when they were putting a bypass through. It seems that the Vogons had their orders, and the orders included putting a bypass through right where the Earth Simulator was.
Rather than fail to complete their orders, they went ahead and demolished the entire thing. This one is a replacement.
[BTW... in case anyone wondered, the answer is 42].
Yeah, it's the same site as was linked to from the web. But if you look, you'll see something like what I'm seeing right now:
Oracle Corp ORCL 12.15 -0.16 Microsoft Corp MSFT 24.46 0.31
See, you've also gotta look at the fact that M$ points out that they *arranged* this deal with TimeLine.
So probably this *is* a good deal for M$. How? Well, #1: they throw their best customers to the dogs. Best customers lose a chunk. [BTW... would this include *google*, which HTMLs all PDFs?]
Since nobody's going to recover from M$ without huge expenditures for legal bills, and a long wait, some of those best customers will be available to be bought out by M$'s.NET. [....PERFECT! 2PTs!...]
Next, the rest are going to have to get licensed. How? Well, they pay an extra chunk to M$, which has arranged a new deal with Timeline. Timeline gets their cut, M$ gets the cut PLUS their extra. [... next, an easy layup...]
Meanwhile, M$ gets publicity, bemoans how their customers don't have much choice, and VPs around the country remember ("well, Nobody Uses Oracle")
[Three point shot at the buzzer! But it's charging... no, the Ref's calling it a Foul! and the first is good; the second is good, and this game is going into overtime!]
Microsoft isn't going to lose. They're too good at the legal game.
Anyhow, either stock buyers are really stupid, or else this is Yet Another Microsoft Dirty Trick. I'm betting with the latter. But not with my money--I don't have money. Bill got it all. You see, it was in this bank account, and the bank uses mSQL...
---- You think this is a sig, but it isn't. I type this by hand every time.
Quite simply, that comment -- how do you prevent a terrorist attack -- clearly was not meant to be a troll post. It's a very real concern, as evidenced by the fact that the company is looking for a "politically stable" site, and that having a politically stable site is more important than getting an equatorial site.
This is very serious, and the answer is "you can't". You *could*, however, make it strong enough that terrorist attacks or earthquakes were unlikely to knock the thing down.
For this very reason, I suggest building bottom up. That is, start by building towers in a bunch of regions, and use the towers to launch rockets.
This *can* be done if the compressive-to-tensile strength ratios approach one. Indeed, looking here or here (for pdf), we see that this is likely the case, as long as your purity is pretty good.
Such a bottom-up construction has several advantages: (1) less likely to suffer a catastrophic failure. (2) thickest at the ground, where terrorist attack is more possible (3) economic advantage to the company that constructs it *before* the project is complete, because there are huge weight savings to be had launching your rockets from even an altitude of 10 km -- so you get customers from the getgo (4) you get to test the things out extensively (5) you end up with an ideal latch-on point for the space elevator when you *do* construct it (6) you end up with a cheaper space elevator to boot, because you're launching your materials from a much higher location. (7) You have one heck of a tourist resort even before you get into space: "Hotel in the sky" whenver launches aren't being carried out.
Part of the problem is that even the professional income tax preparers get it wrong, though not entirely, and so we don't really trust the pros, much less software. We'd have to read it for ourselves, anyhow.
In the earlier years of our business, when we were in America, she'd typically spend a few days getting all the documentation together in a nice orderly format the way the HR-Block people, or the private income tax preparer [depending on who we used that year] liked it.
Then she'd go down, and give them the material, and spend a few hours taking them through it.
After a week and $400-$500, they'd give back a return for her to sign. She'd take it home, spend another 2-3 days, glance through it, find a few errors, and then pull out the documentation and the IRS rules to show them how they were wrong. Sometimes their mistake appeared to save us money [if caught, you lose money anyhow], sometimes it cost us money. But she'd always get it fixed, take it back, show them how they were wrong, let them re-prepare it, and then signed and submitted it.
Anyhow, if the pros can't get it right, I can't really say that we'd trust the software to get it right either -- and with the IRS, mistakes can be expensive.
My wife is an engineer, with a master's of science in Mechanical Engineering, and having had a job working for Newport News Shipbuilding; among other things she ran the Access databases coordinating the outfitting of the Double-Eagle double-hulled tankers. Her father is an accountant, and beyond what skills she already had, he additionally taught her how to do the books and taxes.
So it isn't that she's dumb. Rather, it is that Congress first, and then the the IRS, update the rules rather whimsically, and that forces you to read and reread their rules in a branched tree fashion.
My wife does our taxes. We have an LLC, really a microbusiness that does less than $30k/yr [this year it'll be $25k]. From that you knock off expenses, ebay fraud [paypal, please take a bow], and the like.
Anyhow, just doing minimum compliance with the law, no massively complicated deductions, you have to do things like calculate "minimum alternative taxes", and such... it's taken my wife since December, 2 hours or so each day, about 3 days a week... so I guess that would be 36 hours so far. She's still not done.
Yeah, she's doing it analog. I don't think turbo tax *would* help a whole lot, especially since a major part of her job is reading and rereading all the IRS documents to find out their new rules this year, and how she has to expense this, deduct that, cannot expense and *must* deduct t'other, *must* expense the third, or fill in a form explaining why she isn't expensing it, and so on and so forth.
I dunno. If you count the cost of her time as $20/hour, then without us owing anything, the cost of taxes would be $720 and counting.
Anyhow, lemme finish up with a link and a comment:
http://www.givemeliberty.org : absolutely right, legally correct based on written law, but it'd be incredibly stupid to join. Lots of our rules have nothing to do with law, if you get my drift. Better just to leave.
Look at that touchpad on your iBook. Now, imagine a keyboard made like that, *ideally with an LCD that can display any layout you like*.
There was a keyboard like this previewed in slashdot -- but I can't find it today.
But essentially, it uses the hall effect to tell where your fingers are -- and it reads not only letters, but gestures.
Do something like this, and every keyboard is completely reprogrammable. Why not have a different key combination for every programming word, for example?
Of course, there is the issue of the learning curve -- but you can ease into that by allowing the *user* to reprogram his keyboard, and just keep his keyboard layout on the internet, and download it when he begins work.
That way, for typing English, you use Dvorak. For programming, you use a special programming set, which can alternate to Dvorak for comments or text.
Indeed, I'm waiting until PDAs wise up to this, and allow input by such a "keyboard" as well. I can type quite quickly. I can't scratch the screen as quickly, and I have to press too hard to do it anyhow, and you can't erase what you've already scratched into the screen [okay, that's a joke].
Of course, this all makes me wonder if this isn't some sort of a repost.
First, it looks to me like the company isn't so much selling solar panels, as it is selling entire solar panel manufacturing systems.
Seems to me that something like RPM's centrifugal power storage units would be ideal to go along with this. That way, you could load up a building's walls and roof with these things, and produce enough to last through the night.
Then sell it as unit solution: Get the whole package, and have power whenever you need it.
But I'll bet these little factories will be extremely expensive.
We had problems with MS Word not working. [I don't mean not working as advertised; I mean not working. Standard corruption problems was taking out about 2/3 of our time.] So we decided we had to get away from MS Toys, and go to something real.
We also had an old copy of Quark 3.3, legally licensed and all -- so I preferred that, but were considering Adobe Pagemaker as well.
Anyhow, I called them, and asked them "Is Quark Xpress legal to be used in Lithuania", specifically because I didn't want to spend the money for Quark Passport, and their license was unclear. Understand that Virginia law enforces the verbal contract as well -- but that turns out to be neither here nor there.
After calling their legal people, and talking to them, they said "by the license, it is unsupported but legal outside of the US and Canada", and essentially took me through the license to show that.
Okay, fine and well. We adopted Quark, and went with three copies: one Passport, one Xpress, and one other passport... which turned out to be a fraudulent sale. About this time we had to go to Lithuania, so from Lithuania we called for a "valuation" to get Paypal's insurance to pay [they never did], and Quark came back and said "Wait a minute, we see that your company has one copy of Quark Xpress. That's now illegal; so to make it legal, you have to pay us another $550." I asked about contract creep, and they said that didn't matter, and they don't know who would have said anything anyhow.
Well, part of this bill -- which PASSED in Virginia, makes it easy for software companies to modify the contract *after* you have the software, and charge an additional fee to keep using it. AND, if you don't pay up, they have the right to REMOTELY DISABLE YOUR SOFTWARE, REGARDLESS OF DAMAGES IT CAUSES, AND WITHOUT LIABILITY!!!
Since we do have a Virginia LLC, I am going to start writing Air Traffic Controller Software.
Anyhow, I claim "First Victim."
P.S. In case you consider Quark to be evil after hearing this, don't forget what Adobe did to that Russian programmer who made ebooks for the blind... which is a lot worse. And your alternative to those two seems to be M$, which is not only evil--it just plain doesn't work. The other alternative is TEX, which is WYSIWYM instead of WYSIWYG, and is therefore not suitable for some usages as page layout software, at least. [It also seems to be limited to the number of fonts it can handle; at least, Scientific Word is. We really considered it, but discarded it because we could not fit our book into their predefined layouts.]
First, let me say that the price that they're charging doesn't seem to be a whole lot more than what you'd pay just to go to a foreign country across the ocean. So it isn't extremely high. You might say that it raises the cost enough to internationalize the process, so that a person is as likely to attend from Argentina or America as from Australia or Germany. But they might have done better, if they wanted it to be available to poorer people everywhere, to start it at the national level in each country, and not have the admission price.
That said, lets not forget that money and power symbolize each other. Now, Microsoft and Sun have power. Gnu does not. What does GNU have? Strength. Strength can resist power, but it doesn't move things.
So you're having a conference on the future of money. The goal here isn't just to predict, it is to predict, and then move people in that direction. That's a function of power. To allow "strength" to be represented would actually stop the whole process.
So for what they want to do, they *definitely* want to price it out of the range of Joe Programmer. This way, they are more likely to succeed at their goals.
That said, yes -- it is priced out of the programmer's range, but Microsoft uses other peoples' code anyhow -- so it shouldn't matter to them.
The problem in this is that if you are building a whole structure while completely ignoring the populace, your structure is going to be unstable [as will be the case with the WTO, too]. A government functions best by legitimately representing on its virtual battlefield all forces that could possibly overthrow the government. If a government fails to represent one of the major forces, or does so too inefficiently, it is likely to sooner or later fall in a characteristic fashion:
(1) Power of the Populace. Represented by: locally elected representatives, with more universal sufferage helping it function better. Characteristic failure: civil unrest, violent revolution without resulting government, anarchy.
(2) Power of Group. Represented by a Senate, chosen by the major politically active groups of people [professional, or ethnic, or other]. Characteristic failure: (1) Babel effect, people developing their own languages (2) balkanization (3) civil war
(3) Power of the Charismatic Leader. Represented by a president or king. Characteristic failure: inability to respond to external threats. Usually the country gets conquered.
(4) Power of the wise leadership: Represented by judges. Characteristic failure: corruption by government leaders.
(5) Power of money: Represented --INEFFICIENTLY-- by lobby groups, but ideally represented by a regularly auctioned house with the power to block new legislation, but not with the power to craft or submit legislation. Characteristic failure: Bribes invading every other part of government, and making them fail.
The fact that they are ignoring the power of the populace seems rather unimportant right now, but if not corrected, it could result later in masse civil unrest. In other words, whoever follows them without getting the approval of their populace is likely to find themselves in a phase similar to Russia after the Bolshevik revolution but before the Communist revolution. Which phase won't necessarily result in Communism, but could as easily result in that as anything else. France had something similar that resulted in an unstable republic, for example. Rome had something similar that resulted in them losing all their slaves, and becoming a city state that was a symbol of power without any real power. Thus, it attracted conquest and reconquest.
I think I'd qualify as "fringe right." I'm one of those religious conservative libertarians.
But when Clinton was appointing Freeh to higher office for successfully gunning down Vicky Weaver [and yes, racism is dispicable. But it wasn't a capitol offense last I heard], and I raised my voice, I heard numerous times that I was a crazy wacko religious nut.
Okay.
And when I was decrying the ATF's terrorism, and the IRS's terrorism... I was told that I was a pro-gun nut, and that I favored the wealthy.
Okay.
And when I pointed out that Clinton was undermining the rule of law with his perjury, and was leading us towards social unrest with his... ummm... PUBLIC foibles, I was told "you're persecuting the best liberal president we've ever had, over sex." Well, no. It wasn't over sex. It was over the damage that was being done to the country AND the constitution.
Okay.
And when I had a problem with using the SSN, for religious reasons, I had my rights summarily denied, and was denied a job without a hearing, but was told "although about 5% of Americans have major religious problems with the SSN, they and you are religious nuts."
Okay. But that first Amendment includes stuff about religion, doesn't it?
Now, last time I looked *before* Bush's (s)election, EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THE 10 AMENDMENTS WAS BEING REGULARLY VIOLATED!!!! REGULARLY (though not often) WITH DEADLY FORCE!!!!
It isn't Bush's fault -- but Bush is what America deserves for supporting Clinton, and Bush, and Reagan [I find no moral or constitutional fault with Carter or Ford], and Nixon, and Eisenhower,... and so on and so forth right on back.
And never once caring that the 10th Amendment, minimum government, was ignored to the demise of the other nine.
Because in order to have a government pay for what you want (Nasa, or welfare, or Social Security, or education), you've got to ignore that 10th Amendment.
So just don't blame us *fringe right* conservatives for not saying anything. We've been bound and gagged for quite a while now.
As often as not, it's been done by you, the mainstream left.
[P.S. I left, but I didn't close the door. You might want to leave before Bush closes it.]
And sorry for yelling -- but really, I've wanted to for quite a while.
Okay, let's see what happened. Pharoah had a dream and couldn't remember it. So Joseph reminded him, and told him how there would be 7 years of good articles, and then 7 years without good articles in Slashdot.
So Pharoah asked "What should we do?" And Joseph said, "Let's save up the seven years of good articles, and then repost them during the seven years of bad articles."
Thus it was said, thus it was done, and thus we got seven years of bad articles.
You might consider getting flywheel electric storage. There are some companies that make very good flywheels out of composites. They can store a ton of energy, are fairly cheap, and don't suffer the same problems as batteries.
The problem with flywheels is if they come apart. In the case of these, they sink the flywheels into the ground, so that if they do explode, nobody is hurt.
Okay, first I'd take aluminum plate. I'd evaporate or plate onto its surface a reasonably thick layer of tungsten.
Tungsten, if I remember from articles about electron-tunnelling microscopes, has the property that when you expose it to NaOH [and sorry, I could have details wrong here], it dissolves most quickly where the curvature is smallest. So you can get things down to on the order of 1-atom points.
Now, I'd coat the whole thing with photoresist, and--if necessary, using the principles of holographic diffraction--expose it in a pattern of a whole bunch of lines.
Then I'd run it through NaOH to refine it, and end up with that anechoic chamber. To see my understanding of anechoic chamber, though, search for another MickLinux entry farther down, about razor blade stacks. My understanding *could* be wrong. I claim no expertise here -- though, I must caution you to read my sig anyways. [It's the principle of the thing].
I don't think he used super glue back then. I'm not sure if they had it. I'd think he used solder, or just a frame to hold them all in place. And either solder or physical contact might be better than superglue, possibly, because it electrically joins the razor blades, which might affect the light absorption characteristics of the heat dump. [some EE can correct me on this, if I'm wrong].
Okay, get a razor without any extra metal on the bottom. Set it flat on the desk, with the blade pointing to the left. [If you want to see one, try looking at the disposable razor blades]. Or by it from the American Razor Company, in Weyer's Cave VA.
Now take another blade, and lay it flat on the first, also with the blade pointing to the left.
Now put another on that. Keep stacking them like that, so that all the blades point to the left and are parallel. Now apply a drop of superglue to the bottom of the stack. Let it dry, and lift the stack up.
On one side, you'll see a lot of razor blades edges. But the thickness of the edge of each razor blade will be extremely small, like 1% of the thickness of a single blade.
Between the blades it will be completely black. Don't believe it? Go into a black room, and shine a penlight on it. You won't see the reflection. It absorbs ALL the light. Well, all except for where the very thin edge is.
Now, this might seem to make a great solar panel, but if you touch it, expect ribbons where your fingers were... and rain will damage it, as will dust. But in space it might be okay.
Stresses will be approximately the same. In reality, if you want to minimize the stresses, you'd build one in space as you describe, and another mounting out from the Earth, and join them like the TransContinental Railroad, but with a diamond spike, not a gold spike.
That being the case, it's probably better to start on the ground, and get some benefit immediately.
Plus construction costs for that part will be a lot lower, because you don't have to lift materials by rocket up there. So you build the platform first, get it as high as you can, and then use that to launch rockets to put a nanotube factory [and material supply industry] into space from that.
To get it even darker, plate a bunch of razor blades with this material, and then stack them.
My father used stacks of razor blades as a heat dump for lasers in his fusion research at University of Wisconsin.
He showed with pencil and paper how the razor blades successively reflect the light into the gaps between the blades, without turning it around. Thus, they absorb all the light, and make a great blackbody.
Just as an interesting note: This was back in the early 70's, at a time when cost-efficient fusion was only a decade away, and had been only a decade away for 20 years. As part of his defense, he was asked whether it would be practical any time soon. His answer was no. When asked why, he pointed out that the reaction that was giving them some success was the D-T reaction, and that Tritium was so rare that it would never be a practical fuel.
That essentially did not earn the pleasure of others in the field, and kept him out of that field -- perhaps a blessing, since success might have doomed his life to failure.
Quick thought here -- if we can build a space elevator with mass-produced nanotubes, then we can essentially build a tall platform, as high as we like.
That being the case, why shoot for the moon? Instead, build a nanotube launch platform that is designed to grow. Start it out in a geologically stable location at the equator, and start getting fuel savings immediately. Eventually, it will *be* a space elevator, but meanwhile, it becomes commercially feasible.
This, then, would not be a "top down" design such as caused the shuttle accidents. It would rather be a "current technology" and slow-growth design that would allow us to understand our technologies and thus avoid disasters.
Okay, here's my idea: lots and lots of government documents.
First, any law archives you can get. Any commentary. You should be able to find tons of stuff out there, and it would be useful.
Second, all FOIA info that is online, which you can get.
Third, all government publications: "Statistics of Income", for example, is a huge archive.
Fourth, -- and here's a techie POV: see if you could get NASA docs online. There's all kinds of useful stuff out there, from such things as the low-speed GA-W-1 or Clark-Y standard wing sections, to hypersonic data, to investigation results from the Challenger, to -- you know what's coming now, because of Columbia.
Fifth, anything from any of the engineering societies that you can distribute online, do. I'd be willing to bet that a lot of them have books that are out of publication and will not be republished. You may be able to get them in PDF format. Chapter by chapter, that could be a great P2P download.
If you do this, I'm willing to bet you'll get a ton of downloads. Lawyers, engineers, do-it-yourselfers, and so on would all be using your service.
BTW: Thanks for trying to go P2P the legal route, and respecting law.
I, too, have noticed wierd UI aspects disappearing and reappearing;
For example, I got moderator access, and saw such options on one of my own posts as what is appended below, with [edit] being buttons I could press. I decided not to touch it, not really understanding it.
Starting Score: 1 pt Moderation +2 100% Inciteful Extra 'Inciteful' Modifier 0 [Edit] Karma-Bonus Modifier +1 [Edit] Total Score: 4 Alien Bonus Round: 17 Alien Percentage: 34% Total Bonus Score: 3400 Adjusted Gross Income from Line 2 14000 Automatic Deduction 3500 Net Gross Income [sub prev. 2 ] 10500 Dividends, Interest, and Savings 2200 Net Adjusted Gross Income 12700
What the heck is all this stuff anyhow? Is anyone supposed to be able to keep track of a worksheet this long? I mean -- there were about 8 different operations there. Or are they just trying to make me mess up, so that they can take all my hard-earned points, and lock me up in a little cell?
Slashdot Mirror
when they were putting a bypass through. It seems that the Vogons had their orders, and the orders included putting a bypass through right where the Earth Simulator was.
Rather than fail to complete their orders, they went ahead and demolished the entire thing. This one is a replacement.
[BTW... in case anyone wondered, the answer is 42].
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-985359.html
.NET. [....PERFECT! 2PTs!...]
Yeah, it's the same site as was linked to from the web. But if you look, you'll see something like what I'm seeing right now:
Oracle Corp ORCL 12.15 -0.16
Microsoft Corp MSFT 24.46 0.31
See, you've also gotta look at the fact that M$ points out that they *arranged* this deal with TimeLine.
So probably this *is* a good deal for M$. How? Well, #1: they throw their best customers to the dogs. Best customers lose a chunk. [BTW... would this include *google*, which HTMLs all PDFs?]
Since nobody's going to recover from M$ without huge expenditures for legal bills, and a long wait, some of those best customers will be available to be bought out by M$'s
Next, the rest are going to have to get licensed. How? Well, they pay an extra chunk to M$, which has arranged a new deal with Timeline. Timeline gets their cut, M$ gets the cut PLUS their extra. [... next, an easy layup...]
Meanwhile, M$ gets publicity, bemoans how their customers don't have much choice, and VPs around the country remember ("well, Nobody Uses Oracle")
[Three point shot at the buzzer! But it's charging... no, the Ref's calling it a Foul! and the first is good; the second is good, and this game is going into overtime!]
Microsoft isn't going to lose. They're too good at the legal game.
Anyhow, either stock buyers are really stupid, or else this is Yet Another Microsoft Dirty Trick. I'm betting with the latter. But not with my money--I don't have money. Bill got it all. You see, it was in this bank account, and the bank uses mSQL...
----
You think this is a sig,
but it isn't. I type this
by hand every time.
This is very serious, and the answer is "you can't". You *could*, however, make it strong enough that terrorist attacks or earthquakes were unlikely to knock the thing down.
For this very reason, I suggest building bottom up. That is, start by building towers in a bunch of regions, and use the towers to launch rockets.
This *can* be done if the compressive-to-tensile strength ratios approach one. Indeed, looking here or here (for pdf), we see that this is likely the case, as long as your purity is pretty good.
Such a bottom-up construction has several advantages: (1) less likely to suffer a catastrophic failure. (2) thickest at the ground, where terrorist attack is more possible (3) economic advantage to the company that constructs it *before* the project is complete, because there are huge weight savings to be had launching your rockets from even an altitude of 10 km -- so you get customers from the getgo (4) you get to test the things out extensively (5) you end up with an ideal latch-on point for the space elevator when you *do* construct it (6) you end up with a cheaper space elevator to boot, because you're launching your materials from a much higher location. (7) You have one heck of a tourist resort even before you get into space: "Hotel in the sky" whenver launches aren't being carried out.
Part of the problem is that even the professional income tax preparers get it wrong, though not entirely, and so we don't really trust the pros, much less software. We'd have to read it for ourselves, anyhow.
In the earlier years of our business, when we were in America, she'd typically spend a few days getting all the documentation together in a nice orderly format the way the HR-Block people, or the private income tax preparer [depending on who we used that year] liked it.
Then she'd go down, and give them the material, and spend a few hours taking them through it.
After a week and $400-$500, they'd give back a return for her to sign. She'd take it home, spend another 2-3 days, glance through it, find a few errors, and then pull out the documentation and the IRS rules to show them how they were wrong. Sometimes their mistake appeared to save us money [if caught, you lose money anyhow], sometimes it cost us money. But she'd always get it fixed, take it back, show them how they were wrong, let them re-prepare it, and then signed and submitted it.
Anyhow, if the pros can't get it right, I can't really say that we'd trust the software to get it right either -- and with the IRS, mistakes can be expensive.
My wife is an engineer, with a master's of science in Mechanical Engineering, and having had a job working for Newport News Shipbuilding; among other things she ran the Access databases coordinating the outfitting of the Double-Eagle double-hulled tankers. Her father is an accountant, and beyond what skills she already had, he additionally taught her how to do the books and taxes.
So it isn't that she's dumb. Rather, it is that Congress first, and then the the IRS, update the rules rather whimsically, and that forces you to read and reread their rules in a branched tree fashion.
My wife does our taxes. We have an LLC, really a microbusiness that does less than $30k/yr [this year it'll be $25k]. From that you knock off expenses, ebay fraud [paypal, please take a bow], and the like.
Anyhow, just doing minimum compliance with the law, no massively complicated deductions, you have to do things like calculate "minimum alternative taxes", and such... it's taken my wife since December, 2 hours or so each day, about 3 days a week... so I guess that would be 36 hours so far. She's still not done.
Yeah, she's doing it analog. I don't think turbo tax *would* help a whole lot, especially since a major part of her job is reading and rereading all the IRS documents to find out their new rules this year, and how she has to expense this, deduct that, cannot expense and *must* deduct t'other, *must* expense the third, or fill in a form explaining why she isn't expensing it, and so on and so forth.
I dunno. If you count the cost of her time as $20/hour, then without us owing anything, the cost of taxes would be $720 and counting.
Anyhow, lemme finish up with a link and a comment:
http://www.givemeliberty.org : absolutely right, legally correct based on written law, but it'd be incredibly stupid to join. Lots of our rules have nothing to do with law, if you get my drift. Better just to leave.
Look at that touchpad on your iBook. Now, imagine a keyboard made like that, *ideally with an LCD that can display any layout you like*.
There was a keyboard like this previewed in slashdot -- but I can't find it today.
But essentially, it uses the hall effect to tell where your fingers are -- and it reads not only letters, but gestures.
Do something like this, and every keyboard is completely reprogrammable. Why not have a different key combination for every programming word, for example?
Of course, there is the issue of the learning curve -- but you can ease into that by allowing the *user* to reprogram his keyboard, and just keep his keyboard layout on the internet, and download it when he begins work.
That way, for typing English, you use Dvorak. For programming, you use a special programming set, which can alternate to Dvorak for comments or text.
Indeed, I'm waiting until PDAs wise up to this, and allow input by such a "keyboard" as well. I can type quite quickly. I can't scratch the screen as quickly, and I have to press too hard to do it anyhow, and you can't erase what you've already scratched into the screen [okay, that's a joke].
Of course, this all makes me wonder if this isn't some sort of a repost.
First, it looks to me like the company isn't so much selling solar panels, as it is selling entire solar panel manufacturing systems.
Seems to me that something like RPM's centrifugal power storage units would be ideal to go along with this. That way, you could load up a building's walls and roof with these things, and produce enough to last through the night.
Then sell it as unit solution: Get the whole package, and have power whenever you need it.
But I'll bet these little factories will be extremely expensive.
Okay, we have a Va-based LLC.
We had problems with MS Word not working. [I don't mean not working as advertised; I mean not working. Standard corruption problems was taking out about 2/3 of our time.] So we decided we had to get away from MS Toys, and go to something real.
We also had an old copy of Quark 3.3, legally licensed and all -- so I preferred that, but were considering Adobe Pagemaker as well.
Anyhow, I called them, and asked them "Is Quark Xpress legal to be used in Lithuania", specifically because I didn't want to spend the money for Quark Passport, and their license was unclear. Understand that Virginia law enforces the verbal contract as well -- but that turns out to be neither here nor there.
After calling their legal people, and talking to them, they said "by the license, it is unsupported but legal outside of the US and Canada", and essentially took me through the license to show that.
Okay, fine and well. We adopted Quark, and went with three copies: one Passport, one Xpress, and one other passport... which turned out to be a fraudulent sale. About this time we had to go to Lithuania, so from Lithuania we called for a "valuation" to get Paypal's insurance to pay [they never did], and Quark came back and said "Wait a minute, we see that your company has one copy of Quark Xpress. That's now illegal; so to make it legal, you have to pay us another $550." I asked about contract creep, and they said that didn't matter, and they don't know who would have said anything anyhow.
Well, part of this bill -- which PASSED in Virginia, makes it easy for software companies to modify the contract *after* you have the software, and charge an additional fee to keep using it. AND, if you don't pay up, they have the right to REMOTELY DISABLE YOUR SOFTWARE, REGARDLESS OF DAMAGES IT CAUSES, AND WITHOUT LIABILITY!!!
Since we do have a Virginia LLC, I am going to start writing Air Traffic Controller Software.
Anyhow, I claim "First Victim."
P.S. In case you consider Quark to be evil after hearing this, don't forget what Adobe did to that Russian programmer who made ebooks for the blind... which is a lot worse. And your alternative to those two seems to be M$, which is not only evil--it just plain doesn't work. The other alternative is TEX, which is WYSIWYM instead of WYSIWYG, and is therefore not suitable for some usages as page layout software, at least. [It also seems to be limited to the number of fonts it can handle; at least, Scientific Word is. We really considered it, but discarded it because we could not fit our book into their predefined layouts.]
First, let me say that the price that they're charging doesn't seem to be a whole lot more than what you'd pay just to go to a foreign country across the ocean. So it isn't extremely high. You might say that it raises the cost enough to internationalize the process, so that a person is as likely to attend from Argentina or America as from Australia or Germany. But they might have done better, if they wanted it to be available to poorer people everywhere, to start it at the national level in each country, and not have the admission price.
That said, lets not forget that money and power symbolize each other. Now, Microsoft and Sun have power. Gnu does not. What does GNU have? Strength. Strength can resist power, but it doesn't move things.
So you're having a conference on the future of money. The goal here isn't just to predict, it is to predict, and then move people in that direction. That's a function of power. To allow "strength" to be represented would actually stop the whole process.
So for what they want to do, they *definitely* want to price it out of the range of Joe Programmer. This way, they are more likely to succeed at their goals.
That said, yes -- it is priced out of the programmer's range, but Microsoft uses other peoples' code anyhow -- so it shouldn't matter to them.
The problem in this is that if you are building a whole structure while completely ignoring the populace, your structure is going to be unstable [as will be the case with the WTO, too]. A government functions best by legitimately representing on its virtual battlefield all forces that could possibly overthrow the government. If a government fails to represent one of the major forces, or does so too inefficiently, it is likely to sooner or later fall in a characteristic fashion:
(1) Power of the Populace. Represented by: locally elected representatives, with more universal sufferage helping it function better. Characteristic failure: civil unrest, violent revolution without resulting government, anarchy.
(2) Power of Group. Represented by a Senate, chosen by the major politically active groups of people [professional, or ethnic, or other]. Characteristic failure: (1) Babel effect, people developing their own languages (2) balkanization (3) civil war
(3) Power of the Charismatic Leader. Represented by a president or king. Characteristic failure: inability to respond to external threats. Usually the country gets conquered.
(4) Power of the wise leadership: Represented by judges. Characteristic failure: corruption by government leaders.
(5) Power of money: Represented --INEFFICIENTLY-- by lobby groups, but ideally represented by a regularly auctioned house with the power to block new legislation, but not with the power to craft or submit legislation. Characteristic failure: Bribes invading every other part of government, and making them fail.
The fact that they are ignoring the power of the populace seems rather unimportant right now, but if not corrected, it could result later in masse civil unrest. In other words, whoever follows them without getting the approval of their populace is likely to find themselves in a phase similar to Russia after the Bolshevik revolution but before the Communist revolution. Which phase won't necessarily result in Communism, but could as easily result in that as anything else. France had something similar that resulted in an unstable republic, for example. Rome had something similar that resulted in them losing all their slaves, and becoming a city state that was a symbol of power without any real power. Thus, it attracted conquest and reconquest.
I think I'd qualify as "fringe right." I'm one of those religious conservative libertarians.
... ummm... PUBLIC foibles, I was told "you're persecuting the best liberal president we've ever had, over sex." Well, no. It wasn't over sex. It was over the damage that was being done to the country AND the constitution.
... and so on and so forth right on back.
But when Clinton was appointing Freeh to higher office for successfully gunning down Vicky Weaver [and yes, racism is dispicable. But it wasn't a capitol offense last I heard], and I raised my voice, I heard numerous times that I was a crazy wacko religious nut.
Okay.
And when I was decrying the ATF's terrorism, and the IRS's terrorism... I was told that I was a pro-gun nut, and that I favored the wealthy.
Okay.
And when I pointed out that Clinton was undermining the rule of law with his perjury, and was leading us towards social unrest with his
Okay.
And when I had a problem with using the SSN, for religious reasons, I had my rights summarily denied, and was denied a job without a hearing, but was told "although about 5% of Americans have major religious problems with the SSN, they and you are religious nuts."
Okay. But that first Amendment includes stuff about religion, doesn't it?
Now, last time I looked *before* Bush's (s)election, EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THE 10 AMENDMENTS WAS BEING REGULARLY VIOLATED!!!! REGULARLY (though not often) WITH DEADLY FORCE!!!!
It isn't Bush's fault -- but Bush is what America deserves for supporting Clinton, and Bush, and Reagan [I find no moral or constitutional fault with Carter or Ford], and Nixon, and Eisenhower,
And never once caring that the 10th Amendment, minimum government, was ignored to the demise of the other nine.
Because in order to have a government pay for what you want (Nasa, or welfare, or Social Security, or education), you've got to ignore that 10th Amendment.
So just don't blame us *fringe right* conservatives for not saying anything. We've been bound and gagged for quite a while now.
As often as not, it's been done by you, the mainstream left.
[P.S. I left, but I didn't close the door. You might want to leave before Bush closes it.]
And sorry for yelling -- but really, I've wanted to for quite a while.
Okay, let's see what happened. Pharoah had a dream and couldn't remember it. So Joseph reminded him, and told him how there would be 7 years of good articles, and then 7 years without good articles in Slashdot.
So Pharoah asked "What should we do?" And Joseph said, "Let's save up the seven years of good articles, and then repost them during the seven years of bad articles."
Thus it was said, thus it was done, and thus we got seven years of bad articles.
Okay, you can't do it.
Although a flu virus *is* a vector, a mountain climber is a scalar.
[You have to know vector math to understand this one].
For a bonus question for you calculus folks:
The integral of [Cabin*dCabin] = Noah's Ark. Why?
Okay, what do you get when you cross a mountain climber with a flu virus?
[Answer one level below]
I was interested in that, in Virginia. There's one electric company, yada yada yada.
Anyhow, I asked, how to go about it, since it was the law there, too. They said you don't.
I asked what they meant by that. They said, well, we'll charge you more to tie into the system than we'll pay you for the electricity.
That's it. They want their coal burning plants. They have their way to get around the law. The rest doesn't matter.
It's not always as simple as it seems.
You might consider getting flywheel electric storage. There are some companies that make very good flywheels out of composites. They can store a ton of energy, are fairly cheap, and don't suffer the same problems as batteries.
The problem with flywheels is if they come apart. In the case of these, they sink the flywheels into the ground, so that if they do explode, nobody is hurt.
But they may be a lot better than batteries.
Okay, first I'd take aluminum plate. I'd evaporate or plate onto its surface a reasonably thick layer of tungsten.
Tungsten, if I remember from articles about electron-tunnelling microscopes, has the property that when you expose it to NaOH [and sorry, I could have details wrong here], it dissolves most quickly where the curvature is smallest. So you can get things down to on the order of 1-atom points.
Now, I'd coat the whole thing with photoresist, and--if necessary, using the principles of holographic diffraction--expose it in a pattern of a whole bunch of lines.
Then I'd run it through NaOH to refine it, and end up with that anechoic chamber. To see my understanding of anechoic chamber, though, search for another MickLinux entry farther down, about razor blade stacks. My understanding *could* be wrong. I claim no expertise here -- though, I must caution you to read my sig anyways. [It's the principle of the thing].
I don't think he used super glue back then. I'm not sure if they had it. I'd think he used solder, or just a frame to hold them all in place. And either solder or physical contact might be better than superglue, possibly, because it electrically joins the razor blades, which might affect the light absorption characteristics of the heat dump. [some EE can correct me on this, if I'm wrong].
Okay, get a razor without any extra metal on the bottom. Set it flat on the desk, with the blade pointing to the left. [If you want to see one, try looking at the disposable razor blades]. Or by it from the American Razor Company, in Weyer's Cave VA.
Now take another blade, and lay it flat on the first, also with the blade pointing to the left.
Now put another on that. Keep stacking them like that, so that all the blades point to the left and are parallel. Now apply a drop of superglue to the bottom of the stack. Let it dry, and lift the stack up.
On one side, you'll see a lot of razor blades edges. But the thickness of the edge of each razor blade will be extremely small, like 1% of the thickness of a single blade.
---=======IIIIIIIIIII Razor Blade 3
---=======IIIIIIIIIII 2
(blade side) ---=======IIIIIIIIIII 1 (base side)
Between the blades it will be completely black. Don't believe it? Go into a black room, and shine a penlight on it. You won't see the reflection. It absorbs ALL the light. Well, all except for where the very thin edge is.
Now, this might seem to make a great solar panel, but if you touch it, expect ribbons where your fingers were... and rain will damage it, as will dust. But in space it might be okay.
Stresses will be approximately the same. In reality, if you want to minimize the stresses, you'd build one in space as you describe, and another mounting out from the Earth, and join them like the TransContinental Railroad, but with a diamond spike, not a gold spike.
That being the case, it's probably better to start on the ground, and get some benefit immediately.
Plus construction costs for that part will be a lot lower, because you don't have to lift materials by rocket up there. So you build the platform first, get it as high as you can, and then use that to launch rockets to put a nanotube factory [and material supply industry] into space from that.
To get it even darker, plate a bunch of razor blades with this material, and then stack them.
My father used stacks of razor blades as a heat dump for lasers in his fusion research at University of Wisconsin.
He showed with pencil and paper how the razor blades successively reflect the light into the gaps between the blades, without turning it around. Thus, they absorb all the light, and make a great blackbody.
Just as an interesting note: This was back in the early 70's, at a time when cost-efficient fusion was only a decade away, and had been only a decade away for 20 years. As part of his defense, he was asked whether it would be practical any time soon. His answer was no. When asked why, he pointed out that the reaction that was giving them some success was the D-T reaction, and that Tritium was so rare that it would never be a practical fuel.
That essentially did not earn the pleasure of others in the field, and kept him out of that field -- perhaps a blessing, since success might have doomed his life to failure.
Quick thought here -- if we can build a space elevator with mass-produced nanotubes, then we can essentially build a tall platform, as high as we like.
That being the case, why shoot for the moon? Instead, build a nanotube launch platform that is designed to grow. Start it out in a geologically stable location at the equator, and start getting fuel savings immediately. Eventually, it will *be* a space elevator, but meanwhile, it becomes commercially feasible.
This, then, would not be a "top down" design such as caused the shuttle accidents. It would rather be a "current technology" and slow-growth design that would allow us to understand our technologies and thus avoid disasters.
Okay, here's my idea: lots and lots of government documents.
First, any law archives you can get. Any commentary. You should be able to find tons of stuff out there, and it would be useful.
Second, all FOIA info that is online, which you can get.
Third, all government publications: "Statistics of Income", for example, is a huge archive.
Fourth, -- and here's a techie POV: see if you could get NASA docs online. There's all kinds of useful stuff out there, from such things as the low-speed GA-W-1 or Clark-Y standard wing sections, to hypersonic data, to investigation results from the Challenger, to -- you know what's coming now, because of Columbia.
Fifth, anything from any of the engineering societies that you can distribute online, do. I'd be willing to bet that a lot of them have books that are out of publication and will not be republished. You may be able to get them in PDF format. Chapter by chapter, that could be a great P2P download.
If you do this, I'm willing to bet you'll get a ton of downloads. Lawyers, engineers, do-it-yourselfers, and so on would all be using your service.
BTW: Thanks for trying to go P2P the legal route, and respecting law.
I, too, have noticed wierd UI aspects disappearing and reappearing;
For example, I got moderator access, and saw such options on one of my own posts as what is appended below, with [edit] being buttons I could press. I decided not to touch it, not really understanding it.
Starting Score: 1 pt
Moderation +2
100% Inciteful
Extra 'Inciteful' Modifier 0 [Edit]
Karma-Bonus Modifier +1 [Edit]
Total Score: 4
Alien Bonus Round: 17
Alien Percentage: 34%
Total Bonus Score: 3400
Adjusted Gross Income from Line 2 14000
Automatic Deduction 3500
Net Gross Income [sub prev. 2 ] 10500
Dividends, Interest, and Savings 2200
Net Adjusted Gross Income 12700
What the heck is all this stuff anyhow? Is anyone supposed to be able to keep track of a worksheet this long? I mean -- there were about 8 different operations there. Or are they just trying to make me mess up, so that they can take all my hard-earned points, and lock me up in a little cell?
Hmm.. prevent people from using lethal weapons--a very interesting concept.
And how would you do that? With lethal weapons? Or with a raspberry?