For any non-trivial application of a replicator there will be issues.
You LEGO house needs to be structurally sound.
It needs to be fire resistant. The plastic must not off-gas toxic fumes.
All this and more has to be documented and certified in a way that will be persuasive to your local zoning board, building inspector, real estate agent, your Savings & Loan.
Well to be fair, if you install windows XP from a recovery image or from an original CD you have from the original version, your computer could probably be pwned before you even have the time to download the service packs.
I actually think the results they report are what I would expect, if I were forced to make a prediction
Why?
The results boost the Slashdot geek's own self image. This is a story he desperately wants to believe --- are you certain it isn't a story you want to believe?
It's possible the firm claiming this study gave tests similar to the WAIS-IV, or gave portions of the WAIS-IV, but it is actually not possible to do what they actually claim in the report. They also don't give enough details to actually know what they really did, either, so you can't know..
This is a PR stunt by a company that wants to sell personality testing to your boss.
Visitors arrived either through organic searches or through advertisements on other sites, and Aptiquant made a note of which browser each test taker was using.
This is add-driven self-selected polling. Manipulative and fraudulent.
The chats do not distinquish between the browser at home and the browser at work. That matters a lot when you looking at Internet Explorer.
Apple devices have big enough margins to easily absorb proprietary codec royalty fees for H264/AAC whereas Android phones have much smaller margins and this is why Google want a free video codec
The "Enterprise Cap" on H.264 royalties is $6.5 million a year.
The maximum is 20 cents a unit on sales of 100,001 to 5 million units. 10 cents a unit above 5 million units. SUMMARY OF AVC/H.264 LICENSE TERMS
These charges are spread across your entire product line.
You may not have noticed, but some things have changed since the period of 1950-1969, among them the fictive notion of "intellectual property".
This is what the New York Times had to say about the economic impact and innovation of Disney's IP in 1938.
"Prosperity Out of Fantasy" New York Times Editorial May 2, 1938
It is said that what America needs to swing it out of the present economic tailspin is a new industry. Many things just over the horizon, such as television, air-conditioning in the home and flivver airplanes, have been suggested. But none of them seems yet to have materialized in terms of wages and heavy sales. Would it be ridiculous to suggest that industrialized fantasy may prove to be the answer?
Industrialized fantasy sounds like something extremely complex. Yet it is quite simple. Walt Disney's picture-play "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" is an excellent example. Here is something manufactured out of practically nothing except some paint pots and a few tons of imagination. In this country imagination is supposed to be a commodity produced in unlimited quantities. If it can be turned out as an article of commerce which the public will readily buy, then prosperity should be-well, just around the corner, anyway. The Disney picture cost about $2,000,000 to produce.
To be sure, it gave employment to no flesh-and-blood actors, human attributes being confined to voices on the sound tracks. But it kept a small army of artists, animators and gag men busy for many months. And from all reports it will not only return more than this investment to Mr. Disney, but is showering fortune on every playhouse that shows it. Dopey, Grumpy and their fellow-dwarfs, despite the fact that they get no wages themselves, have been the most valiant miners and sappers against recession whom the moving picture magnates have hired this year. No matter what business may have been in most theaters, the exhibitors of "Snow White" have not had to layoff a single dwarf.
Moreover, the picture has virtually developed a new industry from its by-products. Figments of Disney's imagination have already sold more than $2,000,000 worth of toys since the first of the year. Since January, says Kay Kamen, Mr. Disney's representative here, 117 toy manufacturers have been licensed to use characters from "Snow White." The only thing in the picture that the public doesn't seem to crave is poisoned apples.
One factory in Akron, Ohio, which makes little rubber dwarfs, has been running twenty-four hours a day, while many of the other rubber factories are closed. Dopey and Grumpy are putting men to work in paint shops, box factories, silica mines, stone quarries and mills all over the map. Wherever they turn up, prosperity begins to radiate. "Snow White" is Disney's first full-length picture. What is going to happen when he really gets into his stride? Industrialized fantasy? It should be industrially fantastic.
As soon as you are done with your BSA nightmare, I advise you to stop using proprietary software. If Ernie Ball can do it, so can you.
But did Ernie Ball ever stop using proprietary software?
Ball's IT crew settled on a potpourri of open-source software--Red Hat's version of Linux, the OpenOffice office suite, Mozilla's Web browser--plus a few proprietary applications that couldn't be duplicated by open source.
The problem with the Ernie Ball story, like so many of the geek's favorite memes, is that it has been kicked around for so many years now that it showing some wear and tear.
Really? Then what's the motivation to cure cancer if there's no profit in it? I mean, Pasteur, Salk and Fleming all retired multi-billionaires, right?
You might want to think about how many decades of work, how much money and manpower it took to get a safe and effective polio vaccine into global distribution.
Penicillin offers another example:
The challenge of mass-producing this drug was daunting. On March 14, 1942, the first patient was treated for streptococcal septicemia with U.S.-made penicillin produced by Merck & Co. Half of the total supply produced at the time was used on that one patient. By June 1942, there was just enough U.S. penicillin available to treat ten patients. In July 1943, the War Production Board drew up a plan for the mass distribution of penicillin stocks to Allied troops fighting in Europe. A moldy cantaloupe in a Peoria, Illinois, market in 1943 was found to contain the best and highest-quality penicillin after a worldwide search. The discovery of the cantaloupe, and the results of fermentation research on corn steep liquor at the Northern Regional Research Laboratory at Peoria, Illinois, allowed the United States to produce 2.3 million doses in time for the invasion of Normandy in the spring of 1944. Large-scale production resulted from the development of deep-tank fermentation by chemical engineer Margaret Hutchinson Rousseau. As a direct result of the war and the War Production Board, by June 1945 over 646 billion units per year were being produced.
Why should anyone pay to see a motion picture from a major studio ever again?
Because the paying customer gets to vote on future productions.
The paying customer gets The Incredibles, Wall-E, Up and Toy Story 3 with a $200 million dollar production budgets. The paying customer gets ten years of Harry Potter with impeccable British casting.
The paying customer gets the theme park and the Broadway production of The Lion King.
The remake of True Grit.
He gets The Dark Knight Returns.
Batman and Batman: The Animated Series. He gets Jack Nicholson, Mark Hamill and Heath Ledger as The Joker. Batman: Arkham Asylum as the video and PC game tie-in.
They can take a story from Aesop, turn it into a movie, and then sue anyone who uses the phrase "The Tortoise and the Hare".
No they can't --- and the geek knows better.
What they can do is copyright their unique interpretation of the characters and story, as Disney did in 1935 and Warner Brothers in 1943. The Tortoise and the Hare
Disney's animated "Cinderella" was released in 1950. The Rogers and Hammerstein musical was produced for television in 1957. Jim Henson's "Hey Cinderella!" with the Muppets in 1969.
Digital television. Broadcast, cable and satellite distribution. Big content. Disney. Blu-Ray. Netflix. Medical imaging. Industrial and militray applications.
Someone seems to have a clue.
While WebM remains little more than mediocre YouTube transcode playable in a browser.
H.264 is theatrical production, Blu Ray, broadcast, cable and sattelite distribution. Medical, industrial and military applications. There is no such thing as an HDTV set or set top box that doesn't support H.264.
WebM is, well, WebM.
Google is an H.264 licensee. Google is hedging its bets.
That means that hardware will be in production and quite probably in place before the media groups start to even think about their next DRM / license encrusted format.
Work began on the next-generation codec in 2004:
HEVC aims to substantially improve coding efficiency compared to AVC High Profile, i.e. reduce bitrate requirements by half with comparable image quality, probably at the expense of increased computational complexity. Depending on the application requirements, HEVC should be able to trade off computational complexity, compression rate, robustness to errors and processing delay time.
HEVC is targeted at next-generation HDTV displays and content capture systems which feature progressive scanned frame rates and display resolutions from QVGA (320x240) up to 1080p and Ultra HDTV (7680x4320), as well as improved picture quality in terms of noise level, color gamut and dynamic range.
The timescale for completing the HEVC standard is as follows:
February 2012: Committee Draft (complete draft of standard)
July 2012: Draft International Standard
January 2013: Final Draft International Standard (ready to be ratified as a Standard)
I think that IBM was 'approached' by MS. Gates' mother had contacts through her role as a high ranking official in the United Way. That got Bill a foot in the door and he made good on the opportunity.
The geek has been peddling this story for so long it has become his gospel truth.
This is the history the IBM PC development team saw when it looked at MIcrosoft:
1975 Microcomputer BASIC for the Altair. 1976 Microcomputer BASIC sales to Fortune 500 companies like GE.
1977 Applesoft BASIC, Microsoft BASIC for the PET, TRS-80 and god alone knows how many others. 1977 Microsoft FORTRAN. Microsoft Assembler.
1978 Microsoft COBOL-80
1979 "Microsoft 8080 BASIC is the first microprocessor product to win the ICP Million Dollar [Sales] Award. Traditionally dominated by software for mainframe computers, this recognition is indicative of the growth and acceptance of the PC industry."
1979 MBASIC for the 8086 1980
Z-80 CP/M Softcard for the Apple II. 1980 16 Bit XENIX OS for the 8086 and other platforms.
In 1980 Microsoft had 40 employees, revenues of $7.5 million and was clearly positioning itself to move outward from programming tools to applications and operating systems.
When Digital Research dropped the ball, Microsoft promised to deliver a serviceable 16 CP/M clone in time for the scheduled launch of the IBM PC. In exchange for the non-exclusive license, Microsoft proposed a barn-burning price fot its OS of $50 retail list.
20% of the projected cost of CP/M 86. These were the words IBM wanted to hear.
The definition of "unshakable" seems self-selecting, and perhaps even tautological.
It puzzles me that you submit this to Physical Review E:
Physical Review E, interdisciplinary in scope, focuses on many-body phenomena, including recent developments in quantum and classical chaos and soft matter physics. It has sections on statistical physics, equilibrium and transport properties of fluids, liquid crystals, complex fluids, polymers, chaos, fluid dynamics, plasma physics, classical physics, and computational physics. In addition, the journal features sections on two rapidly growing areas: biological physics and granular materials.
In Thomas Jefferson (State) and Alexander Hamilton (Treasury) you have the American two party system in embryo. One man provincial and agrarian, the other nationalist and commercial - the prototypical New Yorker.
Jefferson, like all our Presidents, was driven by contingencies.
The Louisana Purchase was something he thought he had to do even though he had no illusions about its political and economic consequences.
He would live long enough to see the birth of an American industrial revolution ---
a revolution driven in no small part by this new comtinental American empire, and a world that is essentially modern and Hamiltonian.
Parties form around very real political divides.
In the American political system coalitions are forged within the two major parties.
Now and again an decaying force like the Whigs will fade out and be replaced by something younger, more vigorous and more willing to compromise.
To launch a successful event of any kind can take months of planning and orgaization. You really need to be thinking at least a year in advance.
You need to stay ahead of the game.
Your campus event on the 17th comes too late.
School isn't out quite yet, but Microsoft already has an ace up its sleeve when it comes to this fall 's back-to-school shopping season. The company announced that anyone buying a Windows 7 PC worth $699 or more will automatically get an Xbox 360 Arcade system for free, no rebates involved. That's right --- completely free.
All you need to do is buy a new computer and provide your.edu e-mail address. If you're shopping at a brick and mortar Microsoft Store or Best Buy, just flash your student ID, and you'll walk out with your new computer and an XBox 360. The promo will run between May 22nd and September 3rd in the United States, and Canadian and French shoppers will get in on the fun later in the summer.
Why does my refrigerator take heat out of the inside, and dump it into my house
Because venting a refigerator limits where you can place a refrigerator and still keep the costs within reason. It adds weight, bulk and complexity to the refigerator itself.
Your central heating and A/C has efficient duct work, fans, etc, for use year-round. How much does a 12 to 16 cubic foot refigerator or freezer add to the load?
Why does my A/C in a house take all the heat and discharge it outside into the atmosphere, which meanwhile a pool heater is running 5 feet away using energy to generate more heat for the pool?
Chances are good the pool won't be a bare five feet away and was sited for precisely the opposite reasons that you sited the A/C: You wanted the A/C shaded and the pool in the open sun.
The function of the pool heater is to jump-start or extend the swimming season.
You need it most when you need the A/C least.
Why do people call incandescent light bulbs "energy wasters", when then can (in the cooler months) defray the work needed to be done by a household heating unit?
You mount a bulb where you need more light not more heat. Low ambient lighting in casual living spaces. High direct lighting in work areas like the kitchen and bath.
That's a remnant from the british houses, where the kitchen was close to the garden to use the herbs und fruits growing there.
The natural gas or electric range meant a kitchen without a wood or coal fire. Gasoline or fuel oil in later years. That brought about a vast improvement in cleanliness, comfort and safety.
The American middle class home in the mid 1020s - the Sears kit home, for example - placed the kitchen and ice box in back, ideally so deliveries could be made without entry into the house.
There are many barrriers to constructing a non-traditional home.
Your neignbors are unsympathetic to the idea. Banks are reluctant to finance the project. You can't find or afford a competent architect or builder.
But the interior of the Monsanto Home of Tomorrow looks quite livable:
an open design with lots of glass, good use of relatively limited space, easy to clean synthetics. an unmistakably modern kitchen with a microwave oven and other amenities.
It would be perfectly plausible as a summer home even now.
I'm glad brick and mortar libraries were set up before the modern era, because it would never happen today. I simply don't understand how an online library would be so horrible, when even small towns have libraries where you can read any book you'd want to.
Andrew Carnagie was willing to donate a building of approriate size ---
but only if you could convince him that you wanted a public library badly enough to see to it that it woulld be locally staffed and funded. Not permanently dependent on the charitable -- but often capricious and self-serving -- impulses of a single fabulously wealthy benefactor three thousand miles distant.
Slashdot Mirror
3D printers have a way to go, but there already have been modeled objects that have received infringement claims. It will only get worse.
You pay the licensing fees just as you would for anything else.
Life goes on.
Ralph Williams' "Business As Usual, During Alterations" First publication, "Astounding," July 1958.
For any non-trivial application of a replicator there will be issues.
You LEGO house needs to be structurally sound.
It needs to be fire resistant. The plastic must not off-gas toxic fumes.
All this and more has to be documented and certified in a way that will be persuasive to your local zoning board, building inspector, real estate agent, your Savings & Loan.
Well to be fair, if you install windows XP from a recovery image or from an original CD you have from the original version, your computer could probably be pwned before you even have the time to download the service packs.
Microsoft will gladly ship you SP3 on CD. Order Windows XP Service Pack 3 on a CD The offer is available globally, and has been from the beginning.
You could, of course, simply download the service pack and install XP off-line.
I actually think the results they report are what I would expect, if I were forced to make a prediction
Why?
The results boost the Slashdot geek's own self image. This is a story he desperately wants to believe --- are you certain it isn't a story you want to believe?
It's possible the firm claiming this study gave tests similar to the WAIS-IV, or gave portions of the WAIS-IV, but it is actually not possible to do what they actually claim in the report. They also don't give enough details to actually know what they really did, either, so you can't know..
Anything.
Visitors arrived either through organic searches or through advertisements on other sites, and Aptiquant made a note of which browser each test taker was using.
This is add-driven self-selected polling. Manipulative and fraudulent.
The chats do not distinquish between the browser at home and the browser at work. That matters a lot when you looking at Internet Explorer.
Apple devices have big enough margins to easily absorb proprietary codec royalty fees for H264/AAC whereas Android phones have much smaller margins and this is why Google want a free video codec
The "Enterprise Cap" on H.264 royalties is $6.5 million a year.
The maximum is 20 cents a unit on sales of 100,001 to 5 million units. 10 cents a unit above 5 million units. SUMMARY OF AVC/H.264 LICENSE TERMS
These charges are spread across your entire product line.
You may not have noticed, but some things have changed since the period of 1950-1969, among them the fictive notion of "intellectual property".
This is what the New York Times had to say about the economic impact and innovation of Disney's IP in 1938.
"Prosperity Out of Fantasy"
New York Times Editorial
May 2, 1938
It is said that what America needs to swing it out of the present economic tailspin is a new industry. Many things just over the horizon, such as television, air-conditioning in the home and flivver airplanes, have been suggested. But none of them seems yet to have materialized in terms of wages and heavy sales. Would it be ridiculous to suggest that industrialized fantasy may prove to be the answer?
Industrialized fantasy sounds like something extremely complex. Yet it is quite simple. Walt Disney's picture-play "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" is an excellent example. Here is something manufactured out of practically nothing except some paint pots and a few tons of imagination. In this country imagination is supposed to be a commodity produced in unlimited quantities. If it can be turned out as an article of commerce which the public will readily buy, then prosperity should be-well, just around the corner, anyway. The Disney picture cost about $2,000,000 to produce.
To be sure, it gave employment to no flesh-and-blood actors, human attributes being confined to voices on the sound tracks. But it kept a small army of artists, animators and gag men busy for many months. And from all reports it will not only return more than this investment to Mr. Disney, but is showering fortune on every playhouse that shows it. Dopey, Grumpy and their fellow-dwarfs, despite the fact that they get no wages themselves, have been the most valiant miners and sappers against recession whom the moving picture magnates have hired this year. No matter what business may have been in most theaters, the exhibitors of "Snow White" have not had to layoff a single dwarf.
Moreover, the picture has virtually developed a new industry from its by-products. Figments of Disney's imagination have already sold more than $2,000,000 worth of toys since the first of the year. Since January, says Kay Kamen, Mr. Disney's representative here, 117 toy manufacturers have been licensed to use characters from "Snow White." The only thing in the picture that the public doesn't seem to crave is poisoned apples.
One factory in Akron, Ohio, which makes little rubber dwarfs, has been running twenty-four hours a day, while many of the other rubber factories are closed. Dopey and Grumpy are putting men to work in paint shops, box factories, silica mines, stone quarries and mills all over the map. Wherever they turn up, prosperity begins to radiate. "Snow White" is Disney's first full-length picture. What is going to happen when he really gets into his stride? Industrialized fantasy? It should be industrially fantastic.
The Entertainment Economy: "Disney Dollars"
You recount a catalog of triviality.
That is your opinion, not mine.
As soon as you are done with your BSA nightmare, I advise you to stop using proprietary software. If Ernie Ball can do it, so can you.
But did Ernie Ball ever stop using proprietary software?
Ball's IT crew settled on a potpourri of open-source software--Red Hat's version of Linux, the OpenOffice office suite, Mozilla's Web browser--plus a few proprietary applications that couldn't be duplicated by open source.
Rockin' on without Microsoft [August 20, 2003]
The problem with the Ernie Ball story, like so many of the geek's favorite memes, is that it has been kicked around for so many years now that it showing some wear and tear.
If you can't afford a lawyer, one will be appointed for you.
In a civil case with a business as a defendant?
Really? Then what's the motivation to cure cancer if there's no profit in it? I mean, Pasteur, Salk and Fleming all retired multi-billionaires, right?
You might want to think about how many decades of work, how much money and manpower it took to get a safe and effective polio vaccine into global distribution.
Penicillin offers another example:
The challenge of mass-producing this drug was daunting. On March 14, 1942, the first patient was treated for streptococcal septicemia with U.S.-made penicillin produced by Merck & Co. Half of the total supply produced at the time was used on that one patient. By June 1942, there was just enough U.S. penicillin available to treat ten patients. In July 1943, the War Production Board drew up a plan for the mass distribution of penicillin stocks to Allied troops fighting in Europe. A moldy cantaloupe in a Peoria, Illinois, market in 1943 was found to contain the best and highest-quality penicillin after a worldwide search. The discovery of the cantaloupe, and the results of fermentation research on corn steep liquor at the Northern Regional Research Laboratory at Peoria, Illinois, allowed the United States to produce 2.3 million doses in time for the invasion of Normandy in the spring of 1944. Large-scale production resulted from the development of deep-tank fermentation by chemical engineer Margaret Hutchinson Rousseau. As a direct result of the war and the War Production Board, by June 1945 over 646 billion units per year were being produced.
Penicillian
Why should anyone pay to see a motion picture from a major studio ever again?
Because the paying customer gets to vote on future productions.
The paying customer gets The Incredibles, Wall-E, Up and Toy Story 3 with a $200 million dollar production budgets. The paying customer gets ten years of Harry Potter with impeccable British casting.
The paying customer gets the theme park and the Broadway production of The Lion King.
The remake of True Grit.
He gets The Dark Knight Returns.
Batman and Batman: The Animated Series. He gets Jack Nicholson, Mark Hamill and Heath Ledger as The Joker. Batman: Arkham Asylum as the video and PC game tie-in.
They can take a story from Aesop, turn it into a movie, and then sue anyone who uses the phrase "The Tortoise and the Hare".
No they can't --- and the geek knows better.
What they can do is copyright their unique interpretation of the characters and story, as Disney did in 1935 and Warner Brothers in 1943. The Tortoise and the Hare
Disney's animated "Cinderella" was released in 1950. The Rogers and Hammerstein musical was produced for television in 1957. Jim Henson's "Hey Cinderella!" with the Muppets in 1969.
MPEG-LA does not seem to know what to do with h264 either
There are 1,027 AVC/H.264 Licensees
Digital television. Broadcast, cable and satellite distribution. Big content. Disney. Blu-Ray. Netflix. Medical imaging. Industrial and militray applications.
Someone seems to have a clue.
While WebM remains little more than mediocre YouTube transcode playable in a browser.
Why no mention of Apple? Or Microsoft? They are both members of MPEG-LA, not to mention other sleazy organizations.
There are about thirty AVC/H.264 licensors, most of them global industrial giants like Mitsubishi, Philips and Toshiba. AVC/H.264 Licensors
There are about 1,030 H.264 licensees. AVC/H.264 Licensees
H.264 is theatrical production, Blu Ray, broadcast, cable and sattelite distribution. Medical, industrial and military applications. There is no such thing as an HDTV set or set top box that doesn't support H.264.
WebM is, well, WebM.
Google is an H.264 licensee. Google is hedging its bets.
That means that hardware will be in production and quite probably in place before the media groups start to even think about their next DRM / license encrusted format.
Work began on the next-generation codec in 2004:
HEVC aims to substantially improve coding efficiency compared to AVC High Profile, i.e. reduce bitrate requirements by half with comparable image quality, probably at the expense of increased computational complexity. Depending on the application requirements, HEVC should be able to trade off computational complexity, compression rate, robustness to errors and processing delay time.
HEVC is targeted at next-generation HDTV displays and content capture systems which feature progressive scanned frame rates and display resolutions from QVGA (320x240) up to 1080p and Ultra HDTV (7680x4320), as well as improved picture quality in terms of noise level, color gamut and dynamic range.
The timescale for completing the HEVC standard is as follows:
February 2012: Committee Draft (complete draft of standard)
July 2012: Draft International Standard
January 2013: Final Draft International Standard (ready to be ratified as a Standard)
High Efficiency Video Coding
I think that IBM was 'approached' by MS. Gates' mother had contacts through her role as a high ranking official in the United Way. That got Bill a foot in the door and he made good on the opportunity.
The geek has been peddling this story for so long it has become his gospel truth.
This is the history the IBM PC development team saw when it looked at MIcrosoft:
1975 Microcomputer BASIC for the Altair.
1976 Microcomputer BASIC sales to Fortune 500 companies like GE.
1977 Applesoft BASIC, Microsoft BASIC for the PET, TRS-80 and god alone knows how many others.
1977 Microsoft FORTRAN. Microsoft Assembler.
1978 Microsoft COBOL-80
1979 "Microsoft 8080 BASIC is the first microprocessor product to win the ICP Million Dollar [Sales] Award. Traditionally dominated by software for mainframe computers, this recognition is indicative of the growth and acceptance of the PC industry."
1979 MBASIC for the 8086
1980 Z-80 CP/M Softcard for the Apple II.
1980 16 Bit XENIX OS for the 8086 and other platforms.
Microsoft's Timeline
In 1980 Microsoft had 40 employees, revenues of $7.5 million and was clearly positioning itself to move outward from programming tools to applications and operating systems.
When Digital Research dropped the ball, Microsoft promised to deliver a serviceable 16 CP/M clone in time for the scheduled launch of the IBM PC. In exchange for the non-exclusive license, Microsoft proposed a barn-burning price fot its OS of $50 retail list.
20% of the projected cost of CP/M 86. These were the words IBM wanted to hear.
The definition of "unshakable" seems self-selecting, and perhaps even tautological.
It puzzles me that you submit this to Physical Review E:
Physical Review E, interdisciplinary in scope, focuses on many-body phenomena, including recent developments in quantum and classical chaos and soft matter physics. It has sections on statistical physics, equilibrium and transport properties of fluids, liquid crystals, complex fluids, polymers, chaos, fluid dynamics, plasma physics, classical physics, and computational physics. In addition, the journal features sections on two rapidly growing areas: biological physics and granular materials.
Physical Review E
Go and read George Washington's farewell address.
In Thomas Jefferson (State) and Alexander Hamilton (Treasury) you have the American two party system in embryo. One man provincial and agrarian, the other nationalist and commercial - the prototypical New Yorker.
Jefferson, like all our Presidents, was driven by contingencies.
The Louisana Purchase was something he thought he had to do even though he had no illusions about its political and economic consequences.
He would live long enough to see the birth of an American industrial revolution ---
a revolution driven in no small part by this new comtinental American empire, and a world that is essentially modern and Hamiltonian.
Parties form around very real political divides.
In the American political system coalitions are forged within the two major parties.
Now and again an decaying force like the Whigs will fade out and be replaced by something younger, more vigorous and more willing to compromise.
"All politics is local."
No one takes you seriously in American politics if you are not willing to begin by taking on the grunt work of winning state and local elections.
To launch a successful event of any kind can take months of planning and orgaization. You really need to be thinking at least a year in advance.
You need to stay ahead of the game.
Your campus event on the 17th comes too late.
School isn't out quite yet, but Microsoft already has an ace up its sleeve when it comes to this fall 's back-to-school shopping season. The company announced that anyone buying a Windows 7 PC worth $699 or more will automatically get an Xbox 360 Arcade system for free, no rebates involved. That's right --- completely free.
All you need to do is buy a new computer and provide your .edu e-mail address. If you're shopping at a brick and mortar Microsoft Store or Best Buy, just flash your student ID, and you'll walk out with your new computer and an XBox 360. The promo will run between May 22nd and September 3rd in the United States, and Canadian and French shoppers will get in on the fun later in the summer.
Microsoft back-to-school deal gives away XBox 360s free with new PCs [May 19]
Microsoft spends millions of $$$ a year on usability studies so it must be the correct thing to do.
Microsoft had a record-breaking quarter even with Windows sales down a percent or two.
The closer its products are to the end user the more successful they have become.
MS Office is the classic example.
"The Ribbon" sells spectacularly well retail boxed from Amazon. Five of the top 25 Bestsellers in Software at 10 PM ET Saturday.
Windows 7 has three slots in the top 25.
Impresive in an environment where the OEM system bundle is king.
Windows Home Server 2011 (at $52) is 23rd --- and that. I will admit, surprised me.
So I am going to go out on a limb and say that money spent on usability studies is money well spent.
Why does my refrigerator take heat out of the inside, and dump it into my house
Because venting a refigerator limits where you can place a refrigerator and still keep the costs within reason. It adds weight, bulk and complexity to the refigerator itself.
Your central heating and A/C has efficient duct work, fans, etc, for use year-round. How much does a 12 to 16 cubic foot refigerator or freezer add to the load?
Why does my A/C in a house take all the heat and discharge it outside into the atmosphere, which meanwhile a pool heater is running 5 feet away using energy to generate more heat for the pool?
Chances are good the pool won't be a bare five feet away and was sited for precisely the opposite reasons that you sited the A/C: You wanted the A/C shaded and the pool in the open sun.
The function of the pool heater is to jump-start or extend the swimming season.
You need it most when you need the A/C least.
Why do people call incandescent light bulbs "energy wasters", when then can (in the cooler months) defray the work needed to be done by a household heating unit?
You mount a bulb where you need more light not more heat. Low ambient lighting in casual living spaces. High direct lighting in work areas like the kitchen and bath.
I'm surprised Apple's earnings report didn't make it to Slashdot's front page.
Microsoft's record quarter didn't make it to the front page either.
Perhaps these "enterprises" that so dearly want these things could put some money together and give it to Mozilla to cover the added costs.
Moz lives and dies by the add click.
Show me some evidence that Moz is acrtively pursuing alternative sources of funding and is willing to make the concessions needed to get there.
At least in the U.S., banks don't care at all how the house will look, and whether it's "traditional" or not.
But they do care.
The non traditonal house has questionable re-sale value because its design and engineering can be over-ambitious, eccentric and trouble-prone.
It will almost cost much more to build and maintain than originally budgeted,
That's a remnant from the british houses, where the kitchen was close to the garden to use the herbs und fruits growing there.
The natural gas or electric range meant a kitchen without a wood or coal fire. Gasoline or fuel oil in later years. That brought about a vast improvement in cleanliness, comfort and safety.
The American middle class home in the mid 1020s - the Sears kit home, for example - placed the kitchen and ice box in back, ideally so deliveries could be made without entry into the house.
There are many barrriers to constructing a non-traditional home.
Your neignbors are unsympathetic to the idea. Banks are reluctant to finance the project. You can't find or afford a competent architect or builder.
But the interior of the Monsanto Home of Tomorrow looks quite livable:
an open design with lots of glass, good use of relatively limited space, easy to clean synthetics. an unmistakably modern kitchen with a microwave oven and other amenities.
It would be perfectly plausible as a summer home even now.
I'm glad brick and mortar libraries were set up before the modern era, because it would never happen today. I simply don't understand how an online library would be so horrible, when even small towns have libraries where you can read any book you'd want to.
Andrew Carnagie was willing to donate a building of approriate size ---
but only if you could convince him that you wanted a public library badly enough to see to it that it woulld be locally staffed and funded. Not permanently dependent on the charitable -- but often capricious and self-serving -- impulses of a single fabulously wealthy benefactor three thousand miles distant.