HAHAHAHA! No, not fidel! Try _patriotic contact_ in _a spook outfit_ who took a huge risk, a lesser of two evils deal. He was not amused with the direction the US was headed back then, being an insider and seeing how the goons and globalist crooks were taking over and corrupting everything. He got out very soon after they hit kennedy, he had had enough. He is deceased now, so there's nothing they can do to him, and what I know is pure verbal hearsay. so that is a neener-neener, and I never told a soul until after he was gone, respecting his wishes.
Want some more? They used both weather warfare (crudely but they tried) and biological attacks (tobacco mosaic for one) against cuba.
The people in the theater would be buying the DVD, all of them, just bump up the ticket price a dollar or two, which is more than enough to cover the disk once they stamp them out by the millions. It's also a loss leader type deal to get them back into the theaters, all of the theaters have been complaining of less and less crowds, a disk with the ticket is a nice inducement, a very nice one. If the real counterfeiters-the pirates-can make dupes and profit at two or three dollars, so can the movie producers. They just don't want to..they want the same cash they used to get for more complex and expensive to produce VHS tapes-they haven't dropped prices in a long time now. I'll keep saying it-volume sales work and we have the technology now to make that happen. And people will have less and less incentive to pirate and file share when they can get legit copies on stamped disks for cheap from a variety of venues. And then they wouldn't have to try and keep coming up with weirder and weirder DRM schemes, again, pissing of their customers and just making things stupider than what they have to be. Humans just don't like being gouged or taken advantage of, that is half the reason no one cares about any ethics when it comes to file sharing, they see it as the producers charge such a rip off price and have been so recalcitrant about it that they lost any ethical business high ground. They have been operating as a blatant price fixing cartel for a long time now, they are angrily getting inj the face of every customer out there with their bogus warnings in front of the movie, and if they just stopped that and dropped prices to a much more reasonable level, and introduce some incentives that make owning disks conveninet for the consumers-like getting to keep the disk instead of turning it in with a rental, the free or near free ones at the movies, etc, they would sell more disks, a lot more,and I bet they would make more net profit in the long run. That's just an opinion, but I bet it would happen.
The movie industry and netflix have an obvious solution to increase sales and interest and push more disks and also cut down piracy, and they have always had it, use advanced tecnology as it becomes available. DROP the price down to the rental fee (around there, very close anyway) and let the movie going public have the disk. Let them keep the thing. They could do it too, stamped disks are cheap, any number of "alternative" businessmen who operate their own "courtesy disk distribution channels" show what stamped disks cost in bulk with some data bits on them. A buck or two max beyond what those gents charge would be a good thing for all concerned. Volume sales, a time honored concept to "make profit". We have the technology to do this, this is one place where we have sci-fi coming true-we have cheap "replicators", I sugggest we adopt that technology across the board.
For netflix that would mean one way shipping, a significant cost savings, for the outside shipping fees and halving the labor handling.. For theater owners,this a great way to get people to watch the movie the first time at the big screen theater and buy their lard brand popcorn and ~cola~, a complimentary disk of the movie the people just paid cash to see on the way out.
The next step is drop the number of movies produced and do some more work on screenplays and plot, etc. Just make better movies, but less of them, right now, just too many out there, dilutes the pool a lot. Then people might actually go and *enjoy**** the movies, and tell-a-friend about them.
*****this still leaves annoying cellphone ringtones in the movies. Not that I would suggest anything illegal, immoral or fattening, but if doofuses who don't turn their phones off got a 5 gallon or so ~cola~ and lard brand popcorn shower from their surrounding movie watching neighbors in the theater every time a ringtone was heard, the problem might become self correcting. IANAL, check local vigilante regulations first;)
...and most gun laws too, oddly enough, came about in the US from primarily racial segregation and minority oppression actions. Originally, marriage had nothing to do with the state, and originally all the states had laws like Vermont still has about firearms, pure second amendment. The marriage laws varied state to state and were weird, you could as "race" such and such only marry an identical race or a small variation/percentage. Now marriage laws are more closely tied to social engineering and business and government handouts and rights of inheritance and all sorts of strangeness.
You are happy, working, providing neat products. Your employees are happy, customers satisifed? Well, sounds OK to me.
Look at this dudes idea about selling out. Sometimes it is better to just do what you are doing at the level you are doing it at and be happy! Companies that get that "must keep growing faster and faster or we fail it!" are not the ultimate. They are just one type of business mindset, no law says you have to emulate them.
--they say that piracy has a ripple effect to the negative, but globalization and outsourcing good paying manufacturing and IT jobs doesn't???? Nonsense! Many intartubes financial experts would beg to differ! Let's look at this.....
If we follow the globalist economist's ideas, then "outsourcing" Hollywood movie distribution to "pirates" should be GOOD for the economy! They need to get with the globalization program!
This is how globalism works, pay attention MPAA:
The jobs go elsewhere where the capital investment is less expensive and you can leverage tech and labor costs downward to the cheapest levels possible acording to sound capitalist guidelines-check! Nothing is cheaper or more efficient than using the pirates to duplicate and distribute the movies!
The resultant product is also then cheaper for the consumer-double check! YAHOO!
It's GLOBALISM! Thanks Wall Street, we are TEH SAVED!
yes, seen those, but I still like the wind up a spring deal. If they could bump to an hour run time, that would be pretty cool. The radios I have only make it half an hour, but they do work well, albeit somewhat noisy, but not so much as to make it weird to listen to the raqdio, they have robust speakers. They are analog tuning though, what I would really like is a digital version with a very good internal battery, so you could wind it up several times in a row and go away and let it dump a charge to the battery.
I was thinking before of sacraficing one of them for the spring and dynamo part, but they just don't put out enough power to use for even a small laptop yet. They might run a minimal PDA though.
They also need-perhaps with ccrane design help-to build a transceiver version and not just a pure receiver. As to the ccrane stuff in general, here's another one, an idea. The clockwork mechanism with one of their super designed for AM and talk radios. they claim to now have the best on the planet for AM (MW) sensitivity and for pushing vocal range, so just combine the two techs. I'm a talk radio fiend so that ould be a pretty cool radio.
Even better, to cut to the chase here thnking about it, perhaps instead of the foot pump if they just made a large clockwork spring powerpack with internal batteries, and make it with an offset two handed crank, like a bicycle crank with handles. Then you could plug in whatever gadget you had to the thing.
Both is a possibility, solar and the RTG. That's the best idea, redundant power supplies, a hybrid system. Much better to have more than adequate power it seems. Both methods are continually undergoing improvements as well,and after all it was the space program that really pushed the development of solar PV and we have had significant breakthroughs there even since the mars rovers currently working were launched.
Not in the fine article. Maybe it just cost too much for the niche thing it was? I know I can go over to a local truckstop here and they have a shirt pocket size battery operated TV that costs 35 bucks, that's it. Any content you can snag with the antenna is free. I can't imagine mobile phone content is cheaper than free. Granted, not all sports are on OTA free broadcasts, but there's still quite a selection.
...they are very nice, I have two of them, although for day to day use I have a plug in sangean multiband. I've been meaning to pick up one of their wind up flashlights they have now, too. http://www.freeplayenergy.com/ I wish they would make a laptop. It needs the clockwork deal, plus a remote solar panel you could stick in the window. Something like the OLPC but for adults, albeit simiar type specs and idea, low power, all solid state, self powered, etc.
That's only partially true with the governments/food deal. There are a lot of places with legitimate and many years running drought or near drought which has made food growing near impossible, and the people so poor they simply can't afford to buy any, or any aid delivered is very minimal and sometimes gets hijacked. It's an "all of the above" type problem, not just the political angle.
We are lucky we are rich in the US generally speaking and can afford to import more, and have such a large nation that droughts or floods in one area still leave other areas able to produce food, but right now quite a few farmers are hurting pretty bad from the current drought,and some ranchers are having to sell their whole herds- no feed-no water-no hay- and some farmers are not getting much in the way of a grains or vegetables crop. Here
It's been pretty severe, I know it affected us somewhat here this summer, our hay crop dropped to around 1/5th of what it should be.
Two years (sometimes just one totally borked year) back to back like that usually results in complete bankruptcy for them the way our economic system is set up now. The poor third world guys don't even come close to the infrastructure backup that we enjoy here, politics or not, it just doesn't exist.
...to fully scratch up the platters in drives when the drive is going to be replaced and destroyed. Some command that would make the read head just scroll back and forth and scratch it all to heck. Obviously it would have to drop down a little, but perhaps it is possible to design them that way with that feature. A niche product but I bet they would sell.
..I'll follow your advice and try to "keep up" better than I have been. Here's a hint: I knew about the cuban missile crisis a few weeks before the bulk of the US public (and military) did.
well, those two countries were sorta the point. If a war breaks out with them and the US involved as well, they will target all the iranian nuke facilities they even think they know about, and Iran is more than likely to lob whatever they have at dimona in israel. This is at a minimum. It could make that whole region rather untenable for living and quite a bit of radioactivity would start to drift downwind. Then if India and pak get into it..oh well. And china and japan are not going to like having the oil shutoff to them, they both get a lot from iran last I knew. Then they get radioactive clouds overhead as a bonus. It certainly could spiral out of contrl, at least the potential is there.
uhhh..headphones to listen to the computer? And I know they make exterior noise cancelling over the ear 'phones, so no matter how much noise outside your cube, you really would only hear what the computer was saying. In fact, this makes me think now, ya'all guys in offices *don't* use these headsets? They make just passive ones that block noise you can get, seems the ticket for concentration if other voices bother you. Maybe some audio expert guy who might read this could recommend a brand of electronic over-the-ear headphones, I don't keep up with it but I know they exist.
A long time ago I used to have a mac classic OS app that would let you do rudimentary tasks with voice activation (computer, open netscape, stuff like that) and it was *neat*.
As to noise at work, etc, I run diesel engined equipment or like two stroke equipment primarily for a living so I can't feel too sorry for those sitting in a climate controlled office and having to listen to some normal speech. heh. I think you could train yourself to just zone out the other voices eventually. Call centers do it already, how do those folks cope with it? I honestly don't know, but it must happen. Again, back to the good quality headphones, solves most of that exterior noise/distraction problem.
Either way, I see the voice activation stuff for more at home use, from the reasons I outlined above. I know I would use it, walk through the room "computer, check the weather for me..computer, read my/. messages", etc, pipelne a string and go about doing what I am doing and let it read stuff off to me. I might be sitting on the floor with a bunch of junk and tools spread out around me (we are geeks, this happens, yes?), but it would be nice to still be surfin, see? I can read a book and listen to the radio at the same time, so I don't see this as too much different. It would be a boon for multitasking at a minimum, and certainly help the folks with vision and dexterity problems. I know my girlfriend can barely type now,her fingers are bad from arthritis, I would love to set her up with a rig like this, she might use the computer more now. As it is she just asks me to stop what I am doing and do her little task, look something up on google, etc, but if she could just talk to the thing-a good deal.
If any of even the little ones are targeted on existing nuclear facilities you would have a downwind chernobyl effect, a bad one most likely. That's one of the things about the possible upcoming iranian fun - n - games that we will be facing. They will *specificially* target existing nuclear research and production facilities.
Just an old big truck battery or a trolling motor battery. You can get a female plug adapter for them that have 1-4 outlets (5-20 dollas), then you'll be able to plug some stuff in when your grid juice goes south, like in a storm. I keep two truck batteries here in the house just for that purpose, use them all the time in storm season. Power goes out, 60 seconds later I have a 12 volt TV and flourescent light going, a little more than that and an old laptop is up and on the net with the car adapter. You can always add solar later but you can get going with 12 volt stuff now with less than a hundred dollars, that's one good storage batt and the female plugs.
You can take global climate change completely out of the picture and it *still* is a good idea to look for alternatives to petroleum. Oner, economics. The way it is set up now, this industry sucks a huge amount of cash out of the world and puts it into the hands of relatively few people, and at least in the USA, is a big factor in balance of trade and our...strange...foreign policy decisions. We need to break the back of that economic dependence and get the cash out to different people. That's my opinion on it anyway. I am rather tired of black suited insane megalomaniacs and fundy mullahs and others of that oil soaked political ilk having their hands on extra billions and billions to play around with, because they just get into..mischief..with it. There's a big tie in with petroleum and the more heinous parts of the military industrial complex and the wars for profits that are always breaking out. One of the ways we can help reduce that is to stop giving them cash for petroleum, and to lessen our dependence on petroleum. I am for a mass decentralization of energy sources basically, using the huge variety of alternatives that we have developed already and that look to be on the horizon.
The next is more immediate and long lasting. The cities keep people soaking 24/7/365 in saturated poison. Petroleum burns dirty, really filthy, I don't care which engine you are talking about, and the obvious health detriments are there to *see* because you can see how dirty the air is, let alone measuring it with instruments. When the air gets chunky styled in a variery of designer colors and fragrances, you know it falls into the "not good for you" category.
What? All I was doing was pointing out originally that there was at least one verified advanced carburetor system that got much better than normal mileage. And was very open about the possibly why's why it wasn't used much. there was another one way way back as well, the Pogue carburetor. Carbs in general have poblems that have been overcome with fuel injection, smokey's came just hen the industry was going to fuel injection, which gives somewhat better mileage and allows a lot better timed delivery. They do the fuel part for vehicles with emissions in mind as well. Smokey was clear his needed expensive lubrication and more advanced engineering and materials, that is primarily the reason they didn't go to anything like that, but that doesn't negate the fact that he did build it, and it did work and at the time was an amazing difference with what was currently out there. As to any high level conspiracies or whatnot, you get what you see, especially with the detroit car bosses, behind the curve a lot compared to the japanese and european car companies because gasoline remained so cheap in the US most likely. That's a guess on my part. US drivers wanted huge engines, bg sound, out of the hole performance and didn't care to mych untilrecently about mileage except for a brief period after the OPEC embargo. We had european and japanese cars hit with much better mileage and designs way before it was common in detroit, fuel injection, overhead cams, turbocharging, etc. In the more modern era we have seen it with stratified charge and hybrids, etc. Now that basically all the car companies are global and own each other, I don't think you can even classify them as being all that regional or national. I do think though you might be seeing a resurgence of the smaller companies as more advanced features are developed. It seems to go in cycles like most others-way way back we had a lot more companies, then consolidation, now we are seeing the very small companies really coming out with some interesting stuff, like AC propulsion with the two stage hybrid concept (the detachable ICE part) or the tesla car. That there will be a much bigger variety of types of cars though is indisputable now, we will be getting a lot more options, flex fuel, more turbo diesels, etc. Honda just announced they will be pushing a much cleaner diesel starting next year IIRC, and a bt more battery design tweaking and we will be seeing comercial plug in hybrids, which really opens up some good mileage areas tat still maintain "performance" and range.
To summarize, there were good mileage carbs that didn't make it into mainstream use, why they weren't adopted is something of a red herring, *aspects* to improved designs get adopted and modified and morphed around. We are seeing a resurgence of variable valve timing now, because altough the concept was sound way back, they couldn't pull it off with reliability, now they can. and etc.
It's very practical and the folks who ever get it working *very* well will be rewarded. Want to know why? Think baby boomer generation, older people, disposable income, reaching retirement or comfortable in established jobs-and age related problems like arthritis and a lot of vision problems as well. Stiff fingers or outright pain and loss of function hits a large segment of the population as you get older, and a lot of computing action is going on now in homes. Ya, maybe not practical in cubes yet so much, but seeing as how the telephone has been in offices for generations now and it hasn't stopped business yet with that yakking, I am not seeing vocal user interface as any big problem. Make the cube walls a little higher and thicker and use better sound absorbtion materials and that might help with the noise travelling aspect.
nice idea really and would be quite the local spectacle. Expensive as in a lot of smashed equipment, but save it for homecoming or something and it would showcase nerd power.
..if I had to make a guess, it would have to be madmax, because of resource depletion and now the billions of people who have an inkling and a taste of what is considered a normal technologically advanced lifestyle. The resources simply don't exist to have all the people on the planet at that same level, say, as western europe or the US/Canada. Probably going to cause problems and more than a bit of social strife, etc in the future.
hadn't heard about the iPod but wouldn't surprise me at all. Some of that loot was wasted, some..how can you make folks happy when everything they owned got destroyed and they are sitting in a katrina/fema camp someplace? From what I recall as to cash they got a two grand check/debit card thing. Oh well, once it was issued, que sera sera how they spent the money. I don't know really, other than there is huge waste there, then stuff that needs fixin is going begging. I imagine crack beer and hookers got bought, along with mundane stuff like groceries and food and some new clothes, humans have a range of interests it appears....
As to hard drives and etc, I am stil on an 8 gig drive, works fine for me. My backup is under 2 gigs, 1.6 I believe. I am king of the cheap! I guess if I needed to store and work on a lot of large image files I would need a larger drive, but I don't, so I don't have one. I primarily use fedora, knoppix or the austrumi live disk, they all work on my rigs. I use my computer as a decent quality adjustable internet appliance, that's about it, and for those purposes you don't need much.
Not for me they aren't, not any more. I get a new computer for a hundred bucks now and slap linux on it. A new mobo and a better chip, that's it, reuse the ram and drives and case, etc. Apple has made x-thousands off of me, that's cool. MS has made some from me, apple has more, now it is time to move on. I don't need the latest and greatest,I'm not a gamer or run intensive 3-d time space warp modelling or whatever, and staying a generation or so back-a hundred dollars every other year does it.
Besides the societal cost of closed source-it took me some years to bingo to FOSS, really, had no clue whatsoever, then I started reading about it, then got a copy and tried, then read some more and the light went on. I am a country geek, FOSS is the community barn raising deal from our past. The concept worked then, it works now.
You have personal cost, then societal cost. I don't like every buck of my taxes goes out, some amount of that goes to fund closed source locked in software just so bureaucrats can type reports about my taxes and..endless loop there. They can at least drop the cost of computing normal stuff way way down. And businesses, when I go shopping around town? How much of an MS premium am I paying for everything I buy? And I don't like it when I stop into the public library (more taxes, in this case local plus state) and their "professionally run" networked windows computers all have spyware ad/"tool"bars on them-the only thing that changes is which set of spyware trojans they get infected with at various times. And no, they won't let you run a knoppix disk for-get this- "security" purposes! HAHAHAHA! For real, got told that. And apple-well, hopefully my government isn't buying too many ipods so my taxes aren't going to that, and their hardware and software computer model-although effective and I used to use it-is still primarily expensive vendor lockin, you are stuck at a minimum with their brand only mobo (can you get one of their x86 boards seperately even?),and they just charge too much, it just isn't worth it. What is it, $ 600for the mini and up and it isn't upgradeable? I have a mini itx box as my backup to my reglar tower, cost me a total of 105 dollars, works swell, thanks. And a grand or so for any tower and up from apple? Nope, don't need that anymore, those days are over. I've dropped enough on expensive hardware the last 20 years, enough's enough.
Nope, I am in the FOSS camp now because it just makes too much sense long term. Open hardware and open software as much as possible. I got other things to do than make literal billionaires even richer. They got enough loot.
Software is the tool to go do real stuff with, the cheaper/better/faster we ALL get good tools, open tools, tools that can be modded, swapped, tweaked and used howerver anyone sees fit the better off society will be. It's that simple to me. Keeping the tools expensive and their functions half secret and forcing you to jump through hoops to even use the damn things doesn't build stuff. And society is a group of hoo-mannz who build stuff mostly.
In ye olden days the king and church made it illegal for the peasants to even *read*, they were denied even that "intellectual property" tool, kept it expensive and closed source and you had to jump through hoops to get access, pay a lot, and kiss some pompous rich fool's ass to get down with a tool that beneficial.
Well, screw that noise, middle ages or the 21st century.
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HAHAHAHA! No, not fidel! Try _patriotic contact_ in _a spook outfit_ who took a huge risk, a lesser of two evils deal. He was not amused with the direction the US was headed back then, being an insider and seeing how the goons and globalist crooks were taking over and corrupting everything. He got out very soon after they hit kennedy, he had had enough. He is deceased now, so there's nothing they can do to him, and what I know is pure verbal hearsay. so that is a neener-neener, and I never told a soul until after he was gone, respecting his wishes.
Want some more? They used both weather warfare (crudely but they tried) and biological attacks (tobacco mosaic for one) against cuba.
The people in the theater would be buying the DVD, all of them, just bump up the ticket price a dollar or two, which is more than enough to cover the disk once they stamp them out by the millions. It's also a loss leader type deal to get them back into the theaters, all of the theaters have been complaining of less and less crowds, a disk with the ticket is a nice inducement, a very nice one. If the real counterfeiters-the pirates-can make dupes and profit at two or three dollars, so can the movie producers. They just don't want to..they want the same cash they used to get for more complex and expensive to produce VHS tapes-they haven't dropped prices in a long time now. I'll keep saying it-volume sales work and we have the technology now to make that happen. And people will have less and less incentive to pirate and file share when they can get legit copies on stamped disks for cheap from a variety of venues. And then they wouldn't have to try and keep coming up with weirder and weirder DRM schemes, again, pissing of their customers and just making things stupider than what they have to be. Humans just don't like being gouged or taken advantage of, that is half the reason no one cares about any ethics when it comes to file sharing, they see it as the producers charge such a rip off price and have been so recalcitrant about it that they lost any ethical business high ground. They have been operating as a blatant price fixing cartel for a long time now, they are angrily getting inj the face of every customer out there with their bogus warnings in front of the movie, and if they just stopped that and dropped prices to a much more reasonable level, and introduce some incentives that make owning disks conveninet for the consumers-like getting to keep the disk instead of turning it in with a rental, the free or near free ones at the movies, etc, they would sell more disks, a lot more,and I bet they would make more net profit in the long run. That's just an opinion, but I bet it would happen.
The movie industry and netflix have an obvious solution to increase sales and interest and push more disks and also cut down piracy, and they have always had it, use advanced tecnology as it becomes available. DROP the price down to the rental fee (around there, very close anyway) and let the movie going public have the disk. Let them keep the thing. They could do it too, stamped disks are cheap, any number of "alternative" businessmen who operate their own "courtesy disk distribution channels" show what stamped disks cost in bulk with some data bits on them. A buck or two max beyond what those gents charge would be a good thing for all concerned. Volume sales, a time honored concept to "make profit". We have the technology to do this, this is one place where we have sci-fi coming true-we have cheap "replicators", I sugggest we adopt that technology across the board.
;)
For netflix that would mean one way shipping, a significant cost savings, for the outside shipping fees and halving the labor handling.. For theater owners,this a great way to get people to watch the movie the first time at the big screen theater and buy their lard brand popcorn and ~cola~, a complimentary disk of the movie the people just paid cash to see on the way out.
The next step is drop the number of movies produced and do some more work on screenplays and plot, etc. Just make better movies, but less of them, right now, just too many out there, dilutes the pool a lot. Then people might actually go and *enjoy**** the movies, and tell-a-friend about them.
*****this still leaves annoying cellphone ringtones in the movies. Not that I would suggest anything illegal, immoral or fattening, but if doofuses who don't turn their phones off got a 5 gallon or so ~cola~ and lard brand popcorn shower from their surrounding movie watching neighbors in the theater every time a ringtone was heard, the problem might become self correcting. IANAL, check local vigilante regulations first
...and most gun laws too, oddly enough, came about in the US from primarily racial segregation and minority oppression actions. Originally, marriage had nothing to do with the state, and originally all the states had laws like Vermont still has about firearms, pure second amendment. The marriage laws varied state to state and were weird, you could as "race" such and such only marry an identical race or a small variation/percentage. Now marriage laws are more closely tied to social engineering and business and government handouts and rights of inheritance and all sorts of strangeness.
You are happy, working, providing neat products. Your employees are happy, customers satisifed? Well, sounds OK to me.
Look at this dudes idea about selling out. Sometimes it is better to just do what you are doing at the level you are doing it at and be happy! Companies that get that "must keep growing faster and faster or we fail it!" are not the ultimate. They are just one type of business mindset, no law says you have to emulate them.
--they say that piracy has a ripple effect to the negative, but globalization and outsourcing good paying manufacturing and IT jobs doesn't???? Nonsense! Many intartubes financial experts would beg to differ! Let's look at this .....
If we follow the globalist economist's ideas, then "outsourcing" Hollywood movie distribution to "pirates" should be GOOD for the economy! They need to get with the globalization program!
This is how globalism works, pay attention MPAA:
The jobs go elsewhere where the capital investment is less expensive and you can leverage tech and labor costs downward to the cheapest levels possible acording to sound capitalist guidelines-check! Nothing is cheaper or more efficient than using the pirates to duplicate and distribute the movies!
The resultant product is also then cheaper for the consumer-double check! YAHOO!
It's GLOBALISM! Thanks Wall Street, we are TEH SAVED!
yes, seen those, but I still like the wind up a spring deal. If they could bump to an hour run time, that would be pretty cool. The radios I have only make it half an hour, but they do work well, albeit somewhat noisy, but not so much as to make it weird to listen to the raqdio, they have robust speakers. They are analog tuning though, what I would really like is a digital version with a very good internal battery, so you could wind it up several times in a row and go away and let it dump a charge to the battery.
I was thinking before of sacraficing one of them for the spring and dynamo part, but they just don't put out enough power to use for even a small laptop yet. They might run a minimal PDA though.
They also need-perhaps with ccrane design help-to build a transceiver version and not just a pure receiver. As to the ccrane stuff in general, here's another one, an idea. The clockwork mechanism with one of their super designed for AM and talk radios. they claim to now have the best on the planet for AM (MW) sensitivity and for pushing vocal range, so just combine the two techs. I'm a talk radio fiend so that ould be a pretty cool radio.
Even better, to cut to the chase here thnking about it, perhaps instead of the foot pump if they just made a large clockwork spring powerpack with internal batteries, and make it with an offset two handed crank, like a bicycle crank with handles. Then you could plug in whatever gadget you had to the thing.
Both is a possibility, solar and the RTG. That's the best idea, redundant power supplies, a hybrid system. Much better to have more than adequate power it seems. Both methods are continually undergoing improvements as well,and after all it was the space program that really pushed the development of solar PV and we have had significant breakthroughs there even since the mars rovers currently working were launched.
Not in the fine article. Maybe it just cost too much for the niche thing it was? I know I can go over to a local truckstop here and they have a shirt pocket size battery operated TV that costs 35 bucks, that's it. Any content you can snag with the antenna is free. I can't imagine mobile phone content is cheaper than free. Granted, not all sports are on OTA free broadcasts, but there's still quite a selection.
...they are very nice, I have two of them, although for day to day use I have a plug in sangean multiband. I've been meaning to pick up one of their wind up flashlights they have now, too. http://www.freeplayenergy.com/
I wish they would make a laptop. It needs the clockwork deal, plus a remote solar panel you could stick in the window. Something like the OLPC but for adults, albeit simiar type specs and idea, low power, all solid state, self powered, etc.
That's only partially true with the governments/food deal. There are a lot of places with legitimate and many years running drought or near drought which has made food growing near impossible, and the people so poor they simply can't afford to buy any, or any aid delivered is very minimal and sometimes gets hijacked. It's an "all of the above" type problem, not just the political angle.
We are lucky we are rich in the US generally speaking and can afford to import more, and have such a large nation that droughts or floods in one area still leave other areas able to produce food, but right now quite a few farmers are hurting pretty bad from the current drought,and some ranchers are having to sell their whole herds- no feed-no water-no hay- and some farmers are not getting much in the way of a grains or vegetables crop. Here
http://drought.unl.edu/dm/monitor.html
It's been pretty severe, I know it affected us somewhat here this summer, our hay crop dropped to around 1/5th of what it should be.
Two years (sometimes just one totally borked year) back to back like that usually results in complete bankruptcy for them the way our economic system is set up now. The poor third world guys don't even come close to the infrastructure backup that we enjoy here, politics or not, it just doesn't exist.
...to fully scratch up the platters in drives when the drive is going to be replaced and destroyed. Some command that would make the read head just scroll back and forth and scratch it all to heck. Obviously it would have to drop down a little, but perhaps it is possible to design them that way with that feature. A niche product but I bet they would sell.
..I'll follow your advice and try to "keep up" better than I have been. Here's a hint: I knew about the cuban missile crisis a few weeks before the bulk of the US public (and military) did.
?? Huh? It's a potential until it happens, then it's data.
I've been doing this a long, long time now, I'll just chalk up your response to me as indigestion or something.
well, those two countries were sorta the point. If a war breaks out with them and the US involved as well, they will target all the iranian nuke facilities they even think they know about, and Iran is more than likely to lob whatever they have at dimona in israel. This is at a minimum. It could make that whole region rather untenable for living and quite a bit of radioactivity would start to drift downwind. Then if India and pak get into it..oh well. And china and japan are not going to like having the oil shutoff to them, they both get a lot from iran last I knew. Then they get radioactive clouds overhead as a bonus. It certainly could spiral out of contrl, at least the potential is there.
uhhh..headphones to listen to the computer? And I know they make exterior noise cancelling over the ear 'phones, so no matter how much noise outside your cube, you really would only hear what the computer was saying. In fact, this makes me think now, ya'all guys in offices *don't* use these headsets? They make just passive ones that block noise you can get, seems the ticket for concentration if other voices bother you. Maybe some audio expert guy who might read this could recommend a brand of electronic over-the-ear headphones, I don't keep up with it but I know they exist.
/. messages", etc, pipelne a string and go about doing what I am doing and let it read stuff off to me. I might be sitting on the floor with a bunch of junk and tools spread out around me (we are geeks, this happens, yes?), but it would be nice to still be surfin, see? I can read a book and listen to the radio at the same time, so I don't see this as too much different. It would be a boon for multitasking at a minimum, and certainly help the folks with vision and dexterity problems. I know my girlfriend can barely type now,her fingers are bad from arthritis, I would love to set her up with a rig like this, she might use the computer more now. As it is she just asks me to stop what I am doing and do her little task, look something up on google, etc, but if she could just talk to the thing-a good deal.
A long time ago I used to have a mac classic OS app that would let you do rudimentary tasks with voice activation (computer, open netscape, stuff like that) and it was *neat*.
As to noise at work, etc, I run diesel engined equipment or like two stroke equipment primarily for a living so I can't feel too sorry for those sitting in a climate controlled office and having to listen to some normal speech. heh. I think you could train yourself to just zone out the other voices eventually. Call centers do it already, how do those folks cope with it? I honestly don't know, but it must happen. Again, back to the good quality headphones, solves most of that exterior noise/distraction problem.
Either way, I see the voice activation stuff for more at home use, from the reasons I outlined above. I know I would use it, walk through the room "computer, check the weather for me..computer, read my
If any of even the little ones are targeted on existing nuclear facilities you would have a downwind chernobyl effect, a bad one most likely. That's one of the things about the possible upcoming iranian fun - n - games that we will be facing. They will *specificially* target existing nuclear research and production facilities.
Just an old big truck battery or a trolling motor battery. You can get a female plug adapter for them that have 1-4 outlets (5-20 dollas), then you'll be able to plug some stuff in when your grid juice goes south, like in a storm. I keep two truck batteries here in the house just for that purpose, use them all the time in storm season. Power goes out, 60 seconds later I have a 12 volt TV and flourescent light going, a little more than that and an old laptop is up and on the net with the car adapter. You can always add solar later but you can get going with 12 volt stuff now with less than a hundred dollars, that's one good storage batt and the female plugs.
You can take global climate change completely out of the picture and it *still* is a good idea to look for alternatives to petroleum. Oner, economics. The way it is set up now, this industry sucks a huge amount of cash out of the world and puts it into the hands of relatively few people, and at least in the USA, is a big factor in balance of trade and our ...strange...foreign policy decisions. We need to break the back of that economic dependence and get the cash out to different people. That's my opinion on it anyway. I am rather tired of black suited insane megalomaniacs and fundy mullahs and others of that oil soaked political ilk having their hands on extra billions and billions to play around with, because they just get into..mischief..with it. There's a big tie in with petroleum and the more heinous parts of the military industrial complex and the wars for profits that are always breaking out. One of the ways we can help reduce that is to stop giving them cash for petroleum, and to lessen our dependence on petroleum. I am for a mass decentralization of energy sources basically, using the huge variety of alternatives that we have developed already and that look to be on the horizon.
The next is more immediate and long lasting. The cities keep people soaking 24/7/365 in saturated poison. Petroleum burns dirty, really filthy, I don't care which engine you are talking about, and the obvious health detriments are there to *see* because you can see how dirty the air is, let alone measuring it with instruments. When the air gets chunky styled in a variery of designer colors and fragrances, you know it falls into the "not good for you" category.
What? All I was doing was pointing out originally that there was at least one verified advanced carburetor system that got much better than normal mileage. And was very open about the possibly why's why it wasn't used much. there was another one way way back as well, the Pogue carburetor. Carbs in general have poblems that have been overcome with fuel injection, smokey's came just hen the industry was going to fuel injection, which gives somewhat better mileage and allows a lot better timed delivery. They do the fuel part for vehicles with emissions in mind as well. Smokey was clear his needed expensive lubrication and more advanced engineering and materials, that is primarily the reason they didn't go to anything like that, but that doesn't negate the fact that he did build it, and it did work and at the time was an amazing difference with what was currently out there. As to any high level conspiracies or whatnot, you get what you see, especially with the detroit car bosses, behind the curve a lot compared to the japanese and european car companies because gasoline remained so cheap in the US most likely. That's a guess on my part. US drivers wanted huge engines, bg sound, out of the hole performance and didn't care to mych untilrecently about mileage except for a brief period after the OPEC embargo. We had european and japanese cars hit with much better mileage and designs way before it was common in detroit, fuel injection, overhead cams, turbocharging, etc. In the more modern era we have seen it with stratified charge and hybrids, etc. Now that basically all the car companies are global and own each other, I don't think you can even classify them as being all that regional or national. I do think though you might be seeing a resurgence of the smaller companies as more advanced features are developed. It seems to go in cycles like most others-way way back we had a lot more companies, then consolidation, now we are seeing the very small companies really coming out with some interesting stuff, like AC propulsion with the two stage hybrid concept (the detachable ICE part) or the tesla car. That there will be a much bigger variety of types of cars though is indisputable now, we will be getting a lot more options, flex fuel, more turbo diesels, etc. Honda just announced they will be pushing a much cleaner diesel starting next year IIRC, and a bt more battery design tweaking and we will be seeing comercial plug in hybrids, which really opens up some good mileage areas tat still maintain "performance" and range.
To summarize, there were good mileage carbs that didn't make it into mainstream use, why they weren't adopted is something of a red herring, *aspects* to improved designs get adopted and modified and morphed around. We are seeing a resurgence of variable valve timing now, because altough the concept was sound way back, they couldn't pull it off with reliability, now they can. and etc.
It's very practical and the folks who ever get it working *very* well will be rewarded. Want to know why? Think baby boomer generation, older people, disposable income, reaching retirement or comfortable in established jobs-and age related problems like arthritis and a lot of vision problems as well. Stiff fingers or outright pain and loss of function hits a large segment of the population as you get older, and a lot of computing action is going on now in homes. Ya, maybe not practical in cubes yet so much, but seeing as how the telephone has been in offices for generations now and it hasn't stopped business yet with that yakking, I am not seeing vocal user interface as any big problem. Make the cube walls a little higher and thicker and use better sound absorbtion materials and that might help with the noise travelling aspect.
nice idea really and would be quite the local spectacle. Expensive as in a lot of smashed equipment, but save it for homecoming or something and it would showcase nerd power.
..if I had to make a guess, it would have to be madmax, because of resource depletion and now the billions of people who have an inkling and a taste of what is considered a normal technologically advanced lifestyle. The resources simply don't exist to have all the people on the planet at that same level, say, as western europe or the US/Canada. Probably going to cause problems and more than a bit of social strife, etc in the future.
hadn't heard about the iPod but wouldn't surprise me at all. Some of that loot was wasted, some..how can you make folks happy when everything they owned got destroyed and they are sitting in a katrina/fema camp someplace? From what I recall as to cash they got a two grand check/debit card thing. Oh well, once it was issued, que sera sera how they spent the money. I don't know really, other than there is huge waste there, then stuff that needs fixin is going begging. I imagine crack beer and hookers got bought, along with mundane stuff like groceries and food and some new clothes, humans have a range of interests it appears....
As to hard drives and etc, I am stil on an 8 gig drive, works fine for me. My backup is under 2 gigs, 1.6 I believe. I am king of the cheap! I guess if I needed to store and work on a lot of large image files I would need a larger drive, but I don't, so I don't have one. I primarily use fedora, knoppix or the austrumi live disk, they all work on my rigs. I use my computer as a decent quality adjustable internet appliance, that's about it, and for those purposes you don't need much.
Not for me they aren't, not any more. I get a new computer for a hundred bucks now and slap linux on it. A new mobo and a better chip, that's it, reuse the ram and drives and case, etc. Apple has made x-thousands off of me, that's cool. MS has made some from me, apple has more, now it is time to move on. I don't need the latest and greatest,I'm not a gamer or run intensive 3-d time space warp modelling or whatever, and staying a generation or so back-a hundred dollars every other year does it.
Besides the societal cost of closed source-it took me some years to bingo to FOSS, really, had no clue whatsoever, then I started reading about it, then got a copy and tried, then read some more and the light went on. I am a country geek, FOSS is the community barn raising deal from our past. The concept worked then, it works now.
You have personal cost, then societal cost. I don't like every buck of my taxes goes out, some amount of that goes to fund closed source locked in software just so bureaucrats can type reports about my taxes and..endless loop there. They can at least drop the cost of computing normal stuff way way down. And businesses, when I go shopping around town? How much of an MS premium am I paying for everything I buy? And I don't like it when I stop into the public library (more taxes, in this case local plus state) and their "professionally run" networked windows computers all have spyware ad/"tool"bars on them-the only thing that changes is which set of spyware trojans they get infected with at various times. And no, they won't let you run a knoppix disk for-get this- "security" purposes! HAHAHAHA! For real, got told that. And apple-well, hopefully my government isn't buying too many ipods so my taxes aren't going to that, and their hardware and software computer model-although effective and I used to use it-is still primarily expensive vendor lockin, you are stuck at a minimum with their brand only mobo (can you get one of their x86 boards seperately even?),and they just charge too much, it just isn't worth it. What is it, $ 600for the mini and up and it isn't upgradeable? I have a mini itx box as my backup to my reglar tower, cost me a total of 105 dollars, works swell, thanks. And a grand or so for any tower and up from apple? Nope, don't need that anymore, those days are over. I've dropped enough on expensive hardware the last 20 years, enough's enough.
Nope, I am in the FOSS camp now because it just makes too much sense long term. Open hardware and open software as much as possible. I got other things to do than make literal billionaires even richer. They got enough loot.
Software is the tool to go do real stuff with, the cheaper/better/faster we ALL get good tools, open tools, tools that can be modded, swapped, tweaked and used howerver anyone sees fit the better off society will be. It's that simple to me. Keeping the tools expensive and their functions half secret and forcing you to jump through hoops to even use the damn things doesn't build stuff. And society is a group of hoo-mannz who build stuff mostly.
In ye olden days the king and church made it illegal for the peasants to even *read*, they were denied even that "intellectual property" tool, kept it expensive and closed source and you had to jump through hoops to get access, pay a lot, and kiss some pompous rich fool's ass to get down with a tool that beneficial.
Well, screw that noise, middle ages or the 21st century.