the FCC is using the granted authority to force a phase-out of NTSC television receivers
They're doing a piss-poor job then. Instead of trying to force broadcasters to move to the HDTV signal that most people can't receive, they should focus on making sure the TVs that people are buying are capable of receiving the signal. The viewers have a lot more sway with TV stations over what format should be aired.
So is their sodium-silica gel a catalyst that reduces the energy barrier to split oxygen from hydrogen through electrolyzing, or is it sucking up the oxygen atoms and releasing hydrogen as a byproduct of the reaction?
Basically what I want to know is, do you just keep feeding more water and electricity into the system, or are you going to be continuously replacing the used up sodium-silica gel?
My experience is from my uncle's wind turbine (a windMILL is a similar device used to grind grain).
His setup is about 50 ft diameter that cost 10k for the generator and rotors, and about 10k for the tower, foundation and install.
The rotors (wings) are barely audible. The noticable noise is from the gearing stepping up the RPMs before hitting the generator. It makes about a quarter of the noise of the wind blowing through the trees, and it's a very constant hum. I found it far less irritating than the noise I get from cars driving by my house or the airplanes taking off from MCI about 15 miles away.
What this guy has done is probably more of an eyesore than a noise problem though. It looks like he's way out in the middle of nowhere and has fairly short trees around, so he gets away with a much shorter tower. He also has lots of space to run wires to tie down his mast. Without them (if he had less space to work with) he would have to install a more expensive tower that would be mounted on a large, deep concrete foundation to suck up the lateral loads. I'm sure this contraption isn't built anywhere near his house.
It's certainly interesting, but useless to 99.9% of/.ers.
And, if digital TV is so important to freeing up those RF ranges, why can I walk into a Best Buy today and still buy a pure Analog television?
That's part of the problem, not a justification for the status quo. We need immediate action from lawmakers (not just the FCC) requiring all new TVs that can receive an analog signal to also be able to receive and decode a digital one as well, regardless of the displayed picture quality. Allow currently selling models one year to rotate out, but no new models should be allowed that don't receive digital.
As long as half(+) of the TVs being sold don't do digital, we're never hitting the 85% mark.
http://www.ilga.gov/commission/lru/ILCountyDataBoo k.pdf
Check pages 6-7 (pdf# 14-15). Your income hotspots are the chicago area and the champaign - bloomington - decatur triangle. And we're not just talking 18% higher income, either. Your high unemployment areas are concentrated in the NW and SE. Check the revenue stats for individual counties. Dupage (one of the areas I used to live in) generates 1.7 billion and only gets back about 500 million. To make up for the huge shortchanging, the wealthier counties have to pass high local sales taxes to generate revenue they can actually keep. OTOH, many southern counties get back 100-200% more state funding than they generate.
Back to the parent troll... Illinois' low income and high unemployment come from the red parts of the state. The blue areas are holding their own, and propping up a lot of other areas as well. Illinois' higher unemployment and lower adjusted income vs. Missouri is not because it's a blue state, it's because it's got so much red state in it.
Lexx was horrid. Like a bad skinemax show with all the softcore sex scenes cut out. It almost promised the 15-18 virgin geeks something to wank to, and then just left them with blue-balls just like the cute unattainable chicks at school. And have I mentioned the storyline? Ultra loser stumbles into control of the greatest power in the galaxy, has nympho-hottie by his side. Still can't lose virginity or even get an ounce of respect... no matter how many planets he blows up.
BG is excellent. Large story arc, questionable enemy motives, traitors within. It seems a bit slow at first glance, but there's lots of tension.
SG1 is good fun scifi in the spirit of the best star trek. Atlantis is the same vein, but the acting is bad.
Farscape spent too much time leaping between intricate story arcs, and too little time wrapping any of them up. And holy cast turnover, batman! Great otherwise.
From my reading of the article, it looks like they're giving Campbell the money to make new b-movies, not to buy old ones. Hopefully these will be actual SCIENCE fiction, instead of his usual crapfest of horror. I also hope he'll stay behind the camera instead of serially audio-raping me with his bad acting.
As someone who has lived in both IL and MO, I can give you a bit more accurate picture than just your quoted statistics.
First off, IL is a very poor representative for the blue states. The Chicago area, except for the wealthiest suburbs, votes heavily democratic. The cost of living is quite high. Anything south of Kankakee is overwhelming republican. The cost of living is quite low. They all want to split the chicago metro area into it's own state until they realize that there's a net flow of tax dollars toward the rest of the state. Southern population is much smaller than the Chicago metro. Chicago calls the shots politically. The rest of the state is happy to not get completely screwed. Illinois is kind of what you would get if you took Massachusets and stapled it to Montana.
MO is split rather evenly in the cities (St.Louis and KC) between parties. The rest of the state is overwhelmingly republican. MO goes to the GOP heavily. MO has shite schools and roads. The only real non-sports tourist/vacation destination, the Ozarks, has become overrun with megasized yachts that nearly flip any appropriately sized boat when they zoom by at full speed. Have fun getting an OB/GYN if you ever have a baby on the way. Rural areas usually have cheaper medical care because it's not as good. They don't have advanced facilities and specialists nearby, so the poor people just die or languish instead of running up bills that get passed to the patients that get saved. If you get cancer in central MO, your're driving 3 hours each way, twice a week for treatment in KC or StL.
If you want a place to make money, or have things to do, go to Illinois. If you're retired, travel a lot and need a place to leave your crap, or you're a homebody who wants a cheaper place to live, go to Missouri. BTW, adjusting your wage stats for cost of living only gives your MO earnings a 5% edge.
The first few episodes of Firefly were a bit slower paced and had more character development. The higher ups decided to start with later episodes that had more action in them and then worry about character development later.
Firefly's problem is that it didn't start off with a huge bang to grab people's attention, like the plane crash in Lost, or even the suicide in Desperate Housewives. It just had a random handful of miscreants aimlessly wandering the galaxy in a beater starship. Not a whole lot of sex appeal either. Even the whore didn't tease it up much, and things went way downhill from there. Plus, the 'space western' moniker manages to turn off the scifi fans and the scifi detractors at the same time. The only viewers that initially tuned in were the hardcore scifi buffs (like me), or the hardcore Whedon fans that would tune in to watch a soap commercial if he made one.
It really should have started off on the SciFi channel where it would have had time to properly mature into the great niche series that it was.
Someone needs to roll out a plan that would use existing wifi APs to add public bandwidth. There is already high coverage of closed or unintentionally open APs. In some areas, there can be dozens of APs fighting for adequate signal; these need to me converted into public access points.
You could set up a system where people who need high bandwidth pay for their own broadband internet connection (already done). They then buy a router and (securely) connect their own computers and wireless devices (already done, more or less). You then provide firmware updates to the user-provided routers that allow them to also provide public wifi access without giving access to the person's home network. You could set them to provide slower 64k access for free, or full available bandwidth to subscribers. A subscriber might be anyone who has an active access point set up in their own home, or someone who pays $10/month (or something small) to the muni wifi project. The cash brought in could be paid out as account credits at about 50% to the people who are providing the used bandwidth. Pro-rated based on how much people use your AP, of course.
Thus, anyone who provides resources to the wifi rollout would get free wifi at other APs or just a cut of money coming in. Everyone gets free dialup+ speeds anywhere. Others get broadband on the cheap.
The difficulties I see are:
Providing firmware updates to a wide variety of routers, or forcing everyone to rebuy a particular router.
Can a router broadcast both an encrypted and uncrypted signal with different SSIDs at the same time?
Making sure no security holes exist that allow someone to hack into my private network through the AP. This is an existing problem, though.
Seperately logging traffic of muni users so that the AP provider doesn't get the blame when the FBI or RIAA comes looking for the person who was downloading infringing or illegal materials. Nobody should ever have to enter your home or talk to you for any information that doesn't pertain to your own web activities.
Setting up the debit/credit system, of course.
Coverage may only be 50%. If this is what it takes to reduce cost from $150k/(year*sqmi) down to $10k, then so be it. Individuals will fill in the bare spots as demand increases. Some people will have to set up repeaters, or surf from their patio. 'Good enough' costs a lot less than 'perfect'.
In poor neighborhoods, nobody may be willing to provide the AP because all their users will just be the 64k people. Actually, they may barely be able to afford a machine with wifi in the first place. Though subsidized wifi in poor neighborhoods could be where it does the greatest economic good.
My instinct tells me that one in five homes would actually be providers, three would pay $10/month into the system, and the other one would take the barebones 64k. That's $6 per month, per home, average. The city gets $3 of it, the providers get the other $3. The city wouldn't have to pay for bandwidth, or set up and maintain boatloads of hardware.
Say I leave my sprinkler turned on to water the area around the city sidewalk in front of my house. Some neighborhood kids start playing on the sidewalk, in the water. I move the sprinkler to another section covering the sidewalk and the kids follow. Is it something they should be punished for, or should I move the sprinkler off the sidewalk, or just shut up and get on with my life?
I'll buy loitering, no problem. Felony computer network trespassing? No way. If the guy had issues with someone using his AP, he should have turned it off. Or simply told the persont o quit leeching his broadband. Either way, I bet the offending guy would have driven off right away.
No, it's more like you leaving your hose running into the gutter, and someone walking down the street takes a drink. Encrypt your network, or stop broadcasting it into the street and your neighbors properties. If you leave your physical posessions on my property, I would be obliged to keep them. From my home, I'll use as much of your wifi as I can/like as well.
If someone has to actually set foot on your property to use your wifi, go ahead and call the cops.
Our lifestyle of lawsuits, safety regulations and insurance policies has made us forget that achieving great things sometimes requires risking great failures. It's turning us into cowering pansies.
The shuttle's top side is easy to spot with telescopes, but very difficult to spot when it's bottom is facing the earth. It's got transponders to lock onto so you know where to look.
If you covered the top with black radar absorbing material and had it run radio silent, you could easily keep it secret from other countries.
The only difficult thing is launching something that big without random people seeing it and blabbing.
Why do you think shuttle pilots always seem to hold an Air Force rank?
You want your JetBlue pilot landing the shuttle? The thing launches at 4 Gs and comes back in starting at over mach 20. Supersonic jet fighters are just a starting point for teaching someone to fly the shuttle.
It seems like a dumb, minor change, but it's not. Also, the shuttle is 30 year tech pimped out with 21st century updates. We need to start planning replacements before another shuttle gets destroyed, rather than wait and end up with a 5 year delay in our space program.
The problem with the current line of shuttles is that Americans aren't comfortable with the 1/40 expected fatal disaster rate. Splitting the cargo away from the crew lets you pay extra for an extremely safe crew launch, and run a cost based risk for the cargo, where all the weight is at.
Our next step isn't just going to the moon, but staying there on 6 month to 2 year missions in preparation for long term missions to Mars. We could easily do Apollo missions again, but there's no justification for anything less than an extended stay.
Of course, modern americans would never accept the number of deaths that occured in the Apollo missions.
In the past 12 years, I lived 7 in central Illinois and 3 in Iowa. Not exactly Montana, but I've been out of the city quite a bit. Not that I have to leave the city to find working people who live in small, shitty houses and can barely afford anything beyond groceries and their rent/mortgage.
My uncle is an engineer for an company that does defense work. He lives on a 4 acre property with a pond, nice 5 BR house, 2.5BA, 3 car garage 40 minutes outside Cedar Rapids, IA that cost him about $100k. He put up a $20k wind turbine for free electricity 6 months per year and his place still costs less than my 3BR, 2.5BA, 2car house on 8000 sq ft. > My inlaws have a house in the boonies just a little smaller than mine, on 10 acres 30 miles from Marion, IL, also with a pond for about 80k. The money they save living out in the country allows the two of them to own three decent cars and trade one of them in every year for a brand new one. Just. For. Fun. My grandparents (late 70s) live on a pretty meager income in a huge, 5BR, 1BA, 90yo, run down Sears Craftsman house out in the country, but their 70+ lakefront acres are worth millions now that the Minneapolis, 60 miles away, is expanding out their way and they just don't want to move. They'd be doing great if they didn't pay $10k per year in property taxes. Houses where I used to live in Champaign/Urbana (more like a suburban island), IL are very cheap (our old 2BR, 2car gar dump sold for $48k), and nice 3000 sq ft properties 10 measly miles out sell for $150-200k on several acres. My neighbor's sister (and family) moved from their $400k 1 BR dump in silicon valley to a $60k house in C-U that was better. They took a 50% pay cut, but their standard of living doubled. They no longer had a neighbor who owned a Ferrari, but at least they could finally afford to buy their first and second cars.
I did some house shopping just 10 miles outside of Iowa City, IA and found new properties (3500 sqft, 2 story, 5BR, 4BA, 3car garage plus an unfinished daylite walkout basement on 2 acres with a pond, but no cable or DSL yet) for $200k that would cost me $550k+ here just in the Kansas City area. The house would have to appreciate $15-20k per year just to balance out the extra mortgage interest alone. That's a very bad investment.
If you want to live in a dump, you can find properties in the country for $40k. Trailer homes the size of a common city apartment run around $20k. Minimal living in the city will start at $80k for a 1 BR place with bullet holes in the siding. Poor people don't need nearby Starbucks, Best Buy and Marshall Fields. They can get by reasonably fine on dialup. Poverty sucks no matter where you live, but poor goes a lot farther in the country than in the city. Actually having a good job out in the country goes a really long way farther than in the city.
Most rural areas that are truly poor end up that way because they depend on a single industry/employer for most of the area's jobs (coal mining, for example). If that business lays off half it's workers, everyone is fairly screwed. The whole town's standard of living can go from Seattle to Detroit in a year. Good leadership becomes vital.
Most country folk live there because there are huge, genuine advantages to living out in the middle of nowhere. It's not because they're ignorant of the *sarcasm* ease and glamour */sarcasm* of urban living. Groceries (for those who can't fill their pickup 6 times a year at Sam's Club), gas, electricity, and water cost a little more. Private schools for your kids cost a lot less, but are mandatory if you're sending them to college. Eating out, or getting car/home repairs cost less. Construction, landscaping, house cleaning, child care or other labor services are a lot less. Land is almost free. If they really need broadband via sattelite, they can get it for about $100/month instead of the $45 I pay in the city for cable modem. Rural areas already eat up a disproportionately high amount of federal tax dollars already, they don't need our telcom subsidies as well.
It's not about how much you make, it's how much you can buy with it. Buying power scales up a lot faster in rural areas than in a city.
(sub)Urban America deserves subsidies from the rural folks to help offset the astronomical prices of land that we pay. Land in rural areas is as cheap as $2000/ acre vs $100000+ / acre in the suburbs alone. They can pay me my my share out of the USF until that runs out next week. We can work out a deal for the rest; maybe start with some loose country girls.
If you just want value/$, you're not looking at the $550 OR $250 CPU market. You'll be looking in the single core neighborhood of $80-150 CPUs.
I'm not entirely sure why you'll pay extra for dual core, but don't care about the performance per core. It's like having a 10 inch dick that's only half an inch wide. It sounds like something to brag about until you actually put it to use.
AMD's market position is a product of two things. Intel's browbeating and shady deals, and AMD's unwillingness to advertise to the unwashed masses. Intel even has a mystery shopper program that teaches retail PC sellers to push intel machines on everyone as the superior technology. They send in random folks to test you and reward (bribe) salespeople with $100 for pushing intel over AMD. OTOH, AMD commonly sells CPU/mobo combos to sales staff at steep discounts so they can try for themselves. Intel's brand name is so well known that some people actually think they make the whole machine, not just the CPU. AMD is generally thought of as an inferior generic knockoff brand. There are literally people who wouldn't take the AMD 64x2 4800+ over the Intel pentium 4 1.8ghz at the same price.
If you want dual core AMD for $250, get two Athlon-Ms. Stop bitching that they won't make a custom CPU just for your needs, though. Or just wait. Their dual core offerings will drop in price, of course.
Actually, games are a very good place to bring multi-core CPUs to the mainstream. Games have distinct, constantly running code sections that don't intermingle all that much. Geometry, physics, AI, IO, audio and general simulation are all loops that intermingle, but don't absolutely have to finish a run through before the others can continue. Geometry, physics and simulation can be split up quite a bit, so you can get lots of use out of the second core.
The big reason that multi-threading isn't used much is that coders haven't had any market for it, so there's no reason to learn the oddities. Programming classes are taught on single core machines. Many professional coders are lucky if their machine even has dual-cores to test on. Now that dual cores are available in mainstream machines, PC games will probably start taking advantage of them before even the xbox360 comes out. I'm sure game developers are very excited about the extra cpu power available to them now.
As the market with the greatest need for CPU power, gamers will probably be the driving force behind dual or even quad core PCs becoming mainstream.
There's a big price/performance curve in chip pricing. As you move up in performance, the price goes up dramatically faster. Thus, to double your processor speed, you probably quadruple (or more) your price. Check out the difference in price between the top speed chips. You can easily double your price and gain only 10% in performance.
For a real comparison, find two dual core CPUs from each company that are close in benchmarks and then compare prices. Intel is putting out slower dual cores just to say they have them. AMD is putting them out to have maximum performance chips. If you want two cores from AMD on the cheap, get two Athlon MPs. They start as low as $160/pair (about $100 less than the Pentium D 820).
BTW, people buying $500+ CPUs don't really care much about the PRICE/performance. It's just PERFORMANCE. Witness the $2605 Opteron 875 Dual-Core 2.2GHz. There's no way it's 20x faster than a $130 Athlon 64 3000. But for some reason, Intel sells them.
Releasing this off cycle is retarded. Nobody is going to pay to downgrade their copy of windows. If nobody buys a stripped down version of longhorn when that comes out, that will be a story.
The real story is that I can't find anyone selling XP-n. No idea what the price is, either. Anyone who's confused that XP-n isn't selling is a fool.
Don't forget that you'll need two of the cheaper best buy warranted cameras to do this. You'll probably wait 3-6 weeks for repairs, so a backup is in order. You should probably have a backup anyway, if this is a tool for you to make money. If your job is to videotape things, you don't deserve a second chance if you ever have to tell a client 'my camera broke'.
The upside to raping best buy's program is that you'll get 100% of the camera's purchase price to spend on a new camera when they declare it unfixable, and the warranty will carry forward to the new cam. Or on the third repair, you get the camera replaced automatically via their lemon clause. Keep your receipts from each repair to make sure you get a new camera before the warranty runs out. Just don't ever admit that the camera is for work. You're just taping everything that your five kids ever do.
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the FCC is using the granted authority to force a phase-out of NTSC television receivers
They're doing a piss-poor job then. Instead of trying to force broadcasters to move to the HDTV signal that most people can't receive, they should focus on making sure the TVs that people are buying are capable of receiving the signal. The viewers have a lot more sway with TV stations over what format should be aired.
So is their sodium-silica gel a catalyst that reduces the energy barrier to split oxygen from hydrogen through electrolyzing, or is it sucking up the oxygen atoms and releasing hydrogen as a byproduct of the reaction?
Basically what I want to know is, do you just keep feeding more water and electricity into the system, or are you going to be continuously replacing the used up sodium-silica gel?
My experience is from my uncle's wind turbine (a windMILL is a similar device used to grind grain). His setup is about 50 ft diameter that cost 10k for the generator and rotors, and about 10k for the tower, foundation and install. The rotors (wings) are barely audible. The noticable noise is from the gearing stepping up the RPMs before hitting the generator. It makes about a quarter of the noise of the wind blowing through the trees, and it's a very constant hum. I found it far less irritating than the noise I get from cars driving by my house or the airplanes taking off from MCI about 15 miles away.
/.ers.
What this guy has done is probably more of an eyesore than a noise problem though. It looks like he's way out in the middle of nowhere and has fairly short trees around, so he gets away with a much shorter tower. He also has lots of space to run wires to tie down his mast. Without them (if he had less space to work with) he would have to install a more expensive tower that would be mounted on a large, deep concrete foundation to suck up the lateral loads. I'm sure this contraption isn't built anywhere near his house.
It's certainly interesting, but useless to 99.9% of
And, if digital TV is so important to freeing up those RF ranges, why can I walk into a Best Buy today and still buy a pure Analog television?
That's part of the problem, not a justification for the status quo. We need immediate action from lawmakers (not just the FCC) requiring all new TVs that can receive an analog signal to also be able to receive and decode a digital one as well, regardless of the displayed picture quality. Allow currently selling models one year to rotate out, but no new models should be allowed that don't receive digital.
As long as half(+) of the TVs being sold don't do digital, we're never hitting the 85% mark.
http://www.ilga.gov/commission/lru/ILCountyDataBoo k.pdf
Check pages 6-7 (pdf# 14-15). Your income hotspots are the chicago area and the champaign - bloomington - decatur triangle. And we're not just talking 18% higher income, either. Your high unemployment areas are concentrated in the NW and SE. Check the revenue stats for individual counties. Dupage (one of the areas I used to live in) generates 1.7 billion and only gets back about 500 million. To make up for the huge shortchanging, the wealthier counties have to pass high local sales taxes to generate revenue they can actually keep. OTOH, many southern counties get back 100-200% more state funding than they generate.
Back to the parent troll... Illinois' low income and high unemployment come from the red parts of the state. The blue areas are holding their own, and propping up a lot of other areas as well. Illinois' higher unemployment and lower adjusted income vs. Missouri is not because it's a blue state, it's because it's got so much red state in it.
Lexx was horrid. Like a bad skinemax show with all the softcore sex scenes cut out. It almost promised the 15-18 virgin geeks something to wank to, and then just left them with blue-balls just like the cute unattainable chicks at school. And have I mentioned the storyline? Ultra loser stumbles into control of the greatest power in the galaxy, has nympho-hottie by his side. Still can't lose virginity or even get an ounce of respect... no matter how many planets he blows up.
BG is excellent. Large story arc, questionable enemy motives, traitors within. It seems a bit slow at first glance, but there's lots of tension.
SG1 is good fun scifi in the spirit of the best star trek. Atlantis is the same vein, but the acting is bad.
Farscape spent too much time leaping between intricate story arcs, and too little time wrapping any of them up. And holy cast turnover, batman! Great otherwise.
From my reading of the article, it looks like they're giving Campbell the money to make new b-movies, not to buy old ones. Hopefully these will be actual SCIENCE fiction, instead of his usual crapfest of horror. I also hope he'll stay behind the camera instead of serially audio-raping me with his bad acting.
As someone who has lived in both IL and MO, I can give you a bit more accurate picture than just your quoted statistics.
First off, IL is a very poor representative for the blue states. The Chicago area, except for the wealthiest suburbs, votes heavily democratic. The cost of living is quite high. Anything south of Kankakee is overwhelming republican. The cost of living is quite low. They all want to split the chicago metro area into it's own state until they realize that there's a net flow of tax dollars toward the rest of the state. Southern population is much smaller than the Chicago metro. Chicago calls the shots politically. The rest of the state is happy to not get completely screwed.
Illinois is kind of what you would get if you took Massachusets and stapled it to Montana.
MO is split rather evenly in the cities (St.Louis and KC) between parties. The rest of the state is overwhelmingly republican. MO goes to the GOP heavily. MO has shite schools and roads. The only real non-sports tourist/vacation destination, the Ozarks, has become overrun with megasized yachts that nearly flip any appropriately sized boat when they zoom by at full speed. Have fun getting an OB/GYN if you ever have a baby on the way. Rural areas usually have cheaper medical care because it's not as good. They don't have advanced facilities and specialists nearby, so the poor people just die or languish instead of running up bills that get passed to the patients that get saved. If you get cancer in central MO, your're driving 3 hours each way, twice a week for treatment in KC or StL.
If you want a place to make money, or have things to do, go to Illinois. If you're retired, travel a lot and need a place to leave your crap, or you're a homebody who wants a cheaper place to live, go to Missouri. BTW, adjusting your wage stats for cost of living only gives your MO earnings a 5% edge.
The first few episodes of Firefly were a bit slower paced and had more character development. The higher ups decided to start with later episodes that had more action in them and then worry about character development later.
Firefly's problem is that it didn't start off with a huge bang to grab people's attention, like the plane crash in Lost, or even the suicide in Desperate Housewives. It just had a random handful of miscreants aimlessly wandering the galaxy in a beater starship. Not a whole lot of sex appeal either. Even the whore didn't tease it up much, and things went way downhill from there. Plus, the 'space western' moniker manages to turn off the scifi fans and the scifi detractors at the same time. The only viewers that initially tuned in were the hardcore scifi buffs (like me), or the hardcore Whedon fans that would tune in to watch a soap commercial if he made one.
It really should have started off on the SciFi channel where it would have had time to properly mature into the great niche series that it was.
Someone needs to roll out a plan that would use existing wifi APs to add public bandwidth. There is already high coverage of closed or unintentionally open APs. In some areas, there can be dozens of APs fighting for adequate signal; these need to me converted into public access points.
You could set up a system where people who need high bandwidth pay for their own broadband internet connection (already done). They then buy a router and (securely) connect their own computers and wireless devices (already done, more or less). You then provide firmware updates to the user-provided routers that allow them to also provide public wifi access without giving access to the person's home network. You could set them to provide slower 64k access for free, or full available bandwidth to subscribers. A subscriber might be anyone who has an active access point set up in their own home, or someone who pays $10/month (or something small) to the muni wifi project. The cash brought in could be paid out as account credits at about 50% to the people who are providing the used bandwidth. Pro-rated based on how much people use your AP, of course.
Thus, anyone who provides resources to the wifi rollout would get free wifi at other APs or just a cut of money coming in. Everyone gets free dialup+ speeds anywhere. Others get broadband on the cheap.
The difficulties I see are:
Providing firmware updates to a wide variety of routers, or forcing everyone to rebuy a particular router.
Can a router broadcast both an encrypted and uncrypted signal with different SSIDs at the same time?
Making sure no security holes exist that allow someone to hack into my private network through the AP. This is an existing problem, though.
Seperately logging traffic of muni users so that the AP provider doesn't get the blame when the FBI or RIAA comes looking for the person who was downloading infringing or illegal materials. Nobody should ever have to enter your home or talk to you for any information that doesn't pertain to your own web activities.
Setting up the debit/credit system, of course.
Coverage may only be 50%. If this is what it takes to reduce cost from $150k/(year*sqmi) down to $10k, then so be it. Individuals will fill in the bare spots as demand increases. Some people will have to set up repeaters, or surf from their patio. 'Good enough' costs a lot less than 'perfect'.
In poor neighborhoods, nobody may be willing to provide the AP because all their users will just be the 64k people. Actually, they may barely be able to afford a machine with wifi in the first place. Though subsidized wifi in poor neighborhoods could be where it does the greatest economic good.
My instinct tells me that one in five homes would actually be providers, three would pay $10/month into the system, and the other one would take the barebones 64k. That's $6 per month, per home, average. The city gets $3 of it, the providers get the other $3. The city wouldn't have to pay for bandwidth, or set up and maintain boatloads of hardware.
Say I leave my sprinkler turned on to water the area around the city sidewalk in front of my house. Some neighborhood kids start playing on the sidewalk, in the water. I move the sprinkler to another section covering the sidewalk and the kids follow. Is it something they should be punished for, or should I move the sprinkler off the sidewalk, or just shut up and get on with my life?
I'll buy loitering, no problem. Felony computer network trespassing? No way. If the guy had issues with someone using his AP, he should have turned it off. Or simply told the persont o quit leeching his broadband. Either way, I bet the offending guy would have driven off right away.
No, it's more like you leaving your hose running into the gutter, and someone walking down the street takes a drink. Encrypt your network, or stop broadcasting it into the street and your neighbors properties. If you leave your physical posessions on my property, I would be obliged to keep them. From my home, I'll use as much of your wifi as I can/like as well.
If someone has to actually set foot on your property to use your wifi, go ahead and call the cops.
Our lifestyle of lawsuits, safety regulations and insurance policies has made us forget that achieving great things sometimes requires risking great failures. It's turning us into cowering pansies.
The shuttle's top side is easy to spot with telescopes, but very difficult to spot when it's bottom is facing the earth. It's got transponders to lock onto so you know where to look.
If you covered the top with black radar absorbing material and had it run radio silent, you could easily keep it secret from other countries.
The only difficult thing is launching something that big without random people seeing it and blabbing.
Why do you think shuttle pilots always seem to hold an Air Force rank?
You want your JetBlue pilot landing the shuttle? The thing launches at 4 Gs and comes back in starting at over mach 20. Supersonic jet fighters are just a starting point for teaching someone to fly the shuttle.
It seems like a dumb, minor change, but it's not. Also, the shuttle is 30 year tech pimped out with 21st century updates. We need to start planning replacements before another shuttle gets destroyed, rather than wait and end up with a 5 year delay in our space program.
The problem with the current line of shuttles is that Americans aren't comfortable with the 1/40 expected fatal disaster rate. Splitting the cargo away from the crew lets you pay extra for an extremely safe crew launch, and run a cost based risk for the cargo, where all the weight is at.
Our next step isn't just going to the moon, but staying there on 6 month to 2 year missions in preparation for long term missions to Mars. We could easily do Apollo missions again, but there's no justification for anything less than an extended stay.
Of course, modern americans would never accept the number of deaths that occured in the Apollo missions.
What is this, a third-world country?
Not yet, but the current administration is working on it.
In the past 12 years, I lived 7 in central Illinois and 3 in Iowa. Not exactly Montana, but I've been out of the city quite a bit. Not that I have to leave the city to find working people who live in small, shitty houses and can barely afford anything beyond groceries and their rent/mortgage.
My uncle is an engineer for an company that does defense work. He lives on a 4 acre property with a pond, nice 5 BR house, 2.5BA, 3 car garage 40 minutes outside Cedar Rapids, IA that cost him about $100k. He put up a $20k wind turbine for free electricity 6 months per year and his place still costs less than my 3BR, 2.5BA, 2car house on 8000 sq ft. > My inlaws have a house in the boonies just a little smaller than mine, on 10 acres 30 miles from Marion, IL, also with a pond for about 80k. The money they save living out in the country allows the two of them to own three decent cars and trade one of them in every year for a brand new one. Just. For. Fun.
My grandparents (late 70s) live on a pretty meager income in a huge, 5BR, 1BA, 90yo, run down Sears Craftsman house out in the country, but their 70+ lakefront acres are worth millions now that the Minneapolis, 60 miles away, is expanding out their way and they just don't want to move. They'd be doing great if they didn't pay $10k per year in property taxes.
Houses where I used to live in Champaign/Urbana (more like a suburban island), IL are very cheap (our old 2BR, 2car gar dump sold for $48k), and nice 3000 sq ft properties 10 measly miles out sell for $150-200k on several acres. My neighbor's sister (and family) moved from their $400k 1 BR dump in silicon valley to a $60k house in C-U that was better. They took a 50% pay cut, but their standard of living doubled. They no longer had a neighbor who owned a Ferrari, but at least they could finally afford to buy their first and second cars.
I did some house shopping just 10 miles outside of Iowa City, IA and found new properties (3500 sqft, 2 story, 5BR, 4BA, 3car garage plus an unfinished daylite walkout basement on 2 acres with a pond, but no cable or DSL yet) for $200k that would cost me $550k+ here just in the Kansas City area. The house would have to appreciate $15-20k per year just to balance out the extra mortgage interest alone. That's a very bad investment.
If you want to live in a dump, you can find properties in the country for $40k. Trailer homes the size of a common city apartment run around $20k. Minimal living in the city will start at $80k for a 1 BR place with bullet holes in the siding. Poor people don't need nearby Starbucks, Best Buy and Marshall Fields. They can get by reasonably fine on dialup. Poverty sucks no matter where you live, but poor goes a lot farther in the country than in the city. Actually having a good job out in the country goes a really long way farther than in the city.
Most rural areas that are truly poor end up that way because they depend on a single industry/employer for most of the area's jobs (coal mining, for example). If that business lays off half it's workers, everyone is fairly screwed. The whole town's standard of living can go from Seattle to Detroit in a year. Good leadership becomes vital.
Most country folk live there because there are huge, genuine advantages to living out in the middle of nowhere. It's not because they're ignorant of the *sarcasm* ease and glamour */sarcasm* of urban living. Groceries (for those who can't fill their pickup 6 times a year at Sam's Club), gas, electricity, and water cost a little more. Private schools for your kids cost a lot less, but are mandatory if you're sending them to college. Eating out, or getting car/home repairs cost less. Construction, landscaping, house cleaning, child care or other labor services are a lot less. Land is almost free. If they really need broadband via sattelite, they can get it for about $100/month instead of the $45 I pay in the city for cable modem. Rural areas already eat up a disproportionately high amount of federal tax dollars already, they don't need our telcom subsidies as well.
It's not about how much you make, it's how much you can buy with it. Buying power scales up a lot faster in rural areas than in a city.
(sub)Urban America deserves subsidies from the rural folks to help offset the astronomical prices of land that we pay. Land in rural areas is as cheap as $2000/ acre vs $100000+ / acre in the suburbs alone. They can pay me my my share out of the USF until that runs out next week. We can work out a deal for the rest; maybe start with some loose country girls.
Anyone have a cache of this article? They seem to have pulled it down.
If you just want value/$, you're not looking at the $550 OR $250 CPU market. You'll be looking in the single core neighborhood of $80-150 CPUs. I'm not entirely sure why you'll pay extra for dual core, but don't care about the performance per core. It's like having a 10 inch dick that's only half an inch wide. It sounds like something to brag about until you actually put it to use.
AMD's market position is a product of two things. Intel's browbeating and shady deals, and AMD's unwillingness to advertise to the unwashed masses. Intel even has a mystery shopper program that teaches retail PC sellers to push intel machines on everyone as the superior technology. They send in random folks to test you and reward (bribe) salespeople with $100 for pushing intel over AMD. OTOH, AMD commonly sells CPU/mobo combos to sales staff at steep discounts so they can try for themselves. Intel's brand name is so well known that some people actually think they make the whole machine, not just the CPU. AMD is generally thought of as an inferior generic knockoff brand. There are literally people who wouldn't take the AMD 64x2 4800+ over the Intel pentium 4 1.8ghz at the same price.
If you want dual core AMD for $250, get two Athlon-Ms. Stop bitching that they won't make a custom CPU just for your needs, though. Or just wait. Their dual core offerings will drop in price, of course.
Actually, games are a very good place to bring multi-core CPUs to the mainstream. Games have distinct, constantly running code sections that don't intermingle all that much. Geometry, physics, AI, IO, audio and general simulation are all loops that intermingle, but don't absolutely have to finish a run through before the others can continue. Geometry, physics and simulation can be split up quite a bit, so you can get lots of use out of the second core.
The big reason that multi-threading isn't used much is that coders haven't had any market for it, so there's no reason to learn the oddities. Programming classes are taught on single core machines. Many professional coders are lucky if their machine even has dual-cores to test on. Now that dual cores are available in mainstream machines, PC games will probably start taking advantage of them before even the xbox360 comes out. I'm sure game developers are very excited about the extra cpu power available to them now.
As the market with the greatest need for CPU power, gamers will probably be the driving force behind dual or even quad core PCs becoming mainstream.
If your vid card is worth less than the price of the game, it's far past time to upgrade. You planning on running that console version of D3 on a N64?
You're grossly uninforment about chip pricing.
There's a big price/performance curve in chip pricing. As you move up in performance, the price goes up dramatically faster. Thus, to double your processor speed, you probably quadruple (or more) your price. Check out the difference in price between the top speed chips. You can easily double your price and gain only 10% in performance.
For a real comparison, find two dual core CPUs from each company that are close in benchmarks and then compare prices. Intel is putting out slower dual cores just to say they have them. AMD is putting them out to have maximum performance chips. If you want two cores from AMD on the cheap, get two Athlon MPs. They start as low as $160/pair (about $100 less than the Pentium D 820).
BTW, people buying $500+ CPUs don't really care much about the PRICE/performance. It's just PERFORMANCE. Witness the $2605 Opteron 875 Dual-Core 2.2GHz. There's no way it's 20x faster than a $130 Athlon 64 3000. But for some reason, Intel sells them.
Releasing this off cycle is retarded. Nobody is going to pay to downgrade their copy of windows. If nobody buys a stripped down version of longhorn when that comes out, that will be a story.
The real story is that I can't find anyone selling XP-n. No idea what the price is, either. Anyone who's confused that XP-n isn't selling is a fool.
Don't forget that you'll need two of the cheaper best buy warranted cameras to do this. You'll probably wait 3-6 weeks for repairs, so a backup is in order. You should probably have a backup anyway, if this is a tool for you to make money. If your job is to videotape things, you don't deserve a second chance if you ever have to tell a client 'my camera broke'.
The upside to raping best buy's program is that you'll get 100% of the camera's purchase price to spend on a new camera when they declare it unfixable, and the warranty will carry forward to the new cam. Or on the third repair, you get the camera replaced automatically via their lemon clause. Keep your receipts from each repair to make sure you get a new camera before the warranty runs out. Just don't ever admit that the camera is for work. You're just taping everything that your five kids ever do.