Use LatexIt on a mac (simmilar is EquationService). This is a service. so you are in a text editor like textedit.app or word,. you type the latex equation, then execute the equation service from the services menu (using an assigned command key). it changes the latex to an equation and pastes in the graphic in the same spot.
you are typing latex, but your are not screwing around with creating files and latexing them.
Voting companies have traditionally offered to "disclose" their source code in the past. By disclose they do not mean open source. in the past it has always meant that certain designated people can get access under certain conditions. E.g. state voting officials under rabid NDA's can see it if they sue.
Until they actually publish it, assume that "disclose" does not mean either access without NDA or open source.
So the software was designed to detect bodies of work that contain phrases from other works. ANd it finds a work that is a composite of Shakespear and Kyd. isn't it more likely that someone back then was plagarizing from Shakespear and Kyd? As opposed to them collaborating?
For example if I turned in a term paper and the plagarism software detected phrases from cory doctrow and thomas pynchon, the conclusion my instructor would leap to is obvioulsy that the three of us collaborated on the term paper right? not! Why should this be different for this Play?
for a game to achieve a given level of revenue at a given price then you can compute the number of items you need to sell. if you make it too hard, your demographic won't support it. if you make it too easy then you bore the hard core and also may lose the demographic size you need.
the question is does medium hard work?
if not then you need to have variable difficulty to capture the area under the demand curve.
Also if lets freinds and guests compete on the turf of an expert. the expert may enjoy having more freinds than the person at his level.
Configurable is nice but i'd probably not be an expert enough to know what i needed until I had played it for a while and gotten frustrated.
Nuclear materials usually are not very dangerous for their nuclear properties. For most nuclear materials your skin is all the protection you need. You can get irradiated if you ingest it, which is how Nuclear medicines intnetionally work. But in many cases nuclear materials like Plutonium are more toxic as chemicals then they are dangerous as radioactive materials. You would not intentionally eat battery acid either, and evidently people don't do it accidentally very often either. The death rate from plutonium ingestion would presumably be about the same as the death rate from people ingesting car batteries.
The upside of nuclear materials is that unlike trace chemical contamination, which is hard to find and hard to clean up (e.g. think ancient leaking service station gas tanks contaminating well water), nuclear contamination is easy to find, easy to trace and easy to know when you have cleaned it all up.
would a single hundred year nuclear battery be less harmful to the enviroment or humans than a hundred years of mercury cadmium telluride hearing aid batteries and all the waste products to mine, produce and transport them?
Another explanation is that xbox uses a somewhat more conventional architecture processor. the Sony PS3 Cell is notoriously difficult to program for and thus requires uncommonly sophisticated skills in the hacker.
That of course is not perfectly true. Each Cell also has a conventional co-processor that could be attacked. but still the over all problem is probably a lot harder.
Maybe this is the way to get more trained cell programmers. Put tempting targets out there running on cells.
How in the heck do they propose to enforce this? most bloggers are anonymous. Many don't live in the US. Even Cringely doesn't use his real name. And then there is the sheer number. Moreover an underhanded company could easily soak up a few 11K fines (unlikely they would have to pay many).
excessive soluble Magnesium in the body depletes calcium. I'm sure they probably have thought about this. One could see this working both ways. Perhaps having magnesium in the replacment helps precipitate calcium in a useful place near the bone replacment. On the other hand soluble magnesium is know to rob bones of calcium, so a large source of soluble calcium especially concntrated near a weak bone might undermine it.
I have no idea what the right answer is here, but it does seem like something that need to be considered strongly.
true, and I said as much in another reply. But this does not change the average power that the service station has to supply. While you wait, another car is going to drive up, and another and another. if an interstate service station averages 1 car per minute then that means in the hour you wait 120 cars are parked, and perhaps 200 people are in the waiting area. the same amount of average megawatts ~20MW is still needed by the service station (assuming perfect effciency).
Also the danger zone for a 300KW line is huge. it's not the same as a wall plug or even a 220 once you get to 480V class systems you have the chance for a propagating arc flash through the air. At 300KW it's pretty extreme danger. These days breakers that operate at that level are done by remotely operated motors.
Or require a licensed operator at charging stations. Or something else.
The point being, it's probably feasible if the consumer drops their assumptions about the way fueling their car is supposed to go.
Not so fast. let's say the consumer was willing to wait 2 hours for his battery to get charged at the filling station. Does that solve the problem?
No the average rate of power usage by people going do the highway is still the same. if you figure 5 to ten people need to fill up at one station every 5 minutes then yor waiting room has to hold 120 to 240 people for that 2 hours it takes. plus you have to have enough service people to be processing 120 batteries per hour.
it's not totally unthinkable. But I suspect you will find people prefer gasoline that putting up with that.
The problem with replacable batteries is that you have not solved the average power delivery problem. You just moved it. if you picture the gas station as doing nothing at all till you arrive, then they swap in a pack, and off you go, there seems like there is no problem. In reality you have 5 to 10 cars all day long filling up for 5 minutes. that means the station has to be charging batteries at the same rate it handing them out. so that's 18 to 36 megawatts of power all day long on average to just stay even with the incoming batteries.
Then of course would you be willing to hook up a megawatt line to a battery that just came into your shop for charging? I would think you'd want to spend maybe an hour safety testing it before you throw the switch.
If you want to charge then 1000x more slowly (which would make more sense-- that would be like about 3 or 4 toaster worth of paper per battery) then you are going to need 1000x batteries in the back room charging.
a few more notes. the 30KW figure for the honda is based on air resistance not engine efficiency. So unless you are prepared to lie flat in a coffin shaped car, your pretty much stuck with the crossection of a Honda as the minimum useful car. Thus there's no way to beat that power demand by more than a small percentage let alone a factor of even 2.
You might suppose then that service stations will instead swap battery packs. But that does not really solve the problem well. At any moment a filling station might have 5 cars trying to fill up every 5 minutes. (probably even more in some stations) so no matter how you slice it, you need the filling station to be delivering 5*3.6= 18 megawatts of juice. (assuming perfect efficiency which won't happen).
This is huge problem that will require massive infrastructure changes to achieve.
It's how fast you can recharge it. If you have a 500 mile range then presumably the reason for thisis so you can use it up all in one go for true x-country travel not just commutes.
How long does it take to charge a 500 mile battery? well this is very easy to compute.
divide 500 by 50,miles per hour gives ten hours to drain it.
it takes roughly 30 KWatts to push a honda accord size car at a stead 55Mph on level ground.
Now how long do you want to wait to recharge it? let's say 5 minutes (1/12 hour) at the filling station is the normal time to fill a tank.
30KW * 10 Hours / (1/12 hour) = 30*120 KWatts
3.6 Megawatts.
So for a perfect efficiency system (not likely!) the minimum amount of power the user is going to be connecting to his car is a 3.6 megawatt line.
No way in hell is that ever going to happen. You simply don't let people who think Sara Palin is a good idea touch even a 10Kwatt power connection, let alone a 3.6 Megawatt one.
When highly trained linemen work on energized systems even a fraction of that power they wear 40 Calorie suits and everyone stands back.
I just don't see how the hell you get around this.
Now for commuting the problem is not so bad. You trickle charge it over many hours, plus your not trying to fill it with 500 miles in one go.
how does one pay to have it maintained? I suppose you might say well contribute a few dollars to the developers. But that does not get them to take my calls.
Moreover with open source libs there could be dozens of (ever changing) dependencies. If I contribute to the top level developer and a lib breaks, he can't fix it. I'm not going to chase the whole chain down and contribute to them.
Finally there's the fact that if I contribute and no one elese does then this doesn not keep it the maintainer in bussiness. that's precisely why people force everyone to pay. it's basic econominc threory not altruism that makes it work. we all pay a little and we all benefit.
What I need is a redhat for major packages. e.g. a redhat for numpy (which by the way I did contribute cash too) or pymol (which by the way I did contribute cash too) or....
Yes I've tried redhat. But since I use both Linux and Mac that does not really help. Moreover I have and will will gladly pay for (affordable) service. I wish it was more available. But it's rarely the OS that I have problems with. The OS works fine. it's all the libs and dependencies outside the paid-for distro that make it a nightmare to use without support.
My point was I love open source preciseley because I can do more with it. For example, matlab does not have YAML bindings at all. If I want to use YAML and also plot scientific calcualtions it's quite likely Python is a better choice.
But it's not free. you pay for it with your time. saying it is free is silly. In my experience open source is more expensive and more versatile. You are getting what you are paying for, but you are paying.
I spend more on support than I do on software and there's almost no support even purchasable for opens source so I'd save a bundle!
What open source software can't you find support for?
Even just on linux the things that have bitten me a myriad. Most recently, changes in the matplotlib 3d libraries mean old codes don't work. the SYCK distribution for YAML is gone, meaning for example, no bindings for Objective-C and a dozen other languages. I've had problems with lots of graphic viz libs not compiling because they needed GCC compat libs or needed libpaths different that the way the current distro was set up.
I tell you, support is never better when one of the core developers for a project is on the payroll and works on that software 24-7.
*snort* if only I had that kind of money!
Open source is not a cheap replacement if your time has value.
This is often quite true for individuals using packages that are not very widely in use. But that's not what this article was all about. He's talking about big businesses who spend huge amounts of money on software licensing for small returns.
Look I acknolwedge your point here. But I think you are living in a dream world where everyone knows what their bussiness plan and budget are more than a yearahead of time. That's not the way reality flows in my experience.
Since you have sources, why don't you just port the old library to the new OS?
That's the point I was trying to make. You pay with your time. code you wrote a years ago won't run. sometimes a couple times a year you have to re-write deep layers to compile it against some new library, re-write code wo work around API changes or bugs. etc... Sometimes the libs you need don't compile on the latest OS or you have to screw around with obscure makefiles, maybe ones written in things you don't understand (configure, c-make, scons, make, distulis, debain,...) and getting the paths and lib paths all set, making sure names of libs are right. Dealing with dead rsync repositiories. conflicts. Sometimes you just don't have that much time.
I use open source a lot. But I use it because it often provides things I need that I can't get other ways. People who sell it because it's "free" of costs amuse me. It's more expensive if your time has value. It's better too. But it's not cheap and I wish I could pay someone to maintain it for me.
How did a critical library go away? (I'm not familiar with whythelucky stiff)
this is getting off topic but google him or look at wikipedia. For some reason he vanished a couple months ago online and deleted all his repositories, e-mail accounts, etc.. Some of this has been saved in an ad hoc fashion. But since his site was sort of a clearing house for YAML bindings built on his libraries, 100% of those links are broken. Google shows no hits on replacement links. So things like YAML bindings for Objective-C have vanished from the universe of ready availability. Presumably lots of people do have the code on their own machines, but it will be a long interval before the situation get's normalized.
I spend more on support than I do on software and there's almost no support even purchasable for opens source so I'd save a bundle!
I'm sure I'll get modded troll or something but I'm being serious. Some software is really expensive like matlab. But it always works. But a couple times a year I have to swicth from Fink to macports or vica versa because one or the other won't build the dependencies I need for matplot lib or octave. that costs me a lot of money in time.
Open source is not a cheap replacement if your time has value. But I still use it a lot none the less. it may not be cheap but sometimes it is better or has features you can't replicate easily in a single computing environment outside open source.
The biggest advantage and problem with open source is portability. I use open source so that I gan give my code written on top of it to someone else. I can't do that if I write in matlab and use exotic toolkits. But on the flip side it's also why code written in open source rather than a homogenous environment is so fragile and may not work in a few years (because say some critical library is gone). (Take for example the disappearance of whythelucky stiff and thus the demise of all SYCK based YAML bindings.)
SO it's true that you'd save a bundle on open source. You'd wish you could pay to have it maintained. You will pay with your own time instead.
Other than a set up for your gag, I don't see why you call paint a thermal insulator. It does not have to be so. many kinds of coating promote thermal coupling.
One thing that does bother me is dumping waste heat in someone elses backyard for free promotes the inefficient use of energy. that is, I can decrease my cooling costs by using more efficient but more expensive computers which incidentally produce less waste heat, or I could use less expensive inefficient computers and take advantage of public domain cooling, like cayuga lake.
Is Cornell paying a tax to use Cayuga lake as a heat dump? that would help internalize the economic externalities that drive them to consume more electricity because the cooling is free.
likewise for sea water cooling.
This might seem like worry much about a small thing: isn't the cooling resevoir comparatively infinite? the answer is surprising no, not only is it not infinite, it's never going to grow, and we have already saturated it in much or the US and Europe. For example the big limit on Nuclear power plant growth is now availability of cooling. SOme rivers in Tenesee are known to heat up to 80 degrees when the power plants operate a full power in summer.
If they want me to pay electronically, can I charge them 1.50 for the added risk of electronic commerce? It's one thing to put your check routing number in a paper envelope and sent it by US mail. it's a whole nother level of trust to send it over the internet and rely on their databases to be properly secured. Look at all the whole sale breeches.
Speaking as a victim of identity theft, Personally, my own weighing of the risks is that I wont do electronic commerce other than insured visa cards until the laws are changed to make it their responsibility if they lose my bank account information. When that happens my expectation will be that they will pay the proper attention to security and it will be safer than mailing checks.
"Mercury concentration in the study room air often exceeds the Maine Ambient Air Guideline (MAAG) of 300 nanograms per cubic meter (ng/m3) for some period of time, with short excursions over 25,000 ng/m3, sometimes over 50,000 ng/m3, and possibly over 100,000 ng/m3 from the breakage of a single compact fluorescent lamp. "
Slashdot Mirror
1) use the sun to create sea salt.
2) sell it
3) buy fresh water.
Yeah I tried it. terrible heavyweight solution if all you want is equations.
Use LatexIt on a mac (simmilar is EquationService). This is a service. so you are in a text editor like textedit.app or word,. you type the latex equation, then execute the equation service from the services menu (using an assigned command key). it changes the latex to an equation and pastes in the graphic in the same spot.
you are typing latex, but your are not screwing around with creating files and latexing them.
Another realtime latex on a mac is grapher.app
Voting companies have traditionally offered to "disclose" their source code in the past. By disclose they do not mean open source. in the past it has always meant that certain designated people can get access under certain conditions. E.g. state voting officials under rabid NDA's can see it if they sue.
Until they actually publish it, assume that "disclose" does not mean either access without NDA or open source.
So the software was designed to detect bodies of work that contain phrases from other works. ANd it finds a work that is a composite of Shakespear and Kyd. isn't it more likely that someone back then was plagarizing from Shakespear and Kyd? As opposed to them collaborating?
For example if I turned in a term paper and the plagarism software detected phrases from cory doctrow and thomas pynchon, the conclusion my instructor would leap to is obvioulsy that the three of us collaborated on the term paper right? not! Why should this be different for this Play?
for a game to achieve a given level of revenue at a given price then you can compute the number of items you need to sell. if you make it too hard, your demographic won't support it. if you make it too easy then you bore the hard core and also may lose the demographic size you need.
the question is does medium hard work?
if not then you need to have variable difficulty to capture the area under the demand curve.
Also if lets freinds and guests compete on the turf of an expert. the expert may enjoy having more freinds than the person at his level.
Configurable is nice but i'd probably not be an expert enough to know what i needed until I had played it for a while and gotten frustrated.
Nuclear materials usually are not very dangerous for their nuclear properties. For most nuclear materials your skin is all the protection you need. You can get irradiated if you ingest it, which is how Nuclear medicines intnetionally work. But in many cases nuclear materials like Plutonium are more toxic as chemicals then they are dangerous as radioactive materials. You would not intentionally eat battery acid either, and evidently people don't do it accidentally very often either. The death rate from plutonium ingestion would presumably be about the same as the death rate from people ingesting car batteries.
The upside of nuclear materials is that unlike trace chemical contamination, which is hard to find and hard to clean up (e.g. think ancient leaking service station gas tanks contaminating well water), nuclear contamination is easy to find, easy to trace and easy to know when you have cleaned it all up.
would a single hundred year nuclear battery be less harmful to the enviroment or humans than a hundred years of mercury cadmium telluride hearing aid batteries and all the waste products to mine, produce and transport them?
Another explanation is that xbox uses a somewhat more conventional architecture processor. the Sony PS3 Cell is notoriously difficult to program for and thus requires uncommonly sophisticated skills in the hacker.
That of course is not perfectly true. Each Cell also has a conventional co-processor that could be attacked. but still the over all problem is probably a lot harder.
Maybe this is the way to get more trained cell programmers. Put tempting targets out there running on cells.
How in the heck do they propose to enforce this? most bloggers are anonymous. Many don't live in the US. Even Cringely doesn't use his real name. And then there is the sheer number. Moreover an underhanded company could easily soak up a few 11K fines (unlikely they would have to pay many).
excessive soluble Magnesium in the body depletes calcium.
I'm sure they probably have thought about this. One could see this working both ways. Perhaps having magnesium in the replacment helps precipitate calcium in a useful place near the bone replacment. On the other hand soluble magnesium is know to rob bones of calcium, so a large source of soluble calcium especially concntrated near a weak bone might undermine it.
I have no idea what the right answer is here, but it does seem like something that need to be considered strongly.
true, and I said as much in another reply. But this does not change the average power that the service station has to supply. While you wait, another car is going to drive up, and another and another. if an interstate service station averages 1 car per minute then that means in the hour you wait 120 cars are parked, and perhaps 200 people are in the waiting area. the same amount of average megawatts ~20MW is still needed by the service station (assuming perfect effciency).
Also the danger zone for a 300KW line is huge. it's not the same as a wall plug or even a 220 once you get to 480V class systems you have the chance for a propagating arc flash through the air. At 300KW it's pretty extreme danger. These days breakers that operate at that level are done by remotely operated motors.
Or require a licensed operator at charging stations. Or something else.
The point being, it's probably feasible if the consumer drops their assumptions about the way fueling their car is supposed to go.
Not so fast. let's say the consumer was willing to wait 2 hours for his battery to get charged at the filling station. Does that solve the problem?
No the average rate of power usage by people going do the highway is still the same. if you figure 5 to ten people need to fill up at one station every 5 minutes then yor waiting room has to hold 120 to 240 people for that 2 hours it takes. plus you have to have enough service people to be processing 120 batteries per hour.
it's not totally unthinkable. But I suspect you will find people prefer gasoline that putting up with that.
The problem with replacable batteries is that you have not solved the average power delivery problem. You just moved it. if you picture the gas station as doing nothing at all till you arrive, then they swap in a pack, and off you go, there seems like there is no problem. In reality you have 5 to 10 cars all day long filling up for 5 minutes. that means the station has to be charging batteries at the same rate it handing them out. so that's 18 to 36 megawatts of power all day long on average to just stay even with the incoming batteries.
Then of course would you be willing to hook up a megawatt line to a battery that just came into your shop for charging? I would think you'd want to spend maybe an hour safety testing it before you throw the switch.
If you want to charge then 1000x more slowly (which would make more sense-- that would be like about 3 or 4 toaster worth of paper per battery) then you are going to need 1000x batteries in the back room charging.
a few more notes. the 30KW figure for the honda is based on air resistance not engine efficiency. So unless you are prepared to lie flat in a coffin shaped car, your pretty much stuck with the crossection of a Honda as the minimum useful car. Thus there's no way to beat that power demand by more than a small percentage let alone a factor of even 2.
You might suppose then that service stations will instead swap battery packs. But that does not really solve the problem well. At any moment a filling station might have 5 cars trying to fill up every 5 minutes. (probably even more in some stations) so no matter how you slice it, you need the filling station to be delivering 5*3.6= 18 megawatts of juice. (assuming perfect efficiency which won't happen).
This is huge problem that will require massive infrastructure changes to achieve.
It's how fast you can recharge it. If you have a 500 mile range then presumably the reason for thisis so you can use it up all in one go for true x-country travel not just commutes.
How long does it take to charge a 500 mile battery? well this is very easy to compute.
divide 500 by 50,miles per hour gives ten hours to drain it.
it takes roughly 30 KWatts to push a honda accord size car at a stead 55Mph on level ground.
Now how long do you want to wait to recharge it? let's say 5 minutes (1/12 hour) at the filling station is the normal time to fill a tank.
30KW * 10 Hours / (1/12 hour) = 30*120 KWatts
3.6 Megawatts.
So for a perfect efficiency system (not likely!) the minimum amount of power the user is going to be connecting to his car is a 3.6 megawatt line.
No way in hell is that ever going to happen. You simply don't let people who think Sara Palin is a good idea touch even a 10Kwatt power connection, let alone a 3.6 Megawatt one.
When highly trained linemen work on energized systems even a fraction of that power they wear 40 Calorie suits and everyone stands back.
I just don't see how the hell you get around this.
Now for commuting the problem is not so bad. You trickle charge it over many hours, plus your not trying to fill it with 500 miles in one go.
how does one pay to have it maintained? I suppose you might say well contribute a few dollars to the developers. But that does not get them to take my calls.
Moreover with open source libs there could be dozens of (ever changing) dependencies. If I contribute to the top level developer and a lib breaks, he can't fix it. I'm not going to chase the whole chain down and contribute to them.
Finally there's the fact that if I contribute and no one elese does then this doesn not keep it the maintainer in bussiness. that's precisely why people force everyone to pay. it's basic econominc threory not altruism that makes it work. we all pay a little and we all benefit.
What I need is a redhat for major packages. e.g. a redhat for numpy (which by the way I did contribute cash too) or pymol (which by the way I did contribute cash too) or ....
how do you propose birthing one of those?
Have you tried IBM, Redhat, and Canonical?
Yes I've tried redhat. But since I use both Linux and Mac that does not really help. Moreover I have and will will gladly pay for (affordable) service. I wish it was more available. But it's rarely the OS that I have problems with. The OS works fine. it's all the libs and dependencies outside the paid-for distro that make it a nightmare to use without support.
My point was I love open source preciseley because I can do more with it. For example, matlab does not have YAML bindings at all. If I want to use YAML and also plot scientific calcualtions it's quite likely Python is a better choice.
But it's not free. you pay for it with your time. saying it is free is silly. In my experience open source is more expensive and more versatile. You are getting what you are paying for, but you are paying.
I spend more on support than I do on software and there's almost no support even purchasable for opens source so I'd save a bundle!
What open source software can't you find support for?
Even just on linux the things that have bitten me a myriad. Most recently, changes in the matplotlib 3d libraries mean old codes don't work. the SYCK distribution for YAML is gone, meaning for example, no bindings for Objective-C and a dozen other languages. I've had problems with lots of graphic viz libs not compiling because they needed GCC compat libs or needed libpaths different that the way the current distro was set up.
I tell you, support is never better when one of the core developers for a project is on the payroll and works on that software 24-7.
*snort* if only I had that kind of money!
Open source is not a cheap replacement if your time has value.
This is often quite true for individuals using packages that are not very widely in use. But that's not what this article was all about. He's talking about big businesses who spend huge amounts of money on software licensing for small returns.
Look I acknolwedge your point here. But I think you are living in a dream world where everyone knows what their bussiness plan and budget are more than a yearahead of time. That's not the way reality flows in my experience.
Since you have sources, why don't you just port the old library to the new OS?
That's the point I was trying to make. You pay with your time. code you wrote a years ago won't run. sometimes a couple times a year you have to re-write deep layers to compile it against some new library, re-write code wo work around API changes or bugs. etc... Sometimes the libs you need don't compile on the latest OS or you have to screw around with obscure makefiles, maybe ones written in things you don't understand (configure, c-make, scons, make, distulis, debain, ...) and getting the paths and lib paths all set, making sure names of libs are right. Dealing with dead rsync repositiories. conflicts. Sometimes you just don't have that much time.
I use open source a lot. But I use it because it often provides things I need that I can't get other ways. People who sell it because it's "free" of costs amuse me. It's more expensive if your time has value. It's better too. But it's not cheap and I wish I could pay someone to maintain it for me.
How did a critical library go away? (I'm not familiar with whythelucky stiff)
this is getting off topic but google him or look at wikipedia. For some reason he vanished a couple months ago online and deleted all his repositories, e-mail accounts, etc.. Some of this has been saved in an ad hoc fashion. But since his site was sort of a clearing house for YAML bindings built on his libraries, 100% of those links are broken. Google shows no hits on replacement links. So things like YAML bindings for Objective-C have vanished from the universe of ready availability. Presumably lots of people do have the code on their own machines, but it will be a long interval before the situation get's normalized.
I spend more on support than I do on software and there's almost no support even purchasable for opens source so I'd save a bundle!
I'm sure I'll get modded troll or something but I'm being serious. Some software is really expensive like matlab. But it always works. But a couple times a year I have to swicth from Fink to macports or vica versa because one or the other won't build the dependencies I need for matplot lib or octave. that costs me a lot of money in time.
Open source is not a cheap replacement if your time has value. But I still use it a lot none the less. it may not be cheap but sometimes it is better or has features you can't replicate easily in a single computing environment outside open source.
The biggest advantage and problem with open source is portability. I use open source so that I gan give my code written on top of it to someone else. I can't do that if I write in matlab and use exotic toolkits. But on the flip side it's also why code written in open source rather than a homogenous environment is so fragile and may not work in a few years (because say some critical library is gone). (Take for example the disappearance of whythelucky stiff and thus the demise of all SYCK based YAML bindings.)
SO it's true that you'd save a bundle on open source. You'd wish you could pay to have it maintained. You will pay with your own time instead.
...also protect you from sellers of snake oil and fake gems?
No but I have a one-line perl script for that.
Other than a set up for your gag, I don't see why you call paint a thermal insulator. It does not have to be so. many kinds of coating promote thermal coupling.
One thing that does bother me is dumping waste heat in someone elses backyard for free promotes the inefficient use of energy. that is, I can decrease my cooling costs by using more efficient but more expensive computers which incidentally produce less waste heat, or I could use less expensive inefficient computers and take advantage of public domain cooling, like cayuga lake.
Is Cornell paying a tax to use Cayuga lake as a heat dump? that would help internalize the economic externalities that drive them to consume more electricity because the cooling is free.
likewise for sea water cooling.
This might seem like worry much about a small thing: isn't the cooling resevoir comparatively infinite? the answer is surprising no, not only is it not infinite, it's never going to grow, and we have already saturated it in much or the US and Europe. For example the big limit on Nuclear power plant growth is now availability of cooling. SOme rivers in Tenesee are known to heat up to 80 degrees when the power plants operate a full power in summer.
thus this needs to be publicly regulated now.
He was framed!
If they want me to pay electronically, can I charge them 1.50 for the added risk of electronic commerce? It's one thing to put your check routing number in a paper envelope and sent it by US mail. it's a whole nother level of trust to send it over the internet and rely on their databases to be properly secured. Look at all the whole sale breeches.
Speaking as a victim of identity theft, Personally, my own weighing of the risks is that I wont do electronic commerce other than insured visa cards until the laws are changed to make it their responsibility if they lose my bank account information. When that happens my expectation will be that they will pay the proper attention to security and it will be safer than mailing checks.
"Mercury concentration in the study room air often exceeds the Maine Ambient Air Guideline (MAAG) of 300 nanograms per cubic meter (ng/m3) for some period of time, with short excursions over 25,000 ng/m3, sometimes over 50,000 ng/m3, and possibly over 100,000 ng/m3 from the breakage of a single compact fluorescent lamp. "
study
But compact fluorescents cost $2, save almost as much power/year, and last about 10 years. They are the most cost effective.
till you break them and contaminate the room in mercury. Professional remediation is about $3000.
Maybe we should go to a lightbulbs as a service model. You pay $40 per year and I will supply you with up to 20 light bulbs.