As far as server connectivity goes, the NT domain model of 3.5/4/2000 versus the AD model for 2003+ seem to currently be the big split beyond UI. I wouldn't be surprised if the underpinnings changed between 2003R2 and 2008, as they reflect the regular NT-derived OSes they're based from.
If you have sex without a condom, STIs and pregnancy are real risks. Claiming that it's different if the risk turns out to be high isn't really legitimate.
If you have sex, STIs and pregnancy are real risks. Claiming that it's different if the risk turns out to be high isn't really legitimate.
There, fixed that for you.
Anyone engaging in sexual activity should know and understand that the activity's primary purpose is to make more humans, and that everything we've ever done to avoid making babies while having sex has failed at some point or another. That doesn't mean that they fail often, but it can happen, and there is no release of liability if a pregnancy occurs while attempting to prevent it.
Assange may be a rat-fink and an asshole, but if a consensual sexual encounter that included a broken condom (or even no condom at all) is all they've got, then in my mind, they've got nothing. I'd argue that it's her burden, just as much as his, to ensure that the birth control device is intact.
Where I live, the heat output is a specific negative for 11 months of the year. Only place in the house I still consider run-of-the-mill incandescents to be right are the bathrooms, where the light produced by them seems less harsh than other means.
And, of course, in my lava lamp.
I want LED bulbs to come down in cost. I have several candelabra base lamps, indoors and out, that wouldn't look good with a CFL spiral. An LED bulb can look like an actual candle. Only problem, I'm not putting $40 apiece bulbs in the three sockets in the lamp outside. I'll wait until my potential loss due to theft is less than $40 for all three.
Works great on the wife's Thinkpad X301, a single-core Centrino if memory serves. Runs fine on my Ideapad S10-2. Worked decent on a Dell Latitude D410 (Core Duo 32bit) that I had laying around, though some more RAM would have been nice. Works quite nicely on the Pentium Dual Core-based Dell Optiplex 780 with 3gb RAM at my desk.
Yeah, because they went through millions of dollars to develop a proprietary console gaming system whose games specifically can't play on a run-of-the-mill PC and specifically make piracy difficult so that some thirteen year old could start loading the game, let it download all of the components it needs to run, then pull the plug and boot into another OS to copy the game files down...
I don't think they'll have any interest in changing how their gaming consoles work or how their system for the consoles work unless profitability drops and there's a real need to make such a change. Right now they make plenty of money and have a fairly secure system, as far as networked systems go. There's no reason for them to make a change.
But back then there were two separate product lines:
Windows 3.0 1990 Windows 3.1/3.11 1992-1993 Windows 95 1995 Windows 98 1998 Windows ME 2000 Windows XP 2001 Windows Vista 2006 Windows 7 2009
Windows NT 3.1 1992 Windows NT 3.5 1994 Windows NT 4.0 1996 Windows 2000 2000 Windows XP 2001 Windows Vista 2006 Windows 7 2009
The other consideration is the relationship between the OSes in these channels. Windows 3.0, 3.1, and 3.11 are substantially similar, and Windows NT 3.1 and 3.5 are as well, sort of blending into 4.0. Windows 95, 98, and ME were also similar enough to be the same product family with incremental changes. Windows 2000 and XP are the same product family. Windows Vista and 7 are the same family.
I'm probably going to skip 8. I've got too many XP-running computers to upgrade, and Microsoft's three-seat volume packs for home users bring the cost down to between $35 and $50 a PC for Win7 Home Premium (depending on the vendor and any deals at the time) makes it easy to justify buying two or three sets of three, and the benefits in the UI scaling, newer APIs for newer programs, and better multicore support seem worthwhile. It also was eight years from the release of XP to the release of 7, so there's probably been some actual real improvement there, even with the new bugs. 8, coming this quickly on the heels of 7, is probably going to only screw up the UI again, without having any real reason under the hood to compel me to change. I figure if I go to 7, I can probably wait to upgrade OSes until 2017 or so before it becomes a real issue.
The congressman isn't wasting time, his constituency includes the factory where the Easy Bake Oven is made, and with the end of the 100W incandescent they'll lose tens of jobs!
Ah, but remember, lots of homeowners and businesses are already personally choosing to invest in solar on their own, even if the costs are higher. The cost of the panels at purchase is fixed, but the cost of energy in the future is probably only going to continue to rise, even if it comes from Nuclear.
I for one appreciate the independence of being able to generate one's own power, and the ability to even recoup some costs with resale during the day while I'm out. I plan to be in this house for forty years or more, and I have the roofs of both a workshop and of the house, I probably have 2000sqft of usable panel space on flat roofs with plenty of space to move among the panels for maintenance, and that's not even putting any on the slanted south-facing roof on the front of the house.
For me, the option to add solar to my house is very easy and practical. The personal risk, beyond the financial one, is low. The risk to my neighbors is nonexistent. The benefit to me as an Arizona resident is great as suddenly that massively expensive piece of equipment that pumps cool air into my house to make it habitable might be offset in its entirety by a resource literally pouring down on my roof, currently heating up the very structure I'm trying to cool.
Not enough energy potential in solar?
on
Bill Gates On Energy
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
What's the total life-cycle cost comparison though?
With solar I see the following:
up front: Mining raw material for the panels, batteries, and electrical converters manufacturing the components in a low-security factory transporting the components on standard truck installing the panels and conversion equipment to an existing structure or building frames to install on bare earth
down the road: cleaning the panels maintaining the circuitry replacing batteries having an electrician or homeowner possibly replace individual components over time if things fail
end of life: remove panels from frames remove frames from structure or earth remove switching equipment and batteries send panels, frames, and switching equipment to recycler send batteries to mild hazardous waste disposal for disassembly or recycling
Potential problems: solar panels smashed en masse in a hail storm - solar is offline until panels are replaced and structure is back on grid power. If owner has insurance, that is used to pay for the replacement. Batteries leak, owner stops storing power for overnight use and goes back on to the grid, and replaces batteries and cleans up acid spill Absolute Worst Case- solar system causes a fire and the small structure burns.
Contrast to nuclear:
Startup: Spend billions to build obtain land, fight local opposition, and build the plant. spend millions to obtain ROW to install power transmission lines Refine nuclear fuel in a high security factory transport fuel in an expensive manner via truck convoy employ dozens, if not hundreds of engineers and technicians to fuel, power up, and baby sit the reactor
down the road: continue to employ dozens, if not hundreds of engineers and technicians to baby sit the reactor spend millions to refuel reactor as necessary spend millions to store spent nuclear fuel in the proper fashion, forcing it to stay cool until it's no longer generating its own heat maintain security at the facility
end of life: spend billions to decommission and clean up plant site find solution for storage of spent fuel?
possible problems: contaminated water spills posing an environmental hazard requiring expensive cleanup mismanagement of the reactor leading to core meltdown and environmental contamination (worst case similar to Chernobyl, but without the graphite moderator) natural disaster leading to core meltdown and environmental contamination (Fukushima) attractive target for terrorism
I'm for solar subsidy, especially once solar panel efficiency exceeds 40%, which they're almost to on the newest panel designs, especially for structures that can receive solar panels without spoiling the appearance of the structure. Commercial and residential structures with flat roofs, retrofitting houses with the backyard side on the south (as to no put the panels on the roof on the front of the house, for appearance), and building new structures with solar in mind from the planning stages all appeal to me. Give subsidy for Photovoltaics with battery storage, grid-tie-in, and intentional islanding (leaving the structure powered by the PV or batteries but separating from the grid when the grid itself loses power) and suddenly every home becomes a mini power plant. It might even cost more per unit of energy than bulk production like at large power facilities, but it also reduces or eliminates a need for more wiring infrastructure, adds failover, and in places like the southern portion of the country, provides power when it's needed most, during the sunniest days when the air conditioning is cranked down and when power grids tend to fail due to a lack of capacity. A big enough solar installation at a house can power the whole house and can sell back to the grid easily.
If people are worried about safety, have cities implement an inspection regimen at installation, significant modification, and every ten years or so. Nothing really expensive, just something to make sure that everything is hooked up properly and safely.
No, I suggested using the web browser and the command line interface.
Regardless though, how do you expect a newbie to become an expert without playing with the tools that an expert uses? I learned because I broke my computer and as a fourteen year old couldn't afford to pay anyone else to fix it, so my friends and I slowly became experts over the next several years.
Of course, fixing sound card IRQ and IO in the Windows 3.1 MCI Control Panel isn't the same as today's repairs, but you gotta start somewhere...
...if you don't plan to actually install. Alternatively, go download the Ultimate Boot CD and boot to the GUI for Parted Magic, which contains a browser, a command line tool, and a whole bunch of hard disk drive diagnostic and recovery tools, among other things. It's also useful for a bunch of other recovery and diagnosis stuff that doesn't use Linux, so it's good to have around for when the computer has a problem. I use it probably daily at work.
At least a tapeworm generated results......and generally didn't kill the patient, unless they lost or otherwise didn't take the remedy to kill the tapeworm so many weeks later...
I wish that everyone would just stop storing passwords as they're typed and instead only store the comparative hash. It wouldn't matter, nearly so much, if they were obtained that way, so long as the algorithm to turn the password into the hash can't also turn the hash into the password.
Yeah, I know, it might break some interoperability, but I'm getting sick and tired of hearing about this crap. Unfortunately the only way this will change is if it becomes in the interest of the requisite parties for it to, like if they can't obtain insurance anymore because no insurer will want to extend liability insurance to a company whose IT structure is so poor that it's likely that a payout might be necessary.
I guess I don't look at video games as "speech" at all. I look at video games as a toy, as they're interactive. Does the mechanical demonic cymbal-clapping monkey count as speech because it makes a noise?
I expect it'll probably go opposite the way I would want to see the ruling go, just given the recent history.
Arizona's Clean Elections law got stomped on despite creating more speech in giving out more money.
Minors can buy violent video games, even though historically Minors haven't had full rights and parents are the ones who have had the authority to regulate their children.
So, I expect this one to disappoint me too, in that I don't think that warrantless GPS monitoring should generally be legal.
What are the roadblocks and/or definciencies of alternative sources of power?
Probably bureaucracy and lack of familiarity and/or comfort with the technology in question.
It take that military a long, long time to change things. They go through conceptual processes, design processes, review processes, redesign processes, certification processes, and that's for things that get developed quickly and that officers want. When officers don't want something or don't understand the nature of the technology, or when they don't think their enlistees can manage the tech, things go a lot slower.
This is partially why the military tends to look for variants on an existing theme. M4 versus M16. All of the versions of the M72. It's much easier to go with the same or with similar. Throwing in a whole new technology, at least as far as their usage, is not nearly as easy for training or simplicity.
Specifically for solar panels, keep in mind that they're fragile, and it wouldn't take much (oh, like a single bullet) to destroy a fairly sizable panel. It would be easy for an enemy, with a few well-placed shots from an iron-sights sniper rifle, to destroy all of the solar panels and thus to destroy all of the cooling. If they're trucking in fuel for things that can't solar-power anyway, it makes sense, to them, to continue to truck that much more fuel in for everything else that uses power.
I don't necessarily agree, and I think that with effort a certain degree of ruggedization of solar panels should be achievable, but right now they're not interested, and that'll be that.
We like having nice views here in Arizona, but large windows are very bad for the temperature of the structure. If one could reclaim some of the cost of the air conditioning with solar power then it's more practical to have large picture windows.
I for one would like to see this integrated into automobile glass, with it powering a combination battery-monitoring and air circulation system. It could be used to reduce the interior temperature of a car by cycling out the hot air with less-hot air from outside while the car sits out in the sun all day. It would make it less bad when getting in and would possibly prolong the life of the interior components. One could even make a combination solar panel and LCD crystal windows, such that the operator can park, turn on the fan, and then whiteout the windows so that even less light makes it inside.
Heh. Friends. I did the whole, "make friends with people on the computer" in my BBS and IRC days. I even met about 30 of them IRL at GTs. One real-life friend is easily worth ten Internet "friends".
It's funny to call me a luddite when I see blogger, livejournal, blogspot, myspace, friendster, and facebook as reinventions of the same things. Sure, some new features get added from time to time, but it's still the same crap that dates back to the BBS message bases, fidonet, and usenet. "Social Media" is not an advancement at all, it's holding us back by making us think that the trivial crap is what's important, and the important stuff is lost in the chaff. It's vanity publishing. If I want to get caught up in the details of someone else's life, it's because I've personally observed those details, not read about what they think is important. When I see real advances in technology headed in a direction that I agree with I'm quite happy to assimilate them into my life. PDAs, smartphones, the ability to bargain-hunt on the fly in stores, the ability to make changes to my itinerary or to get around traffic problems or to find new places and know I'll be able to get out again with good maps are all great developments. Allowing people to talk at me about their cats isn't.
If you get in trouble, how many Internet Friends are going to help you? How many can you count on to interrupt what they're doing and come to lend you a hand?
This isn't a conversation though, this is the evolved form of a computer system graffiti wall. It's a bunch of posts, some of which get replies.
I do this when I am forced to wait but when my time is otherwise not my own, and I use Slashdot as a way of keeping up with some of the developments in one of my hobbies. Slashdot gets an appropriate amount of my time as such, a couple of hours a week. It can't help me with model rocketry, ham radio, swing dancing, auto restoration, trebuchet construction, or many other things. It can help me with computers and electronics, and sometimes with science fiction fandom, and that's what I use it for. Oh, and bad jokes. Good place to steal bad jokes from.
Turn off the TV, shut down the computer, and go interact with other people, or go do something with your hands. You'd be amazed how many calories you burn by puttering around in the garage or in the yard, or by meeting friends out in public. You should especially do this kind of stuff in the years between 18 and getting married. Don't worry about updating your status, use that smartphone to assist being out and about, not as a replacement for it.
Every time an inspection at a government facility is conducted for emissions or safety (as many places require) the odometer reading is noted. When a vehicle is registered the odometer reading is noted.
It wouldn't be all that hard to start conducting equipment or emissions inspections in the few places that currently lack them, and while doing so, check the odometer.
Mind you, I don't think it's right, and I'm much more in favor of fuel taxes, but it's certainly not hard to do it.
Slashdot Mirror
I had forgotten about the server line.
As far as server connectivity goes, the NT domain model of 3.5/4/2000 versus the AD model for 2003+ seem to currently be the big split beyond UI. I wouldn't be surprised if the underpinnings changed between 2003R2 and 2008, as they reflect the regular NT-derived OSes they're based from.
If you have sex, STIs and pregnancy are real risks. Claiming that it's different if the risk turns out to be high isn't really legitimate.
There, fixed that for you.
Anyone engaging in sexual activity should know and understand that the activity's primary purpose is to make more humans, and that everything we've ever done to avoid making babies while having sex has failed at some point or another. That doesn't mean that they fail often, but it can happen, and there is no release of liability if a pregnancy occurs while attempting to prevent it.
Assange may be a rat-fink and an asshole, but if a consensual sexual encounter that included a broken condom (or even no condom at all) is all they've got, then in my mind, they've got nothing. I'd argue that it's her burden, just as much as his, to ensure that the birth control device is intact.
Where I live, the heat output is a specific negative for 11 months of the year. Only place in the house I still consider run-of-the-mill incandescents to be right are the bathrooms, where the light produced by them seems less harsh than other means.
And, of course, in my lava lamp.
I want LED bulbs to come down in cost. I have several candelabra base lamps, indoors and out, that wouldn't look good with a CFL spiral. An LED bulb can look like an actual candle. Only problem, I'm not putting $40 apiece bulbs in the three sockets in the lamp outside. I'll wait until my potential loss due to theft is less than $40 for all three.
Works great on the wife's Thinkpad X301, a single-core Centrino if memory serves. Runs fine on my Ideapad S10-2. Worked decent on a Dell Latitude D410 (Core Duo 32bit) that I had laying around, though some more RAM would have been nice. Works quite nicely on the Pentium Dual Core-based Dell Optiplex 780 with 3gb RAM at my desk.
Yeah, because they went through millions of dollars to develop a proprietary console gaming system whose games specifically can't play on a run-of-the-mill PC and specifically make piracy difficult so that some thirteen year old could start loading the game, let it download all of the components it needs to run, then pull the plug and boot into another OS to copy the game files down...
I don't think they'll have any interest in changing how their gaming consoles work or how their system for the consoles work unless profitability drops and there's a real need to make such a change. Right now they make plenty of money and have a fairly secure system, as far as networked systems go. There's no reason for them to make a change.
Then why did they explain Windows 7 Starter's lack of ability to change background images as a resource issue?
But back then there were two separate product lines:
Windows 3.0 1990
Windows 3.1/3.11 1992-1993
Windows 95 1995
Windows 98 1998
Windows ME 2000
Windows XP 2001
Windows Vista 2006
Windows 7 2009
Windows NT 3.1 1992
Windows NT 3.5 1994
Windows NT 4.0 1996
Windows 2000 2000
Windows XP 2001
Windows Vista 2006
Windows 7 2009
The other consideration is the relationship between the OSes in these channels. Windows 3.0, 3.1, and 3.11 are substantially similar, and Windows NT 3.1 and 3.5 are as well, sort of blending into 4.0. Windows 95, 98, and ME were also similar enough to be the same product family with incremental changes. Windows 2000 and XP are the same product family. Windows Vista and 7 are the same family.
I'm probably going to skip 8. I've got too many XP-running computers to upgrade, and Microsoft's three-seat volume packs for home users bring the cost down to between $35 and $50 a PC for Win7 Home Premium (depending on the vendor and any deals at the time) makes it easy to justify buying two or three sets of three, and the benefits in the UI scaling, newer APIs for newer programs, and better multicore support seem worthwhile. It also was eight years from the release of XP to the release of 7, so there's probably been some actual real improvement there, even with the new bugs. 8, coming this quickly on the heels of 7, is probably going to only screw up the UI again, without having any real reason under the hood to compel me to change. I figure if I go to 7, I can probably wait to upgrade OSes until 2017 or so before it becomes a real issue.
The congressman isn't wasting time, his constituency includes the factory where the Easy Bake Oven is made, and with the end of the 100W incandescent they'll lose tens of jobs!
Ah, but remember, lots of homeowners and businesses are already personally choosing to invest in solar on their own, even if the costs are higher. The cost of the panels at purchase is fixed, but the cost of energy in the future is probably only going to continue to rise, even if it comes from Nuclear.
I for one appreciate the independence of being able to generate one's own power, and the ability to even recoup some costs with resale during the day while I'm out. I plan to be in this house for forty years or more, and I have the roofs of both a workshop and of the house, I probably have 2000sqft of usable panel space on flat roofs with plenty of space to move among the panels for maintenance, and that's not even putting any on the slanted south-facing roof on the front of the house.
For me, the option to add solar to my house is very easy and practical. The personal risk, beyond the financial one, is low. The risk to my neighbors is nonexistent. The benefit to me as an Arizona resident is great as suddenly that massively expensive piece of equipment that pumps cool air into my house to make it habitable might be offset in its entirety by a resource literally pouring down on my roof, currently heating up the very structure I'm trying to cool.
What's the total life-cycle cost comparison though?
With solar I see the following:
up front:
Mining raw material for the panels, batteries, and electrical converters
manufacturing the components in a low-security factory
transporting the components on standard truck
installing the panels and conversion equipment to an existing structure or building frames to install on bare earth
down the road:
cleaning the panels
maintaining the circuitry
replacing batteries
having an electrician or homeowner possibly replace individual components over time if things fail
end of life:
remove panels from frames
remove frames from structure or earth
remove switching equipment and batteries
send panels, frames, and switching equipment to recycler
send batteries to mild hazardous waste disposal for disassembly or recycling
Potential problems:
solar panels smashed en masse in a hail storm - solar is offline until panels are replaced and structure is back on grid power. If owner has insurance, that is used to pay for the replacement.
Batteries leak, owner stops storing power for overnight use and goes back on to the grid, and replaces batteries and cleans up acid spill
Absolute Worst Case- solar system causes a fire and the small structure burns.
Contrast to nuclear:
Startup:
Spend billions to build obtain land, fight local opposition, and build the plant.
spend millions to obtain ROW to install power transmission lines
Refine nuclear fuel in a high security factory
transport fuel in an expensive manner via truck convoy
employ dozens, if not hundreds of engineers and technicians to fuel, power up, and baby sit the reactor
down the road:
continue to employ dozens, if not hundreds of engineers and technicians to baby sit the reactor
spend millions to refuel reactor as necessary
spend millions to store spent nuclear fuel in the proper fashion, forcing it to stay cool until it's no longer generating its own heat
maintain security at the facility
end of life:
spend billions to decommission and clean up plant site
find solution for storage of spent fuel?
possible problems:
contaminated water spills posing an environmental hazard requiring expensive cleanup
mismanagement of the reactor leading to core meltdown and environmental contamination (worst case similar to Chernobyl, but without the graphite moderator)
natural disaster leading to core meltdown and environmental contamination (Fukushima)
attractive target for terrorism
I'm for solar subsidy, especially once solar panel efficiency exceeds 40%, which they're almost to on the newest panel designs, especially for structures that can receive solar panels without spoiling the appearance of the structure. Commercial and residential structures with flat roofs, retrofitting houses with the backyard side on the south (as to no put the panels on the roof on the front of the house, for appearance), and building new structures with solar in mind from the planning stages all appeal to me. Give subsidy for Photovoltaics with battery storage, grid-tie-in, and intentional islanding (leaving the structure powered by the PV or batteries but separating from the grid when the grid itself loses power) and suddenly every home becomes a mini power plant. It might even cost more per unit of energy than bulk production like at large power facilities, but it also reduces or eliminates a need for more wiring infrastructure, adds failover, and in places like the southern portion of the country, provides power when it's needed most, during the sunniest days when the air conditioning is cranked down and when power grids tend to fail due to a lack of capacity. A big enough solar installation at a house can power the whole house and can sell back to the grid easily.
If people are worried about safety, have cities implement an inspection regimen at installation, significant modification, and every ten years or so. Nothing really expensive, just something to make sure that everything is hooked up properly and safely.
No, I suggested using the web browser and the command line interface.
Regardless though, how do you expect a newbie to become an expert without playing with the tools that an expert uses? I learned because I broke my computer and as a fourteen year old couldn't afford to pay anyone else to fix it, so my friends and I slowly became experts over the next several years.
Of course, fixing sound card IRQ and IO in the Windows 3.1 MCI Control Panel isn't the same as today's repairs, but you gotta start somewhere...
...if you don't plan to actually install. Alternatively, go download the Ultimate Boot CD and boot to the GUI for Parted Magic, which contains a browser, a command line tool, and a whole bunch of hard disk drive diagnostic and recovery tools, among other things. It's also useful for a bunch of other recovery and diagnosis stuff that doesn't use Linux, so it's good to have around for when the computer has a problem. I use it probably daily at work.
At least a tapeworm generated results... ...and generally didn't kill the patient, unless they lost or otherwise didn't take the remedy to kill the tapeworm so many weeks later...
I wish that everyone would just stop storing passwords as they're typed and instead only store the comparative hash. It wouldn't matter, nearly so much, if they were obtained that way, so long as the algorithm to turn the password into the hash can't also turn the hash into the password.
Yeah, I know, it might break some interoperability, but I'm getting sick and tired of hearing about this crap. Unfortunately the only way this will change is if it becomes in the interest of the requisite parties for it to, like if they can't obtain insurance anymore because no insurer will want to extend liability insurance to a company whose IT structure is so poor that it's likely that a payout might be necessary.
... reviews on the Internet can be false? Holy Crap!
I guess I don't look at video games as "speech" at all. I look at video games as a toy, as they're interactive. Does the mechanical demonic cymbal-clapping monkey count as speech because it makes a noise?
I expect it'll probably go opposite the way I would want to see the ruling go, just given the recent history.
Arizona's Clean Elections law got stomped on despite creating more speech in giving out more money.
Minors can buy violent video games, even though historically Minors haven't had full rights and parents are the ones who have had the authority to regulate their children.
So, I expect this one to disappoint me too, in that I don't think that warrantless GPS monitoring should generally be legal.
Probably bureaucracy and lack of familiarity and/or comfort with the technology in question.
It take that military a long, long time to change things. They go through conceptual processes, design processes, review processes, redesign processes, certification processes, and that's for things that get developed quickly and that officers want. When officers don't want something or don't understand the nature of the technology, or when they don't think their enlistees can manage the tech, things go a lot slower.
This is partially why the military tends to look for variants on an existing theme. M4 versus M16. All of the versions of the M72. It's much easier to go with the same or with similar. Throwing in a whole new technology, at least as far as their usage, is not nearly as easy for training or simplicity.
Specifically for solar panels, keep in mind that they're fragile, and it wouldn't take much (oh, like a single bullet) to destroy a fairly sizable panel. It would be easy for an enemy, with a few well-placed shots from an iron-sights sniper rifle, to destroy all of the solar panels and thus to destroy all of the cooling. If they're trucking in fuel for things that can't solar-power anyway, it makes sense, to them, to continue to truck that much more fuel in for everything else that uses power.
I don't necessarily agree, and I think that with effort a certain degree of ruggedization of solar panels should be achievable, but right now they're not interested, and that'll be that.
We like having nice views here in Arizona, but large windows are very bad for the temperature of the structure. If one could reclaim some of the cost of the air conditioning with solar power then it's more practical to have large picture windows.
I for one would like to see this integrated into automobile glass, with it powering a combination battery-monitoring and air circulation system. It could be used to reduce the interior temperature of a car by cycling out the hot air with less-hot air from outside while the car sits out in the sun all day. It would make it less bad when getting in and would possibly prolong the life of the interior components. One could even make a combination solar panel and LCD crystal windows, such that the operator can park, turn on the fan, and then whiteout the windows so that even less light makes it inside.
Give her more pipe!
Heh. Friends. I did the whole, "make friends with people on the computer" in my BBS and IRC days. I even met about 30 of them IRL at GTs. One real-life friend is easily worth ten Internet "friends".
It's funny to call me a luddite when I see blogger, livejournal, blogspot, myspace, friendster, and facebook as reinventions of the same things. Sure, some new features get added from time to time, but it's still the same crap that dates back to the BBS message bases, fidonet, and usenet. "Social Media" is not an advancement at all, it's holding us back by making us think that the trivial crap is what's important, and the important stuff is lost in the chaff. It's vanity publishing. If I want to get caught up in the details of someone else's life, it's because I've personally observed those details, not read about what they think is important. When I see real advances in technology headed in a direction that I agree with I'm quite happy to assimilate them into my life. PDAs, smartphones, the ability to bargain-hunt on the fly in stores, the ability to make changes to my itinerary or to get around traffic problems or to find new places and know I'll be able to get out again with good maps are all great developments. Allowing people to talk at me about their cats isn't.
If you get in trouble, how many Internet Friends are going to help you? How many can you count on to interrupt what they're doing and come to lend you a hand?
This isn't a conversation though, this is the evolved form of a computer system graffiti wall. It's a bunch of posts, some of which get replies.
I do this when I am forced to wait but when my time is otherwise not my own, and I use Slashdot as a way of keeping up with some of the developments in one of my hobbies. Slashdot gets an appropriate amount of my time as such, a couple of hours a week. It can't help me with model rocketry, ham radio, swing dancing, auto restoration, trebuchet construction, or many other things. It can help me with computers and electronics, and sometimes with science fiction fandom, and that's what I use it for. Oh, and bad jokes. Good place to steal bad jokes from.
Turn off the TV, shut down the computer, and go interact with other people, or go do something with your hands. You'd be amazed how many calories you burn by puttering around in the garage or in the yard, or by meeting friends out in public. You should especially do this kind of stuff in the years between 18 and getting married. Don't worry about updating your status, use that smartphone to assist being out and about, not as a replacement for it.
Life is short, don't squander it.
We CANNOT have a Telescope Gap! /with apologies to George C. Scott
Every time an inspection at a government facility is conducted for emissions or safety (as many places require) the odometer reading is noted. When a vehicle is registered the odometer reading is noted.
It wouldn't be all that hard to start conducting equipment or emissions inspections in the few places that currently lack them, and while doing so, check the odometer.
Mind you, I don't think it's right, and I'm much more in favor of fuel taxes, but it's certainly not hard to do it.