Pop/rock concerts have been relatively expensive for as long as I can remember. $40 in 1983 was a heck of a lot of money for me to fund from my paper route, especially when I could by an LP for $5.98. But it's not just rock concerts that are expensive: Cirque du Soleil will easily cost you $100+ per ticket, and my local symphony charges $65. Going to the theater to see a live performance is getting incredibly expensive, too. The big advantage that the likes of Madonna and U2 have is massive and numbing exposure on the radio or the President's iPod.
GoDaddy.com doesn't seem to have anything to do with turbocow.com. It's is registered through doteasy.com in British Columbia to:
Messersmith, Terence
P.O. Box 81024
Burnaby, BC V5H 4K2
Canada
That said, I've often wondered if searching the status of a domain name on a registrar's site causes them to put it onto a list of domains that should be offered to potential customers who search something similar. Potentially, that could be a very profitable little venture.
I was thinking of electric light rail. It works reasonably well where I'm from, but needs significant investment to expand the system. It saved our family the expense of a second car for years -- an inexpensive 10 mile ride to the city center each day. Sadly, most smaller cities in the US and Canada don't have rail. It doesn't have to be a billion dollar system -- retrofitting LRT tram lines on existing roadways can be done with cheap raised platforms. But the trick is convincing people that it's necessary.
And I agree that a lot of people on this continent drive out of necessity, but that just points out city design flaws. I'm a big fan of urban redevelopment and walkable communities rather than allowing even more suburban sprawl, because eventually it will become completely unsustainable.
The ideas you present would work well to conserve a little fossil fuel over the next few years, but none of them address the underlying problem: fossil fuels are being depleted at an amazing rate, and there's no viable alternative. We use oil & gas for a lot more than heating and driving to work. Plastic (ie: your car interior, most consumer goods). Pesticides. Fuel to power tractors and construction equipment. Food additives. Man-made fabric. Dishwashing detergent. Shipping tomatoes 2500 miles across the continent so people in Minnesota can eat them in winter. And so on. You can't replace any of that with biofuel or a windmill without drastic changes in our behaviour and consumption patterns.
For starters, North America needs to get past the idea that everyone needs a car. It simply shouldn't be this way. Nuclear electricity (in existing forms) is also a finite resource. I suspect we should be spending money on effective public transit (ie: forget the diesel-fueled busses that rumble almost empty around the suburbs every hour or so) and human-scale communities.
All in all, we need to realize how much of what we buy is actually unnecessary, and how "hybrid cars" and "hydrogen cars" are false idols (remember that 45% of the energy consumed by a car is used in its construction) -- they merely fit a corporate marketing niche, rather than addressing the fundamental problem.
The problem is that a short period of extremely high volume does the same damage as prolonged listening at moderate volumes. And humans are extremely bad at perceiving volume -- I often crank my iPod higher than I should when on the train with lots of ambient noise. So the iPod volume limiter is a cute idea, but in practice it should lower the volume if I leave my earphones stuffed into my head for an entire afternoon.
The best thing is to educate yourself on the dangers of loud music (heck, ANY loud ambient noise can be dangerous as well). I'm from an older generation and did some permanent damage to my hearing with a string of Sony Walkman players and car stereos.
I'm guessing that these things have engines that burn quite cleanly, but does anyone have a good handle on the environmental impact of zorching around at more than Mach 7?
I got bitten by the copyright board's $25 levy on iPods several years ago. Luckily, it was overturned and Apple was *very* quick to refund my money - it was the only rebate claim I've ever had processed in less than a week.;)
As for the CD tax -- it stinks. I use a dozen or so CDs (and DVDs) for project backups, photos, home movies, and so on. I no longer use a tape-based VCR; It's much nicer to burn timeshifted TV shows to DVD/CD with DivX compression. Why should I have to pay a levy on that?!
This is a bit like cereal companies, who buy shelf space and fill it with dozens of derivative products: "Cinammon Cheerios with Honey..." But in this case, the retailers probably won't have the pleasure of demanding payment in return for premium shelf space (or its web equivalent). Also : Who in their right mind would buy a product named "Windows Home Basic?" It sounds like something that Dell et al will offer with the intent of enticing up-sells, because it certainly won't become a big-seller. Same goes for Vista Starter. So that leaves home users with Home Premium or Vista Ultimate. I'm still not sure about Vista Business -- wouldn't most biz users only need to run spreadsheets and send email (yes, I know they've probably crippled "domaining" in other "lesser" versions.
Just say no. Refuse to upgrade your friends and family. Discourage them by saying "Windows XP does everything you need." Point out that upgrading is just a cash-grab for Microsoft, with no solid value for most people. And when their machines are truly old, hustle them into OS X land.
Similar restrictions are going into effect across Europe. Their goal is two-fold: restrict the sale of goods containing certain hazardous substances such as lead-based solder, mercury, and a handful of others (termed the RoHS initiative). If you think about it, this makes sense. We can't pee in our drinking water forever.;) The second part of the European legislation involves a formal disposal process for *all* electronic devices. It's termed WEE, and requires manufacturers to arrange for the collection and recycling/disposal of all our old crap.
Like Japan, this may effect the resale of used goods, although there will be a patchwork of mildly inconsistent laws throughout the EU. As I see it, these initiatives will have enormous impact on the used technology market AND on small manufacturers, as another level of paperwork and expense is added to the process. The result could be fewer garage startups like Apple and H-P.
There are times when it makes sense to stay cheap & simple. For instance, many people who live in the countryside find dialup to be the only affordable option - they can't get cable or DSL broadband, and satellite is an expensive proposition for casual users. And lets not forget that people like my mom don't need rip-snorting broadband to check e-mail once a week. And in other news, bus drivers have announced a raise in fares to encourage people to buy cars.;)
Ahh. So you're planning to retrofit our homes for electric heat? The majority of electricity used in the U.S. is generated from power plants that burn fossil fuels. About 50% of the total is coal, 10% natural gas, and two percent of the total is oil. And take a look at your SUV -- it's a little steel cage filled with oil-based plastic.
No, I haven't seen that documentary, although I heard someone use the term "starter mansion" recently and liked it. Especially since I remember my realtor talking about how we could "trade up" from our home to something larger in a few years -- and our house is already twice the size of my parent's home. But I digress.
As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, there are a *lot* of industries and practices that rely on cheap fuel. The current agricultural/food processing model in which food is shipped across the continent is unsustainable without cheap oil -- tractors run on diesel, as do semi trucks. Pesticides are oil-based, and so on. Our cars are full of oil-based fabrics and oil-based plastic components. So are our houses.
The idea of global manufacturing goes out of the window -- I don't see how we'll be able to ship stuff from China like we do now if oil costs 10x as much. That means Wal-Mart and their ilk will have to radically shift their supply chain model. And gas that costs $10/gallon means that commuting significant distances will impact their disposable income and curtail expenditure on plastic-based televisions and the like. The impact will be huge, although not as quick and all-encompassing as the panicked Greenfreaks would have you believe.
Just stop and think it all through. Look around and ignore both sides of the media and plan a strategy that works well for you, because things are going to shift. It will be framed as "the government's fault" or "evil big business" or perhaps even "those damn green party people and their expensive and useless environmental regulations." But the fact remains -- North Americans use a disproportionate amount of the World's oil and energy, and it can't continue indefinitely.
With even more respect, we use oil & gas for a lot more than heating and driving to work. Plastic. Pesticides. Fuel to power tractors and construction equipment. Food additives. Man-made fabric. Dishwashing detergent. Shipping tomatoes 2500 miles across the continent so people in Minnesota can eat them in winter. And so on. Manufacturing shower curtains out of uranium just isn't practical.;)
It's interesting that your response includes "cars running on nuke-electrolysed hydrogen" -- we need to get past the idea that everyone needs a car. It simply shouldn't be this way. Nuclear electricity (in existing forms) is also a finite resource. We should be spending money on effective public transit (ie: not diesel-fueled busses) and human-scale communities.
Your numbers are a bit off. It's estimated that the oil sands in Canada contain just under a third of the world's remaining oil - hardly enough to last 200 years. That oil is in a heavy bituminous sand (clay, water, oil and sand mixture). Right now, it is strip-mined (requires oil to run equipment). Over 80% of the deposits are too deep to strip and require new technologies. Extraction of oil from the sand requires tremendous amounts of water and heat (currently generated with natural gas, which is getting scarce itself).
Each barrel of extracted oil from the tar sands requires the release of more than 80kg of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and about 5 barrels of waste water - not to mention the environmental nightmare caused by strip-mining. There is no easy answer to our oil addiction. It's certainly not to be found in Canada's north. It will stave off the inevitable for a few short years, at tremendous economic and environmental cost, but our world will change forever.
The good news is that we will be "forced" to rediscover local agriculture and commerce. No more "made in China" stickers on our locally made goods, and craftspeople will regain the stature they once had. Just remember that suburban "starter mansions" will be the slums of the future -- to expensive to heat, too far from shops, farmland and gathering places to be worth inhabiting. My advice? Learn blacksmithing in your spare time.
In the interview, Eckert seems to imply that Atanasoff wasn't really worthy of receiving a patent because he had little more than test-bench ideas, wheras Mauchly and Eckert took their concepts and produced a machine that did cutting-edge scientific work for a decade. In a way, this points out many of the flaws with modern technology patents -- RIM would not be in the situation it is currently facing if the NTP lawyers were required to produce a working prototype of a wireless email system.
The reason that everyone lauds ENIAC is that it was the first *meaningful* public application of a "pluggable/programmable" computer. Of course, a few folks at Bletchley Park knew that Tommy Flowers had built a tube-based computer in 1943-1944 to crack the German Lorenz codes. The British went on to build ten of them. And, incidentally, it used a parallel architecture.
The political system in the US in an interesting beast. It tries to cram 300 million people into a system that lets you vote "blue" or "red," and little more. To exacerbate the problem, the electoral college system compounds the confusion around electing red or blue power brokers. And yet... there's so much rhetoric about freedom and democracy in the news all the time.
Perhaps you should consider representation by population and the establishment of a few more meaningful political parties (although the current ones will fight tooth and nail to block their creation) It seems to work well in Switzerland.
Both of the large local broadband providers in my region (Western Canada) currently offer tiered service, capping download and upload speeds arbitrarily to allow them to offer "lite, regular, and extreme" service at siginificantly different price points. One of them even charges a $10 monthly fee to ensure "VoIP quality" service if you're using a third-party internet phone system (that one makes me wonder).
In reality, the sweet spot is still the standard service. If I ever find myself needed an extra two or three Mbps of downstream transfer, it seems appropriate for me to pay an extra $10/month -- I'd obviously cease to be a typical "browsing and emailing" user.
"No system will ever be successful at never having an accident, but eventually we (or our grandchildren) will all be riding in these things."
I rather suspect our grandchildren will be riding horses. They have brilliant accident avoidance systems and run on readily available biofuel.
Things will start to get expensive the first time one of these things is involved in a fatal accident that involves the death of an attractive young family. Software fails, and the complexity of a real-world driving system will almost certainly lead to catastrophic failure at some point.
1. How on Earth would it cope with extremely snowy and icy conditions? Heavy rain? Fog? Radar and imaging will have a heck of a time in less than perfect environments.
2. Accident avoidance becomes a huge isse with an automated system. Drivers who learn to trust their computerized cars will be more likely to play with Blackberries, fiddle with the car stereo, read, or carry on conversations without watching the road. That'd make it pretty hard to react quickly to sudden lane changes or accidents in adjacent lanes.
3. How would the system cope with a flock of birds or junk on the roadway?
4. What if the driver fell asleep and the system failed to correctly detect traffic pylons or railway crossings?
5. Just wait for the onslaught of DUI arrests when people try to get their car to drive them home.
In other words, this is a brilliant ideas that's time should never come.
Someone just sent me a fantastic link to Syntax Error's Joystick and Control Pad Archive. It's filled to the brim with dozens of wickedly funky controllers, including personal faves like the TAC 2.
[As an aside...] My retro tech book includes chapter on vintage videogaming from the 1970s and 1980s. You can download the chapter free from here: http://tinyurl.com/8bqdy/ [retrothing.com]
The list should start with Ralph Baer's dual-knob analog design for the original Magnavox Odyssey (one for controlling the paddle, one for the ball's English). It'd be fun to include Atari Pong and a Coleco Telstar unit, too. Anyone remember the triangular Telstar Arcade with the steering wheel, light gun, and paddles? Now that was cool.
Other nifty stuff from the Seventies... the slightly odd Magnavox 2 and Fairchild Channel F. And from the Eighties, what about the famed Tac 2 controller that accompanied so many Commodore 64s? Or the Intellivision/Colecovision/Vectrex. Almost like the list was written by a teenager who doesn't know how to Google.
Yes, "Heat will enter the building at a rate proportional to the difference in temperature between the inside and outside air," but you are forgetting the role that direct sunlight (or lack thereof) plays in the daily cycle. I used to work in a brand-spanking-new computerized building with temperature sensors everywhere. It had a massive sloped metal roof that the sun heated to an interior temp of about fifty five degrees Celsius on a warm afternoon.
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Pop/rock concerts have been relatively expensive for as long as I can remember. $40 in 1983 was a heck of a lot of money for me to fund from my paper route, especially when I could by an LP for $5.98. But it's not just rock concerts that are expensive: Cirque du Soleil will easily cost you $100+ per ticket, and my local symphony charges $65. Going to the theater to see a live performance is getting incredibly expensive, too. The big advantage that the likes of Madonna and U2 have is massive and numbing exposure on the radio or the President's iPod.
GoDaddy.com doesn't seem to have anything to do with turbocow.com. It's is registered through doteasy.com in British Columbia to:
Messersmith, Terence
P.O. Box 81024
Burnaby, BC V5H 4K2
Canada
That said, I've often wondered if searching the status of a domain name on a registrar's site causes them to put it onto a list of domains that should be offered to potential customers who search something similar. Potentially, that could be a very profitable little venture.
I was thinking of electric light rail. It works reasonably well where I'm from, but needs significant investment to expand the system. It saved our family the expense of a second car for years -- an inexpensive 10 mile ride to the city center each day. Sadly, most smaller cities in the US and Canada don't have rail. It doesn't have to be a billion dollar system -- retrofitting LRT tram lines on existing roadways can be done with cheap raised platforms. But the trick is convincing people that it's necessary. And I agree that a lot of people on this continent drive out of necessity, but that just points out city design flaws. I'm a big fan of urban redevelopment and walkable communities rather than allowing even more suburban sprawl, because eventually it will become completely unsustainable.
For starters, North America needs to get past the idea that everyone needs a car. It simply shouldn't be this way. Nuclear electricity (in existing forms) is also a finite resource. I suspect we should be spending money on effective public transit (ie: forget the diesel-fueled busses that rumble almost empty around the suburbs every hour or so) and human-scale communities.
All in all, we need to realize how much of what we buy is actually unnecessary, and how "hybrid cars" and "hydrogen cars" are false idols (remember that 45% of the energy consumed by a car is used in its construction) -- they merely fit a corporate marketing niche, rather than addressing the fundamental problem.
The best thing is to educate yourself on the dangers of loud music (heck, ANY loud ambient noise can be dangerous as well). I'm from an older generation and did some permanent damage to my hearing with a string of Sony Walkman players and car stereos.
I'm guessing that these things have engines that burn quite cleanly, but does anyone have a good handle on the environmental impact of zorching around at more than Mach 7?
Errm... why the hell would we let the American FBI into Canada?
As for the CD tax -- it stinks. I use a dozen or so CDs (and DVDs) for project backups, photos, home movies, and so on. I no longer use a tape-based VCR; It's much nicer to burn timeshifted TV shows to DVD/CD with DivX compression. Why should I have to pay a levy on that?!
Just say no. Refuse to upgrade your friends and family. Discourage them by saying "Windows XP does everything you need." Point out that upgrading is just a cash-grab for Microsoft, with no solid value for most people. And when their machines are truly old, hustle them into OS X land.
Like Japan, this may effect the resale of used goods, although there will be a patchwork of mildly inconsistent laws throughout the EU. As I see it, these initiatives will have enormous impact on the used technology market AND on small manufacturers, as another level of paperwork and expense is added to the process. The result could be fewer garage startups like Apple and H-P.
There are times when it makes sense to stay cheap & simple. For instance, many people who live in the countryside find dialup to be the only affordable option - they can't get cable or DSL broadband, and satellite is an expensive proposition for casual users. And lets not forget that people like my mom don't need rip-snorting broadband to check e-mail once a week. And in other news, bus drivers have announced a raise in fares to encourage people to buy cars. ;)
Ahh. So you're planning to retrofit our homes for electric heat? The majority of electricity used in the U.S. is generated from power plants that burn fossil fuels. About 50% of the total is coal, 10% natural gas, and two percent of the total is oil. And take a look at your SUV -- it's a little steel cage filled with oil-based plastic.
As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, there are a *lot* of industries and practices that rely on cheap fuel. The current agricultural/food processing model in which food is shipped across the continent is unsustainable without cheap oil -- tractors run on diesel, as do semi trucks. Pesticides are oil-based, and so on. Our cars are full of oil-based fabrics and oil-based plastic components. So are our houses.
The idea of global manufacturing goes out of the window -- I don't see how we'll be able to ship stuff from China like we do now if oil costs 10x as much. That means Wal-Mart and their ilk will have to radically shift their supply chain model. And gas that costs $10/gallon means that commuting significant distances will impact their disposable income and curtail expenditure on plastic-based televisions and the like. The impact will be huge, although not as quick and all-encompassing as the panicked Greenfreaks would have you believe.
Just stop and think it all through. Look around and ignore both sides of the media and plan a strategy that works well for you, because things are going to shift. It will be framed as "the government's fault" or "evil big business" or perhaps even "those damn green party people and their expensive and useless environmental regulations." But the fact remains -- North Americans use a disproportionate amount of the World's oil and energy, and it can't continue indefinitely.
With even more respect, we use oil & gas for a lot more than heating and driving to work. Plastic. Pesticides. Fuel to power tractors and construction equipment. Food additives. Man-made fabric. Dishwashing detergent. Shipping tomatoes 2500 miles across the continent so people in Minnesota can eat them in winter. And so on. Manufacturing shower curtains out of uranium just isn't practical. ;)
It's interesting that your response includes "cars running on nuke-electrolysed hydrogen" -- we need to get past the idea that everyone needs a car. It simply shouldn't be this way. Nuclear electricity (in existing forms) is also a finite resource. We should be spending money on effective public transit (ie: not diesel-fueled busses) and human-scale communities.
Each barrel of extracted oil from the tar sands requires the release of more than 80kg of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and about 5 barrels of waste water - not to mention the environmental nightmare caused by strip-mining. There is no easy answer to our oil addiction. It's certainly not to be found in Canada's north. It will stave off the inevitable for a few short years, at tremendous economic and environmental cost, but our world will change forever.
The good news is that we will be "forced" to rediscover local agriculture and commerce. No more "made in China" stickers on our locally made goods, and craftspeople will regain the stature they once had. Just remember that suburban "starter mansions" will be the slums of the future -- to expensive to heat, too far from shops, farmland and gathering places to be worth inhabiting. My advice? Learn blacksmithing in your spare time.
What on Earth does the CRTC (and by indirect reference, Cancon) have to do with mass censorship of Internet sites in China?
The reason that everyone lauds ENIAC is that it was the first *meaningful* public application of a "pluggable/programmable" computer. Of course, a few folks at Bletchley Park knew that Tommy Flowers had built a tube-based computer in 1943-1944 to crack the German Lorenz codes. The British went on to build ten of them. And, incidentally, it used a parallel architecture.
Perhaps you should consider representation by population and the establishment of a few more meaningful political parties (although the current ones will fight tooth and nail to block their creation) It seems to work well in Switzerland.
In reality, the sweet spot is still the standard service. If I ever find myself needed an extra two or three Mbps of downstream transfer, it seems appropriate for me to pay an extra $10/month -- I'd obviously cease to be a typical "browsing and emailing" user.
"No system will ever be successful at never having an accident, but eventually we (or our grandchildren) will all be riding in these things." I rather suspect our grandchildren will be riding horses. They have brilliant accident avoidance systems and run on readily available biofuel.
1. How on Earth would it cope with extremely snowy and icy conditions? Heavy rain? Fog? Radar and imaging will have a heck of a time in less than perfect environments.
2. Accident avoidance becomes a huge isse with an automated system. Drivers who learn to trust their computerized cars will be more likely to play with Blackberries, fiddle with the car stereo, read, or carry on conversations without watching the road. That'd make it pretty hard to react quickly to sudden lane changes or accidents in adjacent lanes.
3. How would the system cope with a flock of birds or junk on the roadway?
4. What if the driver fell asleep and the system failed to correctly detect traffic pylons or railway crossings?
5. Just wait for the onslaught of DUI arrests when people try to get their car to drive them home.
In other words, this is a brilliant ideas that's time should never come.
Someone just sent me a fantastic link to Syntax Error's Joystick and Control Pad Archive. It's filled to the brim with dozens of wickedly funky controllers, including personal faves like the TAC 2.
The list should start with Ralph Baer's dual-knob analog design for the original Magnavox Odyssey (one for controlling the paddle, one for the ball's English). It'd be fun to include Atari Pong and a Coleco Telstar unit, too. Anyone remember the triangular Telstar Arcade with the steering wheel, light gun, and paddles? Now that was cool.
Other nifty stuff from the Seventies... the slightly odd Magnavox 2 and Fairchild Channel F. And from the Eighties, what about the famed Tac 2 controller that accompanied so many Commodore 64s? Or the Intellivision/Colecovision/Vectrex. Almost like the list was written by a teenager who doesn't know how to Google.
Yes, "Heat will enter the building at a rate proportional to the difference in temperature between the inside and outside air," but you are forgetting the role that direct sunlight (or lack thereof) plays in the daily cycle. I used to work in a brand-spanking-new computerized building with temperature sensors everywhere. It had a massive sloped metal roof that the sun heated to an interior temp of about fifty five degrees Celsius on a warm afternoon.
Beta. "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."