In a lot of areas the load at night is HIGH in winter, when people heat. Throw in hot water, the stove, big-screen tv, and maybe a load or two of laundry, and evening is a peak period, and overnight, as it gets colder, demand stays high.
Now throw in an electric car with a frozen battery... a very ugly scenario.
Actually 200 amp (and even 400 amp) 240v entries became features in plenty of new houses in Quebec when power rates were so low that electric heating (even heating an outdoor pool in the winter) was the cheapest way to go.
Nobody bothered putting in "just" 100 amp entries unless they were aiming for the lowest price point.
It will be less of a problem in California because California has been bleeding jobs and investment, and more jobs.
People are leaving California. It's not JUST the rotten schools, the traffic jams, the lack of jobs, the rising budget deficit, with no solution in sight, the huge stockpile of underwater homes - it's all of them combined.
A destitute California won't be able to continue to offer state $$$$ (or IOUs, since they won't have any "real" money) for switching to an electric car.
That's the problem - one of the defenses did work. The "lack of personal standing."
You can't sue for lost revenue if you're not the copyright holder. Further, you can't sue for lost revenue if you can't prove that, you know, you actually lost revenue.
Which, come to think of it, is a problem with their current suit - they can't prove they lost revenue because of a successful defense against their tactics, because a successful defense means they weren't entitled to the MOH-NEE!.
Then again, too many lawyers have this sense of personal entitlement. Just look at your politi-critters.
Easy prediction - within the next decade, someone will successfully sue for the right of non-lawyers to represent people in court, on the following basis:
Religious freedom guarantees. Several religious sects take the "no doctor of the law shall enter into the kingdom" literally, and as an injunction against being represented by lawyers. To allow ONLY them a religious exemption is unconstitutional, as it discriminates against non-believers (reverse discrimination);
Full and complete defense: Money, money, money. An interested, motivated party who is not a lawyer may be better able, in some cases, to provide a full and complete defense, than ANY paid lawyer, no matter what the price; but on top of that, most people simply can't AFFORD the cost of "professional" services;
Freedom of association: Some countries have a constitutional guarantee of freedom of association. The requirement to "associate" your legal case with a lawyer to represent you is contrary to such guarantees;
Freedom of political expression: Insisting on a non-lawyer is certainly an act of political speech; more so than currently-protected political expressions such as flag-burning;
As in this case, you don't need all 4 to be valid - any one succeeding will do.
Without the space program, we wouldn't have personal computers. How much has that contributed to the economy? I couldn't give you an off-hand figure, but I know that, as a software programmer, it contributes to my personal "economy."
Well, given the choice, I think I'd rather stand near a burning landfill. They'll both make me and my clothes stink, but at least the landfill doesn't cost me anything, and I can always stand up-wind:-)
It's Windows that is the regulated monopoly and it's already under supervision
The consent decree has expired. And as I pointed out, Microsoft has pretty much zero space in mobile. No anti-trust issues.
They even have to offer an option screen on first run for their web browser in Europe, something that has come standard in any sane OS distribution for many years.
I've never seen this "option screen" on any other OS. Certainly not in linux or bsd.
There's no way that desktop Windows could come bundled with a cellphone.
Why not? Apple can sell a mac bundled with an iPod or an iPad or an iPhone...
Besides, Microsoft is an international company. They can be crucified in a lot of places.
The Irish will be happy to hear that... oh, wait...
One a month for 20 years is not a "one-trick pony" - it's a mass-produced Mack Truck. Something that would have gotten a permanent orbiting space station around earth, another one around the moon, and a permanent colony on the moon.
"Space planes" are like sending a letter by envelope to your niece in BC, then paying return postage for the empty envelope. A really dumb idea.
The idea is to get as much mass INTO space as possible. The more you leave up there, the less dead weight goes into supporting your return structure's functionality.
Think of what mass-producing the monster version of the Saturn V would have meant, that 989,000 pounds into LEO translates into 350,000 pounds into lunar orbit.. Even one launch a month would have quickly led to a permanent lunar colony.
Think of it - 4 launches into LEO would have given us a space station almost 4x the size of the current one - and another 8 would have given a second one twice the size of the current one in orbit around the moon. All within the first year, at a total launch cost of around $6 billion.
And since the design of the station components could be simpler (no need to make each unit comparatively small, and then bolt them together, when they could be lifted in larger sections) the cost of the stations would be less as well.
When you have that much lifting capacity, you don't have to make things so finely engineered that, for example, people standing on a floor in 1 g can buckle them.
I agree the shuttle was amazingly stupid. First, because it's mission requirements and configuration were severely compromised by it's requirement to be able to do high-inclination missions (military satellites and military reconnaissance) which meant both payload size and dimensions got down-sized so that it could work with that flight profile.
Second, the Saturn V, with a truly huge throw weight (262,000 pounds to LEO), could launch full assemblies into orbit that would require many smaller missions to complete. The 500 tons of the space station could have been done in just 4 launches.
Some of the crazier upgrades planned could have done it in ONE launch (the twinned booster with SRBs, for example, 989,000 pounds to LEO)...
Then while you're at it, leave the upper stage in orbit as raw material... like skylab...
It doesn't make sense to bring so much bulk home on every mission. They even had plans for single-person lifting bodies for individual re-entry, so you wouldn't need to bring everyone home at once. Cheap, flexible... a lot better than a "space bus" with no hope of any economies of scale.
Israel did the invade and get out quickly thing. Ditto the British in the Falklands. You need a lot more to HOLD than to just do a quick in-and-out, which is what I said.
Also, the Falklands population is 3,140. Britain deployed a lot more than 4x that number of personnel in the Falklands war.
And if I recall my history correctly, Germany lost both world wars.
In 1934, War Plan Red was amended
to authorize the immediate first use of poison gas against
Canadians and to use strategic bombing to destroy Halifax
if it could not be captured.
In February 1935, the War Department arranged a
Congressional appropriation of $57 million dollars to
build three border air bases for the purposes of
pre-emptive surprise attacks on Canadian air fields. The
base in the Great Lakes region was to be camouflaged as a
civilian airport and was to "be capable of dominating the
industrial heart of Canada, the Ontario Peninsula" from p.
61 of the February 11-13, 1935, hearings of the Committee
on Military Affairs, House of Representatives, on Air
Defense Bases (H.R. 6621 and H.R. 4130). This testimony
was to have been secret but was published by mistake. See
the New York Times, May 1, 1935, p. 1.
In August 1935, the US held its largest peacetime
military manoeuvres in history, with 36,000 troops
converging at the Canadian border south of Ottawa, and
another 15,000 held in reserve in Pennsylvania. The war
game scenario was a US motorized invasion of Canada, with
the defending forces initially repulsing the invading Blue
forces, but eventually to lose "outnumbered and outgunned"
when Blue reinforcements arrive. This according to the
Army's pamphlet "Souvenir of of the First Army Maneuvers:
The Greatest Peace Time Event in US History" (p.2).
The following document is a declassified public
domain document and may be freely reproduced. This should
be of particular interest to people in the Halifx and
Quebec City regions, then considered to be the most
strategic cities in Canada.
It couldn't have succeeded then, and even less so now. We have a new secret weapon - Poutine.
I wasn't thinking of the cost of the fuel, but the dead weight of the oxidant and the structure to contain it. The biggest problem then with dyna-soar was having to cool the wings at hypersonic speed so they didn't just melt. A rocket doesn't have that issue. No wings.
So the ideas looked at the time involved circulating liquid hydrogen through the wing to keep it cool - sort of workable for the launch portion, despite the increased complexity and additional dead weight, since you can then burn it, but absolutely useless for the return trip, where you want to just dispose of the H2 after it's done its job cooling, instead of burning it for more thrust.
Now that we've solved the wing problem w/o needing to use liquid coolants, the wing structure is much simpler - as is the engine, since we don't have to have one that can use both liquid and vapor fuels.
That was because they hadn't solved the problem of cooling the leading edges of the lifting surfaces - now solved.
We don't need to pipe liquid hydrogen through the wing to cool it, so there goes all the dead weight of the plumbing associated with it, and the associated losses of carrying enough extra H2 that won't be used for thrust for cooling on re-entry.
It makes a big difference. The space shuttle wouldn't have been possible either without it.
On the other hand: "The holiday season is coming, so I suspect I'll be giving a couple of blu-ray players as presents," offered Barbara Hudson, a blogger on Slashdot who goes by "Tom" on the site.
It has a lot to do with the rule of thumb of needing 4x the "boots on the ground" for an external force to win.
Do the math, and you know that the only countries with enough people to actually be able to raise up a large enough army to win a ground war in Afghanistan (pop. 30 million) or Iraq (pop. 31 million) are China or India, and that neither has anywhere near enough trained soldiers to even think about it.
Even Russia, #1 with 21 million troops, couldn't do it.
Today, it's limited to "Go in, do the job (and make sure you have a clear-cut definition of "the job"), declare victory, and get the heck out." Trying to hold on or succumb to mission creep just gets you stuck in a never-ending morass. Same as Afghanistan was to the Russians, Viet Nam to the US, etc.
Space planes were looking good back in the early 1960s. The early designs, such as Dyna-Soar (Dynamic Soaring) weren't practical back then because of materials. We could easily do them today, instead of wasting money on the Aries.
Not needing to lug your oxidant along on the first stage is a HUGE win. The same $ would give you a 5x to 10x greater LTO capacity. At that cost, it's not a stunt - it's a true space tug, unlike the shuttle.
Why don't you pull your head out of your ass? Is there some reason that you seem to walk around with a permanent fucking erection for yourself? Is your shit that fucking radioactive hot? Is your wife a fucking super model or something? Jesus. It's people like you that make me think that there is a purpose for torture, because I'd like to see you naked and blindfolded with a fucking battery charger clipped to your cock, in a dark room shackled to the fucking floor.
which part of you got offended the most? The 49 yo, the grandmother, the feminist or the c programmer?
I'm thinkin 20 years of programming is going to make anyone a bit touchy.
I would suspect it's the "49 years old"... no woman likes to admit they're about to hit the big 5-0, and many of us stay 39 years old well into our 50s just like most guys suddenly have a second childhood, complete with sports car and 20-something girlfriend, around that age. Neither sex is immune to denial:-)
It can't be the 20 years of c programming, because I'm in the same situation - you generally don't stay a coder that long unless you enjoy it.
And it certainly shouldn't be feminists, because feminists nowadays recognize that we don't all have to be pant-suit-wearing, bra-burning, man-hating asexual clones.
And it can't be the "grandmother" thing... unless you're granny and you
re afraid that your relatives want to stick granny into one of these and fire you into orbit for 9 months without life support. We all probably have one relative who, in our darker moments, we like to imagine might "benefit" from such treatment, but we don't REALLY wish that on anyone.
With so many usb and wireless devices, nobody uses a docking station any more.
Printers? usb and wireless (I saw a wireless COLOR LASER on sale for $99.99 Huh???? $99.99? Amazing).
Networking? You already have wireless if you have a laptop, and you probably have either a 100mpbs or a 1gbps ethernet port too.
External displays? vga, svga, hdmi - you probably have at least two of those 3 options.
External keyboard and mouse? Plug them into your external monitor's usb hub, along with any other usb devices, like external storage, then just plug the hub into your laptop usb connection. Two wires - video and usb - to rule the all:-)
The thing is that touch typing does NOT involve feeling keys
I learned how to touch-type in school, and I can tell when I miss a key by feel. Without that feel feedback, I would be seriously slowed down.
Part of the reason is that I allow my hands to roam over the whole keyboard - for me, that's faster than using the "correct" finger all the time to type the "right" key. I'd rather not lose the speed advantage that the extra feedback gives me, and have to debug more code because of stupid typos, or type slower because I'm forced to do it the "right way."
Also, there are times when I'm NOT watching the material I'm typing, at least not 100% - like when I'm trying to finish something and reply to a question at the same time - I'll start talking while finishing up, then give the person my whole attention - but that means first acknowledging that they're there, which means, if you're polite, looking at them.
Also, often I'll be looking at something on the second monitor while I'm typing - I'm not going to do an imitation of a bobble-head just because my keyboard no longer gives me tactile feedback. Sure, if I only used one screen, your argument might make some sense, but I've been using dual monitors for more than 2 decades. Why would I want to cripple myself by using an inadequate input device?
I have to disagree. It might work for you, but for me, and probably for many others who have developed their own style over the years, a non-tactile keyboard is going to just be another source of errors.
For a notebook with ONLY a 14" screen, 6.1 pounds is a boat anchor territory.
6.1 pounds is 17" - 18" desktop replacement territory.
14" screens are not all that great to work with. They're SMALL, in comparison to 17" or greater. A 17.4" display has more than 50% more screen area than a 14.1". That's screen area that isn't broken up by a hinge and two bezels.
Buy a single 17" or 18" instead. For less money, you can get one with 1920x1080, 8 gigs of ram (instead of 4), 1 tb of storage (instead of 64o gigs), and an i7 (instead of an i5).
And if you STILL need more screen space, plug up to two external monitors.
Besides, pretty much everywhere you go, there's going to be a spare, decent-sized LCD hanging around if you need a second screen. It's not like they're $999.00 apiece any more.
So the "read your spreadsheet across 2 screens" scenario is pretty much DOA - you can wander into most offices and just plug a lighter laptop into a spare screen (and as more office workers switch to laptops, more are already using their old screen as a second screen, so again, just the natural hardware refresh is killing the market for this in offices).
At home? In bed? 6.1 pounds? That would be like lugging a copy of the Oxford Dictionary to bed to read. At 6.1 pounds, it adds new meaning to the term "heavy reading".
Take a lighter laptop and rotate the screen 90 degrees, then use your laptops' remote to navigate. Problem solved for free!
Slashdot Mirror
Now throw in an electric car with a frozen battery ... a very ugly scenario.
Actually 200 amp (and even 400 amp) 240v entries became features in plenty of new houses in Quebec when power rates were so low that electric heating (even heating an outdoor pool in the winter) was the cheapest way to go.
Nobody bothered putting in "just" 100 amp entries unless they were aiming for the lowest price point.
People are leaving California. It's not JUST the rotten schools, the traffic jams, the lack of jobs, the rising budget deficit, with no solution in sight, the huge stockpile of underwater homes - it's all of them combined.
A destitute California won't be able to continue to offer state $$$$ (or IOUs, since they won't have any "real" money) for switching to an electric car.
You can't sue for lost revenue if you're not the copyright holder. Further, you can't sue for lost revenue if you can't prove that, you know, you actually lost revenue.
Which, come to think of it, is a problem with their current suit - they can't prove they lost revenue because of a successful defense against their tactics, because a successful defense means they weren't entitled to the MOH-NEE!.
Then again, too many lawyers have this sense of personal entitlement. Just look at your politi-critters.
Easy prediction - within the next decade, someone will successfully sue for the right of non-lawyers to represent people in court, on the following basis:
As in this case, you don't need all 4 to be valid - any one succeeding will do.
-- Barbie
-- Barbie
About age 38, all by itself, a Mazda Miata suddenly started seeming like a reasonable transportation solution
You do know that the Miata just screams "chick car", just like the VW Cabriolet and New Beetle? Especially the convertible models.
-- Barbie
...We have a new secret weapon - Poutine.
Oh gods. Why didn't you keep it a secret? (at least until the Party Congress on Monday...)
Because we've upgraded to a newer version - Italian Poutine.
Not only is it an offer you can't refuse - after one bite, you don't WANT to refuse it.
-- Barbie
The consent decree has expired. And as I pointed out, Microsoft has pretty much zero space in mobile. No anti-trust issues.
I've never seen this "option screen" on any other OS. Certainly not in linux or bsd.
Why not? Apple can sell a mac bundled with an iPod or an iPad or an iPhone ...
The Irish will be happy to hear that ... oh, wait ...
Big jobs require big tools.
The idea is to get as much mass INTO space as possible. The more you leave up there, the less dead weight goes into supporting your return structure's functionality.
Think of what mass-producing the monster version of the Saturn V would have meant, that 989,000 pounds into LEO translates into 350,000 pounds into lunar orbit.. Even one launch a month would have quickly led to a permanent lunar colony.
Think of it - 4 launches into LEO would have given us a space station almost 4x the size of the current one - and another 8 would have given a second one twice the size of the current one in orbit around the moon. All within the first year, at a total launch cost of around $6 billion.
And since the design of the station components could be simpler (no need to make each unit comparatively small, and then bolt them together, when they could be lifted in larger sections) the cost of the stations would be less as well.
When you have that much lifting capacity, you don't have to make things so finely engineered that, for example, people standing on a floor in 1 g can buckle them.
1. IF the person is not logged in, then they have to log in to pay for something/
2. IF the person is logged in, if they don't have payment info on hand, request it.
3 IF the person is logged in and their payment info is on hand, just let them buy it.
There's no "creativity" in what's an obvious step - and actually easier to implement than a shopping cart.
-- Barbie
Second, the Saturn V, with a truly huge throw weight (262,000 pounds to LEO), could launch full assemblies into orbit that would require many smaller missions to complete. The 500 tons of the space station could have been done in just 4 launches.
Some of the crazier upgrades planned could have done it in ONE launch (the twinned booster with SRBs, for example, 989,000 pounds to LEO) ...
Then while you're at it, leave the upper stage in orbit as raw material ... like skylab ...
It doesn't make sense to bring so much bulk home on every mission. They even had plans for single-person lifting bodies for individual re-entry, so you wouldn't need to bring everyone home at once. Cheap, flexible ... a lot better than a "space bus" with no hope of any economies of scale.
Also, the Falklands population is 3,140. Britain deployed a lot more than 4x that number of personnel in the Falklands war.
And if I recall my history correctly, Germany lost both world wars.
On to matters closer to home, the US planned to invade Canada, and the information was declassified in 1974
It couldn't have succeeded then, and even less so now. We have a new secret weapon - Poutine.
So the ideas looked at the time involved circulating liquid hydrogen through the wing to keep it cool - sort of workable for the launch portion, despite the increased complexity and additional dead weight, since you can then burn it, but absolutely useless for the return trip, where you want to just dispose of the H2 after it's done its job cooling, instead of burning it for more thrust.
Now that we've solved the wing problem w/o needing to use liquid coolants, the wing structure is much simpler - as is the engine, since we don't have to have one that can use both liquid and vapor fuels.
We don't need to pipe liquid hydrogen through the wing to cool it, so there goes all the dead weight of the plumbing associated with it, and the associated losses of carrying enough extra H2 that won't be used for thrust for cooling on re-entry.
It makes a big difference. The space shuttle wouldn't have been possible either without it.
-- Barbie
Tom:
Tell your woman to get her own damned Slashdot account.
That is all.
Please read my slashdot profile.
Or you could read this article from linuxinsider:
That is all;--p
-- Barbie
Do the math, and you know that the only countries with enough people to actually be able to raise up a large enough army to win a ground war in Afghanistan (pop. 30 million) or Iraq (pop. 31 million) are China or India, and that neither has anywhere near enough trained soldiers to even think about it.
Even Russia, #1 with 21 million troops, couldn't do it.
Today, it's limited to "Go in, do the job (and make sure you have a clear-cut definition of "the job"), declare victory, and get the heck out." Trying to hold on or succumb to mission creep just gets you stuck in a never-ending morass. Same as Afghanistan was to the Russians, Viet Nam to the US, etc.
Not needing to lug your oxidant along on the first stage is a HUGE win. The same $ would give you a 5x to 10x greater LTO capacity. At that cost, it's not a stunt - it's a true space tug, unlike the shuttle.
Why don't you pull your head out of your ass? Is there some reason that you seem to walk around with a permanent fucking erection for yourself? Is your shit that fucking radioactive hot? Is your wife a fucking super model or something? Jesus. It's people like you that make me think that there is a purpose for torture, because I'd like to see you naked and blindfolded with a fucking battery charger clipped to your cock, in a dark room shackled to the fucking floor.
Wow. Just ... wow.
Hey everybody - Dick Cheney posts on slashdot!
which part of you got offended the most? The 49 yo, the grandmother, the feminist or the c programmer? I'm thinkin 20 years of programming is going to make anyone a bit touchy.
I would suspect it's the "49 years old" ... no woman likes to admit they're about to hit the big 5-0, and many of us stay 39 years old well into our 50s just like most guys suddenly have a second childhood, complete with sports car and 20-something girlfriend, around that age. Neither sex is immune to denial :-)
It can't be the 20 years of c programming, because I'm in the same situation - you generally don't stay a coder that long unless you enjoy it.
And it certainly shouldn't be feminists, because feminists nowadays recognize that we don't all have to be pant-suit-wearing, bra-burning, man-hating asexual clones.
And it can't be the "grandmother" thing ... unless you're granny and you
re afraid that your relatives want to stick granny into one of these and fire you into orbit for 9 months without life support. We all probably have one relative who, in our darker moments, we like to imagine might "benefit" from such treatment, but we don't REALLY wish that on anyone.
No, I'd guess it's the age thing.
-- Barbie
Printers? usb and wireless (I saw a wireless COLOR LASER on sale for $99.99 Huh???? $99.99? Amazing).
Networking? You already have wireless if you have a laptop, and you probably have either a 100mpbs or a 1gbps ethernet port too.
External displays? vga, svga, hdmi - you probably have at least two of those 3 options.
External keyboard and mouse? Plug them into your external monitor's usb hub, along with any other usb devices, like external storage, then just plug the hub into your laptop usb connection. Two wires - video and usb - to rule the all :-)
Docking stations are so 1990.
-- Barbie
The thing is that touch typing does NOT involve feeling keys
I learned how to touch-type in school, and I can tell when I miss a key by feel. Without that feel feedback, I would be seriously slowed down.
Part of the reason is that I allow my hands to roam over the whole keyboard - for me, that's faster than using the "correct" finger all the time to type the "right" key. I'd rather not lose the speed advantage that the extra feedback gives me, and have to debug more code because of stupid typos, or type slower because I'm forced to do it the "right way."
Also, there are times when I'm NOT watching the material I'm typing, at least not 100% - like when I'm trying to finish something and reply to a question at the same time - I'll start talking while finishing up, then give the person my whole attention - but that means first acknowledging that they're there, which means, if you're polite, looking at them.
Also, often I'll be looking at something on the second monitor while I'm typing - I'm not going to do an imitation of a bobble-head just because my keyboard no longer gives me tactile feedback. Sure, if I only used one screen, your argument might make some sense, but I've been using dual monitors for more than 2 decades. Why would I want to cripple myself by using an inadequate input device?
I have to disagree. It might work for you, but for me, and probably for many others who have developed their own style over the years, a non-tactile keyboard is going to just be another source of errors.
-- Barbie
6.1 pounds is 17" - 18" desktop replacement territory.
14" screens are not all that great to work with. They're SMALL, in comparison to 17" or greater. A 17.4" display has more than 50% more screen area than a 14.1". That's screen area that isn't broken up by a hinge and two bezels.
Buy a single 17" or 18" instead. For less money, you can get one with 1920x1080, 8 gigs of ram (instead of 4), 1 tb of storage (instead of 64o gigs), and an i7 (instead of an i5).
And if you STILL need more screen space, plug up to two external monitors.
So the "read your spreadsheet across 2 screens" scenario is pretty much DOA - you can wander into most offices and just plug a lighter laptop into a spare screen (and as more office workers switch to laptops, more are already using their old screen as a second screen, so again, just the natural hardware refresh is killing the market for this in offices).
At home? In bed? 6.1 pounds? That would be like lugging a copy of the Oxford Dictionary to bed to read. At 6.1 pounds, it adds new meaning to the term "heavy reading".
Take a lighter laptop and rotate the screen 90 degrees, then use your laptops' remote to navigate. Problem solved for free!