You're right, most photographic prints made for the whole history of photography have terrible problems with degradation.
Really old black & whites, from Daguerreotypes to early silver gelatin prints, fade horribly when subjected to light. For most glossy black & white prints the substrate slowly breaks down into vinegar, causing the emulsion layer to bunch up, crack, and peel. Nearly all color prints face horrible color shifts- some in as little as two or three years, while others are good for ten or twenty. Most negatives fade too, and a lot of slides are just awful. Kodachrome slides last well, but a lot of Ektachrome slides fade entirely to red in just ten to twenty years. And I don't just mean a red "shift," I mean near total loss of two thirds of the image data. And it doesn't matter much if you store them "right"- in complete darkness, with low humidity and constant temperature. They still fade. It's an internal chemical process. Yes, light fading usually makes things much worse, but most photographic prints have trouble with dark fading too.
The world expert in photographic print longevity is Henry Wilhelm. You can download a lot of great articles on print longevity, as well as the entire text of his book, The Permanence and Care of Color Photographs: Traditional and Digital Color Prints, Color Negatives, Slides, and Motion Pictures, from his website.
Fuji Crystal Archive and Kodak Duralife papers are both good attempts to fix this problem, but most existing prints were done before these were developed. Even most expensive prints from professional studios fade away terribly.
What can you do about it?
Well Bill Gates knows. He owns Corbis, which bought New York's famous Bettman Archive and is storing the whole thing in sub-zero storage underneath Iron Mountain in Pennsylvania.
But what can the average user do? Scanning and digital storage is pretty good, but it's true that unless you run regular backups, a hard drive crash can obliterate your entire photographic history in seconds. And most backup media have potential problems too. I'd suggest backing up your photographs to a Mitsui Gold Archival CD. Various libraries have certified these as an "archival" format. Then keep two copies of each CD in different locations (far apart), in case of a natural disaster.
This is very safe and affordable, if not particularly convenient.
As for prints from the digital files lasting, most ink jet prints aren't any better than photographic prints. A lot of older Canon printers produced photographic prints that were practically worthless in a year. But there are a few very good options now. Epson has three printers with archival, pigmented ink sets: the 2000p, the 2200 (2100 in Europe), and the R800. Additionally, many Epsons, and some other printers, can use third-party long-life ink sets, made by companies like Lyson, MIS, and others. Used on the right papers and stored properly, prints made with these should last for several generations.
Disclaimer: I have a company that preserves photographs. I have no ties with anyone listed above in this message. If you are interested, my company, The Family Reserve, is here.
If you want your pictures of any sort to last, go here
They archive your digital pictures on redundant hard drives and burn gold archival CD's that are stored off-premises.
They also make top quality archival prints and hard-bound albums.
And they scan your existing photos, and can retouch and restore them.
Big Disclaimer! This is my company! So I'm biased. But photographic preservation and archiving is my business, so if that's what you want, please take a look at all we can do!
Historically, high voter turn out correlates with more wins for Democrats. If you're a democrat, you probably really want to get the vote out. Apparently there are more people who only sometimes vote who tend to vote democratic than there are who tend to vote republican.
> Then only those who have really thought for themselves will vote
This is incorrect. The people who really think things out are just as likely to decide to rationally abstain. After all, no presidential election has ever hinged on one vote, or even came close. Even Florida four years ago came down to 500 something votes- over two orders of magnitude from anyone's vote having any effect at all. Your chances of dying on the way to the polls or back is much higher than your chance of swinging an election.
Besides, the rational people who think things through are likely to be the ones who see lots of positives and negatives for each candidate, and have trouble weighing the many weighty issues of which is better [worse]. They're less likely to see things in terms of black and white and less likely to think it's incredibly important which candidate they vote for.
It's the mindless zombies who are the die-hard, knee-jerk zealots who will always get out and vote for "their" candidate. Many of the thoughtful people care less about getting to the polls.
Just a link to a previous post on the possibility of reducing global warming by taking removing energy through wind turbines. Conclusions: it's not going to happen.
I would have moded that up as "funny," but "insightful?" Come on.
Anyone can run for president, and if they'd get national air time for doing so, that list you linked to would be 10,000 times as long. They'd have to clear out a 6-month block of TV time to let everyone have their free say.
It needs to be restricted to some degree based on anybody having interest in the party. Perhaps something like being on the ballots in at least x number of states, or getting at least x number of names on a petition supporting you.
Congress had a shared drive Miranda had access to, and there were a bunch of unlocked documents on it. Congress had procedures for locking minimal security documents, and keeping high security documents on disc under lock and key, but the documents in question were on a shared volume Miranda had rightful access to, and he looked at them. They do not contain classified or privileged information. So maybe he committed a misdemeanor, and maybe he didn't.
But the "poor bumpkins" who's documents he was reading are our elected representatives, who were trampling the constitution. They were basing court nominations on bribes, withholding nominations to influence court verdicts, and wrote that they planned to block a court nomination because the nominee was latino.
Maybe Miranda committed a misdemeanor, maybe he didn't. How many people in the US are convicted of misdemeanors every day? He could have jaywalked. The story is that our elected representatives are a bunch of sold-out racist bigots who are trampling the constitution. Whether he was right or wrong in the way he found this out, he is a hero for exposing this information.
I'd just like to point out with the "Democracy In Pakistan" thing that if I were answering questions on the spot in an interview, and I did interviews often and was in the public spotlight, I'm sure I'd say stupid things. Slips of the tongue, saying one thing while thinking about the next thing I'm going to say. I think I'm a reasonably bright guy, and have various testing scores and such to back that sort of claim up, but I know it's frequent that I'm meaning to say one thing and I say another. I usually catch myself, but probably not always. Saying based on this that Bush really thinks Pakistan is a democracy is not really fair.
In this case, at least he really said something stupid. A lot of the most famous ones are setups.
For example, Dan Quayle and spelling "Potato" with an "e." First of all, he was conducting the final round of the National Spelling Bee, so people claiming "potato" is an easy word to spell are wrong. Even though it looks easy, it's a commonly misspelled word, and it is an exception to the spelling rule with similar words like "Tomatoe." But all of that is hardly relevant. If you were on a stage in front of a huge audience of spelling experts, being televised, and you had in your hand a card that that gave the official spelling for a word, as determined by the foremost experts on spelling, specifically in order for that word to be judged at the finals of the national spelling bee, would you even consider correcting what the card says? I sure as hell wouldn't. In fact, I'd think that, as long as I went with what was on the card, I couldn't be criticized. The mistake was made by the people who made & checked the cards. This isn't to say Quayle didn't have a serious case of foot-in-mouth disease, just that the media gets caught up in the smallest, dumbest things that could happen to anyone. Things where the person being criticized had no chance to correct themselves or the record. In fact, if they do go back to stand up from themselves on these things, they look petty. All they can do is hope they peter out.
Reagan thinking "ketchup" was a vegetable was a similar setup.
I've got a nice bridge in Manhattan I could sell to you, why don't you give me a call?
No one had to invest the $5 billion. In fact, no one should have invested it- the world is worse off for that investment. We launced $5 billion worth of scarce capital out into space, and earth will never, ever see anything near a $5 billion return on that investment. It's hard to come up with worse ways to spend it.
Apparently their analysts were not very decent, because when I first heard about it, I drew the supply/demand curve on the back of a napkin, and it was immediatly obvious to everyone I showed it to that the project didn't stand a chance. If I'm so smart, how come Mototrola didn't get it? I don't know, but I've got a lot of backup on this one. For one thing, Mototrola took this on the regular fund-raising rounds, and couldn't get investors. AT&T and NTT thought it had no chance of profitability. So did almost everyone else. They eventually had to restructure the entire plan, because they couldn't find any traditional investors who would take a part in it. They eventually ended up pre-selling pieces of the (supposed future) profits from their air-time rate plan to an odd batch of investors, largely royalty, oil barrons, and third world governments, and other people who saw Motorola's pie-in the sky numbers, and thought they were buying a piece of the future. People who also happened to know very little about economics or calculating expected returns. In general, you probably shouldn't invest in anything where Venture Capitalists during the 90's universally thought it looked like a sure looser, and you have to turn to Saudi Princes (some of whom think Al Queda is a good investment for the future) to get your funding.
There are lots of colossal business failures I'd call risks, or intelligent gambles, that just didn't pay off. But I hate it when people seem to think that stupid and high risk are the same thing. You could call it a high-risk endeavor to spend $1 trillion dollars designing the ultimate mousetrap, but that's not a high risk proposition: there's no risk at all, it's absolutely definite it will lose a fortune. Same with Iridium. Explain to me how the logic is wrong that, going into this from the beginning, there was no price they could set on the product where they could even conceivably come within an order of magnitude of making a profit. Perhaps you didn't get that supply curve I was talking about. I only set the up the unrealistic boundary conditions- everyone has a phone, or no one does. Let's take a look at that. The system cost $5 billion to put up, $80 million a month to run, phones cost $2,000 apiece, and the population of Earth is about 6 billion. They knew from the outset that cell phones were cheaper, lighter, and provided better service in every local market. Iridium was only for rich people who travelled a lot and were willing to pay massive premiums not to have to switch phones and yet were willing to carry a big, heavy, awkward phone- or for people in the middle of nowhere who had a lot of money and really needed to communicate.
Do you think there are 1 million people who will each pay $3,000 for this? That means a million people who are willing to pay $2,000 for a phone and $3/minute for air time, when 99.9% of the population of the world that could possibly afford that much money lives within range of a higher quality cellular communications system that costs a fraction of the price. That's what Motorolla thought, but every investment firm disagreed, and it doesn't sound likely off the top of your head. All they actually got was 27,000 people, about one fortieth of what they needed to just break even. So they were off by a bit.
I'm not the only one using his 20/20 hindsight to say this was stupid from day 1. This has become a textbook case in business classes and textbooks for how 2 minutes of common sense math can show that $5 billion in capital was a sure waste. How this ever got through Motorolla is beyond me.
Iridium was the dumbest investment opportunity since a 3,000 Guilder Tulip bulb in 1624. The constellation cost $5 billion to construct. It was immediately obvious from the very outset to anyone who spent a little while playing around with the math that there would never be any way to make money from this. You could estimate any reasonable supply/demand curve and come up with a loss- from 1 phone at $5 billion apiece to 5 billion phones (about 1 per person on earth who can ho,d a phone) at $2,001 apiece (the phones cost about $2,000 to produce), there was no number in between where they could conceivably ever make money. In fact, there was no way they could do anything but lose billions.
So they went bankrupt, and no one would buy the system. It was a textbook case of a colossal business failure, and no one would touch it with a 10-ft pole. The judge hated to rule that a $5 billion infrastructure system burn up in the atmosphere, and luckily, at the last minute, Dan Colussy stepped in with a $25 million bid- less than half a cent on the dollar of initial construction costs, and swept it up.
Then what? The new Iridium Satellite LLC started cleanning up, which it's still doing. Very profitable. It turns out that, while it's impossible to recoup a $5 billion investment on a satellite phone system is impossible, recouping an investment 1/200 that size isn't so bad.
This is a silly story. Many people interested in high-end audio have insisted that tubes amps are better than transistor amps all along. (although most admit that transistors are getting closer and closer all the time). So you plug your ipod into a tube amp. You can plug your ipod into any amp. Good amps sound better. If they're trying to get at the combo digital/analog audio angle as being news, why have there been dozens of tube CD players for sale for years? And many other people have normal CD players hooked up to tube amps. The Headroom sells headphone transistor & tube amps with special iPod cases. This is nothing new
Perhaps the story should have been when Apple released Apple Lossless Encoder. That's the recent iPod news that makes the iPod better for audiophiles.
There are a lot of responses to this, and there are a lot of sub-topics here, so I'm just going to sum up a few points on this issue.
There are a several mechanisms to consider in asking weather (sorry, pun intended) a shift away from current energy sources to wind power would reduce global warming.
1. The original post says: "the amount of power being extracted from the atmosphere would be more than the increase in greenhouse gas atmospheric energy forcing since 1600." So there's the issue of how much power is subtracted from the atmosphere by wind power, compared to how much (if any) is added or subtracted by other means of generating power.
2. There's the matter of how much power is added to the atmosphere by using the electricity, a la the parent post claiming: "Almost all the electricity used today is CONVERTED TO HEAT!" Again, this should be compared in relation to other sources of power.
3. There are completely separate issues from how much power is directly added or subtracted from the atmosphere, ie, carbon dioxide emissions leading to a greenhouse effect, thereby increasing the heat retention of the atmosphere.
Let's take a quick look at the physical accuracy of these claims.
1. Is it even clear that turbines are subtracting heat from the atmosphere? They slow down the wind. Net, over the course of years, the total amount of wind on earth probably isn't changing much (you don't hear much about the global wind epidemic, however people in Florida might feel about things right now), so the wind is probably being converted into heat when it expends itself in friction. So turbines probably do reduce heat by some amount, because some of the wind that goes by them doesn't just get converted into heat, some gets converted into electricity. This can't be said for other most major sources of power today, particularly fossil fuels and nuclear. Where these don't subtract heat, they actually release huge amounts of heat.
2. Where the power came from probably has very little net effect on consumer habits for power usage, so this argument is probably irrelevant.
3. Wind power does not contribute to any warming effects I know of, where evidence for the greenhouse effect is mounting. Nuclear doesn't contribute here (even fusion would not significantly change the composition of the atmosphere), but fossil fuels are generally considered to be the major cause of the greenhouse effect.
Now let's guess if these are relevant:
1. The amount of heat subtracted from the atmosphere by turbines should be equal to the amount of power they generate. (Yes, this power comes back out as heat when the electricity is used, but remember, we're comparing the net effect vs. other forms of power, and we're assuming the usage is the same for all forms, so we're comparing the generation side). According to
this, in 1999 the world used about 377 quadrillion BTU of electricity. Assuming we switch all that power to wind, there are complications regarding storage inefficiencies, but I think these would all cancel out anyway. (Producing 43% more total energy to make up for 70% lost in conversion & storage would take more heat out of the atmosphere, but in that case it actually would put more heat back in through usage than other forms of generation that don't need to go through the conversions and storage.) So how much global cooling does a sync of 4*10^15 BTU provide us? Would it make a dent in atmospheric temperature? Check this math, but 4*10^15 BTU is about 1.8*10^14 watt-hours. According to the equations here, (and their assumptions about the specific heat capacity of the atmosphere) that's about 1.13 degrees Kelvin per year, or about 2 degrees Fahrenheit. Zounds, that's enough to take us into global cooling! NASA estimates for global warming are closer to
Far off, but going to happen
on
Palmtop Nirvana?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Mod me off topic, but I don't want a palmtop.
They're inconvenient. I want a wristwatch with:
A cell phone
A fast two-way data connection
A computer with at least 1GB of storage
A GPS
Altimeter, Thermometer, barometer
Being a watch, the interface would be verbal from me to the watch, and a high-resolution screen built into (and superimposed inside the lenses of) a pair of glasses for the interface from the watch to me.
ie, "Watch- what time is my appointment with Bill?"
"Where do I turn to get to the nearest Wendy's, and how far is it?"
"Read me the headlines from Slashdot," etc.
Thus, I will be waiting for several (many?) years.
> Unfortunately, I think they've pretty much sold out the previous generation iMacs
They may have, but that doesn't mean you can't buy one of the 73 iMac G4's for sale on eBay.
> I wish they'd kept a 15" model at $999. This lack of low end is Apple's greatest problem with consumers.
You're complaining about a lack of a low-end 15" $999 machine, when they sell a low-end 17" machine for $799? Or $749 with an educational discount.
Although I would agree that price is still a problem with Apple, since low-end these days is closer to $300 for PC's. Yes, those PC's are much lower-end than the $799 eMac, but they still meet the needs of a lot of people. I'd love to see a low-end headless Apple box for more like $400, for geeks & such to use to play with OS-X, but that's just not the market Apple's going for, unfortunately.
Of course Macs are immune to this virus, but this sort of thing is theoretically possible for a Mac.
That's one of the reasons the iSight is such a great design- you turn your iSight on and off, automatically lauching and closing the iChat software, by twisitng the LENS SHUTTER OPEN AND CLOSED. Unless the virus also implements X-Ray vision in the iSight, I wouldn't worry about it spying on you when you thought it was off.
Slashdot Mirror
You're right, most photographic prints made for the whole history of photography have terrible problems with degradation.
Really old black & whites, from Daguerreotypes to early silver gelatin prints, fade horribly when subjected to light. For most glossy black & white prints the substrate slowly breaks down into vinegar, causing the emulsion layer to bunch up, crack, and peel. Nearly all color prints face horrible color shifts- some in as little as two or three years, while others are good for ten or twenty. Most negatives fade too, and a lot of slides are just awful. Kodachrome slides last well, but a lot of Ektachrome slides fade entirely to red in just ten to twenty years. And I don't just mean a red "shift," I mean near total loss of two thirds of the image data. And it doesn't matter much if you store them "right"- in complete darkness, with low humidity and constant temperature. They still fade. It's an internal chemical process. Yes, light fading usually makes things much worse, but most photographic prints have trouble with dark fading too.
The world expert in photographic print longevity is Henry Wilhelm. You can download a lot of great articles on print longevity, as well as the entire text of his book, The Permanence and Care of Color Photographs: Traditional and Digital Color Prints, Color Negatives, Slides, and Motion Pictures, from his website.
Fuji Crystal Archive and Kodak Duralife papers are both good attempts to fix this problem, but most existing prints were done before these were developed. Even most expensive prints from professional studios fade away terribly.
What can you do about it?
Well Bill Gates knows. He owns Corbis, which bought New York's famous Bettman Archive and is storing the whole thing in sub-zero storage underneath Iron Mountain in Pennsylvania.
But what can the average user do? Scanning and digital storage is pretty good, but it's true that unless you run regular backups, a hard drive crash can obliterate your entire photographic history in seconds. And most backup media have potential problems too. I'd suggest backing up your photographs to a Mitsui Gold Archival CD. Various libraries have certified these as an "archival" format. Then keep two copies of each CD in different locations (far apart), in case of a natural disaster.
This is very safe and affordable, if not particularly convenient. As for prints from the digital files lasting, most ink jet prints aren't any better than photographic prints. A lot of older Canon printers produced photographic prints that were practically worthless in a year. But there are a few very good options now. Epson has three printers with archival, pigmented ink sets: the 2000p, the 2200 (2100 in Europe), and the R800. Additionally, many Epsons, and some other printers, can use third-party long-life ink sets, made by companies like Lyson, MIS, and others. Used on the right papers and stored properly, prints made with these should last for several generations.
Disclaimer: I have a company that preserves photographs. I have no ties with anyone listed above in this message. If you are interested, my company, The Family Reserve, is here.
If you want your pictures of any sort to last, go here
They archive your digital pictures on redundant hard drives and burn gold archival CD's that are stored off-premises.
They also make top quality archival prints and hard-bound albums.
And they scan your existing photos, and can retouch and restore them.
Big Disclaimer! This is my company! So I'm biased. But photographic preservation and archiving is my business, so if that's what you want, please take a look at all we can do!
> Then only those who have really thought for themselves will vote
This is incorrect. The people who really think things out are just as likely to decide to rationally abstain. After all, no presidential election has ever hinged on one vote, or even came close. Even Florida four years ago came down to 500 something votes- over two orders of magnitude from anyone's vote having any effect at all. Your chances of dying on the way to the polls or back is much higher than your chance of swinging an election.
Besides, the rational people who think things through are likely to be the ones who see lots of positives and negatives for each candidate, and have trouble weighing the many weighty issues of which is better [worse]. They're less likely to see things in terms of black and white and less likely to think it's incredibly important which candidate they vote for.
It's the mindless zombies who are the die-hard, knee-jerk zealots who will always get out and vote for "their" candidate. Many of the thoughtful people care less about getting to the polls.
Just a link to a previous post on the possibility of reducing global warming by taking removing energy through wind turbines. Conclusions: it's not going to happen.
Anyone can run for president, and if they'd get national air time for doing so, that list you linked to would be 10,000 times as long. They'd have to clear out a 6-month block of TV time to let everyone have their free say.
It needs to be restricted to some degree based on anybody having interest in the party. Perhaps something like being on the ballots in at least x number of states, or getting at least x number of names on a petition supporting you.
But the "poor bumpkins" who's documents he was reading are our elected representatives, who were trampling the constitution. They were basing court nominations on bribes, withholding nominations to influence court verdicts, and wrote that they planned to block a court nomination because the nominee was latino.
Maybe Miranda committed a misdemeanor, maybe he didn't. How many people in the US are convicted of misdemeanors every day? He could have jaywalked. The story is that our elected representatives are a bunch of sold-out racist bigots who are trampling the constitution. Whether he was right or wrong in the way he found this out, he is a hero for exposing this information.
I think we should all email it out to everyone we know.
Was it a giant bee guy stepping on a penguin?
Similar problems have been found with XP SP I, the original XP, along with Windows 2000, 98, ME, CE, 95, and 3.1.
In this case, at least he really said something stupid. A lot of the most famous ones are setups.
For example, Dan Quayle and spelling "Potato" with an "e." First of all, he was conducting the final round of the National Spelling Bee, so people claiming "potato" is an easy word to spell are wrong. Even though it looks easy, it's a commonly misspelled word, and it is an exception to the spelling rule with similar words like "Tomatoe." But all of that is hardly relevant. If you were on a stage in front of a huge audience of spelling experts, being televised, and you had in your hand a card that that gave the official spelling for a word, as determined by the foremost experts on spelling, specifically in order for that word to be judged at the finals of the national spelling bee, would you even consider correcting what the card says? I sure as hell wouldn't. In fact, I'd think that, as long as I went with what was on the card, I couldn't be criticized. The mistake was made by the people who made & checked the cards. This isn't to say Quayle didn't have a serious case of foot-in-mouth disease, just that the media gets caught up in the smallest, dumbest things that could happen to anyone. Things where the person being criticized had no chance to correct themselves or the record. In fact, if they do go back to stand up from themselves on these things, they look petty. All they can do is hope they peter out.
Reagan thinking "ketchup" was a vegetable was a similar setup.
I've got a nice bridge in Manhattan I could sell to you, why don't you give me a call?
No one had to invest the $5 billion. In fact, no one should have invested it- the world is worse off for that investment. We launced $5 billion worth of scarce capital out into space, and earth will never, ever see anything near a $5 billion return on that investment. It's hard to come up with worse ways to spend it. Apparently their analysts were not very decent, because when I first heard about it, I drew the supply/demand curve on the back of a napkin, and it was immediatly obvious to everyone I showed it to that the project didn't stand a chance. If I'm so smart, how come Mototrola didn't get it? I don't know, but I've got a lot of backup on this one. For one thing, Mototrola took this on the regular fund-raising rounds, and couldn't get investors. AT&T and NTT thought it had no chance of profitability. So did almost everyone else. They eventually had to restructure the entire plan, because they couldn't find any traditional investors who would take a part in it. They eventually ended up pre-selling pieces of the (supposed future) profits from their air-time rate plan to an odd batch of investors, largely royalty, oil barrons, and third world governments, and other people who saw Motorola's pie-in the sky numbers, and thought they were buying a piece of the future. People who also happened to know very little about economics or calculating expected returns. In general, you probably shouldn't invest in anything where Venture Capitalists during the 90's universally thought it looked like a sure looser, and you have to turn to Saudi Princes (some of whom think Al Queda is a good investment for the future) to get your funding.
There are lots of colossal business failures I'd call risks, or intelligent gambles, that just didn't pay off. But I hate it when people seem to think that stupid and high risk are the same thing. You could call it a high-risk endeavor to spend $1 trillion dollars designing the ultimate mousetrap, but that's not a high risk proposition: there's no risk at all, it's absolutely definite it will lose a fortune. Same with Iridium. Explain to me how the logic is wrong that, going into this from the beginning, there was no price they could set on the product where they could even conceivably come within an order of magnitude of making a profit. Perhaps you didn't get that supply curve I was talking about. I only set the up the unrealistic boundary conditions- everyone has a phone, or no one does. Let's take a look at that. The system cost $5 billion to put up, $80 million a month to run, phones cost $2,000 apiece, and the population of Earth is about 6 billion. They knew from the outset that cell phones were cheaper, lighter, and provided better service in every local market. Iridium was only for rich people who travelled a lot and were willing to pay massive premiums not to have to switch phones and yet were willing to carry a big, heavy, awkward phone- or for people in the middle of nowhere who had a lot of money and really needed to communicate.
Do you think there are 1 million people who will each pay $3,000 for this? That means a million people who are willing to pay $2,000 for a phone and $3/minute for air time, when 99.9% of the population of the world that could possibly afford that much money lives within range of a higher quality cellular communications system that costs a fraction of the price. That's what Motorolla thought, but every investment firm disagreed, and it doesn't sound likely off the top of your head. All they actually got was 27,000 people, about one fortieth of what they needed to just break even. So they were off by a bit.
I'm not the only one using his 20/20 hindsight to say this was stupid from day 1. This has become a textbook case in business classes and textbooks for how 2 minutes of common sense math can show that $5 billion in capital was a sure waste. How this ever got through Motorolla is beyond me.
Anyone remember the furor when it looked like Richard Stallman's office and the Free Software Foundation would be in the new Gates building at MIT?
So they went bankrupt, and no one would buy the system. It was a textbook case of a colossal business failure, and no one would touch it with a 10-ft pole. The judge hated to rule that a $5 billion infrastructure system burn up in the atmosphere, and luckily, at the last minute, Dan Colussy stepped in with a $25 million bid- less than half a cent on the dollar of initial construction costs, and swept it up.
Then what? The new Iridium Satellite LLC started cleanning up, which it's still doing. Very profitable. It turns out that, while it's impossible to recoup a $5 billion investment on a satellite phone system is impossible, recouping an investment 1/200 that size isn't so bad.
Embedded? If you gut the case, you could just set the whole G5 in there.
You could probably sit in there while you use it too.
Perhaps the story should have been when Apple released Apple Lossless Encoder. That's the recent iPod news that makes the iPod better for audiophiles.
There are a lot of responses to this, and there are a lot of sub-topics here, so I'm just going to sum up a few points on this issue.
:
There are a several mechanisms to consider in asking weather (sorry, pun intended) a shift away from current energy sources to wind power would reduce global warming.
1. The original post says:
"the amount of power being extracted from the atmosphere would be more than the increase in greenhouse gas atmospheric energy forcing since 1600."
So there's the issue of how much power is subtracted from the atmosphere by wind power, compared to how much (if any) is added or subtracted by other means of generating power.
2. There's the matter of how much power is added to the atmosphere by using the electricity, a la the parent post claiming
"Almost all the electricity used today is CONVERTED TO HEAT!"
Again, this should be compared in relation to other sources of power.
3. There are completely separate issues from how much power is directly added or subtracted from the atmosphere, ie, carbon dioxide emissions leading to a greenhouse effect, thereby increasing the heat retention of the atmosphere.
Let's take a quick look at the physical accuracy of these claims.
1. Is it even clear that turbines are subtracting heat from the atmosphere? They slow down the wind. Net, over the course of years, the total amount of wind on earth probably isn't changing much (you don't hear much about the global wind epidemic, however people in Florida might feel about things right now), so the wind is probably being converted into heat when it expends itself in friction. So turbines probably do reduce heat by some amount, because some of the wind that goes by them doesn't just get converted into heat, some gets converted into electricity. This can't be said for other most major sources of power today, particularly fossil fuels and nuclear. Where these don't subtract heat, they actually release huge amounts of heat. 2. Where the power came from probably has very little net effect on consumer habits for power usage, so this argument is probably irrelevant.
3. Wind power does not contribute to any warming effects I know of, where evidence for the greenhouse effect is mounting. Nuclear doesn't contribute here (even fusion would not significantly change the composition of the atmosphere), but fossil fuels are generally considered to be the major cause of the greenhouse effect.
Now let's guess if these are relevant:
1. The amount of heat subtracted from the atmosphere by turbines should be equal to the amount of power they generate. (Yes, this power comes back out as heat when the electricity is used, but remember, we're comparing the net effect vs. other forms of power, and we're assuming the usage is the same for all forms, so we're comparing the generation side). According to this, in 1999 the world used about 377 quadrillion BTU of electricity. Assuming we switch all that power to wind, there are complications regarding storage inefficiencies, but I think these would all cancel out anyway. (Producing 43% more total energy to make up for 70% lost in conversion & storage would take more heat out of the atmosphere, but in that case it actually would put more heat back in through usage than other forms of generation that don't need to go through the conversions and storage.) So how much global cooling does a sync of 4*10^15 BTU provide us? Would it make a dent in atmospheric temperature? Check this math, but 4*10^15 BTU is about 1.8*10^14 watt-hours. According to the equations here, (and their assumptions about the specific heat capacity of the atmosphere) that's about 1.13 degrees Kelvin per year, or about 2 degrees Fahrenheit. Zounds, that's enough to take us into global cooling! NASA estimates for global warming are closer to
Mod me off topic, but I don't want a palmtop.
They're inconvenient. I want a wristwatch with:
A cell phone
A fast two-way data connection
A computer with at least 1GB of storage
A GPS
Altimeter, Thermometer, barometer
Being a watch, the interface would be verbal from me to the watch, and a high-resolution screen built into (and superimposed inside the lenses of) a pair of glasses for the interface from the watch to me.
ie, "Watch- what time is my appointment with Bill?"
"Where do I turn to get to the nearest Wendy's, and how far is it?"
"Read me the headlines from Slashdot," etc.
Thus, I will be waiting for several (many?) years.
Soon, maybe they'll invent "dumb terminals" that run all their programs off a central, "mainframe" computer!
> Unfortunately, I think they've pretty much sold out the previous generation iMacs
They may have, but that doesn't mean you can't buy one of the 73 iMac G4's for sale on eBay.
> I wish they'd kept a 15" model at $999. This lack of low end is Apple's greatest problem with consumers.
You're complaining about a lack of a low-end 15" $999 machine, when they sell a low-end 17" machine for $799? Or $749 with an educational discount.
Although I would agree that price is still a problem with Apple, since low-end these days is closer to $300 for PC's. Yes, those PC's are much lower-end than the $799 eMac, but they still meet the needs of a lot of people. I'd love to see a low-end headless Apple box for more like $400, for geeks & such to use to play with OS-X, but that's just not the market Apple's going for, unfortunately.
It's not for XM (yet), but I wonder how the RIAA feels about the Griffin Radio Shark?
They'll probably ignore it until there's a PC version.
The ultimate application of this technology?
Spying on Birds.
Being jaded is one thing, being scared is another.
What's scary is when the term "terrorist' is used to describe ordinary people in a court of law. See here, here, here, and elsewhere.
I have a can that can not only keep cold things cold, it also keeps warm things warm.
What I haven't puzzled out yet is how on earth it knows which to do.
Drat! You beat me too it.
However, here's their Official Website, and here's an interesting Wired article about Sealand.
Of course Macs are immune to this virus, but this sort of thing is theoretically possible for a Mac.
That's one of the reasons the iSight is such a great design- you turn your iSight on and off, automatically lauching and closing the iChat software, by twisitng the LENS SHUTTER OPEN AND CLOSED. Unless the virus also implements X-Ray vision in the iSight, I wouldn't worry about it spying on you when you thought it was off.