Wine seems pretty good for most MS Windows 3.x programs.
I have flash disabled (actually, I never installed it since I find the EULA too nasty), and if a site requires it, I just move on to the next site. Only a tiny fraction (1 or 2%) of the sites I try to visit require it, though many more need it for their ads to work (which is the reason I would disable it even if it were installed).
As far as installation goes, what good are programs for MS OSs if virtually all have a EULA that I'm not willing to sign? And most of the stuff without such EULAs is ported from Linux and would run better on a POSIX compliant system anyway. I've installed mplayer for a few people on their XP systems (mostly because it's very robust, doesn't rely on the.avi video.dlls, and doesn't come with any spyware/malware/viruses) and I haven't had any complaints about files not playing or locking up halfway through since then.
The amount of bandwidth used by ordinary people isn't very big. Poor regulation and monopolies/oligopolies are the reason why it costs what it does from small customers.
On the other hand, disabling ads has many other benefits, so it's still a very worthy enterprise.
I was referring to a specific thing (the USA's foreign aid policies), and in that light, the developing world is where the effects of those policies are felt. There are a lot of other things that should be done by all countries, but this is some very low hanging fruit and completely in our control.
It's pretty substantial (millions of avoided births a year), but a much smarter idea would be to stop spreading pronatal views to the developing world.
Those frequencies are likely to remain noisy for quite some time. TV equipment is pretty leaky and it will likely be decades before most NTSC equipment is gone. This isn't a problem today because TV transmitters are extremely powerful, but it could make using the frequencies for low power stuff like ham difficult.
PS: I once was wondering why my video game was coming up all fuzzy. It turned out I had hooked up the antenna instead of the video game to the TV and was picking up the signal "over the air." I was probably producing interference for a decent distance - less than a mile but I'm sure that leaky setups are fairly common (which wasn't too much an issue there, since you use an unused channel [3 or 4] for video games/VCRs anyway and even if the channel was used, broadcasters use very high powers so the interference wouldn't spread very far).
The transmitter could be designed to only broadcast if there is no signal detected on that frequency, which would make accidental interference pretty much impossible.
It's not going to work. You'll never get a controlling interest (often it's mathematically impossible), and in the meantime, stock purchases just drive the stock price higher.
Boycotting means avoiding. That means don't acquire the target stuff, regardless of how you get it. The effect of a successful boycott goes well beyond the immediate effect of a few lost sales (if lost sales from the people actually boycotting were the only effect, they would be quite weak indeed).
How exactly does ownership of television shows go? One would think that PBS would own Dragon Tales with Sony (via Columbia Pictures) being the contractor that subcontracted it out to foreign firms to actually make. If not, it's an utter waste of public money to subsidize something that isn't even publicly owned and controlled afterwards (assuming PBS is in fact a state enterprise - not sure how the semantics work out).
Either way, thanks for pointing that out. I maintain an active boycott (and badmouthing campaign) of things Sony and Dragon Tales had slipped through the cracks, having attributed PBS as the controlling entity and not seeing Sony as being involved in that business. Should have been obvious considering that Sony subsidiaries published the DVD version and CD spinoffs (which I naturally didn't buy).
The problem is the enormous needs for defense. South and North Korea are still officially at war (it's just a cease-fire) and having such a large army is necessary for security from invasion from the US. Loyalty is pretty good in North Korea and such an army is definitely overkill for any use in a police state.
The trade embargo that the West maintains on North Korea doesn't help their economy either. They might be rich in some resources, but without energy they're quite useless. They're also quite industrialized - which is actually part of their problem. A pre-industrial economy would function better than their Soviet-style industrial economy given that they are so short on energy.
Even with headphones, you need a real-time operating system because the response must be generated within a few dozen microseconds. Off the shelf Linux or, -gasps-, MS Windows, cannot deliver this, no matter how fancy the software. In practice, you use a small computer or microcontroller built into the headphones.
It's only $30/gal because the US military makes bad decision after bad decision. Overpaying for the transport planes is 1, flying in bulky supplies or staying in a base where you can't truck or ship in supplies is 2, and relying on contractors like Halliburton makes for 3 strikes.
I wonder how much rich Iraqis pay for their clean water?
It's pretty much a reusable desiccant - and in the best case (probably using reverse osmosis) the energy cost will be about an order of magnitude worse than desalinization plants. It even says in the article that the cost is 30 cents a gallon (which is probably highly optimistic and certainly cannot be verified without full disclosure from the company). At 30 cents a gallon (or perhaps 3 dollars a gallon when you're operating it in field conditions) you could forget about serving any sort of civilian market, and even for military use it would be quite expensive.
You need to look at each tax and situation individually. Corporations price to maximize profits, not based on the cost of production. If a tax lowers the profit margin from 40% to 30%, the firm will still produce at full tilt assuming it's a competitive market. To do otherwise would be to shoot itself in the foot.
Oil taxes are one of the best ways to raise revenue, as demand and supply are very inelastic and there are very large externalities. Certainly better than raising the sales tax or raising tolls.
Just look at countries like Venezuela that jacked up their tax rates as the price of oil rose. Their currency is now stable, inflation is being brought under control, and the standard of living is skyrocketing.
This purported 'invention' will surely not work. Relativity or not, conversation of momentum still holds true. A closed system (which his cylinder appears to be, at least in terms of E/M radiation) will never generate any net thrust. Even when E/M radiation can escape, it will impart at most a momentum of E/c - a very tiny amount indeed.
Re:I think it will work for the price point
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Will the Wii Work?
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· Score: 1
Apparently you don't know how much use a controller can get. Dozens of hours isn't exactly much time.
As far as the PS2 and Gamecube controllers go - the official ones don't break as often, but they're extremely expensive - something like $25 a pop or so. They still break too often (well under 1,000 hours of use vs. over 1,000 hours for NES and SNES).
Re:I think it will work for the price point
on
Will the Wii Work?
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· Score: 1
I happen to have Super Smash Bros. (and the Melee version too). It does seem to do a number on the controllers. Between N64 and Gamecube controllers, we must have gone through over a dozen (about 50-50 split between generics and brand name ones). Not very happy at that considering how expensive they are.
I've only lost 1 NES controller and 0 SNES controllers despite similar levels of use - the NES controller was worn through on the circuit board.
Re:I think it will work for the price point
on
Will the Wii Work?
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· Score: 1
Ahem, you can get a PS2 for a heck of a lot less than $250. There's also a pretty big selection of older (but still very good) $20 games available (if you're into modding and don't mind violating the DMCA/copyright, the price can go down to that of a blank DVD-R).
The Revolution games are going to be very expensive initially - probably about $60 or so if history is any guide.
Personally, I like simple controllers like the SNES or PS1 controllers. In particular I don't like analog controls or anything wireless (the former because they break easily and are less precise, the latter because of interference/line-of-sight issues and because they need batteries).
Hmm, a little look on Wikipedia explains things: It turns out the engine I'm thinking of is called a ramjet while you're probably thinking of a turbojet or turbofan or some similar engine with a rotating compressor and a turbine. Ramjets indeed have no moving parts except for a valve or two, but they apparently aren't used much in practice. Perhaps I was taught that design because it's simpler to understand?
The total energy can easily exceed the energy of the gas expansion - you're neglecting the kinetic energy of the turbine blades and whatever they're attached to, which can come from gas burned previously. For large turbines the kinetic energy works out to orders of magnitude more than potential energy of the gas in the turbine. In fact, it's the primary way that momentary dips and spikes in the demand for electricity in the grid are buffered, and a large turbine can store on the order of 10^9 joules of kinetic energy.
This seems pretty odd to me. Turbines need very uniform flows (to avoid damage to the blades) and small devices need to be low maintenance. Carburetors are neither, being easily flooded, containing moving parts, and not giving very good control of the fuel-air mix over a range of throttle settings and air temperatures.
Seems like an odd comment, considering that jet engines are solid state and have no moving parts (and most definitely don't spin).
That aside, 20,000 rps isn't so hard to fathom when the device is so tiny. Possible speed (for the same material) is inversely proportional to the diameter of the spinning part, and this device is tiny.
I wonder what the cost is through? Precision-manufactured turbine blades for conventional (~200MW) turbines aren't exactly cheap and the process does not get much cheaper as the device gets smaller. Steam engines can actually be more practical than steam turbines in the range of a few kW (roughly an air conditioner) up to perhaps 50kW (roughly a small car motor) - they just aren't used because internal combustion engines are even more practical and anything steam is expensive and not very efficient in small sizes.
You can make turbines out of poorly engineered materials, but they will be less efficient (easily worse than a piston-based external combustion engine), bulkier, and in need of more maintenance.
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Wine seems pretty good for most MS Windows 3.x programs.
.avi video .dlls, and doesn't come with any spyware/malware/viruses) and I haven't had any complaints about files not playing or locking up halfway through since then.
I have flash disabled (actually, I never installed it since I find the EULA too nasty), and if a site requires it, I just move on to the next site. Only a tiny fraction (1 or 2%) of the sites I try to visit require it, though many more need it for their ads to work (which is the reason I would disable it even if it were installed).
As far as installation goes, what good are programs for MS OSs if virtually all have a EULA that I'm not willing to sign? And most of the stuff without such EULAs is ported from Linux and would run better on a POSIX compliant system anyway. I've installed mplayer for a few people on their XP systems (mostly because it's very robust, doesn't rely on the
The amount of bandwidth used by ordinary people isn't very big. Poor regulation and monopolies/oligopolies are the reason why it costs what it does from small customers.
On the other hand, disabling ads has many other benefits, so it's still a very worthy enterprise.
What would you get by plugging in processors from 2006 into that formula? My guess is that the doubling time is even slower now.
I was referring to a specific thing (the USA's foreign aid policies), and in that light, the developing world is where the effects of those policies are felt. There are a lot of other things that should be done by all countries, but this is some very low hanging fruit and completely in our control.
It's pretty substantial (millions of avoided births a year), but a much smarter idea would be to stop spreading pronatal views to the developing world.
Those frequencies are likely to remain noisy for quite some time. TV equipment is pretty leaky and it will likely be decades before most NTSC equipment is gone. This isn't a problem today because TV transmitters are extremely powerful, but it could make using the frequencies for low power stuff like ham difficult.
PS: I once was wondering why my video game was coming up all fuzzy. It turned out I had hooked up the antenna instead of the video game to the TV and was picking up the signal "over the air." I was probably producing interference for a decent distance - less than a mile but I'm sure that leaky setups are fairly common (which wasn't too much an issue there, since you use an unused channel [3 or 4] for video games/VCRs anyway and even if the channel was used, broadcasters use very high powers so the interference wouldn't spread very far).
The transmitter could be designed to only broadcast if there is no signal detected on that frequency, which would make accidental interference pretty much impossible.
It's not going to work. You'll never get a controlling interest (often it's mathematically impossible), and in the meantime, stock purchases just drive the stock price higher.
Boycotting means avoiding. That means don't acquire the target stuff, regardless of how you get it. The effect of a successful boycott goes well beyond the immediate effect of a few lost sales (if lost sales from the people actually boycotting were the only effect, they would be quite weak indeed).
How exactly does ownership of television shows go? One would think that PBS would own Dragon Tales with Sony (via Columbia Pictures) being the contractor that subcontracted it out to foreign firms to actually make. If not, it's an utter waste of public money to subsidize something that isn't even publicly owned and controlled afterwards (assuming PBS is in fact a state enterprise - not sure how the semantics work out).
Either way, thanks for pointing that out. I maintain an active boycott (and badmouthing campaign) of things Sony and Dragon Tales had slipped through the cracks, having attributed PBS as the controlling entity and not seeing Sony as being involved in that business. Should have been obvious considering that Sony subsidiaries published the DVD version and CD spinoffs (which I naturally didn't buy).
The problem is the enormous needs for defense. South and North Korea are still officially at war (it's just a cease-fire) and having such a large army is necessary for security from invasion from the US. Loyalty is pretty good in North Korea and such an army is definitely overkill for any use in a police state.
The trade embargo that the West maintains on North Korea doesn't help their economy either. They might be rich in some resources, but without energy they're quite useless. They're also quite industrialized - which is actually part of their problem. A pre-industrial economy would function better than their Soviet-style industrial economy given that they are so short on energy.
Even with headphones, you need a real-time operating system because the response must be generated within a few dozen microseconds. Off the shelf Linux or, -gasps-, MS Windows, cannot deliver this, no matter how fancy the software. In practice, you use a small computer or microcontroller built into the headphones.
It's only $30/gal because the US military makes bad decision after bad decision. Overpaying for the transport planes is 1, flying in bulky supplies or staying in a base where you can't truck or ship in supplies is 2, and relying on contractors like Halliburton makes for 3 strikes.
I wonder how much rich Iraqis pay for their clean water?
It's pretty much a reusable desiccant - and in the best case (probably using reverse osmosis) the energy cost will be about an order of magnitude worse than desalinization plants. It even says in the article that the cost is 30 cents a gallon (which is probably highly optimistic and certainly cannot be verified without full disclosure from the company). At 30 cents a gallon (or perhaps 3 dollars a gallon when you're operating it in field conditions) you could forget about serving any sort of civilian market, and even for military use it would be quite expensive.
You need to look at each tax and situation individually. Corporations price to maximize profits, not based on the cost of production. If a tax lowers the profit margin from 40% to 30%, the firm will still produce at full tilt assuming it's a competitive market. To do otherwise would be to shoot itself in the foot.
Oil taxes are one of the best ways to raise revenue, as demand and supply are very inelastic and there are very large externalities. Certainly better than raising the sales tax or raising tolls.
Just look at countries like Venezuela that jacked up their tax rates as the price of oil rose. Their currency is now stable, inflation is being brought under control, and the standard of living is skyrocketing.
This purported 'invention' will surely not work. Relativity or not, conversation of momentum still holds true. A closed system (which his cylinder appears to be, at least in terms of E/M radiation) will never generate any net thrust. Even when E/M radiation can escape, it will impart at most a momentum of E/c - a very tiny amount indeed.
Apparently you don't know how much use a controller can get. Dozens of hours isn't exactly much time.
As far as the PS2 and Gamecube controllers go - the official ones don't break as often, but they're extremely expensive - something like $25 a pop or so. They still break too often (well under 1,000 hours of use vs. over 1,000 hours for NES and SNES).
I happen to have Super Smash Bros. (and the Melee version too). It does seem to do a number on the controllers. Between N64 and Gamecube controllers, we must have gone through over a dozen (about 50-50 split between generics and brand name ones). Not very happy at that considering how expensive they are.
I've only lost 1 NES controller and 0 SNES controllers despite similar levels of use - the NES controller was worn through on the circuit board.
Ahem, you can get a PS2 for a heck of a lot less than $250. There's also a pretty big selection of older (but still very good) $20 games available (if you're into modding and don't mind violating the DMCA/copyright, the price can go down to that of a blank DVD-R).
The Revolution games are going to be very expensive initially - probably about $60 or so if history is any guide.
Personally, I like simple controllers like the SNES or PS1 controllers. In particular I don't like analog controls or anything wireless (the former because they break easily and are less precise, the latter because of interference/line-of-sight issues and because they need batteries).
Then how do you regulate power output? The laptop's power draw is not constant.
Hmm, a little look on Wikipedia explains things: It turns out the engine I'm thinking of is called a ramjet while you're probably thinking of a turbojet or turbofan or some similar engine with a rotating compressor and a turbine. Ramjets indeed have no moving parts except for a valve or two, but they apparently aren't used much in practice. Perhaps I was taught that design because it's simpler to understand?
The total energy can easily exceed the energy of the gas expansion - you're neglecting the kinetic energy of the turbine blades and whatever they're attached to, which can come from gas burned previously. For large turbines the kinetic energy works out to orders of magnitude more than potential energy of the gas in the turbine. In fact, it's the primary way that momentary dips and spikes in the demand for electricity in the grid are buffered, and a large turbine can store on the order of 10^9 joules of kinetic energy.
This seems pretty odd to me. Turbines need very uniform flows (to avoid damage to the blades) and small devices need to be low maintenance. Carburetors are neither, being easily flooded, containing moving parts, and not giving very good control of the fuel-air mix over a range of throttle settings and air temperatures.
Seems like an odd comment, considering that jet engines are solid state and have no moving parts (and most definitely don't spin).
That aside, 20,000 rps isn't so hard to fathom when the device is so tiny. Possible speed (for the same material) is inversely proportional to the diameter of the spinning part, and this device is tiny.
I wonder what the cost is through? Precision-manufactured turbine blades for conventional (~200MW) turbines aren't exactly cheap and the process does not get much cheaper as the device gets smaller. Steam engines can actually be more practical than steam turbines in the range of a few kW (roughly an air conditioner) up to perhaps 50kW (roughly a small car motor) - they just aren't used because internal combustion engines are even more practical and anything steam is expensive and not very efficient in small sizes.
You can make turbines out of poorly engineered materials, but they will be less efficient (easily worse than a piston-based external combustion engine), bulkier, and in need of more maintenance.