The Constitution doesn't regulate transactions between private parties. It regulates the powers granted to the Government.
DRM in the US is not a transaction between two private parties. Instead, it is the *government* offering to step in and put legal force behind one party's interference with another's right to use their own property.
The problem is that there are zero general-purpose registers - many instructions require that the operands be in specific registers, which blows the whole idea of general-purpose registers right out of the water. This is compounded by the fact that there are only four registers which you could even call general-purpose with a straight face.
While that was true in 16-bit mode, 32-bit mode made things much more general. Most of the remaining instructions that use dedicated implicit register operands have been "deprecated" for a long time. If you stick to the recommended "RISCish" subset of X86 instructions, 7 of the 8 registers are usually equivalent (the stack pointer is the big exception).
So the time is 123456789? That's the stupidest time I've ever heard in my life... It sounds like something an idiot would have on his luggage.
Indeed, it would be hard to find a more stupid era than Nov 1973. It was the height of the Watergate scandal, a time of inflation, energy crisis, bad haircuts, ugly suits, and the quality of pop music spiraling downward. Truly a nadir in modern history.
You'd have to hole-up in your house for weeks, perhaps months, to avoid the HUGE risk of driving on ice.
I take it you've never been up north. Road ice is usually cleared within a day or two of any storm. They have these things called plows and salt trucks. During any given winter, only a handful of days are genuinely dangerous for travel.
With wind speeds more than twice that of the strongest hurricanes, the debris spreads over a very wide area, and does severe damage for dozens of miles around.
I take it you've never been in a tornado zone. These storms travel in a geometric pattern called a line. If you walk perpendicular to said line, you'll be out of the damage zone within a minute or two. Even the most rare, largest tornadoes leave a swath not much more than a mile wide.
At an elevation of 200+ feet, it would require a hell of a tidal wave to damage anything more than the relatively small percentage of beachfront areas.
That's what you get with asteroids: Monster waves hundreds of feet high.
For all the hysteria about the hurricane season on the coasts that kill a dozen people each year, the hundreds that die in the north from freezing cold, snow and ice storms go almost completely unreported,
In both of those cases, the majority of casualties are those who foolishly don't take a few basic precautions in the face of weather warnings. The difference is that in a hurricane zone dozens of counties can have a significant chunk of their real estate wiped off the map in one single event. Most peoples lives in the region are totally disrupted and it takes many years to recover.
Moreover, the winter weather warning is: "stay in your house tonight". No big deal. The hurricane warning is: "Cram your family in the car, drive 200 miles in gridlock and hole up in a hotel for half a week." That sucks.
Witness: Los Angeles.
When the "big one" hits Los Angeles without warning, then you'll really witness something that wasn't a safe place to begin with. It wasn't safe when it was sparsely populated because people built a lot of unreinforced masonry structures. It's actually a little bit safer now with more modern building codes.
Not to mention the tsunami risk they face if a even a tiny asteroid hits anywhere in the Pacific ocean or there's a large undersea landslide or earthquake in the right spot. All of these things potentially dwarf the murder rate you seem to be hinting at.
And in the non-coastal areas of the south have tornadoes to contend with.
That's unfortunately true, but these days with a tornado you usually have enough warning to take cover, and even in the worst case you can walk a hundred yards or so to return to normalcy after the event. Volcanoes, hurricanes, tsunamis and earthquakes can all potentially turn an entire region into a nightmare for weeks, while causing orders of magnitude more damage than any tornado could.
No. There are not enough safe areas on Earth to hold all or even the majority of the population
Sure there are. They're just not generally close enough to the trendy seashores for most people's tastes.
Today, people are actually packed tightest into the relatively small high risk areas because they have the most attractive geological features and climate.
Just wondering, since the frequencies are still UHF/VHF - why would people be messing with their antennas?
Because they'll be desperately trying to adjust them once they find out that digital signals usually have poorer reception than analog. Also, many who used to get by with rabbit ears will need to install a new external antenna.
The problem is multiplied by the fact that any small glitch in reception causes a black screen, and most annoyingly, dropped audio, which can easily ruin an entire show if it happens at a critical moment. (They really should have allocated a few KHz for a backup *analog* audio channel in the ATSC broadcast standard.)
Do you have any idea how much more will be released if every car on the planet is replaced with a hydrogen-powered car?
Why, yes. But let's not stop there: What if all of the world's energy needs were met by burning hydrogen?
The annual global energy consumption is somewhere around 5e20 J. That would mean burning 3.5e12 kg of H2 to create 3.1e13 kg of water. Worldwide annual precipitation is 5e17 kg of water, which is more than 16000X greater.
In other words, even in the worst case our impact on humidity levels would be lost in the statistical noise. And as others have pointed out, any of this insignificant excess would rain out within a couple of days (in contrast to CO2, which lingers for centuries).
We undoubtedly already cause much larger variations in humidity by building dams and other activities that alter the balance between land and water surface area. Maybe you should worry about that instead of hydrogen cars.
People tend to get antsy and rather irritable when packed in with many other people in a small space; a really overcrowded planet seems to be asking for trouble.
This would only be a problem assuming continued exponential population growth. In that case, the only other remotely habitable real estate in the solar system, the Moon and Mars, would only postpone the problem for a couple of decades while exponential growth overwhelmed their small surface areas, too.
Not to mention that due to deadly radiation, the only way to survive on those bodies would be to hovel in caves. Which sounds to me like putting a lot of people in a small space, so now you'd have entire planets of irritable, pasty skinned, people clamoring for trace amounts of available water.
To me it seems a lot simpler to just stabilize the population levels here on earth.
What resources do you think we need? Resources are made of two things: energy and matter. Energy is currently the most pressing problem, but solutions to long term energy supplies don't generally involve space.
At the end of the day, there are fewer than 100 chemical elements in the universe. Most of those we heavily use are available in huge quantities right here on earth. (In various bulk minerals if not in their traditional ores.) Before anybody makes any big plans, they need to enumerate exactly *which* elements are going to run out here, why they can't be replaced with some other material (including new developments like nanotechnologies), where they can be found elsewhere in the solar system in suitable quantities, and how they will be retrieved.
Could someone explain to me, why Bill Gates would be arguing for H1-B Visas before congress now? I thought he left Microsoft?
Because he's still chairman of the board.
He's also their lovable nerdy Horatio Alger philanthropist mascot, over which which the senators will swoon. They would not react so favorably if forced to listen to a sweaty chair thrower.
Can't they move this thing to the moon and control it remotely, they should have plenty of room for a nuclear power plant of its very own...and if it gets swallowed in a small black hole at least we might have a chance.
I doubt that would help. *If* the moon were to collapse into a black hole (and I'm not saying that's really possible), most of its mass would probably fall in through an accretion disk. In the case of stellar black holes, such disks are the most efficient known way to convert mass into energy. Therefore, the earth would probably be totally scorched by the huge flux of X-rays and other radiation from the disk.
If you're looking to hack something you should use your own money to buy one and not mine.
If he has an analog-only TV, he is entitled to a coupon. End of story.
The poor people who didn't act earlier are also entitled to a coupon, but not his coupon. Any problems that the program is having getting coupons distributed are due to government incompetence, not coupon recipients.
These coupons are paid for from the proceeds that the government made selling the old TV bandwidth. They compensate TV owners for the diminished value of their property resulting from the government action, so the coupon fund is not your money to begin with.
Sure, if you make up any numbers you need out of the air in order to prop up your argument.
Just an example: you can't allocate a fixed cost like a furnace with a fixed lifetime (often determined by corrosion of the heat exchanger, which happens under either light or heavy loads) to variable heating costs. Unless you can totally eliminate the furnace from your house, that cost remains constant, regardless of TV or no TV. It just doesn't figure in this calculation.
You can try to cherry pick power rates, too. But the fact remains that in most locations, electricity is vastly more expensive than gas.
That's not true. Most people in the US with serious heating needs get natural gas, which in my case costs about $1 per therm, which is equivalent to 3.4 cents/kWh. Modern gas furnaces are around 90% efficient, so heat costs 3.8 cents/kWh. Replacing that with 15 cent/kWh resistive electric heat is most certainly not equivalent.
People with more modest heating requirements tend to have heat pumps, which have a multiplication factor similar to the one you mention for cooling. Once again, resistive heating costs several times more than the climate control unit.
I think that's his point. It's $26 per year. I make impulse purchases at that price range without blinking on a weekly basis.
But you get something in return when you make those purchases. Like cases of beer.
why wouldn't they pay that a year for the convenience of an instant-on device?
Because with a proper design, you can have an instant on device that consumes a fraction of 1 watt. Investing a buck or two in the components necessary to implement such a design would save $hundreds over the lifetime of the TV set.
So, unplug and replug your TV every time you want to watch it. I honestly don't care if my TV uses 20 Watts when it isn't turned on or not, that is a rather insignificant part of my electric bill for a major part of my (and most people's) life.
At 15 cents per kWh, that's $26 per year. That's like having to buy a case of beer for your TV every six months.
If it's technically feasible to have the TV *not* consume 20W, I'd prefer to keep the beer money for myself.
He was blah blahing senseless technobabble the same way a NASA bureaucrat would.
So it's better that Souyuz kills its passengers for less cost?
Sure. If they both kill people at comparable rates, you might as well use the cheaper option.
Besides, anyone with any sense already knows that the shuttle is way too expensive to operate as a passenger vehicle because it's designed to be a truck.
Exactly. That's why the shuttle should have been scrapped in the 1980s as soon as real-world experience conclusively proved that combining those two incompatible functions was doomed to failure.
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The Constitution doesn't regulate transactions between private parties. It regulates the powers granted to the Government.
DRM in the US is not a transaction between two private parties. Instead, it is the *government* offering to step in and put legal force behind one party's interference with another's right to use their own property.
The problem is that there are zero general-purpose registers - many instructions require that the operands be in specific registers, which blows the whole idea of general-purpose registers right out of the water. This is compounded by the fact that there are only four registers which you could even call general-purpose with a straight face.
While that was true in 16-bit mode, 32-bit mode made things much more general. Most of the remaining instructions that use dedicated implicit register operands have been "deprecated" for a long time. If you stick to the recommended "RISCish" subset of X86 instructions, 7 of the 8 registers are usually equivalent (the stack pointer is the big exception).
If the files you are editing are *that* big, then a text editor is not the correct tool.
Ok. Let's assume that you've been given a plain text file of that size, and you need to modify something in it. What tool do you suggest?
I can think of the stock answers:
"Load it into a database" - lots of hassle and probably overkill
"Filter it with a custom script" - maybe, if you're a programmer
"sed" - could work, but why bother if vim works? Personally, I can never remember the sed syntax.
"Don't use text files that big" - Assumes facts not in evidence
Any other suggestions?
the best example is that of 'ETOPS' (Extended Twin Engine Operational Performance Standard)
To me, the alternate joke acronym seems to describe the situation more succinctly: "Engines Turn Or Passengers Swim".
Actually, the bash shell in my system has some magical app awareness that lets me do:
I never looked up how it's done, but it comes in handy sometimes.
So the time is 123456789? That's the stupidest time I've ever heard in my life... It sounds like something an idiot would have on his luggage.
Indeed, it would be hard to find a more stupid era than Nov 1973. It was the height of the Watergate scandal, a time of inflation, energy crisis, bad haircuts, ugly suits, and the quality of pop music spiraling downward. Truly a nadir in modern history.
This just in, Charter Cable customers are capping monthly cash payments made to Charter Cable.
Actually, what Charter has recently been capping the most is interest payments on its $2e10 debt:
Cable co Charter preps bankruptcy filing-sources
You'd have to hole-up in your house for weeks, perhaps months, to avoid the HUGE risk of driving on ice.
I take it you've never been up north. Road ice is usually cleared within a day or two of any storm. They have these things called plows and salt trucks. During any given winter, only a handful of days are genuinely dangerous for travel.
With wind speeds more than twice that of the strongest hurricanes, the debris spreads over a very wide area, and does severe damage for dozens of miles around.
I take it you've never been in a tornado zone. These storms travel in a geometric pattern called a line. If you walk perpendicular to said line, you'll be out of the damage zone within a minute or two. Even the most rare, largest tornadoes leave a swath not much more than a mile wide.
At an elevation of 200+ feet, it would require a hell of a tidal wave to damage anything more than the relatively small percentage of beachfront areas.
That's what you get with asteroids: Monster waves hundreds of feet high.
For the time being, I'd avoid this weblink issue altogether and just use archie.
For all the hysteria about the hurricane season on the coasts that kill a dozen people each year, the hundreds that die in the north from freezing cold, snow and ice storms go almost completely unreported,
In both of those cases, the majority of casualties are those who foolishly don't take a few basic precautions in the face of weather warnings. The difference is that in a hurricane zone dozens of counties can have a significant chunk of their real estate wiped off the map in one single event. Most peoples lives in the region are totally disrupted and it takes many years to recover.
Moreover, the winter weather warning is: "stay in your house tonight". No big deal. The hurricane warning is: "Cram your family in the car, drive 200 miles in gridlock and hole up in a hotel for half a week." That sucks.
Witness: Los Angeles.
When the "big one" hits Los Angeles without warning, then you'll really witness something that wasn't a safe place to begin with. It wasn't safe when it was sparsely populated because people built a lot of unreinforced masonry structures. It's actually a little bit safer now with more modern building codes.
Not to mention the tsunami risk they face if a even a tiny asteroid hits anywhere in the Pacific ocean or there's a large undersea landslide or earthquake in the right spot. All of these things potentially dwarf the murder rate you seem to be hinting at.
And in the non-coastal areas of the south have tornadoes to contend with.
That's unfortunately true, but these days with a tornado you usually have enough warning to take cover, and even in the worst case you can walk a hundred yards or so to return to normalcy after the event. Volcanoes, hurricanes, tsunamis and earthquakes can all potentially turn an entire region into a nightmare for weeks, while causing orders of magnitude more damage than any tornado could.
No. There are not enough safe areas on Earth to hold all or even the majority of the population
Sure there are. They're just not generally close enough to the trendy seashores for most people's tastes.
Today, people are actually packed tightest into the relatively small high risk areas because they have the most attractive geological features and climate.
But the mercury from the standard incandescent lights is not concentrated in my living room.
It can be. Just take any cans of tuna you have from your kitchen and put them in your living room.
Just wondering, since the frequencies are still UHF/VHF - why would people be messing with their antennas?
Because they'll be desperately trying to adjust them once they find out that digital signals usually have poorer reception than analog. Also, many who used to get by with rabbit ears will need to install a new external antenna.
The problem is multiplied by the fact that any small glitch in reception causes a black screen, and most annoyingly, dropped audio, which can easily ruin an entire show if it happens at a critical moment. (They really should have allocated a few KHz for a backup *analog* audio channel in the ATSC broadcast standard.)
Do you have any idea how much more will be released if every car on the planet is replaced with a hydrogen-powered car?
Why, yes. But let's not stop there: What if all of the world's energy needs were met by burning hydrogen?
The annual global energy consumption is somewhere around 5e20 J. That would mean burning 3.5e12 kg of H2 to create 3.1e13 kg of water. Worldwide annual precipitation is 5e17 kg of water, which is more than 16000X greater.
In other words, even in the worst case our impact on humidity levels would be lost in the statistical noise. And as others have pointed out, any of this insignificant excess would rain out within a couple of days (in contrast to CO2, which lingers for centuries).
We undoubtedly already cause much larger variations in humidity by building dams and other activities that alter the balance between land and water surface area. Maybe you should worry about that instead of hydrogen cars.
People tend to get antsy and rather irritable when packed in with many other people in a small space; a really overcrowded planet seems to be asking for trouble.
This would only be a problem assuming continued exponential population growth. In that case, the only other remotely habitable real estate in the solar system, the Moon and Mars, would only postpone the problem for a couple of decades while exponential growth overwhelmed their small surface areas, too.
Not to mention that due to deadly radiation, the only way to survive on those bodies would be to hovel in caves. Which sounds to me like putting a lot of people in a small space, so now you'd have entire planets of irritable, pasty skinned, people clamoring for trace amounts of available water.
To me it seems a lot simpler to just stabilize the population levels here on earth.
What resources do you think we need? Resources are made of two things: energy and matter. Energy is currently the most pressing problem, but solutions to long term energy supplies don't generally involve space.
At the end of the day, there are fewer than 100 chemical elements in the universe. Most of those we heavily use are available in huge quantities right here on earth. (In various bulk minerals if not in their traditional ores.) Before anybody makes any big plans, they need to enumerate exactly *which* elements are going to run out here, why they can't be replaced with some other material (including new developments like nanotechnologies), where they can be found elsewhere in the solar system in suitable quantities, and how they will be retrieved.
Could someone explain to me, why Bill Gates would be arguing for H1-B Visas before congress now? I thought he left Microsoft?
Because he's still chairman of the board.
He's also their lovable nerdy Horatio Alger philanthropist mascot, over which which the senators will swoon. They would not react so favorably if forced to listen to a sweaty chair thrower.
Can't they move this thing to the moon and control it remotely, they should have plenty of room for a nuclear power plant of its very own...and if it gets swallowed in a small black hole at least we might have a chance.
I doubt that would help. *If* the moon were to collapse into a black hole (and I'm not saying that's really possible), most of its mass would probably fall in through an accretion disk. In the case of stellar black holes, such disks are the most efficient known way to convert mass into energy. Therefore, the earth would probably be totally scorched by the huge flux of X-rays and other radiation from the disk.
There is also a bit of a rant against Google for ranking Wikipedia above Britannica on most search terms.
Well, I guess that Google doesn't like to read teaser summaries that demand a paid subscription to read "premium content" any more than I do.
If you're looking to hack something you should use your own money to buy one and not mine.
If he has an analog-only TV, he is entitled to a coupon. End of story.
The poor people who didn't act earlier are also entitled to a coupon, but not his coupon. Any problems that the program is having getting coupons distributed are due to government incompetence, not coupon recipients.
These coupons are paid for from the proceeds that the government made selling the old TV bandwidth. They compensate TV owners for the diminished value of their property resulting from the government action, so the coupon fund is not your money to begin with.
Not much difference using those numbers...
Sure, if you make up any numbers you need out of the air in order to prop up your argument.
Just an example: you can't allocate a fixed cost like a furnace with a fixed lifetime (often determined by corrosion of the heat exchanger, which happens under either light or heavy loads) to variable heating costs. Unless you can totally eliminate the furnace from your house, that cost remains constant, regardless of TV or no TV. It just doesn't figure in this calculation.
You can try to cherry pick power rates, too. But the fact remains that in most locations, electricity is vastly more expensive than gas.
a watt here a watt there its all the same
That's not true. Most people in the US with serious heating needs get natural gas, which in my case costs about $1 per therm, which is equivalent to 3.4 cents/kWh. Modern gas furnaces are around 90% efficient, so heat costs 3.8 cents/kWh. Replacing that with 15 cent/kWh resistive electric heat is most certainly not equivalent.
People with more modest heating requirements tend to have heat pumps, which have a multiplication factor similar to the one you mention for cooling. Once again, resistive heating costs several times more than the climate control unit.
I think that's his point. It's $26 per year. I make impulse purchases at that price range without blinking on a weekly basis.
But you get something in return when you make those purchases. Like cases of beer.
why wouldn't they pay that a year for the convenience of an instant-on device?
Because with a proper design, you can have an instant on device that consumes a fraction of 1 watt. Investing a buck or two in the components necessary to implement such a design would save $hundreds over the lifetime of the TV set.
So, unplug and replug your TV every time you want to watch it. I honestly don't care if my TV uses 20 Watts when it isn't turned on or not, that is a rather insignificant part of my electric bill for a major part of my (and most people's) life.
At 15 cents per kWh, that's $26 per year. That's like having to buy a case of beer for your TV every six months.
If it's technically feasible to have the TV *not* consume 20W, I'd prefer to keep the beer money for myself.
Wow, brilliant counterargument.
He was blah blahing senseless technobabble the same way a NASA bureaucrat would.
So it's better that Souyuz kills its passengers for less cost?
Sure. If they both kill people at comparable rates, you might as well use the cheaper option.
Besides, anyone with any sense already knows that the shuttle is way too expensive to operate as a passenger vehicle because it's designed to be a truck.
Exactly. That's why the shuttle should have been scrapped in the 1980s as soon as real-world experience conclusively proved that combining those two incompatible functions was doomed to failure.