When I went looking for my first job after college, the career counselor told me something which I didn't get to use but will never forget. Volunteer. You start by finding a company that does what you are interested in doing. Then you send them your resume making sure to note your self taught skills(but you don't need to mention that they are self taught, just that you have experience). Finally, in your cover letter you express your interest in volunteering for them for 3-6 months. The fact that they won't have to pay you will give them the opportunity to meet you and see your skills without taking as much risk. You can do it part time since they don't have to pay you anyway and still work a somewhat regular job on the side(though working hours may be strange so you'd need a flexible job).
After the 3-6 months you have a few things going for you. First, you have your foot in the door giving you the opportunity to try to get a job with the company who already knows you do good work. Second, you now have something to put on your resume. Finally, you have contacts in the field. These are all the things you need to get yourself a job in the field and it just takes a little monetary sacrifice. Heck, if you're good and they know it they might offer you the job long before the 3-6 months comes up. Good Luck!
To all media companies out there: give us what we want (not broken with DRM) and when we want it (not 9 months to 3 years later), and you'll see piracy decline significantly. Oh, and make new innovative product rather than coasting off the work of an earlier genius (Disney, that comment is directed precisely at you.)
Don't forget that we want it for a reasonable price. Most of us are willing to pay for something that we consider reasonable. I'm happy to watch TV shows on a company's website that includes commercials but if the company doesn't offer it, I'm not going to go out and buy or rent the full season just to watch one episode. I'm happy to purchase a game that I can play at home and then sell to someone else if I decide I don't want it anymore. I'm not going to pay the same price for a game that I cannot play without internet, I cannot sell to my friends, and I only can install on my own machine so many times before it stops working. Price shouldn't be dependent upon what the company thinks something is worth, it should be dependent upon what people will pay for it.
Look at what Itunes did for music. They provided a way to purchase songs for a reasonable price and people paid for them. Piracy will never go away, but punishing pirates is not the way to get rid of it. Instead they need to get rid of the reason for the piracy and most people will happily conform.
It all depends on what you really want to get into.
DOSBox - For all your old DOS based games, this emulator works wonders. The only part you need to worry about is getting them off those old 3.5" and 5.25" floppies. If the floppies don't work anymore or you just don't have a floppy drive, you can always hop over to the various Abandonware sites and try to get a full copy of the game from them. My favorite site is Home of the Underdogs.
Emulators - For your old console systems, you can easily pick up any number of emulators. There are plenty of places like The Emulator Zone that let you grab both an emulator and various game roms for any number of console systems. Most of them let you install a USB Gamepad of some sort that gives you an even more old game style feel. Many of them are pretty good these days and a lot of computers are more powerful than some of the even more recent consoles. I use a PS emulator to run all my old PS1 games and they look better than on my PS2.
Online - An absolutely amazing number of games and other things have been ported to an online version of the game. A quick Google search for "DOOM online" returns a Flash based Doom Conversion. My experience has shown that most of the online versions of games don't play as smooth as on emulators, but they are usually free and no installation is needed.
There are plenty of other solutions out there as well. You could probably track down an older computer on ebay if you looked hard enough and what does it hurt to let it sit in a closet or your attic when you want to pull it out. If you need to ask these questions, you haven't been looking hard enough. Many others have forged this road long before you came to it and they have freely provided their solutions to all.
Forgive me if I missed something, after all I don't own a tablet, but did tablets surpass laptops in speed and capability? I mean these magic devices called laptops have been doing exactly this for years and they have never matched a desktop in raw power. Suddenly tablets, which are smaller than most laptops, are so much further ahead than laptops that this article chooses to compare them with desktops instead of laptops? I find it hard to believe to be sure.
I disagree with your analogy because the envelope would required to be opened to get to the data. Not hard to do but it effectively blocks someone looking in your mailbox. The guy with the postcard analogy is closer.
I offer what I believe to be a better analogy. It's like someone changing their clothes in front of an open window and the guy across the street with the binoculars staring at them. The person changing their clothing could close the curtains but they don't really expect someone else to be looking. All Google did was drive by with a video camera and take a few seconds of video.
This is why I don't play MMOs. If I pay $60 for a disk, I better get a game on it. If I then have to pay $15 a month to play the game I own, then it's a scam. If you want me to pay $15 a month, that's fine. Give me the game for free.
To be truly anal, Final Fantasy IV is what they've called all of the Japan releases of the game as well as the releases of the game for Playstation 1, Advanced, AND the most recent version on the DS. The only version called Final Fantasy II was the US SNES release. The game has been released several times since then. Anyone who has been playing Final Fantasy since the start has been calling it FFIV since FFVII came out and the realization that there had been 6 others before it but only three had been released in the US.
So to bring my point back home, it certainly isn't just now that they have begun calling it FFIV, they have been calling it FFIV for well over 10 years.
I was going to make a similar comment but then I went started reading the report for ammunition. Right there on page 11 it reads:
We do not adjust for double counting in our analysis. If someone is watching TV and using the computer at the same time, our data sources will record this as two hours of total information. This is consistent with most other researchers. Note, though, that this means there are theoretically more than 24 hours in an information day!
So basically they say that most americans work, sleep and spend at least 4 of their other hours multitasking between TV and Computer.
I will never buy HP again. My previous laptop was a Compaq(For those out of the loop or just too young, Compaq was bought by HP) and my senior year of college, I got the motherboard replaced on warranty a dozen times or more(Our college had a program to give free laptops to students and they kept spare motherboards on hand because this was a very frequent occurrence).
My current HP had its battery replaced twice because it had died within 3 months of the battery coming out of the box(both times) and the only reason I didn't replace it more is because it was just going to fail again(Why replace faulty parts with more faulty parts? In case you couldn't guess, it died a total of three times and I just didn't care anymore after the third. My laptop is now essentially a desktop). The second time they even brought the laptop in to see if it was causing the battery failures. It was but they couldn't fix it.
Even worse, they held my credit card number ransom. They said if I didn't send the old battery in after they sent me the replacement, they would charge me for a new one. Keep in mind that they logged onto my computer to check to see if my battery was indeed dead before confirming that it was covered under warranty, but they still didn't trust me enough to return a brick that they were just going to throw away/recycle. The doesn't even mention that they could have sent me an empty box and had me send them the dead battery first since it was dead and I couldn't use it anyway.
Whatever, this article only supports me in my hatred of HP products.
While technically true, the problem comes along with people who work from home. Teachers are in fact a prime example of this in that they do almost all of their grading and lesson planing at home. So where is the line between work and play? Unless you are specifically cataloging your hours, it would be kind of hard to fight it in court.
It's actually even worse than this. There is no cancel option on their website which means to stop service, you have to call them and deal with their trashy customer service. That doesn't even mention the fact that they will refuse to delete your account if you ask. They claim they have to keep the credit card for record purposes. Somehow I doubt it. The only way to get your credit card number out of their hands is to cancel it.
If you go online and check out each of the four major carriors, all their plans are pretty much exactly the same. They all charge relatively the exact same prices for everything. The only differences between them are what phones you get to pick from, the contract length, and which part of quality you want. Remember, you can't get both good quality signal and no lost calls. You can't get both full bars everywhere you want to be and some bars everywhere else.
Some of them have something a little special like rollover minutes or the ability to call a certain number of people outside their network(under very special circumstances), but it's more about who you know in each network and not what they offer or what they cost. I have Verizon because all of my family and friends are on Verizon. This means I can call everyone I know for free. But the fact is that with normal competition, prices should have fallen by now and they have not. It doesn't cost them $5 to send 100 text messages but that's what they charge me.
It's like two gas stations across the street from one another. They could get into a price war till neither of them makes any money, or they could silently agreed to charge the same price and split the customers. Next time you see two gas stations across the street from one another, notice if their prices are the same. Unfortunately for most of us, we can't just drive down the street to find a wireless company that isn't silently price fixing.
According to AskOxford.com, Man means several things.
man
noun (pl. men) 1 an adult human male. 2 a male member of a workforce, team, etc. 3 a husband or lover. 4 a person. 5 human beings in general. 6 a figure or token used in a board game.
While you are correct in that it is not typically used that way, you'll notice that usage #4 IS Person. So technically 3-man team is an acceptable usage.
If you RTFA, it's from The New Yorker. Or, at least it was in TFA when I read it earlier today before Slashdot posted it.
I'm too lazy to check to see about the link now, but fortunately, since I thought the article interesting, I saved it. So here it is. It's an 18 page PDF, The proposal is mentioned on page 11.
While I was too lazy to read the entire thing, I did take time to notice that the article you posted was dated for the 21st of January or 6 days from now.
Most of the data NASA has gained helps out NASA. There is very little of it that is useful in the public's eyes. For instance, wind patterns, weather changes, and soil solidity don't give the public much information. On the other hand, those things allow NASA to plan out future missions better. They have the ability to take soil samples but they obviously haven't gotten any ground shattering information yet as otherwise we would have heard something. The big thing we get out of this is that instead of sending off a new probe every year for $1B or more, we spend on the order of a few million and pay people's salaries.
There is one other HUGE benefit NASA gets from the rover missions. Publicity. The longer those things work, the better NASA looks. They are showing the public that they are capable of building good equipment. Every time they build a probe and it accidentally smashes into something or they build a telescope and the lenses are out of focus, it makes NASA look bad. With the rovers working so well, they can make other mistakes in the background and say, "Well those rovers are still running." Then when they think they've reached the limits of the rovers or the rovers finally do die, they can come back to the public and say, "Can we have lots of money to build replacements?" The public will say, "You built those last ones so well, we'll expect the same from these next ones." Whether NASA comes through again when that time comes is a toss up.
To some degree, yes. But without competition, there is no incentive to truly innovate, merely to change slightly and resell. Look at Windows. What was the difference between Win95 and Win98? Win95 took less space and crashed less? Things like Linux and Firefox have forced Microsoft to take action to try and truly make their product better because if it continue to be a buggy blue screen of death memory and hard drive eating POS, people finally will stop buying it. They made WinXP well enough that people are asking why they should upgrade. To keep earning money, Microsoft is going to have to work on innovation.
Greed is what drives the Producer to produce.
Competition is what gives the consumer better products.
I worked directly with LG at a Hyundai site in Alabama. They are some of the worst people I have ever worked with. I would request they help me fix a problem I would be having and they would say that they would do it. Next thing I know, the problem was still there and they'd be pointing fingers at me for the problem I requested them to help me fix saying it was my fault and my responsibility to fix it. They did this repeatedly and what was worse was that they were Korean and so was Hyundai. Nothing against Koreans specifically but it is human nature to trust someone you can understand over someone you can barely communicate with. They would start jabbering away in Korean and I knew the finger would invariably be pointed back at me. I will never buy an LG product.
One of the biggest problem I have with our society right now is that everyone is put into groups based upon their beliefs. You know what the problem with groups is? It causes bigotry. People generalize these groups into their good sides and bad sides and only look at the side they want to. I got into a fight with my wife because she tried to put me into one of these political groups. I don't want to be grouped. I have my own beliefs that may or may not mesh with these so called groups, but don't throw me in with them. If you want to know my beliefs, ask me, don't generalize me. I am of the myself party. I am the sex I perceive, the color I perceive and as wealthy as I perceive and nobody else can tell me any differently.
Many side effects
on
Water From Wind
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
From what I see there will be many side effects of such a system.
First, as many have mentioned, it will pull moisture out of the air. This means that there will be less moisture downwind and with enough of these windmills, a dry region. That said, though, taking moisture out of the air increase the amount of room in the air for more moisture and thereby would allow evaporation downwind to be more efficient. On the other hand, if there is no rain replenishing the water, it would eventually all dry out.
Second, since it has a cooling effect, this also means the air temperature would drop downwind. In fact, with enough of them, you may cause a significant drop in temperature. Not only is it dry at that point, but its also cold. Since colder air cannot hold moisture as well as warmer air, this cancels out any increased efficiency in evaporation.
Third, if you drop the temperature enough, you might hit your dewpoint. You also might not considering you are removing moisture from the air and thereby lowering the dewpoint. Lets say for now you do hit your dewpoint because the removal of moisture isn't as effective as the decrease in temperature. Anyone who knows anything about weather knows if the temperature reaches the dewpoint, it start to rain. This means there is more moisture in the air than the air can hold. Now its raining removing even more of the moisture from the air, though putting it on our dry cold region we were talking about. At that point, its just a cold region though dropping water out of the air may cause a region further away to now become our dry cold region.
Last, as people have also noted, there will be a low pressure area in our cold region. Storms tend to develop between high and low pressure regions under some circumstances and at the very least, high winds. If our cold region isn't a stormy cold region and that point, its a windy cold region. But then again, the air of the high pressure area will probably be warmer than our windy cold region which then makes it warmer. So now we just have a windy region.
If the windmills slow down the air at all, then everything may just equal out in the end. I think it would take a meteorologist of some experience and perhaps someone of the more physical science persuasion to work out all the effects and if it will have any overall effect.
This book has a very nice premise but I have one problem. The demon princes seem extrodinarily weak. Graz'zt for instance is listed and set up as a CR 22 creature. A Balor is what, CR 19 or 20? This means a half dozen Balors not happy with Graz'zt could come along and off him and then kill one another for rightful place on the throne. A ruler on a Chaotic Evil Plane better be powerful enough to shred the most powerful of his commanders without thinking twice because otherwise his Chaotic Commanders will turn on his sorry butt. Fear and power is how they would have to rule.
Slashdot Mirror
When I went looking for my first job after college, the career counselor told me something which I didn't get to use but will never forget. Volunteer. You start by finding a company that does what you are interested in doing. Then you send them your resume making sure to note your self taught skills(but you don't need to mention that they are self taught, just that you have experience). Finally, in your cover letter you express your interest in volunteering for them for 3-6 months. The fact that they won't have to pay you will give them the opportunity to meet you and see your skills without taking as much risk. You can do it part time since they don't have to pay you anyway and still work a somewhat regular job on the side(though working hours may be strange so you'd need a flexible job).
After the 3-6 months you have a few things going for you. First, you have your foot in the door giving you the opportunity to try to get a job with the company who already knows you do good work. Second, you now have something to put on your resume. Finally, you have contacts in the field. These are all the things you need to get yourself a job in the field and it just takes a little monetary sacrifice. Heck, if you're good and they know it they might offer you the job long before the 3-6 months comes up. Good Luck!
To all media companies out there: give us what we want (not broken with DRM) and when we want it (not 9 months to 3 years later), and you'll see piracy decline significantly. Oh, and make new innovative product rather than coasting off the work of an earlier genius (Disney, that comment is directed precisely at you.)
Don't forget that we want it for a reasonable price. Most of us are willing to pay for something that we consider reasonable. I'm happy to watch TV shows on a company's website that includes commercials but if the company doesn't offer it, I'm not going to go out and buy or rent the full season just to watch one episode. I'm happy to purchase a game that I can play at home and then sell to someone else if I decide I don't want it anymore. I'm not going to pay the same price for a game that I cannot play without internet, I cannot sell to my friends, and I only can install on my own machine so many times before it stops working. Price shouldn't be dependent upon what the company thinks something is worth, it should be dependent upon what people will pay for it.
Look at what Itunes did for music. They provided a way to purchase songs for a reasonable price and people paid for them. Piracy will never go away, but punishing pirates is not the way to get rid of it. Instead they need to get rid of the reason for the piracy and most people will happily conform.
I think the following video basically says it as much: The World Is Saved
It all depends on what you really want to get into.
DOSBox - For all your old DOS based games, this emulator works wonders. The only part you need to worry about is getting them off those old 3.5" and 5.25" floppies. If the floppies don't work anymore or you just don't have a floppy drive, you can always hop over to the various Abandonware sites and try to get a full copy of the game from them. My favorite site is Home of the Underdogs.
Emulators - For your old console systems, you can easily pick up any number of emulators. There are plenty of places like The Emulator Zone that let you grab both an emulator and various game roms for any number of console systems. Most of them let you install a USB Gamepad of some sort that gives you an even more old game style feel. Many of them are pretty good these days and a lot of computers are more powerful than some of the even more recent consoles. I use a PS emulator to run all my old PS1 games and they look better than on my PS2.
Online - An absolutely amazing number of games and other things have been ported to an online version of the game. A quick Google search for "DOOM online" returns a Flash based Doom Conversion. My experience has shown that most of the online versions of games don't play as smooth as on emulators, but they are usually free and no installation is needed.
There are plenty of other solutions out there as well. You could probably track down an older computer on ebay if you looked hard enough and what does it hurt to let it sit in a closet or your attic when you want to pull it out. If you need to ask these questions, you haven't been looking hard enough. Many others have forged this road long before you came to it and they have freely provided their solutions to all.
Forgive me if I missed something, after all I don't own a tablet, but did tablets surpass laptops in speed and capability? I mean these magic devices called laptops have been doing exactly this for years and they have never matched a desktop in raw power. Suddenly tablets, which are smaller than most laptops, are so much further ahead than laptops that this article chooses to compare them with desktops instead of laptops? I find it hard to believe to be sure.
I disagree with your analogy because the envelope would required to be opened to get to the data. Not hard to do but it effectively blocks someone looking in your mailbox. The guy with the postcard analogy is closer.
I offer what I believe to be a better analogy. It's like someone changing their clothes in front of an open window and the guy across the street with the binoculars staring at them. The person changing their clothing could close the curtains but they don't really expect someone else to be looking. All Google did was drive by with a video camera and take a few seconds of video.
This is why I don't play MMOs. If I pay $60 for a disk, I better get a game on it. If I then have to pay $15 a month to play the game I own, then it's a scam. If you want me to pay $15 a month, that's fine. Give me the game for free.
To be truly anal, Final Fantasy IV is what they've called all of the Japan releases of the game as well as the releases of the game for Playstation 1, Advanced, AND the most recent version on the DS. The only version called Final Fantasy II was the US SNES release. The game has been released several times since then. Anyone who has been playing Final Fantasy since the start has been calling it FFIV since FFVII came out and the realization that there had been 6 others before it but only three had been released in the US.
So to bring my point back home, it certainly isn't just now that they have begun calling it FFIV, they have been calling it FFIV for well over 10 years.
We do not adjust for double counting in our analysis. If someone is watching TV and using the computer at the same time, our data sources will record this as two hours of total information. This is consistent with most other researchers. Note, though, that this means there are theoretically more than 24 hours in an information day!
So basically they say that most americans work, sleep and spend at least 4 of their other hours multitasking between TV and Computer.
I will never buy HP again. My previous laptop was a Compaq(For those out of the loop or just too young, Compaq was bought by HP) and my senior year of college, I got the motherboard replaced on warranty a dozen times or more(Our college had a program to give free laptops to students and they kept spare motherboards on hand because this was a very frequent occurrence).
My current HP had its battery replaced twice because it had died within 3 months of the battery coming out of the box(both times) and the only reason I didn't replace it more is because it was just going to fail again(Why replace faulty parts with more faulty parts? In case you couldn't guess, it died a total of three times and I just didn't care anymore after the third. My laptop is now essentially a desktop). The second time they even brought the laptop in to see if it was causing the battery failures. It was but they couldn't fix it.
Even worse, they held my credit card number ransom. They said if I didn't send the old battery in after they sent me the replacement, they would charge me for a new one. Keep in mind that they logged onto my computer to check to see if my battery was indeed dead before confirming that it was covered under warranty, but they still didn't trust me enough to return a brick that they were just going to throw away/recycle. The doesn't even mention that they could have sent me an empty box and had me send them the dead battery first since it was dead and I couldn't use it anyway.
Whatever, this article only supports me in my hatred of HP products.
While technically true, the problem comes along with people who work from home. Teachers are in fact a prime example of this in that they do almost all of their grading and lesson planing at home. So where is the line between work and play? Unless you are specifically cataloging your hours, it would be kind of hard to fight it in court.
It's actually even worse than this. There is no cancel option on their website which means to stop service, you have to call them and deal with their trashy customer service. That doesn't even mention the fact that they will refuse to delete your account if you ask. They claim they have to keep the credit card for record purposes. Somehow I doubt it. The only way to get your credit card number out of their hands is to cancel it.
Correlation does not imply causation.
What if the aliens realized it was a period of time where we were most receptive to close encounters of the third kind.
Or maybe they just realized people would blame it on too much alcohol and a drunk encounter with ID4.
The aliens are smarter than us, this idea is just us playing right into their hands!
*Puts on his tinfoil hat*
If you go online and check out each of the four major carriors, all their plans are pretty much exactly the same. They all charge relatively the exact same prices for everything. The only differences between them are what phones you get to pick from, the contract length, and which part of quality you want. Remember, you can't get both good quality signal and no lost calls. You can't get both full bars everywhere you want to be and some bars everywhere else.
Some of them have something a little special like rollover minutes or the ability to call a certain number of people outside their network(under very special circumstances), but it's more about who you know in each network and not what they offer or what they cost. I have Verizon because all of my family and friends are on Verizon. This means I can call everyone I know for free. But the fact is that with normal competition, prices should have fallen by now and they have not. It doesn't cost them $5 to send 100 text messages but that's what they charge me.
It's like two gas stations across the street from one another. They could get into a price war till neither of them makes any money, or they could silently agreed to charge the same price and split the customers. Next time you see two gas stations across the street from one another, notice if their prices are the same. Unfortunately for most of us, we can't just drive down the street to find a wireless company that isn't silently price fixing.
man
noun (pl. men) 1 an adult human male. 2 a male member of a workforce, team, etc. 3 a husband or lover. 4 a person. 5 human beings in general. 6 a figure or token used in a board game.
While you are correct in that it is not typically used that way, you'll notice that usage #4 IS Person. So technically 3-man team is an acceptable usage.
Once again another reason why owning a Mac is better. Right? I mean all those commercials tell me PCs and Macs are totally different!
You mean 201, you've got to keep one to actually do research with after all.
If you RTFA, it's from The New Yorker. Or, at least it was in TFA when I read it earlier today before Slashdot posted it.
I'm too lazy to check to see about the link now, but fortunately, since I thought the article interesting, I saved it. So here it is. It's an 18 page PDF, The proposal is mentioned on page 11.
While I was too lazy to read the entire thing, I did take time to notice that the article you posted was dated for the 21st of January or 6 days from now.Most of the data NASA has gained helps out NASA. There is very little of it that is useful in the public's eyes. For instance, wind patterns, weather changes, and soil solidity don't give the public much information. On the other hand, those things allow NASA to plan out future missions better. They have the ability to take soil samples but they obviously haven't gotten any ground shattering information yet as otherwise we would have heard something. The big thing we get out of this is that instead of sending off a new probe every year for $1B or more, we spend on the order of a few million and pay people's salaries. There is one other HUGE benefit NASA gets from the rover missions. Publicity. The longer those things work, the better NASA looks. They are showing the public that they are capable of building good equipment. Every time they build a probe and it accidentally smashes into something or they build a telescope and the lenses are out of focus, it makes NASA look bad. With the rovers working so well, they can make other mistakes in the background and say, "Well those rovers are still running." Then when they think they've reached the limits of the rovers or the rovers finally do die, they can come back to the public and say, "Can we have lots of money to build replacements?" The public will say, "You built those last ones so well, we'll expect the same from these next ones." Whether NASA comes through again when that time comes is a toss up.
To some degree, yes. But without competition, there is no incentive to truly innovate, merely to change slightly and resell. Look at Windows. What was the difference between Win95 and Win98? Win95 took less space and crashed less? Things like Linux and Firefox have forced Microsoft to take action to try and truly make their product better because if it continue to be a buggy blue screen of death memory and hard drive eating POS, people finally will stop buying it. They made WinXP well enough that people are asking why they should upgrade. To keep earning money, Microsoft is going to have to work on innovation. Greed is what drives the Producer to produce. Competition is what gives the consumer better products.
I worked directly with LG at a Hyundai site in Alabama. They are some of the worst people I have ever worked with. I would request they help me fix a problem I would be having and they would say that they would do it. Next thing I know, the problem was still there and they'd be pointing fingers at me for the problem I requested them to help me fix saying it was my fault and my responsibility to fix it. They did this repeatedly and what was worse was that they were Korean and so was Hyundai. Nothing against Koreans specifically but it is human nature to trust someone you can understand over someone you can barely communicate with. They would start jabbering away in Korean and I knew the finger would invariably be pointed back at me. I will never buy an LG product.
One of the biggest problem I have with our society right now is that everyone is put into groups based upon their beliefs. You know what the problem with groups is? It causes bigotry. People generalize these groups into their good sides and bad sides and only look at the side they want to. I got into a fight with my wife because she tried to put me into one of these political groups. I don't want to be grouped. I have my own beliefs that may or may not mesh with these so called groups, but don't throw me in with them. If you want to know my beliefs, ask me, don't generalize me. I am of the myself party. I am the sex I perceive, the color I perceive and as wealthy as I perceive and nobody else can tell me any differently.
Here is a link to the petition to save internet radio. http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/saveinternetrad io/
Please go sign it. The more people the better.
From what I see there will be many side effects of such a system. First, as many have mentioned, it will pull moisture out of the air. This means that there will be less moisture downwind and with enough of these windmills, a dry region. That said, though, taking moisture out of the air increase the amount of room in the air for more moisture and thereby would allow evaporation downwind to be more efficient. On the other hand, if there is no rain replenishing the water, it would eventually all dry out. Second, since it has a cooling effect, this also means the air temperature would drop downwind. In fact, with enough of them, you may cause a significant drop in temperature. Not only is it dry at that point, but its also cold. Since colder air cannot hold moisture as well as warmer air, this cancels out any increased efficiency in evaporation. Third, if you drop the temperature enough, you might hit your dewpoint. You also might not considering you are removing moisture from the air and thereby lowering the dewpoint. Lets say for now you do hit your dewpoint because the removal of moisture isn't as effective as the decrease in temperature. Anyone who knows anything about weather knows if the temperature reaches the dewpoint, it start to rain. This means there is more moisture in the air than the air can hold. Now its raining removing even more of the moisture from the air, though putting it on our dry cold region we were talking about. At that point, its just a cold region though dropping water out of the air may cause a region further away to now become our dry cold region. Last, as people have also noted, there will be a low pressure area in our cold region. Storms tend to develop between high and low pressure regions under some circumstances and at the very least, high winds. If our cold region isn't a stormy cold region and that point, its a windy cold region. But then again, the air of the high pressure area will probably be warmer than our windy cold region which then makes it warmer. So now we just have a windy region. If the windmills slow down the air at all, then everything may just equal out in the end. I think it would take a meteorologist of some experience and perhaps someone of the more physical science persuasion to work out all the effects and if it will have any overall effect.
This book has a very nice premise but I have one problem. The demon princes seem extrodinarily weak. Graz'zt for instance is listed and set up as a CR 22 creature. A Balor is what, CR 19 or 20? This means a half dozen Balors not happy with Graz'zt could come along and off him and then kill one another for rightful place on the throne. A ruler on a Chaotic Evil Plane better be powerful enough to shred the most powerful of his commanders without thinking twice because otherwise his Chaotic Commanders will turn on his sorry butt. Fear and power is how they would have to rule.