You can't do a whole house on PV up north. But you can take adwantage of solar air heating, solar water heating, ground heat exchange loops. Saw a lot of this stuff in action at a place called Prairie Woods Conveint in Iowa. The local energy geeks outfit them with all sorts of stuff and use it as a proving ground and expo center in the summer. They have everything going there except wind power I think.
Well, if its the one in South Florida, people know other people that moved to that subdivision. Everytime you drive by you figure you should visit them someday, but then, the mall is only a few more miles away, and its been a while since you ate, so it's forgotten. Til the next time you drive by.
Debunking itself can become a sort of religion. There was one urban legends FAQ that seemed to think that you could burn a mix of sugar and gasoline in your car with no ill effects.
And no fight gets worse than when new medical science contradicts old models. Psychiatry being the worst of them all. You'll probably get the Pope to endorse forced abortions for poor people before you'll get them to rethink procedures on cash cows like ADD, Bipolar, or Schizophrenia.
You'll find more info under "New Hydrogen Energy", but not that much more. Asian countries have been toying with it a little bit. If you have the right latice structure you can get an excess heat reaction, but too much heat and the latice deforms, and the reation dies out. If I remember right, there was some hit and miss results with nickel, better thermal tolerances, but almost impossible to get the alloy right in the first place.
Sounds almost as bad as the hot fusion guys and their trying to get the right hydrogen pellet configuration for the lasers to ignite.
Maybe all in all a good thing that noone has gotten one or the other to go. Look at the trouble coal and oil have gotten the world into so far. If people are drunk on energy that's this cheap, what sort of mess will you have when you have fusion to play with ?
I seem to remember that the flood legend in the bible was 3rd or 4th hand. So if by some odd twist of fate, it is real, just what culture did it come from anyway ? Nothing that says it had to float either to do the job. For all anyone knows it was a barn up on the side of the mountain waiting for some flash flood 12,000-18,000 years ago. No one will really know. But the truth is many times stranger than fiction. Remember, the City of Troy was once considered to be nothing but a legend.
The real interesting gasoline alternative was M85 methanol. It was cheap to produce from coal, cellulose, etc. Problem was, its not really bio friendly, and eats through steel and aluminum. Requiring stainless steel tanks, fuel lines, etc. Other than that, and the toxic/mutagenic effects, it was great. Same problem as hydrogen though, perfectly contained, its awesome, if there are any leaks, theres hell to pay.
There must have been some confusion about the mission statement, this is supposed to demonstrate gravitic "frame dragging", not NASA "foot dragging". They should keep re-issuing the memo with different wording until people get it.
I'm a pretty bad satt map junkie. I've built a collection from various web sources of old home towns, vacations spots, places I've been, etc.
I don't really see the problem with it. About the only thing that's roughly close to being up to date is the landsat 7 IR maps, and those will give you a headache if you look at em too long.
But for general viewing, I usually go though lostoutdoors.com or teraserver depending on what kind of map format I want. lostoutdoors has a pretty limited interface, but if you get your coordinates narrowed down from teraserver, you can get a nice big detailed map of the area, as well as the topo map. Usually you can get something within the last 5 years from airplane survey photos stitched together.
Was fun looking at old places I'd been and seeing what had changed. Was disapointed that the hardware store in marshalltown iowa had not kept the writing on their roof so I could see it on there. Was primarily something used by the local pilots back in the day. Would have been really cool to read it off of satellite, web server airplane photos, or even landsatt(unlikely on that though as the resolution is iffy).
Until you have cheap lifting vehicles for space, you can forget the enemy of the state nonsense. You'll get some interesting views, but the chance of it being more recent than a year ago if you live in the sticks is nil. It would simply take way way too many birds to get same day data on everyone, not to mention a lot of luck unless you were also in a very arid pollution free area. Being a several thousand feet about sea level helps too.
Also this will be a great personal collectors item to subscribers. But I suspect in time it'll be like the national geographic holographic skull pic. A neat gimick, soon to be copied by everyone and old news really fast.
I think the upside will be that interest will spike for a while, and people will want more up to date and higher rez photos, faster web servers for the data, etc.
For me though, there is no downside, I got most of what I want for the moment, so if all the USGS servers choke for weeks, its no big deal.
After rocky flats, the detroit reactor neer explosion, hanfords non stop spew of radiation and of course after the nation had been glowing with nuke test fallout for 30 years, THEN they decide to wimp out because a reactors failsafes actually began working to the point where there was little radiation leakage ? WTF ?
The russians on the other hand, their main food production area is not EPA weenie HOT, its will I die of this THIS year hot. And they keep all the reactors of the same type going because if they shut them down they'll FREEZE to death.
In the US most of our energy problems are self inflicted, political scams to run up energy sales prices, the oil companies sticking it to the consumer every time the EPA sticks it to them, calfornia sucking up all the cheap natural gas so they can have "clean" power and then the people in the northern states who relied on that for home heating now have their bills tripple or more. While those using heating oil and some cases even just electricity are now paying less while carbon fouling the air like crazy. And don't think that coal is "non-nuclear" the ash from burning that doesn't go up in the air is contains enough uranium and thorium to be a potential source of reactor fuel. http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/ colmain.html
At least in a nuclear plant they keep the waste and fuel contained, not blasted out of a smoke stack or floating around on some barge until they can find a country to unload it in.
The energy has to come from some place. And it HAS to come from YOUR BACK YARD because the grid wasn't made to have power generated in a designated dirty state like kentucy, or tennessee and transmitted all the way to the east coast. The question is, do you want CO2 and thorium ash spewing plant in every city, or a reactor powering 12 cities and giving some neurotic mommies a panic attack 6 times a day.
As for alternate energy, solar cells take a lot of power to make, windmills take energy to machine and transport to the location, micro-turbines/water wheels require a certain type of landscape and water supply. All these are great if you live in the middle of nowhere. Solar heating/cooling is great if you can afford to have it worked into your house.
But the bulk of your power needs still come from coal and nuclear power. And nuclear power can't continue if you have to bury every ton of concrete ever touched by 12 extra neutrons in some dump. And coal burning can't go on for another hundred years or we'll run out of air. This means we have to come up with some sort of reasonable nuclear regulation, acceptable loses, etc.
Worst case is that they live in a house with a bit of dust and a whole lot of smoking.
Had an accountant for a place I worked bring me his PC, replaced the clogged with smoke residue/dust fan on his P2-350 cpu, sprayed, vaccumed the hell out of the inside. was sparkling clean.
Get a call 2 days later, the computer is spewing hot glue out the vents. WTF ??
Go in and look at it, one dust ball that had hidden in the computers power supply somehow slowed the PC fan, but it still moved fast enough to somehow suck the melting hot glue out of it before it stopped and the computer died.
Replaced the power supply, and it was fine. Not sure about the owner though. When I took the dead power supply apart it was totally polluted with nicotine and assorted crap. Always was amazed that the PC died, but the owner still lived.
Life is a crapshoot. If you want little Billy with ADD to be able to concentrate and get his MBA in the future giving him dexadrine might help. However if little Billy has a weak or quirked nervous system in his heart (latent WPW, etc.) he probably won't make it past Jr. High, if he has a latent psychosis or schizophrenia, the parents probably won't make it past jr high.
If little Billy is left to his own devices he may end up as a drywall contractor with his own business, and have a big enough business that he hires a dozen MBAs. Who can say ?
For someone who is feeling really crappy, and thinking of going on an asskicking mission next day at work, XTC is probably not that big of a risk overall. Worst case you have to go to the ER and then have a legitimate to get out of work for the next week.
Luckily in this society of neurotic mommies we have a number of legal and excessively dangerous substances that we can always point to and say those are 3 orders of magnitude more dangerous.
Why else would so called medical professionals risk the life and health of some nutcase by shooting them full of thorazine or some other anti-psychotic likely to turn them into a physical and mental cripple. In that case the human critter is more dangerous overall than just about anything. Even a monkey with a nailgun.
Having read through a bunch of the Phikal lab notes I was amazed that the whole class of drugs XTC was part of were personally used by their inventor and a bunch of his friends. That's 170+ variations on mescalin, mutltiple isomers and salts of each. And yet the guy was actually alive at the end of it all, and still with enough of a brain to write a more or less coherant book about it(considering that he was of russian stock, a shrink, and a biochemist the fact that the book isn't 600 pages+ is amazing alone by itself)
The studies on MDMA most often cited were bogus. The idiots couldn't even tell they were using methamphetamine rather than MDMA. After they find out they blew the entire thing they still try to cover their ass and say it's still legit. In a perfect world these researchers would be force fed random doses of 250 mg MDMA or 250mg of Meth 3 times a day until they could tell the difference. If they died, too bad, can use their brains for studies of after effects.
You miss a basic fact of business, you don't want to burn your customer base when your competitor has about the same or better services.
You can argue all the trial lawyer crap you want, if you have a declining customer base when it comes time to put that replacement bird into orbit all the legal immunity in the world isn't going to save your company.
I have no problem with two bit script kiddies being sent to be fresh meat for the other prisoners in the federal prison system. Will teach them character and help build intestinal fortitude.
Have to give a shout out to Fabian Franz and the rest of the guys who keep the whole knoppix project going with new innovations, scripts, and help to the newbies on freenode IRCs #knoppix channel.
No doubt, slashdot gets some real fruitcake types. This one easily tops the commie vegans striving for a zero carbon load.
But since its slashdot, odds are fair that its total BS in the first place. 98 out of 100 web admins would fall to the floor in extasy at having landed an interview at a company with a real profit potential future. The 1 out of 100 the voices tell them not to take the job, the final 1 out of 100 claims the voice in their head is Jesus, and its religiously motivated rather than really being mental illness related.
Real americans don't do gratitude, if you keep the ball rolling fast enough you don't have to. When you start worrying about if you are groveling and sucking up enough, then you've hit a stagnation point and are completely and totally screwed. At this point all the groveling, sniveling, and licking the feet of those who throw you enough crumbs to get by isn't going to cut it since they too are going to go down the same toilet as you soon enough.
I have to suspect that the engineers who made the camera are laughing themselves silly. Flash ram is the only really costly item in the box, and theres very little of that. the plastic lens and CMOS sensor is probably not more than $2 at the worst for a run of several hundred thousand cameras.
You also have to consider the cost in time. Someone who could rig a custom interface, and do the code needed would likely be able to charge $75+ for the time they burned on a silly project like this if they had rather used it to do something usefull.
But then photography has always been funny on the cost issue. You can buy 35mm film by 100 foot lengths, make your own customs roll, and do you own film development if you are a real hardcore film nut.
The majority though will buy 24 exposure rolls for $3-4 then pay another $10 or so to get em processed. And shoot the film in cameras that they paid $70-$200 for, and probably not shoot more than a dozen rolls a year max.
Digital photos though, even with a modest $30 closeout sale priced intel 640x480 jpeg producing cam, you can run off hundreds of exposures in a week. These give you somewhere between the old 110 film and low end 35mm film quality. Even printouts at standard 3x5 size look good.
You go up a bit to the new autofocus with flash and 2-3 megapixel quality, buy a cheap 128 meg flashram stick, and how you have something thats worth paying to have printed with a photo grade printer.
You have true freedom then. You can alter, crop, zoom, whatever you want before getting printouts. And if 99 out of 100 shots you made were worthless, you aren't out much more than some rechargeable battery power. Needless to say, for the people out there who simple totally suck at photography, this is a great thing. It now opens up a whole new world, and for the photo shop out there with the right equipment, it could mean business for them. Plug in your memory stick, and get multiple copies instantly of whatever.
Customer satisfaction would then be at the highest. Course, those investing in silver are gonna get killed unless they sell short as Kodak and other film makers are the highest consumption of silver of all users. So I suppose the future isn't totally wonderfull for all.
They'll still have the high speed film users for a while though. 1600-6400 speed film will likely not be replaced by anything as cheap for quite some time.
Considering the tiny amount of the population that read more than a few books a year, and the smaller subset that reads pirate books, and the smaller numbers that serve pirate books, and the even fewer that scan and proof the books to pirate, this is not really much of a real problem.
If you wanted to scare book pirates straight, you could always excavate a new bunker under wright patterson, and put the captured book pirates down there with harlan ellison. Heheh. you might actually be able to hear the screams underground over the jet engines running on the surface.
The books that just come off the scanner with only minimal proofing are rough cuts. It's up to the readers to do some proofing, and send it back into the pipeline with the corrections. Which is why you'll see v1 or v1.1 v2 v3 after a book title.
Haven't seen too many book pirates who are into the k3wl 0 day warez type thing. I would be cool to have a whole library at your disposal though. From talking with a bunch of em though, they actually have real life book piles worse than what they have online.
Pirating books is usually a labor of love. Even if you saw off the book spine and feed the pages through an automated scanner, and OCR the thing with the best possible software you can buy or pirate, you then have to go through and manually check the thing. This process takes days, weeks, months depending on how good/fast you are. Even then you'll miss something.
The people I know who do this usually want to preserve their favorites that are no longer in print and never will be. The book will many times be falling apart and start having black mold taking over. It's farenheit 451, but against economic factors, and environmental factors.
Now obviously, other people want the latest and greatest. so they'll nag someone to scan it for them, and they agree to proof it. Or many other arangements.
But now down to the nitty gritty, Harry Potter was the rare exception to the rule. It took a 16 hour marathon proofing by one guy to get the thing out. I have no idea how much dexadrine you have to eat to pull that one off. But that's 800 pages in 16 hours, I don't think I'd even try to read it that fast. But for the bulk of the books, it's usually been months or years after the author has milked all they are going to get out of the book. And for most of the book series ones, either you wait years for it to get online, or go down to the store and buy a copy. Many times that last book in the series sucked too much to be scanned.
And I doubt most of the people pirating books are slowing down on actual book purchases. That if they save a hundred bucks on books they actually read, its just another hundred they can spend on MORE books. In an average year even I will spend something like $400-500 on books, and that's nothing compared to most who are really into it. Even when I discovered local used book stores, if I got $20 to spend, it's gonna be pretty well gone.
And what of the books I've read and no longer want ? Why some poor souls end up with a 2'x 2' brick of em every so often. These people get them for FREE, and the author gets NOTHING! They then pass theses books on and on. Why I remember a copy of fear and loathing in las vegas a friend loaned me. It was a first print run in paperback, had been lent to dozen of people. Was pretty beat up and close to falling apart, then it got left in my trunk for a few months, and reaked of gas fumes. The original owner hated gas fumes and said just keep it, so eventually it ended up with on old roomie who was a Hunter S Thompson fanatic. First edition, reeks of gas, and falling apart, sure he'd take it. Another $1.25 Hunter didn't make on that book, but at least the guys cat was named after him.
Well, if both drives are under warantee its no problem. I had to do this once with a 6 gig drive full of business data. I got the owner to go and get the new drive, I swapped the boards. got the old one running, then the owner exchanged the new "bad" drive for another one, and then ghosted the data to the totally new one as a backup.
If it had failed, then you take both back, get two new hard drives, and mirror everything from that day forward after reconstructing everything from outdated floppy backups or whatever you have.
I you haven't seen that in action, then you've had your head in the sand for a very very long time.
Getting coherant answers out of pissed off autistic kids is probably easier than getting something out of a linux/unix geek.
There are a few groups where this is not the case, knoppix.net and their IRC channel are pretty good, but even still the attitude surfaces around there as well from time to time.
The gentoo crowd seems ok as well, but I suppose they've had lots of time to learn to socialise waiting for frequent compiles and such.
I don't think user support is likely to improve until more actual normal human beings are able to learn and form their own support groups. Right now the unix/linux crowd consists of too many former digruntled beatup/tormented in school wanna be columbine kids. And if you ain't in their clique, or they just don't feel like being nice that day, it's gonna be more RTFM crap.
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You can't do a whole house on PV up north. But you can take adwantage of solar air heating, solar water heating, ground heat exchange loops. Saw a lot of this stuff in action at a place called Prairie Woods Conveint in Iowa. The local energy geeks outfit them with all sorts of stuff and use it as a proving ground and expo center in the summer. They have everything going there except wind power I think.
Well, if its the one in South Florida, people know other people that moved to that subdivision. Everytime you drive by you figure you should visit them someday, but then, the mall is only a few more miles away, and its been a while since you ate, so it's forgotten. Til the next time you drive by.
Debunking itself can become a sort of religion. There was one urban legends FAQ that seemed to think that you could burn a mix of sugar and gasoline in your car with no ill effects.
And no fight gets worse than when new medical science contradicts old models. Psychiatry being the worst of them all. You'll probably get the Pope to endorse forced abortions for poor people before you'll get them to rethink procedures on cash cows like ADD, Bipolar, or Schizophrenia.
You'll find more info under "New Hydrogen Energy", but not that much more. Asian countries have been toying with it a little bit. If you have the right latice structure you can get an excess heat reaction, but too much heat and the latice deforms, and the reation dies out. If I remember right, there was some hit and miss results with nickel, better thermal tolerances, but almost impossible to get the alloy right in the first place.
Sounds almost as bad as the hot fusion guys and their trying to get the right hydrogen pellet configuration for the lasers to ignite.
Maybe all in all a good thing that noone has gotten one or the other to go. Look at the trouble coal and oil have gotten the world into so far. If people are drunk on energy that's this cheap, what sort of mess will you have when you have fusion to play with ?
I seem to remember that the flood legend in the bible was 3rd or 4th hand. So if by some odd twist of fate, it is real, just what culture did it come from anyway ? Nothing that says it had to float either to do the job. For all anyone knows it was a barn up on the side of the mountain waiting for some flash flood 12,000-18,000 years ago. No one will really know. But the truth is many times stranger than fiction. Remember, the City of Troy was once considered to be nothing but a legend.
The real interesting gasoline alternative was M85 methanol. It was cheap to produce from coal, cellulose, etc. Problem was, its not really bio friendly, and eats through steel and aluminum. Requiring stainless steel tanks, fuel lines, etc.
Other than that, and the toxic/mutagenic effects, it was great. Same problem as hydrogen though, perfectly contained, its awesome, if there are any leaks, theres hell to pay.
When in trouble danger or doubt, run and jump, scream and shout.
I don't care what happenes to the corporate rights to jpegs, I'm not re-encoding my porn to be pngs!
There must have been some confusion about the mission statement, this is supposed to demonstrate gravitic "frame dragging", not NASA "foot dragging". They should keep re-issuing the memo with different wording until people get it.
I'm a pretty bad satt map junkie. I've built a collection from various web sources of old home towns, vacations spots, places I've been, etc.
I don't really see the problem with it. About the only thing that's roughly close to being up to date is the landsat 7 IR maps, and those will give you a headache if you look at em too long.
But for general viewing, I usually go though lostoutdoors.com or teraserver depending on what kind of map format I want. lostoutdoors has a pretty limited interface, but if you get your coordinates narrowed down from teraserver, you can get a nice big detailed map of the area, as well as the topo map. Usually you can get something within the last 5 years from airplane survey photos stitched together.
Was fun looking at old places I'd been and seeing what had changed. Was disapointed that the hardware store in marshalltown iowa had not kept the writing on their roof so I could see it on there. Was primarily something used by the local pilots back in the day. Would have been really cool to read it off of satellite, web server airplane photos, or even landsatt(unlikely on that though as the resolution is iffy).
Until you have cheap lifting vehicles for space, you can forget the enemy of the state nonsense. You'll get some interesting views, but the chance of it being more recent than a year ago if you live in the sticks is nil. It would simply take way way too many birds to get same day data on everyone, not to mention a lot of luck unless you were also in a very arid pollution free area. Being a several thousand feet about sea level helps too.
Also this will be a great personal collectors item to subscribers. But I suspect in time it'll be like the national geographic holographic skull pic. A neat gimick, soon to be copied by everyone and old news really fast.
I think the upside will be that interest will spike for a while, and people will want more up to date and higher rez photos, faster web servers for the data, etc.
For me though, there is no downside, I got most of what I want for the moment, so if all the USGS servers choke for weeks, its no big deal.
After rocky flats, the detroit reactor neer explosion, hanfords non stop spew of radiation and of course after the nation had been glowing with nuke test fallout for 30 years, THEN they decide to wimp out because a reactors failsafes actually began working to the point where there was little radiation leakage ? WTF ?
/ colmain.html
The russians on the other hand, their main food production area is not EPA weenie HOT, its will I die of this THIS year hot. And they keep all the reactors of the same type going because if they shut them down they'll FREEZE to death.
In the US most of our energy problems are self inflicted, political scams to run up energy sales prices, the oil companies sticking it to the consumer every time the EPA sticks it to them, calfornia sucking up all the cheap natural gas so they can have "clean" power and then the people in the northern states who relied on that for home heating now have their bills tripple or more. While those using heating oil and some cases even just electricity are now paying less while carbon fouling the air like crazy. And don't think that coal is "non-nuclear" the ash from burning that doesn't go up in the air is contains enough uranium and thorium to be a potential source of reactor fuel. http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text
At least in a nuclear plant they keep the waste and fuel contained, not blasted out of a smoke stack or floating around on some barge until they can find a country to unload it in.
The energy has to come from some place. And it HAS to come from YOUR BACK YARD because the grid wasn't made to have power generated in a designated dirty state like kentucy, or tennessee and transmitted all the way to the east coast. The question is, do you want CO2 and thorium ash spewing plant in every city, or a reactor powering 12 cities and giving some neurotic mommies a panic attack 6 times a day.
As for alternate energy, solar cells take a lot of power to make, windmills take energy to machine and transport to the location, micro-turbines/water wheels require a certain type of landscape and water supply. All these are great if you live in the middle of nowhere. Solar heating/cooling is great if you can afford to have it worked into your house.
But the bulk of your power needs still come from coal and nuclear power. And nuclear power can't continue if you have to bury every ton of concrete ever touched by 12 extra neutrons in some dump. And coal burning can't go on for another hundred years or we'll run out of air. This means we have to come up with some sort of reasonable nuclear regulation, acceptable loses, etc.
Worst case is that they live in a house with a bit of dust and a whole lot of smoking.
Had an accountant for a place I worked bring me his PC, replaced the clogged with smoke residue/dust fan on his P2-350 cpu, sprayed, vaccumed the hell out of the inside. was sparkling clean.
Get a call 2 days later, the computer is spewing hot glue out the vents. WTF ??
Go in and look at it, one dust ball that had hidden in the computers power supply somehow slowed the PC fan, but it still moved fast enough to somehow suck the melting hot glue out of it before it stopped and the computer died.
Replaced the power supply, and it was fine. Not sure about the owner though. When I took the dead power supply apart it was totally polluted with nicotine and assorted crap. Always was amazed that the PC died, but the owner still lived.
Life is a crapshoot. If you want little Billy with ADD to be able to concentrate and get his MBA in the future giving him dexadrine might help. However if little Billy has a weak or quirked nervous system in his heart (latent WPW, etc.) he probably won't make it past Jr. High, if he has a latent psychosis or schizophrenia, the parents probably won't make it past jr high.
If little Billy is left to his own devices he may end up as a drywall contractor with his own business, and have a big enough business that he hires a dozen MBAs. Who can say ?
For someone who is feeling really crappy, and thinking of going on an asskicking mission next day at work, XTC is probably not that big of a risk overall. Worst case you have to go to the ER and then have a legitimate to get out of work for the next week.
Luckily in this society of neurotic mommies we have a number of legal and excessively dangerous substances that we can always point to and say those are 3 orders of magnitude more dangerous.
Why else would so called medical professionals risk the life and health of some nutcase by shooting them full of thorazine or some other anti-psychotic likely to turn them into a physical and mental cripple. In that case the human critter is more dangerous overall than just about anything. Even a monkey with a nailgun.
Having read through a bunch of the Phikal lab notes I was amazed that the whole class of drugs XTC was part of were personally used by their inventor and a bunch of his friends. That's 170+ variations on mescalin, mutltiple isomers and salts of each. And yet the guy was actually alive at the end of it all, and still with enough of a brain to write a more or less coherant book about it(considering that he was of russian stock, a shrink, and a biochemist the fact that the book isn't 600 pages+ is amazing alone by itself)
The studies on MDMA most often cited were bogus. The idiots couldn't even tell they were using methamphetamine rather than MDMA. After they find out they blew the entire thing they still try to cover their ass and say it's still legit. In a perfect world these researchers would be force fed random doses of 250 mg MDMA or 250mg of Meth 3 times a day until they could tell the difference. If they died, too bad, can use their brains for studies of after effects.
Great. Another geek who wants to be a lawyer.
You miss a basic fact of business, you don't want to burn your customer base when your competitor has about the same or better services.
You can argue all the trial lawyer crap you want, if you have a declining customer base when it comes time to put that replacement bird into orbit all the legal immunity in the world isn't going to save your company.
I have no problem with two bit script kiddies being sent to be fresh meat for the other prisoners in the
federal prison system. Will teach them character and help build intestinal fortitude.
Have to give a shout out to Fabian Franz and the rest of the guys who keep the whole knoppix project
going with new innovations, scripts, and help to
the newbies on freenode IRCs #knoppix channel.
No doubt, slashdot gets some real fruitcake types. This one easily tops the commie vegans striving for a zero carbon load.
But since its slashdot, odds are fair that its total
BS in the first place. 98 out of 100 web admins would fall to the floor in extasy at having landed an interview at a company with a real profit potential future. The 1 out of 100 the voices tell them not to take the job, the final 1 out of 100 claims the voice in their head is Jesus, and its religiously motivated rather than really being mental illness related.
Real americans don't do gratitude, if you keep the ball rolling fast enough you don't have to. When you start worrying about if you are groveling and sucking up enough, then you've hit a stagnation point and are completely and totally screwed. At this point all the groveling, sniveling, and licking the feet of those who throw you enough crumbs to get
by isn't going to cut it since they too are going to go down the same toilet as you soon enough.
I have to suspect that the engineers who made the camera are laughing themselves silly. Flash ram is the only really costly item in the box, and theres very little of that. the plastic lens and CMOS sensor is probably not more than $2 at the worst for a run of several hundred thousand cameras.
You also have to consider the cost in time. Someone who could rig a custom interface, and do the code needed would likely be able to charge $75+ for the time they burned on a silly project like this if they had rather used it to do something usefull.
But then photography has always been funny on the cost issue. You can buy 35mm film by 100 foot lengths, make your own customs roll, and do you own film development if you are a real hardcore film nut.
The majority though will buy 24 exposure rolls for $3-4 then pay another $10 or so to get em processed. And shoot the film in cameras that they paid $70-$200 for, and probably not shoot more than a dozen rolls a year max.
Digital photos though, even with a modest $30 closeout sale priced intel 640x480 jpeg producing cam, you can run off hundreds of exposures in a week. These give you somewhere between the old
110 film and low end 35mm film quality. Even printouts at standard 3x5 size look good.
You go up a bit to the new autofocus with flash and 2-3 megapixel quality, buy a cheap 128 meg flashram stick, and how you have something thats worth paying to have printed with a photo grade printer.
You have true freedom then. You can alter, crop, zoom, whatever you want before getting printouts. And if 99 out of 100 shots you made were worthless, you aren't out much more than some rechargeable battery power. Needless to say, for the people out there who simple totally suck at photography, this is a great thing. It now opens up a whole new world, and for the photo shop out there with the right equipment, it could mean business for them. Plug in your memory stick, and get multiple copies instantly of whatever.
Customer satisfaction would then be at the highest. Course, those investing in silver are gonna get killed unless they sell short as Kodak and other film makers are the highest consumption of silver of all users. So I suppose the future
isn't totally wonderfull for all.
They'll still have the high speed film users for a while though. 1600-6400 speed film will likely not be replaced by anything as cheap for quite some time.
Considering the tiny amount of the population that read more than a few books a year, and the smaller subset that reads pirate books, and the smaller numbers that serve pirate books, and the even fewer that scan and proof the books to pirate, this is not really much of a real problem. If you wanted to scare book pirates straight, you could always excavate a new bunker under wright patterson, and put the captured book pirates down there with harlan ellison. Heheh. you might actually be able to hear the screams underground over the jet engines running on the surface.
The books that just come off the scanner with only minimal proofing are rough cuts. It's up to the readers to do some proofing, and send it back into the pipeline with the corrections. Which is why you'll see v1 or v1.1 v2 v3 after a book title.
Haven't seen too many book pirates who are into the k3wl 0 day warez type thing. I would be cool to have a whole library at your disposal though. From talking with a bunch of em though, they actually have real life book piles worse than what they have online.
Pirating books is usually a labor of love. Even if you saw off the book spine and feed the pages through an automated scanner, and OCR the thing with the best possible software you can buy or pirate, you then have to go through and manually check the thing. This process takes days, weeks, months depending on how good/fast you are. Even then you'll miss something.
The people I know who do this usually want to preserve their favorites that are no longer in print and never will be. The book will many times be falling apart and start having black mold taking over. It's farenheit 451, but against economic factors, and environmental factors.
Now obviously, other people want the latest and greatest. so they'll nag someone to scan it for them, and they agree to proof it. Or many other arangements.
But now down to the nitty gritty, Harry Potter was
the rare exception to the rule. It took a 16 hour marathon proofing by one guy to get the thing out.
I have no idea how much dexadrine you have to eat to pull that one off. But that's 800 pages in 16 hours, I don't think I'd even try to read it that fast. But for the bulk of the books, it's usually
been months or years after the author has milked all they are going to get out of the book. And for
most of the book series ones, either you wait years for it to get online, or go down to the store and buy a copy. Many times that last book in the series sucked too much to be scanned.
And I doubt most of the people pirating books are slowing down on actual book purchases. That if they save a hundred bucks on books they actually read, its just another hundred they can spend on MORE books. In an average year even I will spend something like $400-500 on books, and that's nothing compared to most who are really into it. Even when I discovered local used book stores, if I got $20 to spend, it's gonna be pretty well gone.
And what of the books I've read and no longer want ? Why some poor souls end up with a 2'x 2' brick of em every so often. These people get them for FREE, and the author gets NOTHING! They then pass theses books on and on. Why I remember a copy of fear and loathing in las vegas a friend loaned me.
It was a first print run in paperback, had been lent to dozen of people. Was pretty beat up and close to falling apart, then it got left in my trunk for a few months, and reaked of gas fumes. The original owner hated gas fumes and said just keep it, so eventually it ended up with on old roomie who was a Hunter S Thompson fanatic. First edition, reeks of gas, and falling apart, sure he'd take it. Another $1.25 Hunter didn't make on that book, but at least the guys cat was named after him.
Well, if both drives are under warantee its no problem. I had to do this once with a 6 gig drive full of business data. I got the owner to go and get the new drive, I swapped the boards. got the old one running, then the owner exchanged the new "bad" drive for another one, and then ghosted the data to the totally new one as a backup. If it had failed, then you take both back, get two new hard drives, and mirror everything from that day forward after reconstructing everything from outdated floppy backups or whatever you have.
I you haven't seen that in action, then you've had your head in the sand for a very very long time.
Getting coherant answers out of pissed off autistic kids is probably easier than getting something out of a linux/unix geek.
There are a few groups where this is not the case,
knoppix.net and their IRC channel are pretty good,
but even still the attitude surfaces around there as well from time to time.
The gentoo crowd seems ok as well, but I suppose they've had lots of time to learn to socialise waiting for frequent compiles and such.
I don't think user support is likely to improve until more actual normal human beings are able to learn and form their own support groups. Right now
the unix/linux crowd consists of too many former digruntled beatup/tormented in school wanna be columbine kids. And if you ain't in their clique, or they just don't feel like being nice that day, it's gonna be more RTFM crap.
Or worse, chain him to an oar in his next replica ship that crosses the atlantic.