I chop ten gallons (two bucket fulls in other words) a day scrap vegetables for my small flock using a machete. Not only efficient, but great sport! whackwhackwhackwhackwhack, big fun! I dice it up small for them then scatter it around, they love it. And ya, it's the best for watermelons, clean full slices with one chop. But when it comes time to clean a clucker to eat, back to pointy knives.
..as long as people keep putting up with it and standing in the big brother check-in line and handing over their money for an airplane ticket. Don't talk! Don't make eye contact with the darth vader goon! Don't do anything while your spouse and children are felt up by the pervos working there! Obey your superior humans, epsilon!
The only thing that is going to work to get some sanity back to airline travel is mass universal boycott and shun the airlines and their hired security goons and pathetic security theater policies. You certainly aren't going to "vote" for anything better. If millions put up with this creeping fascism, and keep getting on those planes and "willingly" subject themselves to all this crap, sure as shit you'll get full fascism eventually. You've -the still flying public "you"- have already proven you'll put up with half way there, no one who flies is showing any different to the global overlords, and they are pleased to have such willing and compliant subjects to rule over.
How would a new web work, what would it look like? We have very powerful governmental and corporate interests outstanding that would force more of a totally censored and locked down web then what we have now is my best guess. I mean it is sucky now in that regard, but there's still an element of random anarchy there, but any "new" web would probably be rather strict big brotherish, IMO, with a ton of features and software being made illegal or restricted, anything that would facilitate "IP piracy" for example. It might technically work better or be more efficient in moving packets around, but I am afraid it would lose the free wheeling aspects that have made it so popular. But..I don't know either, just guessing, how would you change it and to what? What needs to be dumped, and what needs to be changed or added, do you have any specifics, browsers or otherwise?
I inadvertently wrote tons instead of thousands of lbs. The big crawlers are both over 50 tons apiece. Pretty large, not the biggest, but fairly impressive in what they can move.
Well, I don't live on a ship, but I do live on the largest commercial farm in this whole area (it's not mine but I am the oldest employee here). We have automatic start and run large diesel generators to operate the farm itself, three of them needed. Those are computer controlled and have redundant wireless and hard wired controls that coordinate that with the climate control systems in the various buildings and broiler houses and the main feed from the electrical grid. They have their own bulk tanks and the farm itself has a separate diesel bulk tank in the thousands of gallons size for all our equipment, which runs from the smallest diesel tractor at 24 horse up to multiple crawlers at over 100 tons apiece, and large trackhoes and pans, etc. We have three 60,000 gallon propane tanks for the heat, and all the residences have 500 gallon tanks. I am the only residence with an additional woodstove though, and I put up around 4 cords a year. I grew up up north but live in georgia now, we don't get those "lost in the blizzards" type of snow, but I sure have seen it before. I also have two smaller gas generators myself and a small solar array with battery bank and an additional windcharger. Oh, we also have a decent enough airport here on the property with full hangar space enough for a couple dozen planes and maintenance/machine shop facilities, roughly equivalent to a normal small size county airport, albeit it is only a grass strip, no jets, but it takes twin engine planes fine.
I was just commenting on Taco's remorse at having to sit in the cold with no juice, that's all, because there's no need for that really, not today with so many options out there, enough to fit most any reasonable budget. Waiting for the crisis to hit and *then* thinking about it (especially in Mich with lake effect snow and ice storms being so very common) doesn't work, you have to build out your redundant infrastructure in advance of an emergency.
My reply was more responding to the relative cheapness of having something for people to use for when their main supplies of energy got disrupted, and noting that in the tech geek community that data backups are a good idea and accepted, but it falls off fast for additional types of backup, but I was encouraged on the followup thread considerable with all the interest and the people who had gone that route of eneregy backups.. You can get a nice automatic start exterior permanent mounted propane generator for under two thousand dollars now and maybe 500 bucks to have it professionally installed to comply with codes and safety, etc, at the 7kw level, which is good enough to run the basic stuff people need, although perhaps not everything, but "enough". I'd say something like that is affordable for most folks in the "middle class" range if they own their own homwe anyway (or a natural gas model, although I prefer propane, it stores well onsite and isn't reliant on exterior delivery as much as natgas is) and even a smaller portable gasoline unit at well under $1,000 is still good enough to work, as evidenced by all the anecdotal in the follow up post he did asking about home generators and so on.
As to doing without and so on, I did a stretch of over five years in my young man days living totally feral way the heck back in the moose and bears woods with no electricity or anything of that sort (I had one flashlight and one battery operated radio to be fair about that), grew/harvested most or all of my own food as well, etc. I'm a bit more comfortable now but we still grow over half our food here (veggies, fruits, our own grassfed beef and my personal flock of chickens and ducks)
I've been into survivalism/preparedness for a long time now, mostly since I went through a big blizzard in 67 that closed everything down for two weeks. 48 inches in 24 hours then drifts, right over the top of our two story home. It was medium big, hehe. (I still have some super 8 movies of it, including getting shots of an *arctic owl* that showed up in the backyard, that was cool..). It mad
They make generators that are both designed to run on propane and also come with an exterior housing for permanent mounting outside. That and figure out which circuits you want to run, etc, other folks here have covered the electronics for you. The good thing about propane is...you get a big tank, and it doesn't go bad, you can store it for years and years. You can easily have a 500 gallon propane tank sitting in the back yard, but try that in the burbs with gasoline...much hoop jumping, probably illegal. Propane, no probs, pretty darn normal. And no freaking out trying to go "get more gas" in an emergency when everyone else is if you already have a big tank sitting there. You can also at the same time install a few wall/room propane heaters that don't need electricity, they just have a piezo electric clicker like on propane BBQs to start them easy. We have two of those, work great when I don't feel like firing up the woodstove, which is our primary heat now. They even make propane refrigerators or dual electric/propane but they are spendy. In the winter I wouldn't think keeping your food cool would be much of a problem in Michigan...stick the stuff outside in a cooler or just bring frozen bricks in and drop them in the freezer and on the top shelf in the fridge, replace once a day or twice a day, whatever.
Just remember to run any generator you have once in awhile regardless of needing it (they actually call this "exercising" it, more of a test and relube the cylinders walls a little I guess) and also keep the starting battery charged up. Farms are about equally split on emergency power from what I have seen, half use propane, half use diesel. The propane gennies tend to be cheaper, that's about it. Home despot even carries a few propane small models I believe, or check like at Tractor Supply. The smaller cheap gasoline ones are just that, and they won't last long, people I know who used them for offgrid living never got that many hours out of them. I have a couple of those, but my next one will be propane with an industrial engine for sure.
Are widely recognized as a good idea. I think electricity and heat backups should be the same. A generator and woodstove are not *that* expensive, and sure come in handy sometimes.....
odd thought but if moz was to jump on the selling of netbooks deal, they might turn a penny or two. And if they were to say put out the call for ideas and developers to help with the design if the thing, so it actually worked well out of the box, hardware and software, especially if the host OS was announced to be linuxey, they wouldn't be forced to be tied so much to either microsoft or google, at least they would be in a stronger bargaining position.
Depends on your definition of "basic" in "basic engineering". The Apollo moon walkers said it was a huge problem, it sticks to everything. They have some plans to use magnets maybe to solve this problem.
All I can say is good luck with that. They need to send a few cheap rovers up there first to see if their magnet dust sucker can keep all the movable bits protected. I live and work on a farm, so I deal with equipment outside in just "normal" dirt all the time, it's a major hassle as it is, so I can't imagine electrostatic cling microscopic and highly abrasive dirt, and trying to deal with that remotely on huge scales.
I know they *want* to, and are planning expeditions and so on regardless, I just am not convinced yet that anything very complex that has to do complex moving actions can last very long in that electric dusty environment. Very simple things that don't require moving parts, sure, but long term mechanical factories? Not sure.
The military has a very hard time keeping their gear running in Iraq, the sandy dust gets into everything and just wears it out really fast, and that is with constant hands-on maintenance. You can only seal stuff so much before you can't use it, if you are talking mining and refining and forging and smelting and extruding and fabbing and..all of that..that's a lot of stuff to protect from contamination.
Basically,anything you put on the lunar surface becomes charged, and the dirt sticks to it. Even solar panels would eventually become so covered in dust they wouldn't work, and there's no moving parts there.
We'll have to see what they come up with. I think it's a spiffy idea, but want to see the "basic engineering" solve that problem, because if they can come up with more robust seals, etc, to make things more dustpoof, that's hundred billion buck industry right here on earth. We have to replace..no idea, a lot, maybe small hundreds of "sealed bearings" per year around here, especially on the fans in the broiler houses, they just don't last, and that dust they get exposed to isn't even electrostatic, just normal litter dust, and those have to run in not as a severe temperature swings as on the moon.
There's this little problem of lunar dust. I think there won't be much in the way of human colonies, or even robotic manufacturing, even just the self replicating mining mentioned until that gem is solved. You have to fix that before you can have space based manufacturing that is in turn based on lunar access. Rockets are the easy part, and that's tough enough and expensive enough right now.
There are zero guarantees between now and..who knows about this economy. sure, tons of eople are still working normally and making good money..but millions aren't and with half a million layoffs in just ONE month, last month, and more to come across all industries..feeling lucky? Is your home all paid off, do you have a big working garden, is your ride paid off and in good shape, do you have some backup solar panels for guaranteed electricity, do you have a year's worth of long term storage food for yourself and family..and so on. In other words, suck it up for now, keep working full time, drag in the cash and spend it *wisely*, pay off bills and get as independent as possible as long as the gravy train is running.
I think that a LOT more people next year are going to be looking at "spare time" as in all their waking moments "spare time", available and a lot more people will feel good if all they have is a part time job. And here's why..if you follow the financials, all the bulls for the past 1.5 years or better have *consistently* almost without fail lowballed how bad it was going to get, only the contrarian bears got it right. Now, the same bulls (wall street and Fed guys and treasury guys, those bulls) are still the same guys, but even they are getting rather antsy about things. Notice all the "emergency bailouts" and so on? These are not normal times. This is more than a clue.
It's way cheaper to give a poor student over in east elbownia hundreds of ebooks and to keep that updated electronically than to try and provide hundreds of dead tree books. Way cheaper and easier. That was the main point of the XO originally. As to the US, we've made team sports and learning political correctness and to not question authority at all for any reason ever the primary goals of "primary" education. You get what you pay for, and in those regards it looks like it has been a successful and transformational social engineering project. If they really wanted to push "education" first, there's nothing stopping them at all, but they don't, that is way down their list of priorities.
...this part here: "New DSL standards can extend the reach of DSL into more rural areas and...." What information do you have on that? What standards, where is it being done, and by whom, and what is this new longer distance DSL? I live a mile too far from the box, and with just a few homes down this line, they are NEVER going to run anything better that would allow DSL, and cable is also a no-go for the same reason and fiber is way out there in flying car land. At least I can get dialup, but that's it, and looks to be it forever..I mean forever, all the wireless broadband is line of sight to the towers, any hill in the way, tough luck, nogettum, already tried it here with the wireless guys, no signal, too many hills.. So what is this thing I never heard of with new DSL standards, would you have a link or two reference? Thanks in advance!
I think that is the one that is going to do it. And I don't think that tech is way off, they routinely slice and dice and mix and match things now. And I seriously doubt all these big governments with black budgets have stopped trying to come up with bioweapons, despite various treaties. For one, an engineered bioweapon can be used stealthily, it can be so close to something "normal" that it could pass as a random mutation. And there are plenty of humans out there who think we need to reduce the planet's population severely in order for Gaia to survive, along those lines. And by severely I mean "with extreme prejudice and in a timely manner". Some crackpot mad scientist or cult group say could actually do this and maybe get away with it, who knows. That weaponized anthrax used in those mail order attacks came from *someplace* after all.
VWs little fuel sippin' diesel. It looks OK and gets better mileage than most mopeds, let alone full road bikes.(it ain't fast though, but that isn't the point either) Sort of George Jetsony looking, but wind tunnels determine shape. And at least you could have heating and cooling and be in out of the sleet and rain, etc. (I used to ride bike a lot, that bad weather stuff got to be old...) And I wouldn't care if it only got half the projected mileage if it was loads cheaper to mass produce using cheaper materials,etc., it would still be medium fantastic at over 100 MPG, and rides two with some cargo. It really is sort of a transition between motorcycle and car.
Any such critter out there? Very easy to mix and match and recycle and make an upgradeable and customized desktop, but for laptops it doesn't seem to exist much. The chokepoint seems to be smallish screens, they seem to cost what a brand new cheap laptop cost. The next one seems to be no standard motherboard config. Granted, I haven't googled much at all on this, but seems there should be some projects already running. I checked the article and didn't see anything, open moko looks to be the closest, and that isn't even netbook sized. Is there even a raw laptop chassis with a screen that takes normal video connectors that you could slip an existing mini itx mobo in?
...but it would beat the heck out of the alternative that used to be, 30 seconds per kid-talk fast- on a scratchy phone call because the rates "ma bell" charged made long distance an expensive treat.
Mr. Natural as Fox Muldaur and Angelfood McSpade as Scully, and the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers as the Lone Gunmen. Evil Spam Monster overlord, Mr. The Toad
It all goes back to the design and common functionality of the internet as we have it now, not as it could be. It is not an equal two way street. The ISPs and telcos don't "allow" you to be a server without draconian extra fees and rules (a "business class" connection), you are mostly restricted by their TOS as just a regular user to only "serve" up a request. If on the other hand everyone was free to be equally a client and server (real net neutrality), we could have a lot more content out there willingly served up to other people merely based on the individuals payment for bandwith, purely voluntary then, and greatly reduce this artificial forced "need" for ads. And the content itself could be replicated with P2P file sharing, which would handle increased demand and interest so it could scale exactly as interest in your content went up.
We should be eliminating bottlenecks, not constructing more elaborate ones based on ad revenue. Bandwith would be a net wash, but the cost of the bandwith would be exactly borne by the ones who used it directly in their connection fees they choose to pay for, and no more, and no less. And this might actually help make better websites and help reduce overall traffic pressures in general, look at some of those sites that spread out a single page of content over ten pages of ads just to pay for things.
It is sort of the micropayment idea but carried over to the simpler side of how to do that, you pay one fee for your connection then and that's it, perhaps a basic per gig a month model, so one size really would fit everyone then, you want more internet, you pay for it, you want less, your fee is less, simple as that, skip the ad and bloated pages middleman layer.
I want an integrated package, a robust good smartphone that is built to hard dock into a laptop shell like thing, the laptop-dock gives you a better screen, more battery, more storage, regular keyboard, and perhaps like an optical drive, etc, whatever would fit. The phones are getting really good and they could be the mainboard replacement for at least low specs useages and it should therefore make the laptop dock cheaper than full-on model. And upgrading would be simple then, whenever you feel like getting a newer cellphone, which would help that whole "laptops suck for upgrading" deal. You could keep the same "lapdock" machine, just replace the phone. I've wanted such a config for a long time now, seems a natural evolution. Netbooks try to cover both things and are lacking, because they are neither. cute idea..but neither...too small for a real computer feel etc, and, too large for pocket carry still. A phone/laptop dock combo would cover both bases as you need them. Give you two screens on a portable as well.
I was going to say the same thing. I don't have any of my peer group boomer friends who have grade school kids, the youngest are like college age or better. It's gen X turn to get bashed for having irresponsible kids, like our folks got bashed, and theirs, and theirs...funny how that keeps happening...
..if you look at the street vendor disk pirates pricing,(1-3$ for about anything you can think of on a disk), which reflects true basic manufacturing costs plus some profit, a simple dollar over their street cost per disk would be a fair price for the producers profit in a theoretical legal version. And that dollar is probably more than what the artists get today with 10-20 dollar disks most of the time, and they'd sure sell more. I know I started buying music in the 50s, right up through the mid 90s or so (in other words a fair and long term customer) and I just finally quit, when I saw they were getting as much for a cheap stamped Cd as an expensive tape...the price gouging is just way too blatant and I won't support it. And digital copies, they want how much??? Ludicrous. Thousands of % markup. Nuts. And DRM is just wickedly stupid and lame anyway. I neither download/pirate NOR purchase new full price, I just reject the whole industry for being out to lunch on pricing. And music in particular, copies are to get fans, it's advertising, treat it that way, sampling and advertising, fans come to concerts, they make their loot working concerts and selling schwag, and that's how it should be if they want to be pros at it. At most we buy a few used disks or tapes a year now (music or movies), that's it. Because that's what they are worth, 10 cents to a buck or two.
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I chop ten gallons (two bucket fulls in other words) a day scrap vegetables for my small flock using a machete. Not only efficient, but great sport! whackwhackwhackwhackwhack, big fun! I dice it up small for them then scatter it around, they love it. And ya, it's the best for watermelons, clean full slices with one chop. But when it comes time to clean a clucker to eat, back to pointy knives.
..as long as people keep putting up with it and standing in the big brother check-in line and handing over their money for an airplane ticket. Don't talk! Don't make eye contact with the darth vader goon! Don't do anything while your spouse and children are felt up by the pervos working there! Obey your superior humans, epsilon!
The only thing that is going to work to get some sanity back to airline travel is mass universal boycott and shun the airlines and their hired security goons and pathetic security theater policies. You certainly aren't going to "vote" for anything better. If millions put up with this creeping fascism, and keep getting on those planes and "willingly" subject themselves to all this crap, sure as shit you'll get full fascism eventually. You've -the still flying public "you"- have already proven you'll put up with half way there, no one who flies is showing any different to the global overlords, and they are pleased to have such willing and compliant subjects to rule over.
How would a new web work, what would it look like? We have very powerful governmental and corporate interests outstanding that would force more of a totally censored and locked down web then what we have now is my best guess. I mean it is sucky now in that regard, but there's still an element of random anarchy there, but any "new" web would probably be rather strict big brotherish, IMO, with a ton of features and software being made illegal or restricted, anything that would facilitate "IP piracy" for example. It might technically work better or be more efficient in moving packets around, but I am afraid it would lose the free wheeling aspects that have made it so popular. But..I don't know either, just guessing, how would you change it and to what? What needs to be dumped, and what needs to be changed or added, do you have any specifics, browsers or otherwise?
I inadvertently wrote tons instead of thousands of lbs. The big crawlers are both over 50 tons apiece. Pretty large, not the biggest, but fairly impressive in what they can move.
Well, I don't live on a ship, but I do live on the largest commercial farm in this whole area (it's not mine but I am the oldest employee here). We have automatic start and run large diesel generators to operate the farm itself, three of them needed. Those are computer controlled and have redundant wireless and hard wired controls that coordinate that with the climate control systems in the various buildings and broiler houses and the main feed from the electrical grid. They have their own bulk tanks and the farm itself has a separate diesel bulk tank in the thousands of gallons size for all our equipment, which runs from the smallest diesel tractor at 24 horse up to multiple crawlers at over 100 tons apiece, and large trackhoes and pans, etc. We have three 60,000 gallon propane tanks for the heat, and all the residences have 500 gallon tanks. I am the only residence with an additional woodstove though, and I put up around 4 cords a year. I grew up up north but live in georgia now, we don't get those "lost in the blizzards" type of snow, but I sure have seen it before. I also have two smaller gas generators myself and a small solar array with battery bank and an additional windcharger. Oh, we also have a decent enough airport here on the property with full hangar space enough for a couple dozen planes and maintenance/machine shop facilities, roughly equivalent to a normal small size county airport, albeit it is only a grass strip, no jets, but it takes twin engine planes fine.
I was just commenting on Taco's remorse at having to sit in the cold with no juice, that's all, because there's no need for that really, not today with so many options out there, enough to fit most any reasonable budget. Waiting for the crisis to hit and *then* thinking about it (especially in Mich with lake effect snow and ice storms being so very common) doesn't work, you have to build out your redundant infrastructure in advance of an emergency.
My reply was more responding to the relative cheapness of having something for people to use for when their main supplies of energy got disrupted, and noting that in the tech geek community that data backups are a good idea and accepted, but it falls off fast for additional types of backup, but I was encouraged on the followup thread considerable with all the interest and the people who had gone that route of eneregy backups.. You can get a nice automatic start exterior permanent mounted propane generator for under two thousand dollars now and maybe 500 bucks to have it professionally installed to comply with codes and safety, etc, at the 7kw level, which is good enough to run the basic stuff people need, although perhaps not everything, but "enough". I'd say something like that is affordable for most folks in the "middle class" range if they own their own homwe anyway (or a natural gas model, although I prefer propane, it stores well onsite and isn't reliant on exterior delivery as much as natgas is) and even a smaller portable gasoline unit at well under $1,000 is still good enough to work, as evidenced by all the anecdotal in the follow up post he did asking about home generators and so on.
As to doing without and so on, I did a stretch of over five years in my young man days living totally feral way the heck back in the moose and bears woods with no electricity or anything of that sort (I had one flashlight and one battery operated radio to be fair about that), grew/harvested most or all of my own food as well, etc. I'm a bit more comfortable now but we still grow over half our food here (veggies, fruits, our own grassfed beef and my personal flock of chickens and ducks)
I've been into survivalism/preparedness for a long time now, mostly since I went through a big blizzard in 67 that closed everything down for two weeks. 48 inches in 24 hours then drifts, right over the top of our two story home. It was medium big, hehe. (I still have some super 8 movies of it, including getting shots of an *arctic owl* that showed up in the backyard, that was cool..). It mad
They make generators that are both designed to run on propane and also come with an exterior housing for permanent mounting outside. That and figure out which circuits you want to run, etc, other folks here have covered the electronics for you. The good thing about propane is...you get a big tank, and it doesn't go bad, you can store it for years and years. You can easily have a 500 gallon propane tank sitting in the back yard, but try that in the burbs with gasoline...much hoop jumping, probably illegal. Propane, no probs, pretty darn normal. And no freaking out trying to go "get more gas" in an emergency when everyone else is if you already have a big tank sitting there. You can also at the same time install a few wall/room propane heaters that don't need electricity, they just have a piezo electric clicker like on propane BBQs to start them easy. We have two of those, work great when I don't feel like firing up the woodstove, which is our primary heat now. They even make propane refrigerators or dual electric/propane but they are spendy. In the winter I wouldn't think keeping your food cool would be much of a problem in Michigan...stick the stuff outside in a cooler or just bring frozen bricks in and drop them in the freezer and on the top shelf in the fridge, replace once a day or twice a day, whatever.
Just remember to run any generator you have once in awhile regardless of needing it (they actually call this "exercising" it, more of a test and relube the cylinders walls a little I guess) and also keep the starting battery charged up. Farms are about equally split on emergency power from what I have seen, half use propane, half use diesel. The propane gennies tend to be cheaper, that's about it. Home despot even carries a few propane small models I believe, or check like at Tractor Supply. The smaller cheap gasoline ones are just that, and they won't last long, people I know who used them for offgrid living never got that many hours out of them. I have a couple of those, but my next one will be propane with an industrial engine for sure.
Are widely recognized as a good idea. I think electricity and heat backups should be the same. A generator and woodstove are not *that* expensive, and sure come in handy sometimes.....
they sort of y 2KIXed the bucket....
odd thought but if moz was to jump on the selling of netbooks deal, they might turn a penny or two. And if they were to say put out the call for ideas and developers to help with the design if the thing, so it actually worked well out of the box, hardware and software, especially if the host OS was announced to be linuxey, they wouldn't be forced to be tied so much to either microsoft or google, at least they would be in a stronger bargaining position.
Depends on your definition of "basic" in "basic engineering". The Apollo moon walkers said it was a huge problem, it sticks to everything. They have some plans to use magnets maybe to solve this problem.
All I can say is good luck with that. They need to send a few cheap rovers up there first to see if their magnet dust sucker can keep all the movable bits protected. I live and work on a farm, so I deal with equipment outside in just "normal" dirt all the time, it's a major hassle as it is, so I can't imagine electrostatic cling microscopic and highly abrasive dirt, and trying to deal with that remotely on huge scales.
I know they *want* to, and are planning expeditions and so on regardless, I just am not convinced yet that anything very complex that has to do complex moving actions can last very long in that electric dusty environment. Very simple things that don't require moving parts, sure, but long term mechanical factories? Not sure.
The military has a very hard time keeping their gear running in Iraq, the sandy dust gets into everything and just wears it out really fast, and that is with constant hands-on maintenance. You can only seal stuff so much before you can't use it, if you are talking mining and refining and forging and smelting and extruding and fabbing and..all of that..that's a lot of stuff to protect from contamination.
Basically,anything you put on the lunar surface becomes charged, and the dirt sticks to it. Even solar panels would eventually become so covered in dust they wouldn't work, and there's no moving parts there.
We'll have to see what they come up with. I think it's a spiffy idea, but want to see the "basic engineering" solve that problem, because if they can come up with more robust seals, etc, to make things more dustpoof, that's hundred billion buck industry right here on earth. We have to replace..no idea, a lot, maybe small hundreds of "sealed bearings" per year around here, especially on the fans in the broiler houses, they just don't last, and that dust they get exposed to isn't even electrostatic, just normal litter dust, and those have to run in not as a severe temperature swings as on the moon.
There's this little problem of lunar dust. I think there won't be much in the way of human colonies, or even robotic manufacturing, even just the self replicating mining mentioned until that gem is solved. You have to fix that before you can have space based manufacturing that is in turn based on lunar access. Rockets are the easy part, and that's tough enough and expensive enough right now.
There are zero guarantees between now and ..who knows about this economy. sure, tons of eople are still working normally and making good money..but millions aren't and with half a million layoffs in just ONE month, last month, and more to come across all industries..feeling lucky? Is your home all paid off, do you have a big working garden, is your ride paid off and in good shape, do you have some backup solar panels for guaranteed electricity, do you have a year's worth of long term storage food for yourself and family..and so on. In other words, suck it up for now, keep working full time, drag in the cash and spend it *wisely*, pay off bills and get as independent as possible as long as the gravy train is running.
I think that a LOT more people next year are going to be looking at "spare time" as in all their waking moments "spare time", available and a lot more people will feel good if all they have is a part time job. And here's why..if you follow the financials, all the bulls for the past 1.5 years or better have *consistently* almost without fail lowballed how bad it was going to get, only the contrarian bears got it right. Now, the same bulls (wall street and Fed guys and treasury guys, those bulls) are still the same guys, but even they are getting rather antsy about things. Notice all the "emergency bailouts" and so on? These are not normal times. This is more than a clue.
It's way cheaper to give a poor student over in east elbownia hundreds of ebooks and to keep that updated electronically than to try and provide hundreds of dead tree books. Way cheaper and easier. That was the main point of the XO originally. As to the US, we've made team sports and learning political correctness and to not question authority at all for any reason ever the primary goals of "primary" education. You get what you pay for, and in those regards it looks like it has been a successful and transformational social engineering project. If they really wanted to push "education" first, there's nothing stopping them at all, but they don't, that is way down their list of priorities.
...this part here: "New DSL standards can extend the reach of DSL into more rural areas and...." What information do you have on that? What standards, where is it being done, and by whom, and what is this new longer distance DSL? I live a mile too far from the box, and with just a few homes down this line, they are NEVER going to run anything better that would allow DSL, and cable is also a no-go for the same reason and fiber is way out there in flying car land. At least I can get dialup, but that's it, and looks to be it forever..I mean forever, all the wireless broadband is line of sight to the towers, any hill in the way, tough luck, nogettum, already tried it here with the wireless guys, no signal, too many hills.. So what is this thing I never heard of with new DSL standards, would you have a link or two reference? Thanks in advance!
I think that is the one that is going to do it. And I don't think that tech is way off, they routinely slice and dice and mix and match things now. And I seriously doubt all these big governments with black budgets have stopped trying to come up with bioweapons, despite various treaties. For one, an engineered bioweapon can be used stealthily, it can be so close to something "normal" that it could pass as a random mutation. And there are plenty of humans out there who think we need to reduce the planet's population severely in order for Gaia to survive, along those lines. And by severely I mean "with extreme prejudice and in a timely manner". Some crackpot mad scientist or cult group say could actually do this and maybe get away with it, who knows. That weaponized anthrax used in those mail order attacks came from *someplace* after all.
VWs little fuel sippin' diesel. It looks OK and gets better mileage than most mopeds, let alone full road bikes.(it ain't fast though, but that isn't the point either) Sort of George Jetsony looking, but wind tunnels determine shape. And at least you could have heating and cooling and be in out of the sleet and rain, etc. (I used to ride bike a lot, that bad weather stuff got to be old...) And I wouldn't care if it only got half the projected mileage if it was loads cheaper to mass produce using cheaper materials,etc., it would still be medium fantastic at over 100 MPG, and rides two with some cargo. It really is sort of a transition between motorcycle and car.
Any such critter out there? Very easy to mix and match and recycle and make an upgradeable and customized desktop, but for laptops it doesn't seem to exist much. The chokepoint seems to be smallish screens, they seem to cost what a brand new cheap laptop cost. The next one seems to be no standard motherboard config. Granted, I haven't googled much at all on this, but seems there should be some projects already running. I checked the article and didn't see anything, open moko looks to be the closest, and that isn't even netbook sized. Is there even a raw laptop chassis with a screen that takes normal video connectors that you could slip an existing mini itx mobo in?
...but it would beat the heck out of the alternative that used to be, 30 seconds per kid-talk fast- on a scratchy phone call because the rates "ma bell" charged made long distance an expensive treat.
Mr. Natural as Fox Muldaur and Angelfood McSpade as Scully, and the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers as the Lone Gunmen. Evil Spam Monster overlord, Mr. The Toad
It all goes back to the design and common functionality of the internet as we have it now, not as it could be. It is not an equal two way street. The ISPs and telcos don't "allow" you to be a server without draconian extra fees and rules (a "business class" connection), you are mostly restricted by their TOS as just a regular user to only "serve" up a request. If on the other hand everyone was free to be equally a client and server (real net neutrality), we could have a lot more content out there willingly served up to other people merely based on the individuals payment for bandwith, purely voluntary then, and greatly reduce this artificial forced "need" for ads. And the content itself could be replicated with P2P file sharing, which would handle increased demand and interest so it could scale exactly as interest in your content went up.
We should be eliminating bottlenecks, not constructing more elaborate ones based on ad revenue. Bandwith would be a net wash, but the cost of the bandwith would be exactly borne by the ones who used it directly in their connection fees they choose to pay for, and no more, and no less. And this might actually help make better websites and help reduce overall traffic pressures in general, look at some of those sites that spread out a single page of content over ten pages of ads just to pay for things.
It is sort of the micropayment idea but carried over to the simpler side of how to do that, you pay one fee for your connection then and that's it, perhaps a basic per gig a month model, so one size really would fit everyone then, you want more internet, you pay for it, you want less, your fee is less, simple as that, skip the ad and bloated pages middleman layer.
I want an integrated package, a robust good smartphone that is built to hard dock into a laptop shell like thing, the laptop-dock gives you a better screen, more battery, more storage, regular keyboard, and perhaps like an optical drive, etc, whatever would fit. The phones are getting really good and they could be the mainboard replacement for at least low specs useages and it should therefore make the laptop dock cheaper than full-on model. And upgrading would be simple then, whenever you feel like getting a newer cellphone, which would help that whole "laptops suck for upgrading" deal. You could keep the same "lapdock" machine, just replace the phone. I've wanted such a config for a long time now, seems a natural evolution. Netbooks try to cover both things and are lacking, because they are neither. cute idea..but neither...too small for a real computer feel etc, and, too large for pocket carry still. A phone/laptop dock combo would cover both bases as you need them. Give you two screens on a portable as well.
I think even home depot quality rope, cable or chain would have been sufficient for a toolbag tether.
I was going to say the same thing. I don't have any of my peer group boomer friends who have grade school kids, the youngest are like college age or better. It's gen X turn to get bashed for having irresponsible kids, like our folks got bashed, and theirs, and theirs...funny how that keeps happening...
Perhaps you can offer to be an expert witness if this case goes on.
..if you look at the street vendor disk pirates pricing,(1-3$ for about anything you can think of on a disk), which reflects true basic manufacturing costs plus some profit, a simple dollar over their street cost per disk would be a fair price for the producers profit in a theoretical legal version. And that dollar is probably more than what the artists get today with 10-20 dollar disks most of the time, and they'd sure sell more. I know I started buying music in the 50s, right up through the mid 90s or so (in other words a fair and long term customer) and I just finally quit, when I saw they were getting as much for a cheap stamped Cd as an expensive tape...the price gouging is just way too blatant and I won't support it. And digital copies, they want how much??? Ludicrous. Thousands of % markup. Nuts. And DRM is just wickedly stupid and lame anyway. I neither download/pirate NOR purchase new full price, I just reject the whole industry for being out to lunch on pricing. And music in particular, copies are to get fans, it's advertising, treat it that way, sampling and advertising, fans come to concerts, they make their loot working concerts and selling schwag, and that's how it should be if they want to be pros at it. At most we buy a few used disks or tapes a year now (music or movies), that's it. Because that's what they are worth, 10 cents to a buck or two.