If I recall correctly (may not be), I think practice is actually illegal somehow -- companies can't charge extra for the use of a credit card. However, the 3% fee is one of the more reasonable fees out there, since the service provided by a credit card money to a merchant, mainly that of handling the money for you, is worth it. Consider when you're running a cash business and you're pulling in a substantial amount a day, you'll probably end up hiring an armored car service to take the cash to the bank for you, which in turn probably costs something like 2-3% I'd imagine. Also, especially for mail order business, accepting credit cards usually increases your sales as it boosts consumer confidence in your services with the added layer of credit card protection. It's generally better business practice to accept credit cards and boost your prices by 3%. Consumers won't notice and the increased revenues make up for the extra overhead.
pkunzip 2.04g is the one piece of software I've had ever since I started using computers (pre-1993) that I still occasionally use and keep copies floating around. There's nothing wrong with it!
Can't say that about any other 10-year old piece of software.
NiCds are a poor choice of battery for electric vehicles in general because they have several undesirable properties: they get REAL hot when charging, they have a low energy density, and are especially more toxic than other batteries.
Anyway, the point to note here is that hybrid in general doesn't pay. Don't expect to ever see a hybrid vehicle make it into the marketplace on economics alone -- it will have to have a government boost to gain market share. Even if a car gets 20 MPG more than its gas-only sibling, most owners never realizes these savings over the increased overhead of the car in the time they own the car. Also, don't forget that the batteries in these vehciles DO go bad after 30-50,000 miles, which will be a $2000+ "repair" added onto your maintenance bill. Moral of the story is, the entire world is waiting on the "perfect" battery. That'll fix all of our problems.
This sort of system is known as a "Series Hybrid". It is exactly what's used in large locomotives for just that reason, you don't need transmissions, clutches, and all that other fun stuff that becomes a pain in the ass with a 5000 horsepower engine.:-) However, on a small scale, think about what you're doing at highway speeds. You're taking the mechanical power from the engine, converting it to electricity, losing some energy to heat, storing it in batteries (losing some energy to heat), converting it from DC to AC (losing some energy to heat), then running the motor (losing some energy to heat), which then turns the wheels. In a smaller system like this, it is more efficent to keep the energy in one form -- mechanical, especially at steady state speeds.
The Prius and the Insight are both a variation on what's called a Parallel hybrid, the engine can drive the wheels directly and/or the electric motor can drive the wheels. Then you get the advantages of the electric motor at low speed hi-torque situations, which improves your city mileage. Then you improve your highway mileage by downsizing your engine. The actual power blending of the two systems is quite different for the two vehicles.
I was thinking that article had to be somewhat silly. Economically, there's NO WAY a company can produce a hybrid for the same price as a comparable gas only car. It has more parts! Gas engines have already reached their low price point in mass production, with millions made every year. There's simply no way a more complicated car will ever sell for cheaper, or even the same price, without subsidies from somebody. Every hybrid is at least a gas car plus another complicated system with big batteries, big electric motors, etc. Someone might argue they have smaller engine blocks in them, but in reality that doesn't lower manufacturing costs much at all.
A move like this would be economical suicide, and the company would have a hard time maintaining profitibility, especially in the very car market.
Two things about this bother me. First of all, these provisions are only addressing "Internet" stores. This leaves traditional phone-in mail order services exempt from sales tax (as they currently are as well). I'm seeing a huge loop-hole here. Place your order online, call a number, press a button to confirm your order, and all of a sudden it's not an internet sale anymore. Tax free!
Second, this is simply unfair to mail order companies in general. Having worked for one the better part of my life, I see the costs that go into such a business. Not only does the warehouse pay all of its traditional taxes -- property, employee taxes, and whatever else you have, they have several high expenses on top of their costs. Since accepting cash is not practical, they pay an additional 3-4% of EVERY DOLLAR that passes to them in credit card fees. I'm not sure exactly how the credit card companies pay their taxes, but I'm certain they do. Also, you have shipping fees on top of all that, in two places -- receiving product and sending out product. These shipping companies are definitely taxed -- the gas they use in their trucks, the employees, their infrastructure, everything. So, point being, a mail order business of any kind, internet or not, is already paying 10-15% of its goods' value in various expenses that directly translate into a tax revenue at some point for governments.
Adding yet another tax on these companies will certainly make them struggle, reduce sales, and greatly affect revenues collected from the other sources. And since online merchants margins are generally very low, we're talking less than 10% in some cases, this extra burden could very easy put a lot of them out of business. Now, we can't tax someone who's out of business, now can we?
The government should be supporting commerce, not stifling it with extra taxes that really don't have any return value for the merchant. How is paying 5% to a box I ship to colorado from florida going to benefit me? It can't! At least local sales taxes have a direct, tangible effect on our daily lives, which makes them somewhat tolerable.
There's got to be some way to statistically detect cheaters, like watching some critical factors. For example, if someone is beating everyone else by 100 frags (or whatever equviliant you use for your particular game), then they MIGHT be cheating!? The credit card companies do this to detect credit fraud, and it's unusually good at picking out unusual activity. Dunno, might be computationally intensive, but a neat thing to look at.
Hehe, can't wait until the drive confuses a mini for a standard, and you get CD parts shooting out of your drive. Finally, my nightmares of my CD-ROM shooting parts at me are coming true!
First thought when I saw this was "oh yay, another format to buy, with mediocre advantages, namely size". Mini-DVD, meet Mini-disc! Then the thought occured to me, you could theoretically increase your maximum transfer rate off this media by quite a bit over traditional-sized DVD/CD-ROMs, since the diameter is smaller and thus angular inertia is much lower. The disc will have a higher maximum speed and won't explode around 28,000 RPM. Don't feel like hacking out the math, but I'd imagine it'd be signficant.
While the effort to isolate the Linux community may be a nobel one in terms of Microsoft's squash 'em mentality, it would be smarter for M$ to try to capitalize on the linux rage by releasing their own distribution and charging for support. People seem to forget, while the actual software is free, implementing it into a specific environment/system is not! There is plenty of money to be made with Linux, just not directly selling it. While I can see there would be plenty of resistance to anything put out by M$, it would be the smartest move on their part -- might improve their image, and have the potential for gaining market share in the Linux sector (While linux is great and all, it's just not quite a viable alternative as a desktop OS for the general public yet. I believe it to be a strict contender in the server market).
Theoretically, this technology would be ridiculously easy to produce, since it should be able to be produced through an inkjet-type printhead. Pretty damn cool. If your screen dies, run to your printer, spit out an new one! (Oh I wish...)
You can play 4 notes a thousand different ways. Rhythm (alone is a huge variety), pitch, tempo, chorus, etc. I don't buy it.
I guarrentee if you took a 4-note progression, you could make it into a techno song, a classical song, a vocal song, and a rock song that all sound completely different and most people wouldn't identify it as the same melody.
* quality of final print (photo printers haven't caught up yet)
Apparently you haven't heard of the latest photo printers that expose photo paper the same way an enlarger does. They're not injkets, dye sub, or laser printers. it's a Photo printer. So, it's A PHOTO! The new minilabs take file inputs now, and print directly up to 12x18" photos.
* artistic manipulation. Photoshop does not count.
Photoshop does count. Do sythesizers not count over regular instruments in music? Does paint not count over pencil in art? Do movies created with computer animation over hand-drawn cells not count? Just because the tools are getting better doesn't justify straight-out rejection. Maybe it changes the standards for the medium, but that's life.
Digital will obliterate film in almost all commercial applications, and it will only remain an artistic technique. It's already happening.
You just nailed the major reason that we're all not driving electric cars right now on the head: Batteries. As soon as a high-enough, affordable, and long-lasting battery is developed, gas cars might actually have some competition. But as long as a decent battery pack weighs 2000 lbs by itself, lasts two years, and costs $50,000 (a typical hi-performance NiMH pack), then we're not going to be seeing consumer electric cars anytime soon.
Be nice to your Chemical Engineer friends, they are the ones that will eventually solve the problem.
As long as consoles output to NTSC devices, image quality will always be substandard. I don't know why more don't include a direct VGA/RGB output so they can actually display sharp images at decent resolutions. The NTSC standard is limited to some 4-500 lines of resolution, with no specific horizontal resolution set. It's interlaced at that, and only provides 29.97 frames per second maximum refresh. If you wanted higher quality, technically the best thing would be to get a PAL tv and Playstation so your resolution is higher at 625!
In reality, TVs and these modulation standards weren't designed with high resoltion, sharp images in mind, which is why they will ALWAYS look like garbage compared to their PC counterparts. You're an absolute fool if you spend $30-50 on a stupid Monster cable to try to make this look any better. That's like someone getting a $50 monster cable to improve the resolution of their atari 2600!
Hopefully HDTV will fix this discrepancy, but the price for a HDTV set right now is still astronomical compared to a 21" computer monitor. I'm not very famiiar with the new consoles, but I know they process their video as RGB, so is there a way to bypass the modulator?
I would hope P2P will eventually evolve to overcome this limitation. If there are P2P programmers out there, how hard would it be to have the clients realize who's on your local subnet and who's outside of it? Give priority to connections inside the local (and higher capacity/cheaper) network, and automatically throttle down connections that go through routers, and safe everyone a little grief.
The way it is now, the software has to evolve to keep the RIAA on its heels... How much of this traffic hogging can we blame on all the crap files they're spewing out everywhere? I say sue the RIAA for using up the bandwidth of all the universities, if it wasn't for them, we'd only be downloading stuff once!
Fortunately, here at Georgia Tech, we've got gobs of bandwidth (OC-12) and they don't seem to scream too often about P2P use.
He took a terrible Japanese film and redubbed it with his own words to make the film considerably more enjoyable. Pretty heavy editing, that could have gotten him in some kind of trouble if Hollywood manages to succeed in their bid to keep people from editing movies.
You should go and thank the folks at Mad Magazine for pounding the way through the courts to allow parodies to be legal. They were constantly battling people for the right to reproduce other works in a humurous light which essentially was new material, and the courts agreed with them. I believe the same principle applies to film and the redubs that are somewhat popular.
Granted, I'm just going off the fact I've never heard of people having problems with parodies in the past.
Unlike spam, which uses easiyl forged e-mail headers making it near impossible to trace, text messenging goes through the phone system and CAN be traced back to the orginiator rather trivially. I'm assuming SMS can't be easily forged. This makes such a law much much easier to enforce, as the phone company can simply look to see where the messages are coming from, and make it easier to fine the appropriate people.
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If I recall correctly (may not be), I think practice is actually illegal somehow -- companies can't charge extra for the use of a credit card. However, the 3% fee is one of the more reasonable fees out there, since the service provided by a credit card money to a merchant, mainly that of handling the money for you, is worth it. Consider when you're running a cash business and you're pulling in a substantial amount a day, you'll probably end up hiring an armored car service to take the cash to the bank for you, which in turn probably costs something like 2-3% I'd imagine. Also, especially for mail order business, accepting credit cards usually increases your sales as it boosts consumer confidence in your services with the added layer of credit card protection. It's generally better business practice to accept credit cards and boost your prices by 3%. Consumers won't notice and the increased revenues make up for the extra overhead.
pkunzip 2.04g is the one piece of software I've had ever since I started using computers (pre-1993) that I still occasionally use and keep copies floating around. There's nothing wrong with it! Can't say that about any other 10-year old piece of software.
AC Propulsion makes a 200hp AC induction motor with peak efficencies of 93% and higher. Poke around the site a little, and you'll find their inverter/controller is also 90+% efficent.
NiCds are a poor choice of battery for electric vehicles in general because they have several undesirable properties: they get REAL hot when charging, they have a low energy density, and are especially more toxic than other batteries.
Anyway, the point to note here is that hybrid in general doesn't pay. Don't expect to ever see a hybrid vehicle make it into the marketplace on economics alone -- it will have to have a government boost to gain market share. Even if a car gets 20 MPG more than its gas-only sibling, most owners never realizes these savings over the increased overhead of the car in the time they own the car. Also, don't forget that the batteries in these vehciles DO go bad after 30-50,000 miles, which will be a $2000+ "repair" added onto your maintenance bill. Moral of the story is, the entire world is waiting on the "perfect" battery. That'll fix all of our problems.
This sort of system is known as a "Series Hybrid". It is exactly what's used in large locomotives for just that reason, you don't need transmissions, clutches, and all that other fun stuff that becomes a pain in the ass with a 5000 horsepower engine. :-) However, on a small scale, think about what you're doing at highway speeds. You're taking the mechanical power from the engine, converting it to electricity, losing some energy to heat, storing it in batteries (losing some energy to heat), converting it from DC to AC (losing some energy to heat), then running the motor (losing some energy to heat), which then turns the wheels. In a smaller system like this, it is more efficent to keep the energy in one form -- mechanical, especially at steady state speeds.
The Prius and the Insight are both a variation on what's called a Parallel hybrid, the engine can drive the wheels directly and/or the electric motor can drive the wheels. Then you get the advantages of the electric motor at low speed hi-torque situations, which improves your city mileage. Then you improve your highway mileage by downsizing your engine. The actual power blending of the two systems is quite different for the two vehicles.
I was thinking that article had to be somewhat silly. Economically, there's NO WAY a company can produce a hybrid for the same price as a comparable gas only car. It has more parts! Gas engines have already reached their low price point in mass production, with millions made every year. There's simply no way a more complicated car will ever sell for cheaper, or even the same price, without subsidies from somebody. Every hybrid is at least a gas car plus another complicated system with big batteries, big electric motors, etc. Someone might argue they have smaller engine blocks in them, but in reality that doesn't lower manufacturing costs much at all.
A move like this would be economical suicide, and the company would have a hard time maintaining profitibility, especially in the very car market.
Two things about this bother me. First of all, these provisions are only addressing "Internet" stores. This leaves traditional phone-in mail order services exempt from sales tax (as they currently are as well). I'm seeing a huge loop-hole here. Place your order online, call a number, press a button to confirm your order, and all of a sudden it's not an internet sale anymore. Tax free!
Second, this is simply unfair to mail order companies in general. Having worked for one the better part of my life, I see the costs that go into such a business. Not only does the warehouse pay all of its traditional taxes -- property, employee taxes, and whatever else you have, they have several high expenses on top of their costs. Since accepting cash is not practical, they pay an additional 3-4% of EVERY DOLLAR that passes to them in credit card fees. I'm not sure exactly how the credit card companies pay their taxes, but I'm certain they do. Also, you have shipping fees on top of all that, in two places -- receiving product and sending out product. These shipping companies are definitely taxed -- the gas they use in their trucks, the employees, their infrastructure, everything. So, point being, a mail order business of any kind, internet or not, is already paying 10-15% of its goods' value in various expenses that directly translate into a tax revenue at some point for governments.
Adding yet another tax on these companies will certainly make them struggle, reduce sales, and greatly affect revenues collected from the other sources. And since online merchants margins are generally very low, we're talking less than 10% in some cases, this extra burden could very easy put a lot of them out of business. Now, we can't tax someone who's out of business, now can we?
The government should be supporting commerce, not stifling it with extra taxes that really don't have any return value for the merchant. How is paying 5% to a box I ship to colorado from florida going to benefit me? It can't! At least local sales taxes have a direct, tangible effect on our daily lives, which makes them somewhat tolerable.
There's got to be some way to statistically detect cheaters, like watching some critical factors. For example, if someone is beating everyone else by 100 frags (or whatever equviliant you use for your particular game), then they MIGHT be cheating!? The credit card companies do this to detect credit fraud, and it's unusually good at picking out unusual activity. Dunno, might be computationally intensive, but a neat thing to look at.
Hehe, can't wait until the drive confuses a mini for a standard, and you get CD parts shooting out of your drive. Finally, my nightmares of my CD-ROM shooting parts at me are coming true!
First thought when I saw this was "oh yay, another format to buy, with mediocre advantages, namely size". Mini-DVD, meet Mini-disc! Then the thought occured to me, you could theoretically increase your maximum transfer rate off this media by quite a bit over traditional-sized DVD/CD-ROMs, since the diameter is smaller and thus angular inertia is much lower. The disc will have a higher maximum speed and won't explode around 28,000 RPM. Don't feel like hacking out the math, but I'd imagine it'd be signficant.
You should sue for patent infringement and cash in, duh!
While the effort to isolate the Linux community may be a nobel one in terms of Microsoft's squash 'em mentality, it would be smarter for M$ to try to capitalize on the linux rage by releasing their own distribution and charging for support. People seem to forget, while the actual software is free, implementing it into a specific environment/system is not! There is plenty of money to be made with Linux, just not directly selling it. While I can see there would be plenty of resistance to anything put out by M$, it would be the smartest move on their part -- might improve their image, and have the potential for gaining market share in the Linux sector (While linux is great and all, it's just not quite a viable alternative as a desktop OS for the general public yet. I believe it to be a strict contender in the server market).
Theoretically, this technology would be ridiculously easy to produce, since it should be able to be produced through an inkjet-type printhead. Pretty damn cool. If your screen dies, run to your printer, spit out an new one! (Oh I wish...)
You can play 4 notes a thousand different ways. Rhythm (alone is a huge variety), pitch, tempo, chorus, etc. I don't buy it. I guarrentee if you took a 4-note progression, you could make it into a techno song, a classical song, a vocal song, and a rock song that all sound completely different and most people wouldn't identify it as the same melody.
...After they voted in a Florida election.
* quality of final print (photo printers haven't caught up yet)
Apparently you haven't heard of the latest photo printers that expose photo paper the same way an enlarger does. They're not injkets, dye sub, or laser printers. it's a Photo printer. So, it's A PHOTO! The new minilabs take file inputs now, and print directly up to 12x18" photos.
* artistic manipulation. Photoshop does not count.
Photoshop does count. Do sythesizers not count over regular instruments in music? Does paint not count over pencil in art? Do movies created with computer animation over hand-drawn cells not count?
Just because the tools are getting better doesn't justify straight-out rejection. Maybe it changes the standards for the medium, but that's life.
Digital will obliterate film in almost all commercial applications, and it will only remain an artistic technique. It's already happening.
You just nailed the major reason that we're all not driving electric cars right now on the head: Batteries. As soon as a high-enough, affordable, and long-lasting battery is developed, gas cars might actually have some competition. But as long as a decent battery pack weighs 2000 lbs by itself, lasts two years, and costs $50,000 (a typical hi-performance NiMH pack), then we're not going to be seeing consumer electric cars anytime soon.
Be nice to your Chemical Engineer friends, they are the ones that will eventually solve the problem.
As long as consoles output to NTSC devices, image quality will always be substandard. I don't know why more don't include a direct VGA/RGB output so they can actually display sharp images at decent resolutions. The NTSC standard is limited to some 4-500 lines of resolution, with no specific horizontal resolution set. It's interlaced at that, and only provides 29.97 frames per second maximum refresh. If you wanted higher quality, technically the best thing would be to get a PAL tv and Playstation so your resolution is higher at 625!
In reality, TVs and these modulation standards weren't designed with high resoltion, sharp images in mind, which is why they will ALWAYS look like garbage compared to their PC counterparts. You're an absolute fool if you spend $30-50 on a stupid Monster cable to try to make this look any better. That's like someone getting a $50 monster cable to improve the resolution of their atari 2600!
Hopefully HDTV will fix this discrepancy, but the price for a HDTV set right now is still astronomical compared to a 21" computer monitor. I'm not very famiiar with the new consoles, but I know they process their video as RGB, so is there a way to bypass the modulator?
Some ski bums and snowboarders are jumping for joy. (Obligatory on topic adjustment: Linux ski bums)
I would hope P2P will eventually evolve to overcome this limitation. If there are P2P programmers out there, how hard would it be to have the clients realize who's on your local subnet and who's outside of it? Give priority to connections inside the local (and higher capacity/cheaper) network, and automatically throttle down connections that go through routers, and safe everyone a little grief.
The way it is now, the software has to evolve to keep the RIAA on its heels... How much of this traffic hogging can we blame on all the crap files they're spewing out everywhere? I say sue the RIAA for using up the bandwidth of all the universities, if it wasn't for them, we'd only be downloading stuff once!
Fortunately, here at Georgia Tech, we've got gobs of bandwidth (OC-12) and they don't seem to scream too often about P2P use.
It'll be a good update to the popular "fortune" program!
I can't wait until they encode Debbie Does Dallas, and other high quality pr0n flicks. As usual, pr0n will take this technology to the next level!!
You should go and thank the folks at Mad Magazine for pounding the way through the courts to allow parodies to be legal. They were constantly battling people for the right to reproduce other works in a humurous light which essentially was new material, and the courts agreed with them. I believe the same principle applies to film and the redubs that are somewhat popular.
Granted, I'm just going off the fact I've never heard of people having problems with parodies in the past.
Unlike spam, which uses easiyl forged e-mail headers making it near impossible to trace, text messenging goes through the phone system and CAN be traced back to the orginiator rather trivially. I'm assuming SMS can't be easily forged. This makes such a law much much easier to enforce, as the phone company can simply look to see where the messages are coming from, and make it easier to fine the appropriate people.
And somewhere out there, there's a Case Modder who just wet his pants.
Have no fear, you'll lose it in your mouth first!