From reading the article, this sounds like only a proposal--not an invention.
There's no working prototype, and though the principles would seem to be sound, it's not even immediately known if one can be possibly made--much less mass-produced for any reasonable costs.
~
I'd agree that doing it yourself would be a lot cheaper (as well as cure the problem of all that annoying free time you have) but I also agree that you need to find out what you can do yourself first--without a permit, and that doesn't require a licensed professional to do. ....
And carpenters and related jobs are unpopular enough (no one wants to learn this type of work any more) that there is enough shortage of those people so that their hourly rates are surprisingly high and they get away with it. So it's a nice "Plan B" in case your current computer related job no longer earns you enough.
I don't know what country you are in... but in the US, the areas where carpenters, plumbers and electricians are highest paid--are the same places that require a permit/licensed professional to do most things. The code inspectors know the difference between the job done properly and well, the job done properly and poorly, or the job done incorrectly by somebody who thought they knew what they were doing. In the more union-heavy regions, if they see something that wasn't done properly and you can't provide proof of who did it, they will require all the work be re-done, and that you show proof of the [union] laborer that you hired to do it.
And how will they find out, you ask? Well, somebody might inform them about you--but even if that doesn't occur....-many places, whenever a house changes ownership, the code inspector will go over it before the transfer is approved. And so when you're trying to sell the house is when you're going to get hit with all this trouble, if it happens.
It sucks and it's a crock of bullshit, but in some places, it is the law. And it is cheaper to find out before you do anything yourself than it is to find out after.
~
The reason US people have to work after retirement is because the US financial system is a sham. The official "core" ionflation figures are a wishful lie, understated by about 66%.
Pension plans are a lie too: in 10-15 years most will be broke or nearly so (along with Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid). If you're young now, pay in as little as you can to these "systems" and don't ever expect to get a dime out, because you won't.
These things were pyramid schemes all along, and we are reaching the breaking point where their un-sustainability becomes apparent. People paid in their money "now" in return for the promise of a big pile of money "later"--and for most of these people, "later" isn't ever going to come. Inflation will eat up most of that money, and taxes (yes taxes) will take most of the rest.
~
Discussing the matter of disobeying police orders on another unrelated forum, I ran across this particularly interesting story concerning a wildfire in California:
Page last updated at 12:12 GMT, Saturday, 12 July 2008 13:12 UK
Charred body found in California
One person has been found dead inside a burned-out house as wildfires continue to sweep through California.
The victim is thought to have been a resident of Concow, Butte County, who did not follow a police evacuation order on Thursday as the blaze neared.
In the past three weeks, hundreds of fires, most started by lightning, have burnt 1,100 sq miles (2,850 sq km).
Some 20,000 people - many of them volunteers - have been battling fires which have destroyed 1,000 homes.
"Unfortunately not everyone chose to leave and you cannot force them to," said police spokesman Sgt. Steven Pelton when asked why the victim had not obeyed a mandatory evacuation order.
"This appears to be one of those people."
But he said a post-mortem examination would be conducted on the charred body to confirm the cause of death.
Stretched thin
California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger summoned an additional 2,000 National Guard troops to assist the firefighting efforts across the state.
Help has also been drafted in from Mexico, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
"We are stretched thin, and our firefighters are exhausted," said the governor.
A thunderstorm on 21 June sparked some 800 wildfires across Northern California, which have been exacerbated by drought and particularly high temperatures.
Officials have described the combination of dry brush and trees, dry weather and windy conditions as a "perfect storm".
Mr Schwarzenegger said the state's fire season, formerly lasting from late summer through the autumn, was now year-round.
He said the state now needed more resources to battle the increase in wildfires.
Of particular interest is the part where it speaks of how "the victim had not obeyed a mandatory evacuation order"....
If you don't have to obey it, then what exactly does it mean when they say it's "mandatory"? Does it mean that you are legally required to evacuate? Or is it just an official admission of sorts that if you stay, no immediate help will be available should you need it?
(,,,of course--the other time, Nagin did his "mandatory gun confiscation" and we all saw how legal that turned out to be...)
~
Re: DC house wiring--you might want to inquire to code inspectors in your area as to how they wish to see this done. It has been an issue with alternative power systems for quite some time, as in most of the US apparently there is no code standardization for household DC wiring or wall fixtures at all. As such, what code inspectors approve varies somewhat.
(people who own 12-volt battery systems run into this problem when they want to utilize RV appliances that can run directly off the 12-volt DC power, to avoid needing expensive inverters. If you don't wish to bother the official people, then you could also investigate solar/wind power forums online for more info on this matter)
Regarding wall-warts--when I get a new one now, I put two duct-tape flags on the wire, one near the plug and the other near the transformer, and then write on them exactly what the damn thing goes to. In the past the charger used to have something on the label that indicated what it went to, but now many times they don't.... -I've got too many to remember which goes to what, and so far I seem to be maintaining 100% diversity; they all seem to be different voltages and/or plug types.
~
Touch-screens are generally not that useful for general computing, outside of graphic design work (such as with the Wacom Cintiq drawing screens: http://www.wacom.com/cintiq/index.cfm ).
I'd much rather have a "laptop" that had no screen at all, and a 1200x1600 head-mounted display instead. Less weight, less power, and easier to use in more situations.
~
By 2012, Linux will pass the critical "100 different unpronounceable text editors" criterion, where adoption will begin to accelerate at a geometric pace as the common person forgets about all the useful Windows-based software and hardware at the store and entertains themselves solely by writing new window managers.
~
This is quite what I was thinking.
A lot of companies have come and [basically] gone claiming to have made huge solar energy improvements, but they never managed to sell the stuff retail. Or the stuff they do offer costs tens of times what they said, and they blame it on "lack of scale".
So now we have two "remarkable" breakthroughs in solar energy (nanosolar and this) that we cannot BUY AND SEE OURSELVES, but that we can perhaps invest in?... Sounds like these companies are selling hype and not panels at all.
Is there any place independent that's keeping track of all these projects in Germany where this stuff is going? As I recall, Nanosolar's production is all going to Germany too.
~
Modding games is probably the easiest way to get into programming, and it has a very quick level of gratification which keeps kids interested. It starts out as modeling/skinning, and can extend to AI and complete modding, which can involve quite a bit of typing.
It's tempting to want to expose kids to "real programming" right off, but quite frankly, anything they could quickly do on their own isn't that interesting--and it's debatable if it's even that wise of a prospective career choice nowadays.
If they have the desire, then Java is free and a literal layout manager is easy to understand.... -but when I was in school, I remember most people reacting most positively to Visual Basic classes, I think because of the drag & drop environment--it was easiest to turn out a program that did something that they could actually imagine being useful. ASM courses (with their file-copying-program and file-batch renaming-program assignments) did not seem to get the same level of enthusiasm.
And I dare say,,,, more people got jobs doing something closer to Visual Basic than they did doing ASM.......
~
eBay or Craigslist. They don't come up real often.
And the only places you see them on Craigslist very much is where home-solar installs are common,,, which means California & the desert states.
Also another option is to look for B-grade panels--these are either cosmetic blemish or non-UL panels. The potential problem there is that these panels may not qualify for gov't rebates (assuming you are going to do a qualifying system). Even though they are new, they may lack the usual warranty as well. http://www.sunelec.com/ has some at the moment, look in the yellow panel that has the title "World's lowest price $2.98/watt". A grade-A 180W panel would cost around $800, where the non-UL panels they have are priced at $550.
It is also an option to build your own by buying cells and connecting and building an enclosure for them, but this has consequences too. The cost of cells to build a 180W panel is around $300 on eBay right now, but DIY panels will not qualify for any rebate programs. Most people who try to seal their home-made enclosures end up with moisture or mildew problems, so the most-dependable way seems to be to use non-wood materials and to provide small venting on the top and bottom while preventing rain from entering through the top.
Humidity seems to be the arch-enemy of all photovoltaic panels.... The humidity itself kills the panels (both home-made and commercial) and the humidity comes from clouds, so if you get a lot of rain you won't get much from solar power anyway, and maybe should consider hydro instead.
....Also it is observed that home-made panels tend to suffer more reliability problems, but then again, they can be made so that they are easier to open and repair. If you have a commercially-made panel that suffers an internal failure and is out of warranty, it can be quite difficult to repair it to be useful at all because of the way these panels are manufactured. The panel is a few layers of plastic laminated to a piece of glass (and cells and wiring stuck in there somewhere) and there's no way to separate the thing non-destructively.
~
Not that he is concerned about the issue of wind power benefiting the country much overall, but that there will eventually be a LOT of investment in it--and if he gets in early, he can cash out his position before it fails.... if it fails. And if it doesn't, he cashed out anyway, so who cares?
~
I would agree to this--just cut up the magazines, scan them, and toss them out.
They can be much more accessible in electronic form--even to you--and aren't likely to ever be worth any significant amount of money. Plus you can pirate bay them, and they can be useful to lots of other people as well.
As one who has digitized a few thousand old family photographs, I would say forget the camera now. It seems like an easy way out, after all a camera can take a picture a lot faster than a scanner can scan a page--but the digital photo from the $500 camera will not be as good of quality as the scan from the $70 scanner.
It's monotonous and it takes time, there's no way around it.
Keep a "unscanned" stack of pages next to your computer, and toss them in a nearby trash can once scanned. Find an image program that can do multiple TWAIN scans at once (last time I tried, GIMP only seems to allow scanning one page without re-starting the whole TWAIN interface, so it fails here).
Book scanners (like what is used to scan valuable books without destroying the bindings) cost $3K-$4K or more. Not many places have them, and (-not to be rude here but-) those that do aren't going to let you screw with it for your silly magazines. If you had a small collection of 200-300+ year old books, they might see their way to allow that,,,, but probably not a collection of 10-yr old videogame magazines.
~
Well yea I know that--and I also am aware of swamp coolers... but I have this grand dream of solar power to run Peltier coolers (as well as other electrical stuff) and to build a way to trap the condensate off the Peltier coolers (if there is any condensate...). So then my solar system could provide electricity, air conditioning and water.
Probably not going to work, but I figure I'll have more free time anyway as a gravel lawn doesn't need mowing.
~
You can set up a solar panel to charge a car battery, and run small things off that. Basically it goes like this: solar panel->battery regulator->battery->invertor-> small-wattage wall current appliance. Alternately, you can use 12-volt RV lights that can be run straight off the battery; there's LED lights now that don't draw squat for power. The battery regulator is a necessary device that prevents the batteries from overcharging.
...About that "wiring a house" business... There's not a lot of people out there who have solar+battery storage systems to run all the junk in their houses, 24 hours a day. Most of the residential systems (in the US) use solar panels with no storage batteries, the solar panels instead feed back into the electrical grid, which gets you credit off your electricity usage but usually not your total electricity bill (you still have to pay the line maintenance charge and the natural gas charge, if it exists).
The only states where these are common is southern California and Arizona, with Nevada and New Mexico being two more possible candidates. It takes a lot of sun before solar panels are even financially worth considering. Also,,, Cali and Arizona have the biggest gov't rebate programs--and if it weren't for that, NOBODY there would have a solar setup. For what they cost, it simply wouldn't make sense.
Because solar systems are so expensive, most people who want a whole-house system start by building a house that is as energy-efficient as practically possible.... So you see, there's no way to do this cheaply. Either you spend a lot of money to build a new house, or you spend a lot of money on the greater amount of solar panels to run a "typical" house off of.
...And even having done that, solar cells are generally not considered "cheaper" than utility power, even over the long-term. It will cost very close to what 30 years of utility bills would have totaled. What you get with a whole-house setup is--you're basically paying your 30 years of utility bills "up front", and you aren't dependent upon the utility company's reliability.
In certain circumstances, a solar+battery setup can be cheaper than utility power. If you buy very remote property that is literally miles from the nearest power line, the fee that the power company may charge to extend the line to your property can run into the tens of thousands of dollars. In this rare instance, it can be cheaper to go solar.
------
When I eventually move to the desert, I'd like to play with using some solar panels to run an air-cooling setup. Using solar power to run air conditioning in the desert just makes sense, and I don't know what else I'd run every day. Will probably try Peltiers first; I know their poor efficiency but the mechanical and electrical simplicity makes them attractive for a stand-alone setup, and easy to try on a small scale. In particular--they can be run basically straight off a battery, and need no invertor. The 3-phase invertor and the amount of solar panels you'd need to run a good-sized room air conditioner would cost six or seven thousand dollars, at least.
~
The hardware has got nothing to do with it, and the hackers have got nothing to do with it. And to a degree, the OLPC buying restrictions don't even have much to do with it.
The reason computers have failed as general educational devices so far is because (at least in the US) there's no material to use on them--no textbook companies will offer a fully-digital version of their textbooks. And that is why in most schools, the ONLY classes that commonly have computers for each student are computer-specific courses.
The MAIN advantage of computers in a general classroom use would be digital textbook storage (and the cheaper distribution costs that could be passed on to schools and students), but textbook publishers will not offer digital versions of their books. Why that is I don't particularly know--since they are in electronic form at some point before hitting paper anyway--but until there is a good base of digital text material to work with, computers in the general classroom situation will go nowhere, because the potential cost savings of them cannot be realized. If schools could spend more money for some mini-PC's or e-book readers but spend a lot less money on "books", that might work out to be financially attractive--but it's not legally possible now. (Electronics prices are always dropping; what are textbook prices doing??? Going up or down???,,,)
In a general gradeschool situation, using "the internet" to teach is usually not useful for learning about anything other than goatse and tubgirl....Don't take my word for it, ask any teacher what they would rather have: internet computers for every student but no books, or unlimited access to textbooks for every student, but no computers. Which one do you think they would choose?
~
Ever since the Geo Metro, everybody already knows that a small light car can get very good MPG, the problem is that there's no publicity in it for anyone. So government and industry promotes such bullshit as EV's and hybrids, when from a total pollution standpoint they are almost certainly a step backwards. If they COST more to build than a conventional gas-engine car, then more resources went into their manufacture--and more pollution was probably produced as a result.
Part of the problem with complaining about SUV's however is that car companies made them because they thought that people would buy them--and generally (in the US) that has been true. The super-tiny cars like Metros did not sell as well, it's not easy to promote poverty as a lifestyle choice.
BMW Minis are pretty small, but they're fairly expensive and it's very likely that most of the people who bought them didn't really give a shit about the MPG. So you see, fashion wins over all else.
People fixate on "smog" and think EV's are great because they don't have a nasty tailpipe, but the fact is that a normal person wouldn't want to live next to an oil field--and they wouldn't want to live next to a battery manufacturing plant (or battery recycling plant) either. Batteries don't grow on trees and they're not filled with milk and honey.
------
For a real boondoggle, take a serious look at commuter rail. There is probably no other system in common use that gets promoted so much as a solution, yet is as wasteful. It serves a very limited area (unless you use some other form of transport at one or both ends of your trip), is not possible to reconfigure to changing geographical populations or needs, and {last but not least} generally runs at near-empty capacity most of the time of day other than morning and evening rush hour. ,,,,
At least with a private vehicle, you always know that it's only on the road when it's needed, it can go grom any origin to any destination and and it's free to take the most-efficient route directly between the two points. THAT should be the standard of efficiency that transportation should be based upon. More mass-transit is a simple-minded waste of money.
~
I have a copy of HL2, but I can't play it anymore.
I bought a CD copy at a local retail store, it worked for about a year and then one day it said my password was incorrect... I never gave out the password, never played it from any public or other PC and nobody else played on my PC.
{I kinda still wonder what the fuck was ON those CD's, because after loading them and connecting to Steam for the first time, it still took my PC over two hours to "decrypt" the files--all the while keeping the lights on, on a 384kb cable modem... }
So then it doesn't work anymore. I couldn't get any response out of anyone at Valve, even though my email pointed out that I had only ever played the game from my home cable connection--seems like this should have been pretty easy to get to the bottom of. And from reports of people who tried running hacks or buying foreign licenses, I don't even know that paying for another copy would allow me to play again.
For some reason, I'm not interested in more network-dependent products and features.
~
When OSX86 first came out, there was a lot of curiosity--but most of the people who were watching (myself included) never bothered to actually set up a system. Most of the people who had gotten it running weren't using it much. Many of the people who I asked were people who already owned a Mac, and were just curious to see it running on a PC. I'm sure somebody at Apple worried about losing revenue but from my informal polls I got the impression that anyone who had wanted a Mac had already bought one, and being able to download OSX86 for free didn't change much of anything.
I was one of the people who didn't bother. Most of my reason was that I already had a bunch of PC software that I knew how to use, and didn't want to bother re-learning other software. I suspect that once people get used to either platform, this is a bigger preventative factor in changing (either way) than the higher prices of a Mac machine.
~
If people are dying after having a Taser used on them and it cannot be shown that these persons would have probably died anyway, then Taser should be financially responsible. The fact that it causes pain when used is not my objection; it has to do that to serve its functionality--but what it is not supposed to do is kill people. The whole point of these devices was that they were "non-lethal", and then when a few people died they changed it to "less-than-lethal".
Taser is a consumer product and if it's killing people when they claim it shouldn't, then it is FAULTY and Taser should be changed in court to "less-than-profitable".
~
Do we really need quantity? I'd rather have quality. Ten fuckwits easily negate the positive impact of one good programmer/cs guy.
Yea but the problem in the US is, five fuckwit Indian CS guys are cheaper than one fuckwit US CS guy.... And if a company never hires fuckwits, they will never have any base to find good people in.
Kind of like what will happen in ~10 years, when all the senior level US tech people are retiring, and there's no US tech people with the same work experience to replace them (in managing offshore projects)....
~
...The real goal of a gold standard is to combat uncontrolled money expansion. There are a number of ways to accomplish that without arbitrarily pivoting on some random and irrelevant metal....
The problem is, the system built on "irrelevant metal" has outlasted lots of other ones that were supposed to act exactly the same. People drawn to positions of power often seek to abuse them, and gold currency wouldn't be open to nearly the same abuse as fiat paper is.
Greenspan himself was pretty sweet on gold currency, until he took the Fed seat--because he wanted to see if inflation could exist indefinitely, and today the US is coping with the results of his experiment.
------
The most disappointing part of this election was that early on the US media collectively decided Ron Paul wasn't worth mentioning. He was "wildly popular online" but not elsewhere, because TV and newsprint often simply refused to even mention he was still in the race at all.
Go to http://ronpaultimeline.com/ and hit "establishment blackout" in the drop-down box, and see for yourself.
More than once, the media was excluding Ron Paul from election reports and articles, while they were still including other candidates who had already dropped out.
Something very underhanded happened here.
If the media had never told you that Mitt Romney was running, how many votes do you suppose Mitt would have gotten?
~
Ron Paul is the only candidate that matters. It's rather sad that so many people think that following the constitution is "crackpot". His supporters are overly-enthusiastic online because the mainstream media seems to be allergic to even just mentioning his name.
I see the same pathetic attitude on firearm forums I frequent--most people there automatically dismiss Paul as unelectable because he "won't get enough votes", and then they debate which of the other candidates will damage gun-ownership rights the least. For some odd reason they thought that Fred would roll into office and save the day--but now that he's gone (early)--what is left is ALL the other candidates are outright ban supporters, or simple recent turncoats on that issue.
As for saying that Paul could never get his ideas through congress, that may be true--but what he could do is veto anything that's unconstitutional, and send it back for another vote. Then next congressional election time, all the candidates will have to stand and be judged for the bills they voted twice to pass, which paves the way for constitutionalist candidates to get elected to congress. Where does change begin?
And as for the argument that "the president can do nothing", well then why even vote for any president at all? Certainly the other candidates can't do anything more than Paul could, right?
I'm going to vote for Paul just on principle, and he probably won't win.
But that doesn't bother me--because none of the other candidates has a plan to change the US economy usefully. The next president is going to inherit a train-wreck-in-progress, literally a looming DEPRESSION, and they have no ideas how to fix that. Their only plans (both Repub and Democrat candidates) seem to center on printing a bunch more money and handing it to bankers, who are already now refusing to give people home loans.
~
Slashdot Mirror
Is there a work-around here? I wanna see....
~
From reading the article, this sounds like only a proposal--not an invention.
There's no working prototype, and though the principles would seem to be sound, it's not even immediately known if one can be possibly made--much less mass-produced for any reasonable costs.
~
....
I don't know what country you are in... but in the US, the areas where carpenters, plumbers and electricians are highest paid--are the same places that require a permit/licensed professional to do most things. The code inspectors know the difference between the job done properly and well, the job done properly and poorly, or the job done incorrectly by somebody who thought they knew what they were doing. In the more union-heavy regions, if they see something that wasn't done properly and you can't provide proof of who did it, they will require all the work be re-done, and that you show proof of the [union] laborer that you hired to do it.
And how will they find out, you ask? Well, somebody might inform them about you--but even if that doesn't occur....-many places, whenever a house changes ownership, the code inspector will go over it before the transfer is approved. And so when you're trying to sell the house is when you're going to get hit with all this trouble, if it happens.
It sucks and it's a crock of bullshit, but in some places, it is the law. And it is cheaper to find out before you do anything yourself than it is to find out after.
~
The reason US people have to work after retirement is because the US financial system is a sham. The official "core" ionflation figures are a wishful lie, understated by about 66%.
Pension plans are a lie too: in 10-15 years most will be broke or nearly so (along with Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid). If you're young now, pay in as little as you can to these "systems" and don't ever expect to get a dime out, because you won't.
These things were pyramid schemes all along, and we are reaching the breaking point where their un-sustainability becomes apparent. People paid in their money "now" in return for the promise of a big pile of money "later"--and for most of these people, "later" isn't ever going to come. Inflation will eat up most of that money, and taxes (yes taxes) will take most of the rest.
~
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7503327.stm
Of particular interest is the part where it speaks of how "the victim had not obeyed a mandatory evacuation order"....
If you don't have to obey it, then what exactly does it mean when they say it's "mandatory"? Does it mean that you are legally required to evacuate? Or is it just an official admission of sorts that if you stay, no immediate help will be available should you need it?
(,,,of course--the other time, Nagin did his "mandatory gun confiscation" and we all saw how legal that turned out to be...)
~
Re: DC house wiring--you might want to inquire to code inspectors in your area as to how they wish to see this done. It has been an issue with alternative power systems for quite some time, as in most of the US apparently there is no code standardization for household DC wiring or wall fixtures at all. As such, what code inspectors approve varies somewhat.
(people who own 12-volt battery systems run into this problem when they want to utilize RV appliances that can run directly off the 12-volt DC power, to avoid needing expensive inverters. If you don't wish to bother the official people, then you could also investigate solar/wind power forums online for more info on this matter)
Regarding wall-warts--when I get a new one now, I put two duct-tape flags on the wire, one near the plug and the other near the transformer, and then write on them exactly what the damn thing goes to. In the past the charger used to have something on the label that indicated what it went to, but now many times they don't.... -I've got too many to remember which goes to what, and so far I seem to be maintaining 100% diversity; they all seem to be different voltages and/or plug types.
~
Touch-screens are generally not that useful for general computing, outside of graphic design work (such as with the Wacom Cintiq drawing screens: http://www.wacom.com/cintiq/index.cfm ).
I'd much rather have a "laptop" that had no screen at all, and a 1200x1600 head-mounted display instead. Less weight, less power, and easier to use in more situations. ~
Keep trying:
/vi/
/vaÉ/
/vahy/
/wi/
/waÉ/
/wahy/
/ooi/
/ooÉ/
/ooahy/
~
By 2012, Linux will pass the critical "100 different unpronounceable text editors" criterion, where adoption will begin to accelerate at a geometric pace as the common person forgets about all the useful Windows-based software and hardware at the store and entertains themselves solely by writing new window managers.
~
This is quite what I was thinking.
A lot of companies have come and [basically] gone claiming to have made huge solar energy improvements, but they never managed to sell the stuff retail. Or the stuff they do offer costs tens of times what they said, and they blame it on "lack of scale".
So now we have two "remarkable" breakthroughs in solar energy (nanosolar and this) that we cannot BUY AND SEE OURSELVES, but that we can perhaps invest in?... Sounds like these companies are selling hype and not panels at all.
Is there any place independent that's keeping track of all these projects in Germany where this stuff is going? As I recall, Nanosolar's production is all going to Germany too.
~
With any luck, the DHS will find it.
~
Modding games is probably the easiest way to get into programming, and it has a very quick level of gratification which keeps kids interested. It starts out as modeling/skinning, and can extend to AI and complete modding, which can involve quite a bit of typing.
It's tempting to want to expose kids to "real programming" right off, but quite frankly, anything they could quickly do on their own isn't that interesting--and it's debatable if it's even that wise of a prospective career choice nowadays.
If they have the desire, then Java is free and a literal layout manager is easy to understand.... -but when I was in school, I remember most people reacting most positively to Visual Basic classes, I think because of the drag & drop environment--it was easiest to turn out a program that did something that they could actually imagine being useful. ASM courses (with their file-copying-program and file-batch renaming-program assignments) did not seem to get the same level of enthusiasm.
And I dare say,,,, more people got jobs doing something closer to Visual Basic than they did doing ASM.......
~
eBay or Craigslist. They don't come up real often.
....Also it is observed that home-made panels tend to suffer more reliability problems, but then again, they can be made so that they are easier to open and repair. If you have a commercially-made panel that suffers an internal failure and is out of warranty, it can be quite difficult to repair it to be useful at all because of the way these panels are manufactured. The panel is a few layers of plastic laminated to a piece of glass (and cells and wiring stuck in there somewhere) and there's no way to separate the thing non-destructively.
And the only places you see them on Craigslist very much is where home-solar installs are common,,, which means California & the desert states.
Also another option is to look for B-grade panels--these are either cosmetic blemish or non-UL panels. The potential problem there is that these panels may not qualify for gov't rebates (assuming you are going to do a qualifying system). Even though they are new, they may lack the usual warranty as well. http://www.sunelec.com/ has some at the moment, look in the yellow panel that has the title "World's lowest price $2.98/watt". A grade-A 180W panel would cost around $800, where the non-UL panels they have are priced at $550.
It is also an option to build your own by buying cells and connecting and building an enclosure for them, but this has consequences too. The cost of cells to build a 180W panel is around $300 on eBay right now, but DIY panels will not qualify for any rebate programs. Most people who try to seal their home-made enclosures end up with moisture or mildew problems, so the most-dependable way seems to be to use non-wood materials and to provide small venting on the top and bottom while preventing rain from entering through the top.
Humidity seems to be the arch-enemy of all photovoltaic panels.... The humidity itself kills the panels (both home-made and commercial) and the humidity comes from clouds , so if you get a lot of rain you won't get much from solar power anyway, and maybe should consider hydro instead.
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This is rather what I suspect.
Not that he is concerned about the issue of wind power benefiting the country much overall, but that there will eventually be a LOT of investment in it--and if he gets in early, he can cash out his position before it fails.... if it fails. And if it doesn't, he cashed out anyway, so who cares?
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I would agree to this--just cut up the magazines, scan them, and toss them out.
They can be much more accessible in electronic form--even to you--and aren't likely to ever be worth any significant amount of money. Plus you can pirate bay them, and they can be useful to lots of other people as well.
As one who has digitized a few thousand old family photographs, I would say forget the camera now. It seems like an easy way out, after all a camera can take a picture a lot faster than a scanner can scan a page--but the digital photo from the $500 camera will not be as good of quality as the scan from the $70 scanner.
It's monotonous and it takes time, there's no way around it.
Keep a "unscanned" stack of pages next to your computer, and toss them in a nearby trash can once scanned. Find an image program that can do multiple TWAIN scans at once (last time I tried, GIMP only seems to allow scanning one page without re-starting the whole TWAIN interface, so it fails here).
Book scanners (like what is used to scan valuable books without destroying the bindings) cost $3K-$4K or more. Not many places have them, and (-not to be rude here but-) those that do aren't going to let you screw with it for your silly magazines. If you had a small collection of 200-300+ year old books, they might see their way to allow that,,,, but probably not a collection of 10-yr old videogame magazines.
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Well yea I know that--and I also am aware of swamp coolers... but I have this grand dream of solar power to run Peltier coolers (as well as other electrical stuff) and to build a way to trap the condensate off the Peltier coolers (if there is any condensate...). So then my solar system could provide electricity, air conditioning and water.
Probably not going to work, but I figure I'll have more free time anyway as a gravel lawn doesn't need mowing.
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Generally speaking, if you already have on-site utility power, that's going to be cheaper over the long run than solar cells.
...About that "wiring a house" business... There's not a lot of people out there who have solar+battery storage systems to run all the junk in their houses, 24 hours a day. Most of the residential systems (in the US) use solar panels with no storage batteries, the solar panels instead feed back into the electrical grid, which gets you credit off your electricity usage but usually not your total electricity bill (you still have to pay the line maintenance charge and the natural gas charge, if it exists).
But say you just want to do it 'cause it's nifty? One web forum is
http://www.solarpowerforum.net/forumVB/
You can set up a solar panel to charge a car battery, and run small things off that. Basically it goes like this: solar panel->battery regulator->battery->invertor-> small-wattage wall current appliance. Alternately, you can use 12-volt RV lights that can be run straight off the battery; there's LED lights now that don't draw squat for power. The battery regulator is a necessary device that prevents the batteries from overcharging.
The only states where these are common is southern California and Arizona, with Nevada and New Mexico being two more possible candidates. It takes a lot of sun before solar panels are even financially worth considering. Also,,, Cali and Arizona have the biggest gov't rebate programs--and if it weren't for that, NOBODY there would have a solar setup. For what they cost, it simply wouldn't make sense.
Because solar systems are so expensive, most people who want a whole-house system start by building a house that is as energy-efficient as practically possible.... So you see, there's no way to do this cheaply. Either you spend a lot of money to build a new house, or you spend a lot of money on the greater amount of solar panels to run a "typical" house off of.
...And even having done that, solar cells are generally not considered "cheaper" than utility power, even over the long-term. It will cost very close to what 30 years of utility bills would have totaled. What you get with a whole-house setup is--you're basically paying your 30 years of utility bills "up front", and you aren't dependent upon the utility company's reliability.
In certain circumstances, a solar+battery setup can be cheaper than utility power. If you buy very remote property that is literally miles from the nearest power line, the fee that the power company may charge to extend the line to your property can run into the tens of thousands of dollars.
In this rare instance, it can be cheaper to go solar.
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When I eventually move to the desert, I'd like to play with using some solar panels to run an air-cooling setup. Using solar power to run air conditioning in the desert just makes sense, and I don't know what else I'd run every day. Will probably try Peltiers first; I know their poor efficiency but the mechanical and electrical simplicity makes them attractive for a stand-alone setup, and easy to try on a small scale. In particular--they can be run basically straight off a battery, and need no invertor. The 3-phase invertor and the amount of solar panels you'd need to run a good-sized room air conditioner would cost six or seven thousand dollars, at least.
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The hardware has got nothing to do with it, and the hackers have got nothing to do with it. And to a degree, the OLPC buying restrictions don't even have much to do with it.
...Don't take my word for it, ask any teacher what they would rather have: internet computers for every student but no books, or unlimited access to textbooks for every student, but no computers. Which one do you think they would choose?
The reason computers have failed as general educational devices so far is because (at least in the US) there's no material to use on them--no textbook companies will offer a fully-digital version of their textbooks. And that is why in most schools, the ONLY classes that commonly have computers for each student are computer-specific courses.
The MAIN advantage of computers in a general classroom use would be digital textbook storage (and the cheaper distribution costs that could be passed on to schools and students), but textbook publishers will not offer digital versions of their books. Why that is I don't particularly know--since they are in electronic form at some point before hitting paper anyway--but until there is a good base of digital text material to work with, computers in the general classroom situation will go nowhere, because the potential cost savings of them cannot be realized. If schools could spend more money for some mini-PC's or e-book readers but spend a lot less money on "books", that might work out to be financially attractive--but it's not legally possible now. (Electronics prices are always dropping; what are textbook prices doing??? Going up or down???,,,)
In a general gradeschool situation, using "the internet" to teach is usually not useful for learning about anything other than goatse and tubgirl.
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Ever since the Geo Metro, everybody already knows that a small light car can get very good MPG, the problem is that there's no publicity in it for anyone. So government and industry promotes such bullshit as EV's and hybrids, when from a total pollution standpoint they are almost certainly a step backwards. If they COST more to build than a conventional gas-engine car, then more resources went into their manufacture--and more pollution was probably produced as a result.
,,,,
Part of the problem with complaining about SUV's however is that car companies made them because they thought that people would buy them--and generally (in the US) that has been true. The super-tiny cars like Metros did not sell as well, it's not easy to promote poverty as a lifestyle choice.
BMW Minis are pretty small, but they're fairly expensive and it's very likely that most of the people who bought them didn't really give a shit about the MPG.
So you see, fashion wins over all else.
People fixate on "smog" and think EV's are great because they don't have a nasty tailpipe, but the fact is that a normal person wouldn't want to live next to an oil field--and they wouldn't want to live next to a battery manufacturing plant (or battery recycling plant) either. Batteries don't grow on trees and they're not filled with milk and honey.
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For a real boondoggle, take a serious look at commuter rail. There is probably no other system in common use that gets promoted so much as a solution, yet is as wasteful. It serves a very limited area (unless you use some other form of transport at one or both ends of your trip), is not possible to reconfigure to changing geographical populations or needs, and {last but not least} generally runs at near-empty capacity most of the time of day other than morning and evening rush hour.
At least with a private vehicle, you always know that it's only on the road when it's needed, it can go grom any origin to any destination and and it's free to take the most-efficient route directly between the two points. THAT should be the standard of efficiency that transportation should be based upon. More mass-transit is a simple-minded waste of money.
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I have a copy of HL2, but I can't play it anymore.
I bought a CD copy at a local retail store, it worked for about a year and then one day it said my password was incorrect... I never gave out the password, never played it from any public or other PC and nobody else played on my PC.
{I kinda still wonder what the fuck was ON those CD's, because after loading them and connecting to Steam for the first time, it still took my PC over two hours to "decrypt" the files--all the while keeping the lights on, on a 384kb cable modem... }
So then it doesn't work anymore. I couldn't get any response out of anyone at Valve, even though my email pointed out that I had only ever played the game from my home cable connection--seems like this should have been pretty easy to get to the bottom of. And from reports of people who tried running hacks or buying foreign licenses, I don't even know that paying for another copy would allow me to play again.
For some reason, I'm not interested in more network-dependent products and features.
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When OSX86 first came out, there was a lot of curiosity--but most of the people who were watching (myself included) never bothered to actually set up a system. Most of the people who had gotten it running weren't using it much. Many of the people who I asked were people who already owned a Mac, and were just curious to see it running on a PC. I'm sure somebody at Apple worried about losing revenue but from my informal polls I got the impression that anyone who had wanted a Mac had already bought one, and being able to download OSX86 for free didn't change much of anything.
I was one of the people who didn't bother. Most of my reason was that I already had a bunch of PC software that I knew how to use, and didn't want to bother re-learning other software. I suspect that once people get used to either platform, this is a bigger preventative factor in changing (either way) than the higher prices of a Mac machine.
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If people are dying after having a Taser used on them and it cannot be shown that these persons would have probably died anyway, then Taser should be financially responsible. The fact that it causes pain when used is not my objection; it has to do that to serve its functionality--but what it is not supposed to do is kill people. The whole point of these devices was that they were "non-lethal", and then when a few people died they changed it to "less-than-lethal".
Taser is a consumer product and if it's killing people when they claim it shouldn't, then it is FAULTY and Taser should be changed in court to "less-than-profitable".
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Kind of like what will happen in ~10 years, when all the senior level US tech people are retiring, and there's no US tech people with the same work experience to replace them (in managing offshore projects)....
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Greenspan himself was pretty sweet on gold currency, until he took the Fed seat--because he wanted to see if inflation could exist indefinitely, and today the US is coping with the results of his experiment.
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The most disappointing part of this election was that early on the US media collectively decided Ron Paul wasn't worth mentioning. He was "wildly popular online" but not elsewhere, because TV and newsprint often simply refused to even mention he was still in the race at all.
Go to http://ronpaultimeline.com/ and hit "establishment blackout" in the drop-down box, and see for yourself.
More than once, the media was excluding Ron Paul from election reports and articles, while they were still including other candidates who had already dropped out.
Something very underhanded happened here.
If the media had never told you that Mitt Romney was running, how many votes do you suppose Mitt would have gotten?
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Ron Paul is the only candidate that matters. It's rather sad that so many people think that following the constitution is "crackpot". His supporters are overly-enthusiastic online because the mainstream media seems to be allergic to even just mentioning his name.
I see the same pathetic attitude on firearm forums I frequent--most people there automatically dismiss Paul as unelectable because he "won't get enough votes", and then they debate which of the other candidates will damage gun-ownership rights the least. For some odd reason they thought that Fred would roll into office and save the day--but now that he's gone (early)--what is left is ALL the other candidates are outright ban supporters, or simple recent turncoats on that issue.
As for saying that Paul could never get his ideas through congress, that may be true--but what he could do is veto anything that's unconstitutional, and send it back for another vote. Then next congressional election time, all the candidates will have to stand and be judged for the bills they voted twice to pass, which paves the way for constitutionalist candidates to get elected to congress. Where does change begin?
And as for the argument that "the president can do nothing", well then why even vote for any president at all? Certainly the other candidates can't do anything more than Paul could, right?
I'm going to vote for Paul just on principle, and he probably won't win.
But that doesn't bother me--because none of the other candidates has a plan to change the US economy usefully. The next president is going to inherit a train-wreck-in-progress, literally a looming DEPRESSION, and they have no ideas how to fix that. Their only plans (both Repub and Democrat candidates) seem to center on printing a bunch more money and handing it to bankers, who are already now refusing to give people home loans.
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