I wasn't able to read the article. Ever since @Home went down I've had wonky DNS issues.
However, the description of the story reminded me of an episode of Quantum Leap called "Future Boy". Sam had lept into one of the actors for a show called "Time Patrol", a '$5 per episode' serial in the mid-50's.
What I found interesting about this episode, in relation to this article, was the argument between the show's Star and the show's Producer. The script originally called for the time travellers (Same co-starred as 'Future Boy') to overhear a conversation between two aliens (or twisted humans... my memory has faded) conspiring about the destruction of Earth. Moe, the star of the show, aborted filming and argued with the producer about people being evil in the future. He was very passionate about the show portraying a bright future where people were happy. He didn't want it ruined by having stories about people trying to destroy it.
I can't help but think this character was inspired by Gene Roddenberry. Gene also had a vision that the future would be bright and welcoming vs. dark and gloomy. It's possible, though, that this character reflected somebody even earlier in the time period.
I'm curious, has anybody seen this episode that thinks Moe was modeled after somebody influential in the sci-fi industry?
How can 4 bonded 10/100 cards provide better throughput than a gigabit card? I can understand them being cheaper, but the idea of them being faster is hard for me to grasp.
The way I see it, 4 100 megabit cards at MOST would create a 400 megabit pipe. Wouldn't bonding add overhead to it to make it even less than 400 megabits?
When I first got my cable modem about a year ago, I had roughly 4 megabits coming down, and 128k upstream PER IP Address.
The way this worked was that I'd pay an extra $5 a month per IP address, and the computer that went on it got a seperate download/upload stream. I loved this because I could do file xfers on one computer, and play Quake on the other without the ping times being affected.
However, since @Home went down things changed a bit. I have 3 computers on my network, 2 of them had IP addresses I was paying for. Now the 3rd one suddenly has an internet connection. (I found this out when Media Player suddenly asked me if I wanted to update.. yah right.)
So now all the computers on my network have an IP address, but the cost of that is all 3 of them share the 128k upstream. This is a bit of a pain because VNC doesn't work so well across them. Guess I'll have to set up a router if I want that to work, I was hoping to avoid doing that.
Anyway, I don't know if AT&T is going to continue charging me the $5 a month or not. I realy wish it'd go back to the way it was. The 1.5 megabit cap doesn't bother me for now, but the upstream limit is really bugging me.
Some might wonder why I don't just switch to DSL. I'll tell you why. I live very close to where I work, so I'd likely have the same DSL provider. My company pays a great deal of money per month to get a dedicated DSL line that is supposed to be up all the time. And why not? They have their web server and mailserver and so on running on it.
One day the DSL line went down. And you know what happend? The DSL provider pointed to the phone company, the phone company pointed to the ISP, and the ISP pointed to the DSL provider again. We were down for 7 (seven) days. 7 DAYS!!! In the times of dot-bombs, you do NOT want your webserver down for 7 days.
So I decided to stay with AT&T. If my internet connection goes down, I have one phone number to call. I just hope they get their act together.
Any chance somebody will set up a Q2 community for improving/modifying the code? I'd really like to monitor what happens here. I can see some really cool potential here.
My personal interest in this project is that some independent game makers make some free, yet good quality games for Dreamcast. Wouldn't that be cool? The DC is $50, and can play burned CD's, which makes it an ideal candidate for this type of thing.
In any case, if the GPL licensing of Q2 sparks some quality spin-offs, this could be a welcome evolution of cross-platform games.
I beg to differ. Climate affects solar AND wind energy. The west coast goes through a drought: not enough power to meet demand. This isn't because the population suddenly increased 200%, it's because there wasn't enough water turning the hyrdo turbines that provide a good chunk of the power for California and Oregon.
If the sun's not out, you don't get as much solar power. If the wind isn't blowing, you don't get as much wind power. Coal plants work just fine, as you have stated. But the change in climate for the northwest created a real problem for us over here.
I wasnt too clear on that. I want to play back Windows Media 7 or 8 at 320 by 240 at 30fps. 206 mhz machines cant quite do that.
The reason I am using this particular setup is that I have a PVR set up to automatically catch shows for me when I'm at work. Right now I watch them on my TV. I could tweak the file settings some to play on the current line of PocketPCs, but it'd make the quality unacceptable for the TV.
The big appeal to me with PocketPC's is being able to use them instead of a laptop on an airplane. I want to be able to play games (yeah! MAME would rock!), watch movies, listen to music, and so on. If I could hook up the iPod with a PocketPC and use it as a portable hard drive to store TV shows on, that would be the killer app for me. I would *stop* taking my laptop on trips! At that point, I would have just two items that each fit in my pocket.
What about waiting an hour or 2 for the mechanic to fix my car?
What about during a power failure?
etc.. I can think of lots of times something like this would come in handy. (... I ache for a Tablet PC though...)
I want to watch the TV shows captured with my home-brew pvr (www.snapstream.com) wirelessly through a PocketPC. The new X-scale processors should have enough horsepower to do it.
Every time somebody throws up a challenge, like CSS for example, then somebody will get around it. They should realize this by now.
The issue that bugs the RIAA is that they are afraid one day nobody will be CD's anymore. If the RIAA were to look forward a little more, they'd realize that what they are doing wrong is fighting a trend, instead of capitolizing on it.
For example, they could provide a streaming subscription service where people could pay x dollars a month and have music on demand. The service they provide is that nearly every song every made is available to play. Music on demand. They could portion up that money to the artists that provide it.
I imagine the reason they don't do this is that they don't imagine they'd rake in as much cash because it's easier to justify the $15-$20 price tag on an actual CD. What they fail to realize is not only could the subscription model work, but they wouldn't have to deal with the cost of pressing CD's anymore. They'd have an easier time signging up more independent artists and not have to worry about building up their image as much. Heck, they might even be able to blow by the radio stations and preview new music themselves. Who knows, maybe they'll advertise in it too!
I have a feeling the RIAA is going to fall, not because of piracy, but because they are unwilling to accept that times change.
I agree with what you are saying. I didnt express what I was thinking very clearly. I was thinking Nintendo as a publisher and licenser of their technlogy. Sony had a policy along the lines of "anybody can be a developer", but the requirement was that all games had to be 3D and use the 3D power of the PSone. This is why we didn't see any more 2D games on the machine.
Im under the impression that Nintendo is lending Miyamoto's help to some companies making quality titles. I can't say that MS or Sony isn't doing this, but the quality of GC games is comparatively better.
I think the rest of your points were valid, but I just wanted to respond to this one:
"#1. We don't even use wind or solar power as heavily as we could be now. Maybe we ought to try harder to use what we get on earth before we start placing horribly expensive power plants on the yet-pure lunar surface"
Wind power is very inefficient. I don't know how it compares to solar power on the surface of the Earth, but I can tell you that wind power is very low power compared to alternatives like hydro-powered turbines.
I believe the moon to be a more efficient place for generating solar power because it is unshielded and they'd be able to get raw solar energy from it. Here its filtered.
Here's a thought: Put a huge nuclear powerplant on the moon and beam the energy down, if it blows up nobody on Earth would be harmed. (in theory anyway)
Sadly, most companies greenlight games described as 'this will be the next Quake...' instead of games described as "the world has never seen anything like it..."
Fortunately, the GameCube seems to be cracking this stigma a little. Too bad I can't get it on the net yet.
I miss the days of 'Garage Developers' creating shareware games on BBS's.
Wow, talk about over-reactive. I give an example of somebody getting their life saved, and then you twist it with an improbable worst case scenario. (like a rapist is going to use cell phone tracing technology to find a victim)
As far as 'justifying' something that benefits me, I don't see why you feel I need to justify it. I don't need to justify it to you. I made a decision to own a cell phone, and that's final. I didn't ask for your approval.
I just felt that somebody saying "I won't get a cell phone because I can get to a pay phone..." was over-simplified. So I pointed out a scenario where you wouldn't be able to get to a pay phone. Obviously I'm not the only one who feels this way because lots, and I do mean LOTS of people have cell phones. Not to mention that market is growing.
Obviously cell phones add something to people's lives, despite being able to reach phones easily.
Getting back on topic, what HP is hoping to do with their CoolTown technology sounds kind of interesting. I like the idea of paramedics being notified if I have a heart attack. You would too if you're at risk. If you have the attitude that you don't like a new technology because [insert silly over-reactive reason here], then I hope you enjoy your time in the stone age.
The Q3a engine, if im not mistaken, is cross platform. It is reasonable to assume they will make a Linux version.
Don't get all high and mighty about Linux, not everybody uses it. I *can't* use Linux because I'm an artist and I use Lightwave and After Effects. Niether are available on Linux right now, so I'm a Windows guy. Do I want to be? Not really. I'm not ashamed of it either. Windows 2000 is surprisingly good.
I think it's pretty clear that Slashdot is a news site. It may be polarized towards Linux, but that doesn't mean every news story has to be about it. It would have been pretty silly for Slashdot to post the WTC attack and have to find a reason why it's Linux related.
My math teacher thought I had to have homework every night. Either I was too busy/lazy to do it, or I'd do it and get it wrong. I miss the grade school days when the work was all done in class and you could ask your teacher about it.
I did a poor job of clarifying my thoughts in an earlier post. I'm concerned about MS requiring Passport to EVERY site of theirs you go to. It's possible that the reason Gaming Zone exists is to lure people into getting a Passport account. By doing this, they force me to stay logged in all the time, which uniquely identifies me. The worst part is we don't know what it is they are doing in the background.
The worst part is that you CANNOT kill your account. I attempted this before. I even wrote to MS and asked them about it. You know what they told me? "Oh, that's easy. All you have to do is not use your account for a year."
Early on, that may not be such an issue. But as more and more sites use Passport, it seems like that becomes almost an impossibility.
I guess that's the main reason I'm bothered by more sites requiring it. It won't be long before MS locks their downloads area to Passport.
"Can you at least put a little bit of thought into your posts?/. used to be informational - now any idiotic rant based on the unfounded premise that M$FT is always wrong will manage to be moderated to 5. "
I assume you mean my original post that started this thread. The point of my original post was to find a way to send a message to MS that what they are doing is unacceptable. My guess is that it was mod'd up to 5 because people believe that my idea would work. If the idea worked, and a bunch of people followed that suggestion, then it'd prove that Microsoft IS wrong. The best thing is that what is 'right' would be chosen democratically as opposed to being what a mega-corporation decides.
Oversimplifying somebody's point down to 3 words only demonstrates that you didn't get the point, it does not prove that their idea had no thought put into it.
It's one thing to use Passport to store CC info for making purchases, etc. But I don't want my gaming experiences to be tied to that same account.
I don't want MS (or anybody else really) drawing conclusions about what might be interested in buying based on where I visit around the site. I don't want to get emails about new games coming out because I happened to visit a catalog containing games.
Another thing that concerns me is dealing with other users. Lets say that I go into a MS chatroom somewhere. Lets say that I cheese off somebody in that room, and they decide to find an exploit to get the information from my username. If they succeed, they have EVERY BIT OF INFO I've given to MS.
On the other hand, if I had one accoun for making purchases and another account for playing games, I'd have little to worry about.
That case may seem a little extreme, but it's multiple layers of identity like this that I use to protect myself from would-be hackers.
I know I could 'log out and log back in with the other name', but that is a bit inconvenient, isn't it. The moment I log into Hotmail, I'm re-logged in via cookie. I can't turn off cookies or the sites boot me out.
I prefer the solution to being asked my username and password PER section I go to. If MS worked like that natively, I wouldn't have this concern.
Anybody know if MS has any competitors here? I think the best way I can express my unwillingness to use my passport account everywhere I go would be to use the competitor's sites.
Hotmail has a bunch of competitors right now, but what about things like the Gaming Zone? I'm not using GZ right now, but if it's ever interesting to me I'd like to know about alternatives before I give MS my name.
There's an OCP news segment about a Star Wars satellite based laser misfired and instanly scorched several acres of land in California, accidentally killing 2 former presidents.
That alone makes me a little spooked about mounting lasers in satellites or on the moon.
Many many nerds were having to go through rolling blackouts in California. Reason? The climate made it diffucult to generate sufficient power.
The moon has very little to alter the climate. There is no atmosphere to speak of, so there are no storms. Because of this it would be really predictable. Nasa (or whoever would construct this...) would be able to say "the moon gets this much light this day, and this much light that day..." and be pretty reliable in their estimates.
Hypothetically, a power generation plant on the Moon would be virtually free of interferance factors like the west coast had over the last year. What does that mean for you as a nerd? It means that rolling blackouts could be a thing of the past. It also means that your power-requiring fate would be less affected by drastic changes in climate.
Slashdot Mirror
I wasn't able to read the article. Ever since @Home went down I've had wonky DNS issues.
However, the description of the story reminded me of an episode of Quantum Leap called "Future Boy". Sam had lept into one of the actors for a show called "Time Patrol", a '$5 per episode' serial in the mid-50's.
What I found interesting about this episode, in relation to this article, was the argument between the show's Star and the show's Producer. The script originally called for the time travellers (Same co-starred as 'Future Boy') to overhear a conversation between two aliens (or twisted humans... my memory has faded) conspiring about the destruction of Earth. Moe, the star of the show, aborted filming and argued with the producer about people being evil in the future. He was very passionate about the show portraying a bright future where people were happy. He didn't want it ruined by having stories about people trying to destroy it.
I can't help but think this character was inspired by Gene Roddenberry. Gene also had a vision that the future would be bright and welcoming vs. dark and gloomy. It's possible, though, that this character reflected somebody even earlier in the time period.
I'm curious, has anybody seen this episode that thinks Moe was modeled after somebody influential in the sci-fi industry?
How can 4 bonded 10/100 cards provide better throughput than a gigabit card? I can understand them being cheaper, but the idea of them being faster is hard for me to grasp.
The way I see it, 4 100 megabit cards at MOST would create a 400 megabit pipe. Wouldn't bonding add overhead to it to make it even less than 400 megabits?
Would somebody mind explaining how this works?
When I first got my cable modem about a year ago, I had roughly 4 megabits coming down, and 128k upstream PER IP Address.
The way this worked was that I'd pay an extra $5 a month per IP address, and the computer that went on it got a seperate download/upload stream. I loved this because I could do file xfers on one computer, and play Quake on the other without the ping times being affected.
However, since @Home went down things changed a bit. I have 3 computers on my network, 2 of them had IP addresses I was paying for. Now the 3rd one suddenly has an internet connection. (I found this out when Media Player suddenly asked me if I wanted to update.. yah right.)
So now all the computers on my network have an IP address, but the cost of that is all 3 of them share the 128k upstream. This is a bit of a pain because VNC doesn't work so well across them. Guess I'll have to set up a router if I want that to work, I was hoping to avoid doing that.
Anyway, I don't know if AT&T is going to continue charging me the $5 a month or not. I realy wish it'd go back to the way it was. The 1.5 megabit cap doesn't bother me for now, but the upstream limit is really bugging me.
Some might wonder why I don't just switch to DSL. I'll tell you why. I live very close to where I work, so I'd likely have the same DSL provider. My company pays a great deal of money per month to get a dedicated DSL line that is supposed to be up all the time. And why not? They have their web server and mailserver and so on running on it.
One day the DSL line went down. And you know what happend? The DSL provider pointed to the phone company, the phone company pointed to the ISP, and the ISP pointed to the DSL provider again. We were down for 7 (seven) days. 7 DAYS!!! In the times of dot-bombs, you do NOT want your webserver down for 7 days.
So I decided to stay with AT&T. If my internet connection goes down, I have one phone number to call. I just hope they get their act together.
Any chance somebody will set up a Q2 community for improving/modifying the code? I'd really like to monitor what happens here. I can see some really cool potential here.
My personal interest in this project is that some independent game makers make some free, yet good quality games for Dreamcast. Wouldn't that be cool? The DC is $50, and can play burned CD's, which makes it an ideal candidate for this type of thing.
In any case, if the GPL licensing of Q2 sparks some quality spin-offs, this could be a welcome evolution of cross-platform games.
I beg to differ. Climate affects solar AND wind energy. The west coast goes through a drought: not enough power to meet demand. This isn't because the population suddenly increased 200%, it's because there wasn't enough water turning the hyrdo turbines that provide a good chunk of the power for California and Oregon.
If the sun's not out, you don't get as much solar power. If the wind isn't blowing, you don't get as much wind power. Coal plants work just fine, as you have stated. But the change in climate for the northwest created a real problem for us over here.
I wasnt too clear on that. I want to play back Windows Media 7 or 8 at 320 by 240 at 30fps. 206 mhz machines cant quite do that.
The reason I am using this particular setup is that I have a PVR set up to automatically catch shows for me when I'm at work. Right now I watch them on my TV. I could tweak the file settings some to play on the current line of PocketPCs, but it'd make the quality unacceptable for the TV.
See what I mean?
The big appeal to me with PocketPC's is being able to use them instead of a laptop on an airplane. I want to be able to play games (yeah! MAME would rock!), watch movies, listen to music, and so on. If I could hook up the iPod with a PocketPC and use it as a portable hard drive to store TV shows on, that would be the killer app for me. I would *stop* taking my laptop on trips! At that point, I would have just two items that each fit in my pocket.
What about waiting an hour or 2 for the mechanic to fix my car?
What about during a power failure?
etc.. I can think of lots of times something like this would come in handy. (... I ache for a Tablet PC though...)
I want to watch the TV shows captured with my home-brew pvr (www.snapstream.com) wirelessly through a PocketPC. The new X-scale processors should have enough horsepower to do it.
Every time somebody throws up a challenge, like CSS for example, then somebody will get around it. They should realize this by now.
The issue that bugs the RIAA is that they are afraid one day nobody will be CD's anymore. If the RIAA were to look forward a little more, they'd realize that what they are doing wrong is fighting a trend, instead of capitolizing on it.
For example, they could provide a streaming subscription service where people could pay x dollars a month and have music on demand. The service they provide is that nearly every song every made is available to play. Music on demand. They could portion up that money to the artists that provide it.
I imagine the reason they don't do this is that they don't imagine they'd rake in as much cash because it's easier to justify the $15-$20 price tag on an actual CD. What they fail to realize is not only could the subscription model work, but they wouldn't have to deal with the cost of pressing CD's anymore. They'd have an easier time signging up more independent artists and not have to worry about building up their image as much. Heck, they might even be able to blow by the radio stations and preview new music themselves. Who knows, maybe they'll advertise in it too!
I have a feeling the RIAA is going to fall, not because of piracy, but because they are unwilling to accept that times change.
I have a question, how legal are dance remixes of songs?
I usually prefer to listen to dance remixes of songs, and I've found that finding mp3 versions of them are a lot easier than finding CD's of them.
So here's my question, am I stuck trying to find CD's of them, or can I freely use the web to find them?
What about fair use? If it's legal to create a 'derivitive work', then what legal reason does a company have to block somebody from doing that?
*puzzled about the law*
I agree with what you are saying. I didnt express what I was thinking very clearly. I was thinking Nintendo as a publisher and licenser of their technlogy. Sony had a policy along the lines of "anybody can be a developer", but the requirement was that all games had to be 3D and use the 3D power of the PSone. This is why we didn't see any more 2D games on the machine.
:)
Im under the impression that Nintendo is lending Miyamoto's help to some companies making quality titles. I can't say that MS or Sony isn't doing this, but the quality of GC games is comparatively better.
Thanks for the links, checking them out now.
I think the rest of your points were valid, but I just wanted to respond to this one:
"#1. We don't even use wind or solar power as heavily as we could be now. Maybe we ought to try harder to use what we get on earth before we start placing horribly expensive power plants on the yet-pure lunar surface"
Wind power is very inefficient. I don't know how it compares to solar power on the surface of the Earth, but I can tell you that wind power is very low power compared to alternatives like hydro-powered turbines.
I believe the moon to be a more efficient place for generating solar power because it is unshielded and they'd be able to get raw solar energy from it. Here its filtered.
Here's a thought: Put a huge nuclear powerplant on the moon and beam the energy down, if it blows up nobody on Earth would be harmed. (in theory anyway)
Sadly, most companies greenlight games described as 'this will be the next Quake...' instead of games described as "the world has never seen anything like it..."
Fortunately, the GameCube seems to be cracking this stigma a little. Too bad I can't get it on the net yet.
I miss the days of 'Garage Developers' creating shareware games on BBS's.
Wow, talk about over-reactive. I give an example of somebody getting their life saved, and then you twist it with an improbable worst case scenario. (like a rapist is going to use cell phone tracing technology to find a victim)
As far as 'justifying' something that benefits me, I don't see why you feel I need to justify it. I don't need to justify it to you. I made a decision to own a cell phone, and that's final. I didn't ask for your approval.
I just felt that somebody saying "I won't get a cell phone because I can get to a pay phone..." was over-simplified. So I pointed out a scenario where you wouldn't be able to get to a pay phone. Obviously I'm not the only one who feels this way because lots, and I do mean LOTS of people have cell phones. Not to mention that market is growing.
Obviously cell phones add something to people's lives, despite being able to reach phones easily.
Getting back on topic, what HP is hoping to do with their CoolTown technology sounds kind of interesting. I like the idea of paramedics being notified if I have a heart attack. You would too if you're at risk. If you have the attitude that you don't like a new technology because [insert silly over-reactive reason here], then I hope you enjoy your time in the stone age.
The Q3a engine, if im not mistaken, is cross platform. It is reasonable to assume they will make a Linux version.
Don't get all high and mighty about Linux, not everybody uses it. I *can't* use Linux because I'm an artist and I use Lightwave and After Effects. Niether are available on Linux right now, so I'm a Windows guy. Do I want to be? Not really. I'm not ashamed of it either. Windows 2000 is surprisingly good.
I think it's pretty clear that Slashdot is a news site. It may be polarized towards Linux, but that doesn't mean every news story has to be about it. It would have been pretty silly for Slashdot to post the WTC attack and have to find a reason why it's Linux related.
Tell that to the woman that was in the basement of the WTC who called for help, and was subsequently rescued. She would have died otherwise.
I guess you're over-simplified logic has a flaw in it.
My math teacher thought I had to have homework every night. Either I was too busy/lazy to do it, or I'd do it and get it wrong. I miss the grade school days when the work was all done in class and you could ask your teacher about it.
"If you don't want to identify yourself than don't use it..."
Do you remember MS being found guilty of running a monopoly?
I did a poor job of clarifying my thoughts in an earlier post. I'm concerned about MS requiring Passport to EVERY site of theirs you go to. It's possible that the reason Gaming Zone exists is to lure people into getting a Passport account. By doing this, they force me to stay logged in all the time, which uniquely identifies me. The worst part is we don't know what it is they are doing in the background.
The worst part is that you CANNOT kill your account. I attempted this before. I even wrote to MS and asked them about it. You know what they told me? "Oh, that's easy. All you have to do is not use your account for a year."
Early on, that may not be such an issue. But as more and more sites use Passport, it seems like that becomes almost an impossibility.
I guess that's the main reason I'm bothered by more sites requiring it. It won't be long before MS locks their downloads area to Passport.
"Can you at least put a little bit of thought into your posts? /. used to be informational - now any idiotic rant based on the unfounded premise that M$FT is always wrong will manage to be moderated to 5. "
I assume you mean my original post that started this thread. The point of my original post was to find a way to send a message to MS that what they are doing is unacceptable. My guess is that it was mod'd up to 5 because people believe that my idea would work. If the idea worked, and a bunch of people followed that suggestion, then it'd prove that Microsoft IS wrong. The best thing is that what is 'right' would be chosen democratically as opposed to being what a mega-corporation decides.
Oversimplifying somebody's point down to 3 words only demonstrates that you didn't get the point, it does not prove that their idea had no thought put into it.
It's one thing to use Passport to store CC info for making purchases, etc. But I don't want my gaming experiences to be tied to that same account.
I don't want MS (or anybody else really) drawing conclusions about what might be interested in buying based on where I visit around the site. I don't want to get emails about new games coming out because I happened to visit a catalog containing games.
Another thing that concerns me is dealing with other users. Lets say that I go into a MS chatroom somewhere. Lets say that I cheese off somebody in that room, and they decide to find an exploit to get the information from my username. If they succeed, they have EVERY BIT OF INFO I've given to MS.
On the other hand, if I had one accoun for making purchases and another account for playing games, I'd have little to worry about.
That case may seem a little extreme, but it's multiple layers of identity like this that I use to protect myself from would-be hackers.
I know I could 'log out and log back in with the other name', but that is a bit inconvenient, isn't it. The moment I log into Hotmail, I'm re-logged in via cookie. I can't turn off cookies or the sites boot me out.
I prefer the solution to being asked my username and password PER section I go to. If MS worked like that natively, I wouldn't have this concern.
I see your point.
Anybody know if MS has any competitors here? I think the best way I can express my unwillingness to use my passport account everywhere I go would be to use the competitor's sites.
Hotmail has a bunch of competitors right now, but what about things like the Gaming Zone? I'm not using GZ right now, but if it's ever interesting to me I'd like to know about alternatives before I give MS my name.
There's an OCP news segment about a Star Wars satellite based laser misfired and instanly scorched several acres of land in California, accidentally killing 2 former presidents.
That alone makes me a little spooked about mounting lasers in satellites or on the moon.
Wouldn't be amusing if somebody registerred a generic account and released the name/password onto the public?
Maybe when MS sees 4 million people logged on as $L4$hd0t it'll realize that the people don't want to be uniquely identified in EVERYTHING they do.
Many many nerds were having to go through rolling blackouts in California. Reason? The climate made it diffucult to generate sufficient power.
The moon has very little to alter the climate. There is no atmosphere to speak of, so there are no storms. Because of this it would be really predictable. Nasa (or whoever would construct this...) would be able to say "the moon gets this much light this day, and this much light that day..." and be pretty reliable in their estimates.
Hypothetically, a power generation plant on the Moon would be virtually free of interferance factors like the west coast had over the last year. What does that mean for you as a nerd? It means that rolling blackouts could be a thing of the past. It also means that your power-requiring fate would be less affected by drastic changes in climate.