I would much rather live in a world where everyone is free to read all the laws that have been passed, than to live in a society where business to even legally operate have to buy a $40,000 manual on how to build houses in a single California county.
the whole idea of copyrighting law was a way for high priced copyright lawyers to market a very expensive but essential set of laws to builders, instead of working for the fees the government was willing to pay, which any decent copyright attorney would refuse to accept as sum total of hundreds of hours perhaps of revisions and research to get a law the courts wont overturn in a day...
but there is a darker side to copyrighted laws. imagine a coup of the government by a 'president' by carefully copyrighting code buried in many thousand page laws, the president could erode the power of a the house and senate and the judiciary, and because the bills were so tightly copyrighted, nobody even read the sections they would have needed to read before it was too late...
once the president becomes an emperor, through abuse of draconian copyright pushed through by greedy bastards in the music and movie and book publishing and now law writing lawyer industries...
we're already pretty close to a police state, laws that not even the congress can read before they vote on them is a dark future, and sets the stage for a coup on the government. I think maybe the courts should hold and sustain that copyright on laws is invalid when passed, and exempt it for law makers while it's in the process of being written, to avoid such a dark future coup possibility.
well you see there is a nasty loophole in federal copyright law. works by the (federal) government may not be copyrighted, but for instance, say a private law firm was contracted to produce a law, say a law on how copyright affects online, and before submitting the law they copyright it, and include all rights to use it 'as part of their work contract' now a law about online copyright, is now copyrighted so that individuals can be sued by a lawyer for reproducing his 'copyrighted' law on internet copyright.
so nasty lawyer then proceeds to sue the shit out of a couple dozen companies that make it their business to disclose information on pending and current bills before the senate, so that these companies can be forced to not disclose important details of how the law was written (it's copyrighted, and no rights are available to anyone but the government) or else be shut down by greedy corrupt politicians who specifically wanted the details of the law private, and others public so that everyone thinks the law was all goodness and sunshine, but really changed the law so that copyright holders can essentially with a single letter win by proxy trials in small claims against online copyright infringers, the portion of the law where specifics were copyrighted.
basically it allows a law all about protecting the children and what not from pedos to contain a clause that because it's all copyrighted not be disseminated and do something like put 10 billion dollars into a an unrelated bridge to nowhere in alaska, that is gold plated.
very bad precedent, laws shouldn't be copyrighted not even by lawyers who work on them. too much incentive to bury copyrighted sections that because they're copyrighted nobody will disseminate them, because the moment they try to they're shut down... copyrighted sections that might be extremely unpopular(or downright dangerous) in an otherwise very popular sounding bill. such as say, a law allowing the president to privately execute any judge on any federal court including the supreme court, and instantly name a successor, and under the law the cause of death is officially 'heart attack' caused of course by lethal injection.
your solution although it sounds simple, is also simple to break. CRCs are very short, are easily tampered with (through hacked system drivers etc) and so on...
but have you ever tried to connect to battle net with a no cd crack for a bliz title? sadly the b.net connection is refused, because to do no CD you need to remove software from the exe, that is easily checked for on connection to blizzard controlled servers.
various cheats are often easily detected, although network sniffing based attacks on battle.net will never be fixable via any reasonable method (does everyone have the bandwidth, and CPU for a game to use 128 bit encryption on every single packet, when some 1,000 packets per second can be generated in a multiplayer game?)
the type of data sent along the lan does include data (such as click locations) that would make a network sniff based undetectable map hack. the best part is all the data needed to generate such a sniffing tool is easily written by comparing network sniff data vs 'saved replay' data. along with a little hex editing, and basically rewriting the entire network stack of the game engine through reverse engineering..
the plus side, is that once written, it doesn't need to be rewritten unless the main game changes how it parses data packets, and you can write nice USB usb drivers that allow keyboard and mouse movements from a 'irc bot' to be sent to a 'clean' unhacked PC running the game client... although certain keyboard/mouse commands are intentionally written buggy to make human bot distinction easy, and they could possibly intentionally create buggy packet formation that would screw up a bot, but not even be seen by a human...
anyways, anything you can think of can be countered. there is no security.
before mentioning the 'largest source of heat' perhaps you should read up on solar variation, or perhaps on the fact that in the past 11 years there has been not even a single watt per sqft change in the energy level of sunlight reaching the outer atmosphere, despite a constant increase in temperature, and a constant increase in carbon dioxide.
yeah, the sun is the big bad boy in charge of producing all 89,000 terrawatts of energy that hit the surface of the earth each second (almost 4 times as much reaches the outer atmosphere, and no i'm not counting the stuff that passes by the earth, only the part of the outer atmosphere that is directly above and the same exact size of half the surface of the earth). According to the Inverse Square law the diffusion of radiation is geometrically related to distance traveled. For example, the intensity of radiation from the Sun is 9140 watts per square meter at the distance of Mercury (0.387AU); but only 1370 watts per square meter at the distance of Earth (1AU)--a threefold increase in distance results in a ninefold decrease in intensity of radiation. because of this, even if the energy from the sun varies by 0.2% the amount that actually reaches the earth is way less. because the earth only receives 1/2,000,000,000 th of the total energy radiated by the sun, or 0.00000005% of the solar radiation, so all increases in solar radiation are automatically divided by 2 billion. the sun would have to increase total output by 2 billion watts to increase the energy the earth receives by a single watt.
so no, the big fusion generator in the sky has almost nothing to do with warming, the biggest single variant in the whole global warming equation is floating between the earth and the sun, we call them 'clouds.' green house gases are very important, but clouds are the single biggest factor, the second factor is the elliptical orbit of the earth, the third is the tilt of the earth on a regional basis.
greenhouse gases ultimately could be countered with a high orbit, roll of very thin highly reflective foil, that would have to be replaced every 30 years or so. or a giant, anchored floating roll of aluminum foil could be put in the oceans, and replaced as often as needed.
a computer model would have to be made to decide where to put either, to favorably shift weather patterns, if only it was global warming that was the only problem. no, human actions are having huge problems besides global warming. el nino, la nina, whatever, the worlds weather patterns normally shift very slowly, affected by very few large scale variables. human intervention has cause a huge shift in where clouds form, how long they float, the size of water droplets, everything about modern clouds are vastly different from the way clouds were, where the only debris that got into the atmosphere was dust from natural fires, and the occasional spew from volcanoes.
massive massive seams of coal being burnt, massive emissions from combustion of petrochemicals, these are changing the type and amount of particulate available to take water vapor from evaporation and bind it into clouds.
the good news is if we switched to clean burning methane hydrates, there would be less particulate, and thus we'd only have global warming from CO2 to worry about. there are more methane hydrates in the worlds permafrost and underneath oceans than there ever were deposits of coal, oil and natural gas ever. by orders of magnitude...
although if methane hydrates become the 'cheap' energy of the future, then civilization still hasn't reached true sustainability. they've just shifted when and where society really faces a future of real renewable energy.
"Study economics and current events, particularly Zimbabwe"
fixed that for you, weimar germany only printed massive amounts of money to repay war repartitions. modern Zimbabwe is printing massive amounts of 100 billion dollar bills to fund and supply their army which is in a protracted civil war with 2 large militia groups as a result of the African war in the Congo.
what happened in germany is minor compared to what Zimbabwe is doing, which is printing money, buying foreign currency and funding their entire army with foreign currencies. that would be like america going out printing 300 trillion dollars, buying euros, yen, etc from banks around the world and then 'using' that foreign non hyper inflated currency to repay the national debt. (yes i realize the national debt is only 9.65 trillion, but to get enough foreign currencies from foreign banks, at least 300 trillion us dollars would have to be printed, if not a few hundred quadrillion, it would be hard to sucker over banks, after the first few large cash transfers they'd start devaluing the dollar in proportion to the reported sizes of unexpected cash purchases)
eventually, if national debt out strips the pace at which our economy grows, the government is going to start using kooky plans to raise the available funds, however, it's pretty clear that we're in no immediate threat of the government pulling any tricks to try and repay debt. a couple lean decades of economic a serious recession, and continued tax cut and spend politics, and America might be in serious trouble finding enough people to buy their debt. for right now though, things aren't critical. although i find the amount of debt, and deficit growth sickening.
slysoft cracked it on easter. iirc, or maybe it was after that, but they charge you like $80 for their hd tools on a download only basis... physical media, costs more, of course.
in addition, despite the 'death' of HD-dvd format, people simply aren't willing to go to Blu-Ray format, because you have to god forbid pay someone $80 for software(thanks slysoft for breaking BD+) to remove protection from the discs, so you can skip the 16 minutes of unskippable adverts they think you need when you just paid $30-40 for a stupid HD movie. maybe if there were easy to use tools, like a BD shrink, or maybe if BD players could play content without having to put it back in BD+ format... (currently you have to convert to h264, and watch on a ps3 or xbox 360)
dvd decryption software starts at 'free' and moves on up to $50, and dvd shrink is hugely popular even though it hasn't been developed in 2+ years (just check it on softpedia!)
yeah content 'owners' just don't get it, every insanely encumbered digital technology has failed, with the exception of DVD-roms, which have minimal, weak protection, that was easily cracked. Divx failed, HD dvd lost the support of studios when it's protection was cracked, but consumers didn't switch to blu-ray, and BD+ was cracked months later... and people still aren't switching (imo partially from the fact that BD+ while cracked, doesn't give end users a 'single click' method of burning it to a BD-r.)
people do pirate content, yeah it really happens, it's been spiraling out of control since the 70's, when copyright became possible without 'submitting' the material to the library of congress. just as prohibition created the mafia, copyright extension created the 'modern pirate.'
the media companies have created multi-billion dollar industries distributing ideas, and they're complaining, because what people once got for nothing, they now steal because they have no money to pay for it.
you can't simply print wealth on a piece of paper, and give it out to everyone, if you try, you wind up with the situation that Zimbabwe is in now with 'hyper inflation.'
actually, wall street hasn't yet factored in the possibility of 20% of nvidia's high to mid end chips being totally reject chips yet.
so a betting man would watch the stock closely for the next few weeks, then when it bottoms buy massive quantities of stock.
this is the kind of a massive chip recall scenario which makes nvidia a likely buyout target by say Intel (everyone likes buying a company at a fraction of the value of the company, which is why M$ worked so hard to try and take over yahoo)
for those saying it's only the chip that is the problem, it's very expensive to remove and replace a chip, because normally the chips are all factory produced on a robotic assembly line, and they're only designed to put the chips on, not take them off. you need people to remove chips, making a massive recall a very expensive option. then there are those who will want their chips recalled, even if the chip was working fine for months, and might be a random lucky working chip.
actually, it can be used as a benchmark or the stability and number crunching abilities of a new, never burned in personal computer. if the computer gets the numbers wrong, or says other numbers are evenly divisible within the number, you know something is seriously wrong, and you can RMA the parts that are screwing the pooch.
much better than say, finding 6 months down the line that your computer keeps randomly rebooting because of a serious flaw in the chips inside it and oh wait it was 6 months tough luck trying to RMA things now...
doing it by hand would be like building the pyramids, by yourself.
it's not a weekend project, just writing down all the numbers from 1, to the number composed of at least 9 million but possibly ten or eleven million digits long... much less then dividing that number by every number from 1 to the number of the same length to make sure it is only evenly divisible by itself, and 1.
i repeat myself it's like trying to build they pyramids by yourself. or even better, trying to build a four lane highway by yourself. I remember hearing about a guy from Duluth Minnesota, who had been trying to build a highway the most direct route between Fargo, ND and Duluth, MN, and he actually started on the Duluth side, i know he didn't get far, but Duluth Minnesota is one of those 'rare' towns that was booming about 100 years ago, but then started shrinking (i forget when) and has never really completely recovered.
the guy started on his quest to get the highway built believing a direct route to Fargo would increase trade and tourism and what not (it would save on average an hours drive each way)
but i think he finally died, having completed somewhere between 12-40 miles of highway.
today's PCs are like having millions of number crunching slaves with never ending papyrus scrolls, there are things computers can do that a human being would never complete if they lived a million years. and even with those millions of number crunching slaves some things take a long time to compute.
the point being, the reason why people do these things with computers is because computers are the only thing that can do them, and to be the first to do something vastly unimaginable by normal standards. kinda like, 'why did we shoot a robot lander to mars?' instead of say, making beer free for everyone in the united states for a day.
well, they have the abstracts... you don't have to download the whole thing... but having read one abstract, i'm lost in the technical jargon, that large particle collider scientists write about without hesitation.
"Abstract. The TOTEM Experiment will measure the total pp cross-section with the luminosity-independent method and study elastic and diffractive scattering at the LHC. To achieve optimum forward coverage for charged particles emitted by the pp collisions in the interaction point IP5, two tracking telescopes, T1 and T2, will be installed on each side in the pseudorapidity region 3.1 || 6.5, and Roman Pot stations will be placed at distances of ±147 m and ±220 m from IP5. Being an independent experiment but technically integrated into CMS, TOTEM will first operate in standalone mode to pursue its own physics programme and at a later stage together with CMS for a common physics programme. This article gives a description of the TOTEM apparatus and its performance."
bargain basement computers often come with bargain basement hard drives, to the standard layperson a dead heard drive == a broken computer, and don't expect people on a sales floor to suggest a $20-$40 part (usable sized HD) is better than buying a $500 computer. cheapo systems also have cheapo optical drives that often crap out, and cheapo power supplies that can fry out equipment or just die prematurely.
any of these problems are easily avoided, by just spending $10-$20 more than for the 'cheapest' of the cheap, sometimes just by researching which part to buy (getting harder year by year as computers blogs get filled with adspace paid for by advertblogers), but don't expect sales floor people to even have a clue about any of this, I'm a die hard build em myself from parts ordered on the internet guy, and have been doing it since 1994.
If a system is built intelligently it will run problem free for a minimum of 4 years, the hard drive is the biggest variable and might hold on for as long as 12 years. every thing else can be bought intelligently to not have any problems other than say a fan failure.
in systems i personally built, the single biggest problem has been user error, the second biggest problem has been dust, followed by unpredictable fan quality, and lastly hard drive failure. in systems people bought without having my help, the typical problem 2-3 years down the road is a POS hdd or optical drive or power supply that dies on them. every 2-3 years something goes wrong on those consumer failure machines from the big box stores, without fail.
on systems i've personally built, the problem with HDDs is 5-8 years down the line. usually though by then the system is horribly obsolete, and mainly i run into issues with specially reconditioned linux machines, unless i buy them a new, 5 year warranty hdd, as a part of reconditioning.
"Are you telling me that as a computer geek, when you lay out money to purchase a computer you do not expect profit to arise from it?
I think that's a very dangerous statement. Everyone who uses their computer for work 'invests' in it. Everyone who uses their second-hand car to drive to work 'invests' in it.
It is not solely necessary for the capital expense to appreciate for it to be an investment."
first off, most people who 'work' on a pc, have one the company paid for in the office, in some cases they even have loaner laptops one can bring home... so you don't 'need' a PC at home to do work.
secondly, before 'everyone' had a car, there were these things called 'trains' that could carry people a vast distance, without having to 'invest' in the purchase of an automobile.
there are also these things called 'bicycles' they're very common methods of transit in china, and i know, you get hot and sweaty riding a bike, but there are restrooms, they have sanitary wipes made specifically for commuter bikers, and quick drying towels, and it's easy to carry a laptop and a briefcase in a good commuter bike bag.
did i mention, biking to work will help you get your vitamin d (15 minutes of sunlight per day minimum is recommended) it will help keep you in better health, and by keeping you in better health help you avoid those dreadful 'weight gain' wardrobe changes.
oh hey, and a good quality bike, all the accessories, and maintaining it will cost less than one month of using a car easily.
'investment' you call a $10,000 cash sink an investment? compared to a $300 bike? which is not just an investment in your transportation, but one in your overall health!
once you're in shape 30 miles a day is easy, the entire course of the tour de france is 2,255 miles, through some of europe's hardest mountain trails. the race takes exactly 21 days, btw that is 107 miles a day, on average the flatter sections get more miles per day than the worst of the mountain sections.
if your vehicle gets 20 MPG and you have a 12 mile commute (each way) and you work 5 days a week. at $4 a gallon that's $24 a week, just for the gas, if your vehicle lasts 6 years, at $10,000 with an average of $3,000 a year in repairs, maintenance, and insurance (a realistic value considering the price of replacement parts, and maintenance, and insurance costs) that's $90 a week, not including interest payments, so it's costing you $114 a week to drive a car to work. Vs maybe $1 a week for bicycling. Bicycles can easily last 20+ years, common replacements will be tires and breaks and lines, and adjustments to and possibly chain break, and possible seat replacement, obviously a lock and any equipment you need, like a rain slicker and snow tires if you plan to bike all season in winter regions.
let's say you own a car for say vacation driving, and grocery trips, the cost per week drops greatly, since a car only needs to be run once a week to keep from having issues, and the maintenance costs are directly proportional to your driving habits. eg: the more you drive the faster things break down.
how fast can you ride a 21-speed bike? I personally have hit 24 MPH on flat level terrain, so commuting on bike does take more time, although in gridlock, a bicycle has the advantage greatly.
if you live in the sticks, you can opt to get a horse and buggy, and grow the fodder yourself if you have enough land. horses have numerous troubles, so they're no where near as cheap as bicycling, but they're basically natures cellulostic ethanol powered vehicles.
"That's got to be one of the silliest critiques of Pastafarianism that I've read. Even setting aside spagnostics/Pastafarianism questions of the veneration of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
People don't believe in Jesus because of the Flying Spaghetti Monster's claim that the Flying Spaghetti Monster made itself pregnant. People believe in Jesus because of claims about his miracles & resurrection.
If you're going to give the pseudoskeptic's treatment to the virgin birth, you're doing it all wrong. You should be doubting whether the Flying Spaghetti Monster ever claimed such a thing--you should be speculating that early Pastafarianism made up the story.
But I realize that wouldn't make as effective an approach to junk rhetoric.
Hmm... I guess you could throw in some half-informed claims about "mistranslation" of the Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, while you're at it."
there, fixed that for you, does it still make sense? that jesus is the only true son of the Flying spaghetti monster?
your religious indoctrination makes about as much sense to me, and the FSM makes any sense to you.
Mennonites, Luddites, and Amish, that's what people who actually 'try' to live as Christ preached call themselves.
personally i could not live that way, even if it's sustainable in respect to the world environment.
besides, Christianity is really just a bunch of mind control for the impoverished masses. kind of the way 'socialism' is in china. they banned religion in china, you know, and replaced it with the teachings of socialism, and i think having the side by side comparisons, makes it all the more to the point that 'mind control' through false belief structures is a tenant of civilization, you can replace belief structures, but if you ignore having them your cities devolve into waring anarchy, where he who has the gun makes the rule.
personally, i have paranoia to keep me in line, so i don't need the 'imprinted' doctrines to keep me from doing whatever i please for my own benefit at every turn. Society doesn't work very well if everyone is paranoid, so having false belief structures works for the so called common good.
i can see plenty of people worshiping the flying spaghetti monster by then, remember harry potter isn't marketed as religion, and while the FSM is marketed as how stupid real religion is, because of the way it parallels real religion we're not far off from people actually worshiping the FSM as real, it's hard coded into our brains, when certain stimuli eg:Near death experiences, specific EM shocks to the brain, disease and hunger and drug induced hallucination.
that or people will start worshiping the 'invisible pink unicorn' not quite sure which one i would 'rather' have replace the 'one true god'
wait, it requires a 1000X microscope to be read, that's crazy, 250x microscopes were fancy just 100 years ago, do they think optical technology will survive the fall of western civilization (a preventable fall, if only greed wasn't the basis of most modern tech)
and 100 years ago massive coal based industrialization had already happened... there is no was modern high tech optics are going to survive as long as 'humanitarians' keep finding more ways to cause the sick and the poor to be able to have dozens of surviving children, instead of half that number without medical and food assistance... even with the 'death' of cheap oil, there are countless poor people around the world going hungry because food prices have risen globally, and they blame america (and rightfully so, the idea of going 'green' energy came alive in the 70's but we opted for 'cheap imports')
i know the 'humanitarians' say 'think of the children' but really, think of how many 'children' those children will have because an endless sink of money from foundations created by the rich are ensuring more and more people can successfully reproduce!
the earth doesn't need 6.64 billion humans, much less the 9 billion we expect to have in just another 38 years. imagine the kinds of wars that will break out, just look at africa in recent years, too many people, plenty of them willing to get guns and start killing other people over land and wealth and control.. if humanitarians hadn't provided food, medicine, etc most of those people would have died in childhood, and there probably would have been no wars, or at least very short wars, since there would have been a shortage of healthy young men to form large resistance groups or armed uprisings.
my views aren't popular, i know, and you really can't stop foundations 'helping' the poor, other than to organize guerrillas and train them to steal the medicines and foods to support their armies, some of that already happens, and it wasn't done intentionally, but rather as a result of humanitarians making sure there enough people for them to fight over water, land, food, and power, once those 'adorable' children grew up, into gun toting militias.
'...the system proved once again that it is an abysmal failure in promoting good leaders.'
"No, we have proven that we are abysmal failures at seeking out good leaders. It is we who are so easily distracted by their shiny trinkets. It is we who act so helpless when only we can make the needed changes."
i think it's more like, the ultra rich and powerful decide who gets to become a 'candidate' for presidency, and the last time the rich and powerful backed the 'wrong' guy was when bill Clinton beat out bush sr. Clinton was a nobody from Arkansas, and at the time bush sr had a 89% approval rating.
Clinton made a lot of enemies by shutting down the government several times, refusing to pass budgets full of deficits that make the rich more secure in their wealth and power, at the cost of 'the working man' who pays taxes and gets less benefit from it than the rich and powerful who get all manners of pork through congress. yeah some of the poor got hurt by government shutdowns, but at the end of the day, it was the pork deprived rich and powerful who were moved to put a crony in the white house for 8 years to completely undo budget surplus and economic recovery that had been accomplished by balancing the budget for a few years...
see the thing is the rich and powerful they like being rich and powerful, and they help their kids get rich and powerful, or see them with sever mental breakdowns trying to live up to what their parents expected of them... and they especially want the grand kids to be rich and powerful, afterall they usually tend to swing back into being the sorts of people willing to take the challenges of being rich and powerful, if their parents failed anyways.
if a person is completely unworthy of running a real company, the solution for the rich and powerful is for them to do no bid contract work for the government, where no matter how bad they screw up, they still get paid. there is a real disconnect between the haves and the have nots.
and the poor get shafted, myself for an example, i was denied disability, despite having a serious mental illness twice, it wasn't until i had a lawyer who takes 25% of my back pay that they'd even seriously consider my claim. Arguably i've never been able to handle any kind of stressful work with my illness, and i also dislike physical but menial labor... i also have a hard time budgeting, again because of my mental illness, but until i got a lawyer, they system was rigged against me getting needed benefits to cover the cost of my food, my medicine, etc. fortunately i was able to get the meds for free, because i'm unable to work and they only look at my income, and when a charity housing specifically designed for people with disabilities had an opening i then qualified for food stamps etc (instead of relying on my parents for food etc.)
and i still haven't gotten my money, but the hearing is going to be scheduled shortly where the lawyer will earn his living getting me disability... and the sad thing is, my disability from fed and state is around $700 a month, it's so low that once i have disability i'm allowed to work part time, like at a fast food. at least i'll have affordable living, because my rent will be 30% of my income, whatever that is. but food is my biggest fear, they won't raise my disability just because food costs go up. and my food stamps will be down to like $10 or $20 a month, because i have disability income.
oh well, if it's that bad, my family will help out.
and here's the goofy thing, the only exempt asset are houses, so if my family had money they could buy me a house, which might be cheaper than living in an apartment, but they don't
you know, i get those in arabic every day, and i don't even READ arabic. plus they get past my spam filter, which doesn't understand international fonts.
http://directmag.com/mag/marketing_oldest_scam/ it at least dates back to 1854, i don't know if that quite qualifies as the 'oldest' scam, personally i thought the oldest scam was pillaging. that came along with the bronze age, if it wasn't already popular in the stone age. (having better weapons allows you to pillage, for a living, without worrying they'll uprise)
"Why would you want to cool the water? If you can only extract energy down to the boiling point at 1 atmosphere, why not at least heat that water back up to steam instead of starting all over with cold water?"
in the old days, power plants often 'sold' waste steam through networks of pipes (the range is highly limited on how far you can pipe steam though) for heating water or houses or for various industrial processes... but for some reason people decided it was better to cool off the steam, rather than try to think about who to sell too, since you can put the power plant in the middle of nowhere where land costs less, and where you don't have to worry about the type of contaminants that get past any type of scrubbing you do on the stack...
as for why not cool the steam with input water, how do you know that they don't already pump a small fraction of the steam through pipes to pre-heat the input water, and still have excess steam to cool?
also, if you're pre heating the water with steam, that means you need to taper off the heat production once a plant is started, EG: you need more power to start a plant than to keep one running, and based on what i've heard about coal fired plants, not being good for 'peaking' then they most likely already do that, and still have waste steam to cool.
bean counters are over rated. consider this, maxwell house, foldgers, big name coffee started in coffee houses in the 20s or so, yet bean counters figured they could use cheaper beans to make more profit, and today we have starbucks etc tons of coffee houses that specialize in making premium coffee's even though coffee drinking has gone down in this generation? why because bean counters were heeded and once strong brands of coffee became el cheapo, so new coffee houses founded by coffee drinkers came back to life.
seriously though, lithography is running into problems working at the scale we're already at, much less at 22nm, but 'lasers' can correct lithography errors to a much higher detail than even 22 nm parts. i think there are going to a be lot of laser corrective surgery on microprocessors to allow the die to keep shrinking.
it's in your own words "engaging in sexually explicit conduct" eg: bart simpson can be nude as the day he was first drawn with his full moon showing and it's not child porn. throw in a dildo, and it's illegal.
they cooked up the law when the 1996 law failed, for being too broad, and impinging on artistic rights...
so the lesson here is Nudity is OKAY, simulated sex, or pornographic video clips not cool. one could argue that a good portion of Japanese, porn is made illegal by this 2003 law... since japan has different standards and regulations...
ah well, if you like Japanese porn that much maybe you should just move to japan.
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I would much rather live in a world where everyone is free to read all the laws that have been passed, than to live in a society where business to even legally operate have to buy a $40,000 manual on how to build houses in a single California county.
the whole idea of copyrighting law was a way for high priced copyright lawyers to market a very expensive but essential set of laws to builders, instead of working for the fees the government was willing to pay, which any decent copyright attorney would refuse to accept as sum total of hundreds of hours perhaps of revisions and research to get a law the courts wont overturn in a day...
but there is a darker side to copyrighted laws. imagine a coup of the government by a 'president' by carefully copyrighting code buried in many thousand page laws, the president could erode the power of a the house and senate and the judiciary, and because the bills were so tightly copyrighted, nobody even read the sections they would have needed to read before it was too late...
once the president becomes an emperor, through abuse of draconian copyright pushed through by greedy bastards in the music and movie and book publishing and now law writing lawyer industries...
we're already pretty close to a police state, laws that not even the congress can read before they vote on them is a dark future, and sets the stage for a coup on the government. I think maybe the courts should hold and sustain that copyright on laws is invalid when passed, and exempt it for law makers while it's in the process of being written, to avoid such a dark future coup possibility.
well you see there is a nasty loophole in federal copyright law. works by the (federal) government may not be copyrighted, but for instance, say a private law firm was contracted to produce a law, say a law on how copyright affects online, and before submitting the law they copyright it, and include all rights to use it 'as part of their work contract' now a law about online copyright, is now copyrighted so that individuals can be sued by a lawyer for reproducing his 'copyrighted' law on internet copyright.
so nasty lawyer then proceeds to sue the shit out of a couple dozen companies that make it their business to disclose information on pending and current bills before the senate, so that these companies can be forced to not disclose important details of how the law was written (it's copyrighted, and no rights are available to anyone but the government) or else be shut down by greedy corrupt politicians who specifically wanted the details of the law private, and others public so that everyone thinks the law was all goodness and sunshine, but really changed the law so that copyright holders can essentially with a single letter win by proxy trials in small claims against online copyright infringers, the portion of the law where specifics were copyrighted.
basically it allows a law all about protecting the children and what not from pedos to contain a clause that because it's all copyrighted not be disseminated and do something like put 10 billion dollars into a an unrelated bridge to nowhere in alaska, that is gold plated.
very bad precedent, laws shouldn't be copyrighted not even by lawyers who work on them. too much incentive to bury copyrighted sections that because they're copyrighted nobody will disseminate them, because the moment they try to they're shut down... copyrighted sections that might be extremely unpopular(or downright dangerous) in an otherwise very popular sounding bill. such as say, a law allowing the president to privately execute any judge on any federal court including the supreme court, and instantly name a successor, and under the law the cause of death is officially 'heart attack' caused of course by lethal injection.
your solution although it sounds simple, is also simple to break. CRCs are very short, are easily tampered with (through hacked system drivers etc) and so on...
but have you ever tried to connect to battle net with a no cd crack for a bliz title? sadly the b.net connection is refused, because to do no CD you need to remove software from the exe, that is easily checked for on connection to blizzard controlled servers.
various cheats are often easily detected, although network sniffing based attacks on battle.net will never be fixable via any reasonable method (does everyone have the bandwidth, and CPU for a game to use 128 bit encryption on every single packet, when some 1,000 packets per second can be generated in a multiplayer game?)
the type of data sent along the lan does include data (such as click locations) that would make a network sniff based undetectable map hack. the best part is all the data needed to generate such a sniffing tool is easily written by comparing network sniff data vs 'saved replay' data. along with a little hex editing, and basically rewriting the entire network stack of the game engine through reverse engineering..
the plus side, is that once written, it doesn't need to be rewritten unless the main game changes how it parses data packets, and you can write nice USB usb drivers that allow keyboard and mouse movements from a 'irc bot' to be sent to a 'clean' unhacked PC running the game client... although certain keyboard/mouse commands are intentionally written buggy to make human bot distinction easy, and they could possibly intentionally create buggy packet formation that would screw up a bot, but not even be seen by a human...
anyways, anything you can think of can be countered. there is no security.
"How strange is it that they think that the largest source of heat"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_variation
before mentioning the 'largest source of heat' perhaps you should read up on solar variation, or perhaps on the fact that in the past 11 years there has been not even a single watt per sqft change in the energy level of sunlight reaching the outer atmosphere, despite a constant increase in temperature, and a constant increase in carbon dioxide.
yeah, the sun is the big bad boy in charge of producing all 89,000 terrawatts of energy that hit the surface of the earth each second (almost 4 times as much reaches the outer atmosphere, and no i'm not counting the stuff that passes by the earth, only the part of the outer atmosphere that is directly above and the same exact size of half the surface of the earth). According to the Inverse Square law the diffusion of radiation is geometrically related to distance traveled. For example, the intensity of radiation from the Sun is 9140 watts per square meter at the distance of Mercury (0.387AU); but only 1370 watts per square meter at the distance of Earth (1AU)--a threefold increase in distance results in a ninefold decrease in intensity of radiation. because of this, even if the energy from the sun varies by 0.2% the amount that actually reaches the earth is way less. because the earth only receives 1/2,000,000,000 th of the total energy radiated by the sun, or 0.00000005% of the solar radiation, so all increases in solar radiation are automatically divided by 2 billion. the sun would have to increase total output by 2 billion watts to increase the energy the earth receives by a single watt.
so no, the big fusion generator in the sky has almost nothing to do with warming, the biggest single variant in the whole global warming equation is floating between the earth and the sun, we call them 'clouds.' green house gases are very important, but clouds are the single biggest factor, the second factor is the elliptical orbit of the earth, the third is the tilt of the earth on a regional basis.
greenhouse gases ultimately could be countered with a high orbit, roll of very thin highly reflective foil, that would have to be replaced every 30 years or so. or a giant, anchored floating roll of aluminum foil could be put in the oceans, and replaced as often as needed.
a computer model would have to be made to decide where to put either, to favorably shift weather patterns, if only it was global warming that was the only problem. no, human actions are having huge problems besides global warming. el nino, la nina, whatever, the worlds weather patterns normally shift very slowly, affected by very few large scale variables. human intervention has cause a huge shift in where clouds form, how long they float, the size of water droplets, everything about modern clouds are vastly different from the way clouds were, where the only debris that got into the atmosphere was dust from natural fires, and the occasional spew from volcanoes.
massive massive seams of coal being burnt, massive emissions from combustion of petrochemicals, these are changing the type and amount of particulate available to take water vapor from evaporation and bind it into clouds.
the good news is if we switched to clean burning methane hydrates, there would be less particulate, and thus we'd only have global warming from CO2 to worry about. there are more methane hydrates in the worlds permafrost and underneath oceans than there ever were deposits of coal, oil and natural gas ever. by orders of magnitude...
although if methane hydrates become the 'cheap' energy of the future, then civilization still hasn't reached true sustainability. they've just shifted when and where society really faces a future of real renewable energy.
"Study economics and current events, particularly Zimbabwe"
fixed that for you, weimar germany only printed massive amounts of money to repay war repartitions. modern Zimbabwe is printing massive amounts of 100 billion dollar bills to fund and supply their army which is in a protracted civil war with 2 large militia groups as a result of the African war in the Congo.
what happened in germany is minor compared to what Zimbabwe is doing, which is printing money, buying foreign currency and funding their entire army with foreign currencies. that would be like america going out printing 300 trillion dollars, buying euros, yen, etc from banks around the world and then 'using' that foreign non hyper inflated currency to repay the national debt. (yes i realize the national debt is only 9.65 trillion, but to get enough foreign currencies from foreign banks, at least 300 trillion us dollars would have to be printed, if not a few hundred quadrillion, it would be hard to sucker over banks, after the first few large cash transfers they'd start devaluing the dollar in proportion to the reported sizes of unexpected cash purchases)
eventually, if national debt out strips the pace at which our economy grows, the government is going to start using kooky plans to raise the available funds, however, it's pretty clear that we're in no immediate threat of the government pulling any tricks to try and repay debt. a couple lean decades of economic a serious recession, and continued tax cut and spend politics, and America might be in serious trouble finding enough people to buy their debt. for right now though, things aren't critical. although i find the amount of debt, and deficit growth sickening.
slysoft cracked it on easter. iirc, or maybe it was after that, but they charge you like $80 for their hd tools on a download only basis... physical media, costs more, of course.
in addition, despite the 'death' of HD-dvd format, people simply aren't willing to go to Blu-Ray format, because you have to god forbid pay someone $80 for software(thanks slysoft for breaking BD+) to remove protection from the discs, so you can skip the 16 minutes of unskippable adverts they think you need when you just paid $30-40 for a stupid HD movie. maybe if there were easy to use tools, like a BD shrink, or maybe if BD players could play content without having to put it back in BD+ format... (currently you have to convert to h264, and watch on a ps3 or xbox 360)
dvd decryption software starts at 'free' and moves on up to $50, and dvd shrink is hugely popular even though it hasn't been developed in 2+ years (just check it on softpedia!)
yeah content 'owners' just don't get it, every insanely encumbered digital technology has failed, with the exception of DVD-roms, which have minimal, weak protection, that was easily cracked. Divx failed, HD dvd lost the support of studios when it's protection was cracked, but consumers didn't switch to blu-ray, and BD+ was cracked months later... and people still aren't switching (imo partially from the fact that BD+ while cracked, doesn't give end users a 'single click' method of burning it to a BD-r.)
people do pirate content, yeah it really happens,
it's been spiraling out of control since the 70's, when copyright became possible without 'submitting' the material to the library of congress. just as prohibition created the mafia, copyright extension created the 'modern pirate.'
the media companies have created multi-billion dollar industries distributing ideas, and they're complaining, because what people once got for nothing, they now steal because they have no money to pay for it.
you can't simply print wealth on a piece of paper, and give it out to everyone, if you try, you wind up with the situation that Zimbabwe is in now with 'hyper inflation.'
actually, wall street hasn't yet factored in the possibility of 20% of nvidia's high to mid end chips being totally reject chips yet.
so a betting man would watch the stock closely for the next few weeks, then when it bottoms buy massive quantities of stock.
this is the kind of a massive chip recall scenario which makes nvidia a likely buyout target by say Intel (everyone likes buying a company at a fraction of the value of the company, which is why M$ worked so hard to try and take over yahoo)
for those saying it's only the chip that is the problem, it's very expensive to remove and replace a chip, because normally the chips are all factory produced on a robotic assembly line, and they're only designed to put the chips on, not take them off. you need people to remove chips, making a massive recall a very expensive option. then there are those who will want their chips recalled, even if the chip was working fine for months, and might be a random lucky working chip.
actually, it can be used as a benchmark or the stability and number crunching abilities of a new, never burned in personal computer. if the computer gets the numbers wrong, or says other numbers are evenly divisible within the number, you know something is seriously wrong, and you can RMA the parts that are screwing the pooch.
much better than say, finding 6 months down the line that your computer keeps randomly rebooting because of a serious flaw in the chips inside it and oh wait it was 6 months tough luck trying to RMA things now...
doing it by hand would be like building the pyramids, by yourself.
it's not a weekend project, just writing down all the numbers from 1, to the number composed of at least 9 million but possibly ten or eleven million digits long... much less then dividing that number by every number from 1 to the number of the same length to make sure it is only evenly divisible by itself, and 1.
i repeat myself it's like trying to build they pyramids by yourself. or even better, trying to build a four lane highway by yourself. I remember hearing about a guy from Duluth Minnesota, who had been trying to build a highway the most direct route between Fargo, ND and Duluth, MN, and he actually started on the Duluth side, i know he didn't get far, but Duluth Minnesota is one of those 'rare' towns that was booming about 100 years ago, but then started shrinking (i forget when) and has never really completely recovered.
the guy started on his quest to get the highway built believing a direct route to Fargo would increase trade and tourism and what not (it would save on average an hours drive each way)
but i think he finally died, having completed somewhere between 12-40 miles of highway.
today's PCs are like having millions of number crunching slaves with never ending papyrus scrolls, there are things computers can do that a human being would never complete if they lived a million years. and even with those millions of number crunching slaves some things take a long time to compute.
the point being, the reason why people do these things with computers is because computers are the only thing that can do them, and to be the first to do something vastly unimaginable by normal standards. kinda like, 'why did we shoot a robot lander to mars?' instead of say, making beer free for everyone in the united states for a day.
well, they have the abstracts... you don't have to download the whole thing... but having read one abstract, i'm lost in the technical jargon, that large particle collider scientists write about without hesitation.
"Abstract. The TOTEM Experiment will measure the total pp cross-section with the luminosity-independent method and study elastic and diffractive scattering at the LHC. To achieve optimum forward coverage for charged particles emitted by the pp collisions in the interaction point IP5, two tracking telescopes, T1 and T2, will be installed on each side in the pseudorapidity region 3.1 || 6.5, and Roman Pot stations will be placed at distances of ±147 m and ±220 m from IP5. Being an independent experiment but technically integrated into CMS, TOTEM will first operate in standalone mode to pursue its own physics programme and at a later stage together with CMS for a common physics programme. This article gives a description of the TOTEM apparatus and its performance."
bargain basement computers often come with bargain basement hard drives, to the standard layperson a dead heard drive == a broken computer, and don't expect people on a sales floor to suggest a $20-$40 part (usable sized HD) is better than buying a $500 computer. cheapo systems also have cheapo optical drives that often crap out, and cheapo power supplies that can fry out equipment or just die prematurely.
any of these problems are easily avoided, by just spending $10-$20 more than for the 'cheapest' of the cheap, sometimes just by researching which part to buy (getting harder year by year as computers blogs get filled with adspace paid for by advertblogers), but don't expect sales floor people to even have a clue about any of this, I'm a die hard build em myself from parts ordered on the internet guy, and have been doing it since 1994.
If a system is built intelligently it will run problem free for a minimum of 4 years, the hard drive is the biggest variable and might hold on for as long as 12 years. every thing else can be bought intelligently to not have any problems other than say a fan failure.
in systems i personally built, the single biggest problem has been user error, the second biggest problem has been dust, followed by unpredictable fan quality, and lastly hard drive failure. in systems people bought without having my help, the typical problem 2-3 years down the road is a POS hdd or optical drive or power supply that dies on them. every 2-3 years something goes wrong on those consumer failure machines from the big box stores, without fail.
on systems i've personally built, the problem with HDDs is 5-8 years down the line. usually though by then the system is horribly obsolete, and mainly i run into issues with specially reconditioned linux machines, unless i buy them a new, 5 year warranty hdd, as a part of reconditioning.
"Are you telling me that as a computer geek, when you lay out money to purchase a computer you do not expect profit to arise from it?
I think that's a very dangerous statement. Everyone who uses their computer for work 'invests' in it. Everyone who uses their second-hand car to drive to work 'invests' in it.
It is not solely necessary for the capital expense to appreciate for it to be an investment."
first off, most people who 'work' on a pc, have one the company paid for in the office, in some cases they even have loaner laptops one can bring home... so you don't 'need' a PC at home to do work.
secondly, before 'everyone' had a car, there were these things called 'trains' that could carry people a vast distance, without having to 'invest' in the purchase of an automobile.
there are also these things called 'bicycles' they're very common methods of transit in china, and i know, you get hot and sweaty riding a bike, but there are restrooms, they have sanitary wipes made specifically for commuter bikers, and quick drying towels, and it's easy to carry a laptop and a briefcase in a good commuter bike bag.
did i mention, biking to work will help you get your vitamin d (15 minutes of sunlight per day minimum is recommended) it will help keep you in better health, and by keeping you in better health help you avoid those dreadful 'weight gain' wardrobe changes.
oh hey, and a good quality bike, all the accessories, and maintaining it will cost less than one month of using a car easily.
'investment' you call a $10,000 cash sink an investment? compared to a $300 bike? which is not just an investment in your transportation, but one in your overall health!
once you're in shape 30 miles a day is easy, the entire course of the tour de france is 2,255 miles, through some of europe's hardest mountain trails. the race takes exactly 21 days, btw that is 107 miles a day, on average the flatter sections get more miles per day than the worst of the mountain sections.
if your vehicle gets 20 MPG and you have a 12 mile commute (each way) and you work 5 days a week. at $4 a gallon that's $24 a week, just for the gas, if your vehicle lasts 6 years, at $10,000 with an average of $3,000 a year in repairs, maintenance, and insurance (a realistic value considering the price of replacement parts, and maintenance, and insurance costs) that's $90 a week, not including interest payments, so it's costing you $114 a week to drive a car to work. Vs maybe $1 a week for bicycling. Bicycles can easily last 20+ years, common replacements will be tires and breaks and lines, and adjustments to and possibly chain break, and possible seat replacement, obviously a lock and any equipment you need, like a rain slicker and snow tires if you plan to bike all season in winter regions.
let's say you own a car for say vacation driving, and grocery trips, the cost per week drops greatly, since a car only needs to be run once a week to keep from having issues, and the maintenance costs are directly proportional to your driving habits. eg: the more you drive the faster things break down.
how fast can you ride a 21-speed bike? I personally have hit 24 MPH on flat level terrain, so commuting on bike does take more time, although in gridlock, a bicycle has the advantage greatly.
if you live in the sticks, you can opt to get a horse and buggy, and grow the fodder yourself if you have enough land. horses have numerous troubles, so they're no where near as cheap as bicycling, but they're basically natures cellulostic ethanol powered vehicles.
if gas prices go up a dollar a year, the horse and buggy are going to become very popular, especially if they have Solar powered A/c units http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/08/greencore-solar-powered-air-conditioning-ac-cooling.php
"That's got to be one of the silliest critiques of Pastafarianism that I've read. Even setting aside spagnostics/Pastafarianism questions of the veneration of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
People don't believe in Jesus because of the Flying Spaghetti Monster's claim that the Flying Spaghetti Monster made itself pregnant. People believe in Jesus because of claims about his miracles & resurrection.
If you're going to give the pseudoskeptic's treatment to the virgin birth, you're doing it all wrong. You should be doubting whether the Flying Spaghetti Monster ever claimed such a thing--you should be speculating that early Pastafarianism made up the story.
But I realize that wouldn't make as effective an approach to junk rhetoric.
Hmm... I guess you could throw in some half-informed claims about "mistranslation" of the Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, while you're at it."
there, fixed that for you, does it still make sense? that jesus is the only true son of the Flying spaghetti monster?
your religious indoctrination makes about as much sense to me, and the FSM makes any sense to you.
Mennonites, Luddites, and Amish, that's what people who actually 'try' to live as Christ preached call themselves.
personally i could not live that way, even if it's sustainable in respect to the world environment.
besides, Christianity is really just a bunch of mind control for the impoverished masses. kind of the way 'socialism' is in china. they banned religion in china, you know, and replaced it with the teachings of socialism, and i think having the side by side comparisons, makes it all the more to the point that 'mind control' through false belief structures is a tenant of civilization, you can replace belief structures, but if you ignore having them your cities devolve into waring anarchy, where he who has the gun makes the rule.
personally, i have paranoia to keep me in line, so i don't need the 'imprinted' doctrines to keep me from doing whatever i please for my own benefit at every turn. Society doesn't work very well if everyone is paranoid, so having false belief structures works for the so called common good.
i can see plenty of people worshiping the flying spaghetti monster by then, remember harry potter isn't marketed as religion, and while the FSM is marketed as how stupid real religion is, because of the way it parallels real religion we're not far off from people actually worshiping the FSM as real, it's hard coded into our brains, when certain stimuli eg:Near death experiences, specific EM shocks to the brain, disease and hunger and drug induced hallucination.
that or people will start worshiping the 'invisible pink unicorn' not quite sure which one i would 'rather' have replace the 'one true god'
wait, it requires a 1000X microscope to be read, that's crazy, 250x microscopes were fancy just 100 years ago, do they think optical technology will survive the fall of western civilization (a preventable fall, if only greed wasn't the basis of most modern tech)
and 100 years ago massive coal based industrialization had already happened... there is no was modern high tech optics are going to survive as long as 'humanitarians' keep finding more ways to cause the sick and the poor to be able to have dozens of surviving children, instead of half that number without medical and food assistance... even with the 'death' of cheap oil, there are countless poor people around the world going hungry because food prices have risen globally, and they blame america (and rightfully so, the idea of going 'green' energy came alive in the 70's but we opted for 'cheap imports')
i know the 'humanitarians' say 'think of the children' but really, think of how many 'children' those children will have because an endless sink of money from foundations created by the rich are ensuring more and more people can successfully reproduce!
the earth doesn't need 6.64 billion humans, much less the 9 billion we expect to have in just another 38 years. imagine the kinds of wars that will break out, just look at africa in recent years, too many people, plenty of them willing to get guns and start killing other people over land and wealth and control.. if humanitarians hadn't provided food, medicine, etc most of those people would have died in childhood, and there probably would have been no wars, or at least very short wars, since there would have been a shortage of healthy young men to form large resistance groups or armed uprisings.
my views aren't popular, i know, and you really can't stop foundations 'helping' the poor, other than to organize guerrillas and train them to steal the medicines and foods to support their armies, some of that already happens, and it wasn't done intentionally, but rather as a result of humanitarians making sure there enough people for them to fight over water, land, food, and power, once those 'adorable' children grew up, into gun toting militias.
'...the system proved once again that it is an abysmal failure in promoting good leaders.'
"No, we have proven that we are abysmal failures at seeking out good leaders. It is we who are so easily distracted by their shiny trinkets. It is we who act so helpless when only we can make the needed changes."
i think it's more like, the ultra rich and powerful decide who gets to become a 'candidate' for presidency, and the last time the rich and powerful backed the 'wrong' guy was when bill Clinton beat out bush sr. Clinton was a nobody from Arkansas, and at the time bush sr had a 89% approval rating.
Clinton made a lot of enemies by shutting down the government several times, refusing to pass budgets full of deficits that make the rich more secure in their wealth and power, at the cost of 'the working man' who pays taxes and gets less benefit from it than the rich and powerful who get all manners of pork through congress. yeah some of the poor got hurt by government shutdowns, but at the end of the day, it was the pork deprived rich and powerful who were moved to put a crony in the white house for 8 years to completely undo budget surplus and economic recovery that had been accomplished by balancing the budget for a few years...
see the thing is the rich and powerful they like being rich and powerful, and they help their kids get rich and powerful, or see them with sever mental breakdowns trying to live up to what their parents expected of them... and they especially want the grand kids to be rich and powerful, afterall they usually tend to swing back into being the sorts of people willing to take the challenges of being rich and powerful, if their parents failed anyways.
if a person is completely unworthy of running a real company, the solution for the rich and powerful is for them to do no bid contract work for the government, where no matter how bad they screw up, they still get paid. there is a real disconnect between the haves and the have nots.
and the poor get shafted, myself for an example, i was denied disability, despite having a serious mental illness twice, it wasn't until i had a lawyer who takes 25% of my back pay that they'd even seriously consider my claim. Arguably i've never been able to handle any kind of stressful work with my illness, and i also dislike physical but menial labor... i also have a hard time budgeting, again because of my mental illness, but until i got a lawyer, they system was rigged against me getting needed benefits to cover the cost of my food, my medicine, etc. fortunately i was able to get the meds for free, because i'm unable to work and they only look at my income, and when a charity housing specifically designed for people with disabilities had an opening i then qualified for food stamps etc (instead of relying on my parents for food etc.)
and i still haven't gotten my money, but the hearing is going to be scheduled shortly where the lawyer will earn his living getting me disability... and the sad thing is, my disability from fed and state is around $700 a month, it's so low that once i have disability i'm allowed to work part time, like at a fast food. at least i'll have affordable living, because my rent will be 30% of my income, whatever that is. but food is my biggest fear, they won't raise my disability just because food costs go up. and my food stamps will be down to like $10 or $20 a month, because i have disability income.
oh well, if it's that bad, my family will help out.
and here's the goofy thing, the only exempt asset are houses, so if my family had money they could buy me a house, which might be cheaper than living in an apartment, but they don't
you know, i get those in arabic every day, and i don't even READ arabic. plus they get past my spam filter, which doesn't understand international fonts.
http://directmag.com/mag/marketing_oldest_scam/ it at least dates back to 1854, i don't know if that quite qualifies as the 'oldest' scam, personally i thought the oldest scam was pillaging. that came along with the bronze age, if it wasn't already popular in the stone age. (having better weapons allows you to pillage, for a living, without worrying they'll uprise)
"There is no rule against rigid sails, it's just too hard to bring dozens of huge metal foils on a boat."
besides which converting a modern ship from diesel to sail powered is very hard, that's why they're using kites, which can easily be added to a conventional freighter, to reduce the fuel consumption. http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/03/beluga-skysails-cargo-ship-kites.php
"Why would you want to cool the water? If you can only extract energy down to the boiling point at 1 atmosphere, why not at least heat that water back up to steam instead of starting all over with cold water?"
in the old days, power plants often 'sold' waste steam through networks of pipes (the range is highly limited on how far you can pipe steam though) for heating water or houses or for various industrial processes... but for some reason people decided it was better to cool off the steam, rather than try to think about who to sell too, since you can put the power plant in the middle of nowhere where land costs less, and where you don't have to worry about the type of contaminants that get past any type of scrubbing you do on the stack...
as for why not cool the steam with input water, how do you know that they don't already pump a small fraction of the steam through pipes to pre-heat the input water, and still have excess steam to cool?
also, if you're pre heating the water with steam, that means you need to taper off the heat production once a plant is started, EG: you need more power to start a plant than to keep one running, and based on what i've heard about coal fired plants, not being good for 'peaking' then they most likely already do that, and still have waste steam to cool.
bean counters are over rated. consider this, maxwell house, foldgers, big name coffee started in coffee houses in the 20s or so, yet bean counters figured they could use cheaper beans to make more profit, and today we have starbucks etc tons of coffee houses that specialize in making premium coffee's even though coffee drinking has gone down in this generation? why because bean counters were heeded and once strong brands of coffee became el cheapo, so new coffee houses founded by coffee drinkers came back to life.
Finally! a use for Xasers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maser#Terminology
seriously though, lithography is running into problems working at the scale we're already at, much less at 22nm, but 'lasers' can correct lithography errors to a much higher detail than even 22 nm parts. i think there are going to a be lot of laser corrective surgery on microprocessors to allow the die to keep shrinking.
it's in your own words "engaging in sexually explicit conduct"
eg: bart simpson can be nude as the day he was first drawn with his full moon showing and it's not child porn. throw in a dildo, and it's illegal.
they cooked up the law when the 1996 law failed, for being too broad, and impinging on artistic rights...
so the lesson here is Nudity is OKAY, simulated sex, or pornographic video clips not cool. one could argue that a good portion of Japanese, porn is made illegal by this 2003 law... since japan has different standards and regulations...
ah well, if you like Japanese porn that much maybe you should just move to japan.