I don't know of a single business that doesn't generate reports on things like sales projections, client feedback surveys, or QoS metrics. Any of those require a solid understanding of statistics, and the projections can often be solved most readily through calculus. Failing to include such non-middle school niceties as a confidence interval can result in utter business disaster.
And may the great script interpreter in the sky that you apparently worship have mercy on your client/employer if you use a built-in function from the wrong statistical group (bayesian vs. frequentist) because you don't really understand what it does.
Business does want solutions to their problems, which are usually more complex than getting a good client-server connection.
The sad part is that if Foleo hadn't been tethered to a smartphone it would have been the EEE. $500, 5hr battery life, Linux-based OS, 10" LCD, Blue Tooth, WiFi, and a flash-drive for storage.
Switch to the much cheaper commodity 7" LCD screen and you're now in the same price range as the EEE but with better brand recognition and BlueTooth-internet support. If they made dev gear (and maybe cash) available to Mozilla, they'd have Firefox and Docs To Go is fairly well known to the ultra-mobile client base.
True enough. I suppose the question is if its easier to maintain a high pressure over low temperature. Various manufacturing processes can provide a "shrink wrap" that provides pretty high compressive forces, at least for small cross sections, and mechanical systems, like a kevlar sleeve can probably get pretty tight.
Of course, it'll probably turn out that this needs 900 TeraPascals of force, or some other Jovian level of pressure to achieve.
IANAL and know nothing about the details of the case. And from the sounds of it, neither do you.
Before you start accusing people of things, why don't you contact them and find out if they "got a personal payout" or if they covered their trial expenses? Even if FSF handled the litigation, they still probably had quite a bit of out of pocket expense involved in showing up in court and meeting with the lawyers. That all happens during 8-5 hours and if nothing else ate up a lot of vacation time.
On a different tact, maybe they got a personal payout and now plan on working on Busybox full time until the cash is gone. Or they may donate it to the FSF, Make a Wish foundation, Child's Play or some other charity.
Or they plan on buying $240 worth of pudding, I don't know and neither do you. So maybe find out before you cast aspersions on people.
Yup, caught that in post #22492036 when I did a second set of math.
The really irritating thing to me is that the presentation has issued an update saying, and I quote: Designer Clay Moulton acknowledges that the current state of the art isn't sufficient to actually build the lamp. The news release should have said: "based on future developments in LED technology."
I emailed the organizers and the only responses were along the line of "no, it's not possible now but it'll work later." They don't understand that no, it will never work later. Actually it's more likely that they do understand it won't work but don't want to tarnish their show by actually rescinding an award.
Actually, as I posted previously, I made a math error and shifted the decimal place to the left. You'd need to make 200 reps to get the 37,000 ft-lbs of energy required for high efficiency blue LEDs to give you 4 hours of ~700 lumens.
Now imagine doing that work without the comfort and ergonomics of the lat machine, since there isn't one integrated into the lamp.
A crappy 40W bulb produces 450 lumens (that's lumens, not lumen-seconds aka talbots). Over 4 hours that's 1800 lumen-hours. A lab-efficiency, single color LED spits out 200 lumens/watt. That comes out to 9 watt-hours, however you slice it. That's 23,897 ft-lbs. With a 100% efficient generator you'd need to lift 5,974lbs 4ft, or 50lbs 478ft.
*I did make a math error. 14watt hours is 37,000 ft-lbs not 3,700 ft-lbs. See what I get for doing the math in my head.
The guy who invented it is not an engineer, he's an architect.
And yes, I am an engineer. Admittedly I'm a civil, not a mechanical or electrical engineer, but this is basic power calculations that you do in high school Physics I.
There's 50lbs of weight that fall about 4ft, if I'm reading the diagrams right. That's 200 ft-lbs. Which comes out to... hmm... 0.075 watt-hours. Over 4 hours that means 0.019 watts continuous power. From memory really good blue LEDs are around 200 lumens/watt so.....3.8 lumens. A candle is...13 lumens. So it's about a third of a candle. An ideal light source is ~680 lumens/watt would be 13 lumens, or a candle.
To get ~700 lumen light at 200 lumen/watt would require 3.5 watts of power, over 4 hours is 14 watt-hours or 3700 ft-lbs. Over 4ft of fall that amounts to 925 lbs. My goodness, that is a group effort.
I saw one at CompUSA back in '98-99 and played with the skiing game. It was able to steer correctly about 75% of the time; not bad since I just walked up and plopped my finger on the little sensor.
Go to http:\\other90.com for an unobtrusive "neural" interface. It's really a biometric sensor that's able to get some very crude up/down/left/right input. Of course, their website is straight out of 1998 and it doesn't look like they have made any significant effort to rewrite their software for 2k, let alone XP.
Given that it never seemed to make any inroads at any time, I sometimes wonder if the system would only work for a minority of people. It seems like even the crude data input it had would be excellent to integrate into artificial limbs.
(For those who haven't seen them, the Tome of Magic classes tended to be weak while the Bo9S classes are quite potent, at least compared to their "core rules" 3.5 equivalents)
Hmm, I don't quite agree on the ToM. It's a very unbalanced book I'll agree with that. The mechanics are very uneven in scope and ability.
IMO you have: Binder: lots of potential but requires as much, if not more, planning than a wizard to get the most out of the class. A wizard can leave 1/3 his slots open and still be fine. A binder with an open vestige is very sub par and without spending feats you are stuck with those vestiges for 24 hours. I like the binder but everyone else I know would rather play a warlock or a dragon shaman.
Shadowcaster: interesting idea but very sketchy on effectiveness. Rarely more effective than a caster, and often less effective than a warlock.
True namer: so much potential, so little actualization. This could have gone so well but it just fell apart. Heck, they couldn't even come up with a catchy phrase for why the invocations can't be used repeatedly. How hard is "destructive resonance"?
I stand by my statement "ToM classes tend to be weaker."
The Tome of Battle is just fantastic, though. All of the base classes are versatile and powerful.... Take whatever maneuvers you want, you'll still be good at something. I'm very happy with ToB. It's not balanced against the core martial classes, so I've house ruled them to be epic classes to avoid upsetting my long running campaign but they are much better balanced to the casters that I'd have no trouble tossing out the PHB warrior types in favor of the Martial Adepts.
For those curious, the Tome of Magic and the Tome of Battle (aka Book of Nine Swords aka Bo9S) and the Warlock from Complete Arcane, and the Dragon Shaman from PHBII were draft 4e rules that were modified for 3.5ed.
If you can get past the balance issues with those books and the rest of 3.5ed, you can see the basic mechanics and approach that 4e is moving towards. (For those who haven't seen them, the Tome of Magic classes tended to be weak while the Bo9S classes are quite potent, at least compared to their "core rules" 3.5 equivalents)
I'll say that many players love the heck out of the 4e-type classes; they are generally easier to play and tend to always have something useful to do. The warrior classes have some high-damage attacks and special moves that make up for their innate lack of spells. The "magic users" have a smaller list of mostly unlimited use powers that tend to be useful in many circumstances.
The downside is that the magic-using classes are constrained in many ways compared to the traditional wizard or cleric, and that drives some people nuts. The arguement tends to boil down to "warlocks/binders/shadowcasters have less than a dozen powers available compared to the hundreds of spells a caster can prepare." On the other hand, I've never seen someone playing a warlock freeze with indecision the way a mage/cleric player might when staring at a couple dozen prepared spells.
DMs are much more divided but they are also concerned with making those classes work with 3.x games, so there are other factors influencing their opinions. I don't like the ToM and Bo9S in comparison to 3.x but as sample mechanics I'm pleased with them, just so you know where I stand.
Buying products isn't abuse, it's how Walmart manages the relationship.
Year 1: BobCo normally sells 10,000 units/year of BobStuff. Walmart contracts for 2,000 units as a test. BobCo throws a party then ramps up staffing to cover the 20% increase.
Year 2: Walmart decides BobStuff is doing well and orders 10,000 units. BobCo does a major plant upgrade to meet the demand.
Year 3: Walmart asks for some additional "economy of scale" cost reduction in return for ordering 15,000 units but Walmart will only buy 15,000 units. BobCo takes a small per-unit profit hit and needs another plant upgrade but the overall revenue stream is great.
Year 4: Walmart pulls out the red hot needles and starts jabbing them under BobCo's finger nails. Walmart will buy BobStuff but only for a price that makes BobCo 1% profit after paying for the plant expansions. If BobCo does NOT take the contract then the debt from the plant expansions will bankrupt the company in under a year.
Year 5: Wallmart tells BobCo they need to spend anther $50,000 on an RFID tagging/implemenation system or we'll charge you $2 for every pallet of BobStuff you send us.
Walmart is an economic bully. Whatever Sam Walton may have intended the company to be, his kids have turned it into a world devouring behemoth. Their management plan is designed to minimize the benefit-earning staff and their sales policy is designed to drive competitors out of business. Their prices, beyond the first year or two of a store opening when they are in loss-leader mode, are only somewhat competitive on name brand items. Where the majority of consumer price savings comes in is on unknown brands (I.e. BobCo) that Walmart essentially owns.
The only way to have a successful contract with Walmart is to be successful before you sign a contract with Walmart.
Walmart wants the RFID b/c it will lower their operational costs. RFID has one advantage over barcodes; they can be read and counted at a distance and ignore dirt. If a sticker gets dirty, the barcode is unreadable, while if the pallet invoice is facing the wall it's inaccessible. RFID will still work.
But this has a non-trivial adoption cost to the manufacturers. Walmart isn't incentivising this; no offers of cost sharing. Just a flat demand. It's not illegal AFAIK but it is abusive.
I dunno.... a switch? Let's be honest, all it takes is a tiny little slide switch to act as an interrupt for the induction coil. Now you have total physical security with a mechanism grandma can handle. And since the distances involved mean you don't have a PAN, you won't need your devices to be communicating while in your pocket.
You forget that this is an induction-based tech, which the article points out is already used to charge sealed devices like electric toothbrushes. Nothing prevents the transfer pad from also being a charger. So you'd put your iPod on the pad, transfer your files around and leave it to charge.
Basically CNN is a Fox clone carefully marketed toward people who know they distrust Fox. It differs from Fox in its preference for subtle sins of omission rather than overt sins of commission, but they manage to frame the issues in the same way, and the average Fox viewer and the average CNN viewer are probably about as equally ill-informed even if their political alignments may differ.
While I agree with your observation, Fox is the clone, rather anti-clone, designed to appeal to those that dislike CNN's political alignment. I don't have a problem with that per se, but it would have been nice had Fox actually made some effort to compete on a journalistic level rather than simply being a feedback loop for a given stance. I think CNN does sometimes give a pass to certain politicians, which would have made a serious, right-wing news organization worthwhile.
Now it's just a hype amplifier with CNN and Fox acting to polarize the fringes more and more leaving the centrists disenfranchised. I think that's Stewart's appeal; he takes shots at both sides with equal glee.
Nope. The company (which I worked at) was acquired and then the division was killed off with no warning due to executive level stupidity. The parent corp maintains the domain because they really have no idea what they do and don't own. Obvious, since when they killed the division it had around 100,000 customers and was profitable. I know they had to pay a fortune in penalties from the dozens of contracts that were broken with large groups.
It's also screwed one of my domains. It was a birthday present from a friend, who worked at the same company, and his account was locked just the same. He used a fake name so it's become something of a legacy. I keep paying by credit card but it's a total nightmare to get the ownership info updated.
I know your pain. The email address on my account is fubared because the company it was attached to went out of business with no warning. It's not quite a classic catch-22. I can't change the email address without having access to the email address, but the mail server no longer exists so no one has access to the email address so no one can change it.
It's probably your router. I've got a cheap access point that every so often stops transmitting any data over the WAN port until I do a hard power cycle. Internal data transfers work just fine. I figure it's either a a malformed packet kills the software for the external port or a buffer that gets corrupted.
The problem was originally pretty sporadic (like every couple of months) but the ocurrence rate spiked when my TiVO went on the network and increased the overall load.
I guess the question is if there are any times that power generation within a hybrid exceeds the recharge rate of Ni or Li batteries. If so, it might be worth using the SciB as a "cache" to absorb the momentary power spikes. Of course, then you have to compare the SciB against capacitors.
I'm not so sure about least environmentally damaging, but let's address the space issue: Gigawatt reactors are fairly typical and take up about 100 acres. You would need 17,000 acres of windfarm to match that, and it would only match it when the wind is blowing. So if we assume we need 3 locations to get 1GW of base load, suddenly we need 51,000 acres of wind farm to produce the base load of a 100 acre reactor.
Again I say WTF.
51,000 acres sounds like a lot until you realize that for most wind farms the land is dual use: ranching, agricultural, secured buffer zones around landfills, water treatment, reservoirs, etc. So in most cases it is simply a matter of retasking a relatively small subset of a property. If an area is in the wind zone, it's pretty much a no-brainer to install wind turbines on lands that can be dual-purposed.
And I'll point out that the power grid in the US ties multiple states together. No, you're not going to get wind-generated power from the Dakotas down to Florida but wind turbines in New Mexico could add to the total grid capacity of Louisiana and Mississipi.
But wind is pointless for me; I live in one of those wind-dead zones. Our hydro's fully tapped and there's a nuclear reactor about an hour and a half from here, and a coal plant about 20 minutes. Needless to say, I'd rather have the coal and nuke plants reversed.
Geothermal has a lot of energy potential, the trick is finding it. There's been some recent breakthroughs in finding geothermal vents by checking the helium2/helium3 ratios in groundwater that may make it fiscally viable in a wide swath across the country. I prefer closed-loop geothermal since it doesn't have as many issues with minerals, but it doesn't generate as much power for the effort.
Ideal? Depends. Is it a perfectly scaling source of wind power? Nope. But that doesn't exist, as yet.
It is, if the article is to be believed, the highest efficiency wind->electricity generator for low power demands. That sounds good. It is made of simple components, most of which are almost cast-offs from the modern nations. You could build these using old walkman headsets (magnets and metal coils) and plastic garbage bags. So it's cheap and simple, both good. It coincides with relatively inexpensive and low power LED lights and radios. Fortuitious timing. In combination with those LED lights does it reduce the risks of harm to individuals(via fire from kerosene lights) as well as benefit the world as a whole by limiting the use of kerosene? Sounds good.
Ideal in the "universally applicable" sense? No, it's not. Ideal in the "fits an assortment of criteria that results in the general betterment of individuals and the world as a whole" sense? Yep.
...than cutting a hole in the skull. Really a case of "because we can."
My wife has MS and the episodes of MS are more likely to happen when you get too hot. There are various devices to cool the body and the brain/spinal column in particular, that the MS Society has recommended.
The simplest is to take a break when you get hot, sit in the shade, and drink something cold to lower core body temperature.
Next is a "neck tie/ascot" filled with watergel, that stuff they put in the bottom of flowers to slowly release water. The water evaporates, providing additional cooling. Placed around the neck it has a big impact on the blood flow into the brain.
Sharper Image has a more high tech version that looks vaguely like it's from Dune. It is a collar, or perhaps a torc, that sits across the back of your neck and includes small fans. The combination of metallic plates, the water reservoir, and a blower you get a much larger temperature drop.
Then you get into the serious cooling vests that range from being filled with watergel for a full-torso temperature reduction to icepack reservoirs that provide extensive cooling.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know of a single business that doesn't generate reports on things like sales projections, client feedback surveys, or QoS metrics. Any of those require a solid understanding of statistics, and the projections can often be solved most readily through calculus. Failing to include such non-middle school niceties as a confidence interval can result in utter business disaster.
And may the great script interpreter in the sky that you apparently worship have mercy on your client/employer if you use a built-in function from the wrong statistical group (bayesian vs. frequentist) because you don't really understand what it does.
Business does want solutions to their problems, which are usually more complex than getting a good client-server connection.
The sad part is that if Foleo hadn't been tethered to a smartphone it would have been the EEE. $500, 5hr battery life, Linux-based OS, 10" LCD, Blue Tooth, WiFi, and a flash-drive for storage.
Switch to the much cheaper commodity 7" LCD screen and you're now in the same price range as the EEE but with better brand recognition and BlueTooth-internet support. If they made dev gear (and maybe cash) available to Mozilla, they'd have Firefox and Docs To Go is fairly well known to the ultra-mobile client base.
True enough. I suppose the question is if its easier to maintain a high pressure over low temperature. Various manufacturing processes can provide a "shrink wrap" that provides pretty high compressive forces, at least for small cross sections, and mechanical systems, like a kevlar sleeve can probably get pretty tight.
Of course, it'll probably turn out that this needs 900 TeraPascals of force, or some other Jovian level of pressure to achieve.
IANAL and know nothing about the details of the case. And from the sounds of it, neither do you.
Before you start accusing people of things, why don't you contact them and find out if they "got a personal payout" or if they covered their trial expenses? Even if FSF handled the litigation, they still probably had quite a bit of out of pocket expense involved in showing up in court and meeting with the lawyers. That all happens during 8-5 hours and if nothing else ate up a lot of vacation time.
On a different tact, maybe they got a personal payout and now plan on working on Busybox full time until the cash is gone. Or they may donate it to the FSF, Make a Wish foundation, Child's Play or some other charity.
Or they plan on buying $240 worth of pudding, I don't know and neither do you. So maybe find out before you cast aspersions on people.
The really irritating thing to me is that the presentation has issued an update saying, and I quote: Designer Clay Moulton acknowledges that the current state of the art isn't sufficient to actually build the lamp. The news release should have said: "based on future developments in LED technology."
I emailed the organizers and the only responses were along the line of "no, it's not possible now but it'll work later." They don't understand that no, it will never work later. Actually it's more likely that they do understand it won't work but don't want to tarnish their show by actually rescinding an award.
Actually, as I posted previously, I made a math error and shifted the decimal place to the left. You'd need to make 200 reps to get the 37,000 ft-lbs of energy required for high efficiency blue LEDs to give you 4 hours of ~700 lumens.
Now imagine doing that work without the comfort and ergonomics of the lat machine, since there isn't one integrated into the lamp.
Okay, let's try it your way.
A crappy 40W bulb produces 450 lumens (that's lumens, not lumen-seconds aka talbots). Over 4 hours that's 1800 lumen-hours. A lab-efficiency, single color LED spits out 200 lumens/watt. That comes out to 9 watt-hours, however you slice it. That's 23,897 ft-lbs. With a 100% efficient generator you'd need to lift 5,974lbs 4ft, or 50lbs 478ft.
*I did make a math error. 14watt hours is 37,000 ft-lbs not 3,700 ft-lbs. See what I get for doing the math in my head.
The guy who invented it is not an engineer, he's an architect.
And yes, I am an engineer. Admittedly I'm a civil, not a mechanical or electrical engineer, but this is basic power calculations that you do in high school Physics I.
You sir, are correct.
.....3.8 lumens. A candle is ...13 lumens. So it's about a third of a candle. An ideal light source is ~680 lumens/watt would be 13 lumens, or a candle.
There's 50lbs of weight that fall about 4ft, if I'm reading the diagrams right. That's 200 ft-lbs. Which comes out to... hmm... 0.075 watt-hours. Over 4 hours that means 0.019 watts continuous power. From memory really good blue LEDs are around 200 lumens/watt so
To get ~700 lumen light at 200 lumen/watt would require 3.5 watts of power, over 4 hours is 14 watt-hours or 3700 ft-lbs. Over 4ft of fall that amounts to 925 lbs. My goodness, that is a group effort.
I saw one at CompUSA back in '98-99 and played with the skiing game. It was able to steer correctly about 75% of the time; not bad since I just walked up and plopped my finger on the little sensor.
Go to http:\\other90.com for an unobtrusive "neural" interface. It's really a biometric sensor that's able to get some very crude up/down/left/right input. Of course, their website is straight out of 1998 and it doesn't look like they have made any significant effort to rewrite their software for 2k, let alone XP.
Given that it never seemed to make any inroads at any time, I sometimes wonder if the system would only work for a minority of people. It seems like even the crude data input it had would be excellent to integrate into artificial limbs.
Hmm, I don't quite agree on the ToM. It's a very unbalanced book I'll agree with that. The mechanics are very uneven in scope and ability.
IMO you have:
Binder: lots of potential but requires as much, if not more, planning than a wizard to get the most out of the class. A wizard can leave 1/3 his slots open and still be fine. A binder with an open vestige is very sub par and without spending feats you are stuck with those vestiges for 24 hours. I like the binder but everyone else I know would rather play a warlock or a dragon shaman.
Shadowcaster: interesting idea but very sketchy on effectiveness. Rarely more effective than a caster, and often less effective than a warlock.
True namer: so much potential, so little actualization. This could have gone so well but it just fell apart. Heck, they couldn't even come up with a catchy phrase for why the invocations can't be used repeatedly. How hard is "destructive resonance"?
I stand by my statement "ToM classes tend to be weaker." The Tome of Battle is just fantastic, though. All of the base classes are versatile and powerful.... Take whatever maneuvers you want, you'll still be good at something. I'm very happy with ToB. It's not balanced against the core martial classes, so I've house ruled them to be epic classes to avoid upsetting my long running campaign but they are much better balanced to the casters that I'd have no trouble tossing out the PHB warrior types in favor of the Martial Adepts.
For those curious, the Tome of Magic and the Tome of Battle (aka Book of Nine Swords aka Bo9S) and the Warlock from Complete Arcane, and the Dragon Shaman from PHBII were draft 4e rules that were modified for 3.5ed.
If you can get past the balance issues with those books and the rest of 3.5ed, you can see the basic mechanics and approach that 4e is moving towards. (For those who haven't seen them, the Tome of Magic classes tended to be weak while the Bo9S classes are quite potent, at least compared to their "core rules" 3.5 equivalents)
I'll say that many players love the heck out of the 4e-type classes; they are generally easier to play and tend to always have something useful to do. The warrior classes have some high-damage attacks and special moves that make up for their innate lack of spells. The "magic users" have a smaller list of mostly unlimited use powers that tend to be useful in many circumstances.
The downside is that the magic-using classes are constrained in many ways compared to the traditional wizard or cleric, and that drives some people nuts. The arguement tends to boil down to "warlocks/binders/shadowcasters have less than a dozen powers available compared to the hundreds of spells a caster can prepare." On the other hand, I've never seen someone playing a warlock freeze with indecision the way a mage/cleric player might when staring at a couple dozen prepared spells.
DMs are much more divided but they are also concerned with making those classes work with 3.x games, so there are other factors influencing their opinions. I don't like the ToM and Bo9S in comparison to 3.x but as sample mechanics I'm pleased with them, just so you know where I stand.
Buying products isn't abuse, it's how Walmart manages the relationship.
Year 1: BobCo normally sells 10,000 units/year of BobStuff. Walmart contracts for 2,000 units as a test. BobCo throws a party then ramps up staffing to cover the 20% increase.
Year 2: Walmart decides BobStuff is doing well and orders 10,000 units. BobCo does a major plant upgrade to meet the demand.
Year 3: Walmart asks for some additional "economy of scale" cost reduction in return for ordering 15,000 units but Walmart will only buy 15,000 units. BobCo takes a small per-unit profit hit and needs another plant upgrade but the overall revenue stream is great.
Year 4: Walmart pulls out the red hot needles and starts jabbing them under BobCo's finger nails. Walmart will buy BobStuff but only for a price that makes BobCo 1% profit after paying for the plant expansions. If BobCo does NOT take the contract then the debt from the plant expansions will bankrupt the company in under a year.
Year 5: Wallmart tells BobCo they need to spend anther $50,000 on an RFID tagging/implemenation system or we'll charge you $2 for every pallet of BobStuff you send us.
Walmart is an economic bully. Whatever Sam Walton may have intended the company to be, his kids have turned it into a world devouring behemoth. Their management plan is designed to minimize the benefit-earning staff and their sales policy is designed to drive competitors out of business. Their prices, beyond the first year or two of a store opening when they are in loss-leader mode, are only somewhat competitive on name brand items. Where the majority of consumer price savings comes in is on unknown brands (I.e. BobCo) that Walmart essentially owns.
The only way to have a successful contract with Walmart is to be successful before you sign a contract with Walmart.
Walmart wants the RFID b/c it will lower their operational costs. RFID has one advantage over barcodes; they can be read and counted at a distance and ignore dirt. If a sticker gets dirty, the barcode is unreadable, while if the pallet invoice is facing the wall it's inaccessible. RFID will still work.
But this has a non-trivial adoption cost to the manufacturers. Walmart isn't incentivising this; no offers of cost sharing. Just a flat demand. It's not illegal AFAIK but it is abusive.
I dunno.... a switch? Let's be honest, all it takes is a tiny little slide switch to act as an interrupt for the induction coil. Now you have total physical security with a mechanism grandma can handle. And since the distances involved mean you don't have a PAN, you won't need your devices to be communicating while in your pocket.
You forget that this is an induction-based tech, which the article points out is already used to charge sealed devices like electric toothbrushes. Nothing prevents the transfer pad from also being a charger. So you'd put your iPod on the pad, transfer your files around and leave it to charge.
How about.... Firewire? IIRC, Apple gets something like a dime for every firewire device and a quarter for every firewire host controller.
Basically CNN is a Fox clone carefully marketed toward people who know they distrust Fox. It differs from Fox in its preference for subtle sins of omission rather than overt sins of commission, but they manage to frame the issues in the same way, and the average Fox viewer and the average CNN viewer are probably about as equally ill-informed even if their political alignments may differ.
While I agree with your observation, Fox is the clone, rather anti-clone, designed to appeal to those that dislike CNN's political alignment. I don't have a problem with that per se, but it would have been nice had Fox actually made some effort to compete on a journalistic level rather than simply being a feedback loop for a given stance. I think CNN does sometimes give a pass to certain politicians, which would have made a serious, right-wing news organization worthwhile.
Now it's just a hype amplifier with CNN and Fox acting to polarize the fringes more and more leaving the centrists disenfranchised. I think that's Stewart's appeal; he takes shots at both sides with equal glee.
Nope. The company (which I worked at) was acquired and then the division was killed off with no warning due to executive level stupidity. The parent corp maintains the domain because they really have no idea what they do and don't own. Obvious, since when they killed the division it had around 100,000 customers and was profitable. I know they had to pay a fortune in penalties from the dozens of contracts that were broken with large groups.
It's also screwed one of my domains. It was a birthday present from a friend, who worked at the same company, and his account was locked just the same. He used a fake name so it's become something of a legacy. I keep paying by credit card but it's a total nightmare to get the ownership info updated.
I know your pain. The email address on my account is fubared because the company it was attached to went out of business with no warning. It's not quite a classic catch-22. I can't change the email address without having access to the email address, but the mail server no longer exists so no one has access to the email address so no one can change it.
Very irritating.
It's probably your router. I've got a cheap access point that every so often stops transmitting any data over the WAN port until I do a hard power cycle. Internal data transfers work just fine. I figure it's either a a malformed packet kills the software for the external port or a buffer that gets corrupted.
The problem was originally pretty sporadic (like every couple of months) but the ocurrence rate spiked when my TiVO went on the network and increased the overall load.
I guess the question is if there are any times that power generation within a hybrid exceeds the recharge rate of Ni or Li batteries. If so, it might be worth using the SciB as a "cache" to absorb the momentary power spikes. Of course, then you have to compare the SciB against capacitors.
I'm not so sure about least environmentally damaging, but let's address the space issue: Gigawatt reactors are fairly typical and take up about 100 acres. You would need 17,000 acres of windfarm to match that, and it would only match it when the wind is blowing. So if we assume we need 3 locations to get 1GW of base load, suddenly we need 51,000 acres of wind farm to produce the base load of a 100 acre reactor.
Again I say WTF. 51,000 acres sounds like a lot until you realize that for most wind farms the land is dual use: ranching, agricultural, secured buffer zones around landfills, water treatment, reservoirs, etc. So in most cases it is simply a matter of retasking a relatively small subset of a property. If an area is in the wind zone, it's pretty much a no-brainer to install wind turbines on lands that can be dual-purposed. And I'll point out that the power grid in the US ties multiple states together. No, you're not going to get wind-generated power from the Dakotas down to Florida but wind turbines in New Mexico could add to the total grid capacity of Louisiana and Mississipi. But wind is pointless for me; I live in one of those wind-dead zones. Our hydro's fully tapped and there's a nuclear reactor about an hour and a half from here, and a coal plant about 20 minutes. Needless to say, I'd rather have the coal and nuke plants reversed. Geothermal has a lot of energy potential, the trick is finding it. There's been some recent breakthroughs in finding geothermal vents by checking the helium2/helium3 ratios in groundwater that may make it fiscally viable in a wide swath across the country. I prefer closed-loop geothermal since it doesn't have as many issues with minerals, but it doesn't generate as much power for the effort.
Ideal? Depends. Is it a perfectly scaling source of wind power? Nope. But that doesn't exist, as yet.
It is, if the article is to be believed, the highest efficiency wind->electricity generator for low power demands. That sounds good. It is made of simple components, most of which are almost cast-offs from the modern nations. You could build these using old walkman headsets (magnets and metal coils) and plastic garbage bags. So it's cheap and simple, both good. It coincides with relatively inexpensive and low power LED lights and radios. Fortuitious timing. In combination with those LED lights does it reduce the risks of harm to individuals(via fire from kerosene lights) as well as benefit the world as a whole by limiting the use of kerosene? Sounds good.
Ideal in the "universally applicable" sense? No, it's not. Ideal in the "fits an assortment of criteria that results in the general betterment of individuals and the world as a whole" sense? Yep.
...than cutting a hole in the skull. Really a case of "because we can."
My wife has MS and the episodes of MS are more likely to happen when you get too hot. There are various devices to cool the body and the brain/spinal column in particular, that the MS Society has recommended.
The simplest is to take a break when you get hot, sit in the shade, and drink something cold to lower core body temperature.
Next is a "neck tie/ascot" filled with watergel, that stuff they put in the bottom of flowers to slowly release water. The water evaporates, providing additional cooling. Placed around the neck it has a big impact on the blood flow into the brain.
Sharper Image has a more high tech version that looks vaguely like it's from Dune. It is a collar, or perhaps a torc, that sits across the back of your neck and includes small fans. The combination of metallic plates, the water reservoir, and a blower you get a much larger temperature drop.
Then you get into the serious cooling vests that range from being filled with watergel for a full-torso temperature reduction to icepack reservoirs that provide extensive cooling.