And no, I did not mean to suggest that Worlds of Adventure was done by Looking Glass (they were Origin products). I just don't recall Garriot being too involved with their production.
And how is that going to beat large-scale production in an industrialized nation? Come on now. Importing cheap products instead of gearing up to build them yourselves, even in a pizza oven, has made sense for industrialized nations such as the US. It's not like developing countries will be looking at job-loss when they opt to buy Chinese imports or what have you.
The idea of "bake it yourself" cells is cute but I have every reason to believe that they can get them cheaper buying from a foreign manufacturer like Nanosolar (just one example that's in my head). Besides, since we both apparently did read the article, I'm sure you remember the part where there is mention of commercialization of this new cheap solar cell technology. It's not like this is going to be an open-source Easy Bake(tm) solar cell production system or what have you. You won't be going online to get the design specs off a handy-dandy, publicly-available information source. Somebody's going to be selling you something, presumably your own "kiln" or whatever with components to make your own cells. Or, shockingly enough, someone may be "baking" these cells on the cheap and shipping them to developing countries, putting them on the same plane as other solar cell manufacturers with respect to business model.
Last time I checked, they had already figured out how to produce low-cost solar cells. They're already shipping. The tech mentioned in the article may take 5 years to fully commercialize.
Not sure if you're thinking of the old "tweaker" FO sorceresses, but they broke most of the "kill everything all the time" strategies with various patches that introduced widespread elemental immunities in Hell mode (and Nightmare to a lesser extent) and added casting delays to prevent Sorceresses from being able to spam their most powerful spells (FO, Blizzard, Meteor, Firewall) without regard for actual aiming or anything else of the sort. Given that you can't break cold immunity with Cold Mastery alone (you need a Lower Resist wand or a helpful Necro), you can't rely on one spell (FO) killing everything anymore, at least not with any degree of efficiency.
You might be able to do it with a cold sorc using a Lower Resist wand, but I have no idea if Cold Mastery works on cold immunes once Lower Resist is in effect. If it does then you'd have to use 2-3 spells (probably a combination of FO and Ice Blast or Glacier Spike) and some Teleportation to stay out of trouble (there are some enemies in Act V that are immune to being frozen/chilled). If Lower Resist doesn't make Cold Mastery effective against cold immunes, then you may as well abandon the Cold tree altogether and play a Charged Bolt/Firewall sorceress or something lame like that and exploit a Lower Resist wand for all that it's worth. You aren't going to do much better than that if you really want to play sloppy and dump mana all over the place (have fun when they hit you with Bloodmana too, urgh).
A true capitalist can and will be utterly destroyed by a company in China that miraculously reverse-engineers every product produced by said true capitalist's corporation.
If you have an employee that leaves the company and then takes a suspicious "personal vacation" to Shanghai or Shenzhen while taking along engineering samples of your products that he was not meant to take with him when he quit, expect your company to fail and fail quickly.
A non-compete might scare the guy into not doing that. Maybe. Either way your patent and patent lawyers will be useless against anyone or anything in China unless you have the right influence in the right places. The non-compete will at least let you sue the defecting employee into oblivion if he's stupid enough to return to the states after selling off your business overseas.
It should also be noted that non-competes can be used as an added layer of protection along with an NDA when disclosing technology/products/IP on a limited basis during the normal course of doing business.
Not necessarily. If this new technology could eventually reach 15% efficiency, then it's still nothing particularly wonderful when you take into account the fact that some firms like Boeing Spectrolabs boast solar cells with efficiencies as high as 40% (they do use "solar concentrators", so it's possible that their panels may take up several square meters of surface area for every square meter of panel surface. Not having seen their designs, I wouldn't know).
Take a 40%-efficient solar cell and use it to feed power to a 50%-efficient electrolyzer, and you get a net total efficiency of 20%, which is better than the maximum estimated efficiency of this dye-based approach.
If they dye approach proves to be cheaper or can also be enhanced by solar concentrators or what have you, then it may have some value from an economic perspective, but I don't see anything 15% efficient providing dense solar power solutions compared to other technologies already available.
The other thing to keep in mind is that the output from this dye is hydrogen, not electricity. If you need electricity from one of these dye-based hydrogen generators, you'll need to marry it with a fuel cell or something long those lines which will further degrade efficiency. In terms of raw electrical output-per-square meter of deployed solar collectors, you'd be better off with conventional solar cells in the 15-20% efficiency range.
. . . was when I was three and my dad still liked going to arcades (games were simpler then, so he could still enjoy them). I would stand on a stool or box or whatever they had provided for kids to use to reach the controls on arcade machines and try playing PacMan, though I was only messing with the controls during the game's demo. Eventually I figured out that the game did something different if you put a quarter in it, so I'd beg quarters off my dad and then plunk them in, only to spend the entire game eating power pellets to turn the ghosts blue. It was a long time before I ever cleared the first stage.
3.5E had so many non-core sourcebooks that you could have easily respun and/or rebalanced the material into a new set of books if you had any need to sell more material (which you presumably do, as would anyone else in the same business). Based on what has been released and what I've read, 4E will be a radical departure of standards set back in 3E which were, in turn, meant to improve the game drastically.
Don't you think more work could have, and should have, been done to improve 3.5E? It seems like you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Unfortunately the stability of B2 chips past 2.3 ghz has been called into question thanks to problems with the Transition Lookaside Buffer (TLB). Anandtech was unable to get their B2 chip stable past 2.6 ghz despite the fact that it would run at speeds as high as 3 ghz. It is telling that reviews on AMD's supplied system (like Tom's) did not include any real stability testing of the much-touted 3 ghz B2 stepping Phenom X4.
Tom's Hardware agreed to the terms of AMD's carefully-managed benchmarking sessions. Way to drink the Kool-Aid, Tom's. Anand stuck up for his own integrity as a reviewer and produced a much better review of the chip. Moral of the story: If you want a Phenom X4, wait for the B3 stepping!
Just keep your eye on MTRON. They're pushing a lot of SSD harddrives out on the market, albeit at astronomical prices. Still, the performance on their drives is fantastic.
Slashdot Mirror
And no, I did not mean to suggest that Worlds of Adventure was done by Looking Glass (they were Origin products). I just don't recall Garriot being too involved with their production.
The Ultima Underworld series came from Looking Glass. Garriot had little to do with them so far as I know (ditto for the Worlds of Adventure games).
How many of them thought to utilize angry sea bass in the process? Hmm? Makes you wonder doesn't it?
While I would not need one for personal use, it might be fun to try to sell such a device to clueless law enforcement agencies.
"Sir, as a condition of your bail, you are instructed to breath into this USB device before emailing anyone".
"Why? It's not like I can run over any more little, old women while puttering around in Gmail after too many Harvey Wallbangers"
"Uh . . . to prevent you from . . . uh . . . bailiff, contact the vendor for this thing".
Subject line says it all. That's what I get for half-assed spellchecking.
I can see this being more useful by being integrated with a USB breathalyzer peripheral. Does such a thing exist? Hmmmm . . .
I guess you could say the original draft of 2001: A Space Odyssey was mothballed? Hur hur!
Great, now all we need to do is stick it in my car's gas tank to improve fuel economy! Yay!
IN SOVIET RUSSIA, further decline indicates YOU!
And how is that going to beat large-scale production in an industrialized nation? Come on now. Importing cheap products instead of gearing up to build them yourselves, even in a pizza oven, has made sense for industrialized nations such as the US. It's not like developing countries will be looking at job-loss when they opt to buy Chinese imports or what have you.
The idea of "bake it yourself" cells is cute but I have every reason to believe that they can get them cheaper buying from a foreign manufacturer like Nanosolar (just one example that's in my head). Besides, since we both apparently did read the article, I'm sure you remember the part where there is mention of commercialization of this new cheap solar cell technology. It's not like this is going to be an open-source Easy Bake(tm) solar cell production system or what have you. You won't be going online to get the design specs off a handy-dandy, publicly-available information source. Somebody's going to be selling you something, presumably your own "kiln" or whatever with components to make your own cells. Or, shockingly enough, someone may be "baking" these cells on the cheap and shipping them to developing countries, putting them on the same plane as other solar cell manufacturers with respect to business model.
Last time I checked, they had already figured out how to produce low-cost solar cells. They're already shipping. The tech mentioned in the article may take 5 years to fully commercialize.
Not sure if you're thinking of the old "tweaker" FO sorceresses, but they broke most of the "kill everything all the time" strategies with various patches that introduced widespread elemental immunities in Hell mode (and Nightmare to a lesser extent) and added casting delays to prevent Sorceresses from being able to spam their most powerful spells (FO, Blizzard, Meteor, Firewall) without regard for actual aiming or anything else of the sort. Given that you can't break cold immunity with Cold Mastery alone (you need a Lower Resist wand or a helpful Necro), you can't rely on one spell (FO) killing everything anymore, at least not with any degree of efficiency.
You might be able to do it with a cold sorc using a Lower Resist wand, but I have no idea if Cold Mastery works on cold immunes once Lower Resist is in effect. If it does then you'd have to use 2-3 spells (probably a combination of FO and Ice Blast or Glacier Spike) and some Teleportation to stay out of trouble (there are some enemies in Act V that are immune to being frozen/chilled). If Lower Resist doesn't make Cold Mastery effective against cold immunes, then you may as well abandon the Cold tree altogether and play a Charged Bolt/Firewall sorceress or something lame like that and exploit a Lower Resist wand for all that it's worth. You aren't going to do much better than that if you really want to play sloppy and dump mana all over the place (have fun when they hit you with Bloodmana too, urgh).
It wouldn't take 90 days for us all to die if gravity took a holiday. In fact, I'm sure it'd be a matter of seconds.
Why did they bother with a $65k fine? I would have been more impressed if they had made it a $65,535 fine or something.
A true capitalist can and will be utterly destroyed by a company in China that miraculously reverse-engineers every product produced by said true capitalist's corporation.
If you have an employee that leaves the company and then takes a suspicious "personal vacation" to Shanghai or Shenzhen while taking along engineering samples of your products that he was not meant to take with him when he quit, expect your company to fail and fail quickly.
A non-compete might scare the guy into not doing that. Maybe. Either way your patent and patent lawyers will be useless against anyone or anything in China unless you have the right influence in the right places. The non-compete will at least let you sue the defecting employee into oblivion if he's stupid enough to return to the states after selling off your business overseas.
It should also be noted that non-competes can be used as an added layer of protection along with an NDA when disclosing technology/products/IP on a limited basis during the normal course of doing business.
Imagine what the Trabi could have been with nanopaper instead of duroplast.
Not necessarily. If this new technology could eventually reach 15% efficiency, then it's still nothing particularly wonderful when you take into account the fact that some firms like Boeing Spectrolabs boast solar cells with efficiencies as high as 40% (they do use "solar concentrators", so it's possible that their panels may take up several square meters of surface area for every square meter of panel surface. Not having seen their designs, I wouldn't know).
Take a 40%-efficient solar cell and use it to feed power to a 50%-efficient electrolyzer, and you get a net total efficiency of 20%, which is better than the maximum estimated efficiency of this dye-based approach.
If they dye approach proves to be cheaper or can also be enhanced by solar concentrators or what have you, then it may have some value from an economic perspective, but I don't see anything 15% efficient providing dense solar power solutions compared to other technologies already available.
The other thing to keep in mind is that the output from this dye is hydrogen, not electricity. If you need electricity from one of these dye-based hydrogen generators, you'll need to marry it with a fuel cell or something long those lines which will further degrade efficiency. In terms of raw electrical output-per-square meter of deployed solar collectors, you'd be better off with conventional solar cells in the 15-20% efficiency range.
Planescape: Torment
. . . was when I was three and my dad still liked going to arcades (games were simpler then, so he could still enjoy them). I would stand on a stool or box or whatever they had provided for kids to use to reach the controls on arcade machines and try playing PacMan, though I was only messing with the controls during the game's demo. Eventually I figured out that the game did something different if you put a quarter in it, so I'd beg quarters off my dad and then plunk them in, only to spend the entire game eating power pellets to turn the ghosts blue. It was a long time before I ever cleared the first stage.
3.5E had so many non-core sourcebooks that you could have easily respun and/or rebalanced the material into a new set of books if you had any need to sell more material (which you presumably do, as would anyone else in the same business). Based on what has been released and what I've read, 4E will be a radical departure of standards set back in 3E which were, in turn, meant to improve the game drastically.
Don't you think more work could have, and should have, been done to improve 3.5E? It seems like you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Unfortunately the stability of B2 chips past 2.3 ghz has been called into question thanks to problems with the Transition Lookaside Buffer (TLB). Anandtech was unable to get their B2 chip stable past 2.6 ghz despite the fact that it would run at speeds as high as 3 ghz. It is telling that reviews on AMD's supplied system (like Tom's) did not include any real stability testing of the much-touted 3 ghz B2 stepping Phenom X4.
Tom's Hardware agreed to the terms of AMD's carefully-managed benchmarking sessions. Way to drink the Kool-Aid, Tom's. Anand stuck up for his own integrity as a reviewer and produced a much better review of the chip. Moral of the story: If you want a Phenom X4, wait for the B3 stepping!
It's not sad, it's potentially pragmatic. The big players are staking claims to oil reserves now and planning for fusion in the future.
Just keep your eye on MTRON. They're pushing a lot of SSD harddrives out on the market, albeit at astronomical prices. Still, the performance on their drives is fantastic.
Pirates of the Caribbean vs. Blade?