Probably bureaucracy and lack of familiarity and/or comfort with the technology in question.
Also political. Its hard to build a stable reliable solar plant that is not permanent. Installing solar plants is an admission we will never leave. Which seems to pretty much be the truth, making it a good idea. But its hard to get people to admit that.
Specifically for solar panels, keep in mind that they're fragile, and it wouldn't take much (oh, like a single bullet) to destroy a fairly sizable panel. It would be easy for an enemy, with a few well-placed shots from an iron-sights sniper rifle, to destroy all of the solar panels and thus to destroy all of the cooling.
I can tell by your other commentary you are either in / involved with / or really close to someone in the US military, and this shows it too, in a different way, the high tech elaborate American style solution. The preferred anti-solar weapon is not an elaborately trained and experienced sniper with an expensive rifle, or even a drive-by clown with an AK, its simply an otherwise unarmed child carrying a simple rock. The guards aren't going to shoot a cuddly cute little kid for carrying a rock on national TV and newspaper front pages, are they? And as economic warfare, they'll win if we deploy $500 solar panels and they deploy... rocks.
If they're trucking in fuel for things that can't solar-power anyway, it makes sense, to them, to continue to truck that much more fuel in for everything else that uses power.
That's the key... People who have never been to the sandbox always emphasize the heat, and forget that the nighttime temps drop to about the dew point, which is really freaking cold in a desert. So the mass media emphasizes the AC demands,/. reflects by writing about powering the AC with solar panels, and meanwhile the troops shiver all night and eat cold food and can't run their reverse osmosis water purifiers at night...
The problem is transporting 10 gallons of water to evaporate is more expensive than transporting 1 gallon of diesel.
I suppose you could "recycle bodily fluids" if your drinkable water demands were more than 10 times higher than your AC diesel fuel demands, but no one wants to go there.
The global GDP and global hard drive manufacturers simply cannot support a 100 GB hard drive per person per year... Cheapest option per byte is probably 1 TB drive for every 10 people. My basement therefore balances against a small African village, but there's plenty of small African villages, and only one me.
Even if all the ACTIVE/.-er types have a basement like mine, and they do not, there are simply not enough of us. And on a global GDP basis a tenth of a TB hard drive is way too expensive per person, that would put data storage at roughly "rice consumption" levels. And the rich are only getting richer while the poor get poorer for some decades now, so don't try the "world is getting richer thus can afford it" argument.
Thus, there are some plot points that seem hilarious to us now, mainly that Luke and Leia have quite a few romantic thoughts about each other. The fact that Lucas allowed this should be pretty good proof that Luke and Leia were not siblings from the beginning.
Well, Tatooine did kind of look like the desert outside Vegas, and what happens in Tatooine stays in Tatooine...
Depending on the book, the author may not be making any money; Mike Stackpole was paid a flat fee in lieu of royalties on some of his titles, for example.
In the ultra-short-term, yes. In the long term, if the publisher doesn't earn the flat fee thru sales, the future opportunity goes away both for that individual and all authors as a group.
In all honesty, I think book publishing should be flat fee for all, after all, I don't get royalties every time someone clicks a "href" or shoves a packet thru my routers. There is no economic risk of "warehouses full of unsold (e)books"
Have you ever tried to reduce depth of field (DOF) to a photo that has too much (for artistic purposes) DOF? It's not easy at all
Bonus! Artiste types love to brag/complain about how difficult/expensive their work was to make.
The non-artsy types don't really care about technical quality or anything other than getting a tolerably viewable "subject standing next to cultural item"
Don't forget flicker. We're immersed in pretty strong alternating 60 hz fields... almost everywhere. If the 60 hz magnetic fields interacted with eyes, then we should be able to see absolutely crazy interference patterns when looking at 60 hz TV screens.
Up until a few years ago, I could be put in just about any given room in any given city, and if I took a minute, closed my eyes, I could point almost due North without any aid. I never knew how it worked, but I was pretty accurate.
You missed a truly golden scientific opportunity to try before and after taping a magnet to your baseball cap.
From my fooling around with magnetic compasses for orienteering, obviously in the pre-GPS pre-geocache era, I don't think whatever you were doing was magnetic. I suppose it depends on the vehicle, but even something as small as an ATV made orienteering pretty much impossible, aside from the obvious (head 1.0 miles at 23 degrees and the only path is a ridgeline trail with impassible 30 foot cliffs on either side, who cares what the compass says we're taking the trail...)
I think there's an underlying assumption in your writing: that there is no inherent good in people so they will evade taxes or sell drugs if given the chance. As for myself, I don't think that's true of the majority...
And if the majority supports it, why should it be illegal? Making the unjustified assumption that govt exists to support its people, rather than the real world implementation which is the other way around.
but also can't do the kinds of things we need it to do to stop depressions.
Currently they seem uninterested or unwilling or unaware of how to do those things... Seems a fine distinction to be worried about, regardless of reason, they aren't doing it.
Anyone who tried to claim euros are worthless because form 1040 requires dollars would be laughed at.Only a man made of hay would claim that. But, if you have a positive quantity on line 76 of your IRS Form 1040, it doesn't matter if you want to pay your US tax bill with Euros, diamonds, or your left kidney: it won't work. You have to exchange the appropriate amount of whatever you've got into U. S. Dollars.
Same with Bitcoins. And from that limited perspective, Bitcoins are no more immediately valuable than a trunk full of aluminum cans or a suitcase full of Pound notes. You pay your debts to the government in the properly-denoted currency demanded by that government, or you rot in jail.
So what exactly is your point? I'm, frankly, mystified how that could even remotely be relevant.
Lets do the standard/. procedure here: 1) I have a cloth bag at home with a handful of euro coins in it from last time I visited southern Ireland. 2) I can't pay my taxes with euro coins. 3).... 4) I will rot in jail and/or Profit!!!!
I think we're missing a little something in step 3...
A trunk full of UK pound notes should be able to pay most reasonable tax bills, there's dozens of old fashioned brick and mortar places to convert into $ within a reasonable drive, at a huge transaction cost and general agony of course. Aluminum cans, maybe not much value there, and there's only a handful of places within a reasonable drive that take them, at least with little hassle although they don't pay market rates either. BTC? A zillion individuals and a zillion "companies" on the entire internet will trade with you, way easier than either example. BTC are waaaaaaay more liquid than a trunk of pound notes or recycled cans.
More importantly, you can be arrested and lose your property if you refuse to pay your taxes, and you need to use USD to do so. Nobody is punished for not having BTC, but people can be punished for not having USD, which creates some serious imbalance in the demand for BTC.
If your one and only contact with the economic system is paying taxes, you need to get out more.
If the $ were exclusively used to pay taxes, it would be fairly worthless, people would burn cash in the winter to keep warm, or use it as toilet paper. In that situation it would seem pretty trivial to find someone who does business with the govt to trade some BTC for some cash-firewood.
A bank will convert euros to dollars. I don't know of any bank I can convert from bitcoin to dollars, thus, to me it's worthless.
OK, for the sake of argument, since you insist for some reason that the money changers who do exist, do not exist, I will humor you. If they're worthless, and you have a hundred thousand of them, because they're worthless, give those worthless things to me. To me, they're worth a couple bucks a piece because I can quite trivially (trivially for me, because I can use google) turn each into dollars or any other currency I desire.
I am tempted to create a BTC receiving address and post it in this thread so all the naysayers who insist "everyone knows they're worthless" can make me rich by giving me worthless BTC.
Same way they got Al Capone, tax evasion. Dude has no non-BTC income, dude spends $250K/yr on non-BTC "things" resulting in Big Trouble.
There seems to be this peculiar idea that BTC is untraceable... Not so. Once you have proof of who owns an address, you got them. Yes, you can make as many addresses as you want, just like you can make as many real world dead drops as you want. But once someone takes the bait...
Compare BTC to US Dollars, which likewise have "nothing of real substance". The big difference I can see is that one can pay tax in USD.
You can pay tax in BTC the same way you can pay tax in euros... simple conversion... Anyone who tried to claim euros are worthless because form 1040 requires dollars would be laughed at.
Or allergic reactions. Certain smells, especially certain colognes, can give me migraines. You can bet they'd be on the forefront of using the technology if it were available.
Beer before the big night out, smells like nectar of the gods.
Beer after waaay too much of the big night out, smells like insta-vomit.
E) The ability to smell things on other planets. What does mars smell like?
The inside of a vacuum tube, pretty close.
Or if you "cheat" and imagine it compressed up to 1 bar, then still very much like nothing. Not much organics there, not much sulfur, its going to be like the inside of a mylar helium balloon except blander.
Before this i had never heard of 'Battleheart'./. advertising at it's best.
Eh, I'd argue that anyone into RPGs on ipods/phones/tablets probably already knew about Battlehart and already decided to either download it or skip it. Its not new. Its like complaining "John Carmack, of Id software" is a slashvertisement, maybe to people who still have not played Doom...
I had no idea who the author is, I like playing battleheart, so knowing the guy actually knows something about game design and programming makes his opinion somewhat more useful than the author of yet another fart app or one of those "ten PG-13 pictures of women for $1.99" spam-plications that were flooding the app store months ago.
But I'm imagining what happens if an engine quits during take-off/landing. In a fixed wing aircraft, you're probably still screwed depending on your altitude, but at least you have a chance at restarting and/or ditching in a field
Its not that bad, or it shouldn't be. Early on in training they make you run the math. In summary, with a "long enough" runway there is no dangerous zone at all... Fail early in takeoff and land on the remaining runway in front of you. Fail late in takeoff and you're so high up you can turn around before landing on the runway. If you insist on operating a "2000 foot minimum" aircraft on a 2001 foot long runway then you could be in trouble. Another way to get in trouble is to be indecisive... I don't wanna declare an emergency because I'll have to fill out a simple one page form, and it might be embarrassing, naah, I'll just stagger along and hope for the best, that kind of attitude kills a lot of pilots. On landing you're in high drag slow flight mode, so when the engine quits drop the nose to optimum glide speed and just glide in. Its traditional to aim for the end of the runway when landing, but if its an extremely long runway you're best bet is somewhere downrange, so if the engine quits you land short, which is the end of the runway instead of a housing development. Again trying to operate a "2000 foot minimum" aircraft on a 2001 foot runway could be bad.
It IS pretty easy to end up in a unrecoverable scenario, and most of the unrecoverable scenarios are unfortunately picturesque (low and slow sightseeing / showing off to friends on the ground, etc). Another traditional way to end up unrecoverable is to have emergency procedure training get a bit out of hand, simulating an engine failure is not funny when the engine doesn't restart, even if you pass spin recovery 99% of the time you only get to fail spin recovery exactly one time in your life, etc.
Connect it to my hand held GPS unit so I can look for geocaches in "heads up" mode, enjoying the scenery rather than staring at the box.
One problem is I'd like the battery life to be equivalent to my GPS, a couple days continuous. Then again, some people geocache with smartphones that have battery lives best measured in minutes, so maybe no big deal?
That's the only wired watch I've seen. I was almost tempted - it was a nice idea, but it just looked hideous, and much too bulky.
What killed it for me was the battery life was measured in hours and could only survive hundreds of charges and it cost hundreds of dollars. So, figure owning one cost about 20 cents/hr no matter if you looked at it or not...
Slashdot Mirror
Probably bureaucracy and lack of familiarity and/or comfort with the technology in question.
Also political. Its hard to build a stable reliable solar plant that is not permanent. Installing solar plants is an admission we will never leave. Which seems to pretty much be the truth, making it a good idea. But its hard to get people to admit that.
Specifically for solar panels, keep in mind that they're fragile, and it wouldn't take much (oh, like a single bullet) to destroy a fairly sizable panel. It would be easy for an enemy, with a few well-placed shots from an iron-sights sniper rifle, to destroy all of the solar panels and thus to destroy all of the cooling.
I can tell by your other commentary you are either in / involved with / or really close to someone in the US military, and this shows it too, in a different way, the high tech elaborate American style solution. The preferred anti-solar weapon is not an elaborately trained and experienced sniper with an expensive rifle, or even a drive-by clown with an AK, its simply an otherwise unarmed child carrying a simple rock. The guards aren't going to shoot a cuddly cute little kid for carrying a rock on national TV and newspaper front pages, are they? And as economic warfare, they'll win if we deploy $500 solar panels and they deploy ... rocks.
If they're trucking in fuel for things that can't solar-power anyway, it makes sense, to them, to continue to truck that much more fuel in for everything else that uses power.
That's the key... People who have never been to the sandbox always emphasize the heat, and forget that the nighttime temps drop to about the dew point, which is really freaking cold in a desert. So the mass media emphasizes the AC demands, /. reflects by writing about powering the AC with solar panels, and meanwhile the troops shiver all night and eat cold food and can't run their reverse osmosis water purifiers at night...
Why all those aircon units which are running on fuel? A cheaper solution was invented in the outback:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coolgardie_safe
The problem is transporting 10 gallons of water to evaporate is more expensive than transporting 1 gallon of diesel.
I suppose you could "recycle bodily fluids" if your drinkable water demands were more than 10 times higher than your AC diesel fuel demands, but no one wants to go there.
I call bogus on this.
10e21 / 10e10 = 10e11 bytes/living human being.
The global GDP and global hard drive manufacturers simply cannot support a 100 GB hard drive per person per year... Cheapest option per byte is probably 1 TB drive for every 10 people. My basement therefore balances against a small African village, but there's plenty of small African villages, and only one me.
Even if all the ACTIVE /.-er types have a basement like mine, and they do not, there are simply not enough of us. And on a global GDP basis a tenth of a TB hard drive is way too expensive per person, that would put data storage at roughly "rice consumption" levels. And the rich are only getting richer while the poor get poorer for some decades now, so don't try the "world is getting richer thus can afford it" argument.
Thus, there are some plot points that seem hilarious to us now, mainly that Luke and Leia have quite a few romantic thoughts about each other. The fact that Lucas allowed this should be pretty good proof that Luke and Leia were not siblings from the beginning.
Well, Tatooine did kind of look like the desert outside Vegas, and what happens in Tatooine stays in Tatooine...
Depending on the book, the author may not be making any money; Mike Stackpole was paid a flat fee in lieu of royalties on some of his titles, for example.
In the ultra-short-term, yes. In the long term, if the publisher doesn't earn the flat fee thru sales, the future opportunity goes away both for that individual and all authors as a group.
In all honesty, I think book publishing should be flat fee for all, after all, I don't get royalties every time someone clicks a "href" or shoves a packet thru my routers. There is no economic risk of "warehouses full of unsold (e)books"
Have you ever tried to reduce depth of field (DOF) to a photo that has too much (for artistic purposes) DOF? It's not easy at all
Bonus! Artiste types love to brag/complain about how difficult/expensive their work was to make.
The non-artsy types don't really care about technical quality or anything other than getting a tolerably viewable "subject standing next to cultural item"
Don't forget flicker. We're immersed in pretty strong alternating 60 hz fields... almost everywhere. If the 60 hz magnetic fields interacted with eyes, then we should be able to see absolutely crazy interference patterns when looking at 60 hz TV screens.
Up until a few years ago, I could be put in just about any given room in any given city, and if I took a minute, closed my eyes, I could point almost due North without any aid. I never knew how it worked, but I was pretty accurate.
You missed a truly golden scientific opportunity to try before and after taping a magnet to your baseball cap.
From my fooling around with magnetic compasses for orienteering, obviously in the pre-GPS pre-geocache era, I don't think whatever you were doing was magnetic. I suppose it depends on the vehicle, but even something as small as an ATV made orienteering pretty much impossible, aside from the obvious (head 1.0 miles at 23 degrees and the only path is a ridgeline trail with impassible 30 foot cliffs on either side, who cares what the compass says we're taking the trail...)
I think there's an underlying assumption in your writing: that there is no inherent good in people so they will evade taxes or sell drugs if given the chance. As for myself, I don't think that's true of the majority...
And if the majority supports it, why should it be illegal? Making the unjustified assumption that govt exists to support its people, rather than the real world implementation which is the other way around.
but also can't do the kinds of things we need it to do to stop depressions.
Currently they seem uninterested or unwilling or unaware of how to do those things ... Seems a fine distinction to be worried about, regardless of reason, they aren't doing it.
Anyone who tried to claim euros are worthless because form 1040 requires dollars would be laughed at.Only a man made of hay would claim that. But, if you have a positive quantity on line 76 of your IRS Form 1040, it doesn't matter if you want to pay your US tax bill with Euros, diamonds, or your left kidney: it won't work. You have to exchange the appropriate amount of whatever you've got into U. S. Dollars.
Same with Bitcoins. And from that limited perspective, Bitcoins are no more immediately valuable than a trunk full of aluminum cans or a suitcase full of Pound notes. You pay your debts to the government in the properly-denoted currency demanded by that government, or you rot in jail.
So what exactly is your point? I'm, frankly, mystified how that could even remotely be relevant.
Lets do the standard /. procedure here: ....
1) I have a cloth bag at home with a handful of euro coins in it from last time I visited southern Ireland.
2) I can't pay my taxes with euro coins.
3)
4) I will rot in jail and/or Profit!!!!
I think we're missing a little something in step 3...
A trunk full of UK pound notes should be able to pay most reasonable tax bills, there's dozens of old fashioned brick and mortar places to convert into $ within a reasonable drive, at a huge transaction cost and general agony of course. Aluminum cans, maybe not much value there, and there's only a handful of places within a reasonable drive that take them, at least with little hassle although they don't pay market rates either. BTC? A zillion individuals and a zillion "companies" on the entire internet will trade with you, way easier than either example. BTC are waaaaaaay more liquid than a trunk of pound notes or recycled cans.
LOL best summary of the opposition to BTC I've seen in awhile.
More importantly, you can be arrested and lose your property if you refuse to pay your taxes, and you need to use USD to do so. Nobody is punished for not having BTC, but people can be punished for not having USD, which creates some serious imbalance in the demand for BTC.
If your one and only contact with the economic system is paying taxes, you need to get out more.
If the $ were exclusively used to pay taxes, it would be fairly worthless, people would burn cash in the winter to keep warm, or use it as toilet paper. In that situation it would seem pretty trivial to find someone who does business with the govt to trade some BTC for some cash-firewood.
A bank will convert euros to dollars. I don't know of any bank I can convert from bitcoin to dollars, thus, to me it's worthless.
OK, for the sake of argument, since you insist for some reason that the money changers who do exist, do not exist, I will humor you. If they're worthless, and you have a hundred thousand of them, because they're worthless, give those worthless things to me. To me, they're worth a couple bucks a piece because I can quite trivially (trivially for me, because I can use google) turn each into dollars or any other currency I desire.
I am tempted to create a BTC receiving address and post it in this thread so all the naysayers who insist "everyone knows they're worthless" can make me rich by giving me worthless BTC.
Same way they got Al Capone, tax evasion. Dude has no non-BTC income, dude spends $250K/yr on non-BTC "things" resulting in Big Trouble.
There seems to be this peculiar idea that BTC is untraceable ... Not so. Once you have proof of who owns an address, you got them. Yes, you can make as many addresses as you want, just like you can make as many real world dead drops as you want. But once someone takes the bait...
Compare BTC to US Dollars, which likewise have "nothing of real substance". The big difference I can see is that one can pay tax in USD.
You can pay tax in BTC the same way you can pay tax in euros... simple conversion... Anyone who tried to claim euros are worthless because form 1040 requires dollars would be laughed at.
Or allergic reactions. Certain smells, especially certain colognes, can give me migraines. You can bet they'd be on the forefront of using the technology if it were available.
Beer before the big night out, smells like nectar of the gods.
Beer after waaay too much of the big night out, smells like insta-vomit.
E) The ability to smell things on other planets. What does mars smell like?
The inside of a vacuum tube, pretty close.
Or if you "cheat" and imagine it compressed up to 1 bar, then still very much like nothing. Not much organics there, not much sulfur, its going to be like the inside of a mylar helium balloon except blander.
How about all those awesome smells from CSI :)
how bout Pr0n?
Before this i had never heard of 'Battleheart'. /. advertising at it's best.
Eh, I'd argue that anyone into RPGs on ipods/phones/tablets probably already knew about Battlehart and already decided to either download it or skip it. Its not new. Its like complaining "John Carmack, of Id software" is a slashvertisement, maybe to people who still have not played Doom...
I had no idea who the author is, I like playing battleheart, so knowing the guy actually knows something about game design and programming makes his opinion somewhat more useful than the author of yet another fart app or one of those "ten PG-13 pictures of women for $1.99" spam-plications that were flooding the app store months ago.
So from "quite good" to "stunning" is a 0.3 rating on a 1 to 5 scale? That's quite a non-linear scale.
Maybe its like the video game review website scale, where they call it 1 to 10 but oddly enough everything scores 8 to 10.
We are both atheists, I just believe in one fewer god than you do.
I had to LOL at that. Sounds good when you're talking to the average fundie, but replying to my post means you believe in "negative one"? LOL
I'm no aerospace engineer...
and obviously not a student pilot
But I'm imagining what happens if an engine quits during take-off/landing. In a fixed wing aircraft, you're probably still screwed depending on your altitude, but at least you have a chance at restarting and/or ditching in a field
Its not that bad, or it shouldn't be. Early on in training they make you run the math. In summary, with a "long enough" runway there is no dangerous zone at all... Fail early in takeoff and land on the remaining runway in front of you. Fail late in takeoff and you're so high up you can turn around before landing on the runway. If you insist on operating a "2000 foot minimum" aircraft on a 2001 foot long runway then you could be in trouble. Another way to get in trouble is to be indecisive ... I don't wanna declare an emergency because I'll have to fill out a simple one page form, and it might be embarrassing, naah, I'll just stagger along and hope for the best, that kind of attitude kills a lot of pilots. On landing you're in high drag slow flight mode, so when the engine quits drop the nose to optimum glide speed and just glide in. Its traditional to aim for the end of the runway when landing, but if its an extremely long runway you're best bet is somewhere downrange, so if the engine quits you land short, which is the end of the runway instead of a housing development. Again trying to operate a "2000 foot minimum" aircraft on a 2001 foot runway could be bad.
It IS pretty easy to end up in a unrecoverable scenario, and most of the unrecoverable scenarios are unfortunately picturesque (low and slow sightseeing / showing off to friends on the ground, etc). Another traditional way to end up unrecoverable is to have emergency procedure training get a bit out of hand, simulating an engine failure is not funny when the engine doesn't restart, even if you pass spin recovery 99% of the time you only get to fail spin recovery exactly one time in your life, etc.
I personally would love to
Connect it to my hand held GPS unit so I can look for geocaches in "heads up" mode, enjoying the scenery rather than staring at the box.
One problem is I'd like the battery life to be equivalent to my GPS, a couple days continuous. Then again, some people geocache with smartphones that have battery lives best measured in minutes, so maybe no big deal?
That's the only wired watch I've seen. I was almost tempted - it was a nice idea, but it just looked hideous, and much too bulky.
What killed it for me was the battery life was measured in hours and could only survive hundreds of charges and it cost hundreds of dollars. So, figure owning one cost about 20 cents/hr no matter if you looked at it or not...