Why isn't someone mating these electric motors with planetary gearsets, so that they can choose whether to emphasize torque or top speed? If manufacturers can do it reliably with $20 cordless screwdrivers, why can't it be scaled up to $10-15k vehicles? If it's a single, centrally-located powerplant with the usual distribution methods, this would turn out much like a conventional automatic transmission, minus the power-robbing torque converter. If you've got small motors at each wheel, they might end up looking more like the aforementioned cordless screwdriver.
Torque converters or some other sort of clutch device are necessary for motors that must idle, but they're not necessary for motors that don't mind starting from 0 rpm. This is a great advantage of an electric motor over an internal combustion engine, but it doesn't mean the REST of the transmission has to be scrapped at the same time.
Honestly that isn't any uglier than a large number of conventionally-powered vehicles. It isn't even that much uglier than a standard Honda CRX of the mid-90's. A decent color could do a lot for it.
What frightens me are the abominations the ricer market would make with something like this. I'm sure it's possible to cram high-torque motors into one and get incredible performance, if it's only expected to go a quarter mile between charges.
You'd also need a DDR pad to move, wouldn't you? This has the possibility of making gaming a physically demanding pastime, which is exactly why it'll never catch on.:)
There are general Election Days, and then there are Primary Election Days, Special Election Days, Recall Election Days, etc. which are going to vary from one locality to another. Are you gonna mandate the day off for ALL of them? If so, wouldn't it make sense to move all election days to Monday in order to disturb the work week the least?
A simpler change, perhaps, would be to allow people to arrange to vote at the polling place nearest to where they work, rather than to where they live. This way most people would only have to go a couple of blocks to cast a vote. The complication would be that many people work in a different city, county, or even state from where they live.
How do you know that the company or site named had any thing to do with the spam? If putting an URL in a mass-mailing is enough to get the owners of that URL punished (financially or legally), then you will see joe-job spam used as yet another means to harrass uninvolved third parties.
Knowing someone that did this (though he used a chain of powered wheelchair batteries), I can say that his biggest issue was this:
"After a couple of hours of running on batteries, it started to smell a little funny."
By the time he hit the 3 hour mark, with probably another hour and a half left in the batteries, he decided to just shut everything down rather than crapping out the inverter that had been designed to run for 20 or 30 minutes at a time. Naturally, the power went back on about 20 minutes after that.:)
The problem isn't just the capacity of the batteries that's in question, it's the rated duty cycle of the other components in the same UPS. Chances are really good that they're not much better than they have to be to match the battery they shipped with.
Could this be an opportunity for someone to set up an escrow service for phone numbers? You transfer your service to the escrow company, which will charge some transfer fee, and allow the number to be assigned to someone else. The new owner now switches to the provider of their choice (at their own expense), and the escrow service gets to pocket the money from the original holder.
You wouldn't even have to provide actual phone service per se, though you could by contracting it out to another carrier and charging as you wish. This would also help ensure people did not stay on your books for more than the minimum amount of time necessary to complete the transaction. Every alternative would be cheaper on usage fees. Where the escrow company would hook people is by offering low switching fees and high usage rates. If you plan to sell your number to someone, do you really want to still be taking calls on it?
But as the precision of computing devices improves, an algorithm using a definition of sqrt(5) will gain from that additional precision. Your fixed number algorithm will not.
Besides, this serves as proof that all things are directly or indirectly related to five.
This won't happen simply because the Federal Reserve doesn't de-monetize anything. Other countries do, but most of them don't have the problem that their currency is in use world-wide. I don't know the number exactly, but a significant fraction (20% pops to mind) of U.S. currency is outside the country. To attempt to "recall" it to combat counterfeiting would have serious impact on the perception of the dollar as stable and unchanging, and thus on the position of the U.S. as an economic power. This might have been feasible in the pre-Euro days, but it no longer is. If we recall the money, people will turn it in for Euros and never buy back the dollars.
In other words, it won't happen unless we become Argentina and our currency collapses so far that we don't CARE about international confidence. And in that case, counterfeiting will be a small part of a very very large problem.
Another legitimate reason would be if you wish to advertise a banknote as available for sale. Maybe it's no longer in circulation (whether it has monetary value or not) and you'd like to sell it as a collectible. To do this, you'd want to make a detailed image of it that a prospective buyer could look at and decide if it's in good enough condition for them or not, or if it has the exact characteristic they want (such as a star in the serial number).
Maybe there is no reason for anyone to buy a brand spanking new $20 from me when they can get them for $20 at any bank -- but a decade from now there may be. The DRM features will still be there. Numismatists should be more upset about this than anyone else, except that most of them collect pieces of paper with no intrinsic value (most of it's been de-monetized) instead of spending all day on/. That said, I helped a friend set up a scanning and printing system a decade ago so that he could make catalogs of the banknotes he had for sale. I also used to help him staple them together, which could take many hours, and put stamps on them. The only thing remotely fraudulent going on was in the stuff he sold on consignment -- he had to list it at the condition the seller WANTED it listed at, regardless of its actual condition. He did mark such notes with a * indicating that they were rated by the seller and not an outside authority, however.
Unfortunately, killing the explorer process also totally mungs your systray. Only the apps that the newly spawned explorer notices get put there, and the others continue running with no way to access them except to kill their processes and restart.
I hope that we will one day indeed design rather than blindly search. We're centainly on the road to it. But then again, I heard the same line about designed drugs coming soon when I started studying biology, and that was, hmm, about 10 years ago.
Designed drugs have already happened. They just happened in areas you probably aren't studying -- namely, the pharmacology of psychedelia.
In an employee video shown at an event last year, they recounted with pride such tales as the colleague who broke up with a girlfriend who bought a Windows PC.
That's only because they were jealous, and because they didn't have anyone to replace him in Warcraft 3.
Damn, I wish I'd thought of that. You even get twice the money from Spanish-speaking countries and anywhere else they use one at BOTH ends of a sentence!
The cost of postage saved would be MORE than 50%, as Business Reply Mail costs more per piece than standard pre-paid mail.
If Netflix wanted to cut down on postage costs, they should encourage customers to send back more than one disc in an envelope (do-this-enough-and-we'll-credit-you-$5 or something). We've done that when we've lost an envelope, and even if the extra weight adds 20 cents to the postage (I've never bothered to weigh a DVD) it still saves them the 20 cents tacked onto each separate Business Reply Mail, and is thus still cheaper than mailing them separately. Also, if you receive two from a person at once, that means you can turn around and send the next two at once. Fold up an extra envelope and slip it inside in case the customer wishes to return them separately this time.
Of course if you're only watching one per night, you may elect not to wait. No problem, they seem to have done just fine with the costs as they are now. But that doesn't mean it's not a good idea to trim costs even more, when it works to the mutual benefit of both company and client.
I did a search based off the preferences of a distant acquaintance -- I put in doctor horse sex and got 99 hits. Scanning the first 20 or so didn't seem to reveal anything remotely related to the search parameters.
I believe the engine searches on an "or" basis, rather than some sort of weighted "and". So it was spouting off anything that matched "sex", regardless of whether it matched horse or doctor. This makes it supremely useless as a search engine, unless there's some way of enabling "search within search results" that I didn't notice. I ran the search again without sex and got absolutely nothing. Removing search terms (except for the only one remaining, of course) should BROADEN the number of hits, not reduce them.
Two thumbs down for Booble, one slight chuckle for the concept.
How much a venue pays depends greatly on the genre being played. I've played with glorified garage bands for practically nothing, and I've played with some pretty damn good bands, who might get nothing on one night and $100 per musician the next night. The primary difference is that the garage bands were rock bands (and generally NOT cover bands) and the band that's getting paid is a salsa band that pretty much does ONLY covers. We have to give away a show here and there when things start getting slow, so that we get noticed again. And we give away lots and lots of demo CDs (also available for download). We've got original tunes, but we don't have the combination of time and money necessary to take a 12-man band into a studio and lay them down. Sure I can handle mixing chores myself, but that only cuts about 25% off the billable hours for the studio.
In any case, my point here is that we make ALL of our money playing live. We don't sell anything.
You can find us at orquestaguayao.com... and before you ask, no I'm not responsible for the hideously overblown website -- they opted for that over my rather understated version that rendered properly on everything. I think the current rotating flash pic with sound loop is as annoying as the rest of you probably will.
Also the event calendar is broken (another consequence of turning the place over to a "professional"), so here's the upcoming event list:
Colonizing other planets will solve the "all eggs in one basket" issue, provided they are self-sufficient, but it does almost nothing for overpopulation. How many people can you cram in a ship bound for another planet, and how many can you pack in a ship headed to, say, Greenland? Greenland doesn't force you to generate your own air, either.
There is plenty of room left on the planet. Most of it is, at present, uninhabitable. There is plenty of room left on other planets, but it too is presently uninhabitable, and it costs many orders of magnitude more to get there and MAKE it inhabitable. This is not to argue that it shouldn't be done (it should), but that it won't directly affect overpopulation. It will provide some insurance against the catastrophic effects of overpopulation (or any other cataclysm), and in this case even a little isnurance is far better than none at all.
Think of a colony as offsite backup. It doesn't solve the problem that your hard drive is ful of porn.
Do you honestly think this will remove our dependence on fossil fuel completely? Look at your computer. It's prolly got a lot of plastic in, on, and around it. Same with probably the rest of your room. Multiply that by a couple/few billion and you get the idea. Also, with the demand for plastic products growing ever more insistent, by the time (if) we get to enact a feasible plan for mining the moon, how much oil will be required to make non-energy products?
That's the WHOLE POINT -- petroleum is so useful for synthesizing/extracting very useful things that it's a shame we're still burning it! If we weren't burning the majority of it, there'd be plenty to build things wit for some time to come. Not only that, but plastic is recyclable and exhaust gases aren't.
Assuming we can replace oil as an energy source, what remains should be more than adequate for building things until we have enough cheap energy to synthesize all the hydrocarbons we could ever want. We might even be best off making more plastic than we really need, just to act as a carbon sink. The technology already exists, it just needs power, and lots of it.
My girlfriend had to get X-rays for a possible sprained knee, and noticed that the radiologist didn't bother to leave the room, don a lead shield, or take any other self-protective measures. Needless to say, she asked why.
Turns out this woman had grown up 80 miles downwind of Chernobyl. Her attitude was "Why bother? I grew up absorbing 1000 times as much radiation as I'll absorb in a whole career here."
Slashdot Mirror
Why isn't someone mating these electric motors with planetary gearsets, so that they can choose whether to emphasize torque or top speed? If manufacturers can do it reliably with $20 cordless screwdrivers, why can't it be scaled up to $10-15k vehicles? If it's a single, centrally-located powerplant with the usual distribution methods, this would turn out much like a conventional automatic transmission, minus the power-robbing torque converter. If you've got small motors at each wheel, they might end up looking more like the aforementioned cordless screwdriver.
Torque converters or some other sort of clutch device are necessary for motors that must idle, but they're not necessary for motors that don't mind starting from 0 rpm. This is a great advantage of an electric motor over an internal combustion engine, but it doesn't mean the REST of the transmission has to be scrapped at the same time.
Mal-2
Honestly that isn't any uglier than a large number of conventionally-powered vehicles. It isn't even that much uglier than a standard Honda CRX of the mid-90's. A decent color could do a lot for it.
What frightens me are the abominations the ricer market would make with something like this. I'm sure it's possible to cram high-torque motors into one and get incredible performance, if it's only expected to go a quarter mile between charges.
Mal-2
If most of your associates are criminals, there's a good chance you are one, too, afterall.
Or you're a lawyer. Oh wait, that's redundant...
Mal-2
You'd also need a DDR pad to move, wouldn't you? This has the possibility of making gaming a physically demanding pastime, which is exactly why it'll never catch on. :)
Mal-2
There are general Election Days, and then there are Primary Election Days, Special Election Days, Recall Election Days, etc. which are going to vary from one locality to another. Are you gonna mandate the day off for ALL of them? If so, wouldn't it make sense to move all election days to Monday in order to disturb the work week the least?
A simpler change, perhaps, would be to allow people to arrange to vote at the polling place nearest to where they work, rather than to where they live. This way most people would only have to go a couple of blocks to cast a vote. The complication would be that many people work in a different city, county, or even state from where they live.
Mal-2
For all of those missing their regular goatse.cx fix, it's back up at goat.cx instead.
Mal-2
How do you know that the company or site named had any thing to do with the spam? If putting an URL in a mass-mailing is enough to get the owners of that URL punished (financially or legally), then you will see joe-job spam used as yet another means to harrass uninvolved third parties.
Mal-2
Knowing someone that did this (though he used a chain of powered wheelchair batteries), I can say that his biggest issue was this:
:)
"After a couple of hours of running on batteries, it started to smell a little funny."
By the time he hit the 3 hour mark, with probably another hour and a half left in the batteries, he decided to just shut everything down rather than crapping out the inverter that had been designed to run for 20 or 30 minutes at a time. Naturally, the power went back on about 20 minutes after that.
The problem isn't just the capacity of the batteries that's in question, it's the rated duty cycle of the other components in the same UPS. Chances are really good that they're not much better than they have to be to match the battery they shipped with.
Mal-2
If you're swapping blank discs, the only thing changing hands is fingerprints.
Mal-2
This is why I think there should be two additional moderation choices, namely "+1, Intoxicated" and "-1, Shitfaced". :)
Mal-2
Could this have not been said more succinctly with a simple quote? Namely:
"What we have here, is failure to communicate."
Mal-2
Could this be an opportunity for someone to set up an escrow service for phone numbers? You transfer your service to the escrow company, which will charge some transfer fee, and allow the number to be assigned to someone else. The new owner now switches to the provider of their choice (at their own expense), and the escrow service gets to pocket the money from the original holder.
You wouldn't even have to provide actual phone service per se, though you could by contracting it out to another carrier and charging as you wish. This would also help ensure people did not stay on your books for more than the minimum amount of time necessary to complete the transaction. Every alternative would be cheaper on usage fees. Where the escrow company would hook people is by offering low switching fees and high usage rates. If you plan to sell your number to someone, do you really want to still be taking calls on it?
Mal-2
But as the precision of computing devices improves, an algorithm using a definition of sqrt(5) will gain from that additional precision. Your fixed number algorithm will not.
Besides, this serves as proof that all things are directly or indirectly related to five.
Mal-2
This won't happen simply because the Federal Reserve doesn't de-monetize anything. Other countries do, but most of them don't have the problem that their currency is in use world-wide. I don't know the number exactly, but a significant fraction (20% pops to mind) of U.S. currency is outside the country. To attempt to "recall" it to combat counterfeiting would have serious impact on the perception of the dollar as stable and unchanging, and thus on the position of the U.S. as an economic power. This might have been feasible in the pre-Euro days, but it no longer is. If we recall the money, people will turn it in for Euros and never buy back the dollars.
In other words, it won't happen unless we become Argentina and our currency collapses so far that we don't CARE about international confidence. And in that case, counterfeiting will be a small part of a very very large problem.
Mal-2
Another legitimate reason would be if you wish to advertise a banknote as available for sale. Maybe it's no longer in circulation (whether it has monetary value or not) and you'd like to sell it as a collectible. To do this, you'd want to make a detailed image of it that a prospective buyer could look at and decide if it's in good enough condition for them or not, or if it has the exact characteristic they want (such as a star in the serial number).
/. That said, I helped a friend set up a scanning and printing system a decade ago so that he could make catalogs of the banknotes he had for sale. I also used to help him staple them together, which could take many hours, and put stamps on them. The only thing remotely fraudulent going on was in the stuff he sold on consignment -- he had to list it at the condition the seller WANTED it listed at, regardless of its actual condition. He did mark such notes with a * indicating that they were rated by the seller and not an outside authority, however.
Maybe there is no reason for anyone to buy a brand spanking new $20 from me when they can get them for $20 at any bank -- but a decade from now there may be. The DRM features will still be there. Numismatists should be more upset about this than anyone else, except that most of them collect pieces of paper with no intrinsic value (most of it's been de-monetized) instead of spending all day on
Mal-2
Unfortunately, killing the explorer process also totally mungs your systray. Only the apps that the newly spawned explorer notices get put there, and the others continue running with no way to access them except to kill their processes and restart.
Mal-2
I hope that we will one day indeed design rather than blindly search. We're centainly on the road to it. But then again, I heard the same line about designed drugs coming soon when I started studying biology, and that was, hmm, about 10 years ago.
Designed drugs have already happened. They just happened in areas you probably aren't studying -- namely, the pharmacology of psychedelia.
Phenethylamines I have Known and Loved, by Alexander and Ann Shulgin.
MDMA came from efforts such as this, and would have been discovered by the above effort even if it hadn't yet been studied (and widely used).
Mal-2
In an employee video shown at an event last year, they recounted with pride such tales as the colleague who broke up with a girlfriend who bought a Windows PC.
That's only because they were jealous, and because they didn't have anyone to replace him in Warcraft 3.
Mal-2
Damn, I wish I'd thought of that. You even get twice the money from Spanish-speaking countries and anywhere else they use one at BOTH ends of a sentence!
Mal-2
Oh no, who's copyright holder on the ! symbol?
The cost of postage saved would be MORE than 50%, as Business Reply Mail costs more per piece than standard pre-paid mail.
If Netflix wanted to cut down on postage costs, they should encourage customers to send back more than one disc in an envelope (do-this-enough-and-we'll-credit-you-$5 or something). We've done that when we've lost an envelope, and even if the extra weight adds 20 cents to the postage (I've never bothered to weigh a DVD) it still saves them the 20 cents tacked onto each separate Business Reply Mail, and is thus still cheaper than mailing them separately. Also, if you receive two from a person at once, that means you can turn around and send the next two at once. Fold up an extra envelope and slip it inside in case the customer wishes to return them separately this time.
Of course if you're only watching one per night, you may elect not to wait. No problem, they seem to have done just fine with the costs as they are now. But that doesn't mean it's not a good idea to trim costs even more, when it works to the mutual benefit of both company and client.
Mal-2
I did a search based off the preferences of a distant acquaintance -- I put in doctor horse sex and got 99 hits. Scanning the first 20 or so didn't seem to reveal anything remotely related to the search parameters.
I believe the engine searches on an "or" basis, rather than some sort of weighted "and". So it was spouting off anything that matched "sex", regardless of whether it matched horse or doctor. This makes it supremely useless as a search engine, unless there's some way of enabling "search within search results" that I didn't notice. I ran the search again without sex and got absolutely nothing. Removing search terms (except for the only one remaining, of course) should BROADEN the number of hits, not reduce them.
Two thumbs down for Booble, one slight chuckle for the concept.
Mal-2
How much a venue pays depends greatly on the genre being played. I've played with glorified garage bands for practically nothing, and I've played with some pretty damn good bands, who might get nothing on one night and $100 per musician the next night. The primary difference is that the garage bands were rock bands (and generally NOT cover bands) and the band that's getting paid is a salsa band that pretty much does ONLY covers. We have to give away a show here and there when things start getting slow, so that we get noticed again. And we give away lots and lots of demo CDs (also available for download). We've got original tunes, but we don't have the combination of time and money necessary to take a 12-man band into a studio and lay them down. Sure I can handle mixing chores myself, but that only cuts about 25% off the billable hours for the studio.
In any case, my point here is that we make ALL of our money playing live. We don't sell anything.
You can find us at orquestaguayao.com... and before you ask, no I'm not responsible for the hideously overblown website -- they opted for that over my rather understated version that rendered properly on everything. I think the current rotating flash pic with sound loop is as annoying as the rest of you probably will.
Also the event calendar is broken (another consequence of turning the place over to a "professional"), so here's the upcoming event list:
Feb. 12, Conga Room Los Angeles
Feb. 21, Rumba Room Universal Citywalk
Feb. 28, Conga Room Los Angeles
Mal-2
Colonizing other planets will solve the "all eggs in one basket" issue, provided they are self-sufficient, but it does almost nothing for overpopulation. How many people can you cram in a ship bound for another planet, and how many can you pack in a ship headed to, say, Greenland? Greenland doesn't force you to generate your own air, either.
There is plenty of room left on the planet. Most of it is, at present, uninhabitable. There is plenty of room left on other planets, but it too is presently uninhabitable, and it costs many orders of magnitude more to get there and MAKE it inhabitable. This is not to argue that it shouldn't be done (it should), but that it won't directly affect overpopulation. It will provide some insurance against the catastrophic effects of overpopulation (or any other cataclysm), and in this case even a little isnurance is far better than none at all.
Think of a colony as offsite backup. It doesn't solve the problem that your hard drive is ful of porn.
Mal-2
Do you honestly think this will remove our dependence on fossil fuel completely? Look at your computer. It's prolly got a lot of plastic in, on, and around it. Same with probably the rest of your room. Multiply that by a couple/few billion and you get the idea. Also, with the demand for plastic products growing ever more insistent, by the time (if) we get to enact a feasible plan for mining the moon, how much oil will be required to make non-energy products?
That's the WHOLE POINT -- petroleum is so useful for synthesizing/extracting very useful things that it's a shame we're still burning it! If we weren't burning the majority of it, there'd be plenty to build things wit for some time to come. Not only that, but plastic is recyclable and exhaust gases aren't.
Assuming we can replace oil as an energy source, what remains should be more than adequate for building things until we have enough cheap energy to synthesize all the hydrocarbons we could ever want. We might even be best off making more plastic than we really need, just to act as a carbon sink. The technology already exists, it just needs power, and lots of it.
Mal-2
My girlfriend had to get X-rays for a possible sprained knee, and noticed that the radiologist didn't bother to leave the room, don a lead shield, or take any other self-protective measures. Needless to say, she asked why.
Turns out this woman had grown up 80 miles downwind of Chernobyl. Her attitude was "Why bother? I grew up absorbing 1000 times as much radiation as I'll absorb in a whole career here."
Mal-2