"Boosters in the freaking driver's seat, that's what's next, I tell you!"
no "a specially crafted driverâ(TM)s seat that has a five point harness for maximum safety." 5 point harnesses are the next big craze... then someone will want to mandate helmets, with locking ties to prevent whiplash.
"In my area during winter, we've regularly got a foot of snow on the ground."
only a foot? I've seen winters with a lot more snow than that, and i drove as a pizza delivery drive, a geo metro in over a foot of snow, on at least 3 separate occasions for work.
I didn't have an SUV, and i got stuck a lot in more than 1' of snow, that's what they make kitty litter or sand and a shovel for.
it is true, that say, a nice modern car like a PT cruiser with computer controlled traction, is a lot easier to handle in the snow than a 'geo metro' but even a PT cruiser still gets around 30 MPG compared to the 40 mpg of the geo metro. No SUV needed, although i have gotten stuck with a PT on a dirt road where i couldn't get it out, my problem? the engine had too much horsepower, and i couldn't get used to just tapping the gas to get unstuck, with my metro i had to floor it in low gear to get unstuck.
4 wheel drive is definitely a godsend if you're trying to drive in over a foot of snow, but if you can drive slower, just about any car can handle it. BTW there are SUVs that get over 20 MPG, with four wheel drive.
oh yeah, to keep in line with the article, lighter vehicles actually work better in the snow.
it's a shame there aren't really light vehicles with four wheel drive, because they'd work better in snow than a big heavy vehicle. oh yeah, then there are other things, like tire studs, or chains, there are lots of things that can improve snow traction. they just also tend to be very hard on roads, so they're only legal in some places.
"Over the last 30 years, there has been less than 1 degree F of warming, globally."
wrong, there has been 5 degrees raise in the past 30 years. but heres the kicker, at the equator the temperature has changed only 1 to 1/2 of a degree. say around the 48th parallel the change has been 2-3 degrees.
But at the poles, the change has been a whopping 14 degrees. this is how global warming pans out, the hot places stay hot, and the coldest places loose their coldness.
'You don't actually learn anything through memorization.'
"I disagree. If someone forced you to memorize the date "July 4, 1776" as the day the U.S. declared independence, and years later you read a book written in England or America in 1778, you automatically know something about the political environment it was written in."
Personally, i think just reading any of the books listed here, on project Gutenberg would be far more informational than your 'example' or rote memorization, and coming 'across' a book written in '1778' as you say... I'm not even sure where you'd come across a book written in '1778' other than project Gutenberg.
> Mathematics is my light and salvation: whom shall I fear?
Zero. And infinity. Especially on the denominator side of equations. no, you must fear 0.99999999999999999999(infinitely repeating) equals one! http://www.blizzard.com/us/press/040401.html
"An obvious example is that melting ice caps will raise ocean levels; a large portion of human civilization is centered on coastal cities that will be flooded by raised ocean levels, and thus global warming can have a huge impact on society and humans in general."
It always bothered me that 'scientists claim' that global warming will lead to ocean rises... why? first thing i learned in geology class, really, Plate Tectonics. if we drop a 100 billion tons of snow and ice off Greenland, Antarctica, etc what happens to the pacific and Atlantic tectonic plates? doesn't that 100 billion tons of water Do Something to those tectonic plates?
i would really like for someone to run a computer model on what all that weight shifting rapidly or slowly would do to plate tectonics. would hawaii erupt in magma flows over the whole chain? would there be massive quakes? would part of California finally fall into the ocean?
i don't think that that Much Weight could have no impact on plate tectonics, i just don't believe it. the ocean rise problem although a problem i think is off the mark, will the oceans only rise an inch? and cause double the world wide earthquakes and volcanic eruptions? or will the oceans rise 10 inches? or will California dropping into the seas create a nice handy pocket for all the 'water' to go into in death valley?
it's a complex scenario, and nobody Really Knows what would happen. I really hope we never find out what would happen, but I'm afraid we Will find out, and in my lifetime the rate we're going.
"I think many alarmists forget that Earth was once significantly warmer than it is now, and had significantly higher levels of atmospheric CO2 than it has now. Was the Earth a desert? Hardly. The Earth was an even greater oasis of life than it is now. The warm Earth gave us the dinosaurs, and all the massive vegetation required to support such enormous animals."
the downside, is that during the several hundreds of millions of years the dinosaurs lived, Not a Single Mammal larger than a Mouse lived.
No, hot sticky good for plants, good for lizards, bad for humans. Humans need Dry Heat, as we regulate temperature by shedding saltwater out our skin. You Really Really wouldn't like a dinosaur world. Did you know, most modern Air conditioners Fail to Provide Cooling in greater than 110F temperatures? It's not entirely and engineering problem, bigger, faster fans would compensate, but 'energy efficiency' laws are making it hard to put those bigger, faster fans into AC units.
You wouldn't Like it reversing the atmosphere to 'dinosaur' conditions, and how many animals could we still breed as feed in a ever warming world? we can't air condition a feedlot... so you want to start eating geckos and iguanas?
well, i never trusted Asus in the first place(for personal reasons).
They've gone to the dark side, the linux version was just posturing, to get microsoft to cave, on pulling windows XP support.
Let's face it, getting Linux on home broad band routers was pushing it. getting linux on internet only laptops? with touch screen inputs? you can bet microsoft will help those OEMs 'see the light' of putting clunky, windows OSes on their devices.
At least as geeks, we can promote Linux as a 'desktop replacement' for those people who always come down with the 'latest' viruses and rootkits, or help them turn an 'old junker' PC into a smoothwall firewall to help keep hackers out, and maybe even to keep roommates from coming to fights over P2P downloading by showing them how much better VoIP and gaming works with smoothwalls QoS capabilities...
when these 'mysterious' OEMs announce their linux products, they'll see the light if balmer has to throw a few chairs around for them to see it.
yes paper has transportation costs, but e-books do too. my point was ebooks have 2 transportation costs, the network to distribute them, and the physical distribution and production of all the parts.
books only have the one distribution network to support.
and you are right, at some point in the future, ebooks could become more environmentally friendly than paper books. The problem is 3 fold 1. the battery. http://www.govtech.com/gt/146829 if the 'hype' about thin film batteries is real, then we're already on the road to a 'green' battery.
2. the microprocessor. all microprocessors based on lithography use many toxic chemicals, just because Intel has policies to reduce the amount of pollution their plants release into the environment, doesn't mean it's a non-polluting technology. how long until some Chinese firm that just dumps all the chemicals in a river can produce chips faster, and cheaper than Intel ever could. Oh wait, thats already been happing with small electronics for as long as i can remember. the future from this angle looks bleak, people want cheap ebook readers, and china will produce the cheapest, because they will pollute the rivers. no matter how small and energy efficient ebook readers get, if they become 'greener' than paper, this will be the 'sore thumb' where ebooks pollute the most.
3. the network. true the network is used for a lot of other aspects,and every year more and more is capable of being done with less energy, so someday in the future perhaps with renewable energy as well, the environmental impact will be so greatly less that even with number 2 ebook readers become 'greener' than paper.
At least greener than 'wood pulp' paper. I don't think they can possibly get greener than kenaf paper. if the distribution network for kenaf paper is using biofuel from algae, organic dyes are used, and of course hydrogen peroxide beaches the kenaf and then turns into harmless water in the process... ah a pipe dream i suppose. i might as well ask that we build massive solar and wind power plants in the respective corridors, and build a green power distribution network, and stop needing to burn coal for power. that would go a long way towards making e-books greener, even with today's technology.
well, excuse me for not using your tool. i wear a tinfoil hat, and while you do provide source, I'd have to painstakingly check every line of code, to make sure it didn't dump the data somewhere, on some remote web server or something, and i don't need to do that much to make sure my data is cleared. if the built-in data clearing tools of firefox aren't effective, there is a nice little tool called darik's boot and nuke. a mil spec hard drive eraser. i don't quite run it monthly, but it takes me about half a day to wipe a system, format and reinstall. http://dban.sourceforge.net/
as far as backup data, i don't restore most of my backup data, and i trust a mil spec drive wiping tool a lot more than i would some tool to 'search' for hidden data on my hdd. yeah i know microsoft internet explorer is terrible at keeping personal data, it probably keeps the credit card number from every time i've purchased something online in one of it's files that it almost never erases...
but that's exactly the kind of data i don't even back up.
"The problem is, if you call it 'fraud' then the defrauded entity is on the hook, and that entity gives and lends tons of money to politicians, lawyers, and judges."
there is more sophisticated type of 'identity theft' that is much more complex, basically, all you need is a mark, a few social security numbers, a couple weeks and a home. every couple of weeks, you use the money you've stolen to acquire more properties, and for each 'fabricated' identity, you take out a new mortgage on a property, legally you can't take out 10 mortgages on one property, but if you work the system, you can get dozens though on the same property, seemingly from different individuals all who appear to be the only owner of that property. this crime scales all the way up to multi-million dollar skyscrapers, at least if you do it right. if you can manage to beat the system long enough you can run away with millions leaving a massive massive debt several millions of dollars greater all belonging to your 'mark;' who, according to all the paper work, did all the signing, even though there was massive massive fraud committed. and for once, banks actually call it fraud. the marks always wind up in prison, they thought they were doing a 'work at home business' helping their lover... they guy i heard about who managed to do all this, did it three times to three different women, but he was too greedy, and never pulled out with the millions he could have... the first thing that happens is they freeze all the assets, if they even suspect someone is doing this, so it's all a matter of pulling out before they know what you've done. it's crazy how easily this kind of identity theft can be done, once you know the whole mortgage system, and how to get a mark to sign all the paperwork, without them knowing what you're up to.
it was on dateline, the guy who kept coming back to the same scam, he even wrote a 'fictional' book, all about how he did all his crimes, sadly the book itself was the most incriminating evidence against him in the crime, all the paper trails led to his 'women.' finding a woman who doesn't know much about running a business, and learning all the skills needed to pull off the crime are way too easy, banks really really want to believe what people are telling them. especially when the paperwork all goes through fine.
you might not know this, but i've lived in Minnesota, and i have relatives on the iron range. America produces most of the iron ore we use, we produce so much, we export it to russia, japan, and probably even china. sure steel tends to be smelted wherever it's cheapest, with a weak dollar, that might even be America. estimates put the supply of iron ore up there at somewhere in the 300 year range. there will be iron in northern Minnesota longer than there will be coal to smelt it into steel.
coal is very useful for smelting steel, because it is a carbon source, and it gets hot enough to make steel, I'm sure with a carbon source, and a hot enough flame, as long as you have energy you can make steel, but, when coal runs out (in say, 100 years or so) there will be a lot of very painful choices, of giving up on the technologies that aren't long term sustainable, in favor of those needed to support humanity.
windmills to provide the energy to say run hydrogen combustion engine tractors, are a more important way to use limited steel production... basically, at some point, the price of everything ratchets up exponentially as limited resources come into contention. to a much smaller effect the 'post peak' oil problem is driving the price of everything higher...
tractors and food, and food distribution are fundamental to society without food, people can't eat. i'm glad that my generation only has to find out how we deal with 'post peak' oil. there are offshore sources of oil, but offshore platforms cost more, environmentalists drive the prices higher, especially after hurricane Katrina.
oil companies have little motivation to 'keep the price of oil' low by massing enough offshore platforms to drive the price of oil low. nah, why do that, when you can milk the mainstream media, and get gas up to $4 a gallon.
but for the environment, facing $4 a gallon gas, pushes environmental issues, it creates markets for 'bio-fuels' which, some are half decent, algae is of course the holy grail of bio-fuels, and it might be 'cheaper' for energy companies to 'drive algae production up' than to mass many expensive off shore oil platforms where they have to constantly keep things up to date so no oil pollutes the ocean. not that i think that's a bad idea myself, the environmentalists are Definitely going to get off your back if you do algae production in a sustainable way.
i just wonder if 'they' are going to be able to sustain a price around $4 a gallon for fuel, in the past, it's been a few years of price spikes that lead to overproduction and 'glut' years. biofuel can also have gluts, but if the cost of production is cheap enough, you can sell in different markets than you originally intended.
I live in a state where we still have manufacturing jobs, and what we do now, is buy parts from china, and assemble them. assembly is where it's at in America. ship it in from china, put it together, then ship it wherever.
once we would have built the parts, as well as assembling them... but, at nasty jobs, like food processing plants, there are some jobs, they have to import people from other countries to live in America to work for the wages they're willing to pay. those people make due, by vastly over crowding houses, making due with less, and not buying fancy electronics. American raised kids are much much less likely to take a job in an evisceration section of a meat processing plant.
no the American raised kids they work in marketing, or in management, or maybe in Quality control, or truck driving, or operating fork lifts.... i mean these places they all claim to be Equal opportunity employers, but then why do all the hmong do the nasty jobs?
there Are electronic libraries. there are drm encumbered systems that have contracts with most library systems, then there is drm free project gutenburg, then there are a few other e-book libraries that cover more targeted groups than gutenburg and contemporary drm encumbered ebooks.
although as different as night and day, both the above sites offer 'free' to the end user, e-books, one at the cost of the public library system, the other with books that have fallen out of copyright, due to the death of the author.
e-paper/e-ink are available in a couple on the market e-book readers (around $300-$400) and the olpc was using a e-paper screen iirc. but olpc is moving away from e-paper, to get the cost down, and there is a small market for e-book readers, even with project Gutenberg. project Gutenberg is only dealing with a few thousand e-book downloads daily. the most popular stuff seems to be mark twain, Shakespeare, and sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
one of the big things a lot of people miss, is that public libraries are stocking e-book checkout systems. some of them even work with portable e-book readers. generally, libraries like to stock titles that people steal, or that people might be embarrassed to check out in person.
it's pretty cool, and if you're not in a hick town like me, there are probably hundreds of e-books to be read all for free. I guess i just have to make due with project Gutenberg.
e-paper isn't environmentally friendly. consider. the cost of servers for people to download e-books, the cost of the end users computer downloading the e-book, the cost of the network infrastructure so people can download e-books.. then the manufacturing of e-books, the cost to distribute them, the cost of charging that e-book reader once a week, the cost of that li-ion battery that is powerful enough to run a cell phone... in comparison, paper is environmentally friendly, sure theres the cost of distributing, it and cutting down trees, but most major paper mills own their own managed forests, which perennially supply the trees for paper production, and the whole paper mill runs on burning the bark of the tree, so they don't use electricity at all. they do use toxic chlorine in the bleaching process, but toxic chemicals are used in battery production as well as e-paper not to mention the computer that runs the whole e-book reader.
although a really environmentally concerned person, would be growing kenaf and using environmentally safe hydrogen peroxide to bleach the kenaf for use in paper...
e-paper does have promise, though, the 'olpc' original design used a fancy, e-paper screen, but they've dropped the spendy screen for commodity dvd-screens. e-paper displays could work really nicely with a sub-notebook design, if the display shut off while you're reading content, it could improve battery life.
the problem, is that starbucks rolled out this wifi thing in 2002, and instead of putting in highspeed internet in each and every starbucks, they put in a wi-fi access point that relayed the data over a cellular network.
much cheaper than paying $40 a month per location for dsl/cable, assuming each store could even realistically get broadband service.
every place that has 'free' wifi, is a place where they put in high speed internet for their 'inventory' system, and the 'free wifi' piggybacks on that internet connection. in some cases, they use satelite for the inventory system ugh.
the problem is, we have great fuel efficient car designs, but thanks to crazy government subsudies for oil the price of oil plumeted throught the 90's and into the 2000's, until the 'post peak' problem came around. pork for the oil industry sickens me the worst, if that pork hadn't been there, the price of oil would have consitantly gradually increased from the 70's all through to today, and car makers would have pushed more fuel efficient cars. but no, we had to do things backwards and wind up with a demand greater than supply, driving costs suddenly massivly higher.
some might argue that the 'governments' strategic oil reserve whic is putting billions of gallons of oil where it can't be used, except by presidential order, is helping keep the 'post peak' problem more problematic, after-all now we need to create all these new massive undergound oil storage tanks every month a new tank goes online, and we only pump it out on a presidential order, sure we hold enough for what is it 58 days? and we've been doing this, since the late 70's when offfshore platforms brought oil prices back down... but oh no, we can't close down the reserve, what if iran cut off all oil from mid-east? we'd need it then!
all because our oil comes from countries not under our control. you'd think with off shore drilling, they'd have figured a way to put off shore platforms off antartica instead.
Maglevs are almost as fast as planes, and the 'amtrack' route was on the 'existing' rail network, meaning it was never designed for high speed trains. in fact, it was a 'sight seeing' train, even worse, it traveled between locations based on how pretty the route was.... driving, even with congestion was faster, cheaper, and saved you paying for a taxi in vegas.
now they could make a new track, for a high speed train, for a lot less than a 'maglev' but again where is the real draw to do this? remember vegas is a small city of under 2 million compared to LA were there is money for decent mass transit... and the casinos aren't going to shell out for decent mass transit, if it's easy to travel between 2 or 3 casinos, why gamblers might decide to try their luck at another casino!
anyways, a big train between LA and vegas is just another way to tack a few billion to the national debt. it's a complete waste of money. Someone should build a toll way, instead of complaining about 6 lanes not being enough.
there may be a real need to reduce the traffic between LA/Las vegas, but without respectable mass transit systems, you still need a car. LA has mass transit, but los vegas is the #2 city for cabs, that's how bad their mass transit is.
the cost of making a maglev is ridiculous. 45M is just the 'environmental survey'. depending on the maglev system they put in it could cost a about 100x as much as putting in a 12-lane highway. (there are 3 types of maglev systems, only 2 have been tested, used commercially)
seriously they have to run a very large steel rail, that's thick enough and dense enough to repel the magnets or electro magnets, (or some combination thereof) if they don't make the rail itself magnetic, to reduce the magnetic field in the cab of the train. not only that, but there has yet to be a commercial maglev based on superconductors, part of the problem is that you need to dynamically change the current in the electromagnets based on a computer monitoring how high the train is levitating! so they're using massive massive electrical current to get almost jet speeds with a train...
if maglev technology didn't have as many draw backs as it does maybe they'd be everywhere. It would be easier to design a flying train. maybe with ground effect flight http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_effect_in_aircraft
think about it, you only need enough track to safely launch and land the train*, if it's going non-stop from LA to las vegas, well ground effect flight is hard to do over anything not ocean, because land tends to have hills, truly flat land is rare, except in north dakota. oh well, still i think a flying train would be less of a boondoggle than building a massive maglev.
*= and possibly tracks through areas where Ground effect flight aren't practical
"The NE is densely populated and parking is a mess."
there are quite a few urban centers where parking is a mess. I was in austin, TX once, I can't imagine anyplace with worse parking without trying. although the LBJ presidential libary is there, but if you try to Park there, they brand you as a student!!! just because the library is technically part of the campus, and i think you're like supposed to get a parking sticker or something if you're a visitor...
crazy. but at least, when i was there in 2002? was it, you could fight your tickets online.. since i was an out of state visitor that was the easiest way to fight it. It wasn't a planned stop, i was on a road trip, and i decided where i went based on who i could get a hold of by telephone/internet. (yes, i had a laptop, and with 802.11b there were even a few cutting edge fast foods with hotspots)
"BART only runs because it is expensive and impractical."
I was in the SF area back in 1989, as a tourist and i though the BART system was pretty slick, we had arrived in california by car, so we had a car, but when we went sight seeing in SF the bart system let us get to various sights without everybody having to go the same places on the same schedule.
and what about the subway system in NY? is that 'expensive' and 'impractical'? cities of that size need mass transit, not everyone can drive cars, or we'd need 456 lane highways, kinda link how the 'internet' is evolving to have OC-1920 lines.
Slashdot Mirror
"Boosters in the freaking driver's seat, that's what's next, I tell you!"
no "a specially crafted driverâ(TM)s seat that has a five point harness for maximum safety." 5 point harnesses are the next big craze... then someone will want to mandate helmets, with locking ties to prevent whiplash.
if it's good enough for nascar...
"In my area during winter, we've regularly got a foot of snow on the ground."
only a foot? I've seen winters with a lot more snow than that, and i drove as a pizza delivery drive, a geo metro in over a foot of snow, on at least 3 separate occasions for work.
I didn't have an SUV, and i got stuck a lot in more than 1' of snow, that's what they make kitty litter or sand and a shovel for.
it is true, that say, a nice modern car like a PT cruiser with computer controlled traction, is a lot easier to handle in the snow than a 'geo metro' but even a PT cruiser still gets around 30 MPG compared to the 40 mpg of the geo metro. No SUV needed, although i have gotten stuck with a PT on a dirt road where i couldn't get it out, my problem? the engine had too much horsepower, and i couldn't get used to just tapping the gas to get unstuck, with my metro i had to floor it in low gear to get unstuck.
4 wheel drive is definitely a godsend if you're trying to drive in over a foot of snow, but if you can drive slower, just about any car can handle it. BTW there are SUVs that get over 20 MPG, with four wheel drive.
oh yeah, to keep in line with the article, lighter vehicles actually work better in the snow.
it's a shame there aren't really light vehicles with four wheel drive, because they'd work better in snow than a big heavy vehicle. oh yeah, then there are other things, like tire studs, or chains, there are lots of things that can improve snow traction. they just also tend to be very hard on roads, so they're only legal in some places.
"Over the last 30 years, there has been less than 1 degree F of warming, globally."
wrong, there has been 5 degrees raise in the past 30 years. but heres the kicker, at the equator the temperature has changed only 1 to 1/2 of a degree. say around the 48th parallel the change has been 2-3 degrees.
But at the poles, the change has been a whopping 14 degrees. this is how global warming pans out, the hot places stay hot, and the coldest places loose their coldness.
'You don't actually learn anything through memorization.'
"I disagree. If someone forced you to memorize the date "July 4, 1776" as the day the U.S. declared independence, and years later you read a book written in England or America in 1778, you automatically know something about the political environment it was written in."
Personally, i think just reading any of the books listed here, on project Gutenberg would be far more informational than your 'example' or rote memorization, and coming 'across' a book written in '1778' as you say... I'm not even sure where you'd come across a book written in '1778' other than project Gutenberg.
http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_(Bookshelf)#International_relations
http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/United_States_(Bookshelf)
Zero. And infinity. Especially on the denominator side of equations. no, you must fear 0.99999999999999999999(infinitely repeating) equals one!
http://www.blizzard.com/us/press/040401.html
"An obvious example is that melting ice caps will raise ocean levels; a large portion of human civilization is centered on coastal cities that will be flooded by raised ocean levels, and thus global warming can have a huge impact on society and humans in general."
It always bothered me that 'scientists claim' that global warming will lead to ocean rises... why? first thing i learned in geology class, really, Plate Tectonics. if we drop a 100 billion tons of snow and ice off Greenland, Antarctica, etc what happens to the pacific and Atlantic tectonic plates? doesn't that 100 billion tons of water Do Something to those tectonic plates?
i would really like for someone to run a computer model on what all that weight shifting rapidly or slowly would do to plate tectonics. would hawaii erupt in magma flows over the whole chain? would there be massive quakes? would part of California finally fall into the ocean?
i don't think that that Much Weight could have no impact on plate tectonics, i just don't believe it. the ocean rise problem although a problem i think is off the mark, will the oceans only rise an inch? and cause double the world wide earthquakes and volcanic eruptions? or will the oceans rise 10 inches? or will California dropping into the seas create a nice handy pocket for all the 'water' to go into in death valley?
it's a complex scenario, and nobody Really Knows what would happen. I really hope we never find out what would happen, but I'm afraid we Will find out, and in my lifetime the rate we're going.
"I think many alarmists forget that Earth was once significantly warmer than it is now, and had significantly higher levels of atmospheric CO2 than it has now. Was the Earth a desert? Hardly. The Earth was an even greater oasis of life than it is now. The warm Earth gave us the dinosaurs, and all the massive vegetation required to support such enormous animals."
the downside, is that during the several hundreds of millions of years the dinosaurs lived, Not a Single Mammal larger than a Mouse lived.
On a warm, tropical planet, full of heat and humidity, mammals die like http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn4259-european-heatwave-caused-35000-deaths.html
the 35,000 Europeans who died in the 2003 heat wave.
No, hot sticky good for plants, good for lizards, bad for humans. Humans need Dry Heat, as we regulate temperature by shedding saltwater out our skin. You Really Really wouldn't like a dinosaur world. Did you know, most modern Air conditioners Fail to Provide Cooling in greater than 110F temperatures? It's not entirely and engineering problem, bigger, faster fans would compensate, but 'energy efficiency' laws are making it hard to put those bigger, faster fans into AC units.
You wouldn't Like it reversing the atmosphere to 'dinosaur' conditions, and how many animals could we still breed as feed in a ever warming world? we can't air condition a feedlot... so you want to start eating geckos and iguanas?
well, i never trusted Asus in the first place(for personal reasons).
They've gone to the dark side, the linux version was just posturing, to get microsoft to cave, on pulling windows XP support.
Let's face it, getting Linux on home broad band routers was pushing it. getting linux on internet only laptops? with touch screen inputs? you can bet microsoft will help those OEMs 'see the light' of putting clunky, windows OSes on their devices.
At least as geeks, we can promote Linux as a 'desktop replacement' for those people who always come down with the 'latest' viruses and rootkits, or help them turn an 'old junker' PC into a smoothwall firewall to help keep hackers out, and maybe even to keep roommates from coming to fights over P2P downloading by showing them how much better VoIP and gaming works with smoothwalls QoS capabilities...
when these 'mysterious' OEMs announce their linux products, they'll see the light if balmer has to throw a few chairs around for them to see it.
yes paper has transportation costs, but e-books do too. my point was ebooks have 2 transportation costs, the network to distribute them, and the physical distribution and production of all the parts.
books only have the one distribution network to support.
and you are right, at some point in the future, ebooks could become more environmentally friendly than paper books. The problem is 3 fold 1. the battery. http://www.govtech.com/gt/146829 if the 'hype' about thin film batteries is real, then we're already on the road to a 'green' battery.
2. the microprocessor. all microprocessors based on lithography use many toxic chemicals, just because Intel has policies to reduce the amount of pollution their plants release into the environment, doesn't mean it's a non-polluting technology. how long until some Chinese firm that just dumps all the chemicals in a river can produce chips faster, and cheaper than Intel ever could. Oh wait, thats already been happing with small electronics for as long as i can remember. the future from this angle looks bleak, people want cheap ebook readers, and china will produce the cheapest, because they will pollute the rivers. no matter how small and energy efficient ebook readers get, if they become 'greener' than paper, this will be the 'sore thumb' where ebooks pollute the most.
3. the network. true the network is used for a lot of other aspects,and every year more and more is capable of being done with less energy, so someday in the future perhaps with renewable energy as well, the environmental impact will be so greatly less that even with number 2 ebook readers become 'greener' than paper.
At least greener than 'wood pulp' paper. I don't think they can possibly get greener than kenaf paper. if the distribution network for kenaf paper is using biofuel from algae, organic dyes are used, and of course hydrogen peroxide beaches the kenaf and then turns into harmless water in the process... ah a pipe dream i suppose. i might as well ask that we build massive solar and wind power plants in the respective corridors, and build a green power distribution network, and stop needing to burn coal for power. that would go a long way towards making e-books greener, even with today's technology.
well, excuse me for not using your tool. i wear a tinfoil hat, and while you do provide source, I'd have to painstakingly check every line of code, to make sure it didn't dump the data somewhere, on some remote web server or something, and i don't need to do that much to make sure my data is cleared. if the built-in data clearing tools of firefox aren't effective, there is a nice little tool called darik's boot and nuke. a mil spec hard drive eraser. i don't quite run it monthly, but it takes me about half a day to wipe a system, format and reinstall. http://dban.sourceforge.net/
as far as backup data, i don't restore most of my backup data, and i trust a mil spec drive wiping tool a lot more than i would some tool to 'search' for hidden data on my hdd. yeah i know microsoft internet explorer is terrible at keeping personal data, it probably keeps the credit card number from every time i've purchased something online in one of it's files that it almost never erases...
but that's exactly the kind of data i don't even back up.
"The problem is, if you call it 'fraud' then the defrauded entity is on the hook, and that entity gives and lends tons of money to politicians, lawyers, and judges."
there is more sophisticated type of 'identity theft' that is much more complex, basically, all you need is a mark, a few social security numbers, a couple weeks and a home. every couple of weeks, you use the money you've stolen to acquire more properties, and for each 'fabricated' identity, you take out a new mortgage on a property, legally you can't take out 10 mortgages on one property, but if you work the system, you can get dozens though on the same property, seemingly from different individuals all who appear to be the only owner of that property. this crime scales all the way up to multi-million dollar skyscrapers, at least if you do it right. if you can manage to beat the system long enough you can run away with millions leaving a massive massive debt several millions of dollars greater all belonging to your 'mark;' who, according to all the paper work, did all the signing, even though there was massive massive fraud committed. and for once, banks actually call it fraud. the marks always wind up in prison, they thought they were doing a 'work at home business' helping their lover... they guy i heard about who managed to do all this, did it three times to three different women, but he was too greedy, and never pulled out with the millions he could have... the first thing that happens is they freeze all the assets, if they even suspect someone is doing this, so it's all a matter of pulling out before they know what you've done. it's crazy how easily this kind of identity theft can be done, once you know the whole mortgage system, and how to get a mark to sign all the paperwork, without them knowing what you're up to.
it was on dateline, the guy who kept coming back to the same scam, he even wrote a 'fictional' book, all about how he did all his crimes, sadly the book itself was the most incriminating evidence against him in the crime, all the paper trails led to his 'women.' finding a woman who doesn't know much about running a business, and learning all the skills needed to pull off the crime are way too easy, banks really really want to believe what people are telling them. especially when the paperwork all goes through fine.
you might not know this, but i've lived in Minnesota, and i have relatives on the iron range. America produces most of the iron ore we use, we produce so much, we export it to russia, japan, and probably even china. sure steel tends to be smelted wherever it's cheapest, with a weak dollar, that might even be America. estimates put the supply of iron ore up there at somewhere in the 300 year range. there will be iron in northern Minnesota longer than there will be coal to smelt it into steel.
coal is very useful for smelting steel, because it is a carbon source, and it gets hot enough to make steel, I'm sure with a carbon source, and a hot enough flame, as long as you have energy you can make steel, but, when coal runs out (in say, 100 years or so) there will be a lot of very painful choices, of giving up on the technologies that aren't long term sustainable, in favor of those needed to support humanity.
windmills to provide the energy to say run hydrogen combustion engine tractors, are a more important way to use limited steel production... basically, at some point, the price of everything ratchets up exponentially as limited resources come into contention. to a much smaller effect the 'post peak' oil problem is driving the price of everything higher...
tractors and food, and food distribution are fundamental to society without food, people can't eat. i'm glad that my generation only has to find out how we deal with 'post peak' oil. there are offshore sources of oil, but offshore platforms cost more, environmentalists drive the prices higher, especially after hurricane Katrina.
oil companies have little motivation to 'keep the price of oil' low by massing enough offshore platforms to drive the price of oil low. nah, why do that, when you can milk the mainstream media, and get gas up to $4 a gallon.
but for the environment, facing $4 a gallon gas, pushes environmental issues, it creates markets for 'bio-fuels' which, some are half decent, algae is of course the holy grail of bio-fuels, and it might be 'cheaper' for energy companies to 'drive algae production up' than to mass many expensive off shore oil platforms where they have to constantly keep things up to date so no oil pollutes the ocean. not that i think that's a bad idea myself, the environmentalists are Definitely going to get off your back if you do algae production in a sustainable way.
i just wonder if 'they' are going to be able to sustain a price around $4 a gallon for fuel, in the past, it's been a few years of price spikes that lead to overproduction and 'glut' years. biofuel can also have gluts, but if the cost of production is cheap enough, you can sell in different markets than you originally intended.
oh well.
I live in a state where we still have manufacturing jobs, and what we do now, is buy parts from china, and assemble them. assembly is where it's at in America. ship it in from china, put it together, then ship it wherever.
once we would have built the parts, as well as assembling them... but, at nasty jobs, like food processing plants, there are some jobs, they have to import people from other countries to live in America to work for the wages they're willing to pay. those people make due, by vastly over crowding houses, making due with less, and not buying fancy electronics. American raised kids are much much less likely to take a job in an evisceration section of a meat processing plant.
no the American raised kids they work in marketing, or in management, or maybe in Quality control, or truck driving, or operating fork lifts.... i mean these places they all claim to be Equal opportunity employers, but then why do all the hmong do the nasty jobs?
there Are electronic libraries. there are drm encumbered systems that have contracts with most library systems, then there is drm free project gutenburg, then there are a few other e-book libraries that cover more targeted groups than gutenburg and contemporary drm encumbered ebooks.
http://www.overdrive.com/ http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/
although as different as night and day, both the above sites offer 'free' to the end user, e-books, one at the cost of the public library system, the other with books that have fallen out of copyright, due to the death of the author.
e-paper/e-ink are available in a couple on the market e-book readers (around $300-$400) and the olpc was using a e-paper screen iirc. but olpc is moving away from e-paper, to get the cost down, and there is a small market for e-book readers, even with project Gutenberg. project Gutenberg is only dealing with a few thousand e-book downloads daily. the most popular stuff seems to be mark twain, Shakespeare, and sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
one of the big things a lot of people miss, is that public libraries are stocking e-book checkout systems. some of them even work with portable e-book readers. generally, libraries like to stock titles that people steal, or that people might be embarrassed to check out in person.
it's pretty cool, and if you're not in a hick town like me, there are probably hundreds of e-books to be read all for free. I guess i just have to make due with project Gutenberg.
e-paper isn't environmentally friendly. consider. the cost of servers for people to download e-books, the cost of the end users computer downloading the e-book, the cost of the network infrastructure so people can download e-books.. then the manufacturing of e-books, the cost to distribute them, the cost of charging that e-book reader once a week, the cost of that li-ion battery that is powerful enough to run a cell phone... in comparison, paper is environmentally friendly, sure theres the cost of distributing, it and cutting down trees, but most major paper mills own their own managed forests, which perennially supply the trees for paper production, and the whole paper mill runs on burning the bark of the tree, so they don't use electricity at all. they do use toxic chlorine in the bleaching process, but toxic chemicals are used in battery production as well as e-paper not to mention the computer that runs the whole e-book reader.
although a really environmentally concerned person, would be growing kenaf and using environmentally safe hydrogen peroxide to bleach the kenaf for use in paper...
e-paper does have promise, though, the 'olpc' original design used a fancy, e-paper screen, but they've dropped the spendy screen for commodity dvd-screens. e-paper displays could work really nicely with a sub-notebook design, if the display shut off while you're reading content, it could improve battery life.
"Not sure where you got the cellular idea."
not sleeping last night didn't help. oh well.
the problem, is that starbucks rolled out this wifi thing in 2002, and instead of putting in highspeed internet in each and every starbucks, they put in a wi-fi access point that relayed the data over a cellular network.
much cheaper than paying $40 a month per location for dsl/cable, assuming each store could even realistically get broadband service.
every place that has 'free' wifi, is a place where they put in high speed internet for their 'inventory' system, and the 'free wifi' piggybacks on that internet connection. in some cases, they use satelite for the inventory system ugh.
"'what would happen if oil prices went up dramatically'
We'd come up with more efficient cars."
you mean, like the geo metro? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geo_Metro
the problem is, we have great fuel efficient car designs, but thanks to crazy government subsudies for oil the price of oil plumeted throught the 90's and into the 2000's, until the 'post peak' problem came around. pork for the oil industry sickens me the worst, if that pork hadn't been there, the price of oil would have consitantly gradually increased from the 70's all through to today, and car makers would have pushed more fuel efficient cars. but no, we had to do things backwards and wind up with a demand greater than supply, driving costs suddenly massivly higher.
some might argue that the 'governments' strategic oil reserve whic is putting billions of gallons of oil where it can't be used, except by presidential order, is helping keep the 'post peak' problem more problematic, after-all now we need to create all these new massive undergound oil storage tanks every month a new tank goes online, and we only pump it out on a presidential order, sure we hold enough for what is it 58 days? and we've been doing this, since the late 70's when offfshore platforms brought oil prices back down... but oh no, we can't close down the reserve, what if iran cut off all oil from mid-east? we'd need it then!
all because our oil comes from countries not under our control. you'd think with off shore drilling, they'd have figured a way to put off shore platforms off antartica instead.
Maglevs are almost as fast as planes, and the 'amtrack' route was on the 'existing' rail network, meaning it was never designed for high speed trains. in fact, it was a 'sight seeing' train, even worse, it traveled between locations based on how pretty the route was.... driving, even with congestion was faster, cheaper, and saved you paying for a taxi in vegas.
now they could make a new track, for a high speed train, for a lot less than a 'maglev' but again where is the real draw to do this? remember vegas is a small city of under 2 million compared to LA were there is money for decent mass transit... and the casinos aren't going to shell out for decent mass transit, if it's easy to travel between 2 or 3 casinos, why gamblers might decide to try their luck at another casino!
anyways, a big train between LA and vegas is just another way to tack a few billion to the national debt. it's a complete waste of money. Someone should build a toll way, instead of complaining about 6 lanes not being enough.
there may be a real need to reduce the traffic between LA/Las vegas, but without respectable mass transit systems, you still need a car. LA has mass transit, but los vegas is the #2 city for cabs, that's how bad their mass transit is.
the cost of making a maglev is ridiculous. 45M is just the 'environmental survey'. depending on the maglev system they put in it could cost a about 100x as much as putting in a 12-lane highway. (there are 3 types of maglev systems, only 2 have been tested, used commercially)
seriously they have to run a very large steel rail, that's thick enough and dense enough to repel the magnets or electro magnets, (or some combination thereof) if they don't make the rail itself magnetic, to reduce the magnetic field in the cab of the train. not only that, but there has yet to be a commercial maglev based on superconductors, part of the problem is that you need to dynamically change the current in the electromagnets based on a computer monitoring how high the train is levitating! so they're using massive massive electrical current to get almost jet speeds with a train...
if maglev technology didn't have as many draw backs as it does maybe they'd be everywhere. It would be easier to design a flying train. maybe with ground effect flight http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_effect_in_aircraft
think about it, you only need enough track to safely launch and land the train*, if it's going non-stop from LA to las vegas, well ground effect flight is hard to do over anything not ocean, because land tends to have hills, truly flat land is rare, except in north dakota. oh well, still i think a flying train would be less of a boondoggle than building a massive maglev.
*= and possibly tracks through areas where Ground effect flight aren't practical
"The NE is densely populated and parking is a mess."
there are quite a few urban centers where parking is a mess. I was in austin, TX once, I can't imagine anyplace with worse parking without trying. although the LBJ presidential libary is there, but if you try to Park there, they brand you as a student!!! just because the library is technically part of the campus, and i think you're like supposed to get a parking sticker or something if you're a visitor...
crazy. but at least, when i was there in 2002? was it, you could fight your tickets online.. since i was an out of state visitor that was the easiest way to fight it. It wasn't a planned stop, i was on a road trip, and i decided where i went based on who i could get a hold of by telephone/internet. (yes, i had a laptop, and with 802.11b there were even a few cutting edge fast foods with hotspots)
sigh, i mean OC-1536 and OC-3072... an OC-1920 would be nice, but it would really be some combination of other OC-connections.
"BART only runs because it is expensive and impractical."
I was in the SF area back in 1989, as a tourist and i though the BART system was pretty slick, we had arrived in california by car, so we had a car, but when we went sight seeing in SF the bart system let us get to various sights without everybody having to go the same places on the same schedule.
and what about the subway system in NY? is that 'expensive' and 'impractical'? cities of that size need mass transit, not everyone can drive cars, or we'd need 456 lane highways, kinda link how the 'internet' is evolving to have OC-1920 lines.