Indeed. My dad bought a Logitech Bluetooth keyboard and the specs claim it can last TWO YEARS between charging. It can pair to three different devices and you just switch between them on the keyboard. So awesome!
Now, I do agree that there are problems with the OS. Even with a Bluetooth keyboard paired, Android wants to erroneously pop up the onscreen keyboard for no good reason when you don't need it, and then other times when you don't have the Bluetooth keyboard handy, it's impossible to get Android to pop up the damn onscreen keyboard!
Anyway, I'm sure someone will get the software right eventually...
What a bunch of bunk. Bluetooth audio is fantastic. They've even got lossless Bluetooth audio nowadays (aptX), so there is no quality lost. By moving the audio DAC and sensitive analog circuitry away from the noisy CPU and mass storage, we could potentially achieve even greater Signal to Noise Ratio. The consumer will only have to pay for a high end DAC -once- in his lifetime instead of paying for a mediocre DAC in every phone, tablet, and computer he buys in his life.
Every pair of headphones I buy inevitably ends up breaking a wire internally after so many uses, besides having those wires constantly in the way. Hell yeah I want to move away from the 3.5mm audio jack!
Back in the beginning days of Slashdot, the changing state of the art in TECHNOLOGY was the driving force in our lives, and it was EXCITING to us nerds because we were the ones building our future. But nowadays, the masses have technology out the ass and much of what we were building has already come into fruition.
Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the 2008 financial crash, technology has slowly been declining as the preeminent force in peoples' lives. Instead, overbearing government policies have been usurping that position, using technology today to spy on us, id/track us, and coordinate control over all under the guise of thwarting the next mass shooting, terrorist attack, or just maintaining status quo. Their programs have created a huge "brain drain" that has left technology mostly stagnating today. This is why "News for nerds" is taking a backseat, because there is too much "Stuff that [supposedly] matters" in the political realm.
I predict there will be a re-awakening eventually. It won't happen on a public site like Slashdot. There are too many lawyers, too much politics for anything meaningful to be born out in the public today. Only the huge technology companies like Google can make any meaningful progress forward under today's hostile environment, and they are struggling to do so, in my opinion.
I have some hope for the darknet, although so far nothing particularly wonderful and game changing has come out of there that I know of. And maybe nothing ever will. If the NSA can infiltrate everything, civilization may well be stuck working on political progress before technological progress can come back in vogue.
I think you should be trying to rehabilitate everybody in any prison, but I am biased.
Something tells me that is not a good idea. Do you think a lion or tiger can be rehabilitated from being a predator? Even if "successful," how sure can you be that they aren't going to pull a Siegfried & Roy on us once left to their own devices?
On the flip side, are there people willing to work for low pay to facilitate such rehabilitation of dangerous criminals? I wouldn't want to be in there working with psychopaths and sociopaths that might be thinking out how best to kill me while I'm attempting to rehabilitate them. And I wouldn't wish to impose such a job upon anyone else either, even if they wanted to do it. For me, it is morally wrong to put innocent people in harm's way.
Guess you've never heard that the average person inadvertently commits three arguable felonies everyday. The game is rigged boys. With private jails profiting off of every "guest" admitted, the profit seeking impetus is to pass more and more laws to put more and more people in jail.
Just failing to mow your lawn can land you in jail today. And once they've got you in jail, you can't mow your lawn to fix the problem, minimum wage laws no longer apply to your labor, and the jailers can nickel and dime you to death as they do with these high prices for phone calls.
Be happy you're lucky enough to be on the outside right now.
Indeed. Every Android smart phone and tablet I own from up to 4 or 5 years old has Bluetooth support built-in. All ya gotta do is go buy a wireless bluetooth keyboard and mouse. Boom! Mobile computing is here.
I don't see much reason to hook up a larger screen. It just wastes electricity. A big screen several feet away from your eyes really isn't all that different than having a tablet screen less than a foot away from your eyes, unless you're trying to play a movie for multiple viewers.
I also don't see the big need for lots of multitasking. At less than $50/tablet, I can just buy more tablets and run multiple tasks on different tablets if I really want multitasking.
Unfortunately, good development tools aren't here yet. I still gotta fire up my hot, heavy, power guzzling laptop to write software for my tablet/phone, but I could easily see that situation changing in a few years. Someone WILL make a good tight development toolchain for Android on Android. And then the laptop will end up in the dustbin of obsolete hardware for me. There are already days when I don't even bother turning on my laptop anymore.
I'm eager to move everything to Android because these cheap, low power computers can be run from a solar panel quite easily and cheaply. GREAT for living on the road in my RV. Less power consumption means less need for A/C to cool things back down, another HUGE power savings. Laptop/desktop computing is on its way out!
Perhaps so. On the other hand, Microsoft has written tons of software over the years and perhaps this study might be born out of decades of experience?
From my own ~20 years of experience writing software (never at Microsoft, mind you), I'd tend to agree with them that dynamic typing is a very good way to introduce subtle errors that would have been easily detected in a static typed system. God knows how many man hours of my life were burned hunting down such bugs created by people before me in my software engineering career.
On the other hand, static typing generally induces a slow compilation step that you have to wait through hundreds of times when developing a significant application. Dynamically typed languages are generally interpreted and forgo compilation at the expense of some runtime performance.
For whipping out some throwaway code to get something up in a hurry, nothing beats dynamically typed and interpreted. But when I want to make something seriously strong, high performance, and lasting the test of time, I'll reach for my static typed compiler every time, thank you very much.
As usual, use the best tool for the job at hand, whichever tool that may be.
The government just *LOVES* to buy votes. You know what also negatively impacts government revenues? Tax deductions on electric and natural gas cars. Why do you suppose those were ever created? Any tax deduction negatively impacts tax revenues. That includes deductions for children, mortgages, education loans, and on and on. The government deducts taxes on things they want you to do, like buy solar panels. It's how the government effectively pays people to do things it wants people to do. The government wants people to have kids, get an education, and buy a house. They also want people to get solar panels.
You're operating under the false pretense that gov't has your best interests in mind. They don't. They have THEIR bests interests in mind. Kids are future tax revenue generators. Mortgage and student loan payments force you to seek full employment, generating income and fuel tax revenues.
You got one thing right though, gov't loves to buy votes. If they can create the IMPRESSION that they are trying to help you with a TAX DEDUCTION, but meanwhile undermine you with bureaucracy and hidden PRICE INFLATING, then they can buy your vote without actually helping you at all.
Prior to 2010, solar panels were so expensive that few people would even consider buying. The tax deduction bought votes, but didn't negatively impact tax revenues because nobody used it.
When the prices of solar panels suddenly started dropping like a rock after 2010, the gov't quickly stepped in with import duties on solar panels and permitting regulations to prevent people from adopting them en masse. Meanwhile, they still CLAIM to be helping you with a tax deduction while artificially inflating the price!
A tax deduction only helps if you have significant income tax bills in the first place. By propping up the purchase price (tariffs) and installation costs (permitting) of solar panels, the gov't makes solar electricity less available to people who don't have significant income - people who might be interested in solar. Meanwhile, many high income folks don't care about the cost of their monthly electric bill and won't bother with installing solar panels!
It's quite devious what the gov't has done here. I don't blame you for falling for their Jedi mind trick.
Think about what a portable gasoline generator is used for. I emphasize "portable" because that's the kind you are going to pick up at a big box store, as opposed to a stationary one that would be a special order item that's not stocked on a shelf. A portable generator is very useful because it is portable. It can be put on the back of a truck or on a trailer and brought just about anywhere.
Much the same could be said for solar panels. Only they don't make any noise, don't require engine maintenance, don't require continuous fuel purchases, and don't have any nasty exhaust to breathe while working under them.
My 5KW array generates electricity on cloudy days. It's not as much electricity on such days, but it's still usable energy.
The reason you can't just stop at a big box store and get a truckload of solar panels is the same reason you cannot just stop at a big box store and get a truckload of shingles. Neither are a high volume item.
Uh, say what? I've never had a problem walking into Home Depot and picking up a pile of roofing shingles. They've got TONS of that. No solar panels though.
A bit of searching the internet tells me that a 5kW solar panel system will take up about 500 square feet, weigh about a half ton, and cost about $20,000.
And it would cost much less than half that if the gov't wasn't manipulating things with import duties and regulations.
Do a little more searching and price out that system if you could do the installation yourself (bypassing the permit requirements and fees) and purchase panels at world market prices outside of the US solar panel import tariffs. The gov't is NOT helping.
The gov't has been penalizing the import of cheap foreign solar panels since at least 2011. Trump is just more of the same old BS...
Free electricity from sunshine negatively impacts gov't tax revenues, therefore it is against gov't's interests to allow solar panels to be easy to obtain and install for cheap. We've had this technology for decades, yet you STILL can not walk into a Walmart or Home Depot today and load your pickup truck with solar panels (overpriced puny toy panels don't count). Yet you can pick up a noisy and expensive to operate gasoline powered generator at ANY of those big box stores quite easily...
I jumped through all the paperwork and bureaucracy back in 2010 to have 5KW of solar installed on my house. Without an electric bill to worry about paying every month, I decided to quit my full-time day job and haven't had to pay significant income taxes ever since. Without driving around to work every day, I also don't pay nearly as much road (fuel) taxes either.
If everyone managed to jump off the grid tomorrow, the gov't would be up a creek without a paddle due to all the tax revenues drying up. You can bet they aren't going to let that happen. So the war against cheap solar panels continues...
Of course they've been tracking you before you signed up. They're a branch of the FBI afterall.
What? You didn't really believe the FBI still drives around in black windowless vans with "Flowers by Irene" painted on the sides did you? Its so much more efficient for them to use your friends and electronics to spy on you than all that old tech.
Last time I checked, US manufacturers didn't make any diesel cars, but they made plenty of diesel pickup trucks. Meanwhile, VW was making diesel cars, but no pickup trucks. The EPA's diesel regulations applied to diesel cars, but did not apply to diesel pickup trucks. No favoritism there! Uh huh...
Go ahead, let them pull the wool over your eyes. Keep towing that party line, comrade...
I drive a 2001 VW diesel car. Still runs good as new after 16+ years. Still perfectly legal, because it was manufactured before the EPA arbitrarily changed the emissions goal posts to shut VW's diesel cars out of the USA car market.
How can domestic companies compete with VW cars that get better fuel mileage, longer range, and never break? They can't! THAT is why we're seeing this smackdown on VW.
Go read the book "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand. The USA companies are attempting to succeed, not through superior technology, production and trade, but by trading influence and favors with politicians and their bureaucracies.
The fact that an ENGINEER, the very type of person that has skills necessary to generate innovation and technological progress, has been wasted on developing a "bureaucracy defeat device" rather than an actual beneficial technological advance and then subsequently sent to JAIL should be a wake up call to engineers everywhere.
In Atlas Shrugged, competent engineers, executives, and workers alike slowly started fading away to toil in private rather than continuing to work for the public where bureaucracy can smack them around.
Don't be surprised when bridges and dams start failing in the future. Oh wait, already happening...
Indeed. From my own personal disassembly, inspection and testing of both laptop battery packs and power tool battery packs, I'd say the laptop battery packs are engineered to fail. The Ryobi Li-Ion power tool battery packs I've had show far more advanced circuitry inside of them to maintain perfect charge balance between all 5 cells used in series. I've used my Ryobi packs heavily for years and have never had any completely shutdown -- only degrade in charge run-time slowly over time.
Laptop batteries on the other hand, only have enough circuitry in them to MONITOR the charge balance between the 5 cells in series, with little or nothing to MAINTAIN charge balance between cells. When the individual cells inside become unbalanced too far, the battery pack circuitry shuts down the entire laptop battery pack from use, even if all of the cells inside are still perfectly fine. Yes, that's right, even if the cells are perfectly fine.
For example, one Lenovo laptop I got came with a dinky 5S1P laptop battery that I used very sparingly -- always used my laptop on AC power with the battery only for avoiding reboot when I needed to move the laptop from room to room. I even used the power settings to initiate charging from below 80% rather than constantly maintaining 100% charge state. A year or two later with less than 20 total accumulated charge/discharge cycles -- the laptop would not take a charge at all any more. After taking the battery pack apart, found one cell that was below the 3.0V threshold that apparently trips the pack's "engineered to fail" trigger. After carefully cutting the cells out and charging them individually, ALL cells held a charge perfectly fine and that one that was below 3.0V initially turns out to be the strongest cell of the pack (largest mAh charge capacity).
Now obviously, most failed laptop battery packs are going to have much more heavily used batteries than my example, but MANY packs are still going to have some usable batteries inside given how the crappy laptop battery circuitry works. Capacity will be lower and internal series resistance will be higher for heavily used batteries, but if you collected enough of them to put less work demand on each cell than they were initially used for, you CAN get many more years of use out of them.
As with all Li-Ion batteries (new and old), beware of the potential for catastrophic failure (fire, fire, FIRE). Dentrites can form internally and cause a short, resulting in thermal run away. Misuse can also lead to problems. BEWARE, FIREBREATHING DRAGONS BE HERE.
What a pathetic PCB design... It doesn't appear to match arduino at all, it doesn't even have dual inline pins for plugging it into a breadboard. Are they expecting me to wire wrap a spaggethi wire nest to hook this thing up to my project?
You think that Canada is better than the US because they have more socialism. It is not. The only thing socialism does is push the 1% away because the cost of living (taxes) is so high. There is not as much inequality in a socialist regime because everyone is equally poor. Just ask Venezuelans.
The problem is not lack of social "services," it's lack of capital. What little capital the middle class had, they lost in the 2008 foreclosures. Instead of rolling up our sleeves and building our homes through blood, sweat and tears, we got lazy and took out huge loans we could not pay back, to pretend we were buying homes when actually we were simply renters pissing away our capital.
Hate 'em all you want, but the 1% are masters of accumulating capital and hanging on to said capital. We need to cultivate and grow that skill, not confiscate their capital and redistribute it to people who will simply piss it away.
Save up, buy some land outright (no loans!), drill a well for water, dig a septic for sewage, install solar panels for electricity, grow crops for food. Never sign on for services that require you to continually pay. Once you're free from such "services," you're free from working for the man. Income inequality exists because people are all too willing to trade future permanent gains for temporary gains right now.
From TFA: "Californians now pay roughly 50% more than the rest of the country for power."
And from the TFA: "California is generating so much solar energy that it is resorting to paying other states to take the excess electricity in order to prevent overloading power lines."
Are we too brain dead to put these two statements together and realize that this is not a technological problem, it is a political problem? Why are Californian's PAYING EXTRA for electricity that is not being delivered to them, but instead being sent to Arizona FOR FREE along with a check to add insult to injury?!?!
Lower the damn price being gouged out of local Californians on that electricity and let local people find good uses for it for goodness sake! The corruption and retardation of California just blows my mind... You people in California should be demanding someone be held criminally accountable. Instead, you're shrugging and saying someone needs to invent better storage technology. WTF?
I don't doubt that a spring would be under surface influence, as a spring by definition is water trickling out of the ground by itself. That water can't be very far underground if it can just ooze out by itself. It could have been filtered by travelling only a short distance through soil, unlike a well.
A 160' well should not suffer from much surface influence -- unless it was constructed poorly. I could see coarse grained sand and/or gravel letting water flow freely with poor filtering effect, but such materials would NOT stay free of finer grained materials washing into the crevices over time. Maybe if you lived on a beach or riverfront where the waves have been literally washing away everything but sand for millennia. Maybe if you were pumping out water (and dirt) in massive quantities to wash out the finer materials. Otherwise, no, there IS going to be finer grained materials washing into the sand and gravel, allowing your well water to be filtered and clean.
One possible problem is that surface water can potentially slide down the outside of the well casing, bypassing the filtering effect of the soil.
A good well should have a 2 inch annular ring of dry sodium bentonite clay down the borehole between the well casing and the surrounding soil. This bentonite clay will swell up when moist, creating a water tight seal around the well casing to prevent surface water from washing down the sides. The ground level around the well should be raised and sealed with concrete to encourage water to run away from the borehole rather than puddling up around it.
A commercial well driller wants to the job done, get paid, then go home and drink beer. If skimping on the bentonite seal or flubbing it up happens without the buyer realizing, they get paid and go home just the same. If the buyer complains later, tell 'em the well is fed by a "dirty underground river" and shrug. Maybe the buyer will buy another well in a new location to try to avoid the dirty underground river -- more beer for the driller, right?
5*5*2 = 50 cubic meters. Or in other words, 1765 cubic ft. A well in a decently moist environment will typically yield water within 50 to 100 feet. That's a heck of a lot less dirt to move, you get filtration and underground storage capacity automatically, and you take up far less surface area (letting you grow more crops, etc).
Don't get me wrong, I'm not knocking rainwater. It's fantastic. If you could catch it up higher, you could gravity feed your house and get free water without ANY energy usage. A small rainwater system for the rainy season could be a wonderful addition to a well for the dry season.
Rain water can be indeed excellent. It is essentially distilled water, the purest water there is.
But rain is unpredictable. Rainwater is sometimes contaminated by bird droppings, dust, critters, etc. Maybe you can build enough water storage to get you through an extended drought, but then again, are you sure it will be enough?
I would suggest that a well is more reliable and sustainable. Waste water can be recycled in a never ending circle. The water you wash with and flush down the drain today may well be the clean/filtered water that you pump back out of the ground several months from now. This does not require rain occurring regularly. This does not require massive amounts of water storage containment.
If your neighbors take a cholera shit, the microbial life in the soil will compost it and break it down to harmless base nutrients. I doubt your neighbors are taking a heavy metal enema twice a day, but if they are, no big deal, the soil is an extremely fine grained filter with slow percolation. By the time the water makes its way down into your well, most contamination like that would be left behind in the upper layers of soil.
How deep you drill is up to you. As you go deeper, you have more and more filter material that dirty surface water must pass through before becoming your clean well water. Of course, the trade off is higher energy expense to lift water from deeper wells. Test the water as you drill and decide if it's clean enough or drill further.
Dirty water dumped by industrial neighbors in the next state over? Not likely to matter much at all. How much contamination from your neighboring state do you think is going to get into your well water when it would have to pass through literally MILES of filter material in a mostly horizontal direction? Gravity does not favor horizontal movement of such contaminates. You would have to be pumping an absolutely EPIC amount of water (and dirt) to be able to get anything to move from a neighboring state into your well.
A common misconception about water wells is what the "water table" looks like. "Water table" makes it sound like if you go deep underground, suddenly the soil ends and free flowing water like a river or lake begins, resting on top of a table of impermeable earth. A layer of pure water sandwiched between layers of dirt. That's completely baloney and ridiculous. There is no "table" where one material ends and the other begins.
Think of a wet sponge that's been sitting around for a while. The top is generally dry due to evaporation and as you go downwards, the sponge is more fully saturated with water due to gravity pulling water downwards. If you drill a hole into the earth (the sponge), soil around your borehole will start oozing water into your hole because pressure from the weight of all materials above are squeezing water out like when you squeeze a wet sponge.
Even if some neighbor drills a hole down to the "water table" and dumps contaminated materials straight down their hole, you've still got many feet of spongy filter material between your well and theirs filtering out contaminates. The water is not free flowing between wells. Any water moving between wells must pass through highly compacted soil/sand/etc that exists between the two holes.
The solution is everyone should have their own source of clean water nearby. You may not be lucky enough to have a spring, but there is very likely clean water down under the ground.
The best way to sustainable clean water is to drill your own well. The Earth's soil, when compacted and compressed by gravity through many feet of material layered on top of itself, is one of the finest water filtration mechanisms available. You can literally flush the toilet and convert your waste water back to clean water after passing it through enough layers of earth. Yes, it's that good. Better yet, the Earth never clogs and never needs a filter replacement.
Drilling a well is not necessarily all that difficult or expensive. Even a hand operated Li-Ion cordless drill and an air-lift pump (air compressor) can do the job. It's just a really deep hole in the ground after all. Once you've got your own well, you can tell the bottled water company to take a hike as you won't have any need for their bottles and plastic chemicals leached into your water anymore.
His staff were lying to cover his ass, because to say that he pressured the director of the FBI to lay off a case, and then fired him when he wouldn't—for any reason whatsoever—puts him at risk of being prosecuted for obstruction of justice. Then Donald Trump undid all of their efforts by saying that he did exactly that.
Once again, flawed logic. AND flawed moral values.
If your subordinates are lying their asses off, even if it is supposedly to your benefit, it is wrong. As a good leader, you should man up and set the record straight with the truth. Even if it supposedly might put you at some imaginary risk of being prosecuted in court.
By your flawed logic, Trump should have followed his subordinates lead by continuing or covering for their lie. Trump did the morally right thing to do, and for that I respect him as a leader even more.
Obstruction of justice is a serious offense no matter who does it. The gravity of the crime gets worse, not better, as you rise in the hierarchy. His staff were culpable for lying in his defence. He is wide open to prosecution for his statements.
So Trump wanted Comey to concentrate efforts on more important cases and Comey got fired because Comey decided to concentrate on the worthless Russia distraction? Cry me a river...
Who killed Seth Rich? There is some serious Obstruction of Justice going on, but it ain't the one you're freaking out about.
In these tweets he admitted to actions that were at the least stupid, and possibly criminal, but were also incredibly disloyal to subordinates that went out on a limb to lie to the American people in an attempt to defend him.
Since when is the top man of ANY hierarchical organization required to behave in accordance with his subordinates' supposed wishes?? Trump is the President of the United States. He is the chief executive of everyone in this country.
The fact that people are going "out on a limb to lie to the American people" doesn't seem to bother you, yet when the President sets the record straight with the truth, even at his own expense, you denigrate him? What kind of ass-backwards logic is this??
Frankly, the whole Russia probe seems very pointless to me. As the top diplomat in the country, Trump and his crew SHOULD be talking to the Russians and making deals. Comey wasting time on investigating Trump for talking to the Russians is time not spent investigating the circumstances of Seth Rich's murder. Lock Her up already! Murdering someone is a serious crime. Negotiating deals with a foreign country is generally not a crime. Trump was damn right to fire Comey.
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Indeed. My dad bought a Logitech Bluetooth keyboard and the specs claim it can last TWO YEARS between charging. It can pair to three different devices and you just switch between them on the keyboard. So awesome!
Now, I do agree that there are problems with the OS. Even with a Bluetooth keyboard paired, Android wants to erroneously pop up the onscreen keyboard for no good reason when you don't need it, and then other times when you don't have the Bluetooth keyboard handy, it's impossible to get Android to pop up the damn onscreen keyboard!
Anyway, I'm sure someone will get the software right eventually...
AC, you are misinformed. Look up aptX -- it's lossless Bluetooth audio, largely based on FLAC compression itself.
What a bunch of bunk. Bluetooth audio is fantastic. They've even got lossless Bluetooth audio nowadays (aptX), so there is no quality lost. By moving the audio DAC and sensitive analog circuitry away from the noisy CPU and mass storage, we could potentially achieve even greater Signal to Noise Ratio. The consumer will only have to pay for a high end DAC -once- in his lifetime instead of paying for a mediocre DAC in every phone, tablet, and computer he buys in his life.
Every pair of headphones I buy inevitably ends up breaking a wire internally after so many uses, besides having those wires constantly in the way. Hell yeah I want to move away from the 3.5mm audio jack!
Back in the beginning days of Slashdot, the changing state of the art in TECHNOLOGY was the driving force in our lives, and it was EXCITING to us nerds because we were the ones building our future. But nowadays, the masses have technology out the ass and much of what we were building has already come into fruition.
Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the 2008 financial crash, technology has slowly been declining as the preeminent force in peoples' lives. Instead, overbearing government policies have been usurping that position, using technology today to spy on us, id/track us, and coordinate control over all under the guise of thwarting the next mass shooting, terrorist attack, or just maintaining status quo. Their programs have created a huge "brain drain" that has left technology mostly stagnating today. This is why "News for nerds" is taking a backseat, because there is too much "Stuff that [supposedly] matters" in the political realm.
I predict there will be a re-awakening eventually. It won't happen on a public site like Slashdot. There are too many lawyers, too much politics for anything meaningful to be born out in the public today. Only the huge technology companies like Google can make any meaningful progress forward under today's hostile environment, and they are struggling to do so, in my opinion.
I have some hope for the darknet, although so far nothing particularly wonderful and game changing has come out of there that I know of. And maybe nothing ever will. If the NSA can infiltrate everything, civilization may well be stuck working on political progress before technological progress can come back in vogue.
I think you should be trying to rehabilitate everybody in any prison, but I am biased.
Something tells me that is not a good idea. Do you think a lion or tiger can be rehabilitated from being a predator? Even if "successful," how sure can you be that they aren't going to pull a Siegfried & Roy on us once left to their own devices?
On the flip side, are there people willing to work for low pay to facilitate such rehabilitation of dangerous criminals? I wouldn't want to be in there working with psychopaths and sociopaths that might be thinking out how best to kill me while I'm attempting to rehabilitate them. And I wouldn't wish to impose such a job upon anyone else either, even if they wanted to do it. For me, it is morally wrong to put innocent people in harm's way.
Guess you've never heard that the average person inadvertently commits three arguable felonies everyday. The game is rigged boys. With private jails profiting off of every "guest" admitted, the profit seeking impetus is to pass more and more laws to put more and more people in jail.
Just failing to mow your lawn can land you in jail today. And once they've got you in jail, you can't mow your lawn to fix the problem, minimum wage laws no longer apply to your labor, and the jailers can nickel and dime you to death as they do with these high prices for phone calls.
Be happy you're lucky enough to be on the outside right now.
Indeed. Every Android smart phone and tablet I own from up to 4 or 5 years old has Bluetooth support built-in. All ya gotta do is go buy a wireless bluetooth keyboard and mouse. Boom! Mobile computing is here.
I don't see much reason to hook up a larger screen. It just wastes electricity. A big screen several feet away from your eyes really isn't all that different than having a tablet screen less than a foot away from your eyes, unless you're trying to play a movie for multiple viewers.
I also don't see the big need for lots of multitasking. At less than $50/tablet, I can just buy more tablets and run multiple tasks on different tablets if I really want multitasking.
Unfortunately, good development tools aren't here yet. I still gotta fire up my hot, heavy, power guzzling laptop to write software for my tablet/phone, but I could easily see that situation changing in a few years. Someone WILL make a good tight development toolchain for Android on Android. And then the laptop will end up in the dustbin of obsolete hardware for me. There are already days when I don't even bother turning on my laptop anymore.
I'm eager to move everything to Android because these cheap, low power computers can be run from a solar panel quite easily and cheaply. GREAT for living on the road in my RV. Less power consumption means less need for A/C to cool things back down, another HUGE power savings. Laptop/desktop computing is on its way out!
Perhaps so. On the other hand, Microsoft has written tons of software over the years and perhaps this study might be born out of decades of experience?
From my own ~20 years of experience writing software (never at Microsoft, mind you), I'd tend to agree with them that dynamic typing is a very good way to introduce subtle errors that would have been easily detected in a static typed system. God knows how many man hours of my life were burned hunting down such bugs created by people before me in my software engineering career.
On the other hand, static typing generally induces a slow compilation step that you have to wait through hundreds of times when developing a significant application. Dynamically typed languages are generally interpreted and forgo compilation at the expense of some runtime performance.
For whipping out some throwaway code to get something up in a hurry, nothing beats dynamically typed and interpreted. But when I want to make something seriously strong, high performance, and lasting the test of time, I'll reach for my static typed compiler every time, thank you very much.
As usual, use the best tool for the job at hand, whichever tool that may be.
The government just *LOVES* to buy votes. You know what also negatively impacts government revenues? Tax deductions on electric and natural gas cars. Why do you suppose those were ever created? Any tax deduction negatively impacts tax revenues. That includes deductions for children, mortgages, education loans, and on and on. The government deducts taxes on things they want you to do, like buy solar panels. It's how the government effectively pays people to do things it wants people to do. The government wants people to have kids, get an education, and buy a house. They also want people to get solar panels.
You're operating under the false pretense that gov't has your best interests in mind. They don't. They have THEIR bests interests in mind. Kids are future tax revenue generators. Mortgage and student loan payments force you to seek full employment, generating income and fuel tax revenues.
You got one thing right though, gov't loves to buy votes. If they can create the IMPRESSION that they are trying to help you with a TAX DEDUCTION, but meanwhile undermine you with bureaucracy and hidden PRICE INFLATING, then they can buy your vote without actually helping you at all.
Prior to 2010, solar panels were so expensive that few people would even consider buying. The tax deduction bought votes, but didn't negatively impact tax revenues because nobody used it.
When the prices of solar panels suddenly started dropping like a rock after 2010, the gov't quickly stepped in with import duties on solar panels and permitting regulations to prevent people from adopting them en masse. Meanwhile, they still CLAIM to be helping you with a tax deduction while artificially inflating the price!
A tax deduction only helps if you have significant income tax bills in the first place. By propping up the purchase price (tariffs) and installation costs (permitting) of solar panels, the gov't makes solar electricity less available to people who don't have significant income - people who might be interested in solar. Meanwhile, many high income folks don't care about the cost of their monthly electric bill and won't bother with installing solar panels!
It's quite devious what the gov't has done here. I don't blame you for falling for their Jedi mind trick.
Think about what a portable gasoline generator is used for. I emphasize "portable" because that's the kind you are going to pick up at a big box store, as opposed to a stationary one that would be a special order item that's not stocked on a shelf. A portable generator is very useful because it is portable. It can be put on the back of a truck or on a trailer and brought just about anywhere.
Much the same could be said for solar panels. Only they don't make any noise, don't require engine maintenance, don't require continuous fuel purchases, and don't have any nasty exhaust to breathe while working under them.
My 5KW array generates electricity on cloudy days. It's not as much electricity on such days, but it's still usable energy.
The reason you can't just stop at a big box store and get a truckload of solar panels is the same reason you cannot just stop at a big box store and get a truckload of shingles. Neither are a high volume item.
Uh, say what? I've never had a problem walking into Home Depot and picking up a pile of roofing shingles. They've got TONS of that. No solar panels though.
A bit of searching the internet tells me that a 5kW solar panel system will take up about 500 square feet, weigh about a half ton, and cost about $20,000.
And it would cost much less than half that if the gov't wasn't manipulating things with import duties and regulations.
Do a little more searching and price out that system if you could do the installation yourself (bypassing the permit requirements and fees) and purchase panels at world market prices outside of the US solar panel import tariffs. The gov't is NOT helping.
The gov't has been penalizing the import of cheap foreign solar panels since at least 2011. Trump is just more of the same old BS...
Free electricity from sunshine negatively impacts gov't tax revenues, therefore it is against gov't's interests to allow solar panels to be easy to obtain and install for cheap. We've had this technology for decades, yet you STILL can not walk into a Walmart or Home Depot today and load your pickup truck with solar panels (overpriced puny toy panels don't count). Yet you can pick up a noisy and expensive to operate gasoline powered generator at ANY of those big box stores quite easily...
I jumped through all the paperwork and bureaucracy back in 2010 to have 5KW of solar installed on my house. Without an electric bill to worry about paying every month, I decided to quit my full-time day job and haven't had to pay significant income taxes ever since. Without driving around to work every day, I also don't pay nearly as much road (fuel) taxes either.
If everyone managed to jump off the grid tomorrow, the gov't would be up a creek without a paddle due to all the tax revenues drying up. You can bet they aren't going to let that happen. So the war against cheap solar panels continues...
Indeed. And even with owning land, homes, and cars we can't trust the govt stealing those from us too under civil asset forfeiture law.
Of course they've been tracking you before you signed up. They're a branch of the FBI afterall.
What? You didn't really believe the FBI still drives around in black windowless vans with "Flowers by Irene" painted on the sides did you? Its so much more efficient for them to use your friends and electronics to spy on you than all that old tech.
Last time I checked, US manufacturers didn't make any diesel cars, but they made plenty of diesel pickup trucks. Meanwhile, VW was making diesel cars, but no pickup trucks. The EPA's diesel regulations applied to diesel cars, but did not apply to diesel pickup trucks. No favoritism there! Uh huh...
Go ahead, let them pull the wool over your eyes. Keep towing that party line, comrade...
I drive a 2001 VW diesel car. Still runs good as new after 16+ years. Still perfectly legal, because it was manufactured before the EPA arbitrarily changed the emissions goal posts to shut VW's diesel cars out of the USA car market.
How can domestic companies compete with VW cars that get better fuel mileage, longer range, and never break? They can't! THAT is why we're seeing this smackdown on VW.
Go read the book "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand. The USA companies are attempting to succeed, not through superior technology, production and trade, but by trading influence and favors with politicians and their bureaucracies.
The fact that an ENGINEER, the very type of person that has skills necessary to generate innovation and technological progress, has been wasted on developing a "bureaucracy defeat device" rather than an actual beneficial technological advance and then subsequently sent to JAIL should be a wake up call to engineers everywhere.
In Atlas Shrugged, competent engineers, executives, and workers alike slowly started fading away to toil in private rather than continuing to work for the public where bureaucracy can smack them around.
Don't be surprised when bridges and dams start failing in the future. Oh wait, already happening...
Indeed. From my own personal disassembly, inspection and testing of both laptop battery packs and power tool battery packs, I'd say the laptop battery packs are engineered to fail. The Ryobi Li-Ion power tool battery packs I've had show far more advanced circuitry inside of them to maintain perfect charge balance between all 5 cells used in series. I've used my Ryobi packs heavily for years and have never had any completely shutdown -- only degrade in charge run-time slowly over time.
Laptop batteries on the other hand, only have enough circuitry in them to MONITOR the charge balance between the 5 cells in series, with little or nothing to MAINTAIN charge balance between cells. When the individual cells inside become unbalanced too far, the battery pack circuitry shuts down the entire laptop battery pack from use, even if all of the cells inside are still perfectly fine. Yes, that's right, even if the cells are perfectly fine.
For example, one Lenovo laptop I got came with a dinky 5S1P laptop battery that I used very sparingly -- always used my laptop on AC power with the battery only for avoiding reboot when I needed to move the laptop from room to room. I even used the power settings to initiate charging from below 80% rather than constantly maintaining 100% charge state. A year or two later with less than 20 total accumulated charge/discharge cycles -- the laptop would not take a charge at all any more. After taking the battery pack apart, found one cell that was below the 3.0V threshold that apparently trips the pack's "engineered to fail" trigger. After carefully cutting the cells out and charging them individually, ALL cells held a charge perfectly fine and that one that was below 3.0V initially turns out to be the strongest cell of the pack (largest mAh charge capacity).
Now obviously, most failed laptop battery packs are going to have much more heavily used batteries than my example, but MANY packs are still going to have some usable batteries inside given how the crappy laptop battery circuitry works. Capacity will be lower and internal series resistance will be higher for heavily used batteries, but if you collected enough of them to put less work demand on each cell than they were initially used for, you CAN get many more years of use out of them.
As with all Li-Ion batteries (new and old), beware of the potential for catastrophic failure (fire, fire, FIRE). Dentrites can form internally and cause a short, resulting in thermal run away. Misuse can also lead to problems. BEWARE, FIREBREATHING DRAGONS BE HERE.
What a pathetic PCB design... It doesn't appear to match arduino at all, it doesn't even have dual inline pins for plugging it into a breadboard. Are they expecting me to wire wrap a spaggethi wire nest to hook this thing up to my project?
Clueless, absolutely clueless.
You think that Canada is better than the US because they have more socialism. It is not. The only thing socialism does is push the 1% away because the cost of living (taxes) is so high. There is not as much inequality in a socialist regime because everyone is equally poor. Just ask Venezuelans.
The problem is not lack of social "services," it's lack of capital. What little capital the middle class had, they lost in the 2008 foreclosures. Instead of rolling up our sleeves and building our homes through blood, sweat and tears, we got lazy and took out huge loans we could not pay back, to pretend we were buying homes when actually we were simply renters pissing away our capital.
Hate 'em all you want, but the 1% are masters of accumulating capital and hanging on to said capital. We need to cultivate and grow that skill, not confiscate their capital and redistribute it to people who will simply piss it away.
Save up, buy some land outright (no loans!), drill a well for water, dig a septic for sewage, install solar panels for electricity, grow crops for food. Never sign on for services that require you to continually pay. Once you're free from such "services," you're free from working for the man. Income inequality exists because people are all too willing to trade future permanent gains for temporary gains right now.
From TFA: "Californians now pay roughly 50% more than the rest of the country for power."
And from the TFA: "California is generating so much solar energy that it is resorting to paying other states to take the excess electricity in order to prevent overloading power lines."
Are we too brain dead to put these two statements together and realize that this is not a technological problem, it is a political problem? Why are Californian's PAYING EXTRA for electricity that is not being delivered to them, but instead being sent to Arizona FOR FREE along with a check to add insult to injury?!?!
Lower the damn price being gouged out of local Californians on that electricity and let local people find good uses for it for goodness sake! The corruption and retardation of California just blows my mind... You people in California should be demanding someone be held criminally accountable. Instead, you're shrugging and saying someone needs to invent better storage technology. WTF?
I don't doubt that a spring would be under surface influence, as a spring by definition is water trickling out of the ground by itself. That water can't be very far underground if it can just ooze out by itself. It could have been filtered by travelling only a short distance through soil, unlike a well.
A 160' well should not suffer from much surface influence -- unless it was constructed poorly. I could see coarse grained sand and/or gravel letting water flow freely with poor filtering effect, but such materials would NOT stay free of finer grained materials washing into the crevices over time. Maybe if you lived on a beach or riverfront where the waves have been literally washing away everything but sand for millennia. Maybe if you were pumping out water (and dirt) in massive quantities to wash out the finer materials. Otherwise, no, there IS going to be finer grained materials washing into the sand and gravel, allowing your well water to be filtered and clean.
One possible problem is that surface water can potentially slide down the outside of the well casing, bypassing the filtering effect of the soil.
A good well should have a 2 inch annular ring of dry sodium bentonite clay down the borehole between the well casing and the surrounding soil. This bentonite clay will swell up when moist, creating a water tight seal around the well casing to prevent surface water from washing down the sides. The ground level around the well should be raised and sealed with concrete to encourage water to run away from the borehole rather than puddling up around it.
A commercial well driller wants to the job done, get paid, then go home and drink beer. If skimping on the bentonite seal or flubbing it up happens without the buyer realizing, they get paid and go home just the same. If the buyer complains later, tell 'em the well is fed by a "dirty underground river" and shrug. Maybe the buyer will buy another well in a new location to try to avoid the dirty underground river -- more beer for the driller, right?
Drill your own well and do it right.
5*5*2 = 50 cubic meters. Or in other words, 1765 cubic ft. A well in a decently moist environment will typically yield water within 50 to 100 feet. That's a heck of a lot less dirt to move, you get filtration and underground storage capacity automatically, and you take up far less surface area (letting you grow more crops, etc).
Don't get me wrong, I'm not knocking rainwater. It's fantastic. If you could catch it up higher, you could gravity feed your house and get free water without ANY energy usage. A small rainwater system for the rainy season could be a wonderful addition to a well for the dry season.
Rain water can be indeed excellent. It is essentially distilled water, the purest water there is.
But rain is unpredictable. Rainwater is sometimes contaminated by bird droppings, dust, critters, etc. Maybe you can build enough water storage to get you through an extended drought, but then again, are you sure it will be enough?
I would suggest that a well is more reliable and sustainable. Waste water can be recycled in a never ending circle. The water you wash with and flush down the drain today may well be the clean/filtered water that you pump back out of the ground several months from now. This does not require rain occurring regularly. This does not require massive amounts of water storage containment.
If your neighbors take a cholera shit, the microbial life in the soil will compost it and break it down to harmless base nutrients. I doubt your neighbors are taking a heavy metal enema twice a day, but if they are, no big deal, the soil is an extremely fine grained filter with slow percolation. By the time the water makes its way down into your well, most contamination like that would be left behind in the upper layers of soil.
How deep you drill is up to you. As you go deeper, you have more and more filter material that dirty surface water must pass through before becoming your clean well water. Of course, the trade off is higher energy expense to lift water from deeper wells. Test the water as you drill and decide if it's clean enough or drill further.
Dirty water dumped by industrial neighbors in the next state over? Not likely to matter much at all. How much contamination from your neighboring state do you think is going to get into your well water when it would have to pass through literally MILES of filter material in a mostly horizontal direction? Gravity does not favor horizontal movement of such contaminates. You would have to be pumping an absolutely EPIC amount of water (and dirt) to be able to get anything to move from a neighboring state into your well.
A common misconception about water wells is what the "water table" looks like. "Water table" makes it sound like if you go deep underground, suddenly the soil ends and free flowing water like a river or lake begins, resting on top of a table of impermeable earth. A layer of pure water sandwiched between layers of dirt. That's completely baloney and ridiculous. There is no "table" where one material ends and the other begins.
Think of a wet sponge that's been sitting around for a while. The top is generally dry due to evaporation and as you go downwards, the sponge is more fully saturated with water due to gravity pulling water downwards. If you drill a hole into the earth (the sponge), soil around your borehole will start oozing water into your hole because pressure from the weight of all materials above are squeezing water out like when you squeeze a wet sponge.
Even if some neighbor drills a hole down to the "water table" and dumps contaminated materials straight down their hole, you've still got many feet of spongy filter material between your well and theirs filtering out contaminates. The water is not free flowing between wells. Any water moving between wells must pass through highly compacted soil/sand/etc that exists between the two holes.
The solution is everyone should have their own source of clean water nearby. You may not be lucky enough to have a spring, but there is very likely clean water down under the ground.
The best way to sustainable clean water is to drill your own well. The Earth's soil, when compacted and compressed by gravity through many feet of material layered on top of itself, is one of the finest water filtration mechanisms available. You can literally flush the toilet and convert your waste water back to clean water after passing it through enough layers of earth. Yes, it's that good. Better yet, the Earth never clogs and never needs a filter replacement.
Drilling a well is not necessarily all that difficult or expensive. Even a hand operated Li-Ion cordless drill and an air-lift pump (air compressor) can do the job. It's just a really deep hole in the ground after all. Once you've got your own well, you can tell the bottled water company to take a hike as you won't have any need for their bottles and plastic chemicals leached into your water anymore.
His staff were lying to cover his ass, because to say that he pressured the director of the FBI to lay off a case, and then fired him when he wouldn't—for any reason whatsoever—puts him at risk of being prosecuted for obstruction of justice. Then Donald Trump undid all of their efforts by saying that he did exactly that.
Once again, flawed logic. AND flawed moral values.
If your subordinates are lying their asses off, even if it is supposedly to your benefit, it is wrong. As a good leader, you should man up and set the record straight with the truth. Even if it supposedly might put you at some imaginary risk of being prosecuted in court.
By your flawed logic, Trump should have followed his subordinates lead by continuing or covering for their lie. Trump did the morally right thing to do, and for that I respect him as a leader even more.
Obstruction of justice is a serious offense no matter who does it. The gravity of the crime gets worse, not better, as you rise in the hierarchy. His staff were culpable for lying in his defence. He is wide open to prosecution for his statements.
So Trump wanted Comey to concentrate efforts on more important cases and Comey got fired because Comey decided to concentrate on the worthless Russia distraction? Cry me a river...
Who killed Seth Rich? There is some serious Obstruction of Justice going on, but it ain't the one you're freaking out about.
In these tweets he admitted to actions that were at the least stupid, and possibly criminal, but were also incredibly disloyal to subordinates that went out on a limb to lie to the American people in an attempt to defend him.
Since when is the top man of ANY hierarchical organization required to behave in accordance with his subordinates' supposed wishes?? Trump is the President of the United States. He is the chief executive of everyone in this country.
The fact that people are going "out on a limb to lie to the American people" doesn't seem to bother you, yet when the President sets the record straight with the truth, even at his own expense, you denigrate him? What kind of ass-backwards logic is this??
Frankly, the whole Russia probe seems very pointless to me. As the top diplomat in the country, Trump and his crew SHOULD be talking to the Russians and making deals. Comey wasting time on investigating Trump for talking to the Russians is time not spent investigating the circumstances of Seth Rich's murder. Lock Her up already! Murdering someone is a serious crime. Negotiating deals with a foreign country is generally not a crime. Trump was damn right to fire Comey.