I've been using FOSS software since 1996, and the only 3 Linux distros i like are smoothwall, ubuntu, and knoppix. in 1996 i gave up on slackware (what all the Linux people were talking about then) for something that worked out of the box as a cross platform Internet gateway/file server... Free BSD.
I've never been cured of my desire for simplicity, never, and neither will the masses.
I don't want to fight with my software for 7 hours to get it 'just right' i want it to just plain work out of the box with no quibbles.
that's the #1 reason i hate Microsoft, despite all the other reasons to hate Microsoft. work with no hassles, and I'm not alone, most of the free world wants what i want, even if they don't know that's what they want.
for the few people who like to meddle with the guts of an OS, building gentoo from source is there, but at best, if the world switches to Linux, you will find the breakdown is the same as it is now, 99.9% wanting stuff that works and.1% that are willing to play around for hours to get things working the way they want it to.
you can't make people enjoy meddling with software who don't already enjoy it, and even then you can't increase the amount of spare time they have unless you put all food, housing and medical care under the direct control of the government... and believe you me, doing that is not cool, just ask people who lived in communist Russia how well that worked for them.
"All for prices cheaper than fancy mineral water."
i think you haven't bought gas lately... $4.60 a gallon is pretty spendy even is 75 cents is taxes
80 cents a liter(in 12 packs)or $1-1.25 individually (3.8 liters per gallon) though they do sell gallon sizes of bottled water too, though usually of a non-brand name, and yeah it says that it's mineral water, it's next to the distilled and purified water bottles with the 'mineral' label on it...
at $1 a liter it's 3.80 a gallon, vs 4.50 a gallon for diesel... with 80 cents tax, and you pay tax on bottled water too, but not as much and it's not added in... it's virtually the same price per gallon, but yes as you pointed out in oil there is a lot more work than in bottled water, the difference is they have portable gasoline combustion engines, but no portable hydrogen fusion power cells...
makes all the difference in the world. in terms of supply/demand.
BTW i know a hobby farmer who makes his own Bio-diesel, for $1.50 a gallon, he runs it straight all summer long, and then runs 50/50 in cold months with real diesel. if gasoline really goes to $6-7 a gallon, as some experts have predicted, expect food prices to rise rapidly as more and more farmers switch from growing food, to growing oil for bio-diesel. (would be nice if energy companies got on board with algea production for bio fuel, but so far only one in texas has...)
OLPC is basically a way to stick big bills to small countries for 'educational laptops'
in TFA OLPC 'complains' about how many countries thought they should have designed the whole thing around cellphone chipsets and displays (and inputs) to get even cheaper costs, and their argument is 'cellphones aren't laptops' typical imperialistic ideals...
all you need is something that can display informational text that should be able to be changed slightly each year, and for each region...
and possibly some way for the end user to take quizzes or tests on the material they read....
India wanted $10 laptops, and they made their own program, and i have no doubt they actually used small cheap processors like the ones in cell phones to make their project. they only got down to $50 last i heard, but still OLPC were $200 devices, and this one 'will be $75 in 2010' India expects their 'device' to be a lot cheaper by 2010. (though there is little known about the project in India, I assume they will try to use as much cheap cell phone tech as possible)
they also find the OLPC program to be suspect, why would you target grade school children in less developed countries to use expensive laptops that could be sold on the open market for three times the price paid by their countries for them as educational tools...
why teach children in poor countries on computers, when it's not even standard in developed nations? I definitely agree with India's problems with the OLPC project, consider the countries that have welcomed the project,
"Rwanda (G1G1 pilot)[42] Americas Haiti (G1G1 pilot) Mexico (50,000 laptops bought by billionaire Carlos Slim) Peru (270,000 laptops bought, now receiving laptops)[43] United States of America (15,000 laptops bought by Birmingham, Alabama)[44] Uruguay (100,000 laptops bought, now receiving laptops)[45] Asia Afghanistan (G1G1 pilot) Cambodia (G1G1 pilot) Mongolia (G1G1 pilot, now receiving 10,000 laptops"
Nigeria was going to order a million, but then elections were held and they haven't solidified the contract, Nigeria the number one source of Internet crime, was the most interested in OLPC.... bah, there is no reason for less developed nations to buy laptops to train kids, it's all a con to get those countries to go into debt to buy things that won't help their economies, that will do nothing but create a cast of children who want fancy electronic gadgets that they can never afford... unless they're as corrupt as Nigeria and create a class of criminals who focus on stealing as much as possible from developed nations...
if OLPC was serious about creating bare-bone education devices they would have modified cellphone style devices, instead of starting around a general purpose CPU with a complex operating system and complicated displays etc etc...
computers were originally designed around micro controllers for microwave ovens, basic text parsing and display is easy and cheap if you don't encumber the device with a fancy OS...
and for 'interactive textbooks' especially when you're targeting less developed countries, should focus on being as simple (and as cheap) as possible. OLPC isn't about bringing electronic textbooks to everyone, it's about making fancy electronic devices and teaching impressionable children to desire them...
some tax law is written to make it easy for people to report the amount of taxable whatever they use each year along with a check, to be above board, but at least in my state it's a major headache to 'legally use bio-diesel' but fwiw, in my county the county social workers tell their clients about the people pirating DVD movies for $3 a movie to make a living... so if you make your own bio-diesel, at least in this county nobody is going to go after you.
you could always research the laws in your own state though, to be sure...
"You must obtain a motor vehicle fuel tax license if you want to act as a "supplier" or "restricted supplier" of motor vehicle fuel in Wisconsin [secs. 73.03(50) and 78.09, Wis. Stats.]."
and
"The above suppliers must also be registered with the federal government under 26 USC 4101 for tax-free transactions in gasoline and diesel fuel."
so if you make your own bio-diesel in Wisconsin it sounds like a major headache... as long as you're trying to be above board.
on the plus side, you can still make your own bio-diesel for use as home heating oil, as that is untaxed.
I was pointing out that people can live in harmony with nature, if they try to. having a solution that scales to a rapidly growing world population (already in the billions) is a lot lot harder than coming up with a system that scales to a few million humans per large arable continent.
if you scale back to a few million humans total, you can even all have flying cars*, and still live in harmony with nature**.
*= or at least flying machines
**= of course all the machinery etc is built by large, robotic factories, that use 100% recycled materials, and are 100% wind/solar/hydroelectric powered, that all waste is 100% recycled, etc etc... and people and animals are kept from clustering at high densities, so as to avoid water polution etc... and there are robotic trains along limited rail lines etc. etc.
whoops perhaps i should read all the pdfs before ranting about how much wind energy is available or how much electricity we actually use...
the one said there is 2x as much energy as we actually use... ahh i see where i made the mistake, the energy 'usage' was in 'thousand megawatt hours' sight i saw the thousand and did the calculation off that, not the 'megawatt' hours....
the solar plan would use less land, but it requires lots and lots of 'fragile mirrors'
i don't like the idead of a hailstorm taking offline 20% of the US's energy supply... even if the 'solar belt' region rarely gets hailstorms...
wind and solar combined could easily wean us off coal, and provide alternatives to using oil.
Solar? forget solar, we could plaster the dakotas with wind turbines and use HVDC lines to send the power to everybody....
that article suggested HVDC can cover 1,000 KM with only 3% losses. if every place within 1000 KM of north dakota, texas, kansas, south dakota, and montana were hooked into a massive class 3 or better wind farm setup, we could use up to 1,000 times more electricity per person...
keep in mind the top 5 states all have areas (marked in red in the pdf) where the wind conditions are so consistant that we don't need much excess capacity for when the wind isn't above 13MPH
1 North Dakota 1,210 11 Colorado 481 2 Texas 1,190 12 New Mexico 435 3 Kansas 1,070 13 Idaho 73 4 South Dakota 1,030 14 Michigan 65 5 Montana 1,020 15 New York 62 6 Nebraska 868 16 Illinois 61 7 Wyoming 747 17 California 59 8 Oklahoma 725 18 Wisconsin 58 9 Minnesota 657 19 Maine 56 10 Iowa 551 20 Missouri 52
Large wind systems require average wind speeds of 6 meters/second (13 mph)
with sufficient investment in wind farms, we could build a system for using hydrogen combustion to replace dependance on oil and gas, and coal... in order for us to use.1% of our national wind resources, we'd have to completely stop depending on any form of fossile fuels.
so, environmental impact isn't a worry, unless you're worried about the occasional bird caught in the turbine blades... we couldn't possible stop enough of the wind to have an evironmental impact...
i don't think 2000 years old is often considered 'new' true, high efficiency electric generation windmills are a recent addition to the knowledge of humanity, but we've been using practical windmills for the past 800 or so years... milling grain, or pumping water with the power of the wind were the first practical applications, that lead to wide spread adoption, in places where waterwheels just weren't practical...
from wikipedia...
'A windmill operating an organ is described as early as the 1st century AD by Hero of Alexandria, marking probably the first instance of a wind powering machine in history.[1][2] Vertical axle windmills were first used in eastern Persia (Sistan) by the 9th century AD as described by Muslim geographers.[3] Horizontal axle windmills of the type generally used today were invented in Northwestern Europe in the 1180s.'
4 of the top ten most profitable fortune 500 companies are energy companies. 2 i know are banks, 2 i don't know what they do, and one is microsoft and one is wal-mart. All 4 energy companies are _above_ both microsoft _And_ Wal-mart. only the big banks can compete with energy companies...
then go live in a forest, get a foot powered griding wheel and an axe. you can convert a normal car to run on woodgas, it's complex, but not impossible, and bumpy roads (eg: dirt ones) are the hardest to use, and if you are driving a long way having someone in the trailer behind you with the wood stove to keep the fire tended might help rather than pulling over and doing it yourself when you get a loss of acceleration.
There are a lot of cheap, woody lake superior lots that the wood/paper industry tried to offload recently, so if you have $20k you can get a realy nice wooded lot that is close to small town america and on the great lakes... as a pet project, you can try to design your own A/C system based on cold, superior lake water, for the 2 months a year you might need A/C. (when the wind isn't from the lake side, that is)
Just remeber to replant your trees, so as to live renewablly..
there are virtually no good paying jobs in that region of wisconsin, so i suggest you only consider this option, if you have a nest egg large enough for you to retire there.
BTW if you like to hunt and fish, there is Plenty of that up there too, but the DNR fees offset the cost savings (vs buying prepackaged foods) a bit, unless you're good enough at it to tag your limits.
the chemistry is so straightforward that it can be done in your garage easily, as long as you use the methanol method, the ethanol method is harder from what i understand, even though methanol fumes can be dangerous...
and BTW for every gallon of vegetable oil you get 1 gallon of bio-diesel. I know many people who make their own bio-diesel, especially since diesel is now $4.50 a gallon, and vegetable oil can be acquired for a lot less, if you can get Waste vegetable oil (sometimes this is free), even if you buy large bulk sizes from warehouse stores you can sometimes get the oil for ~$3 a gallon, which if the other chemicals cheaply, might still be cheaper than paying at the pump (you use very little of the other chemicals, lye and methanol)
well, WVO is the cheapest source of home brew Bio-diesel, if you're near a vegetable oil plant, you might look into non-food grade oil, you will have to pay, but there are always some batches that fail to pass for food grade...
"However, it certainly qualifies them as a political organization concerning itself with propaganda victories rather than real solutions."
Well, you might not like it, but winning propaganda victories can be important too. I was frequently as a kid bombarded with all kinds of crap about how the earth was dying from environmentalist nutjobs like green peace. So were a lot of people, and a LOT of people tried to do their part about all the stories they were being told (regardless of if they were true or not) Because of all that propaganda, America has the most forests of any industrialized nation, compare that to what has happened in places where there were only greed, and self preservation at work, like India. i remember as a kid they were telling me that every tree would be cut down by the year 2010... well, it didn't happen here, but It has nearly happened in India... deforestation is so bad there they declared in a 'national emergency' and they're not the only country where greed has caused massive massive deforestation.
"I'm sure the Chinese will be happy to buy American coal, considering the future of their power infrastructure is heavily dependant on coal fired plants."
not as long as they have the worlds largest coal seam (and they mine it open pit too)
india would love to buy american coal however, and not just for electricity, for use as a replaclment for all the forests they've raped without replanting for the past 140 years, turning what were once beautiful forests into a desert like wasteland...
the problem is that the number of wind turbines that would have to go in, and the way they'd be spaced.
normally tornadoes hit out in the middle of fields, maybe an unlucky farmhouse gets hit... well, guess what, almost all of those wind turbines are going to be scattered along fields, close enough to residential areas to make them pay off...
there are hundreds of tornadoes each season, in each state along tornado alley, just because houses aren't scattered around in a pattern likely to take losses from tornadoes, wind farms by their very nature would be, if we drew 40% of our energy from wind, every year there would be turbines lost (or at least damaged enough to require repairs) and again, i said this was part of the FUD thrown against wind farms, FUD doesn't have to say you will always loose money taking a chance, it just has to create enough uncertainty to keep investors away.
lack of enough wind to drive the turbines is another part of that FUD, but with how high megawatt capacity wind turbines are, they're far less susceptible to slow wind days, and properly sited the owners of the wind mills will already have a ball park figure of how much idle time the turbines really will have anyways.
macrovision was horrible, and the thing is on some tapes, the macrovision code would 'self' strip from repeated viewings of the tape, as the 'tape' streched, and made the macrovision code no longer legible to the part of the vcr that knew what to do when it got that code...
it wasn't until macrovision started getting involved in video game and dvd protection schemes that they finally got so annoying that people had to download special programs to remove macrovision protection from content.
sadly, there are asome standalone dvd players of dubious quality that won't properly play back non encrypted dvds. how sad, it's so easy with modern technology to make home movies that will actually last a long time, and then stupid small minded companies decide that you shouldn't be able to watch non encrypted content on home video players... (blu-ray supposedly requres all blu-ray discs be encrypted to playback, at least that's what i've heard, stupid, with HD camcorders finally finding a market)
tivo boxes treat the flag in a normal predictable way, anything flagged, the tivo will record, but prevent you from making a copy to any other tivo etc, because tivo considers 'recording' to it's 'blessed drive' as simply timeshifting. window's vista creating a non encumbered mpeg stream of a 'do not copy' flagged program is a whole different ball of wax, even if a skilled tivo hacker can take the video files off a tivo by popping it in a linux machine...
it requires voiding your warrenty to copy a tivo recorded show to a seperate linux drive where you can then upload it to the internet, since the tivo hardware won't let you move it, they don't have to worry about creating a 'timeshifting' file for content with the broadcast flag.
"Of course, this device will not copy programs from commercial DVDs to the machine. I tried to play from another DVD to this machine and it wouldn't record that way either (I was hoping to make DVD backups that could cut the time to start the movie from minutes to seconds)."
if you want to back up DVDs you need a PC, with a DVD burner, there are a lot of companies out there with DVD ripping tools, i use a free one, that strips prohibited user operations, so you can simply hit the menu key to skip to the main menu, even if it has 7 minutes of garbage previews... i recently had to do such with 'the sixth sense' when i wanted to rewatch it, despite owning the DVD because it had stupid trailers that couldn't be skipped.
the one i use is 'dvdfabhd decryptor' they sell a more feature rich full version, but i use the free one, and 'dvd shrink' which you have to find with google to find a download site.. i then use 'infra recorder' which is free open source software, the only free dvd burning software that supports importing normal video ts folders correctly..
prohibited user operations are patently stupid, who 10 years down the road is going to sit through trailers for 7 minutes? for movies they didn't want to see the first time they saw the trailers? stupid...
i know many people who do exactly that, first game i recall being popular for split screen was goldeneye, nowadays it's halo 3, and people often say 'stop screen peeking' some people cheat and find where the others are by looking at their screens to ambush them... but people still play that way...
"2. Game Systems gain their stability due to LOOOOONG (4-5 years) release cycles. In PC terms, 4-5 years is an eternity."
I am an avid PC gamer, and i rarely replace my gaming rig more than once every four years, that being said, I always Always Build my own rig hand selecting every part, and i avoid any component that is garbage.
I also whenever possible pick my graphic solution to far exceed what is needed by todays gaming needs, because i rarely change my graphic card solution within 4 years time. Most game engines tune down to support lesser cards, with a basic feature spec, over 4 years there is almost never a problem running games on the 'old' gaming rig, but then again I am a strategy gamer, i hate FPS games, i hate mmorpgs, if it's strategy, i love it turn based or real time... I was a big fan of RPGs in my console days, but RPGs have less draw for me nowadays... When i was a kid i loved side scrollers, and i rarely play what has become of the side scroller today (they're now all in 3-d and annoying and they don't call them side scrollers anymore... but the basics are the same, collect the coins or the rings, clear levels, etc)
basically, the only genera of games I've consistently enjoyed are strategy. puzzle games are hit or miss, loved Tetris as it was on the original Gameboy, stayed forever on level 9... the ones that go to level 15 i can't take, after level 11 i intentionally suicide... ruined a game i used to love by adding more difficulty...
but in general puzzle games start to get annoyingly hard, i remember cracking the code to the lolo (nes) series codes, by using pen and paper, rather than 'solving' the puzzles that stumped me... even today i avoid puzzle games, i might rent one now and then but i never buy them.
"I've been saying this since at least '95, "Why can't games be bootable?"
Console games, are esentially bootable, to switch games you switch discs and hit reset...
Why would Pc games do the same thing? it's easier for a PC to make the game a program that installs and uses whatever drivers the OS has, there is no point to make PCs load programs like consoles do, because consoles already provide that functionality for less cost.
i recall something about the airport usage of t-rays (and yes some airports use t-ray scanners to look for weapons, they don't scan everyone though, because the equipment was ver expensive until this new innovation.)
I recall that the designers of 't-ray' devices had to patch their devices to 'blur' private regions, because people were getting upset that you 'could see too much detail' with the first t-ray scanners...
making t-ray scanners 'cheaper' to build and operate will increase their use in airport security, but again, it can't see into body cavities for weapons... and there are certain kinds of plastic weapons (iirc) that don't show up in a t-ray scan, but almost all explosives and anything made of metal shows.
At last, someone who is familiar with the problem and the technology involved. Yes, SMM memory space is often locked by the BIOS and not subject to viewing by anti-virus. Not that anti-virus would know what code written to run in SMM looks like since it's not exactly a normal Windows or Linux binary. are you sure? http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/05/19/2223258
sounds like colinux runs in SMM, and would be a perfect starting platform for writing a stealth rootkit with complete LAMP capabilities.. far more functionality than any normal stealth rootkit could ever hope to give hackers... and most of the code is already written for them! (sure they have to write the bit that flips the bit that makes colinux invisible, and colinux might not work on all systems yada yada yada....)
great just great, as if paid hackers needed any help designing and deploying system managment mode rootkits, with colinux they can put a full LAMP server on somone's windows box and they'd never notice, except that their bandwidth and memory keep getting used up...
hydro isn't 100% tapped, there are tons of places around the world where new hydro electric plants are going up, maybe in America the market was saturated early, but if we put in hydro plants in many countries in Africa, those countries won't have to put in as many coal fired plants at technology gets cheaper, etc.
wind is nowhere near tapped.... i think the Department of energy once found in a study that wind power plants could provide up to 40% of the energy needs of the US, overall, the problem though, is that the states where wind power is really viable, are far away from the major population centers, putting up massive wind farms to power all of north Dakota would be easy, but north Dakota would never ever have the money to install that many wind farms...
there are countless places where wind power is so predictable and reliable that those regions could get almost all their power from wind, but the very high upfront cost, compared to the 'artificially low' price of coal, makes it unlikely for those regions to go wind.
Wind turbines can pay for themselves, easily, but there are things (tornadoes, etc) that make them a 'risky' bet, if your wind farm stands for 20 years you've paid off expenses, but if a F5 tears them down in year 3 you're hosed...
remember, windy places are usually in tornado country, so tornadoes are the 'fear, uncertainty, doubt' factor that keeps energy companies (thinking only of the bottom line) from turning to wind power...
Solar PVs are never going to be cheap as long as they require pure silicon, even if this technology helps significantly (if it ramps up, if it can be cheaply mass produced, big ifs, there) PV will still be an 'expensive' power source, home owners buy PV because they 'pay less than buying from the grid' but that price supports a lot more than the 'cost' of producing the energy, so if this tech works, in a few years the demand for cheap, home installed PV will grow way beyond production capacities, but it still will be way more expensive than coal, it will only save homeowners from paying 'full retail' cost for energy... they won't use this new solar PV technology to power cities, it's still too expensive...
Slashdot Mirror
"Think of Ubuntu as a gateway drug, uh, distro."
.1% that are willing to play around for hours to get things working the way they want it to.
I've been using FOSS software since 1996, and the only 3 Linux distros i like are smoothwall, ubuntu, and knoppix. in 1996 i gave up on slackware (what all the Linux people were talking about then) for something that worked out of the box as a cross platform Internet gateway/file server... Free BSD.
I've never been cured of my desire for simplicity, never, and neither will the masses.
I don't want to fight with my software for 7 hours to get it 'just right' i want it to just plain work out of the box with no quibbles.
that's the #1 reason i hate Microsoft, despite all the other reasons to hate Microsoft. work with no hassles, and I'm not alone, most of the free world wants what i want, even if they don't know that's what they want.
for the few people who like to meddle with the guts of an OS, building gentoo from source is there, but at best, if the world switches to Linux, you will find the breakdown is the same as it is now, 99.9% wanting stuff that works and
you can't make people enjoy meddling with software who don't already enjoy it, and even then you can't increase the amount of spare time they have unless you put all food, housing and medical care under the direct control of the government... and believe you me, doing that is not cool, just ask people who lived in communist Russia how well that worked for them.
"All for prices cheaper than fancy mineral water."
i think you haven't bought gas lately... $4.60 a gallon is pretty spendy even is 75 cents is taxes
80 cents a liter(in 12 packs)or $1-1.25 individually (3.8 liters per gallon) though they do sell gallon sizes of bottled water too, though usually of a non-brand name, and yeah it says that it's mineral water, it's next to the distilled and purified water bottles with the 'mineral' label on it...
at $1 a liter it's 3.80 a gallon, vs 4.50 a gallon for diesel... with 80 cents tax, and you pay tax on bottled water too, but not as much and it's not added in... it's virtually the same price per gallon, but yes as you pointed out in oil there is a lot more work than in bottled water, the difference is they have portable gasoline combustion engines, but no portable hydrogen fusion power cells...
makes all the difference in the world. in terms of supply/demand.
BTW i know a hobby farmer who makes his own Bio-diesel, for $1.50 a gallon, he runs it straight all summer long, and then runs 50/50 in cold months with real diesel. if gasoline really goes to $6-7 a gallon, as some experts have predicted, expect food prices to rise rapidly as more and more farmers switch from growing food, to growing oil for bio-diesel. (would be nice if energy companies got on board with algea production for bio fuel, but so far only one in texas has...)
OLPC is basically a way to stick big bills to small countries for 'educational laptops'
in TFA OLPC 'complains' about how many countries thought they should have designed the whole thing around cellphone chipsets and displays (and inputs) to get even cheaper costs, and their argument is 'cellphones aren't laptops' typical imperialistic ideals...
all you need is something that can display informational text that should be able to be changed slightly each year, and for each region...
and possibly some way for the end user to take quizzes or tests on the material they read....
India wanted $10 laptops, and they made their own program, and i have no doubt they actually used small cheap processors like the ones in cell phones to make their project. they only got down to $50 last i heard, but still OLPC were $200 devices, and this one 'will be $75 in 2010' India expects their 'device' to be a lot cheaper by 2010. (though there is little known about the project in India, I assume they will try to use as much cheap cell phone tech as possible)
they also find the OLPC program to be suspect, why would you target grade school children in less developed countries to use expensive laptops that could be sold on the open market for three times the price paid by their countries for them as educational tools...
why teach children in poor countries on computers, when it's not even standard in developed nations? I definitely agree with India's problems with the OLPC project, consider the countries that have welcomed the project,
"Rwanda (G1G1 pilot)[42]
Americas
Haiti (G1G1 pilot)
Mexico (50,000 laptops bought by billionaire Carlos Slim)
Peru (270,000 laptops bought, now receiving laptops)[43]
United States of America (15,000 laptops bought by Birmingham, Alabama)[44]
Uruguay (100,000 laptops bought, now receiving laptops)[45]
Asia
Afghanistan (G1G1 pilot)
Cambodia (G1G1 pilot)
Mongolia (G1G1 pilot, now receiving 10,000 laptops"
Nigeria was going to order a million, but then elections were held and they haven't solidified the contract, Nigeria the number one source of Internet crime, was the most interested in OLPC.... bah, there is no reason for less developed nations to buy laptops to train kids, it's all a con to get those countries to go into debt to buy things that won't help their economies, that will do nothing but create a cast of children who want fancy electronic gadgets that they can never afford... unless they're as corrupt as Nigeria and create a class of criminals who focus on stealing as much as possible from developed nations...
if OLPC was serious about creating bare-bone education devices they would have modified cellphone style devices, instead of starting around a general purpose CPU with a complex operating system and complicated displays etc etc...
computers were originally designed around micro controllers for microwave ovens, basic text parsing and display is easy and cheap if you don't encumber the device with a fancy OS...
and for 'interactive textbooks' especially when you're targeting less developed countries, should focus on being as simple (and as cheap) as possible. OLPC isn't about bringing electronic textbooks to everyone, it's about making fancy electronic devices and teaching impressionable children to desire them...
some tax law is written to make it easy for people to report the amount of taxable whatever they use each year along with a check, to be above board, but at least in my state it's a major headache to 'legally use bio-diesel' but fwiw, in my county the county social workers tell their clients about the people pirating DVD movies for $3 a movie to make a living... so if you make your own bio-diesel, at least in this county nobody is going to go after you.
you could always research the laws in your own state though, to be sure...
"You must obtain a motor vehicle fuel tax license if you want to act as a "supplier" or "restricted supplier" of motor vehicle fuel in Wisconsin [secs. 73.03(50) and 78.09, Wis. Stats.]."
and
"The above suppliers must also be registered with the federal government under 26 USC 4101 for tax-free transactions in gasoline and diesel fuel."
so if you make your own bio-diesel in Wisconsin it sounds like a major headache... as long as you're trying to be above board.
on the plus side, you can still make your own bio-diesel for use as home heating oil, as that is untaxed.
I was pointing out that people can live in harmony with nature, if they try to. having a solution that scales to a rapidly growing world population (already in the billions) is a lot lot harder than coming up with a system that scales to a few million humans per large arable continent.
if you scale back to a few million humans total, you can even all have flying cars*, and still live in harmony with nature**.
*= or at least flying machines
**= of course all the machinery etc is built by large, robotic factories, that use 100% recycled materials, and are 100% wind/solar/hydroelectric powered, that all waste is 100% recycled, etc etc... and people and animals are kept from clustering at high densities, so as to avoid water polution etc... and there are robotic trains along limited rail lines etc. etc.
your the twitter who brought in stock prices when i linked to an article citing the companies 'net annual profit' not their share prices...
the numbers after the list in my previous article, is their NET PROFIT IN MILLIONS OF DOLLARS AND HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH SHARE VALUE.
so get a clue, i wasn't talking about share prices, i was pointing out that energy is the most profitable business in the modern world.
whoops perhaps i should read all the pdfs before ranting about how much wind energy is available or how much electricity we actually use...
the one said there is 2x as much energy as we actually use... ahh i see where i made the mistake, the energy 'usage' was in 'thousand megawatt hours' sight i saw the thousand and did the calculation off that, not the 'megawatt' hours....
the solar plan would use less land, but it requires lots and lots of 'fragile mirrors'
i don't like the idead of a hailstorm taking offline 20% of the US's energy supply...
even if the 'solar belt' region rarely gets hailstorms...
wind and solar combined could easily wean us off coal, and provide alternatives to using oil.
Solar? forget solar, we could plaster the dakotas with wind turbines and use HVDC lines to send the power to everybody....
.1% of our national wind resources, we'd have to completely stop depending on any form of fossile fuels.
that article suggested HVDC can cover 1,000 KM with only 3% losses. if every place within 1000 KM of north dakota, texas, kansas, south dakota, and montana were hooked into a massive class 3 or better wind farm setup, we could use up to 1,000 times more electricity per person...
keep in mind the top 5 states all have areas (marked in red in the pdf) where the wind conditions are so consistant that we don't need much excess capacity for when the wind isn't above 13MPH
Today's energy usage ahref=http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epates.htmlrel=url2html-23150http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epates.html>
All Energy Sources (thousands of KWh) 4,064,702
that's 4 billion KWH/year...
energy potention of the top 20 US states (in anual billions of kw/hours) http://www.awea.org/pubs/factsheets/Top_20_States.pdf
1 North Dakota 1,210 11 Colorado 481
2 Texas 1,190 12 New Mexico 435
3 Kansas 1,070 13 Idaho 73
4 South Dakota 1,030 14 Michigan 65
5 Montana 1,020 15 New York 62
6 Nebraska 868 16 Illinois 61
7 Wyoming 747 17 California 59
8 Oklahoma 725 18 Wisconsin 58
9 Minnesota 657 19 Maine 56
10 Iowa 551 20 Missouri 52
Large wind systems require average wind speeds of 6 meters/second (13 mph)
with sufficient investment in wind farms, we could build a system for using hydrogen combustion to replace dependance on oil and gas, and coal... in order for us to use
so, environmental impact isn't a worry, unless you're worried about the occasional bird caught in the turbine blades... we couldn't possible stop enough of the wind to have an evironmental impact...
"3) It's new."
i don't think 2000 years old is often considered 'new' true, high efficiency electric generation windmills are a recent addition to the knowledge of humanity, but we've been using practical windmills for the past 800 or so years... milling grain, or pumping water with the power of the wind were the first practical applications, that lead to wide spread adoption, in places where waterwheels just weren't practical...
from wikipedia...
'A windmill operating an organ is described as early as the 1st century AD by Hero of Alexandria, marking probably the first instance of a wind powering machine in history.[1][2] Vertical axle windmills were first used in eastern Persia (Sistan) by the 9th century AD as described by Muslim geographers.[3] Horizontal axle windmills of the type generally used today were invented in Northwestern Europe in the 1180s.'
Wow where's the -5 'wrong' option
4 of the top ten most profitable fortune 500 companies are energy companies. 2 i know are banks, 2 i don't know what they do, and one is microsoft and one is wal-mart. All 4 energy companies are _above_ both microsoft _And_ Wal-mart. only the big banks can compete with energy companies...
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/performers/companies/profits/
1 Exxon Mobil 1 36,130.0
2 Citigroup 8 24,589.0
3 Bank of America Corp. 12 16,465.0
4 General Electric 7 16,353.0
5 Chevron 4 14,099.0
6 ConocoPhillips 6 13,529.0
7 Microsoft 48 12,254.0
8 Wal-Mart Stores 2 11,231.0
9 American Intl. Group 9 10,477.0
10 Altria Group 20 10,435.0
11 Johnson & Johnson 32 10,411.0
12 Intel 49 8,664.0
13 Berkshire Hathaway
then go live in a forest, get a foot powered griding wheel and an axe. you can convert a normal car to run on woodgas, it's complex, but not impossible, and bumpy roads (eg: dirt ones) are the hardest to use, and if you are driving a long way having someone in the trailer behind you with the wood stove to keep the fire tended might help rather than pulling over and doing it yourself when you get a loss of acceleration.
There are a lot of cheap, woody lake superior lots that the wood/paper industry tried to offload recently, so if you have $20k you can get a realy nice wooded lot that is close to small town america and on the great lakes... as a pet project, you can try to design your own A/C system based on cold, superior lake water, for the 2 months a year you might need A/C. (when the wind isn't from the lake side, that is)
Just remeber to replant your trees, so as to live renewablly..
there are virtually no good paying jobs in that region of wisconsin, so i suggest you only consider this option, if you have a nest egg large enough for you to retire there.
BTW if you like to hunt and fish, there is Plenty of that up there too, but the DNR fees offset the cost savings (vs buying prepackaged foods) a bit, unless you're good enough at it to tag your limits.
well, you can always make your own bio-diesel.
the chemistry is so straightforward that it can be done in your garage easily, as long as you use the methanol method, the ethanol method is harder from what i understand, even though methanol fumes can be dangerous...
and BTW for every gallon of vegetable oil you get 1 gallon of bio-diesel. I know many people who make their own bio-diesel, especially since diesel is now $4.50 a gallon, and vegetable oil can be acquired for a lot less, if you can get Waste vegetable oil (sometimes this is free), even if you buy large bulk sizes from warehouse stores you can sometimes get the oil for ~$3 a gallon, which if the other chemicals cheaply, might still be cheaper than paying at the pump (you use very little of the other chemicals, lye and methanol)
well, WVO is the cheapest source of home brew Bio-diesel, if you're near a vegetable oil plant, you might look into non-food grade oil, you will have to pay, but there are always some batches that fail to pass for food grade...
"However, it certainly qualifies them as a political organization concerning itself with propaganda victories rather than real solutions."
Well, you might not like it, but winning propaganda victories can be important too. I was frequently as a kid bombarded with all kinds of crap about how the earth was dying from environmentalist nutjobs like green peace. So were a lot of people, and a LOT of people tried to do their part about all the stories they were being told (regardless of if they were true or not) Because of all that propaganda, America has the most forests of any industrialized nation, compare that to what has happened in places where there were only greed, and self preservation at work, like India. i remember as a kid they were telling me that every tree would be cut down by the year 2010... well, it didn't happen here, but It has nearly happened in India... deforestation is so bad there they declared in a 'national emergency' and they're not the only country where greed has caused massive massive deforestation.
"I'm sure the Chinese will be happy to buy American coal, considering the future of their power infrastructure is heavily dependant on coal fired plants."
not as long as they have the worlds largest coal seam (and they mine it open pit too)
india would love to buy american coal however, and not just for electricity, for use as a replaclment for all the forests they've raped without replanting for the past 140 years, turning what were once beautiful forests into a desert like wasteland...
the problem is that the number of wind turbines that would have to go in, and the way they'd be spaced.
normally tornadoes hit out in the middle of fields, maybe an unlucky farmhouse gets hit... well, guess what, almost all of those wind turbines are going to be scattered along fields, close enough to residential areas to make them pay off...
there are hundreds of tornadoes each season, in each state along tornado alley, just because houses aren't scattered around in a pattern likely to take losses from tornadoes, wind farms by their very nature would be, if we drew 40% of our energy from wind, every year there would be turbines lost (or at least damaged enough to require repairs) and again, i said this was part of the FUD thrown against wind farms, FUD doesn't have to say you will always loose money taking a chance, it just has to create enough uncertainty to keep investors away.
lack of enough wind to drive the turbines is another part of that FUD, but with how high megawatt capacity wind turbines are, they're far less susceptible to slow wind days, and properly sited the owners of the wind mills will already have a ball park figure of how much idle time the turbines really will have anyways.
macrovision was horrible, and the thing is on some tapes, the macrovision code would 'self' strip from repeated viewings of the tape, as the 'tape' streched, and made the macrovision code no longer legible to the part of the vcr that knew what to do when it got that code...
it wasn't until macrovision started getting involved in video game and dvd protection schemes that they finally got so annoying that people had to download special programs to remove macrovision protection from content.
sadly, there are asome standalone dvd players of dubious quality that won't properly play back non encrypted dvds. how sad, it's so easy with modern technology to make home movies that will actually last a long time, and then stupid small minded companies decide that you shouldn't be able to watch non encrypted content on home video players... (blu-ray supposedly requres all blu-ray discs be encrypted to playback, at least that's what i've heard, stupid, with HD camcorders finally finding a market)
tivo boxes treat the flag in a normal predictable way, anything flagged, the tivo will record, but prevent you from making a copy to any other tivo etc, because tivo considers 'recording' to it's 'blessed drive' as simply timeshifting. window's vista creating a non encumbered mpeg stream of a 'do not copy' flagged program is a whole different ball of wax, even if a skilled tivo hacker can take the video files off a tivo by popping it in a linux machine...
it requires voiding your warrenty to copy a tivo recorded show to a seperate linux drive where you can then upload it to the internet, since the tivo hardware won't let you move it, they don't have to worry about creating a 'timeshifting' file for content with the broadcast flag.
"Of course, this device will not copy programs from commercial DVDs to the machine. I tried to play from another DVD to this machine and it wouldn't record that way either (I was hoping to make DVD backups that could cut the time to start the movie from minutes to seconds)."
if you want to back up DVDs you need a PC, with a DVD burner, there are a lot of companies out there with DVD ripping tools, i use a free one, that strips prohibited user operations, so you can simply hit the menu key to skip to the main menu, even if it has 7 minutes of garbage previews... i recently had to do such with 'the sixth sense' when i wanted to rewatch it, despite owning the DVD because it had stupid trailers that couldn't be skipped.
the one i use is 'dvdfabhd decryptor' they sell a more feature rich full version, but i use the free one, and 'dvd shrink' which you have to find with google to find a download site.. i then use 'infra recorder' which is free open source software, the only free dvd burning software that supports importing normal video ts folders correctly..
prohibited user operations are patently stupid, who 10 years down the road is going to sit through trailers for 7 minutes? for movies they didn't want to see the first time they saw the trailers? stupid...
i know many people who do exactly that, first game i recall being popular for split screen was goldeneye, nowadays it's halo 3, and people often say 'stop screen peeking' some people cheat and find where the others are by looking at their screens to ambush them... but people still play that way...
"2. Game Systems gain their stability due to LOOOOONG (4-5 years) release cycles. In PC terms, 4-5 years is an eternity."
I am an avid PC gamer, and i rarely replace my gaming rig more than once every four years, that being said, I always Always Build my own rig hand selecting every part, and i avoid any component that is garbage.
I also whenever possible pick my graphic solution to far exceed what is needed by todays gaming needs, because i rarely change my graphic card solution within 4 years time. Most game engines tune down to support lesser cards, with a basic feature spec, over 4 years there is almost never a problem running games on the 'old' gaming rig, but then again I am a strategy gamer, i hate FPS games, i hate mmorpgs, if it's strategy, i love it turn based or real time... I was a big fan of RPGs in my console days, but RPGs have less draw for me nowadays... When i was a kid i loved side scrollers, and i rarely play what has become of the side scroller today (they're now all in 3-d and annoying and they don't call them side scrollers anymore... but the basics are the same, collect the coins or the rings, clear levels, etc)
basically, the only genera of games I've consistently enjoyed are strategy. puzzle games are hit or miss, loved Tetris as it was on the original Gameboy, stayed forever on level 9... the ones that go to level 15 i can't take, after level 11 i intentionally suicide... ruined a game i used to love by adding more difficulty...
but in general puzzle games start to get annoyingly hard, i remember cracking the code to the lolo (nes) series codes, by using pen and paper, rather than 'solving' the puzzles that stumped me... even today i avoid puzzle games, i might rent one now and then but i never buy them.
ah well.
"I've been saying this since at least '95, "Why can't games be bootable?"
Console games, are esentially bootable, to switch games you switch discs and hit reset...
Why would Pc games do the same thing? it's easier for a PC to make the game a program that installs and uses whatever drivers the OS has, there is no point to make PCs load programs like consoles do, because consoles already provide that functionality for less cost.
i recall something about the airport usage of t-rays (and yes some airports use t-ray scanners to look for weapons, they don't scan everyone though, because the equipment was ver expensive until this new innovation.)
I recall that the designers of 't-ray' devices had to patch their devices to 'blur' private regions, because people were getting upset that you 'could see too much detail' with the first t-ray scanners...
making t-ray scanners 'cheaper' to build and operate will increase their use in airport security, but again, it can't see into body cavities for weapons... and there are certain kinds of plastic weapons (iirc) that don't show up in a t-ray scan, but almost all explosives and anything made of metal shows.
sounds like colinux runs in SMM, and would be a perfect starting platform for writing a stealth rootkit with complete LAMP capabilities.. far more functionality than any normal stealth rootkit could ever hope to give hackers... and most of the code is already written for them! (sure they have to write the bit that flips the bit that makes colinux invisible, and colinux might not work on all systems yada yada yada....)
"Is it just me, or did this already exist [andlinux.org]? Doesn't sound that new to me.."
What worries me, is this runs in 'system managment mode' sounds like colinux is a perfect system to design a 'stealth' rootkit around...
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/05/11/2044216&from=rss
great just great, as if paid hackers needed any help designing and deploying system managment mode rootkits, with colinux they can put a full LAMP server on somone's windows box and they'd never notice, except that their bandwidth and memory keep getting used up...
hydro isn't 100% tapped, there are tons of places around the world where new hydro electric plants are going up, maybe in America the market was saturated early, but if we put in hydro plants in many countries in Africa, those countries won't have to put in as many coal fired plants at technology gets cheaper, etc.
wind is nowhere near tapped.... i think the Department of energy once found in a study that wind power plants could provide up to 40% of the energy needs of the US, overall, the problem though, is that the states where wind power is really viable, are far away from the major population centers, putting up massive wind farms to power all of north Dakota would be easy, but north Dakota would never ever have the money to install that many wind farms...
there are countless places where wind power is so predictable and reliable that those regions could get almost all their power from wind, but the very high upfront cost, compared to the 'artificially low' price of coal, makes it unlikely for those regions to go wind.
Wind turbines can pay for themselves, easily, but there are things (tornadoes, etc) that make them a 'risky' bet, if your wind farm stands for 20 years you've paid off expenses, but if a F5 tears them down in year 3 you're hosed...
remember, windy places are usually in tornado country, so tornadoes are the 'fear, uncertainty, doubt' factor that keeps energy companies (thinking only of the bottom line) from turning to wind power...
Solar PVs are never going to be cheap as long as they require pure silicon, even if this technology helps significantly (if it ramps up, if it can be cheaply mass produced, big ifs, there) PV will still be an 'expensive' power source, home owners buy PV because they 'pay less than buying from the grid' but that price supports a lot more than the 'cost' of producing the energy, so if this tech works, in a few years the demand for cheap, home installed PV will grow way beyond production capacities, but it still will be way more expensive than coal, it will only save homeowners from paying 'full retail' cost for energy... they won't use this new solar PV technology to power cities, it's still too expensive...