Palm has a massive problem, and that problem is, a Palm Pilot is really only good for one thing, and that's what it was good for in the '90s.
They've got a pretty strict monopoly on stuff for the Palm, and they'll charge you for anything. There's nothing free in the world of the Palm.
The biggest problem with that is, there's nothing particularly good in the world of the Palm either.
If the company wants to gain back the market share it's been consistently losing, they need to truly open their product up, and give open source and independant developers the tools they need to make utilities that will make people like me want to buy their product. I've got a Tungsten E, and I can't use it for anything. The hardware is fine, but there's no software to do what I want to do with it.
Until then, they're going to get raped by the PocketPC, because it has a more open platform, and the Blackberry, because it does the few things anyone cares about better.
It's easy if you use your amazing powers for evil instead of good.
Who else but a nerd could understand the long scientific explanations of the locations of nerve clusters and evolutionary biology which explain the proper use of a vagina?
Shit man, if I can figure out vi, I can figure out a vagina.
"The contrary Republican was Representative Tim Johnson of Illinois, described by the Almanac of American Politics as a lawmaker "with maverick tendencies," as demonstrated by his opposition to much of the Bush administration's record on the environment."
I thought it was Ron Paul too.
Ron Paul instead didn't vote on this bill. That seems strange at face value, but remember this issue is contrary to his premise. The entire program was unconstitutional. Why would Ron Paul bother voting for the paticulars of a program he knows never should have existed in the first place?
I think a better idea would be to simply license the original X-Box for OSS development. A few million dollars isn't going to do anything for production scale hardware development, but it'll easily buy licensing from Microsoft to release a softmod disk with OpenXDK tools.
I think the problem is that with OSS, everyone gets a say, but with a good game, you need a vision.
Most games I see created purely by programmers tend to suffer from 'developeritis'. When it's a bittorrent client or even a web browser, that's fine. I actually like having some of the extra guts showing. When it's a game, I don't want to be able to tweak all the enemies. I don't want to know what the enemies are thinking. I don't want to know, and I ESPECIALLY don't want to see numbers reminding me that I'm playing a game.
Some of the most enduring games of all time were created by a single programmer working with 512 bytes of memory and a video update you had to keep up with or you'd mess up the display. The difference is, the games weren't designed for programmers. That's where OSS will fail every time.
The RTG has a few benefits. For one thing, it's one power source that'll never stop putting out energy. This means that you're charging while you drive and while you rest. That helps the equation somewhat. The fact that the electric system you'd be using to utilize the power is incredibly efficient compared to the 20% of an internal combustion engine means you can't say "the energy is equivilent to 6 litres of gas" and have it mean anything.
Let's look at this from a pure energy perspective.
Using the calculations on the Wikipedia article on electric cars, The Honda Insight uses 0.52 kWh/mi. We'll assume we want to travel on the highway (because it's a pretty energy intensive state), and work from there. It'd take our vehicle about 31.2kW to travel 60 miles, which we can assume would take an hour to travel.
If our RTG is a 7.8kW/hr model like you suggest(Though the article didn't suggest that was a maximum possible, only that it was the maximum created), we're looking at 187.2kWh created in a day in terms of heat. This means that with the energy you'd generate in 24 hours, you could travel for exactly 6 hours if we were talking 100% efficiency. Range of about 360 miles.
Now, that's a silly thing for me to say, of course, because efficiency will never be 100%. On the other hand, since this thing isn't going into space, we can do better than a thermocouple to gather heat. If we used this RTG to boil water instead of heat thermocouples, we'd be able to get 60-90% efficiency, according to the wiki article on steam engines. That's a bit better. Let's use something like that instead, so we can get closer to a conservative 30% efficiency from the 5% we get with the thermocouples. We get about 2 hours of driving time out of 56kWh total gathered energy. To get that, you'd never have to pull up to a gas station again. Your car's power supply, though it would degrade to 85% of capacity every 20 years, could remain useful long after you're dead. You'd have to store the energy, but you could get some forklift batteries which would happily store a day's energy for 20 years before they need servicing. I'd prefer advanced supercapacitors, but the tech isn't there yyet. You can buy supercapacitors right now which will start a diesel motor in 40 below without problems, but they'll only do it once. There's just not enough juice yet.
Now there'd be trade-offs here and there, but it pretty much balances out. You don't need 32kg of shielding for a 4.5kg source if you're not going to be re-entering the atmostphere, but the steam engine would weigh more. The batteries would weigh a lot, but my vehicle carries 120kg of fuel at full load and I don't see many that don't carry at least 60. You wwouldn't need a motor and you could design the vehicle to reduce the weight based on that fact, but batteries DO weigh a lot.
The biggest problem is probably just that people would be afraid of driving around with a chunk of glowing rock under their hoods. If you could get past that, you'd have an excellent power source that could last for a very long time, and would definitely make the folks in the middle east very cranky because they wouldn't get any money for our transportation for quite some time(Now that's just wishful thinking. There isn't likely enough material for mass production).
I can concieve of an internal combusion engine which functions by spraying water onto a piston with a sacrificial cesium, rubidium, sodium or potassium slab. The end result would function, I'm certain(The only problem I'd see would be making sure the waste products on the slab were removed for the next cycle. The question is, would it be considered "water powered"?
I'd argue it isn't. The energy which releases the hydrogen is a result of the reactivity of the alkali metal. It's the alkali in my example which is the secret ingredient which makes the reaction work, even though the water is consumed in the reaction.
It's the same reason that gasoline and diesel engines aren't considered "air powered". The air doesn't provide the volitility, it just provides raw materials for the substance which is reacting and releasing energy.
I've always wondered if an RTG coupled to banks of supercapacitors could be the solution for an electric car you'd never have to fuel up during the effective life of the battery? If you ran out of juice, just rest the night and you're ready to rock and roll for another days travel.
This seems pretty overcomplicated to me. Why not just provide a standard DC voltage signal at any given voltage, then use a switching regulator to get the voltage down to where you need it, and where you need to step up, just use an appropriate step-up circuit? It'd mean your supply would cost a few bucks instead of 100, it'd probably cost less on the peripheral side, and there'd be no further problems.
There's an entire industrial world out there that runs at 24VDC, why can't we design consumer hardware around a standard voltage too?
That shit isn't beer. Beer is made with barley, hopps, malt, sometimes wheat, yeast, and water.
American 'beer flavoured coolers' are made with distilled rice and corn alcohols added to artificial flavours.
That said, it is a matter of taste. There's no right or wrong answer. Some people like beer flavoured coolers, but myself, I really enjoy a good beer. You know, the way they've made beer for 6,000 years. I've got nothing against the coolers, but when you're adding rice and corn alcohol to flavouring, that's not how you make beer.
Man, I've never payed $200 for a video card and I've played most of the big games that have come along.
Seconded. I've always been able to play the latest games by taking advantage of the fact that you don't need the latest and greatest to play the games. A 100 dollar budget video card will give you all the features you need, for a fraction of the price for the same card a year or two earlier.
Considering the capital investment required to convert to a full CNC shop, I'd strongly disagree, and suggest that you'd have to look at all the numbers and do a cost/benefit analysis.
We've got a multi-million dollar machine shop with a handful of machinists, which has relatively low utilization but handles mission critical tasks for our site. To convert to a full CNC shop would cost millions. Those millions would pay our machinists for years. Despite the capital investment, most of the labour reduction would be offset by the maintenance employees who would have to be out there pretty constantly, ensuring all the equipment is lubricated, calibrated, and clean, and in the short term, benefits paid out to laid-off machinists would be a pretty good chunk of change as well. The increase in production capacity would go unused. The increase in precision wouldn't result in greater uptime for our site or greater quality for our product.
In our case, the payback period would be decades, if converting to CNC machines paid back at all. Odds are better the incredibly huge gamble on a capital project with negligable returns would rightfully never go through.
Just becuase something is cooler or higher tech doesn't mean it's automatically better.
I work for a paper mill that's been in operation for 40 years. Our entire CAD database is accessible from R14, because we don't need anything more.
We've considered updating, but at 6000 dollars/license, we just convert contractor drawings to R14 instead of spend tens of thousands of dollars on software that won't be as effective as what we've been using for years without any problem.
Remember; In the field, not everyone does everything the same.
The requirements you're implying should be imposed on contract and licensing law with these statements are staggering. You're basically demanding that all agreements be completely performed in person simultaneously or else they are unconscionable.
According to my sources, duress is defined as a "threat of harm made to compel a person to do something against his or her will or judgment; esp., a wrongful threat made by one person to compel a manifestation of seeming assent by another person to a transaction without real volition."
It seems to me that threatening to 'take back' software that has already been bought and paid for if you don't accept some new contract after you've already agreed to a common sense implied contract of "I spend this money, I own this software and, by natural common sense extension, the right to use it for it's intended purpose on my PC" is using a wrongful threat of harm to compel a person to 'click through' this agreement.
The wrongful threat of harm increases with the cost of the software or device involved. If you bought a brand new $10,000 alienware PC only to not have use of it because you don't like the EULA of Windows Vista, basically Microsoft is holding your $10,000 computer hostage after you've paid for it with the implicit, common sense contract of "You've spent $10,000 on a new computer including Windows Vista, that price includes the cost of licensing and media, you have the right to use your new computer"
By contrast, the GPL doesn't hold but the right to distribute modified software, which you never had any other right to, implied or otherwise. Even if you paid for the product, copyright law implicitly protects all copyrighted software from redistribution in any form without the contract.
Hell, the current regime still permits post-purchase refusal and refund
The current regime does NOT permit de facto post-purchase refusal and refund, becuase software retailers don't allow refunds on opened software, and computer vendors don't have a system in place for a reasonable person to recieve a refund for software they have declined to accept the EULA for. There is no reasonable ability to refuse the contract, because it requires going to extraordinary lengths like these. This man was denied a refund three times.
Good lord, almost every freaking consumer product you buy now has licenses included.
You'll have to point to examples. I've bought a lot of things over the past couple years, and the only thing that's come with a contract is software.
I've bought a truck, it came with no EULA. I've bought a skidoo, no EULA. I've bought dishes, pots, pans, and no EULA. I've bought furniture. No EULA. Got a great deal on a Queen size bed. No EULA. I've bought a wireless phone, and while it came with a piece of paper clarifying it's status under the appropriate laws regarding it's creation of interference which could affect other devices, but no EULA. Barbeque, despite being a dangerous gas appliance, no EULA. Propane for the barbeque, despite being an extremely dangerous substance which can't be dispensed without a proper license, no EULA.
I've even bought 3 cellular phones, 2 pay-as-you-go and 1 regular, and while I had to sign a contract before they'd accept my first payment and give me service for the regular phone, I didn't have to spend 2 seconds looking at a EULA, because there was none -- and there was none for the pay-as-you-go phones at all.
The only thing I've bought that has come with a EULA or equivilent contract to be agreed to after money has changed hands under threat of denial of service is software.
I'm sure there's contrary case law, but that's a failure of the legal system. Far too many geriatrics will accept a ridiculous legal arguement because the phrase 'on computers' is thrown in front, and that's going to be a roadblock for younger, less ignorant lawyers and judges as they transition into positions of judicial authority over the next decade.
The hilarious part of the analogy is that water through a pipe is ridiculously complicated compared to voltage. You get started on laminar vs. turbulent flows, reynold's number, height, pressure head, velocity head, pressure drop, K factor, it all just adds up to something way more difficult than simple Ohms Law.
It's only NATURAL to have to press more than one key to switch modes. It's completely intuitive that creating arbitrary shapes be part of the right-click menu but mode switching isn't.
I've written editors where everything was a completely unintuitive mix of awkward states and keyboard commands that make sense only if you were there when they were coded and you know which hand was laying where at the time.
I rewrote the editor to use a simple mouse interface with menus, dialog boxes, and scroll bars.
The first editor was way faster to use. It was insanely fast. You could do anything in a single keystroke. The problem was, I needed to check the documentation in order to do anything other than the 3 functions I'd memorized.
The second editor, on the other hand I can pick up with 0 training, 0 manual, 0 anything. It just works, and it's immediately apparent how to do stuff I want.
The first one was NOT intuitive. The second one was. Speed be damned. I spent a couple days learning how to use Blender, and it's closer to the first editor I made than any program I've ever used.
Now, for software that's actually fairly intuitive after a learning curve, I love AutoCAD. I use it at work, and while it's easy to use for a beginner (The basic tools are all buttons), the keyboard interface, a command line, is actually sane and so a user who knows what he or she wants to do can do it very quickly.
None of the evidence supporting such conspiracy theories would hold up in a court of law. Presenting just the evidence which could would leave such a book pretty spartan.
If your reasons for hating a group are based in fact, then it's not hate speech under Canadian law.
It's legal to say "I hate Muslims because Muslim extremists ran planes into the World Trade centre on September 11th, 2001" because it's verifiable fact. It's not legal to say "I hate Jews because The Jews caused 9/11...And World War II." because neither of those facts can be proven to be true.
Just think; George Bush could've been charged with hate speech for his lies about Iraq if he lived in Canada. He sure as hell incited violence against Iraqis...
It's a bit oldschool, but maybe a better idea would be to drive a DC brushless motor with the voltage from the solar panels et. al., attached to a variable size pulley, which would be attached to an AC motor attached to the grid. Control the pulley size based on the phase shift between the induced voltage and the line voltage, and you've got yourself a ghetto method for relatively high quality conversion of DC power to mains power.
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Palm has a massive problem, and that problem is, a Palm Pilot is really only good for one thing, and that's what it was good for in the '90s.
They've got a pretty strict monopoly on stuff for the Palm, and they'll charge you for anything. There's nothing free in the world of the Palm.
The biggest problem with that is, there's nothing particularly good in the world of the Palm either.
If the company wants to gain back the market share it's been consistently losing, they need to truly open their product up, and give open source and independant developers the tools they need to make utilities that will make people like me want to buy their product. I've got a Tungsten E, and I can't use it for anything. The hardware is fine, but there's no software to do what I want to do with it.
Until then, they're going to get raped by the PocketPC, because it has a more open platform, and the Blackberry, because it does the few things anyone cares about better.
In soviet Russia, the moderation system doesn't understand YOU!
(Well, that guy over there, but who wants to ruin a perfectly good cliche?)
It's easy if you use your amazing powers for evil instead of good.
Who else but a nerd could understand the long scientific explanations of the locations of nerve clusters and evolutionary biology which explain the proper use of a vagina?
Shit man, if I can figure out vi, I can figure out a vagina.
From the article,
"The contrary Republican was Representative Tim Johnson of Illinois, described by the Almanac of American Politics as a lawmaker "with maverick tendencies," as demonstrated by his opposition to much of the Bush administration's record on the environment."
I thought it was Ron Paul too.
Ron Paul instead didn't vote on this bill. That seems strange at face value, but remember this issue is contrary to his premise. The entire program was unconstitutional. Why would Ron Paul bother voting for the paticulars of a program he knows never should have existed in the first place?
I think a better idea would be to simply license the original X-Box for OSS development. A few million dollars isn't going to do anything for production scale hardware development, but it'll easily buy licensing from Microsoft to release a softmod disk with OpenXDK tools.
I think the problem is that with OSS, everyone gets a say, but with a good game, you need a vision.
Most games I see created purely by programmers tend to suffer from 'developeritis'. When it's a bittorrent client or even a web browser, that's fine. I actually like having some of the extra guts showing. When it's a game, I don't want to be able to tweak all the enemies. I don't want to know what the enemies are thinking. I don't want to know, and I ESPECIALLY don't want to see numbers reminding me that I'm playing a game.
Some of the most enduring games of all time were created by a single programmer working with 512 bytes of memory and a video update you had to keep up with or you'd mess up the display. The difference is, the games weren't designed for programmers. That's where OSS will fail every time.
The only way the twilight princess hack can be used remotely is if you use a really long stick to put the disk and memory card in.
The RTG has a few benefits. For one thing, it's one power source that'll never stop putting out energy. This means that you're charging while you drive and while you rest. That helps the equation somewhat. The fact that the electric system you'd be using to utilize the power is incredibly efficient compared to the 20% of an internal combustion engine means you can't say "the energy is equivilent to 6 litres of gas" and have it mean anything.
Let's look at this from a pure energy perspective.
Using the calculations on the Wikipedia article on electric cars, The Honda Insight uses 0.52 kWh/mi. We'll assume we want to travel on the highway (because it's a pretty energy intensive state), and work from there. It'd take our vehicle about 31.2kW to travel 60 miles, which we can assume would take an hour to travel.
If our RTG is a 7.8kW/hr model like you suggest(Though the article didn't suggest that was a maximum possible, only that it was the maximum created), we're looking at 187.2kWh created in a day in terms of heat. This means that with the energy you'd generate in 24 hours, you could travel for exactly 6 hours if we were talking 100% efficiency. Range of about 360 miles.
Now, that's a silly thing for me to say, of course, because efficiency will never be 100%. On the other hand, since this thing isn't going into space, we can do better than a thermocouple to gather heat. If we used this RTG to boil water instead of heat thermocouples, we'd be able to get 60-90% efficiency, according to the wiki article on steam engines. That's a bit better. Let's use something like that instead, so we can get closer to a conservative 30% efficiency from the 5% we get with the thermocouples. We get about 2 hours of driving time out of 56kWh total gathered energy. To get that, you'd never have to pull up to a gas station again. Your car's power supply, though it would degrade to 85% of capacity every 20 years, could remain useful long after you're dead. You'd have to store the energy, but you could get some forklift batteries which would happily store a day's energy for 20 years before they need servicing. I'd prefer advanced supercapacitors, but the tech isn't there yyet. You can buy supercapacitors right now which will start a diesel motor in 40 below without problems, but they'll only do it once. There's just not enough juice yet.
Now there'd be trade-offs here and there, but it pretty much balances out. You don't need 32kg of shielding for a 4.5kg source if you're not going to be re-entering the atmostphere, but the steam engine would weigh more. The batteries would weigh a lot, but my vehicle carries 120kg of fuel at full load and I don't see many that don't carry at least 60. You wwouldn't need a motor and you could design the vehicle to reduce the weight based on that fact, but batteries DO weigh a lot.
The biggest problem is probably just that people would be afraid of driving around with a chunk of glowing rock under their hoods. If you could get past that, you'd have an excellent power source that could last for a very long time, and would definitely make the folks in the middle east very cranky because they wouldn't get any money for our transportation for quite some time(Now that's just wishful thinking. There isn't likely enough material for mass production).
I can concieve of an internal combusion engine which functions by spraying water onto a piston with a sacrificial cesium, rubidium, sodium or potassium slab. The end result would function, I'm certain(The only problem I'd see would be making sure the waste products on the slab were removed for the next cycle. The question is, would it be considered "water powered"?
I'd argue it isn't. The energy which releases the hydrogen is a result of the reactivity of the alkali metal. It's the alkali in my example which is the secret ingredient which makes the reaction work, even though the water is consumed in the reaction.
It's the same reason that gasoline and diesel engines aren't considered "air powered". The air doesn't provide the volitility, it just provides raw materials for the substance which is reacting and releasing energy.
I've always wondered if an RTG coupled to banks of supercapacitors could be the solution for an electric car you'd never have to fuel up during the effective life of the battery? If you ran out of juice, just rest the night and you're ready to rock and roll for another days travel.
This seems pretty overcomplicated to me. Why not just provide a standard DC voltage signal at any given voltage, then use a switching regulator to get the voltage down to where you need it, and where you need to step up, just use an appropriate step-up circuit? It'd mean your supply would cost a few bucks instead of 100, it'd probably cost less on the peripheral side, and there'd be no further problems.
There's an entire industrial world out there that runs at 24VDC, why can't we design consumer hardware around a standard voltage too?
That shit isn't beer. Beer is made with barley, hopps, malt, sometimes wheat, yeast, and water.
American 'beer flavoured coolers' are made with distilled rice and corn alcohols added to artificial flavours.
That said, it is a matter of taste. There's no right or wrong answer. Some people like beer flavoured coolers, but myself, I really enjoy a good beer. You know, the way they've made beer for 6,000 years. I've got nothing against the coolers, but when you're adding rice and corn alcohol to flavouring, that's not how you make beer.
Forget thermodynamics. That's a long and fancy word that obscures the truth here.
The Law of Conservation of Energy states that energy cannot be created or destroyed, only converted from one form to another.
This means that you can't simply convert from one form of matter to another at the same spot and expect to get more energy back than you started with.
Examples that people use to show 'creating' energy is more often than not just taking energy that already existed and using it more efficiently.
Man, I've never payed $200 for a video card and I've played most of the big games that have come along.
Seconded. I've always been able to play the latest games by taking advantage of the fact that you don't need the latest and greatest to play the games. A 100 dollar budget video card will give you all the features you need, for a fraction of the price for the same card a year or two earlier.
Considering the capital investment required to convert to a full CNC shop, I'd strongly disagree, and suggest that you'd have to look at all the numbers and do a cost/benefit analysis.
We've got a multi-million dollar machine shop with a handful of machinists, which has relatively low utilization but handles mission critical tasks for our site. To convert to a full CNC shop would cost millions. Those millions would pay our machinists for years. Despite the capital investment, most of the labour reduction would be offset by the maintenance employees who would have to be out there pretty constantly, ensuring all the equipment is lubricated, calibrated, and clean, and in the short term, benefits paid out to laid-off machinists would be a pretty good chunk of change as well. The increase in production capacity would go unused. The increase in precision wouldn't result in greater uptime for our site or greater quality for our product.
In our case, the payback period would be decades, if converting to CNC machines paid back at all. Odds are better the incredibly huge gamble on a capital project with negligable returns would rightfully never go through.
Just becuase something is cooler or higher tech doesn't mean it's automatically better.
I work for a paper mill that's been in operation for 40 years. Our entire CAD database is accessible from R14, because we don't need anything more.
We've considered updating, but at 6000 dollars/license, we just convert contractor drawings to R14 instead of spend tens of thousands of dollars on software that won't be as effective as what we've been using for years without any problem.
Remember; In the field, not everyone does everything the same.
The requirements you're implying should be imposed on contract and licensing law with these statements are staggering. You're basically demanding that all agreements be completely performed in person simultaneously or else they are unconscionable.
According to my sources, duress is defined as a "threat of harm made to compel a person to do something against his or her will or judgment; esp., a wrongful threat made by one person to compel a manifestation of seeming assent by another person to a transaction without real volition."
It seems to me that threatening to 'take back' software that has already been bought and paid for if you don't accept some new contract after you've already agreed to a common sense implied contract of "I spend this money, I own this software and, by natural common sense extension, the right to use it for it's intended purpose on my PC" is using a wrongful threat of harm to compel a person to 'click through' this agreement.
The wrongful threat of harm increases with the cost of the software or device involved. If you bought a brand new $10,000 alienware PC only to not have use of it because you don't like the EULA of Windows Vista, basically Microsoft is holding your $10,000 computer hostage after you've paid for it with the implicit, common sense contract of "You've spent $10,000 on a new computer including Windows Vista, that price includes the cost of licensing and media, you have the right to use your new computer"
By contrast, the GPL doesn't hold but the right to distribute modified software, which you never had any other right to, implied or otherwise. Even if you paid for the product, copyright law implicitly protects all copyrighted software from redistribution in any form without the contract.
Hell, the current regime still permits post-purchase refusal and refund
The current regime does NOT permit de facto post-purchase refusal and refund, becuase software retailers don't allow refunds on opened software, and computer vendors don't have a system in place for a reasonable person to recieve a refund for software they have declined to accept the EULA for. There is no reasonable ability to refuse the contract, because it requires going to extraordinary lengths like these. This man was denied a refund three times.
Good lord, almost every freaking consumer product you buy now has licenses included.
You'll have to point to examples. I've bought a lot of things over the past couple years, and the only thing that's come with a contract is software.
I've bought a truck, it came with no EULA. I've bought a skidoo, no EULA. I've bought dishes, pots, pans, and no EULA. I've bought furniture. No EULA. Got a great deal on a Queen size bed. No EULA. I've bought a wireless phone, and while it came with a piece of paper clarifying it's status under the appropriate laws regarding it's creation of interference which could affect other devices, but no EULA. Barbeque, despite being a dangerous gas appliance, no EULA. Propane for the barbeque, despite being an extremely dangerous substance which can't be dispensed without a proper license, no EULA.
I've even bought 3 cellular phones, 2 pay-as-you-go and 1 regular, and while I had to sign a contract before they'd accept my first payment and give me service for the regular phone, I didn't have to spend 2 seconds looking at a EULA, because there was none -- and there was none for the pay-as-you-go phones at all.
The only thing I've bought that has come with a EULA or equivilent contract to be agreed to after money has changed hands under threat of denial of service is software.
I'm sure there's contrary case law, but that's a failure of the legal system. Far too many geriatrics will accept a ridiculous legal arguement because the phrase 'on computers' is thrown in front, and that's going to be a roadblock for younger, less ignorant lawyers and judges as they transition into positions of judicial authority over the next decade.
The hilarious part of the analogy is that water through a pipe is ridiculously complicated compared to voltage. You get started on laminar vs. turbulent flows, reynold's number, height, pressure head, velocity head, pressure drop, K factor, it all just adds up to something way more difficult than simple Ohms Law.
It's only NATURAL to have to press more than one key to switch modes. It's completely intuitive that creating arbitrary shapes be part of the right-click menu but mode switching isn't.
I've written editors where everything was a completely unintuitive mix of awkward states and keyboard commands that make sense only if you were there when they were coded and you know which hand was laying where at the time.
I rewrote the editor to use a simple mouse interface with menus, dialog boxes, and scroll bars.
The first editor was way faster to use. It was insanely fast. You could do anything in a single keystroke. The problem was, I needed to check the documentation in order to do anything other than the 3 functions I'd memorized.
The second editor, on the other hand I can pick up with 0 training, 0 manual, 0 anything. It just works, and it's immediately apparent how to do stuff I want.
The first one was NOT intuitive. The second one was. Speed be damned. I spent a couple days learning how to use Blender, and it's closer to the first editor I made than any program I've ever used.
Now, for software that's actually fairly intuitive after a learning curve, I love AutoCAD. I use it at work, and while it's easy to use for a beginner (The basic tools are all buttons), the keyboard interface, a command line, is actually sane and so a user who knows what he or she wants to do can do it very quickly.
Wow! Are you a super-intelligent alien squid?
None of the evidence supporting such conspiracy theories would hold up in a court of law. Presenting just the evidence which could would leave such a book pretty spartan.
If your reasons for hating a group are based in fact, then it's not hate speech under Canadian law.
It's legal to say "I hate Muslims because Muslim extremists ran planes into the World Trade centre on September 11th, 2001" because it's verifiable fact. It's not legal to say "I hate Jews because The Jews caused 9/11...And World War II." because neither of those facts can be proven to be true.
Just think; George Bush could've been charged with hate speech for his lies about Iraq if he lived in Canada. He sure as hell incited violence against Iraqis...
It's a bit oldschool, but maybe a better idea would be to drive a DC brushless motor with the voltage from the solar panels et. al., attached to a variable size pulley, which would be attached to an AC motor attached to the grid. Control the pulley size based on the phase shift between the induced voltage and the line voltage, and you've got yourself a ghetto method for relatively high quality conversion of DC power to mains power.
Engineering Technologists = Engineers who don't think sociology or psychology is important to understanding how charge moves.