ownership of the methodology and refuse to publish it. ("hockey stick" curve anyone?)
"Scientific consensus" is to science as the fur indutry is to baby seals. (hmm my new sig)
No it does not mean 1 baby per month.
1> The design spec only called for a production run of one baby.
2> You had to pay for 9 mommies for nine months. That is 81 "mommy months". It still works out to 9 "mommy months" per baby.
3> Surplus inventory has extremely high carrying costs - you can't just stick the extras in a warehouse.(no profit)
Or to put it another way, there is zero parallelism on the mommy side of the baby development process. (except in the case of twins, triplets, etc but once again that was not what the original design spec called for)
At the next meeting of the local Teacher's Union
"Okay people, lets have your vote ID so we can make sure you voted for the right candidates"
Right outside the polling place:
"Okay give me your vote ID, if you voted the right way, we will have your payment mailed to you after verification"
In a dark alley:
"Hey a vote ID - if our victim voted for the right person, we let em go less their money, but if they voted wrong, we express our opinion foreceully and in a permanemt fashion"
Lose the obsession on using software to vote. When you have to keep complicating the system (multiple remote logs etc) you are actually emphasizing the perceived insecurity of your paperless system. The voting machine itself is the single point of failure. If the feed from that machine is corrupt, your "neutral party logs" are also corrupt. The added layers of complexity do NOT make voters feel more confident that their vote will be accurately counted - it has the exact opposite effect. Because the problem here is one of emotional investment it will not be resolved through "reasoned argument".
Seriously, Paper ballots that are marked on - not punched through. Use a machine and human countable (scantron) format. It is not bright, it is not shiny, it is not new. Howevere it works, and the methods of corrupting it are well understood by all involved - the same is not true of voting machines which will never be perceived as anything other than an opaque black box.
Now if you are just suffering from a common desire to complicate things, why not complicate the democratic process, not the actual act of voting?
For example, elections cost money, lets bring back a poll tax to pay for it. Say two bucks - and allow charities or political party reps to hand out two dollar bills to anyone who asks for one (but at least 100 feet from the polling place)
Runoff elections are expensive too - eliminate them and use an IRV system.
Straight Party Line voting is a pain to count - lets not allow it. If the voter won't explicitly vote for a specific candidate, then that candidate is undeserving of a vote.
Ballots are getting unwieldly, have separate ballots for each jurisdiction (federal, state, county, city, precint, etc). There are never more than 3 races on the federal ballot. Why confuse those races with the JP and Sheriff's races?
It's hard to get on a ballot especially with laws set to favor the major parties. Let anyone get on the ballot if they can pony up a "ballot placement fee". Let's say 1 penny per registered voter in the jurisdiction, but triple that to have party affiliation listed. (It would cost about a million bucks to get on the Presidential ballot, but triple that to run as a Republican, Green, Democrat, Libertarian) It would cost a lot less to get on the ballot where there are fewer potential voters - 5 bucks to run for Mayor of Cut-n-shoot TX for example.
Just a thought or two on how to complicate things.