Corrected quote - still apropos: "You've left out a Hungadunga. You left out the main one, too."
Still apropos - perhaps even more so than it was in the original skit, as the amperstand that was left out was the one necessary for the parallel functionality intended, while the one that was present just makes the difference between getting your shell back after you kill mplayer versus getting it right away. B-)
I thought early thinkpads did this, too. Not just to be a flat display surface, but so they could have the light source removed and sit as a "foil" on an overhead projector - in the days before video projectors were common in conference rooms.
Don't recall if this was before or after powerpoint.
I'm tired of sending invoices and dealing with companies who tell you that your photo wasn't worth the $300 you charge and instead send you $50 thinking that it will clear up the matter.
What fools.
By paying the $50 they've admitted they know they owe you SOMETHING.
Are you kidding? ACTA's going to harmonise everything so closely to the US that they'll be able to prosecute anyone.
Only among countries that both sign and implement it.
If there's big bucks to be made by providing a safe haven, some small and possibly impoverished country will likely do so - either explicitly or by giving lip service while doing little to enforce.
By the way: Price signals do a VERY good job of encoding human values and comparing costs and benefits. These values include environmental quality and damage, to the extent that it affects humans and things humans value (which, these days, is everything). (And attempts to dump costs on others involuntarily have been, if anything, OVER-mapped by regulations and cooperative social conventions - which predate regulation by centuries.)
So you can usually figure out the social fallout by looking at price. This has two useful effects: It leads people to make "socially responsible" decisions by simply looking out for their own self-interest, without having to do enormous research (and sort out the host of bogus claims they don't have the time and tools to test). And a high cost for a new social prescription raises an alarm, indicating that the reasoning behind it may be overlooking something major.
The initial rise of the SUV in "inappropriate services" was mostly an unintended consequence of the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards - a law intended to reduce fuel consumption. This killed the station wagon. So people with kids to haul, shopping to do at a distance, etc. had to move up to something they COULD get that would do the job.
Candidate station-wagon replacements: Vans (primarily a commercial vehicle), SUVs, and trucks. (For the CAFE standard an SUV was a "truck" - because of its uses for ranching and the like.) So they switched to SUVs (mainly for smaller families) and passenger-remodeled vans (mainly for larger). And the savings from the small commuter cars (which would have been adopted anyhow) were offset by the extra fuel consumption of the upgraded passenger/cargo/etc.
Since then many "SUV" models have been redesigned, trading away off-road capability for on-road comfort and style. And with their increased popularity some activists have staged public relations attacks on them and attempted to reclassify them as "cars" (totally missing the continued need for them in their old niches - such as raising food, and fighting fires in wilderness areas).
If the reclassification were to be successful the result would likely be a similar death of the SUV. At which point people would switch to the NEXT vehicle up that would do their job: Vans, crew-cab pickup trucks, etc. And still more fuel consumption. Iterate a bit and you might move them first to big box trucks and small school buses, then large buses and class-A RVs, and maybe eventually a "suburban semi". B-)
You will notice that they are, respectively, a REAL SUV and a REAL 4x4 pickup truck - not the "Mall Terrain Vehicles" built for the urban market after SUVs caught on.
They are the most wasteful and dangerous vehicles on the road; more people die in SUVs per passenger mile than in any other type of vehicle.
Because a lot of people get them for the wrong reasons and/or don't learn how to drive them. SUVs are small wheelbase and high center of gravity because they need high clearance to avoid getting stuck (high-centered) or damaged (by rocks and the like) in bad-road or off-road conditions, narrow profile to fit through small spaces between obstructions, and short turning radius to negotiate tight turns. This means they are (unavoidably) easier to roll if the driver attempts a tight turn at high speed.
I assume you live way out in the sticks and have a dirt road leading to your house?
Yes. We also go offroad or through unmaintained areas - a lot.
I assume you have an f-150 because you own a construction company (nobody else needs one)
That is VERY judgmental. Also wrong. (For starters: You don't do any kind of ranching without a pickup truck - especially in remote or rough country.) There are a LOT of uses for an F-150 (which is the shortest of the F-x50 line.)
Besides: The mule refuses to get into the back seat of a Prius. B-)... but since you have that, why have the Cherokee? Why not something safer and less wasteful?
See above. And for starters there are two of us and we each need a vehicle.
The F-150 is for towing heavy loads both on and off road. (It has a towing capacity of 11,000 lb in the configuration I purchased. The Cherokee can tow less than half that and would take too much wear trying.) But it is too long and wide for some of the trails we negotiate. Also the Cherokee (NOT a Grand, by the way) predates the F-150 by a bunch. The F-150 was selected as a replacement for the previous tow vehicle, which was retired, along with the previous commuter vehicle, due to age and wearout.
(At the moment it also gets used for commuting, because even with the rotten gas mileage it is better than buying a THIRD vehicle at this time. That's both for the pocket book and the environment: Compare the extra fuel burned to what's needed to make another vehicle. This one should last until I retire. But in a few years the (remaining) auto companies MAY get their act together on a plug-in hybrid that can handle my driving cycle - including storage sufficient to recover power from an 8,000 foot altitude drop to use when crossing CA's central valley. Then I may get one of those and recharge it from a windmill. B-) )
I suppose that's why industries that care about their professional image never use brown for anything.
Explain UPS then?
The UPS trucks are painted "Pullman Brown". This is a paint color originally selected by the company that made the Pullman railroad cars.
It was selected after considerable research: It is the color that can get the most road dirt on it before it LOOKS dirty. This lets them use a long interval between washings, saving money on cleaning while still having equipment that looks decent. When you have a large number of rail cars - or delivery trucks - it costs a LOT to keep them clean-looking. So savings on cleaning adds up fast.
(When my wife or I purchase an offroad vehicle we try to find one with a paint color close to Pullman Brown, for the same reason. My wife's Cheroke is such a color - though a tad redish. My Ford F-150 4x4 is white - which {surprisingly} also can go a long time without washing or looking bad in the kind of road and offroad dust it encounters - though mud looks bad right away and needs a hose-down. Shades of FedEx - literally.)
Tax data is separate from criminal investigative data because access to tax information without a VERY hard-to-get warrant is prohibited.
Similarly, gun transfer information is supposed to be destroyed after a small amount of time to prevent compilation of a database for confiscation - either by a runaway government or an invading power trying to disarm a potential resistance movement. (Also: It's tax information because the only way they could get federal gun bans and tracking passed back when congress and the courts paid more than lip service to the constitution was to disguise it as a tax. That's why BATF is part of treasury.)
Many other classes of information are confidential and access restricted to small groups of people with a particular need to know. Examples: Medical information. Competitive bidding information. Company secrets disclosed to regulators. I could go on.
Keeping this information restricted to the personnel of the agency with the need-to-know is easier if it's in the agency's own I.T. operation. Then other agencies don't have automatic access to it - and interdepartmental rivalry works to keep the information bottled up. "Consolidate the IT operations" and you have a much larger I.T. staff with back-channel access, while need-to-know compartmentalization is a bolt-on to the unified database, with enormous potential for failure or bypassing (if it's implemented at all).
So consolidating the IT operations is a grand opportunity for both foulups leaking data outside their authorized compartmentalization and the clandestine creation of a "Total Information Awareness" Big-Brother superstate.
Understanding complex issue X can increase our ability to cure cancer and HIV, thereby making X-research eligible for the ocean of cancer-related research funding./Mister Cynical
The claim is that understanding THIS is a significant component of understanding the behavior of the molecular machinery of which cells, cancers, and anything that can affect them are composed.
If that's correct, making it eligible for such funding may be appropriate.
Sometimes self-interest and truth point in the same direction.
Simple as it might seem, water is one of the most complex fluids, because of the long range order created by hydrogen bonds.
Hear hear.
Back in the '60s when I was taking chemistry there was much talk about how @$^%ing complex the behavior of water was, how major breakthroughs were needed to really understand it, how it affected so many other things in chemistry, how you have to understand not just the individual molecules but the interactions of many of them with each other and other molecules, yadda yadda. Expectation was that really understanding water would occur late in the reduction of chemistry to something that could be (near-)fully modeled and predicted.
Then supercomputers came along and we started to get good solutions for a lot of stuff. Complex mechanical loading. Nuclear and subatomic physics. The utterly anti-intuitive science of aerodynamics. Brute-force correct solutions to video synthesis replacing cute tricks that dripped with artifacts. Weather prediction (pushing out near the newly-understood chaos limit of the input measurements). Then they were surpassed by more powerful supercomputers formed of networks of machines for parallelizable tasks. Even digital cryptanalysis and protein folding began to be tractable.
But it is only now, as cheap supercomputing capability is in the hands of individuals (in the forms of graphic processing units that became cheap commodities due to their utility for computer gaming), that we're starting to see breakthroughs in understanding the behavior of water.
What I believe the IIPA is saying that mandates to use open source without considering other alternatives is something they see as a barrier to market access...
Governments, like any other organization running an IT operation, get to make their own policies on what qualifications they require of their external vendors. (Moreso than most: If their laws interfere with their policy choices they're in a position to change the laws. B-) )
Mandating open source software for their own internal operations doesn't block commercial competitors from selling to the governments in question. It only blocks them from selling CLOSED SOURCE SOFTWARE. They're welcome to sell as much open source software and associated service and customization contracts as they can win the bids on. B-)
Meanwhile there are issues other than cost involved with software applications used by governments.
Travel trailers (and some remote sites where grid power is not practical) tend to have several appliances powered by propane being burned to produce heat: Refrigerator, furnace, and water heater are typical.
But they have a real problem coming up with electrical power - to control these appliances and for other loads - lighting, electronics, etc. They resort to deep-cycle lead-acid batteries (charged from line power or the vehicle when being towed) or a propane-powered engine with a generator. For considerably more bux they can have solar panels and charge controllers mounted to run them on extended stays at remote sites - IF they're sunny.
Seems to me that replacing the burner in one or more of these appliances with a small model of one of these devices and using the waste heat for the original heating job could provide plenty of charging power "for free". The fuel's energy still ends up mostly as waste heat which isn't "waste" for the original appliance. The fuel burns hotter an the fuel cell uses the drop across the first several hundred degrees to make juice, after which the appliance (which didn't need the heat at such a high temperature) uses the rest. The fuel consumption would be only slightly more than the original appliance, rather than the much greater consumption of the appliance plus a separate generator.
This reminds me of The Stalker's Home Page - which Glen Roberts put up as a warning about the many places that personal information is published on the web. It lists a large number of personal-information resources available publicly on the web.
Glen's a privacy advocate. (Early on he filed a freedom of information request on the CIA asking for their manual of procedures for responding to freedom of information act requests. B-) ) The page title is a shocker to attract attention to the risks of these databases - which he wants to go away.
I'm not saying he's right, but it does highlight something interesting about finding work as an ex-con.
His first conviction was for criminally violating the trust of his employer and working in direct contravention to his employer's interests and mission. His skills are such that to be employed effectively he must be trusted.
Oops!
He did it to himself. No employment for him. (He'd have been lucky to find burgers to flip.)
So then he starts a business. High corporate positions may have been barred to him by his first conviction, but a lot of smaller stuff still was open. Yet what does he chose? Cybercrime.
Oops!
When he finally gets out from THIS one he'll be watched so closely that even organized crime is unlikely to work with him.
I thought it would be a smart idea to change out the electrolyte instead of the whole battery, but it wasn't actually all that smart either.
Look at Vanadium Redox batteries - where the battery is essentially a fuel cell sized for the power and would stay with the car, while the electrolyte is pumped through it from/to separate storage and the tankage is sized for the energy capacity.
Swapping electrolyte on such a system would be quite practical. (And you could be credited for the state-of-charge of the partially depleted electrolyte you traded in.)
Because a cellphone is a portable communications device and a modern one has major compute power and storage, thanks to decades of Moore's Law. Adding a translation application to such a platform - even if an only moderately competent one - is a natural fit and a potentially major benefit to the user at negligible cost to the provider.
... a partially telepathic device, rather than a pure computer program? (And invented by Spock's mother - a scientist who ended up marrying a high-ranking (and of course telepathic) Vulcan she encountered during her research?)
I THINK that was cannon rather than fan fiction...
Also... calling them Indians is so last century. These days thay are called Native Americans or Indigenous people within the United States.
According to my wife (part American Indian and raised on a different tribe's reservation): The bulk of the American Indians (in her estimation) prefer "American Indian" to "Native American". (Exceptions being mostly a couple plains tribes and some individuals from all over who went to universities and got involved in political movements.) Two main reasons given:
1) It's a running gag on how the stupid Europeans still haven't figured out that Columbus was almost half a planet away from where he thought he was.
2) Anyone born in the USofA (commonly referred to by the rest of the world as "Americans") is a "Native American", regardless of percentage of tribal ancestry (including zero), culture, or state of tribal adoption. So using that term to refer to American Indians is not just politically-motivated claptrap but a misuse of the language.
The US does not allow for that. The banks don't link into other banking systems seamlessly.
Sure they do. Through the Automated Clearing House (ACH) network, also used for direct deposits, etc. Businesses can initiate Direct Debits on your account (with your permission). It's equivalent to a check - including the low level of transaction fees (which is why it is practical to be used for small payments).
A downside is that you have to be a big operation and do your transactions in a batch. So it's great for something like a utility company or large mailorder house. But for the little guy you have to get your bank to give you such access. Why should they do that, when they have an equivalent service where they charge you two-digit dollar amounts per transaction?
(Not sure whether this is available to businesses outside the US and with no US presence, though.)
To be honest I think that perception was held by a lot fewer people than you're making out here, unless you're talking about those who would have been doing the persecution back in Europe (WASPs).
I was referring just to the perception in much of the west around the time of the transcontinental railroad construction. (Which I don't share, by the way.;-) )
You're talking about a lot of other history. This was a different round of immigration.
Post-European-settlement North American has a lot of years of history. There was plenty of time for the perception of people from various foreign lands to go through several changes. Since Blazing Saddles was set in a period when a particularly strong and low stereotype of the Irish was prevalent in the west, and the stereotype is largely forgotten now outside the west, it gave Mel Brooks an opportunity for some particularly subtle wit do to the a second-level in-joke.
How else does an Irishman become Father of the United States Navy?
I take it you're referring to John Barry, rather than, say, John Paul Jones, John Adams, George Washington, or Benjamin Franklin. B-) Yes, "Saucy Jack" has a strong claim to that title.
While we're at it, the highest ranking casualty at the (two-day) battle of Bunker Hill was an "Ulster Scott", i.e. an Irishman of Scottish descent.
artificial life, with serial numbers on DNA, and a pre-programmed lifespan... where did DARPA replicate that idea from, and when can I get a basic pleasure model?
Looks like they were reading Mark Stanley's excellent webcomic "Freefall".
It examines these issues in detail, with considerable humor.
Slashdot Mirror
Corrected quote - still apropos: "You've left out a Hungadunga. You left out the main one, too."
Still apropos - perhaps even more so than it was in the original skit, as the amperstand that was left out was the one necessary for the parallel functionality intended, while the one that was present just makes the difference between getting your shell back after you kill mplayer versus getting it right away. B-)
Tivo was granted a patent for "cat /dev/video0 > tivo-sucks.mpg; mplayer tivo-sucks.mpg &".
To quote Groucho Marks: "You missed a Hungadunga. And the most important one, too." B-)
Tivo was granted a patent for "cat /dev/video0 > tivo-sucks.mpg&; mplayer tivo-sucks.mpg &".
(And have I just added "Hungadunga" as hacker jargon for "amperstand"? If so: You saw it here first!)
Freesat interface: http://www.hauppauge.co.uk/site/products/data_novahds2.html
But does it run (with) linux?
I thought early thinkpads did this, too. Not just to be a flat display surface, but so they could have the light source removed and sit as a "foil" on an overhead projector - in the days before video projectors were common in conference rooms.
Don't recall if this was before or after powerpoint.
I'm tired of sending invoices and dealing with companies who tell you that your photo wasn't worth the $300 you charge and instead send you $50 thinking that it will clear up the matter.
What fools.
By paying the $50 they've admitted they know they owe you SOMETHING.
Are you kidding? ACTA's going to harmonise everything so closely to the US that they'll be able to prosecute anyone.
Only among countries that both sign and implement it.
If there's big bucks to be made by providing a safe haven, some small and possibly impoverished country will likely do so - either explicitly or by giving lip service while doing little to enforce.
(Example: Nigeria and the 419 con men.)
No problem.
By the way: Price signals do a VERY good job of encoding human values and comparing costs and benefits. These values include environmental quality and damage, to the extent that it affects humans and things humans value (which, these days, is everything). (And attempts to dump costs on others involuntarily have been, if anything, OVER-mapped by regulations and cooperative social conventions - which predate regulation by centuries.)
So you can usually figure out the social fallout by looking at price. This has two useful effects: It leads people to make "socially responsible" decisions by simply looking out for their own self-interest, without having to do enormous research (and sort out the host of bogus claims they don't have the time and tools to test). And a high cost for a new social prescription raises an alarm, indicating that the reasoning behind it may be overlooking something major.
The initial rise of the SUV in "inappropriate services" was mostly an unintended consequence of the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards - a law intended to reduce fuel consumption. This killed the station wagon. So people with kids to haul, shopping to do at a distance, etc. had to move up to something they COULD get that would do the job.
Candidate station-wagon replacements: Vans (primarily a commercial vehicle), SUVs, and trucks. (For the CAFE standard an SUV was a "truck" - because of its uses for ranching and the like.) So they switched to SUVs (mainly for smaller families) and passenger-remodeled vans (mainly for larger). And the savings from the small commuter cars (which would have been adopted anyhow) were offset by the extra fuel consumption of the upgraded passenger/cargo/etc.
Since then many "SUV" models have been redesigned, trading away off-road capability for on-road comfort and style. And with their increased popularity some activists have staged public relations attacks on them and attempted to reclassify them as "cars" (totally missing the continued need for them in their old niches - such as raising food, and fighting fires in wilderness areas).
If the reclassification were to be successful the result would likely be a similar death of the SUV. At which point people would switch to the NEXT vehicle up that would do their job: Vans, crew-cab pickup trucks, etc. And still more fuel consumption. Iterate a bit and you might move them first to big box trucks and small school buses, then large buses and class-A RVs, and maybe eventually a "suburban semi". B-)
I'm curious, why do you have two SUVs?
You will notice that they are, respectively, a REAL SUV and a REAL 4x4 pickup truck - not the "Mall Terrain Vehicles" built for the urban market after SUVs caught on.
They are the most wasteful and dangerous vehicles on the road; more people die in SUVs per passenger mile than in any other type of vehicle.
Because a lot of people get them for the wrong reasons and/or don't learn how to drive them. SUVs are small wheelbase and high center of gravity because they need high clearance to avoid getting stuck (high-centered) or damaged (by rocks and the like) in bad-road or off-road conditions, narrow profile to fit through small spaces between obstructions, and short turning radius to negotiate tight turns. This means they are (unavoidably) easier to roll if the driver attempts a tight turn at high speed.
I assume you live way out in the sticks and have a dirt road leading to your house?
Yes. We also go offroad or through unmaintained areas - a lot.
I assume you have an f-150 because you own a construction company (nobody else needs one)
That is VERY judgmental. Also wrong. (For starters: You don't do any kind of ranching without a pickup truck - especially in remote or rough country.) There are a LOT of uses for an F-150 (which is the shortest of the F-x50 line.)
Besides: The mule refuses to get into the back seat of a Prius. B-) ... but since you have that, why have the Cherokee? Why not something safer and less wasteful?
See above. And for starters there are two of us and we each need a vehicle.
The F-150 is for towing heavy loads both on and off road. (It has a towing capacity of 11,000 lb in the configuration I purchased. The Cherokee can tow less than half that and would take too much wear trying.) But it is too long and wide for some of the trails we negotiate. Also the Cherokee (NOT a Grand, by the way) predates the F-150 by a bunch. The F-150 was selected as a replacement for the previous tow vehicle, which was retired, along with the previous commuter vehicle, due to age and wearout.
(At the moment it also gets used for commuting, because even with the rotten gas mileage it is better than buying a THIRD vehicle at this time. That's both for the pocket book and the environment: Compare the extra fuel burned to what's needed to make another vehicle. This one should last until I retire. But in a few years the (remaining) auto companies MAY get their act together on a plug-in hybrid that can handle my driving cycle - including storage sufficient to recover power from an 8,000 foot altitude drop to use when crossing CA's central valley. Then I may get one of those and recharge it from a windmill. B-) )
The UPS trucks are painted "Pullman Brown". This is a paint color originally selected by the company that made the Pullman railroad cars.
It was selected after considerable research: It is the color that can get the most road dirt on it before it LOOKS dirty. This lets them use a long interval between washings, saving money on cleaning while still having equipment that looks decent. When you have a large number of rail cars - or delivery trucks - it costs a LOT to keep them clean-looking. So savings on cleaning adds up fast.
(When my wife or I purchase an offroad vehicle we try to find one with a paint color close to Pullman Brown, for the same reason. My wife's Cheroke is such a color - though a tad redish. My Ford F-150 4x4 is white - which {surprisingly} also can go a long time without washing or looking bad in the kind of road and offroad dust it encounters - though mud looks bad right away and needs a hose-down. Shades of FedEx - literally.)
Some separations are for a REASON.
For instance:
Tax data is separate from criminal investigative data because access to tax information without a VERY hard-to-get warrant is prohibited.
Similarly, gun transfer information is supposed to be destroyed after a small amount of time to prevent compilation of a database for confiscation - either by a runaway government or an invading power trying to disarm a potential resistance movement. (Also: It's tax information because the only way they could get federal gun bans and tracking passed back when congress and the courts paid more than lip service to the constitution was to disguise it as a tax. That's why BATF is part of treasury.)
Many other classes of information are confidential and access restricted to small groups of people with a particular need to know. Examples: Medical information. Competitive bidding information. Company secrets disclosed to regulators. I could go on.
Keeping this information restricted to the personnel of the agency with the need-to-know is easier if it's in the agency's own I.T. operation. Then other agencies don't have automatic access to it - and interdepartmental rivalry works to keep the information bottled up. "Consolidate the IT operations" and you have a much larger I.T. staff with back-channel access, while need-to-know compartmentalization is a bolt-on to the unified database, with enormous potential for failure or bypassing (if it's implemented at all).
So consolidating the IT operations is a grand opportunity for both foulups leaking data outside their authorized compartmentalization and the clandestine creation of a "Total Information Awareness" Big-Brother superstate.
Understanding complex issue X can increase our ability to cure cancer and HIV, thereby making X-research eligible for the ocean of cancer-related research funding. /Mister Cynical
The claim is that understanding THIS is a significant component of understanding the behavior of the molecular machinery of which cells, cancers, and anything that can affect them are composed.
If that's correct, making it eligible for such funding may be appropriate.
Sometimes self-interest and truth point in the same direction.
Simple as it might seem, water is one of the most complex fluids, because of the long range order created by hydrogen bonds.
Hear hear.
Back in the '60s when I was taking chemistry there was much talk about how @$^%ing complex the behavior of water was, how major breakthroughs were needed to really understand it, how it affected so many other things in chemistry, how you have to understand not just the individual molecules but the interactions of many of them with each other and other molecules, yadda yadda. Expectation was that really understanding water would occur late in the reduction of chemistry to something that could be (near-)fully modeled and predicted.
Then supercomputers came along and we started to get good solutions for a lot of stuff. Complex mechanical loading. Nuclear and subatomic physics. The utterly anti-intuitive science of aerodynamics. Brute-force correct solutions to video synthesis replacing cute tricks that dripped with artifacts. Weather prediction (pushing out near the newly-understood chaos limit of the input measurements). Then they were surpassed by more powerful supercomputers formed of networks of machines for parallelizable tasks. Even digital cryptanalysis and protein folding began to be tractable.
But it is only now, as cheap supercomputing capability is in the hands of individuals (in the forms of graphic processing units that became cheap commodities due to their utility for computer gaming), that we're starting to see breakthroughs in understanding the behavior of water.
Sounds like it's right on track.
That's why counterfeiting is the way to go. You don't have to employ violence, you just print your own money.
But to be successful at it AND avoid having the Secret Service come down on you, you need to do it by owning a Federal Reserve Bank.
What I believe the IIPA is saying that mandates to use open source without considering other alternatives is something they see as a barrier to market access ...
Governments, like any other organization running an IT operation, get to make their own policies on what qualifications they require of their external vendors. (Moreso than most: If their laws interfere with their policy choices they're in a position to change the laws. B-) )
Mandating open source software for their own internal operations doesn't block commercial competitors from selling to the governments in question. It only blocks them from selling CLOSED SOURCE SOFTWARE. They're welcome to sell as much open source software and associated service and customization contracts as they can win the bids on. B-)
Meanwhile there are issues other than cost involved with software applications used by governments.
Travel trailers (and some remote sites where grid power is not practical) tend to have several appliances powered by propane being burned to produce heat: Refrigerator, furnace, and water heater are typical.
But they have a real problem coming up with electrical power - to control these appliances and for other loads - lighting, electronics, etc. They resort to deep-cycle lead-acid batteries (charged from line power or the vehicle when being towed) or a propane-powered engine with a generator. For considerably more bux they can have solar panels and charge controllers mounted to run them on extended stays at remote sites - IF they're sunny.
Seems to me that replacing the burner in one or more of these appliances with a small model of one of these devices and using the waste heat for the original heating job could provide plenty of charging power "for free". The fuel's energy still ends up mostly as waste heat which isn't "waste" for the original appliance. The fuel burns hotter an the fuel cell uses the drop across the first several hundred degrees to make juice, after which the appliance (which didn't need the heat at such a high temperature) uses the rest. The fuel consumption would be only slightly more than the original appliance, rather than the much greater consumption of the appliance plus a separate generator.
This reminds me of The Stalker's Home Page - which Glen Roberts put up as a warning about the many places that personal information is published on the web. It lists a large number of personal-information resources available publicly on the web.
Glen's a privacy advocate. (Early on he filed a freedom of information request on the CIA asking for their manual of procedures for responding to freedom of information act requests. B-) ) The page title is a shocker to attract attention to the risks of these databases - which he wants to go away.
I'm not saying he's right, but it does highlight something interesting about finding work as an ex-con.
His first conviction was for criminally violating the trust of his employer and working in direct contravention to his employer's interests and mission. His skills are such that to be employed effectively he must be trusted.
Oops!
He did it to himself. No employment for him. (He'd have been lucky to find burgers to flip.)
So then he starts a business. High corporate positions may have been barred to him by his first conviction, but a lot of smaller stuff still was open. Yet what does he chose? Cybercrime.
Oops!
When he finally gets out from THIS one he'll be watched so closely that even organized crime is unlikely to work with him.
Next: Internet is considered witchcraft, and all of those in contact with it will need to be burned into ashes!
I hear the typical penalty was actually hanging.
I thought it would be a smart idea to change out the electrolyte instead of the whole battery, but it wasn't actually all that smart either.
Look at Vanadium Redox batteries - where the battery is essentially a fuel cell sized for the power and would stay with the car, while the electrolyte is pumped through it from/to separate storage and the tankage is sized for the energy capacity.
Swapping electrolyte on such a system would be quite practical. (And you could be credited for the state-of-charge of the partially depleted electrolyte you traded in.)
Why do it on a cellphone on a large scale?
Because a cellphone is a portable communications device and a modern one has major compute power and storage, thanks to decades of Moore's Law. Adding a translation application to such a platform - even if an only moderately competent one - is a natural fit and a potentially major benefit to the user at negligible cost to the provider.
... a partially telepathic device, rather than a pure computer program? (And invented by Spock's mother - a scientist who ended up marrying a high-ranking (and of course telepathic) Vulcan she encountered during her research?)
I THINK that was cannon rather than fan fiction...
Also... calling them Indians is so last century. These days thay are called Native Americans or Indigenous people within the United States.
According to my wife (part American Indian and raised on a different tribe's reservation): The bulk of the American Indians (in her estimation) prefer "American Indian" to "Native American". (Exceptions being mostly a couple plains tribes and some individuals from all over who went to universities and got involved in political movements.) Two main reasons given:
1) It's a running gag on how the stupid Europeans still haven't figured out that Columbus was almost half a planet away from where he thought he was.
2) Anyone born in the USofA (commonly referred to by the rest of the world as "Americans") is a "Native American", regardless of percentage of tribal ancestry (including zero), culture, or state of tribal adoption. So using that term to refer to American Indians is not just politically-motivated claptrap but a misuse of the language.
The US does not allow for that. The banks don't link into other banking systems seamlessly.
Sure they do. Through the Automated Clearing House (ACH) network, also used for direct deposits, etc. Businesses can initiate Direct Debits on your account (with your permission). It's equivalent to a check - including the low level of transaction fees (which is why it is practical to be used for small payments).
A downside is that you have to be a big operation and do your transactions in a batch. So it's great for something like a utility company or large mailorder house. But for the little guy you have to get your bank to give you such access. Why should they do that, when they have an equivalent service where they charge you two-digit dollar amounts per transaction?
(Not sure whether this is available to businesses outside the US and with no US presence, though.)
[Bunch of historical stuff delayed until below.]
To be honest I think that perception was held by a lot fewer people than you're making out here, unless you're talking about those who would have been doing the persecution back in Europe (WASPs).
I was referring just to the perception in much of the west around the time of the transcontinental railroad construction. (Which I don't share, by the way. ;-) )
You're talking about a lot of other history. This was a different round of immigration.
Post-European-settlement North American has a lot of years of history. There was plenty of time for the perception of people from various foreign lands to go through several changes. Since Blazing Saddles was set in a period when a particularly strong and low stereotype of the Irish was prevalent in the west, and the stereotype is largely forgotten now outside the west, it gave Mel Brooks an opportunity for some particularly subtle wit do to the a second-level in-joke.
How else does an Irishman become Father of the United States Navy?
I take it you're referring to John Barry, rather than, say, John Paul Jones, John Adams, George Washington, or Benjamin Franklin. B-) Yes, "Saucy Jack" has a strong claim to that title.
While we're at it, the highest ranking casualty at the (two-day) battle of Bunker Hill was an "Ulster Scott", i.e. an Irishman of Scottish descent.
artificial life, with serial numbers on DNA, and a pre-programmed lifespan... where did DARPA replicate that idea from, and when can I get a basic pleasure model?
Looks like they were reading Mark Stanley's excellent webcomic "Freefall".
It examines these issues in detail, with considerable humor.