the problem with the tv today is content, not presentation. crap like "friends" and "survivor" and "who wants to debase himself on national tv for a few dollars" isn't gonna be any better in 720p than it is now. well, if bush gets his way at least the history channel will have some new stuff to beat into the ground by this time next year. grrr. screw you kids and you newfangled digital tv, i'll stick to npr and the bbc on the wireless. feh.
My local college FM station puts out 100 watts, and i can usually pick it up at least 20 miles away. At night I can pick up 50kw AM stations from Chicago, which is about 800 miles away. i think most local commercial FM stations are around 5kw, since FM transmissions are line of site, broadcasting at super high power doesn't really increase your range. at shortwave frequency multi-hundred kw stations are common, because the signal can propagte around the world. so it really depends on what kind of station you're setting up. still, equipment and licensing fees are going to be beyond what the average person can afford out of pocket, but if do your market research and write up a decent business plan, you may be able to get start-up capital for a small station. or if the school offers a communications program, maybe you could talk them into funding a campus radio station.
ah yes, the enfield taurus with a whopping 6 hp engine. there is also a diesel bike designed for military use that gets 120 mpg and tops out at 85 mph. that's around 40-50 more mpg than most gasoline powered bikes and the performance is perfectly reasonable for personal transportation. the bike is based on a stock frame, if it was redesigned around a lightweight aerodynamic frame, and perhaps a slightly smaller engine, you could probably have a bike with increased efficiency and similar performance. the hybrid just seems way too complicated, although i'm sure they're counting on the hype surrounding the gas/electric hybrid concept to sell the thing to lots of hippie enviro whackos.
One of the things VW says about that concept car is that it weighs about as much as a sport bike. There is no way that a car like that could meet safety standards for automobiles. It's basically a diesel powered golf cart. I thought I read somewhere recently though that they have a production model capable of over 90 mpg. ebike should skip the electrical part and just work on a more efficient diesel, there's no reason they shouldn't be able to get well over 100 mpg out of a small diesel bike, and avoid all the complexity of the hybrid model as well as the need to replace expensive batteries regularly.
I've heard this argument dozens of times from "experts" in the media, and it makes no sense. No bacteria becomes resistant to antiseptics. Ever. There is no such thing as a bacteria that is resistant to chlorine. Antibiotics interfere with the metabolism of bacteria, sometimes a specific system controlled by a single gene. Organisms lacking the gene are resistant and survive. Antiseptics and disinfectants are totally different. They use brute force techniques like oxidation or affecting membrane permeability. There is no such thing as resistance to antiseptics.
The girl says the rock was rusty on one side like it might contain iron. A meteorite fresh from space would not be rusty. And even a small rock like that would be going fast enough to sting more than a little if it hit your foot. I'm not buying this at all.
"Biodiesel" usually refers to methyl or ethyl esters of fatty acids; it's made by reacting methanol or ethanol with vegetable oil with sodium hydroxide. You can make this yourself for about 30 or 40 cents a gallon if you have a source of free vegetable oil. Biodiesel can be used as a direct replacement for diesel in any diesel engines. Plain vegetable oil will burn in a diesel engine (they really aren't that picky about what fuel you put into them), but it generally must be heated to around 160 degrees fahrenheit first. Plain vegetable oil is too viscous for the stock injectors on diesel engines. So to use it, these kits heat the veggie oil with coolant from the engine, which means that you have to warm the car up on regular diesel first, then switch to the veggie oil tank, and also you have to switch back to diesel for a few minutes before you shut the motor off, to clear the fuel lines. This probably is not a good idea for use in cold climates (even real biodiesel gels at temps below 40 Fahrenheit). Anoter alternative is to mix the veggie oil with about 20-30% kerosene. There is also evidence that vegetable oil can damage fuel pumps, and both vegetable oil and biodiesel can cause problems with rubber seals in the fuel system.
let's see, if only we had some sort of device that you could use to shoot unexploded ordnace and detonate it. Oh wait, we do, it's called a rifle and it's been used for that purpose for about 100 years now. A fifty cent bullet does just as good a job as a million dollar laser, and has a longer range too.
Although it is possible to improve resolution of optical telescopes with interferometry, separation of the instruments is limited to tens of meters because the light from each must be combined physically. Anyway, the point of having a telescope this large is not to improve resolution, but light-gathering ability. A mirror this large would be able to see much dimmer objects than any realistically sized space telescope. This telescope should be able to see further into deep space than any but radio telescopes. Most of the work will be done in the infrared, because light from objects that far away is red-shifted well away from the visible spectrum.
The size of the pie is fixed, it's just that Malthus was not aware of the potential of some of out unexploited resources, namely oil. Basically, oil allowed us to expand food production far beyond what would have been possible without it. In a very real sense, oil is food. Once oil production starts to decline, prices for all goods including food will skyrocket, unless an energy source is found to take its place. the result of this is that nations like the U.S. will cease to be food exporters and countries that rely on imports of food will starve. it won't be the end of the world, just the end of a large portion of those who occupy it. as always, the market will correct itself.
right, but if you're producing it by electrolysis, you need a source for the electricity. if that's coming from a coal plant, well, the best coal fired power plants are about 75% efficient. if the electricity comes from wind or OTEC (solar is really totally inadequate for large scale production at this point, and probably always will be) efficiency is less of a problem, but generating capacity isn't as great as with coal or nuclear. so in reality, you're always going to end up with a net loss.
fuels cells are not magic, they require hydrogen. hydrogen requires slightly more energy to produce than it contains. at best it is a means of storing energy produced by burning fossil fuels or nuclear, solar, wind, hydro, whatever it's not an energy source. ethanol is even worse. it takes 70% more energy to produce ethanol than it contains. and every acre used to grow biomass fuels is an acre that cannot be used for food production.
Actually, this is going to happen, and sooner than most people think. Points 1 and 2 in the above post are simply wrong, and point 3 may be irrelevant. First of all, fuel efficiency, although it roughly doubled since 1975, mostly because manufacturers reduced engine sizes, has been slowly but steadily decreasing in the U.S. since 1987.
As for the claim that more fuel is being found, it is simply not true. Oil discovery peaked in 1960 and has been steadily declining ever since. The current rate of consumption exceeds new discovery by a margin of 3:1 and demand is increasing at a rate between 2 and 3 percent every year. New technology does not solve this problem, at a certain point the laws of thermodynamics kick in and standard economic paradigms fail. at some point, it takes more energy to recover the oil than the oil contains. after that, there is no longer any point in trying to recover more oil.
In 1956 a geologist named M. King Hubbert published his prediction that U.S. Oil production would peak by 1970. Most people in the petroleum industry ridiculed him, but he was right. Oil production in the U.S. has been declining since 1970, Dr. Hubbert was spot-on in his predicition. Recently Dr. Hubbert's theory has been applied to estimated worldwide reserves. One study estimates that global oil production will peak by 2010. This study has also taken some heat from the establishment, but even if you accept the most wildly optimistic estimates of the people doing the ridiculing, peak oil production is only pushed 20-30 years into the future. After the peak, production declines every year, until it becomes uneconomical to produce more oil. When production peaks, demand will exceed supply permanently, a situation that will get worse every year from then on. For a good example of what happens to prices when demand for a commodity exceeds supply, check out the prices for real balsamic vinegar these days. Prices would skyrocket so quickly that the average person would no longer be able to afford to run a vehicle, not even a hybrid one.
What about alternative fuels and energy sources? What about them? they aren't being developed. politicians pay lip service to alternative energy, and cut funding. We don't need them right now, oil prices are still cheap. The killer here is that oil prices stay cheap, right up until it becomes clear that production is decreasing. after that oil prices climb. So does the price of everything else. Suddenly, the economy is too weak to support the development of other energy sources, even if we wanted to.
What about coal? there's like 1000 years worth of coal left. What about natural gas? Well, the 700 million automobiles in the world today don't run on coal or natural gas. neither do the airplanes and railroads. and neither does the equipment used to mine and transport the coal and natural gas. heh heh.
Our economy is based on oil. in a very real sense, at this point in human history oil is food. oil is everything. and it's running out. there is no good substitute for it, and we don't seem all that interested in finding one. we're all gonna die. really. it's probably too late already, so no point in worrying about it now.
MLS Paid ABC and ESPN to carry the games
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World Cup Final
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MLS paid $40 million for the broadcast rights to the games, and also had to pay ABC and ESPN to carry them. Pathetic. They basically had to pay the networks as much as they would normally get in adverstising revenue for the time the games aired, and hope to recoup some of it from the ads that aired at halftime.
Jump a split second after the ball is kicked? the ball is in the back of the net approximately 2/10 of a second after it is kicked, not much time to analyze the flight path and react appropriately, is it. the only thing they can do is guess
According to the article, media player is just downloading the title and track listings of cds and dvds and storing them so it can display them whenever you put the same disc in. Winamp has been doing this forever, and so have a billion other media apps. Microsoft may indeed be conspiring to take over the world and subject us all to their evil whims, but this feature doesn't really seem to have much to do with that diabolical plan.
it was cool when you could jack a celeron300a up to 450mhz and have it run faster than a pentium 450 at less than half the price, but with most processors today you're looking at maybe a 5 or 10 percent gain and maybe a 20 or 30 dollars in savings. the savings is nil when you have to buy a fancy cooling solution to keep running
Thomas Pynchon- people will still be trying to figure Gravity's Rainbow out in 50 years
Neal Stephenson- same goes for Cryptonomicon
Alexander Solzhenitsyn- maybe the most important Russian author of the 20th century, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich preserves the horrors of Stalinism for generations to come.
Don Delillo- his books speak volumes about America during the last half of the 20th century
Quite possible David Foster Wallace, if he gets over his own cleverness and produces something that won't seem dated 20 years from now.
Most of the SF authors that seem to be so popular here need not apply. Ditto for other genre-bound authors. Regardless of how good these writers are at storytelling, the vast majority of their works are formulaic and derivitive.
I mean, if you are never going to be able to recreate the experience of hearing it live anyway, then it seems to me that $140,000 would buy an awful lot of symphony, opera, and concert tickets. you could probably commute from New York to London or Vienna to hear world class orchestras every week for a few years for that much. Then again, unless you have the right connections, you would probably have some difficulty getting Elvis to play at your house.
Because if they don't microsoft can revoke their right to use licenses without refunding a penny.they don't have to let you use their software if you don't agree to their terms. they can also sue or file a criminal complaint and then the court will require the alleged violator to prove compliance, and you can't tell the court to shove it. it is cheaper just to agree to the audit and pay the penalties for any violations discovered.
The facts would suggest otherwise. No western European country occupied by the Nazis suffered the same treatment as the Soviet Union. 25 million Soviets died, 2/3 of those were civilians. Soviet prisoners of war were kept under conditions similar to concentration camps. Entire villages were liquidated to prevent inhabitants from aiding partisans. what crops weren't stolen by the Germans for their own use were destroyed to prevent them from falling into partisan hands. People that weren't enslaved by the Nazis were simply left to starve. The Nazis considered all Slavic peoples to be one step above Jews and several below farm animals. Slavic art and cultural items were deemed degenerate and destroyed accordingly. The German plans for the future of Russia basically included no Russians. And, for the most part, it wasn't the SS that carried these crimes out, it was the regular German army.
The treatment of captured German soldiers by the Soviets certainly was't any better (90% never returned home) but one can make a stronger argument in defense of the Soviets, who had good reason to be pissed off by the end of the Stalingrad siege. The Germans were fighting a war of expansion. They pretty much got what they deserved.
"Stalingrad" basically ignores all these facts and portrays this company of stormtroopers, who are meant to represent the average soldier, as decent men who are as much victims of the Nazis as anyone else is. That may be true in a sense, and certainly there were decent human beings in the Wehrmacht (at least one hopes there were), but the compassion shown by the soldiers portrayed in the movie certainly does not seem to have been typical of German troops.
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Actually, missiles self destruct at a predetermined range if they miss the target.
the problem with the tv today is content, not presentation. crap like "friends" and "survivor" and "who wants to debase himself on national tv for a few dollars" isn't gonna be any better in 720p than it is now. well, if bush gets his way at least the history channel will have some new stuff to beat into the ground by this time next year. grrr. screw you kids and you newfangled digital tv, i'll stick to npr and the bbc on the wireless. feh.
My local college FM station puts out 100 watts, and i can usually pick it up at least 20 miles away. At night I can pick up 50kw AM stations from Chicago, which is about 800 miles away. i think most local commercial FM stations are around 5kw, since FM transmissions are line of site, broadcasting at super high power doesn't really increase your range. at shortwave frequency multi-hundred kw stations are common, because the signal can propagte around the world. so it really depends on what kind of station you're setting up. still, equipment and licensing fees are going to be beyond what the average person can afford out of pocket, but if do your market research and write up a decent business plan, you may be able to get start-up capital for a small station. or if the school offers a communications program, maybe you could talk them into funding a campus radio station.
ah yes, the enfield taurus with a whopping 6 hp engine. there is also a diesel bike designed for military use that gets 120 mpg and tops out at 85 mph. that's around 40-50 more mpg than most gasoline powered bikes and the performance is perfectly reasonable for personal transportation. the bike is based on a stock frame, if it was redesigned around a lightweight aerodynamic frame, and perhaps a slightly smaller engine, you could probably have a bike with increased efficiency and similar performance. the hybrid just seems way too complicated, although i'm sure they're counting on the hype surrounding the gas/electric hybrid concept to sell the thing to lots of hippie enviro whackos.
One of the things VW says about that concept car is that it weighs about as much as a sport bike. There is no way that a car like that could meet safety standards for automobiles. It's basically a diesel powered golf cart. I thought I read somewhere recently though that they have a production model capable of over 90 mpg. ebike should skip the electrical part and just work on a more efficient diesel, there's no reason they shouldn't be able to get well over 100 mpg out of a small diesel bike, and avoid all the complexity of the hybrid model as well as the need to replace expensive batteries regularly.
I've heard this argument dozens of times from "experts" in the media, and it makes no sense. No bacteria becomes resistant to antiseptics. Ever. There is no such thing as a bacteria that is resistant to chlorine. Antibiotics interfere with the metabolism of bacteria, sometimes a specific system controlled by a single gene. Organisms lacking the gene are resistant and survive. Antiseptics and disinfectants are totally different. They use brute force techniques like oxidation or affecting membrane permeability. There is no such thing as resistance to antiseptics.
The girl says the rock was rusty on one side like it might contain iron. A meteorite fresh from space would not be rusty. And even a small rock like that would be going fast enough to sting more than a little if it hit your foot. I'm not buying this at all.
"Biodiesel" usually refers to methyl or ethyl esters of fatty acids; it's made by reacting methanol or ethanol with vegetable oil with sodium hydroxide. You can make this yourself for about 30 or 40 cents a gallon if you have a source of free vegetable oil. Biodiesel can be used as a direct replacement for diesel in any diesel engines. Plain vegetable oil will burn in a diesel engine (they really aren't that picky about what fuel you put into them), but it generally must be heated to around 160 degrees fahrenheit first. Plain vegetable oil is too viscous for the stock injectors on diesel engines. So to use it, these kits heat the veggie oil with coolant from the engine, which means that you have to warm the car up on regular diesel first, then switch to the veggie oil tank, and also you have to switch back to diesel for a few minutes before you shut the motor off, to clear the fuel lines. This probably is not a good idea for use in cold climates (even real biodiesel gels at temps below 40 Fahrenheit). Anoter alternative is to mix the veggie oil with about 20-30% kerosene. There is also evidence that vegetable oil can damage fuel pumps, and both vegetable oil and biodiesel can cause problems with rubber seals in the fuel system.
let's see, if only we had some sort of device that you could use to shoot unexploded ordnace and detonate it. Oh wait, we do, it's called a rifle and it's been used for that purpose for about 100 years now. A fifty cent bullet does just as good a job as a million dollar laser, and has a longer range too.
Well, even if no one can read the signs in 5000 years, it won't take more than a few intrepid explorers to figure out not to go in there.
Although it is possible to improve resolution of optical telescopes with interferometry, separation of the instruments is limited to tens of meters because the light from each must be combined physically. Anyway, the point of having a telescope this large is not to improve resolution, but light-gathering ability. A mirror this large would be able to see much dimmer objects than any realistically sized space telescope. This telescope should be able to see further into deep space than any but radio telescopes. Most of the work will be done in the infrared, because light from objects that far away is red-shifted well away from the visible spectrum.
The size of the pie is fixed, it's just that Malthus was not aware of the potential of some of out unexploited resources, namely oil. Basically, oil allowed us to expand food production far beyond what would have been possible without it. In a very real sense, oil is food. Once oil production starts to decline, prices for all goods including food will skyrocket, unless an energy source is found to take its place. the result of this is that nations like the U.S. will cease to be food exporters and countries that rely on imports of food will starve. it won't be the end of the world, just the end of a large portion of those who occupy it. as always, the market will correct itself.
right, but if you're producing it by electrolysis, you need a source for the electricity. if that's coming from a coal plant, well, the best coal fired power plants are about 75% efficient. if the electricity comes from wind or OTEC (solar is really totally inadequate for large scale production at this point, and probably always will be) efficiency is less of a problem, but generating capacity isn't as great as with coal or nuclear. so in reality, you're always going to end up with a net loss.
fuels cells are not magic, they require hydrogen. hydrogen requires slightly more energy to produce than it contains. at best it is a means of storing energy produced by burning fossil fuels or nuclear, solar, wind, hydro, whatever it's not an energy source. ethanol is even worse. it takes 70% more energy to produce ethanol than it contains. and every acre used to grow biomass fuels is an acre that cannot be used for food production.
Actually, this is going to happen, and sooner than most people think. Points 1 and 2 in the above post are simply wrong, and point 3 may be irrelevant. First of all, fuel efficiency, although it roughly doubled since 1975, mostly because manufacturers reduced engine sizes, has been slowly but steadily decreasing in the U.S. since 1987.
As for the claim that more fuel is being found, it is simply not true. Oil discovery peaked in 1960 and has been steadily declining ever since. The current rate of consumption exceeds new discovery by a margin of 3:1 and demand is increasing at a rate between 2 and 3 percent every year. New technology does not solve this problem, at a certain point the laws of thermodynamics kick in and standard economic paradigms fail. at some point, it takes more energy to recover the oil than the oil contains. after that, there is no longer any point in trying to recover more oil.
In 1956 a geologist named M. King Hubbert published his prediction that U.S. Oil production would peak by 1970. Most people in the petroleum industry ridiculed him, but he was right. Oil production in the U.S. has been declining since 1970, Dr. Hubbert was spot-on in his predicition. Recently Dr. Hubbert's theory has been applied to estimated worldwide reserves. One study estimates that global oil production will peak by 2010. This study has also taken some heat from the establishment, but even if you accept the most wildly optimistic estimates of the people doing the ridiculing, peak oil production is only pushed 20-30 years into the future. After the peak, production declines every year, until it becomes uneconomical to produce more oil. When production peaks, demand will exceed supply permanently, a situation that will get worse every year from then on. For a good example of what happens to prices when demand for a commodity exceeds supply, check out the prices for real balsamic vinegar these days. Prices would skyrocket so quickly that the average person would no longer be able to afford to run a vehicle, not even a hybrid one.
What about alternative fuels and energy sources? What about them? they aren't being developed. politicians pay lip service to alternative energy, and cut funding. We don't need them right now, oil prices are still cheap. The killer here is that oil prices stay cheap, right up until it becomes clear that production is decreasing. after that oil prices climb. So does the price of everything else. Suddenly, the economy is too weak to support the development of other energy sources, even if we wanted to.
What about coal? there's like 1000 years worth of coal left. What about natural gas? Well, the 700 million automobiles in the world today don't run on coal or natural gas. neither do the airplanes and railroads. and neither does the equipment used to mine and transport the coal and natural gas. heh heh.
Our economy is based on oil. in a very real sense, at this point in human history oil is food. oil is everything. and it's running out. there is no good substitute for it, and we don't seem all that interested in finding one. we're all gonna die. really. it's probably too late already, so no point in worrying about it now.
MLS paid $40 million for the broadcast rights to the games, and also had to pay ABC and ESPN to carry them. Pathetic. They basically had to pay the networks as much as they would normally get in adverstising revenue for the time the games aired, and hope to recoup some of it from the ads that aired at halftime.
even franz beckenbauer said the hand ball should have been called. we wuz robbed.
Jump a split second after the ball is kicked? the ball is in the back of the net approximately 2/10 of a second after it is kicked, not much time to analyze the flight path and react appropriately, is it. the only thing they can do is guess
According to the article, media player is just downloading the title and track listings of cds and dvds and storing them so it can display them whenever you put the same disc in. Winamp has been doing this forever, and so have a billion other media apps. Microsoft may indeed be conspiring to take over the world and subject us all to their evil whims, but this feature doesn't really seem to have much to do with that diabolical plan.
it was cool when you could jack a celeron300a up to 450mhz and have it run faster than a pentium 450 at less than half the price, but with most processors today you're looking at maybe a 5 or 10 percent gain and maybe a 20 or 30 dollars in savings. the savings is nil when you have to buy a fancy cooling solution to keep running
Thomas Pynchon- people will still be trying to figure Gravity's Rainbow out in 50 years
Neal Stephenson- same goes for Cryptonomicon
Alexander Solzhenitsyn- maybe the most important Russian author of the 20th century, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich preserves the horrors of Stalinism for generations to come.
Don Delillo- his books speak volumes about America during the last half of the 20th century
Quite possible David Foster Wallace, if he gets over his own cleverness and produces something that won't seem dated 20 years from now.
Most of the SF authors that seem to be so popular here need not apply. Ditto for other genre-bound authors. Regardless of how good these writers are at storytelling, the vast majority of their works are formulaic and derivitive.
I mean, if you are never going to be able to recreate the experience of hearing it live anyway, then it seems to me that $140,000 would buy an awful lot of symphony, opera, and concert tickets. you could probably commute from New York to London or Vienna to hear world class orchestras every week for a few years for that much. Then again, unless you have the right connections, you would probably have some difficulty getting Elvis to play at your house.
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^.
( @ )
Soylent Foods, Inc.
Microsoft realizes that if they audited federal agencies they would only reveal how much they were overcharging them.
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( @ )
Soylent Foods, Inc.
Because if they don't microsoft can revoke their right to use licenses without refunding a penny.they don't have to let you use their software if you don't agree to their terms. they can also sue or file a criminal complaint and then the court will require the alleged violator to prove compliance, and you can't tell the court to shove it. it is cheaper just to agree to the audit and pay the penalties for any violations discovered.
.^
^.
( @ )
Soylent Foods, Inc.
The facts would suggest otherwise. No western European country occupied by the Nazis suffered the same treatment as the Soviet Union. 25 million Soviets died, 2/3 of those were civilians. Soviet prisoners of war were kept under conditions similar to concentration camps. Entire villages were liquidated to prevent inhabitants from aiding partisans. what crops weren't stolen by the Germans for their own use were destroyed to prevent them from falling into partisan hands. People that weren't enslaved by the Nazis were simply left to starve. The Nazis considered all Slavic peoples to be one step above Jews and several below farm animals. Slavic art and cultural items were deemed degenerate and destroyed accordingly. The German plans for the future of Russia basically included no Russians. And, for the most part, it wasn't the SS that carried these crimes out, it was the regular German army.
.^
The treatment of captured German soldiers by the Soviets certainly was't any better (90% never returned home) but one can make a stronger argument in defense of the Soviets, who had good reason to be pissed off by the end of the Stalingrad siege. The Germans were fighting a war of expansion. They pretty much got what they deserved.
"Stalingrad" basically ignores all these facts and portrays this company of stormtroopers, who are meant to represent the average soldier, as decent men who are as much victims of the Nazis as anyone else is. That may be true in a sense, and certainly there were decent human beings in the Wehrmacht (at least one hopes there were), but the compassion shown by the soldiers portrayed in the movie certainly does not seem to have been typical of German troops.
^.
( @ )
Soylent Foods, Inc.