I too tend to suspect that many (US) people who claim to "object" to more gov't intrusion are only doing it as a knee-jerk reaction. Real-ID will not likely solve all the problems it's claimed and there will be instances of it being used in error, but overall nobody will say much about it five years after, because it doesn't stop one from doing anything that most people do anyway. Kind of like registering a car: you must have license plates. Does anyone object to license plates anymore? And if the gov't removed the requirements for them, do you think vehicle crime would go up, stay the same or go down?
If you troll shooting web forums two themes that often get re-hashed is that "I don't need no stinkin' Real ID for the government to harass me for", and "I wish the goverment would keep these stinkin' illegals out of our country". How do these guys think the police are supposed to KNOW who is a US citizen, if there's no centralized database for that? It seems as though they do not have a realistic view of the situations they seem to be so worried about.
Also people wax romantically about the advantages of "living anonymously", but few people really ever attempt to do it. Most are simply unaware of how much data is available on them, and from what sources it comes. How many people do you know that only conduct transactions in cash, do not own a vehicle or own or rent a home, do not subscribe to any professional organizations, don't file taxes, don't maintain any professional licenses or certifications, and are self-employed? Who lives like this? ...Yea, that's right--STREET BUMS! If you want to live anonymously, there's your solution. Enjoy your freedom!:rolleyes:
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....I had a comp sci college prof who (before teaching) worked for the gov't for many years. One story he told us was about how paranoid people thought that simply wiping a drive wasn't good enough. After projects, extra computers got put into storage, and often re-used--but as newer better desktop computers came out, the older ones got sold off as surplus--so they had one guy there who would run wiping programs on the drives, and then run another program to verify the drives had been wiped.....Over time the drives got larger and larger however, and the department heads figured out that it really wasn't economical to pay an engineer to stand there and wipe drives just to protect the data when there was a good chance they wouldn't need to ever use the PC at all, so they started pulling the drives from the computers and using other magnetic methods of erasing them--that also happened to render the drives non-functional. So the rest of the computers got sold off, but now without the drives.,,,, When buyers at surplus auctions saw that gov't PC's were coming out without the drives, they jumped to the conclusion that "the data can be recovered now!!!" when that was never the case--as the drives storage capacity got larger and larger, it simply became uneconomical to pay a tech with security clearance to do data wipes on the drives.
....Lastly--if I thought that I needed to guarantee a hard drive wouldn't be recovered, I would melt the platters into a lump with an oxy-acetylene welding torch (recover this, NSA spooks!). And being a bachelor, I have an oxy-acetylene torch kit (complete with tanks) sitting in the dining room. I generally don't light it inside the house, but if the police were at the door I could fire a couple shots through the ceiling and still have time to blaze through a couple or three hard drives before the SWAT team arrives. Heck, you don't even have to take the platters out, you can just go right through the drive's bottom side.
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Who really cares? If the general intent was not racist, what's the point of pretending that it was?
I asked a question on a message board once about lowrider bicycles, and called them "Hispanic-type lowrider bikes". One guy (apparently Hispanic) got hugely offended, and insisted that I apologize. I was not denigrating "Hispanic bicycles", just trying to describe a particular bicycle by saying what other kinds of bicycles it was not.
I told him that I was of German descent, and that I wanted him to apologize to me for all the times that people call Porsches "German cars". He refused, and so did I.
It is only a child who would complain of such a minor thing--because it's only younger people that would mistake slavery, separate drinking fountains and lack of voting rights to be the moral equivalent of calling a bicycle "Hispanic" or a pig "Chinese".
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The thorium was what I was wondering about too....
When I took an interest in tube audio some years back, I asked why people didn't make their own tubes, and the problem of obtaining {or of home-manufacturing} thoriated tungsten filaments was the reason given. Without Thorium, the filaments don't last very long at typical power levels--and Thorium (at least, of the type needed) was pretty toxic, and quite radioactive besides.
Lots of people (online) had built their own transformers--but I didn't hear from any who had really attempted to make a tube, that they were willing to actually wire into a project and expect to work very long.
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If the fiscal emergency starting on 01 Jan 2008 gets ugly enough (and there are a lot of people who think it will) we may well see solar subsidies get shelved, at least for a couple years. If to keep daily operations going the state government is pulling budget money from schools, do you think they'll still be helping homeowners buy solar panels?
....
In a way, this is come full-circle hasn't it?
People in california getting government subsidies to buy solar systems that aren't really economical, and the subsidies were based on property tax rates that were based on inflated property values, driven by speculators with bad loans--that were not really economical either.
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There's only three problems with solar power installations: the cost of solar cells, the cost of inverters, and the cost of storage batteries.
Solar cells without storage batteries is only helpful for things that you only need to run during peak daylight hours--or if you live in an area that doesn't have enough power capability for peak-load use times (such as California, with its regular rolling blackouts in certain areas during the summer).
The huge costs of residential whole-house solar setups makes them economically unattractive to most people where utility power is an available option... the only places in the US they're popular (or even common) is where there are big government subsidies available.... such as in California. Outside of areas with such subsidies, solar system contractors won't claim that a suburban house system will save money, because overall,,, -it won't.
It's my understanding that in most cases, a windmill will give a greater return of electricity for its cost than a solar panel will--but there again is a problem. The main factor of a windmill is how high it can be mounted, and 25 feet off the ground doesn't get you much in terms of wind speed. They don't really start cooking until they're mounted 150 or 200 feet off the ground, and I don't know that's something I'd care to see suburbia even attempt.
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The EV1 was only a failure in GM's eyes, no one else's....
That's because GM knew what they really cost to build.
It's very common to attribute the lack of consumer-level electric cars to "macho, fat, lazy, stupid American car buyers" but the sad fact is that there's lots of boring old companies like UPS and Fedex that have no ego at all when it comes to fleet costs. They'd do whatever would cover their needs and cost the least--and if they called up GM or Ford and requested EV's with specific batteries and motors, the car companies would do it if it was economically possible. Yet last time I looked, there was no major on-road company in the entire US using electric vehicles.
When these companies start using EV's, you'll know that EV's are really comparable to IC vehicles on costs.
And if you're not willing to base your comparisons on financial costs, then you can justify anything.
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This has been pointed out by numerous commentators in the past:
medical regulatory bodies generally tend to reject new technology, even if individual patients are willing to accept the risks.
The usual logic for this is that if the regulating agency approves anything new that leads to the death of people, the regulatory agency gets blamed well for that--but if they refuse to approve a new medicine for use, nobody knows the true cost of doing that--how many people it would have saved. So from a practical standpoint, it's safer for them not to approve anything new.
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Hey there! I'm in an unrelated field and I don't know how to do your job, but here's a few changes I'd like to see anyway....
So Mr. Grove, let's consider all the faulty products you shipped in just one year of your career at Intel--and now let's imagine every single customer that bought one of those products suing your company for a half-million dollars each, and winning....
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Mixing powdered iron into the paint used on the walls will greatly decrease RF signal strength across much of the spectrum, but it provides no way for selective blocking, and the key ingredient (powdered iron) is rather expensive.
As for "the right to be a loudmouthed annoyance wherever you want" (noted by another poster), most of the examples cited were owners of private establishments using such jammers. A fancy restaurant can deny you entry for any number of reasons including not dressing cool enough, and nobody noted talked of blocking cellphone signals on the street just because they don't like cell phones.
Come to think of it, my phones barely get a signal when I'm sitting in front of the computer. Restaurants could just install a headless mini-ITX on the underside of each table, and leave it running a fancy 3-D screensaver....
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... And biodiesel can be made from used cooking oil, instead of used oil being a waste biodiesel could be made from it...
I do not understand the emphasis that advocates of biodiesel like to place on used cooking oil.
Years back, I worked at a moderately-sized gas station (16 pumps, and not near any major highways), and it was normal to sell ~10,000 gallons of fuel per day. There was a McDonald's nearby on the same road, and I don't ever remember seeing a tanker truck come by daily to being them new cooking oil.
How much does a typical fast-food joint use per week, and how much biodiesel could be produced from it? How much of that biodiesel would be wasted in the process of collecting that fuel, processing it, and redistributing it? Or do you expect McDonald's to start making biodiesel on-site and retailing it directly to customers? Fuel dispensing pumps are federally-regulated and a typical example can easily cost ~$10,000 alone--not even including the storage tanks, installation and other related equipment......This wouldn't be economically viable for most restaurants to do until the cost of current motor fuels goes several times higher than it is now--and when that happens, most certainly restaurants' business is likely to be severely impacted downwards, by the fact that fewer people will want to drive anywhere.
The "free biodiesel from cooking oil" line strikes me as kind of like saying "if you had an electric car, you could put solar panels on the roof and get FREE ELECTRICITY!!!".... which is true, technically--but the amount of electricity you can get from the area of a typical car's rooftop is not going to be that significant compared to what the car will end up using, considering the expenses involved with buying the necessary solar cells.
I would think a better idea for using old cooking oil might be to use it at the point of production--burn it for heat at the restaurant directly. This would utilize the energy in it, and still avoid the problems of the glycerol produced by making biofuel with it, as well as the extraneous transportation/distribution losses.
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I tried it, and don't like Steam: ...Previous to HL2, I had retail copies of HL-1 and Opposing Force, as well as several mods, They Hunger the most-played. When I installed Steam, it "took over" all these, without giving any choice in the matter, breaking every last one of them--so the entire year I had HL-2 installed, I could not play the earlier games at all.
...Installing HL-2 took about THREE HOURS on my Athlon-64 1.8Ghz, 1meg-RAM PC. It took about an hour to load through the five CD's, and then about another two hours connecting online to "decrypt files". Reinstalling it was not exactly a minor amount of hassle. This goes back to what I said about "retail users seemed to have more problems than online buyers did".
...I noticed that every time I did play HL-2, it would need to connect and download files, often for several minutes at full-speed. I had broadband cable internet; I only wonder what dial-up users did.
...My copy would never play at all unless it could connect online to Steam. The game simply would not start. Yea, I know there's supposed to be a way to store the password, but it never worked on mine. I'd try to start HL-2, and Steam would start instead, and it would try to connect for about 45 seconds and if it couldn't connect, it would just disappear, and that was that. There was never any explanation I found why this was.
Finally, the ending, that you have read--suddenly Steam tells me that my password is no longer valid--and nobody else the least bit interested in gaming ever used my computer. It's highly unlikely that it was stolen from anyone at my keyboard, and Valve was no help at all. This should have been easy to detirmine--I lived at the same physical address and had the same cable internet service the entire time. Who suddenly started using that account?
Half-Life-2 was network-dependent from the start, and should have been advertised as such. Is there a class-action suit in the house?
I can understand Valve wanting to block hacked copies from playing online, and even for them forcing updates on people who played online (other games do that as well, sometimes it's just necessary)--but all this other shit wasn't necessary for people playing in single-player, after their copy was validated the first time.
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I noticed this when Half-Life 2 first came out--I was casually interested in it, was walking through an electronics store one day and they had retail copies, so I bought one. I later found out that the online version had a couple added features that you could not download for free, and could not buy separately. If you wanted them at all, you had to pay full price for ANOTHER copy online.
(-at least,,, I think that would have worked.... I never tried it-).
I also noticed throughout its initially buggy-ridden first few months, that the online-purchasers seemed to have fewer problems than retail copy purchasers did. It seemed like most people posting problems had bought hard copies, either CD or DVD.
,,,,,
My copy of HL-2 worked fine for about a year, then told me one day that the password was no longer valid. Emails to the Steam support and on the STEAM forum went unanswered, and the entire game would not work anymore after that. It looked nice, but didn't play all that great and wasn't worth the risk of my computer getting rooted trying to use cracks on it.
Was it only good for a year? I don't know.
Would it have worked if I'd have bought another copy? Maybe, but that won't happen.
Valve got its last $60 from me.
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US tech jobs of many stripes have already seen heavy offshoring. Kids aren't dumb, they won't bother with a difficult career path that may be yanked from under them and sent to the other side of the globe at any time.
A doctor can't be offshored, a lawyer can't be offshored. An MBA can't spin marketing bullshit in IndiEnglish from a phone halfway around the world.
US tech jobs are a dying breed, following in machine-tool operators' footsteps. The subject is as interesting as it ever was, but the career is simply not that attractive anymore.
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....Two things I'd point out:
1. Ghana is the exception. A lot of people wonder why it is, but it is. What "better international policies" would they benefit from?
2. The book's premise is that (over the last ~30 years, and now we might say the last 45 years) whatever has been done as "international aid" has not had a positive impact on the overall situation.
I wouldn't claim to know any solution, but would agree that what's intended as aid by foreign countries isn't working.
From what international news I've seen, there seems to be a tendency towards populist African leaders choosing short-term non-solutions. Mugabe's white farm seisure efforts to redistribute wealth have been a glorious, comical disaster by everyone else's accounting. Who is keeping him in power?
What MOST Africans are still struggling to invent is a slippery little thing called "rule of law", specifically of the non-religious variety.
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The belt generator is far from ideal.
A wind generator can only extract power from the flow it recieves, which relates to the cross-section that it sweeps. Compared to most other types of windmills, a belt/ribbon generator doesn't sweep very much cross-section.
...There isn't very much difference in amplifiers either. 5.1 speakers vs two makes a huge difference when listening to a movie but the idea that one amplifier sounds 'better' than another is just silly. There is certainly still something of a difference in the quality of loudspeakers but even that is not that great....
Well, not really.
Some of us view surround-sound as sort of a childish gimmick--if certainly works, but whether it adds anything of value to a movie is debateable. When it first came out it was pretty impressive, but now it's taken for granted and generally ignored unless the cinematography is purposely utilizing it. Can you think of any moves in the last few years that were outstanding because of their 5.1 sound effects? A lot of the best movies of all-time wouldn't lose much if they were limited to mono sound.
I have heard in my own time that a cheap pair of speakers hooked up to a good amp still sounds nice (as long as the volume is low enough for the cheap speakers to handle)--but a pair of great speakers hooked up to a cheap amp still sounds like shit.
Also... I grew up during the 70's, after everybody with a stereo had switched to transistors because they were more "modern"--but a lot of big TV's people had were older and still used tube circuits, even for the audio amp. To my ears, tube amps just sound right, I can't describe it really--and no amount of tweaking the bass and treble on any $5000 transistor amp I've heard can duplicate it.
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Seems like a SWATH could do something close to this (cruise rough seas) without all the active mumbo-jumbo (whatever it is).
On the one hand, a SWATH has more hull-surface drag - but on the other hand, the greater submerged hull volume means more fuel storage.
"...Ugo Conti, an Italian-born engineer and oceanographer who designed Proteus, was aboard a chartered harbor cruise boat during his creation's star turn on Thursday....."
Not aboard for the maiden press voyage? Hmmm,,,,,
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...Where I live, the way the deal works is that if you generate more power than you use over the course of 12 months, then you simply don't pay any money to the electric company, but they will never send you a check for the surplus....
Looks like we need a federal law stating that all electric utilites MUST pay you for overproduction, perhaps about once every three months.
Of course we realize--they cannot pay for infinite overproduction, as they have no use beyond demand... -but under the system you mention there's not much incentive for average people to bother with a solar grid-die system at all.
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What exactly was the big pissfit about the firings?
The district attorney general positions are appointees, that means that every president gets to appoint them, and has, by firing all the existing ones.
I don't remember the Democrats OR the republicans bitching when Clinton fired all the Republican district att's and replaced them with Democrats. It was normal, and is expected by both parties.
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The problems happen in a couple of ways:
1.) "My kid should be in the smart class" (whether they belong there or not)
2.) Claims of discrimination / creation of a caste system being unacceptable.
Yea I remember this...
It's funny how the most disruptive kids' parents always come in bitching because ther kid got put in a remedial class.
Also we note: in the US, the teachers union would never allow some teachers to get gravy classes while others are stuck with borderline retards.
It's only charter schools that allow that, and the teachers union tries to undermine them at every step.
One more reason the US teachers union needs to be crushed.
At least the school board does respond to public pressure. The teachers union lives in its own little world, where teachers are the most critical part of the educational machine, yet beyond scrutiny by any common means except the union itself.
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Re: Is the metal housing really necessary?....Yes, for the most part.
I tried this some time back, and it didn't quite work, but I'll relate what I know anyway:
1. There's TWO laser diodes in a DVD burner--remove them both out carefully, preserving as much of the leads already-soldered-on as you can! The leads of the laser diodes are very short (maybe 2mm) and only about a half-millimeter apart, it's damn tough to get the longer leads soldered back on if you cut them off, and there's no need to cut them off and then attempt to solder them back on anyway.
2. Inside the DVD burner you will find TWO laser diodes, with mirrors that feed them both into the same beam. Each will be glued inside its own heatsink, a piece of metal that may be a very odd shape, and then these are attached to a bigger copper plate. To tell them apart, just test them--try applying 1.5V power to both diodes one at a time, the CD one is IR and won't appear to do anything. The DVD one will light up visible red. (if all the lenses are removed from them at this point, you cannot burn your eyes out, that's in the next step...)
3. The bare laser diodes don't put out a laser "beam", they just create a pinpoint light (that's safe to look at!). To get the beam, you must mount a fisheye lens with its concave side set very close to the diode, almost touching it.
4. The laser housing is a metal tube with a fisheye lense set in it. The laser diode will get warm with 1.5V on it, and will get too hot to hold in ~30 seconds with 3V on it. The laser housing serves partly as a heatsink, and also as a way to hold the lens without melting (the DVD-drive optics will have a fisheye lense, but those optics are usually set into little plastic frames, and they may melt in this use).
....Mine didn't work because I could not find a way to get the laser diode out of the original steel heatsink it came in. It was glued inside a hole about 6mm deep in a odd-shaped steel heatsink. You could maybe grind the heatsink away a bit at a time with a Dremel & cutoff wheel, but laser diodes are sensitive to heat, so you cant let the laser get too hot. I tried using mine still in its heatsink with other optics (telescope objectives and whatnot), and with those set in front of it, it would melt a garbage bag a little but wouldn't do much else.
IF you manage to get one out and do this, don't run it for more than ~20 seconds at a time without letting it cool down for a minute or so. The laser diode will work with 3V batteries hooked straight to it, but you're definitely not going to get that 100,000 hour lifetime. You'd be lucky to get 1000 hours. The DVD laser output power is typically around 210mW, and more than 150mW is enough to burn stuff (the CD laser won't burn stuff because it's only around 40-50mW max).
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Slashdot Mirror
I too tend to suspect that many (US) people who claim to "object" to more gov't intrusion are only doing it as a knee-jerk reaction. Real-ID will not likely solve all the problems it's claimed and there will be instances of it being used in error, but overall nobody will say much about it five years after, because it doesn't stop one from doing anything that most people do anyway. Kind of like registering a car: you must have license plates. Does anyone object to license plates anymore? And if the gov't removed the requirements for them, do you think vehicle crime would go up, stay the same or go down?
:rolleyes:
If you troll shooting web forums two themes that often get re-hashed is that "I don't need no stinkin' Real ID for the government to harass me for", and "I wish the goverment would keep these stinkin' illegals out of our country". How do these guys think the police are supposed to KNOW who is a US citizen, if there's no centralized database for that? It seems as though they do not have a realistic view of the situations they seem to be so worried about.
Also people wax romantically about the advantages of "living anonymously", but few people really ever attempt to do it. Most are simply unaware of how much data is available on them, and from what sources it comes. How many people do you know that only conduct transactions in cash, do not own a vehicle or own or rent a home, do not subscribe to any professional organizations, don't file taxes, don't maintain any professional licenses or certifications, and are self-employed?
Who lives like this?
...Yea, that's right--STREET BUMS!
If you want to live anonymously, there's your solution. Enjoy your freedom!
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Couple points:
....I had a comp sci college prof who (before teaching) worked for the gov't for many years. One story he told us was about how paranoid people thought that simply wiping a drive wasn't good enough. After projects, extra computers got put into storage, and often re-used--but as newer better desktop computers came out, the older ones got sold off as surplus--so they had one guy there who would run wiping programs on the drives, and then run another program to verify the drives had been wiped. ....Over time the drives got larger and larger however, and the department heads figured out that it really wasn't economical to pay an engineer to stand there and wipe drives just to protect the data when there was a good chance they wouldn't need to ever use the PC at all, so they started pulling the drives from the computers and using other magnetic methods of erasing them--that also happened to render the drives non-functional. So the rest of the computers got sold off, but now without the drives. ,,,, When buyers at surplus auctions saw that gov't PC's were coming out without the drives, they jumped to the conclusion that "the data can be recovered now!!!" when that was never the case--as the drives storage capacity got larger and larger, it simply became uneconomical to pay a tech with security clearance to do data wipes on the drives.
....Lastly--if I thought that I needed to guarantee a hard drive wouldn't be recovered, I would melt the platters into a lump with an oxy-acetylene welding torch (recover this, NSA spooks!). And being a bachelor, I have an oxy-acetylene torch kit (complete with tanks) sitting in the dining room. I generally don't light it inside the house, but if the police were at the door I could fire a couple shots through the ceiling and still have time to blaze through a couple or three hard drives before the SWAT team arrives. Heck, you don't even have to take the platters out, you can just go right through the drive's bottom side.
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Who really cares? If the general intent was not racist, what's the point of pretending that it was?
I asked a question on a message board once about lowrider bicycles, and called them "Hispanic-type lowrider bikes". One guy (apparently Hispanic) got hugely offended, and insisted that I apologize. I was not denigrating "Hispanic bicycles", just trying to describe a particular bicycle by saying what other kinds of bicycles it was not.
I told him that I was of German descent, and that I wanted him to apologize to me for all the times that people call Porsches "German cars". He refused, and so did I.
It is only a child who would complain of such a minor thing--because it's only younger people that would mistake slavery, separate drinking fountains and lack of voting rights to be the moral equivalent of calling a bicycle "Hispanic" or a pig "Chinese".
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The thorium was what I was wondering about too....
When I took an interest in tube audio some years back, I asked why people didn't make their own tubes, and the problem of obtaining {or of home-manufacturing} thoriated tungsten filaments was the reason given. Without Thorium, the filaments don't last very long at typical power levels--and Thorium (at least, of the type needed) was pretty toxic, and quite radioactive besides.
Lots of people (online) had built their own transformers--but I didn't hear from any who had really attempted to make a tube, that they were willing to actually wire into a project and expect to work very long.
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If the fiscal emergency starting on 01 Jan 2008 gets ugly enough (and there are a lot of people who think it will) we may well see solar subsidies get shelved, at least for a couple years. If to keep daily operations going the state government is pulling budget money from schools, do you think they'll still be helping homeowners buy solar panels?
....
In a way, this is come full-circle hasn't it?
People in california getting government subsidies to buy solar systems that aren't really economical, and the subsidies were based on property tax rates that were based on inflated property values, driven by speculators with bad loans--that were not really economical either.
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This is true.
There's only three problems with solar power installations: the cost of solar cells, the cost of inverters, and the cost of storage batteries.
Solar cells without storage batteries is only helpful for things that you only need to run during peak daylight hours--or if you live in an area that doesn't have enough power capability for peak-load use times (such as California, with its regular rolling blackouts in certain areas during the summer).
The huge costs of residential whole-house solar setups makes them economically unattractive to most people where utility power is an available option... the only places in the US they're popular (or even common) is where there are big government subsidies available.... such as in California. Outside of areas with such subsidies, solar system contractors won't claim that a suburban house system will save money, because overall,,, -it won't.
It's my understanding that in most cases, a windmill will give a greater return of electricity for its cost than a solar panel will--but there again is a problem. The main factor of a windmill is how high it can be mounted, and 25 feet off the ground doesn't get you much in terms of wind speed. They don't really start cooking until they're mounted 150 or 200 feet off the ground, and I don't know that's something I'd care to see suburbia even attempt.
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It's very common to attribute the lack of consumer-level electric cars to "macho, fat, lazy, stupid American car buyers" but the sad fact is that there's lots of boring old companies like UPS and Fedex that have no ego at all when it comes to fleet costs. They'd do whatever would cover their needs and cost the least--and if they called up GM or Ford and requested EV's with specific batteries and motors, the car companies would do it if it was economically possible. Yet last time I looked, there was no major on-road company in the entire US using electric vehicles.
When these companies start using EV's, you'll know that EV's are really comparable to IC vehicles on costs.
And if you're not willing to base your comparisons on financial costs, then you can justify anything.
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Well nuts, somebody turned the website off.....
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This has been pointed out by numerous commentators in the past:
medical regulatory bodies generally tend to reject new technology, even if individual patients are willing to accept the risks.
The usual logic for this is that if the regulating agency approves anything new that leads to the death of people, the regulatory agency gets blamed well for that--but if they refuse to approve a new medicine for use, nobody knows the true cost of doing that--how many people it would have saved. So from a practical standpoint, it's safer for them not to approve anything new.
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Hey there! I'm in an unrelated field and I don't know how to do your job, but here's a few changes I'd like to see anyway....
So Mr. Grove, let's consider all the faulty products you shipped in just one year of your career at Intel--and now let's imagine every single customer that bought one of those products suing your company for a half-million dollars each, and winning....
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Mixing powdered iron into the paint used on the walls will greatly decrease RF signal strength across much of the spectrum, but it provides no way for selective blocking, and the key ingredient (powdered iron) is rather expensive.
As for "the right to be a loudmouthed annoyance wherever you want" (noted by another poster), most of the examples cited were owners of private establishments using such jammers. A fancy restaurant can deny you entry for any number of reasons including not dressing cool enough, and nobody noted talked of blocking cellphone signals on the street just because they don't like cell phones.
Come to think of it, my phones barely get a signal when I'm sitting in front of the computer. Restaurants could just install a headless mini-ITX on the underside of each table, and leave it running a fancy 3-D screensaver....
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Years back, I worked at a moderately-sized gas station (16 pumps, and not near any major highways), and it was normal to sell ~10,000 gallons of fuel per day. There was a McDonald's nearby on the same road, and I don't ever remember seeing a tanker truck come by daily to being them new cooking oil.
How much does a typical fast-food joint use per week, and how much biodiesel could be produced from it? How much of that biodiesel would be wasted in the process of collecting that fuel, processing it, and redistributing it? Or do you expect McDonald's to start making biodiesel on-site and retailing it directly to customers? Fuel dispensing pumps are federally-regulated and a typical example can easily cost ~$10,000 alone--not even including the storage tanks, installation and other related equipment.
The "free biodiesel from cooking oil" line strikes me as kind of like saying "if you had an electric car, you could put solar panels on the roof and get FREE ELECTRICITY!!!".... which is true, technically--but the amount of electricity you can get from the area of a typical car's rooftop is not going to be that significant compared to what the car will end up using, considering the expenses involved with buying the necessary solar cells.
I would think a better idea for using old cooking oil might be to use it at the point of production--burn it for heat at the restaurant directly. This would utilize the energy in it, and still avoid the problems of the glycerol produced by making biofuel with it, as well as the extraneous transportation/distribution losses.
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I tried it, and don't like Steam:
...Previous to HL2, I had retail copies of HL-1 and Opposing Force, as well as several mods, They Hunger the most-played. When I installed Steam, it "took over" all these, without giving any choice in the matter, breaking every last one of them--so the entire year I had HL-2 installed, I could not play the earlier games at all.
...Installing HL-2 took about THREE HOURS on my Athlon-64 1.8Ghz, 1meg-RAM PC. It took about an hour to load through the five CD's, and then about another two hours connecting online to "decrypt files". Reinstalling it was not exactly a minor amount of hassle. This goes back to what I said about "retail users seemed to have more problems than online buyers did".
...I noticed that every time I did play HL-2, it would need to connect and download files, often for several minutes at full-speed. I had broadband cable internet; I only wonder what dial-up users did.
...My copy would never play at all unless it could connect online to Steam. The game simply would not start. Yea, I know there's supposed to be a way to store the password, but it never worked on mine. I'd try to start HL-2, and Steam would start instead, and it would try to connect for about 45 seconds and if it couldn't connect, it would just disappear, and that was that. There was never any explanation I found why this was.
Finally, the ending, that you have read--suddenly Steam tells me that my password is no longer valid--and nobody else the least bit interested in gaming ever used my computer. It's highly unlikely that it was stolen from anyone at my keyboard, and Valve was no help at all. This should have been easy to detirmine--I lived at the same physical address and had the same cable internet service the entire time. Who suddenly started using that account?
Half-Life-2 was network-dependent from the start, and should have been advertised as such. Is there a class-action suit in the house?
I can understand Valve wanting to block hacked copies from playing online, and even for them forcing updates on people who played online (other games do that as well, sometimes it's just necessary)--but all this other shit wasn't necessary for people playing in single-player, after their copy was validated the first time.
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I noticed this when Half-Life 2 first came out--I was casually interested in it, was walking through an electronics store one day and they had retail copies, so I bought one. I later found out that the online version had a couple added features that you could not download for free, and could not buy separately. If you wanted them at all, you had to pay full price for ANOTHER copy online.
,,,,,
(-at least,,, I think that would have worked.... I never tried it-).
I also noticed throughout its initially buggy-ridden first few months, that the online-purchasers seemed to have fewer problems than retail copy purchasers did. It seemed like most people posting problems had bought hard copies, either CD or DVD.
My copy of HL-2 worked fine for about a year, then told me one day that the password was no longer valid. Emails to the Steam support and on the STEAM forum went unanswered, and the entire game would not work anymore after that. It looked nice, but didn't play all that great and wasn't worth the risk of my computer getting rooted trying to use cracks on it.
Was it only good for a year? I don't know.
Would it have worked if I'd have bought another copy? Maybe, but that won't happen.
Valve got its last $60 from me.
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US tech jobs of many stripes have already seen heavy offshoring. Kids aren't dumb, they won't bother with a difficult career path that may be yanked from under them and sent to the other side of the globe at any time.
A doctor can't be offshored, a lawyer can't be offshored. An MBA can't spin marketing bullshit in IndiEnglish from a phone halfway around the world.
US tech jobs are a dying breed, following in machine-tool operators' footsteps. The subject is as interesting as it ever was, but the career is simply not that attractive anymore.
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....Two things I'd point out:
1. Ghana is the exception. A lot of people wonder why it is, but it is. What "better international policies" would they benefit from?
2. The book's premise is that (over the last ~30 years, and now we might say the last 45 years) whatever has been done as "international aid" has not had a positive impact on the overall situation.
I wouldn't claim to know any solution, but would agree that what's intended as aid by foreign countries isn't working.
From what international news I've seen, there seems to be a tendency towards populist African leaders choosing short-term non-solutions.
Mugabe's white farm seisure efforts to redistribute wealth have been a glorious, comical disaster by everyone else's accounting. Who is keeping him in power?
What MOST Africans are still struggling to invent is a slippery little thing called "rule of law", specifically of the non-religious variety.
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Here's a fun read on the matter, a bit dated now but certain to destroy any optimism you had concerning the African situation-
Lords of Poverty by Graham Hancock
http://www.google.com/search?num=30&hl=en&c2coff=1&safe=off&q=lords+of+poverty+graham+hancock&btnG=Search
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The belt generator is far from ideal.
A wind generator can only extract power from the flow it recieves, which relates to the cross-section that it sweeps. Compared to most other types of windmills, a belt/ribbon generator doesn't sweep very much cross-section.
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Some of us view surround-sound as sort of a childish gimmick--if certainly works, but whether it adds anything of value to a movie is debateable. When it first came out it was pretty impressive, but now it's taken for granted and generally ignored unless the cinematography is purposely utilizing it. Can you think of any moves in the last few years that were outstanding because of their 5.1 sound effects? A lot of the best movies of all-time wouldn't lose much if they were limited to mono sound.
I have heard in my own time that a cheap pair of speakers hooked up to a good amp still sounds nice (as long as the volume is low enough for the cheap speakers to handle)--but a pair of great speakers hooked up to a cheap amp still sounds like shit.
Also... I grew up during the 70's, after everybody with a stereo had switched to transistors because they were more "modern"--but a lot of big TV's people had were older and still used tube circuits, even for the audio amp. To my ears, tube amps just sound right, I can't describe it really--and no amount of tweaking the bass and treble on any $5000 transistor amp I've heard can duplicate it.
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I heard the Israeli method of "targeting Arabs trying to get on planes" works pretty well.
It's a sad shame the US goverment is a fucking buch of pussies.
For once the A.C.L.U. needs to be told to go eat shit.
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On the one hand, a SWATH has more hull-surface drag - but on the other hand, the greater submerged hull volume means more fuel storage.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Waterplane_Are
I especially like this line from the story:
Not aboard for the maiden press voyage? Hmmm,,,,,
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Of course we realize--they cannot pay for infinite overproduction, as they have no use beyond demand... -but under the system you mention there's not much incentive for average people to bother with a solar grid-die system at all.
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What exactly was the big pissfit about the firings?
The district attorney general positions are appointees, that means that every president gets to appoint them, and has, by firing all the existing ones.
I don't remember the Democrats OR the republicans bitching when Clinton fired all the Republican district att's and replaced them with Democrats. It was normal, and is expected by both parties. ~
It's funny how the most disruptive kids' parents always come in bitching because ther kid got put in a remedial class.
Also we note: in the US, the teachers union would never allow some teachers to get gravy classes while others are stuck with borderline retards.
It's only charter schools that allow that, and the teachers union tries to undermine them at every step.
One more reason the US teachers union needs to be crushed.
At least the school board does respond to public pressure. The teachers union lives in its own little world, where teachers are the most critical part of the educational machine, yet beyond scrutiny by any common means except the union itself.
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Re: Is the metal housing really necessary? ....Yes, for the most part.
....Mine didn't work because I could not find a way to get the laser diode out of the original steel heatsink it came in. It was glued inside a hole about 6mm deep in a odd-shaped steel heatsink. You could maybe grind the heatsink away a bit at a time with a Dremel & cutoff wheel, but laser diodes are sensitive to heat, so you cant let the laser get too hot. I tried using mine still in its heatsink with other optics (telescope objectives and whatnot), and with those set in front of it, it would melt a garbage bag a little but wouldn't do much else.
I tried this some time back, and it didn't quite work, but I'll relate what I know anyway:
1. There's TWO laser diodes in a DVD burner--remove them both out carefully, preserving as much of the leads already-soldered-on as you can! The leads of the laser diodes are very short (maybe 2mm) and only about a half-millimeter apart, it's damn tough to get the longer leads soldered back on if you cut them off, and there's no need to cut them off and then attempt to solder them back on anyway.
2. Inside the DVD burner you will find TWO laser diodes, with mirrors that feed them both into the same beam. Each will be glued inside its own heatsink, a piece of metal that may be a very odd shape, and then these are attached to a bigger copper plate. To tell them apart, just test them--try applying 1.5V power to both diodes one at a time, the CD one is IR and won't appear to do anything. The DVD one will light up visible red. (if all the lenses are removed from them at this point, you cannot burn your eyes out, that's in the next step...)
3. The bare laser diodes don't put out a laser "beam", they just create a pinpoint light (that's safe to look at!). To get the beam, you must mount a fisheye lens with its concave side set very close to the diode, almost touching it.
4. The laser housing is a metal tube with a fisheye lense set in it. The laser diode will get warm with 1.5V on it, and will get too hot to hold in ~30 seconds with 3V on it. The laser housing serves partly as a heatsink, and also as a way to hold the lens without melting (the DVD-drive optics will have a fisheye lense, but those optics are usually set into little plastic frames, and they may melt in this use).
IF you manage to get one out and do this, don't run it for more than ~20 seconds at a time without letting it cool down for a minute or so. The laser diode will work with 3V batteries hooked straight to it, but you're definitely not going to get that 100,000 hour lifetime. You'd be lucky to get 1000 hours. The DVD laser output power is typically around 210mW, and more than 150mW is enough to burn stuff (the CD laser won't burn stuff because it's only around 40-50mW max).
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