I want a touchscreen to sit in my living room. When idle, it can cycle through images like one of those digital photo displays. When touched, it switches to Amarok (or equivalent) and lets me select from music on my server upstairs (wireless connection to home network, Samba-shared drive with music on it). The music is streamed downstairs and plays through the room's sound system.
That doesn't happen to be what you are working on, does it? I was gonna tackle one of these as a project this year, but I'd rather just buy one...
Nonsense. Capitalism is a failure unless it is tempered by regulation:
1. Capitalism allows for and indeed promotes exploitation of common resources, putting immediate profits over long-term sustainability in things like the air and water quality, fish populations, or eco-diversity. Not even post-damage litigation can undue the damage done, and in many cases post-damage litigation is hampered because the original instigators are dead or retired or have spent all their gains. The short-sighted nature of capitalism is one of its biggest drawbacks, and it must be constantly balanced with the long-term views of governments and social groups.
2. Because of the barriers to entry in many markets, capitalism's long-term stable state is that of monopoly. Monopolies can be the logical result of some markets, but exploitation of a monopoly in one market to affect other, developing markets goes against the principles of capitalism. In other words, without regulation capitalism destroys itself.
3. Capitalism encourages greed. Without question, money can be a good driver for innovation, which can in turn benefit more people than those who got rich. At the same time, greed to the point of exploitation, creating a poverty class to finance the wealth of the upper class, is not stable in the long term due for political reasons (namely, revolutions). As the political instability will itself disrupt markets, capitalism must be throttled to maintain a minimum standard of living for the poorest classes.
Regulated capitalism is the fairest trade system in the history of man. That regulation can include fair trade/fair price practices. Unregulated capitalism is a cancer that will eventually kill itself and, possibly, everything else.
That's what I have now, and I agree. My problems are:
A) They track every site you and I visit and sell the information to the feds.
B) I have to pay them for telephone service for the privilege of buying their DSL.
If I lived two miles over and had Time Warner for cable service, I'd switch in a minute. But we had Cox (now Suddenlink) and the service was awful. SBC DSL is the best I can get.
Indeed, I had no love for AT&T, but I was pleased to hear that the old "T" stock ticker was coming back. It just left a little tear in my eye for the olden days when I wasn't born yet. ~
If standalone DSL means I can drop my home telephone service without having to switch to Suddenlink's crappy cable internet service, I'm all for it. (The standalone DSL, not necessarily the merger with BellSouth.)
Yes, and computers that just booted to a command line used to sell like hotcakes, too, 20 years ago. They were also pretty darn expensive.
Markets change. Something that would sell like crazy five years ago might not sell at all, now. This is especially true when the market doesn't easily support competition, due to DRM (iTMS) and mechanical integration (factory in-car systems, etc.).
And the guy several posts above who broke his back and has been told by his doctor that he will suffer from chronic pain for the rest of his life? Should we not research medications to ease his pain, so he can better figure out why his back hurts? (Hint: It hurts because he broke it.)
Just because your chronic pain is self-induced, it doesn't mean all people's pain is so caused.
I posted a review of pre-paid service providers later down in this article. In short, I just switched from Cingular (who was cutting my phone off when they disabled their CDMA network) to Virgin Mobile. I'm happy so far.
Consumer Report's review (yes, I have a web subscription and read the entire thing) only covers the major contract-based cell phone providers. They don't discuss pre-pay or by-the-minute services of those providers, or discuss the pre-pay only providers at all.
I'm sure there are others here that prefer to remain disconnected from the world when not at my work desk, and only carry a cell phone for wife/family/emergency use. I just changed providers this week and have my own (very brief) review of the pre-pay providers.
I had been using Cingular's Pay-As-You-Go service, with by-the-minute pay rather than the monthly charge. (Actually, I had been using AT&T's pre-paid service until the merger.) I was on Cingular's CDMA network, which they are shutting down April 1. Cingular offered a choice of two new GSM phones for free for me to use to remain with them, but both phones were featureless and looked similar to the now-clunky Nokia phones of the early part of the decade. (That probably speaks more to Nokia's stagnant development, but Cingular still chose to buy and offer that product.)
I chose not to stay with Cingular in part because I was offended at the offer they made me, and in part because of my past service.
- While I have few to no problems with dropped calls, my wife says that she often has to dial 2-3 times before the call will go through. (The other times, it goes straight to voice mail without ringing.) This likely has to do in part with my phone (one of those ugly Nokia models) and part to do with the network (Cingular hasn't invested in their CDMA network in years, instead investing in GSM).
- I was more concerned with the expiration dates for their pre-paid minutes. AT&T offered 635 minutes with a year of expiration for $100, which is about 15 cents a minute. Cingular's $100 offer was 400 minutes, with only 180 day expiration. Given that I talk about 30 minutes a month, the loss of minutes was not so bad, but the expiration made the product useless. Instead I bought $25 for 100 minutes @ 90 day expiration, and had to buy another one each quarter. (They also shorted me a day every time I refreshed.) I think Cingular just changed the $100 card back to a year expiration, but it was too little too late.
Looking at other providers, I considered both major carriers that offer pre-paid plans, and the pre-paid only providers.
- Verizon's pre-paid plans cost, at minimum, $1 a day for service. The Verizon salesman at a Dallas Circuit City, to his credit, recommended that I not go with them as it would be too expensive for my needs.
- The Verizon rep instead pointed me to Amp'D mobile, which he said used the Verizon network. This would have allowed me to get a major-model phone (like a Motorola Razor). I didn't chose Amp'D because I don't want a phone with a camera (I attend 2-3 movie festivals each year, including one this past weekend, and I would have to surrender my phone if it had a camera), and I didn't really need a phone that still costs $200 or more for my pre-paid service. They also charge $0.25 cents a minute, and (from their brochures) would require quarterly fill-ups to avoid expiration.
- Cricket wireless has been advertising their pre-paid service in my area. They offer service here in Austin, but don't serve Dallas/Fort Worth where my family lives and my wife and I travel each holiday.
I chose Virgin Mobile, as they seemed like the best service for me:
- They offered nice-looking phones at reasonable prices. I got a Vox 8610, a nice flip phone without a camera, for about $25 from their website. The reviews I read about this phone before I ordered it were generally positive.
- They use Sprint's network. Despite the Consumer Reports publication, in 3-4 days of use I have yet to miss or drop a call. I am even able to receive calls and text messages while the phone's antenna is down, the phone is in my pocket, and I'm sitting down, which is an improvement. (Yes, the p
Other costs need to be taken into account. For example, many people leave their computers on when not in use, because they don't want to waste time letting them start up when they return. (I leave my work computer on except over three-day weekends or longer, though I turn the CRT monitors off each night.) Their time is money, and they don't want to pay the price.
But, leaving the computers on also costs money in terms of electricity. This is also a big price to pay. If the computers would boot significantly faster, their users might be more willing to shut them down. There was a big discussion on this a few articles ago. If it cost a little extra to put the OS on a super-fast non-volatile storage medium, perhaps it would be worth it.
And that may have been true when you were a young lad, but I very much doubt it's true now, unless you still drive a car from that time.
A) Starters are durable. B) Gas is more expensive. C) Leaving it idle pollutes more than shutting it down (if your car maintenance is up-to-date).
Item C) may not apply, as we are talking about cars used by "young lads" to deliver pizzas. In my experience, those are rarely in tip-top shape.;p If the kid knew how to take care of the car like that, he'd work at a mechanic, not delivering pizza.
I'm not sure that's the right angle to take. This implies that you have a fixed set of tasks, and that you would do those tasks faster if it meant you could leave work when they were finished, regardless of how long they took to complete. It also means that your boss has already examined the tasks, examined you, and decided that they would take you a full day to do. (If this wasn't true, they would have given you more tasks.)
In contrast, I think most self-driven employees (i.e. the kind that would comprise an office where "flex-time" is allowed) make their own list of tasks to achieve higher-level company objectives. This may complement a list of fixed tasks from management, but generally freedom is given to budget time for both lists.
In other words, if you finish your work on the task your boss gave you after six hours of work, you spend the next two hours voluntarily brainstorming new products or efficiencies for your company, or doing data mining on sales to better learn customer patterns, or checking up with key accounts to see if they need assistance, or doing web training on the latest version of an app you use, etc. Only when you are willing to take such initiative is flex time appropriate. Then, they may not mind if you arrive at work at 10:30 AM, finish your boss' task around 7:00 PM (taking into account a long lunch and a game of ping-pong in the afternoon), then work at home from 9:00-11:00 PM on your own initiative. Or, you get to work at 6:00 AM, work nonstop, and leave at 2:00 PM. Your choice.
Absolutely not, because: A) nothing like that would or could ever be globally enforced
B) the definition of material that would fall into that category varies from city to city, much less from country to country
On the other hand, a *.#.kids.us domain could work, where: A) The # represents the age of the kids that some committee in the US decides can view content on that site. For example, the Cheerios website with little games and such could be cheerios.5.kids.us, while a website useful for anatomy classes in high school could be anatomy.15.kids.us. Of course this committee will cater to the most conservative people in the country, but see item B below.
B) Parents can choose to limit their internet connectivity to sites based on an age number. If you have a ten-year-old, you restrict all sites except those within *.2.kids.us to *.kids.10.us. If you are more liberal than the national average, you open up *.11.kids.us or higher as well, thus compensating for the inherently conservative nature of the classification committee.
C) Websites with information spanning multiple age groups buy (or are simply given) domains for all those ages. xmen.9.kids.us might have less-mature content than xmen.16.kids.us, for example.
D) If you want to view a website outside of the kids.us domain? Well, all bets are off, because the US cannot control websites outside of the US anyway.
The US has the ability to make a "safe" sandbox for kids, where "safe" is defined by the most conservative people in the country. This sandbox would be inherently limited to those who wish to be included, because voluntary participation (while leaving the rest of the internet alone) is the only way to avoid first amendment conflicts and the fact that the US does not control the internet outside of its borders. Instead of doing this, the US has chosen to try every other possible unrealistic alternative, then spent my tax money defending them in court.
I have 2GB in my work machine that I receive late last year. That certainly isn't standard at my company, though; I justified the cost for the extra gig by pointedly not buying a new flatscreen LCD monitor, which is standard fare for most other people who upgrade PCs.
Of course, I A) don't like the display quality of most LCD monitors, as I need to run in a lower-than-optimal resolution to avoid eye strain B) would have probably needed to downgrade monitor size C) wouldn't have gotten much use out of one LCD monitor when I run dual-display D) can try to justify an LCD monitor later (if I wish to) by pointing out their power consumption savings
I would like to point out that this is known as forming concrete and not casting concrete. The difference is like the difference between pouring concrete for a foundation of a house and laying brick. Laying brick is casting while pouring concrete (like the article alludes to) is called 'forming.'
Actually, I'm not so sure I agree with the authors on this point. Assuming some of them are made and not quarried, then if they were formed in place, why are they still clearly distinctive stones with detectable (though still very small) gaps between them? It's not like with modern concrete, where rubber or stone is used to separate pieces, or where it is poured as one long piece then scored to direct cracking.
Rather, I would propose that some of the higher stones were cast. Assuming they had the technology to do so, why not? I would bet that, by the time the pyramid was nearing completion, there were thousands of tons of loose limestone debris sitting around the construction site, from broken stones, shaved fragments, or bits removed during fitting. Rather than drag another thousand tons of stone from the quarry, why not cast some new big stones from the leftovers? After they are cast, they can be hand trimmed to size and set into place like all the quarried stones.
Then, this still leaves the question of where the stones were cast (on the ground, or on the big ramps built up around the pyramid) and how they were set into place. The authors of this study might think that they have answered this question, but see no reason to believe they have done so, as I think this alternative proposal is a more likely scenario.
Say I want to map out my hometown using aerial geography. That's a fairly large undertaking, requiring a plane, probably multiple camera, and almost certainly multiple passes over the area. If I'm expected pay for the costs of acquiring those photos, but I can't expect to even break even (because someone can take my data and release it for free), then I have less incentive to spend the money required to acquire the data. We don't get innovation on the use of this data until such time as the data is acquired, and that can be a costly venture.
Well, you could use contract law and prevent anyone who receives your images from distributing them in any way. I have some pictures, taken in 1917, that I used in a research project in college. They are not copyrighted in the US or anywhere else, but I signed a contract when I bought them that defined my rights to redistribute them (the originals, or copies of those originals), and the penalties for doing so improperly. These limitations actually prevented me from publishing my project online as I originally intended - I had to turn it in on CD instead - but they were important enough to use anyway.
Without copyright, there are still ways to protect investment in so-called "intellectual property".
Seriously, we're going to figure out how to override the nervous system of insects and get them to do our bidding long before we'll miniaturize rotors and batteries to the same size. If the payload is a mini camera and a poison stinger, the hornet will be able to carry it, too.
All the thermal energy created by your coloumputer in the winter, IS 100% efficient in that it is all heat.
Yeah, but alternatives such as a heat pump can do much better than 100% efficiency, as they use electricity to move heat from outside (where it is cold) to inside (where it is hot). 100% efficient isn't really very good for electrical heating.
[Heat pumps] make good use of the high quality and flexibility of electric energy in that they can use one unit of electric energy to transfer more than one unit of energy from a cold area to a hot area. For example, an electric resistance heater using one kilowatt-hour of electric energy can transfer only 1 kWh of energy to heat your house at 100% efficiency. But 1 kWh of energy used in an electric heat pump could "pump" 3 kWh of energy from the cooler outside environment into your house for heating. The ratio of the energy transferred to the electric energy used in the process is called its coefficient of performance (CP). A typical CP for a commercial heat pump is between 3 and 4 units transferred per unit of electric energy supplied.
The same argument applies to those lightbulbs. It would use less power to use fluorescent lights and turn on your heat pump. Whatever article you read was describing science the author didn't understand - namely that using electricity to perform work is more efficient than using it to generate heat. The author probably saw "100%" and thought it was the best you could get.
I bought the Commodore 2400 (or was it 1200?) baud modem in 1989 for my Commodore 128. Wow, that was such an improvement over 300 baud! BBS text flowed line at a time on my screen, instead of character at a time.
All that hardware - computers, monitors, lots and lots of probably-broken floppy drives - is in the closet of our computer room.
He's got it right here. We may have 50 years left of easily enriched uranium, but if we're willing to invest in breeder reactors, we have a near infinite supply of fission material.
The "if" is the big part. Because are closer to what can be used to produce weapons-grade materials, breeder reactors always get the boogeyman attached to them.
I've always considered my PCB designs to be works of art. In some designs especially, the trace organization screams for symmetry and flow. The walls of my cube are covered in my board layouts, and I have some at home as well.
Incidentally, I can usually beat a frequency target by 2X or more, without specific RF design considerations. I consider this a side of effect of "beautiful" board design - performance derives from form.
This is one reason why, whenever I can justify it, I do my own layouts instead of leaving them to a PCB designer.
Slashdot Mirror
I want a touchscreen to sit in my living room. When idle, it can cycle through images like one of those digital photo displays. When touched, it switches to Amarok (or equivalent) and lets me select from music on my server upstairs (wireless connection to home network, Samba-shared drive with music on it). The music is streamed downstairs and plays through the room's sound system.
That doesn't happen to be what you are working on, does it? I was gonna tackle one of these as a project this year, but I'd rather just buy one...
Nonsense. Capitalism is a failure unless it is tempered by regulation:
1. Capitalism allows for and indeed promotes exploitation of common resources, putting immediate profits over long-term sustainability in things like the air and water quality, fish populations, or eco-diversity. Not even post-damage litigation can undue the damage done, and in many cases post-damage litigation is hampered because the original instigators are dead or retired or have spent all their gains. The short-sighted nature of capitalism is one of its biggest drawbacks, and it must be constantly balanced with the long-term views of governments and social groups.
2. Because of the barriers to entry in many markets, capitalism's long-term stable state is that of monopoly. Monopolies can be the logical result of some markets, but exploitation of a monopoly in one market to affect other, developing markets goes against the principles of capitalism. In other words, without regulation capitalism destroys itself.
3. Capitalism encourages greed. Without question, money can be a good driver for innovation, which can in turn benefit more people than those who got rich. At the same time, greed to the point of exploitation, creating a poverty class to finance the wealth of the upper class, is not stable in the long term due for political reasons (namely, revolutions). As the political instability will itself disrupt markets, capitalism must be throttled to maintain a minimum standard of living for the poorest classes.
Regulated capitalism is the fairest trade system in the history of man. That regulation can include fair trade/fair price practices. Unregulated capitalism is a cancer that will eventually kill itself and, possibly, everything else.
That is one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind
You left out the "a". Not only did he intend to say it, he did say it, and it was lost in the poor voice transmission.
That's what I have now, and I agree. My problems are:
A) They track every site you and I visit and sell the information to the feds.
B) I have to pay them for telephone service for the privilege of buying their DSL.
If I lived two miles over and had Time Warner for cable service, I'd switch in a minute. But we had Cox (now Suddenlink) and the service was awful. SBC DSL is the best I can get.
Indeed, I had no love for AT&T, but I was pleased to hear that the old "T" stock ticker was coming back. It just left a little tear in my eye for the olden days when I wasn't born yet. ~
If standalone DSL means I can drop my home telephone service without having to switch to Suddenlink's crappy cable internet service, I'm all for it. (The standalone DSL, not necessarily the merger with BellSouth.)
Yes, and computers that just booted to a command line used to sell like hotcakes, too, 20 years ago. They were also pretty darn expensive.
Markets change. Something that would sell like crazy five years ago might not sell at all, now. This is especially true when the market doesn't easily support competition, due to DRM (iTMS) and mechanical integration (factory in-car systems, etc.).
And the guy several posts above who broke his back and has been told by his doctor that he will suffer from chronic pain for the rest of his life? Should we not research medications to ease his pain, so he can better figure out why his back hurts? (Hint: It hurts because he broke it.)
Just because your chronic pain is self-induced, it doesn't mean all people's pain is so caused.
I posted a review of pre-paid service providers later down in this article. In short, I just switched from Cingular (who was cutting my phone off when they disabled their CDMA network) to Virgin Mobile. I'm happy so far.
Consumer Report's review (yes, I have a web subscription and read the entire thing) only covers the major contract-based cell phone providers. They don't discuss pre-pay or by-the-minute services of those providers, or discuss the pre-pay only providers at all.
I'm sure there are others here that prefer to remain disconnected from the world when not at my work desk, and only carry a cell phone for wife/family/emergency use. I just changed providers this week and have my own (very brief) review of the pre-pay providers.
I had been using Cingular's Pay-As-You-Go service, with by-the-minute pay rather than the monthly charge. (Actually, I had been using AT&T's pre-paid service until the merger.) I was on Cingular's CDMA network, which they are shutting down April 1. Cingular offered a choice of two new GSM phones for free for me to use to remain with them, but both phones were featureless and looked similar to the now-clunky Nokia phones of the early part of the decade. (That probably speaks more to Nokia's stagnant development, but Cingular still chose to buy and offer that product.)
I chose not to stay with Cingular in part because I was offended at the offer they made me, and in part because of my past service.
- While I have few to no problems with dropped calls, my wife says that she often has to dial 2-3 times before the call will go through. (The other times, it goes straight to voice mail without ringing.) This likely has to do in part with my phone (one of those ugly Nokia models) and part to do with the network (Cingular hasn't invested in their CDMA network in years, instead investing in GSM).
- I was more concerned with the expiration dates for their pre-paid minutes. AT&T offered 635 minutes with a year of expiration for $100, which is about 15 cents a minute. Cingular's $100 offer was 400 minutes, with only 180 day expiration. Given that I talk about 30 minutes a month, the loss of minutes was not so bad, but the expiration made the product useless. Instead I bought $25 for 100 minutes @ 90 day expiration, and had to buy another one each quarter. (They also shorted me a day every time I refreshed.) I think Cingular just changed the $100 card back to a year expiration, but it was too little too late.
Looking at other providers, I considered both major carriers that offer pre-paid plans, and the pre-paid only providers.
- Verizon's pre-paid plans cost, at minimum, $1 a day for service. The Verizon salesman at a Dallas Circuit City, to his credit, recommended that I not go with them as it would be too expensive for my needs.
- The Verizon rep instead pointed me to Amp'D mobile, which he said used the Verizon network. This would have allowed me to get a major-model phone (like a Motorola Razor). I didn't chose Amp'D because I don't want a phone with a camera (I attend 2-3 movie festivals each year, including one this past weekend, and I would have to surrender my phone if it had a camera), and I didn't really need a phone that still costs $200 or more for my pre-paid service. They also charge $0.25 cents a minute, and (from their brochures) would require quarterly fill-ups to avoid expiration.
- Cricket wireless has been advertising their pre-paid service in my area. They offer service here in Austin, but don't serve Dallas/Fort Worth where my family lives and my wife and I travel each holiday.
I chose Virgin Mobile, as they seemed like the best service for me:
- They offered nice-looking phones at reasonable prices. I got a Vox 8610, a nice flip phone without a camera, for about $25 from their website. The reviews I read about this phone before I ordered it were generally positive.
- They use Sprint's network. Despite the Consumer Reports publication, in 3-4 days of use I have yet to miss or drop a call. I am even able to receive calls and text messages while the phone's antenna is down, the phone is in my pocket, and I'm sitting down, which is an improvement. (Yes, the p
Other costs need to be taken into account. For example, many people leave their computers on when not in use, because they don't want to waste time letting them start up when they return. (I leave my work computer on except over three-day weekends or longer, though I turn the CRT monitors off each night.) Their time is money, and they don't want to pay the price.
But, leaving the computers on also costs money in terms of electricity. This is also a big price to pay. If the computers would boot significantly faster, their users might be more willing to shut them down. There was a big discussion on this a few articles ago. If it cost a little extra to put the OS on a super-fast non-volatile storage medium, perhaps it would be worth it.
And that may have been true when you were a young lad, but I very much doubt it's true now, unless you still drive a car from that time.
;p If the kid knew how to take care of the car like that, he'd work at a mechanic, not delivering pizza.
A) Starters are durable.
B) Gas is more expensive.
C) Leaving it idle pollutes more than shutting it down (if your car maintenance is up-to-date).
Item C) may not apply, as we are talking about cars used by "young lads" to deliver pizzas. In my experience, those are rarely in tip-top shape.
I'd be more efficient if I could leave sooner.
I'm not sure that's the right angle to take. This implies that you have a fixed set of tasks, and that you would do those tasks faster if it meant you could leave work when they were finished, regardless of how long they took to complete. It also means that your boss has already examined the tasks, examined you, and decided that they would take you a full day to do. (If this wasn't true, they would have given you more tasks.)
In contrast, I think most self-driven employees (i.e. the kind that would comprise an office where "flex-time" is allowed) make their own list of tasks to achieve higher-level company objectives. This may complement a list of fixed tasks from management, but generally freedom is given to budget time for both lists.
In other words, if you finish your work on the task your boss gave you after six hours of work, you spend the next two hours voluntarily brainstorming new products or efficiencies for your company, or doing data mining on sales to better learn customer patterns, or checking up with key accounts to see if they need assistance, or doing web training on the latest version of an app you use, etc. Only when you are willing to take such initiative is flex time appropriate. Then, they may not mind if you arrive at work at 10:30 AM, finish your boss' task around 7:00 PM (taking into account a long lunch and a game of ping-pong in the afternoon), then work at home from 9:00-11:00 PM on your own initiative. Or, you get to work at 6:00 AM, work nonstop, and leave at 2:00 PM. Your choice.
"Gather a mob, shoot the bureaucrats between the eyes" "The world would be a better place if this happened more frequently."
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/56093
Absolutely not, because:
A) nothing like that would or could ever be globally enforced
B) the definition of material that would fall into that category varies from city to city, much less from country to country
On the other hand, a *.#.kids.us domain could work, where:
A) The # represents the age of the kids that some committee in the US decides can view content on that site. For example, the Cheerios website with little games and such could be cheerios.5.kids.us, while a website useful for anatomy classes in high school could be anatomy.15.kids.us. Of course this committee will cater to the most conservative people in the country, but see item B below.
B) Parents can choose to limit their internet connectivity to sites based on an age number. If you have a ten-year-old, you restrict all sites except those within *.2.kids.us to *.kids.10.us. If you are more liberal than the national average, you open up *.11.kids.us or higher as well, thus compensating for the inherently conservative nature of the classification committee.
C) Websites with information spanning multiple age groups buy (or are simply given) domains for all those ages. xmen.9.kids.us might have less-mature content than xmen.16.kids.us, for example.
D) If you want to view a website outside of the kids.us domain? Well, all bets are off, because the US cannot control websites outside of the US anyway.
The US has the ability to make a "safe" sandbox for kids, where "safe" is defined by the most conservative people in the country. This sandbox would be inherently limited to those who wish to be included, because voluntary participation (while leaving the rest of the internet alone) is the only way to avoid first amendment conflicts and the fact that the US does not control the internet outside of its borders. Instead of doing this, the US has chosen to try every other possible unrealistic alternative, then spent my tax money defending them in court.
If you let all your WoW equipment decay and don't repair it, can you consider it a depreciated asset?
I have 2GB in my work machine that I receive late last year. That certainly isn't standard at my company, though; I justified the cost for the extra gig by pointedly not buying a new flatscreen LCD monitor, which is standard fare for most other people who upgrade PCs.
Of course, I
A) don't like the display quality of most LCD monitors, as I need to run in a lower-than-optimal resolution to avoid eye strain
B) would have probably needed to downgrade monitor size
C) wouldn't have gotten much use out of one LCD monitor when I run dual-display
D) can try to justify an LCD monitor later (if I wish to) by pointing out their power consumption savings
I would like to point out that this is known as forming concrete and not casting concrete. The difference is like the difference between pouring concrete for a foundation of a house and laying brick. Laying brick is casting while pouring concrete (like the article alludes to) is called 'forming.'
Actually, I'm not so sure I agree with the authors on this point. Assuming some of them are made and not quarried, then if they were formed in place, why are they still clearly distinctive stones with detectable (though still very small) gaps between them? It's not like with modern concrete, where rubber or stone is used to separate pieces, or where it is poured as one long piece then scored to direct cracking.
Rather, I would propose that some of the higher stones were cast. Assuming they had the technology to do so, why not? I would bet that, by the time the pyramid was nearing completion, there were thousands of tons of loose limestone debris sitting around the construction site, from broken stones, shaved fragments, or bits removed during fitting. Rather than drag another thousand tons of stone from the quarry, why not cast some new big stones from the leftovers? After they are cast, they can be hand trimmed to size and set into place like all the quarried stones.
Then, this still leaves the question of where the stones were cast (on the ground, or on the big ramps built up around the pyramid) and how they were set into place. The authors of this study might think that they have answered this question, but see no reason to believe they have done so, as I think this alternative proposal is a more likely scenario.
Say I want to map out my hometown using aerial geography. That's a fairly large undertaking, requiring a plane, probably multiple camera, and almost certainly multiple passes over the area. If I'm expected pay for the costs of acquiring those photos, but I can't expect to even break even (because someone can take my data and release it for free), then I have less incentive to spend the money required to acquire the data. We don't get innovation on the use of this data until such time as the data is acquired, and that can be a costly venture.
Well, you could use contract law and prevent anyone who receives your images from distributing them in any way. I have some pictures, taken in 1917, that I used in a research project in college. They are not copyrighted in the US or anywhere else, but I signed a contract when I bought them that defined my rights to redistribute them (the originals, or copies of those originals), and the penalties for doing so improperly. These limitations actually prevented me from publishing my project online as I originally intended - I had to turn it in on CD instead - but they were important enough to use anyway.
Without copyright, there are still ways to protect investment in so-called "intellectual property".
They'll power it with a hornet?
Seriously, we're going to figure out how to override the nervous system of insects and get them to do our bidding long before we'll miniaturize rotors and batteries to the same size. If the payload is a mini camera and a poison stinger, the hornet will be able to carry it, too.
We're already doing this with cockroaches.
I'd settle for being able to send myself a short message.
\MessageBegins\ It's a trap! \MessageEnds\
LK
Yeah, but alternatives such as a heat pump can do much better than 100% efficiency, as they use electricity to move heat from outside (where it is cold) to inside (where it is hot). 100% efficient isn't really very good for electrical heating.
See http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/thermo
From that site:
The same argument applies to those lightbulbs. It would use less power to use fluorescent lights and turn on your heat pump. Whatever article you read was describing science the author didn't understand - namely that using electricity to perform work is more efficient than using it to generate heat. The author probably saw "100%" and thought it was the best you could get.
I bought the Commodore 2400 (or was it 1200?) baud modem in 1989 for my Commodore 128. Wow, that was such an improvement over 300 baud! BBS text flowed line at a time on my screen, instead of character at a time.
All that hardware - computers, monitors, lots and lots of probably-broken floppy drives - is in the closet of our computer room.
Buy a few thousand of these for 'inner city urban warfare' er, 'police useage'.
Been there done that.
He's got it right here. We may have 50 years left of easily enriched uranium, but if we're willing to invest in breeder reactors, we have a near infinite supply of fission material.
The "if" is the big part. Because are closer to what can be used to produce weapons-grade materials, breeder reactors always get the boogeyman attached to them.
I've always considered my PCB designs to be works of art. In some designs especially, the trace organization screams for symmetry and flow. The walls of my cube are covered in my board layouts, and I have some at home as well.
Incidentally, I can usually beat a frequency target by 2X or more, without specific RF design considerations. I consider this a side of effect of "beautiful" board design - performance derives from form.
This is one reason why, whenever I can justify it, I do my own layouts instead of leaving them to a PCB designer.