I have kept all of my textbooks (except one, and I actually wish I had kept that one too). I refer to them all the time, years after the course. In the semesters following the course, I referred to some textbooks from past courses weekly or daily. There is no way that 5 months is the useful life of the book. For me, the useful life of a textbook is about the same as the lifespan of the paper is printed on, at least several decades.
Not having access to textbooks from previous classes could even put a senior student at a disadvantage.
Have you ever written an open-book exam? Hardcover/softcover books have been allowed to some of my final exams. I doubt any professor would allow electronic books into an exam, as that opens the doors to laptops, wireless connections, IM, and internet access.
There is no way that I would pay money for an electronic book if it was locked to a platform and disintigrated after a set time period. No way. You would have a hard time giving one to me.
These e-textbooks are not something I could use. They are not so easy to use at a random table on campus or in the library, on the bus, at your friends apartament or anywhere except the computer it is locked to.
Has anyone thought about what impact building this thing would have on the environment? I mean, it sounds like a big project ($6 trillion? that's a lot in my books). It needs to get resources from somewhere. Where are they going to get the energy and raw materials to build the thing?
Wouldn't it be cheaper, easier and more effective to take the $500 billion or $6 trillion, and instead of increasing overall production and consumption, just give everyone a few more vacations days per year where they can do some things that are good for the environment and require fewer resources (read a book, sleep in, clean up garbage, change the car oil, go for a bike ride). Or I am just off my rocker here?
Actually, I would bet you are influenced by ads. When you thought about what kind of your you might buy someday, you came up with a list of Ford and Chevy. You didn't think of VM, BMW, Kia, Toyota, Mazda, Renault, Opel, Jaguar, Honda or any of the others. Perhaps you thought of Ford and Chevy first because the ads from those dealers are more prevalent near you.
And I think I am also influenced by ads, as my list is by no means complete. And I came up with the first names a bit faster than the last few names...
I have doubleclick.net not only adblocked by the browser, but also have an entry in my hosts file that routes doubleclick to the bitbucket: 0.0.0.0 doubleclick.net
But I do click on Google ads. What's the difference? Doubleclick tends to send me stupid, annoying, irrelevant ads that waste screen space. Google send me relevant, non-annoying ads that work in a 3cm^2 textbox. I have even bought things that I found in part with Google ads.
I can easily ignore Google ads when I am not interested. Pop-up windows are annoying and frustrating, and even create a "negative advertising experience".
So Doubleclick, don't be annoying, and maybe, someday, I will consider perhaps not routing you to the bitbucket. Maybe.
I guess you must have moved in during the beta phase. Should have waited until your house was in production phase, or even wait for the next minor version. Lots of people have had problems with House 0.9beta2. I am waiting for 1.0 to settle, and I know some people are waiting for 1.1 before they move in.
Well, when a house builder considers a house finished and it has passed inspection, it usually is a good house. It is a product worthy of being sold on the market. It has met requirements. It may not have been tested against all known factors (children), but the product is typically well-built enough to pass muster.
What are the standards for a box of software that is sold on the shelves of a store?
I don't remember many of the video games I have played, or any of the TV I have watched, but I distictly remember many of the hiking trails and camping and canoeing and biking trips and model rocket lauching that my parents have taken me and my siblings on. In fact, I can remember very specific details and places (and could probably draw a map of the trails we hiked) even though some of those events were 15 years ago. And this from a guy who has already forgotten what he had for breakfast yesterday, and where is that pen I lost again? I think my keys are in here somewhere, and I forgot two passwords last week..
It has been almost one year since there has been a TV here. However, before, there was a TV here, and it was sometimes watched (a few hous a week?). Low usage. Many years ago, I suppose you may have said I watched too much (even it was slightly lower than the average for my age group at the time). My TV watching time has decreased over several years, but it has been zero for almost one now. So we are talking about rounding errors - does 2 hours of TV a week count as "almost none"? What about 3 hours one week and nothing the next??
You are the Dad, you are the leader. If you start leading them on hiking trips when they are young, and share the beauty of the outdoors with them, maybe they will enjoy that and stick to it. If they are doing something great (maybe they want to join some outdoors club or something) and you like it, then encourage them and support them.
If you do nothing, they will find something to do. And that may very well be playing the same video-games the kids next door are playing.
Let them see the outdoors, and if technology is there, it is a tool and not the toy.
DO: get them outside, go canoeing, biking, hiking, walking, skiing, camping, exploring, build and launch model rockets (please, lauch outside), build a treehouse... If you must involve technology, bring a GPS and a digital camera (but don't forget a map and compass - be sure they know how to use those when the GPS batteries die). While you are out there, talk to them abou the plants species, the mountains, how the compass works, how the water flows around the canoe and what make the bike stable while it is moving.
What did you enjoy doing outside as a kid? Why not try that? If they enjoy it too, that's great - you are doing somehting you enjoy outside, and your kids are there and having fun too!!
Is it possible for you to even raise your kids without a TV? I can certainly live without a TV (over a year now, almost 3 years depending on how you count it).
DO NOT: buy a Nintendo/PS3/XBox and let the toy babysit the kids for you. People at Slashdot will expel the virtues of how they learned problem solving and "other skills" while playing video games. Well, I learned a few German words playing a foreign game, and picked up some geography from Civ3, but try and keep the video games to a minimum.
Being a parent is an active responsibility (but it can be fun). Just be sure you go exploring. If you are having fun, they probably will be too. If the kids look forward to going biking with dad more than sitting in front of the boob-tube playing Mari Kart 12, you are doing your job well! If they hear "Dad's home, and were building rockets tonight!" and drop the video game in the middle of a game to join you, you are doing great!
actually, the film plot as it stands does include a subtle medical twist. After learning from Grog how to cook food, Grok doesn't die of Salmonella poisoning.
Here's another idea for a film. Turn the contest around and show how people benefit from the sharing of ideas.
Setting: prehistoric man, living in a cave. Gork has the idea of rubbing two sticks together to make a fire. He finds that fire is indeed warm, and it is very comfortable to sit near it. The fire keeps him warm during the cold night.
Grog is very jealous of Gork's fire, and steals one of the burning branches while Gork is not looking, so that he can have his own fire. He carefully takes the branch to his cave, and makes his own fire. Ironically, Gork's fire keeps burning...
Grog enjoys his new fire, and soon realises that it is also very good for preparing food. Grog roasts himself a good meal. Grok is enticed by the new smells, and cones to check it out. He sees Grog also has a fire.
Should he be furious and sue for patent infringement??? It took him a lot of work and time to figure out the proper way to rub two sticks together to make the fire. No, Grok tries the food and likes the roasting idea as well. He stays awhile and learns what Grog has been doing. Pretty soon, Grok is enjoying his own home-cooked meals by his warm fire, having benefited from Grog building on his idea. Both are happier and warmer because of the fire. Both have learned something new from each other, and both are better off for the sharing of ideas.
fastforward a generation, and they are swapping BBQ recipies..
-- Please steal this idea and work with it. And then share it with everyone else.
How much of that 196 Euros goes to the photographers whose pictures are stored on the HD? it is, after all, an iPod PHOTO. Maybe some people would use it for, perhaps, follow me here, photos????
Has anyone ben able to fit a book through one of those fax machines that feed the page in? And if you cut out one page from a book and fax that, is that considered a fair use? (i.e. I can quote a few lines from a book, but not a whole chapter. There is a certain percentage of the complete work that may be copied, in some countries, that is considered fair use).
And anywhere that you pay per minute for the call, it is stupid to send a book by fax - it is cheaper to buy the book outright. Faster and better quality too.
The difference is that the photo industry sees you as a creator. You are the photographer. You are the one taking pictures, and maybe you can take better pictures if they can make a better camera and convince you to buy it. They seek to empower you. If you start enjoying taking pictures with a 4MP automatic digicam, maybe you will really enjoy taking more and better pictures with a 8MP digital SLR. You are the copyright owner of the pictures you take (barring any contracts you may have signed).
I for one have over 30GB (or more, including backups and galleries) of pictures I have taken, and am saving up for a digital SLR. I have spent much more on my digital camera and accessories than I ever did on my film camera and developing. And I take 100x as many pictures now.
The music industry sees you as a consumer. You make nothing, you just consume. You are not creative, you will buy what they tell you to, and they are not aware of any other alternatives. The only use for a 100GB HD, in their eyes, is to store copyright infriging material. Their material. And you should pay for it in advance.
I for one, have stopped listening to RIAA music and buying RIAA cds. Now I can save that money and spend it on a digital SLR!
short (oversimplified) summary: digital camera industry - try to empower the customers, and maybe they will come back and buy more cameras and accessories and storage media
music industry - the customers should just consume our products, and never dare to do otherwise. noone stores their photos from their digicam on a compact flash or hard drive!
Images of the Eiffel Tower have long been in the public domain; however in 2003, the operating company SNTE installed a new lighting display on the tower, which they then copyrighted. The effect is to put the night-time image of the tower under copyright. It follows that it is no longer legal to publish contemporary photographs of the tower without permission. The imposition of copyright is not without some controversy. The Director of Documentation for SNTE, Stéphane Dieu, commented in January 2005 "It is really just a way to manage commercial use of the image, so that it isn't used in ways we don't approve". However techically it also applies to tourist photographs of the tower. external link
Coal contains trace radioactive elements, and when thousands of tonnes of coal is burned, trace amounts add up to significant amounts. And those radioactive elements can go right up the flue stack and into the air.
Radioactive Elements in Coal and Fly Ash: Abundance, Forms, and Environmental Significance U.S. Geological Survey Fact Sheet FS-163-97 pdf archive.org cache
Karl S Kruszelnicki, What else might be in your Ceiling Dust? link archive.org cache
I will second that nomination. Fastmail.fm is great. You get POP3, IMAP, SMTP, an nice (skinnable too) web interface. Everything can run over SSL, including using their redirect proxies over arbitrary port numbers. They have some popmail checkers that will check my other accounts at defined intervals and deliver it to me.
Spam filters work great, and you can tune it if you prefer. Everyone in your addressbook can be automatically whitelisted.
I can use it at home, at work, on my mobile, on the road... It is great.
It is easy to use, and advanced options are a few clicks away if you can swim in deeper water.
Lots of great features - filter to folder, aliases, multiple names and domains...
The service is fantastic. Lots of documentation on how things work, and a community of users to help you solve a problem or suggest new features (and I believe one of my suggestions has been implemented).
If there is going to be a planned outage that cannot be resolved without downtime, they will post a warning about it, and then progress notes as they proceed. Everyone has downtime, but not everyone will tell you about it, and fewer still will give you a minute-by-minute synopsis.
A while ago, there was an outage for one day (actually, most of NE USA was dark that day). It was due to a power failure at one of ther hosting fascilities. They had a contract for guarenteed X% uptime, with a refund of $Y if that was not met. When the hosting company sent Fastmail.fm a refund for downtime, Fastmail.fm sent ME my portion of it (in the form of credits to my account). WOW. That's never happened to me before.
If not, where could I find a RJ-11-to-VoIP converter for my base station?
check out a SIPPhone Call-in-One. It appears to do a good job of combining a land line and a VoIP line onto one phone or extension cable. What sounds great - you connect your regular analog phone. To dial normally, just dial normally. To dial using VoIP, press # to switch to the VoIP line and then dial! Almost easy enough for Grandma to use!
I hope you aren't the only person tallying votes. On my calculator, 250,000/110,000,000*100% = 0.2%. You are out by a factor of 10. Not to be picky or anything, but if being off by a factor of ten is acceptable, then Nader stands a much better chance of getting the popular vote.
Face it, people make mistakes. I make mistakes, you make mistakes, But the double-checking for mistakes then better. Every vote matters. It might be that this time, "only 10000 votes" doesn't shift an election, but sometimes that is the difference between two candidates. Also, if someone knows that their vote was thrown out, that makes them a little more jaded knowing their vote doesn't count. Do you want your vote to count? I want mine to count, and I hope that those in charge of my vote after it goes into the ballot box respect that as well.
Elections are a big business
That's awful. Running elections may be big business now, but there are much more important things at stake. Like the political future of a nation. Some things are worth taking the time to do correctly, and not in an environment where the number one priority is shareholder value and profit margins.
To oversimplify - implementing Kyoto is in the short term more expensive, long term cheaper. However, the long term is more difficult to measure. A couple hundred $$ for a catalytic converter, or long-term better environment, lower health-care costs, and improved quality of life? How do you measure these things??
Then there is the whole issue of Tragedy of the Commons. Why shouldn't YOU implement these measures, and I'll keep to my old ways. It is cheaper for me to not buy the catalytic converter, and because everyone else is polluting less, I still enjoy cleaner air. But that only works when I am the only one who thinks that way. When everyone thinks that way, we have the Tragedy of the Commons. So we need some kind of incentive to make sure everyone sees the advantages of cleaner air and less pollution.
Bush is thinking like a short-term manager, not a long-term engineer. For example, what are the largest costs to a chemical plant? Well, the big three major costs to a chemical plant are often:
1) energy
2) raw materials
3) wages/insurance.
They are often in that order. How do you make you chemical plant more efficient and more cost-effective? Focus on reducing your major costs.
Since the biggest cost to a chemical plant is energy, how do you reduce you energy usage? Design more efficient processes, reuse energy - instead of dumping heat into the atmosphere, reuse it as utility steam (and reduce your energy costs). Process integration (using the byproducts of one process to fuel another instead of just dumping it) requires some smarts, some planning, but can make your industry more efficient, more cost-effective and more profitable. Did I mention that reducing energy costs is not only profitable, but environmentally friendly???!?
Yes, you heard me right - reducing energy costs is not only good for the bank account, but good for Mother Nature too? And it makes the industry more competitive?
What that means is that American industries will not be nearly as competitive or profitable as Kyoto countries. It will take a few years for the Kyoto countries to become more efficient, but when they are, America will lose big time in the global economy due to their lower efficiency.
Slashdot Mirror
You sound like you are looking for Wikibooks. They are developing and disseminating free open content textbooks, manuals, and other texts.
I have kept all of my textbooks (except one, and I actually wish I had kept that one too). I refer to them all the time, years after the course. In the semesters following the course, I referred to some textbooks from past courses weekly or daily. There is no way that 5 months is the useful life of the book. For me, the useful life of a textbook is about the same as the lifespan of the paper is printed on, at least several decades.
Not having access to textbooks from previous classes could even put a senior student at a disadvantage.
Have you ever written an open-book exam? Hardcover/softcover books have been allowed to some of my final exams. I doubt any professor would allow electronic books into an exam, as that opens the doors to laptops, wireless connections, IM, and internet access.
There is no way that I would pay money for an electronic book if it was locked to a platform and disintigrated after a set time period. No way. You would have a hard time giving one to me.
These e-textbooks are not something I could use. They are not so easy to use at a random table on campus or in the library, on the bus, at your friends apartament or anywhere except the computer it is locked to.
Has anyone thought about what impact building this thing would have on the environment? I mean, it sounds like a big project ($6 trillion? that's a lot in my books). It needs to get resources from somewhere. Where are they going to get the energy and raw materials to build the thing?
Wouldn't it be cheaper, easier and more effective to take the $500 billion or $6 trillion, and instead of increasing overall production and consumption, just give everyone a few more vacations days per year where they can do some things that are good for the environment and require fewer resources (read a book, sleep in, clean up garbage, change the car oil, go for a bike ride). Or I am just off my rocker here?
Actually, I would bet you are influenced by ads. When you thought about what kind of your you might buy someday, you came up with a list of Ford and Chevy. You didn't think of VM, BMW, Kia, Toyota, Mazda, Renault, Opel, Jaguar, Honda or any of the others. Perhaps you thought of Ford and Chevy first because the ads from those dealers are more prevalent near you.
And I think I am also influenced by ads, as my list is by no means complete. And I came up with the first names a bit faster than the last few names...
Agreed.
I have doubleclick.net not only adblocked by the browser, but also have an entry in my hosts file that routes doubleclick to the bitbucket:
0.0.0.0 doubleclick.net
But I do click on Google ads. What's the difference? Doubleclick tends to send me stupid, annoying, irrelevant ads that waste screen space. Google send me relevant, non-annoying ads that work in a 3cm^2 textbox. I have even bought things that I found in part with Google ads.
I can easily ignore Google ads when I am not interested. Pop-up windows are annoying and frustrating, and even create a "negative advertising experience".
So Doubleclick, don't be annoying, and maybe, someday, I will consider perhaps not routing you to the bitbucket. Maybe.
I guess you must have moved in during the beta phase. Should have waited until your house was in production phase, or even wait for the next minor version. Lots of people have had problems with House 0.9beta2. I am waiting for 1.0 to settle, and I know some people are waiting for 1.1 before they move in.
Well, when a house builder considers a house finished and it has passed inspection, it usually is a good house. It is a product worthy of being sold on the market. It has met requirements. It may not have been tested against all known factors (children), but the product is typically well-built enough to pass muster.
What are the standards for a box of software that is sold on the shelves of a store?
I don't remember many of the video games I have played, or any of the TV I have watched, but I distictly remember many of the hiking trails and camping and canoeing and biking trips and model rocket lauching that my parents have taken me and my siblings on. In fact, I can remember very specific details and places (and could probably draw a map of the trails we hiked) even though some of those events were 15 years ago. And this from a guy who has already forgotten what he had for breakfast yesterday, and where is that pen I lost again? I think my keys are in here somewhere, and I forgot two passwords last week..
It has been almost one year since there has been a TV here. However, before, there was a TV here, and it was sometimes watched (a few hous a week?). Low usage. Many years ago, I suppose you may have said I watched too much (even it was slightly lower than the average for my age group at the time). My TV watching time has decreased over several years, but it has been zero for almost one now. So we are talking about rounding errors - does 2 hours of TV a week count as "almost none"? What about 3 hours one week and nothing the next??
to reply to my own post:
You are the Dad, you are the leader. If you start leading them on hiking trips when they are young, and share the beauty of the outdoors with them, maybe they will enjoy that and stick to it. If they are doing something great (maybe they want to join some outdoors club or something) and you like it, then encourage them and support them.
If you do nothing, they will find something to do. And that may very well be playing the same video-games the kids next door are playing.
Let them see the outdoors, and if technology is there, it is a tool and not the toy.
DO: get them outside, go canoeing, biking, hiking, walking, skiing, camping, exploring, build and launch model rockets (please, lauch outside), build a treehouse... If you must involve technology, bring a GPS and a digital camera (but don't forget a map and compass - be sure they know how to use those when the GPS batteries die). While you are out there, talk to them abou the plants species, the mountains, how the compass works, how the water flows around the canoe and what make the bike stable while it is moving.
What did you enjoy doing outside as a kid? Why not try that? If they enjoy it too, that's great - you are doing somehting you enjoy outside, and your kids are there and having fun too!!
Is it possible for you to even raise your kids without a TV? I can certainly live without a TV (over a year now, almost 3 years depending on how you count it).
DO NOT: buy a Nintendo/PS3/XBox and let the toy babysit the kids for you. People at Slashdot will expel the virtues of how they learned problem solving and "other skills" while playing video games. Well, I learned a few German words playing a foreign game, and picked up some geography from Civ3, but try and keep the video games to a minimum.
Being a parent is an active responsibility (but it can be fun). Just be sure you go exploring. If you are having fun, they probably will be too. If the kids look forward to going biking with dad more than sitting in front of the boob-tube playing Mari Kart 12, you are doing your job well! If they hear "Dad's home, and were building rockets tonight!" and drop the video game in the middle of a game to join you, you are doing great!
You are not looking hard enough. There are many companies and bands out there selling/giving away non-DRM'd music. And some of it is even really good.
Magnatune
Creative Commmons Audio
actually, the film plot as it stands does include a subtle medical twist. After learning from Grog how to cook food, Grok doesn't die of Salmonella poisoning.
Here's another idea for a film. Turn the contest around and show how people benefit from the sharing of ideas.
Setting: prehistoric man, living in a cave. Gork has the idea of rubbing two sticks together to make a fire. He finds that fire is indeed warm, and it is very comfortable to sit near it. The fire keeps him warm during the cold night.
Grog is very jealous of Gork's fire, and steals one of the burning branches while Gork is not looking, so that he can have his own fire. He carefully takes the branch to his cave, and makes his own fire. Ironically, Gork's fire keeps burning...
Grog enjoys his new fire, and soon realises that it is also very good for preparing food. Grog roasts himself a good meal. Grok is enticed by the new smells, and cones to check it out. He sees Grog also has a fire.
Should he be furious and sue for patent infringement??? It took him a lot of work and time to figure out the proper way to rub two sticks together to make the fire. No, Grok tries the food and likes the roasting idea as well. He stays awhile and learns what Grog has been doing. Pretty soon, Grok is enjoying his own home-cooked meals by his warm fire, having benefited from Grog building on his idea. Both are happier and warmer because of the fire. Both have learned something new from each other, and both are better off for the sharing of ideas.
fastforward a generation, and they are swapping BBQ recipies..
--
Please steal this idea and work with it. And then share it with everyone else.
How much of that 196 Euros goes to the photographers whose pictures are stored on the HD? it is, after all, an iPod PHOTO. Maybe some people would use it for, perhaps, follow me here, photos????
Has anyone ben able to fit a book through one of those fax machines that feed the page in? And if you cut out one page from a book and fax that, is that considered a fair use? (i.e. I can quote a few lines from a book, but not a whole chapter. There is a certain percentage of the complete work that may be copied, in some countries, that is considered fair use).
And anywhere that you pay per minute for the call, it is stupid to send a book by fax - it is cheaper to buy the book outright. Faster and better quality too.
The difference is that the photo industry sees you as a creator. You are the photographer. You are the one taking pictures, and maybe you can take better pictures if they can make a better camera and convince you to buy it. They seek to empower you. If you start enjoying taking pictures with a 4MP automatic digicam, maybe you will really enjoy taking more and better pictures with a 8MP digital SLR. You are the copyright owner of the pictures you take (barring any contracts you may have signed).
I for one have over 30GB (or more, including backups and galleries) of pictures I have taken, and am saving up for a digital SLR. I have spent much more on my digital camera and accessories than I ever did on my film camera and developing. And I take 100x as many pictures now.
The music industry sees you as a consumer. You make nothing, you just consume. You are not creative, you will buy what they tell you to, and they are not aware of any other alternatives. The only use for a 100GB HD, in their eyes, is to store copyright infriging material. Their material. And you should pay for it in advance.
I for one, have stopped listening to RIAA music and buying RIAA cds. Now I can save that money and spend it on a digital SLR!
short (oversimplified) summary:
digital camera industry - try to empower the customers, and maybe they will come back and buy more cameras and accessories and storage media
music industry - the customers should just consume our products, and never dare to do otherwise. noone stores their photos from their digicam on a compact flash or hard drive!
But if you are in Germany and type in http://google.ca, low and behold, you get Google Canada, the Canadian Google site. Google.com, Google.se, Google.fr, Google.ch, Google.ru, Google.co.nz, Google.co.au, all appear to work from other countries, and I presume all of the 113 country local domains should also work. I have no idea if the search results vary, as that is a study for someone else to do.
Eiffel Tower:
(copied from Wikipedia)
Images of the Eiffel Tower have long been in the public domain; however in 2003, the operating company SNTE installed a new lighting display on the tower, which they then copyrighted. The effect is to put the night-time image of the tower under copyright. It follows that it is no longer legal to publish contemporary photographs of the tower without permission. The imposition of copyright is not without some controversy. The Director of Documentation for SNTE, Stéphane Dieu, commented in January 2005 "It is really just a way to manage commercial use of the image, so that it isn't used in ways we don't approve". However techically it also applies to tourist photographs of the tower. external link
Also see the Eiffel Tower FAQ
Coal contains trace radioactive elements, and when thousands of tonnes of coal is burned, trace amounts add up to significant amounts. And those radioactive elements can go right up the flue stack and into the air.
Radioactive Elements in Coal and Fly Ash: Abundance, Forms, and Environmental Significance
U.S. Geological Survey Fact Sheet FS-163-97
pdf
archive.org cache
Karl S Kruszelnicki, What else might be in your Ceiling Dust?
link
archive.org cache
Try multimap:3 &lon=-71.1161&scale=50000&icon=x
http://www.multimap.com/map/browse.cgi?lat=42.376
This should be what you are looking for.
I will second that nomination. Fastmail.fm is great. You get POP3, IMAP, SMTP, an nice (skinnable too) web interface. Everything can run over SSL, including using their redirect proxies over arbitrary port numbers. They have some popmail checkers that will check my other accounts at defined intervals and deliver it to me.
Spam filters work great, and you can tune it if you prefer. Everyone in your addressbook can be automatically whitelisted.
I can use it at home, at work, on my mobile, on the road... It is great.
It is easy to use, and advanced options are a few clicks away if you can swim in deeper water.
Lots of great features - filter to folder, aliases, multiple names and domains...
The service is fantastic. Lots of documentation on how things work, and a community of users to help you solve a problem or suggest new features (and I believe one of my suggestions has been implemented).
If there is going to be a planned outage that cannot be resolved without downtime, they will post a warning about it, and then progress notes as they proceed. Everyone has downtime, but not everyone will tell you about it, and fewer still will give you a minute-by-minute synopsis.
A while ago, there was an outage for one day (actually, most of NE USA was dark that day). It was due to a power failure at one of ther hosting fascilities. They had a contract for guarenteed X% uptime, with a refund of $Y if that was not met. When the hosting company sent Fastmail.fm a refund for downtime, Fastmail.fm sent ME my portion of it (in the form of credits to my account). WOW. That's never happened to me before.
Bottom line - Fastmail is great. Try them out.
check out a SIPPhone Call-in-One. It appears to do a good job of combining a land line and a VoIP line onto one phone or extension cable. What sounds great - you connect your regular analog phone. To dial normally, just dial normally. To dial using VoIP, press # to switch to the VoIP line and then dial! Almost easy enough for Grandma to use!
I hope you aren't the only person tallying votes. On my calculator, 250,000/110,000,000*100% = 0.2%. You are out by a factor of 10. Not to be picky or anything, but if being off by a factor of ten is acceptable, then Nader stands a much better chance of getting the popular vote.
Face it, people make mistakes. I make mistakes, you make mistakes, But the double-checking for mistakes then better. Every vote matters. It might be that this time, "only 10000 votes" doesn't shift an election, but sometimes that is the difference between two candidates. Also, if someone knows that their vote was thrown out, that makes them a little more jaded knowing their vote doesn't count. Do you want your vote to count? I want mine to count, and I hope that those in charge of my vote after it goes into the ballot box respect that as well.
That's awful. Running elections may be big business now, but there are much more important things at stake. Like the political future of a nation. Some things are worth taking the time to do correctly, and not in an environment where the number one priority is shareholder value and profit margins.
To oversimplify - implementing Kyoto is in the short term more expensive, long term cheaper. However, the long term is more difficult to measure. A couple hundred $$ for a catalytic converter, or long-term better environment, lower health-care costs, and improved quality of life? How do you measure these things??
Then there is the whole issue of Tragedy of the Commons. Why shouldn't YOU implement these measures, and I'll keep to my old ways. It is cheaper for me to not buy the catalytic converter, and because everyone else is polluting less, I still enjoy cleaner air. But that only works when I am the only one who thinks that way. When everyone thinks that way, we have the Tragedy of the Commons. So we need some kind of incentive to make sure everyone sees the advantages of cleaner air and less pollution.
1) energy
2) raw materials
3) wages/insurance.
They are often in that order. How do you make you chemical plant more efficient and more cost-effective? Focus on reducing your major costs.
Since the biggest cost to a chemical plant is energy, how do you reduce you energy usage? Design more efficient processes, reuse energy - instead of dumping heat into the atmosphere, reuse it as utility steam (and reduce your energy costs). Process integration (using the byproducts of one process to fuel another instead of just dumping it) requires some smarts, some planning, but can make your industry more efficient, more cost-effective and more profitable. Did I mention that reducing energy costs is not only profitable, but environmentally friendly???!?
Yes, you heard me right - reducing energy costs is not only good for the bank account, but good for Mother Nature too? And it makes the industry more competitive?
What that means is that American industries will not be nearly as competitive or profitable as Kyoto countries. It will take a few years for the Kyoto countries to become more efficient, but when they are, America will lose big time in the global economy due to their lower efficiency.