Re:PocketPC is better than Palm - well, until now
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Palm to go Linux
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· Score: 1
the simple fact is that most people don't watch videos on their PDAs. All treos (650 and later) have MP3 and/or video programs built in. If not, go download some freeware.
Core Media Player (TCMP) for PalmOS Supports: AVI (*.avi), Matroska (*.mkv, *.mka), MP4 (*.mp4, *.m4a), Ogg Media (*.ogg, *.ogm), ASF (*.asf), Mpeg 1 Layer III, Ogg Vorbis, Musepack, AC-3, AMR, Adpcm, uLaw, DivX, XviD, MPEG4-SP (plus B-frame support), MPEG1, M-JPEG. And
Depending on the Treo you have a built-in keyboard, on screen keyboard, and Grafitti. I actually have Grafitti 1 and 2 on mine if I want it. I prefer Graf1.
Comparing an older Palm with newer Windows Mobile isn't quite fair since it ignores the competition of the day. I started with a Hitachi H/PC with Windows CE1. Handwriting recognition was comically slow and the keyboard was too small. Grafitti may have required practice but it was about as fast as typing on the H/PC and it could be done without a desk (the H/PC was too big and the wrong shape to thumb-type).
Synch software from microsoft is just as buggy as anything from Palm. I've had to support everything from the Pilot & WinCE 1 to recent Axims, Jornadas and Treos. The same synch software, installed from the same CD, talking to the same PDA will may run stably on one just-unboxed-from-dell PC and not another. Drives me insane. On the whole, I've had more trouble with getting ActiveSync to work at all but probably more trouble getting HotSync to do something non-standard (like sync a 3rd party app).
I don't know what you mean by "customize the desktop" but you can acquire alternate launcher programs if you like that completely change the UI of the "OS" (meaning when no program is active.)
I'd like to mount my palm as a USB device without needing a 3rd party app (Missing Synch, CardExport, etc) too. I'd much prefer a mini-USB port.
You can get custom ROMs for Palms now; numerous homebrew ROMs exist to add/remove various applications and features. I would like that to continue. I want anything that must be GPLd to have its source properly released but I'm not so much of a info-anarchist to have a problem with closed source applications.
Tom-Tom has had PalmOS support for several years. I'm too lazy to figure out just how many years.
If I read this right, it's an unoptimized install on a barely server-grade system using a dev package rather than a production package. I would *expect* it to run less than stellarly.
This translates to "brother-in-law IT is crap."
heck, it might be better to say "VMware server will limit performance degradation to 43% when used in a poorly thought out implementation."
I suspect a little of both--you probably need far more social context than an 18-year-old will have to pursue studies of voter demographics (not to mention the data acq is probably beyond their capabilities).
Nahh, it's well within their capabilities in the information age. As long as the student has access to a decent GIS application, there are scadloads of census-type data available. Mixing geospatial and temporal data is something that any teenager capable of a SQL query can pull off.
I think it was your other notion; that the students lack the world view to see those problems. Let's face it, if the kid can do SQL and statistics, they are more likely to go for "hard science" type problems that have clearcut solutions or results. Soft sciences produce "squishy" results. Lots of Venn diagram stuff, where the data can indicate that A, B, as well as C are all true. Plenty of uncertainty or subjectivity; not a happy place for a teen.
But some of that context used to be handled by education as well--you had to read the classics, you had to study some philosophy, you had to know history. My aero engineer friend has really never done any of that, so he's an engineer who doesn't know what "empiricism" means. Is this also a failing by our educational system? Isn't such education necessary to be a good researcher?
I know that at my school (a state university, even) engineering students had to take a certain amount of humanities courses. I took logic, philosophy, several semesters of french, art history, a communication course, history of europe (I think, maybe that's just what stands out) and your basic business micro & macro economics. That's a pretty typical number; some of the courses counted both as social studies and history (e.g. art history, french, maybe philosophy) and some didn't. I probably could have shaved off one or two courses there but no more.
Secondly, researcher != engineer. Engineers can be researchers and researchers can be engineers but research is a particular subfield that not all engineers can, or need, to do. I think they should be trained in basic research but not to the point that every engineer will be a researcher. Research is a subfield and, like any other subfield, a professional may go an entire career without delving into it. I'm in civil engineering and its unlikely I'll ever do more than scratch the surface of any three subfields (hydraulics, geotech, structural, environmental and transportation) let alone research.
Then you never had Documents to Go. It is a 3rd party app bundled with many Palms & Treos (depending on carrier) that reads MSWord & Excel files no problem along with a couple of the palm DOC-type formats. The newer version which I don't have adds PDF, Powerpoint, and outlook support. It has a decent amount of wysiswyg graphics and is visually comparable to WinMobile versions of Office apps.
It's been out for many years and IMO Palm should use some of their cash reserve to buy DataViz flat out and bundle Docs2Go with everything they sell that is "prosumer" grade or better.
Palm really kills me. The 650, 680, and 700 are really top end devices that are the equal or better of pretty much any phone on the market. They may not be the thinnest or have the best cameras, but the PalmOS versions have higher res screens with vibrant colors, decent native and 3rd party apps, and useful interfaces.
But you'd never know it if you don't already know what a treo is. I've go a 650 from sprint, my boss has as blackjack. Other than fit in a smaller pocket, the blackjack doesn't do anything the treo can't despite the nearly 2-year difference in release dates. And I'll trade the pocket aspect for the runtime as my Treo can go 2-3 days between charges despite frequent web access and heavy usage unlike the Blackjack's ~1 day heavy usage.
Have you ever seen a treo commercial? I haven't but I'll see fifty bajillion "Helo Moto/Razr/Red" commercials this week. C'mon, run something on CNN during the financial hour, for cris'sakes.
People crank about the lack of updates to the PalmOS. When was the last time you actually updated your Symbian phone? Heck, what percentage of users know what os their phone uses? PalmOS is not the easiest to code for? Fine. How does it compare to symbian? Or the motorola in-house OS? Oh wait, there's not many apps for Symbian because of network carriers locking phones and motorola will tell you to sod off if you don't want to jump through their hoops. Obviously it isn't impossible to code for given the sheer number of programs out there and the big draw items are as pretty as anything on Windows Mobile. (Documents to Go, for instance, is both pretty and a solid mobile Office app)
First off, 99% of things military trickle down to the civilian sector in some front, even if it isn't obvious. I mean, the Wii uses optical gyros that were at one point military technology.
Second, the very first paragraph says, and I quote, The machine, designed for the U.S. military, would allow soldiers in the field to convert waste into power and could have widespread civilian applications in the future. It goes on to say "I think it could be used outside the military shortly thereafter."
Does this technology already exist? Yes, in industrial capacities. Does it exist in a van-sized packages suitable for deployment with forward command and supply posts? No, no it does not. For perma-temp facilities (think M.A.S.H.) that will be in place for months, a series of these would seriously cut down the environmental impact in an energy-positive fashion.
When it finally comes to the non-military markets, McDonalds is not going to pick this up. The park & wildlife service probably will, though. For 10 gallons of diesel fuel, we can destroy all the trash at a fire watch station or a remote wildlife refuge [b]AND[/b] we get the electrical equivalent of 19 gallons of diesel. That cuts the number and size of supply trips dramatically.
Greenpeace/ecologists will lobby for these to be installed on ships rather than dumping waste at sea and given that it is power-positive will be hard to refuse, assuming the operating life is halfway decent.
If they make any major inroads it will probably be at always-on facilities like airports in regions where trash disposal is expensive and ultimately in larger apartment/office buildings that have enough trash generation to keep the beast fed and running 24/7.
All funnin' aside, this does advance science quite a bit. I'm happy to see the "science bombs" properly specced out as disposable tech rather than the live-forever approach NASA typically produces (Go rovers!)
Plus, I'm all for having an OTS weapon system for targets within the solar system. But I blame that on my recent reading list. Curse you John Ringo! Curse you, your Posleen and Von Neumann probes all to hell!
according to the article, algae in one system managed to double its biomass in "a couple of hours." That was in a system with the exhaust gases from a power plant bubbled through an algae-filled pipe network. That extra mass came from the 82% of waste gases that were absorbed by the algae.
Assuming "a couple of hours" really means 8 hours, you could theoretically increase the algae's biomass by 1,073,741,824 times while the duck grass doubled in mass. Now, that assumes you have a network able to hold and feed that much active algae. In reality you would be able to harvest algae 30 times before you could get in one harvest of duck grass and do so by filtering the air for a coal or oil power plant.
It's possible duck grass could still be more appealing than algae if it turns out algae has incredibly high start-up costs (lots of tubing, special refining needed, etc) in comparison to duck grass.
I think that's the still-not-released PalmOS 6.1 Cobalt. It's got a lot more graphical support 640x960) and supposedly some of the really smart multimedia tricks from BeOS.
Dunno why it's never been released other than a sneaking suspicion that either the Dragonball emulator is too slow or it is somehow incompatible with the smartphone implementation.
I personally would love to see a PalmOS version of the Nokia 770; a paper-back book sized device with a screen big enough for decent web browsing, and some extra horsepower for better VPN/VNC and multimedia support (e.g. videos worth bothering with).
PalmOS supports 320x480 which is on the T3, T5, Tx and Lifedrive. My 650 is 320x320. Meanwhile the WM5 Blackjack & Dash are 240x320. None of the devices I can find on the Windows Mobile product page match the Treo650, let alone the Ts or the lifedrive. If we are comparing theoretical products that have not appeared on the market but could at any time, PalmOS 6.1 supports up to 640x960.
As far as my inability to customize, I have a different launcher (think "start button"), remapped most the navigation buttons, added new handwriting recognition with 2 different entry notations (Graffiti 1 & 2), different phone ringer program, the LED indicator has been reconfigured to change color when I have voice mail, the alarms and notifications are customized to be persistent nags, and there is a Wiki app that ties all my memos, calendar, and address book entries together.
This doesn't include replacing the stock applications, like the web browser, calendar, mail or memo applications. Not that I have found something I like better than the PalmOS versions, but I have the option.
As to the "mythicalness" of it, it's a PCS Treo 650 from Sprint I bought about 2 years ago at CompUSA. I know a couple of other people with Sprint PCS Treo 600s and 650s in my company that work just fine. Sprint Customer Service has been more often the problem than the hardware. About half the Cingular 650s I've seen are absolute nightmares, though. My boss's could get about 200kbit from the tower for software patches while sitting in our office but never broke 20kbit downloading email. Mine would easily hit an effective 100kbit when downloading mail from the same server. I only know one person with a TMobile 650 and his is an unlocked model, so it's stability is non-representational.
My only problem came from the AIM client (now abandonware) that would refuse to surrender the network stack. The treo wouldn't crash per se but after AIM would spazz I didn't get or make calls, access the internet, receive voicemail notifications, etc. Took me about a week to track that bug down. I had another program, one of the customizers, that was stable but sloooooow. The hooks would intercept calls to any feature the program could modify, even if I didn't have it set to modify that function. It was a real drag on performance, especially where the Wiki was concerned.
I've used multiple Palms, starting with a handmedown USR Pilot. I moved to the PalmIIIx, then to the Handspring Visor for the expansion port (CF & SD card reading goodness). I switched from a pager to a cellphone sometime during the Visor era and when my Visor started dying at the same time ATT fell into the Cingularity I went for the Treo650 and a new phone carrier. My Treo runs virtually all my old apps. I added Grafitti-1 to it and enabled shortcuts. It is, from a UI standpoint, identical to my Pilot.
My Treo650 is pretty stable, with the occassional long pause when I manage to do a major memory swap (close/open an ebook on the SD card) at the same moment the email auto-download occurs. I get a crash or hard freeze maybe once every 2-3 months, usually when I manage to have the above happen when listening to MP3s or when an alarm is set to go off, or when I turn on the internet at the exact moment a call is coming in (CDMA doesn't let you do both).
I don't know anyone with a WinMobile device that has half the stability I do, let alone with the same degree of customization. It works, it's reliable, and it's pretty (PalmOS supports higher res screens than WinMoble).
Palm has 2 hurdles: 1) the carriers have so many special requirements some of them destabilize the Treos (I'm looking at you Cingular!) and 2) they need mindshare. Palm doesn't have any buzz anymore. They need to advertise the Treo. Mine plays MP3s, videos, takes acceptable pictures, reads office docs, etc. They almost need the PC/Mac commercial but with "Mobile Office" on one side of Treo, "Rock'r" on the other.
Actually, it is a step in evolution. Though it might be categorized more accurately as a mis-step. If, and I stress the 'if', it turned out that 2 heads were better at detecting danger, gathering food, or finding a mate, then animals who had a genetic propensity for embryonic twins comingling or developing two heads would prosper and become common.
Since it hasn't worked, it obviously is not a beneficial mutation. However given the relative commonness of this significant developmental deviation, it must be an *easy* thing to trigger and thus it keeps happening.
As far as six fingers goes, it could be a beneficial mutation. Or might not. Heck, it could have been a beneficial mutation as recently as a few thousand years ago but due to cultural norms now be a flaw despite significant advantage that would have been gained in a hunter-gatherer environment.
I don't mind the personification of evolution as "Mother Nature" but only if people realize that Mother Nature is a deaf-mute who randomly makes small changes to her creations with no forethought or malice. If it works, it works but if not, hey, there's a lot of other critters out there and even if most of them get wiped out she can probably rework the whole plaent in a couple of million years.
She has the SIM that came packaged with her gophone and I tried it with an unlocked GSM phone a friend had, my old ATT siemens s46, and my wife's Cingular samsung. None of them would boot the gophone SIM.
I got my mother one of the Go Phones, despite my hatred of Cingular, simply b/c the service by other pre-paid or pay-as-you-go carriers was craptastic in their area.
I passionately hate the phone she received. The internet is easily activated by touching "5" key and there's no way to turn off the GPRS system. Each time she accidentally does that she gets dinged $1.05 (the daily dollar usage and the minimum $0.05 data usage) I finally did some phone-no-jitsu to get the keypad to completely lock. I tried to use the SIM in an old cingular phone and an unlocked GSM phone but they've got some freaky programming on the SIM so it won't work on anything but those crappy gophones.
I miss ATT's nokia gophones. Those were simple, reliable, dependable and cheap phones that were perfect for the market. Now it's freakin' pre-paid Razrs covered in bling.
...I'd be stuck with the Palm platform. This platform has problems of its own, like a total lack of real multitasking (closing your SSH session just because you switch apps is really annoying).
That's a fault of the Palm app, not the OS. There are multiple applications I am aware of that remain operational even if you switch to another program. The MP3 player is a straight forward example of background functionality. And from an internet standpoint, my Treo650 has run PtPChat (an IRC client) and the now-defunct AIM client in the background, keeping the connection active and logging messages while I was in notepad or my contact list. I can't say that I got the audible notices of new text, but when I popped back to them the entire message history was present and I never dropped offline.
Unless SSH's encryption is too CPU intensive to maintain while running something else, I'd focus more on the application side than the OS.
I had AT&T because a) best coverage in my area if you had a GSM+analog phone b) best service plan for the money at my usage rate and c) inexpensive handsets. My coverage was excellent both in the city, country and along the interstates other than one particular area near my parents' house in a "shadow" of a ridge. I used that phone without fail across a big chunk of the eastern US with no troubles.
Then came cingular. My service became irregular as they decommissioned the analog towers before new GSM towers were up and running. They kept pressing me to "upgrade" my phone and used vaguely worded scare tactics that old phones were the devil (I loved my multiband Siemens S46). They "lost" the ability to unlock AT&T phones, something AT&T would do if you planned on traveling internationally. They discontinued my plan in favor of a "better" one that had more mintues but a later "unlimited" period. They refused to apply my company's employee discount unless I renewed my contract. The last straw came when they started mucking with the billing system and I got overage charges despite being well within my monthly limits.
I'd avoided Sprint b/c at the time I went with AT&T their phones were crap, IMO. The data service was new and the phones were high on glam features but with horrible battery life or form factors. This time I went with a Treo 650 with the unlimited data plan. Service is pretty good, though at times in the rural areas it doesn't match AT&T. Data speeds are surprisingly good, in the 128kbit range, which may be limited by the Treo's ability to process the data.
My boss got a Cingular Treo 650 at the same time. His was a nightmare. Data connection to the towers was great for software updates (I saw close to 220kbit when I downloaded service patches for him) so the Treo GPRS was pretty good but Cingular's internet connection was crap. It took upwards of 5 minutes for his Treo to synch email from our corporate mail server; mine would do it on Sprint in ~15 seconds. The Cingular add-on software kept trying to take over his phone functionality and if the unit reset or the battery went dead it would re-default to the Cingular-specific apps instead of the standard (and much superior) Palm programs.
Sprint CS is kinda spotty when it comes to the technical questions but nothing compared to Cingular, who were basically unable to comprehend that data != voice service and went to great pains to avoid transferring me to an engineer or data tech. When I did get to the Cingular engineering group for my boss it took several minutes to explain that "I can't get to a particular server using the domain name but I can using the IP" means their DNS is borked. Even then they never, ever, never called back when they said they would and "open" complaints would mysteriously becomes "closed" after 3 days.
Nope, I hate Cingular. Sprint is okay once you accept that most of the "free" phones are crap but that goes for Cingular too.
Even the use of aquifers, when near a seacoast, can lead to contamination of groundwater supplies with salt, because the inland groundwater level falls and then saltwater seeps in from the coast. So, by providing an alternative water source, desalination helps avoid that problem of "salting the soil." Depending on how and where the water from desalination is used, it could even be added to rivers to increase their flow for some distance, for aesthetic and environmental benefit and use by multiple users.
It is true that aquifer drawdown can result in saltwater contamination. However use of desalination plants only changes the location that the salt is brought in land. Instead of being near, say, Washington DC the salt pile would be at coastal Virginia.
And the notion of creating freshwater via desalination and then pumping it uphill to bolster a river is somewhere between "inconceivible" and "irresponsible." A typical small river (thirty foot wide, running at a fairly sedate 2 feet/second aka 1.3mph) would require a 39MGD desalination & pumping system, which is a water supply for approximately 325,000 people at a typical~120 gallons/person/day. The energy needs would be, to say the least, significant.
As for disposing of the salt, I don't have an easy answer, but (1) some amount can be sold, and (2) to the extent that the water makes it back into the sea, there's no net effect on the ocean even if there's salt poisoning in specific regions.
That logic is what contributed to multiple ecological disasters of the past. Many "specific regions" of the ocean are connected by currents, massive water channels within the ocean. The Gulf Stream starts in the Gulf of Mexico and heads north along the eastern US, crosses the Atlantic, and arrives in Europe as the North Atlantic Drift. While the odds of a desalination plant altering the ocean as a whole (or even one of the Streams) is virtually negligible, the possibility that a spill could create a highly saline "slug" that moves like an oil-slick, killing off the weak and young fish and/or the krill/algae they feed upon, is not beyond comprehension. The impact of losing even a fraction of a year's north Atlantic fishing production is mind numbing.
The volume of salt required would be pretty immense but I figure a hurricane/typhoon could easily create the kind of conditions required to return that much salt to the ocean. It wouldn't even require a Katrina; enough rain to flood the salt storage facility could do the trick.
Another alternative to desalination is to gengineer plants for salt tolerance, so that we can irrigate them with seawater. Realistically that'd be hard even for a master gengineer, because where does the salt go? The best I can think of here is, "have the plants stuff all the salt into the parts of themselves that aren't eaten."
That has merit but only for naturally occurring salt-marsh regions whose ecology can already deal with the salt-laden stems and remains. Otherwise you're going to get a couple dozen harvests and then be left with salted soil that exceeds your gengineered plants' tolerances.
Before the situation becomes "desalinate or depopulate" the population should consider food importing. Cultivating crops is highly water intensive. Every acre dedicated to grain production requires 2.7MG of water/year, or equates to 61 people. Assuming you can capture the water, eliminating two square miles of agriculture will result in enough water for ~75,000 people. Importing food is not cheap but it may be cheaper than the desalination system and the environmental consequences.
Different scale, purpose, and intent. Not everyone can jam a 70' tower in their yard; there are permits and zoning issues. I can put a couple hundred square feet of cells on my roof with no problems. Today's cells produce about 1kW per 100sf and the area would only decrease.
Plus I can't buy a residential wind turbine for $1/w. For a turbine (installed) in the 1-5kW range it costs about $3/w, with a big chunk of the cost being the tower & installation. $3/w is the same as the solar listed.
I haven't found a turbine for $2/watt until I hit the 20KW level. $40,000 is a lot to recoup and 20kW is a lot of residential power. I'll note that a 20KW turbine is only about about 2% more than 10kW turbine, so wind scales real well once you commit to spending $40,000+.
Which means that individuals will still find solar to be more appealing than wind because a) no tower, b) no moving parts, c) no moving parts located at the top of a 70' tower. Communities will likely find wind to be more appealing because a) it scales well, b) it requires fairly small land area, c) wind is generally more available, especially if you are willing to build a 100' tower.
So stop being a downer on solar, it's really like watching BSD & Linux fanatics going at it. If nothing else, the wind industry should be promoting solar to help get uniform nationwide grid-tie legislation passed.
Holy crap, no. Desalination should be avoided wherever possible. Usage control and freshwater management should be maxed to the hilt prior to desalination.
Desalination is another way to say "salt generator." Do you know why the Romans would salt the lands of mortal enemies? So nothing would grow there. "But this is a desert" you say. Fine, don't care about a desert ecology, I can understand that, but that high salinity goes for the ocean, too. Most oceanic species cannot tolerate high salinity and it only takes one good SNAFU to result in a huge salt "spill" from the desalination product. See the Dead Sea for an example of a hypersaline environment with no macrobiological life.
Engineers should focus on freshwater capture systems, promote the use of "gray water" reclamation systems for agricultural needs, improved water delivery devices (showerheads, water faucets, drinking fountains), implementing low-usage appliances & sanitary facilities, and mitigation of transportation losses.
Desalination may be necessary but it should always be considered the last resort. Heck, I'd suggest emigration.
While it's not an "golden oldie" the Siemens S46 was an excellent example of a functional phone with no silly business. The battery lasted 6 days on average despite having web browsing, IM, "daily planner" and other such toys simply because it used a monochrome screen. it was large enough that I didnt' feel like if I sneezed it would vanish but still small enough to not be a brick. It had both analog and GSM systems so it almost never dropped signal. My only whine was that it didn't have bluetooth.
Unfortunately, AT&T sold off their wireless to Suckular, who dropped the phone and did everything in their power to drive off the AT&T phone users. After they tried to overbill me by changing my billing date and refusing to acknowledge the bonus minutes my plan came with, I bailed to Sprint and a Treo650.
The 650's nice but only b/c I was also lugging around a Visor. My wife has no idea how to make calls on it and it is a tad bricky. It gets about 3 days battery life (not bad considering my heavy PDA usage) and has bluetooth (which if I disabled would add about a day to the battery life). When I'm on vacation and not using the PDA side of the Treo, I really miss my S46.
What a horribly foolish and short sighted statement. While it is true that solar works when the sun shines, it also works when it is cloudy, albeit producing less power. Therefore the average annual power production of solar is dependable on an annual basis.
Power storage for solar can come in many forms. For a solar-thermal system (i.e. a stirling engine generator) you can simply store the heat using one of many mediums. For a photovoltaic system you can store the power using batteries, capacitors, hydrogen, heat, or even gravity by pumping water uphill. While the last three require a hybrid power system to access the stored energy (PV->H2/heat/gravity->electricity) they are not new technologies. In most areas you won't want a single power generation system so you'd have multiple plants anyway. The solar-thermal systems are particularly compatible with stored power as they work under direct solar energy, stored heat, or any combustible fuel (coal, wood, ethanol, petroleum, etc). And a solar/hydrogen power plant would double as a power source for hydrogen vehicles.
While it is true that areas closer to the equator see more power generation capacity from solar, even areas farther away still benefit from solar's ability to mitigate peak demand in summer and winter.
The cost of solar (PV or thermal) eliminates the almost incalculable secondary costs of conventional fuels (impacts on asthmatics from particulates, acid rain, ecological damage from mining coal or spilling oil, etc).
Coal contains about 3ppm of uranium. Ordinary soil contains about 1.8ppm of uranium. Coal may be an enviornmental disaster due to its chemical and kinematic properties, but a radioactive pollutant it is not.
That's great when the coal is unburned. Once you burn away the organics, the remaining ash (10% coal weight, typically) is around 30ppm. Even if you aren't concerned about the fact that at least a small percentage of particulates make it past the scrubbers resulting in higher ambient radiation directly downwind of coal plants than downwind of nuclear plants, you should be concerned about the roughly 120 million tons of coal ash, containing a total of 3,600 tons of uranium (30ppm over 120 million tons of ash)
Note that 12,000 tons of nuclear waste are created annually and it is only 3% high level waste, containing the equivalent of about 360 tons of uranium. So if we mixed all the nuclear waste into the coal ash, we'd only increase the radioactivity of the coal ash by 10%. If 3ppm isn't a problem, 3.3ppm shouldn't be much more of a problem.
Coal ash is often used in scenarios I don't find dangerous (concrete, metallurgy, etc) but I am somewhat concerned about it being used in home construction (wallboard, roofing materials, insulation), as a material for snow melting, but most particularly soil fill.
With 30ppm uranium, coal ash fill is a great potential source of radon gas. You know, that lung-cancer causing radioactive gas created in soils with a higher than average uranium density. Like, I dunno, having 15x the uranium density of common soil.
These take stock vehicles and modify them. The 2004 competition used a Ford Explorer as the baseline and the vehicles competed on vehicle safety, fuel efficiency, emissions, off-road performance and towing performance performance (2,000lb trailer on 7% grade). The winning team reached 25mpg (yeah, still crappy but a 33% improvement), passed all the tests, and the emissions were below the Ultra Low Emissions Vehicle (ULEV) requirements.
Those high schoolers from the "unrealistic" project move on to colleges that take part in Future Truck and eventually become the next round of automotive engineers. They need motivation, the opportunity to get their hands dirty and to see some results. Anyone who competed came up with a very high efficiency vehicle and some real skills to be proud of, skills that benefit us tomorrow, if not today.
FYI, China produces roughly 2 million one-cylinder diesel rural vehicles each year. They have a max speed of 50km/hr, max payload of 500kg and use 12-15 hp engines (many of them look like ATVs). They are also pollution machines that are environmental nightmares. If you want something more real-world, sponsor a project to design a low-emission, fuel-efficient, small diesel vehicle.
That's the point; it is a very subtle distinction. Only a lawyer can say with any certainty whether the liability is SPI's and/or that of the specific FTP-master. Since no one asked a lawyer, no one can be sure who is liable.
I'll point out that, as a non-lawyer who could be on a jury, if the ftp-masters have always approved licenses as standard operating procedures for the Debian project (a project "owned" by SPI) then it could easily be seen that the ftp-masters have been granted the authority by the project and thus SPI.
This is a case where "we've always done it that way" and "what the law says you should do" might be at odds. I wouldn't expect coders to be legal experts any more than I'd expect a lawyer to hack machine code. I would, however, expect a coder to be aware of their ignorance in legal matters just as much as I would a lawyer be aware of their coding limitations. When Debian has legal experts on retainer, via SPI, it starts becoming willfull ignorance of the law.
As a potential juror I might show lenience to someone who can't afford a lawyer and did the best they could but if you can call a lawyer whenever you want and you REFUSE to do so, I guarantee I would vote to bring down the mjolnir of law-hammers.
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the simple fact is that most people don't watch videos on their PDAs. All treos (650 and later) have MP3 and/or video programs built in. If not, go download some freeware.
Core Media Player (TCMP) for PalmOS Supports: AVI (*.avi), Matroska (*.mkv, *.mka), MP4 (*.mp4, *.m4a), Ogg Media (*.ogg, *.ogm), ASF (*.asf), Mpeg 1 Layer III, Ogg Vorbis, Musepack, AC-3, AMR, Adpcm, uLaw, DivX, XviD, MPEG4-SP (plus B-frame support), MPEG1, M-JPEG. And
Palms support, and have supported, keyboards for years using the synch port, IR, or Bluetooth.
Depending on the Treo you have a built-in keyboard, on screen keyboard, and Grafitti. I actually have Grafitti 1 and 2 on mine if I want it. I prefer Graf1.
Comparing an older Palm with newer Windows Mobile isn't quite fair since it ignores the competition of the day. I started with a Hitachi H/PC with Windows CE1. Handwriting recognition was comically slow and the keyboard was too small. Grafitti may have required practice but it was about as fast as typing on the H/PC and it could be done without a desk (the H/PC was too big and the wrong shape to thumb-type).
Synch software from microsoft is just as buggy as anything from Palm. I've had to support everything from the Pilot & WinCE 1 to recent Axims, Jornadas and Treos. The same synch software, installed from the same CD, talking to the same PDA will may run stably on one just-unboxed-from-dell PC and not another. Drives me insane. On the whole, I've had more trouble with getting ActiveSync to work at all but probably more trouble getting HotSync to do something non-standard (like sync a 3rd party app).
I don't know what you mean by "customize the desktop" but you can acquire alternate launcher programs if you like that completely change the UI of the "OS" (meaning when no program is active.)
I'd like to mount my palm as a USB device without needing a 3rd party app (Missing Synch, CardExport, etc) too. I'd much prefer a mini-USB port.
You can get custom ROMs for Palms now; numerous homebrew ROMs exist to add/remove various applications and features. I would like that to continue. I want anything that must be GPLd to have its source properly released but I'm not so much of a info-anarchist to have a problem with closed source applications.
Tom-Tom has had PalmOS support for several years. I'm too lazy to figure out just how many years.
Minors cannot be held to a contract. Minors can not own property.
Someone should tell the RIAA this. They are suing children who were 9 & 11 at the time of their "contract violation."
If I read this right, it's an unoptimized install on a barely server-grade system using a dev package rather than a production package. I would *expect* it to run less than stellarly.
This translates to "brother-in-law IT is crap."
heck, it might be better to say "VMware server will limit performance degradation to 43% when used in a poorly thought out implementation."
Nahh, it's well within their capabilities in the information age. As long as the student has access to a decent GIS application, there are scadloads of census-type data available. Mixing geospatial and temporal data is something that any teenager capable of a SQL query can pull off.
I think it was your other notion; that the students lack the world view to see those problems. Let's face it, if the kid can do SQL and statistics, they are more likely to go for "hard science" type problems that have clearcut solutions or results. Soft sciences produce "squishy" results. Lots of Venn diagram stuff, where the data can indicate that A, B, as well as C are all true. Plenty of uncertainty or subjectivity; not a happy place for a teen.
But some of that context used to be handled by education as well--you had to read the classics, you had to study some philosophy, you had to know history. My aero engineer friend has really never done any of that, so he's an engineer who doesn't know what "empiricism" means. Is this also a failing by our educational system? Isn't such education necessary to be a good researcher?
I know that at my school (a state university, even) engineering students had to take a certain amount of humanities courses. I took logic, philosophy, several semesters of french, art history, a communication course, history of europe (I think, maybe that's just what stands out) and your basic business micro & macro economics. That's a pretty typical number; some of the courses counted both as social studies and history (e.g. art history, french, maybe philosophy) and some didn't. I probably could have shaved off one or two courses there but no more.
Secondly, researcher != engineer. Engineers can be researchers and researchers can be engineers but research is a particular subfield that not all engineers can, or need, to do. I think they should be trained in basic research but not to the point that every engineer will be a researcher. Research is a subfield and, like any other subfield, a professional may go an entire career without delving into it. I'm in civil engineering and its unlikely I'll ever do more than scratch the surface of any three subfields (hydraulics, geotech, structural, environmental and transportation) let alone research.
Then you never had Documents to Go. It is a 3rd party app bundled with many Palms & Treos (depending on carrier) that reads MSWord & Excel files no problem along with a couple of the palm DOC-type formats. The newer version which I don't have adds PDF, Powerpoint, and outlook support. It has a decent amount of wysiswyg graphics and is visually comparable to WinMobile versions of Office apps.
e x_palm.html
http://www.dataviz.com/products/documentstogo/ind
It's been out for many years and IMO Palm should use some of their cash reserve to buy DataViz flat out and bundle Docs2Go with everything they sell that is "prosumer" grade or better.
Palm really kills me. The 650, 680, and 700 are really top end devices that are the equal or better of pretty much any phone on the market. They may not be the thinnest or have the best cameras, but the PalmOS versions have higher res screens with vibrant colors, decent native and 3rd party apps, and useful interfaces.
But you'd never know it if you don't already know what a treo is. I've go a 650 from sprint, my boss has as blackjack. Other than fit in a smaller pocket, the blackjack doesn't do anything the treo can't despite the nearly 2-year difference in release dates. And I'll trade the pocket aspect for the runtime as my Treo can go 2-3 days between charges despite frequent web access and heavy usage unlike the Blackjack's ~1 day heavy usage.
Have you ever seen a treo commercial? I haven't but I'll see fifty bajillion "Helo Moto/Razr/Red" commercials this week. C'mon, run something on CNN during the financial hour, for cris'sakes.
People crank about the lack of updates to the PalmOS. When was the last time you actually updated your Symbian phone? Heck, what percentage of users know what os their phone uses? PalmOS is not the easiest to code for? Fine. How does it compare to symbian? Or the motorola in-house OS? Oh wait, there's not many apps for Symbian because of network carriers locking phones and motorola will tell you to sod off if you don't want to jump through their hoops. Obviously it isn't impossible to code for given the sheer number of programs out there and the big draw items are as pretty as anything on Windows Mobile. (Documents to Go, for instance, is both pretty and a solid mobile Office app)
Second, the very first paragraph says, and I quote, The machine, designed for the U.S. military, would allow soldiers in the field to convert waste into power and could have widespread civilian applications in the future. It goes on to say "I think it could be used outside the military shortly thereafter."
Does this technology already exist? Yes, in industrial capacities. Does it exist in a van-sized packages suitable for deployment with forward command and supply posts? No, no it does not. For perma-temp facilities (think M.A.S.H.) that will be in place for months, a series of these would seriously cut down the environmental impact in an energy-positive fashion.
When it finally comes to the non-military markets, McDonalds is not going to pick this up. The park & wildlife service probably will, though. For 10 gallons of diesel fuel, we can destroy all the trash at a fire watch station or a remote wildlife refuge [b]AND[/b] we get the electrical equivalent of 19 gallons of diesel. That cuts the number and size of supply trips dramatically.
Greenpeace/ecologists will lobby for these to be installed on ships rather than dumping waste at sea and given that it is power-positive will be hard to refuse, assuming the operating life is halfway decent.
If they make any major inroads it will probably be at always-on facilities like airports in regions where trash disposal is expensive and ultimately in larger apartment/office buildings that have enough trash generation to keep the beast fed and running 24/7.
All funnin' aside, this does advance science quite a bit. I'm happy to see the "science bombs" properly specced out as disposable tech rather than the live-forever approach NASA typically produces (Go rovers!)
Plus, I'm all for having an OTS weapon system for targets within the solar system. But I blame that on my recent reading list. Curse you John Ringo! Curse you, your Posleen and Von Neumann probes all to hell!
according to the article, algae in one system managed to double its biomass in "a couple of hours." That was in a system with the exhaust gases from a power plant bubbled through an algae-filled pipe network. That extra mass came from the 82% of waste gases that were absorbed by the algae.
Assuming "a couple of hours" really means 8 hours, you could theoretically increase the algae's biomass by 1,073,741,824 times while the duck grass doubled in mass. Now, that assumes you have a network able to hold and feed that much active algae. In reality you would be able to harvest algae 30 times before you could get in one harvest of duck grass and do so by filtering the air for a coal or oil power plant.
It's possible duck grass could still be more appealing than algae if it turns out algae has incredibly high start-up costs (lots of tubing, special refining needed, etc) in comparison to duck grass.
But on a pounds/time system, algae for teh win.
I think that's the still-not-released PalmOS 6.1 Cobalt. It's got a lot more graphical support 640x960) and supposedly some of the really smart multimedia tricks from BeOS.
Dunno why it's never been released other than a sneaking suspicion that either the Dragonball emulator is too slow or it is somehow incompatible with the smartphone implementation.
I personally would love to see a PalmOS version of the Nokia 770; a paper-back book sized device with a screen big enough for decent web browsing, and some extra horsepower for better VPN/VNC and multimedia support (e.g. videos worth bothering with).
PalmOS supports 320x480 which is on the T3, T5, Tx and Lifedrive. My 650 is 320x320. Meanwhile the WM5 Blackjack & Dash are 240x320. None of the devices I can find on the Windows Mobile product page match the Treo650, let alone the Ts or the lifedrive. If we are comparing theoretical products that have not appeared on the market but could at any time, PalmOS 6.1 supports up to 640x960.
As far as my inability to customize, I have a different launcher (think "start button"), remapped most the navigation buttons, added new handwriting recognition with 2 different entry notations (Graffiti 1 & 2), different phone ringer program, the LED indicator has been reconfigured to change color when I have voice mail, the alarms and notifications are customized to be persistent nags, and there is a Wiki app that ties all my memos, calendar, and address book entries together.
This doesn't include replacing the stock applications, like the web browser, calendar, mail or memo applications. Not that I have found something I like better than the PalmOS versions, but I have the option.
As to the "mythicalness" of it, it's a PCS Treo 650 from Sprint I bought about 2 years ago at CompUSA. I know a couple of other people with Sprint PCS Treo 600s and 650s in my company that work just fine. Sprint Customer Service has been more often the problem than the hardware. About half the Cingular 650s I've seen are absolute nightmares, though. My boss's could get about 200kbit from the tower for software patches while sitting in our office but never broke 20kbit downloading email. Mine would easily hit an effective 100kbit when downloading mail from the same server. I only know one person with a TMobile 650 and his is an unlocked model, so it's stability is non-representational.
My only problem came from the AIM client (now abandonware) that would refuse to surrender the network stack. The treo wouldn't crash per se but after AIM would spazz I didn't get or make calls, access the internet, receive voicemail notifications, etc. Took me about a week to track that bug down. I had another program, one of the customizers, that was stable but sloooooow. The hooks would intercept calls to any feature the program could modify, even if I didn't have it set to modify that function. It was a real drag on performance, especially where the Wiki was concerned.
I've used multiple Palms, starting with a handmedown USR Pilot. I moved to the PalmIIIx, then to the Handspring Visor for the expansion port (CF & SD card reading goodness). I switched from a pager to a cellphone sometime during the Visor era and when my Visor started dying at the same time ATT fell into the Cingularity I went for the Treo650 and a new phone carrier. My Treo runs virtually all my old apps. I added Grafitti-1 to it and enabled shortcuts. It is, from a UI standpoint, identical to my Pilot.
My Treo650 is pretty stable, with the occassional long pause when I manage to do a major memory swap (close/open an ebook on the SD card) at the same moment the email auto-download occurs. I get a crash or hard freeze maybe once every 2-3 months, usually when I manage to have the above happen when listening to MP3s or when an alarm is set to go off, or when I turn on the internet at the exact moment a call is coming in (CDMA doesn't let you do both).
I don't know anyone with a WinMobile device that has half the stability I do, let alone with the same degree of customization. It works, it's reliable, and it's pretty (PalmOS supports higher res screens than WinMoble).
Palm has 2 hurdles: 1) the carriers have so many special requirements some of them destabilize the Treos (I'm looking at you Cingular!) and 2) they need mindshare. Palm doesn't have any buzz anymore. They need to advertise the Treo. Mine plays MP3s, videos, takes acceptable pictures, reads office docs, etc. They almost need the PC/Mac commercial but with "Mobile Office" on one side of Treo, "Rock'r" on the other.
Actually, it is a step in evolution. Though it might be categorized more accurately as a mis-step. If, and I stress the 'if', it turned out that 2 heads were better at detecting danger, gathering food, or finding a mate, then animals who had a genetic propensity for embryonic twins comingling or developing two heads would prosper and become common.
Since it hasn't worked, it obviously is not a beneficial mutation. However given the relative commonness of this significant developmental deviation, it must be an *easy* thing to trigger and thus it keeps happening.
As far as six fingers goes, it could be a beneficial mutation. Or might not. Heck, it could have been a beneficial mutation as recently as a few thousand years ago but due to cultural norms now be a flaw despite significant advantage that would have been gained in a hunter-gatherer environment.
I don't mind the personification of evolution as "Mother Nature" but only if people realize that Mother Nature is a deaf-mute who randomly makes small changes to her creations with no forethought or malice. If it works, it works but if not, hey, there's a lot of other critters out there and even if most of them get wiped out she can probably rework the whole plaent in a couple of million years.
She has the SIM that came packaged with her gophone and I tried it with an unlocked GSM phone a friend had, my old ATT siemens s46, and my wife's Cingular samsung. None of them would boot the gophone SIM.
I got my mother one of the Go Phones, despite my hatred of Cingular, simply b/c the service by other pre-paid or pay-as-you-go carriers was craptastic in their area.
I passionately hate the phone she received. The internet is easily activated by touching "5" key and there's no way to turn off the GPRS system. Each time she accidentally does that she gets dinged $1.05 (the daily dollar usage and the minimum $0.05 data usage) I finally did some phone-no-jitsu to get the keypad to completely lock. I tried to use the SIM in an old cingular phone and an unlocked GSM phone but they've got some freaky programming on the SIM so it won't work on anything but those crappy gophones.
I miss ATT's nokia gophones. Those were simple, reliable, dependable and cheap phones that were perfect for the market. Now it's freakin' pre-paid Razrs covered in bling.
...I'd be stuck with the Palm platform. This platform has problems of its own, like a total lack of real multitasking (closing your SSH session just because you switch apps is really annoying).
That's a fault of the Palm app, not the OS. There are multiple applications I am aware of that remain operational even if you switch to another program. The MP3 player is a straight forward example of background functionality. And from an internet standpoint, my Treo650 has run PtPChat (an IRC client) and the now-defunct AIM client in the background, keeping the connection active and logging messages while I was in notepad or my contact list. I can't say that I got the audible notices of new text, but when I popped back to them the entire message history was present and I never dropped offline.
Unless SSH's encryption is too CPU intensive to maintain while running something else, I'd focus more on the application side than the OS.
I had AT&T because a) best coverage in my area if you had a GSM+analog phone b) best service plan for the money at my usage rate and c) inexpensive handsets. My coverage was excellent both in the city, country and along the interstates other than one particular area near my parents' house in a "shadow" of a ridge. I used that phone without fail across a big chunk of the eastern US with no troubles.
Then came cingular. My service became irregular as they decommissioned the analog towers before new GSM towers were up and running. They kept pressing me to "upgrade" my phone and used vaguely worded scare tactics that old phones were the devil (I loved my multiband Siemens S46). They "lost" the ability to unlock AT&T phones, something AT&T would do if you planned on traveling internationally. They discontinued my plan in favor of a "better" one that had more mintues but a later "unlimited" period. They refused to apply my company's employee discount unless I renewed my contract. The last straw came when they started mucking with the billing system and I got overage charges despite being well within my monthly limits.
I'd avoided Sprint b/c at the time I went with AT&T their phones were crap, IMO. The data service was new and the phones were high on glam features but with horrible battery life or form factors. This time I went with a Treo 650 with the unlimited data plan. Service is pretty good, though at times in the rural areas it doesn't match AT&T. Data speeds are surprisingly good, in the 128kbit range, which may be limited by the Treo's ability to process the data.
My boss got a Cingular Treo 650 at the same time. His was a nightmare. Data connection to the towers was great for software updates (I saw close to 220kbit when I downloaded service patches for him) so the Treo GPRS was pretty good but Cingular's internet connection was crap. It took upwards of 5 minutes for his Treo to synch email from our corporate mail server; mine would do it on Sprint in ~15 seconds. The Cingular add-on software kept trying to take over his phone functionality and if the unit reset or the battery went dead it would re-default to the Cingular-specific apps instead of the standard (and much superior) Palm programs.
Sprint CS is kinda spotty when it comes to the technical questions but nothing compared to Cingular, who were basically unable to comprehend that data != voice service and went to great pains to avoid transferring me to an engineer or data tech. When I did get to the Cingular engineering group for my boss it took several minutes to explain that "I can't get to a particular server using the domain name but I can using the IP" means their DNS is borked. Even then they never, ever, never called back when they said they would and "open" complaints would mysteriously becomes "closed" after 3 days.
Nope, I hate Cingular. Sprint is okay once you accept that most of the "free" phones are crap but that goes for Cingular too.
Even the use of aquifers, when near a seacoast, can lead to contamination of groundwater supplies with salt, because the inland groundwater level falls and then saltwater seeps in from the coast. So, by providing an alternative water source, desalination helps avoid that problem of "salting the soil." Depending on how and where the water from desalination is used, it could even be added to rivers to increase their flow for some distance, for aesthetic and environmental benefit and use by multiple users.
It is true that aquifer drawdown can result in saltwater contamination. However use of desalination plants only changes the location that the salt is brought in land. Instead of being near, say, Washington DC the salt pile would be at coastal Virginia.
And the notion of creating freshwater via desalination and then pumping it uphill to bolster a river is somewhere between "inconceivible" and "irresponsible." A typical small river (thirty foot wide, running at a fairly sedate 2 feet/second aka 1.3mph) would require a 39MGD desalination & pumping system, which is a water supply for approximately 325,000 people at a typical~120 gallons/person/day. The energy needs would be, to say the least, significant.
As for disposing of the salt, I don't have an easy answer, but (1) some amount can be sold, and (2) to the extent that the water makes it back into the sea, there's no net effect on the ocean even if there's salt poisoning in specific regions.
That logic is what contributed to multiple ecological disasters of the past. Many "specific regions" of the ocean are connected by currents, massive water channels within the ocean. The Gulf Stream starts in the Gulf of Mexico and heads north along the eastern US, crosses the Atlantic, and arrives in Europe as the North Atlantic Drift. While the odds of a desalination plant altering the ocean as a whole (or even one of the Streams) is virtually negligible, the possibility that a spill could create a highly saline "slug" that moves like an oil-slick, killing off the weak and young fish and/or the krill/algae they feed upon, is not beyond comprehension. The impact of losing even a fraction of a year's north Atlantic fishing production is mind numbing.
The volume of salt required would be pretty immense but I figure a hurricane/typhoon could easily create the kind of conditions required to return that much salt to the ocean. It wouldn't even require a Katrina; enough rain to flood the salt storage facility could do the trick.
Another alternative to desalination is to gengineer plants for salt tolerance, so that we can irrigate them with seawater. Realistically that'd be hard even for a master gengineer, because where does the salt go? The best I can think of here is, "have the plants stuff all the salt into the parts of themselves that aren't eaten."
That has merit but only for naturally occurring salt-marsh regions whose ecology can already deal with the salt-laden stems and remains. Otherwise you're going to get a couple dozen harvests and then be left with salted soil that exceeds your gengineered plants' tolerances.
Before the situation becomes "desalinate or depopulate" the population should consider food importing. Cultivating crops is highly water intensive. Every acre dedicated to grain production requires 2.7MG of water/year, or equates to 61 people. Assuming you can capture the water, eliminating two square miles of agriculture will result in enough water for ~75,000 people. Importing food is not cheap but it may be cheaper than the desalination system and the environmental consequences.
Different scale, purpose, and intent. Not everyone can jam a 70' tower in their yard; there are permits and zoning issues. I can put a couple hundred square feet of cells on my roof with no problems. Today's cells produce about 1kW per 100sf and the area would only decrease.
Plus I can't buy a residential wind turbine for $1/w. For a turbine (installed) in the 1-5kW range it costs about $3/w, with a big chunk of the cost being the tower & installation. $3/w is the same as the solar listed.
I haven't found a turbine for $2/watt until I hit the 20KW level. $40,000 is a lot to recoup and 20kW is a lot of residential power. I'll note that a 20KW turbine is only about about 2% more than 10kW turbine, so wind scales real well once you commit to spending $40,000+.
Which means that individuals will still find solar to be more appealing than wind because a) no tower, b) no moving parts, c) no moving parts located at the top of a 70' tower. Communities will likely find wind to be more appealing because a) it scales well, b) it requires fairly small land area, c) wind is generally more available, especially if you are willing to build a 100' tower.
So stop being a downer on solar, it's really like watching BSD & Linux fanatics going at it. If nothing else, the wind industry should be promoting solar to help get uniform nationwide grid-tie legislation passed.
Holy crap, no. Desalination should be avoided wherever possible. Usage control and freshwater management should be maxed to the hilt prior to desalination.
Desalination is another way to say "salt generator." Do you know why the Romans would salt the lands of mortal enemies? So nothing would grow there. "But this is a desert" you say. Fine, don't care about a desert ecology, I can understand that, but that high salinity goes for the ocean, too. Most oceanic species cannot tolerate high salinity and it only takes one good SNAFU to result in a huge salt "spill" from the desalination product. See the Dead Sea for an example of a hypersaline environment with no macrobiological life.
Engineers should focus on freshwater capture systems, promote the use of "gray water" reclamation systems for agricultural needs, improved water delivery devices (showerheads, water faucets, drinking fountains), implementing low-usage appliances & sanitary facilities, and mitigation of transportation losses.
Desalination may be necessary but it should always be considered the last resort. Heck, I'd suggest emigration.
While it's not an "golden oldie" the Siemens S46 was an excellent example of a functional phone with no silly business. The battery lasted 6 days on average despite having web browsing, IM, "daily planner" and other such toys simply because it used a monochrome screen. it was large enough that I didnt' feel like if I sneezed it would vanish but still small enough to not be a brick. It had both analog and GSM systems so it almost never dropped signal. My only whine was that it didn't have bluetooth.
Unfortunately, AT&T sold off their wireless to Suckular, who dropped the phone and did everything in their power to drive off the AT&T phone users. After they tried to overbill me by changing my billing date and refusing to acknowledge the bonus minutes my plan came with, I bailed to Sprint and a Treo650.
The 650's nice but only b/c I was also lugging around a Visor. My wife has no idea how to make calls on it and it is a tad bricky. It gets about 3 days battery life (not bad considering my heavy PDA usage) and has bluetooth (which if I disabled would add about a day to the battery life). When I'm on vacation and not using the PDA side of the Treo, I really miss my S46.
What a horribly foolish and short sighted statement. While it is true that solar works when the sun shines, it also works when it is cloudy, albeit producing less power. Therefore the average annual power production of solar is dependable on an annual basis.
Power storage for solar can come in many forms. For a solar-thermal system (i.e. a stirling engine generator) you can simply store the heat using one of many mediums. For a photovoltaic system you can store the power using batteries, capacitors, hydrogen, heat, or even gravity by pumping water uphill. While the last three require a hybrid power system to access the stored energy (PV->H2/heat/gravity->electricity) they are not new technologies. In most areas you won't want a single power generation system so you'd have multiple plants anyway. The solar-thermal systems are particularly compatible with stored power as they work under direct solar energy, stored heat, or any combustible fuel (coal, wood, ethanol, petroleum, etc). And a solar/hydrogen power plant would double as a power source for hydrogen vehicles.
While it is true that areas closer to the equator see more power generation capacity from solar, even areas farther away still benefit from solar's ability to mitigate peak demand in summer and winter.
The cost of solar (PV or thermal) eliminates the almost incalculable secondary costs of conventional fuels (impacts on asthmatics from particulates, acid rain, ecological damage from mining coal or spilling oil, etc).
Coal contains about 3ppm of uranium. Ordinary soil contains about 1.8ppm of uranium. Coal may be an enviornmental disaster due to its chemical and kinematic properties, but a radioactive pollutant it is not.
That's great when the coal is unburned. Once you burn away the organics, the remaining ash (10% coal weight, typically) is around 30ppm. Even if you aren't concerned about the fact that at least a small percentage of particulates make it past the scrubbers resulting in higher ambient radiation directly downwind of coal plants than downwind of nuclear plants, you should be concerned about the roughly 120 million tons of coal ash, containing a total of 3,600 tons of uranium (30ppm over 120 million tons of ash)
Note that 12,000 tons of nuclear waste are created annually and it is only 3% high level waste, containing the equivalent of about 360 tons of uranium. So if we mixed all the nuclear waste into the coal ash, we'd only increase the radioactivity of the coal ash by 10%. If 3ppm isn't a problem, 3.3ppm shouldn't be much more of a problem.
Coal ash is often used in scenarios I don't find dangerous (concrete, metallurgy, etc) but I am somewhat concerned about it being used in home construction (wallboard, roofing materials, insulation), as a material for snow melting, but most particularly soil fill.
With 30ppm uranium, coal ash fill is a great potential source of radon gas. You know, that lung-cancer causing radioactive gas created in soils with a higher than average uranium density. Like, I dunno, having 15x the uranium density of common soil.
http://www.transportation.anl.gov/research/competi tions/futuretruck/2004_futuretruck_results.html
These take stock vehicles and modify them. The 2004 competition used a Ford Explorer as the baseline and the vehicles competed on vehicle safety, fuel efficiency, emissions, off-road performance and towing performance performance (2,000lb trailer on 7% grade). The winning team reached 25mpg (yeah, still crappy but a 33% improvement), passed all the tests, and the emissions were below the Ultra Low Emissions Vehicle (ULEV) requirements.
Those high schoolers from the "unrealistic" project move on to colleges that take part in Future Truck and eventually become the next round of automotive engineers. They need motivation, the opportunity to get their hands dirty and to see some results. Anyone who competed came up with a very high efficiency vehicle and some real skills to be proud of, skills that benefit us tomorrow, if not today.
FYI, China produces roughly 2 million one-cylinder diesel rural vehicles each year. They have a max speed of 50km/hr, max payload of 500kg and use 12-15 hp engines (many of them look like ATVs). They are also pollution machines that are environmental nightmares. If you want something more real-world, sponsor a project to design a low-emission, fuel-efficient, small diesel vehicle.
That's the point; it is a very subtle distinction. Only a lawyer can say with any certainty whether the liability is SPI's and/or that of the specific FTP-master. Since no one asked a lawyer, no one can be sure who is liable.
I'll point out that, as a non-lawyer who could be on a jury, if the ftp-masters have always approved licenses as standard operating procedures for the Debian project (a project "owned" by SPI) then it could easily be seen that the ftp-masters have been granted the authority by the project and thus SPI.
This is a case where "we've always done it that way" and "what the law says you should do" might be at odds. I wouldn't expect coders to be legal experts any more than I'd expect a lawyer to hack machine code. I would, however, expect a coder to be aware of their ignorance in legal matters just as much as I would a lawyer be aware of their coding limitations. When Debian has legal experts on retainer, via SPI, it starts becoming willfull ignorance of the law.
As a potential juror I might show lenience to someone who can't afford a lawyer and did the best they could but if you can call a lawyer whenever you want and you REFUSE to do so, I guarantee I would vote to bring down the mjolnir of law-hammers.