You can't buy a used motorcycle of any size in the US for $2,500.
If you don't want "butt jewelry" as they call it, finding something under $2500 should be easy. Of course if you can only ride it half the year, it's probably not worth the extra cost of insurance, titling, and capital other than for sake of entertainment.
I see no evidence that the traditional piston and crankshaft, poppet valve, type of mechanism is going to be replaced by a new IC engine.
The "next big thing" for IC engines will probably be rotary valves or camless engines. You are right, though, that future changes will almost surely be incremental.
Also, the fact that you have to rebuild every update from scratch is a real pain on Gentoo, despite it being great for a home user, having 1-2 hours of 100% CPU usage in a business means that 1-2 hours employees can't work.
An institutional Gentoo installation would probably have one or two compile/test machines to produce packages, then just install the binary packages on all the production machines. At least that's how Purdue's CS department seems to do it.
It's a myth that you can just call up and they'll undo it.
Your right. I just filled out a form on Discover's web site and they reversed the charge within a few days. Granted it was only about $30, putting it well below the cost of finding a replacement customer. However, since the chargebacks are usually passed straight back to the merchant, the amount of the charge shouldn't too be significant.
Many non chain stores will discount you ~4.0% for using cash.
Where do you live? My understanding was that in the US the merchant agreements with the credit card companies prevented differential pricing. I think I read though that Australia passed legislating preventing this type of agreement and allowing differential prices.
Believe me, you have more than paid for those perks.
In the form of higher prices due to interchange fees, higher prices I'd pay even if I used cash. Using a credit card is a no-brainer. Take the 30-day interest free loan and a refund of 1-5% of the interchange fee. Of course, actually carrying a balance is equally a no-brainer; don't do it.
I still am trying to figure out how the Supreme Court allows Congress to support, or directly provide, loans at the Federal level for college students.
Government supports education because education is a Public Good. Federal support lets more students go to college which makes them more productive which ultimately benefits everybody. At least that's the theory.
Can't people see that Federally-financed loans are one of the primary reasons that tuition is so high?
I'd say it has more to do with the increasing demand for a college education. A generation ago, a person could get along just fine with only a high school diploma. Today, life without a college degree would be pretty rough. The increase in demand would necessarily drive up the cost.
The Web and Email let you connect with other people? Amazing!
Seriously, I don't really see anything too spectacular with the walled-garden social networking sites. They do some maybe useful munging of data, and they allow for the click-and-drool usage pattern. Really though, they're nothing you couldn't already do ten years ago.
What we need is less government regulation and more freedom. Businesses should duke it out, and consumers should be mindful of what is happening and vote with their dollars when making purchasing decisions for products and services.
For competitive industries like retail and restaurants, that's exactly how it should work. However, cable is a natural monopoly or at best an oligopoly. Without sufficient competition, the customer will get screwed. Furthermore, it'd be rather difficult to go laying copper everywhere without some cooperation from the local government.
The (almost) proper analogy here is the financial services industry, which is highly regulated yet fiercely competitive. The regulation of that industry is good because it promotes competition. Compare that to the regulation of the medical industry which has choked off the supply of service providers and makes switching providers very inconvenient.
Because it would be inefficient to have two sets of wires going to each house, some type of regulation is required to make up for the lack of competition. As has already been suggested, the most appropriate and obvious solution is to decouple the physical layer from all network layers above it. Thus, the physical layer could be handled by the designated and regulated monopoly or, dare I say, socialized, while all network layers above could be opened to competition.
Yeah, electric motors cost so much more to make and maintain than modern IC engines and transmission systems.
Per my example, if you'd replace the chain drive on a Honda 750 nighthawk with a belt, the only required maintenance would be an oil change every 4000 miles, and there is hardly a part on it that isn't necessary. Yes electric motors require essentially zero maintenance, but this is not just an electric car. It needs additional actuators to fold up.
Call me crazy, but I'm not fan of the proliferation of black box microcontrollers. It's probably a one-off design, and the lawyers surely won't let you have the source. If it breaks, your stuck paying the assuredly outrageous cost to the OEM for a replacement. At least with mechanical parts you can see what's broken and there are often more reasonably priced aftermarket parts.
On second thought though, the modularity of each wheel in their design might actually reduce complexity. Also, the main cost of an electric car isn't the motor, it's the battery.
Also, I don't think IT project management theories unnecessarily work the same way in other industries.
Check out the book "Normal Accidents." Complexity leads to unpredicted interactions which cause cascading failures./blockquote.
Let's create a vehicle twice as complex as anything out there. Oh, and while we're at it, let's change the whole social structure of car ownership. Now, if this actually goes anywhere, super and good for them, but how many of these radical concept cars do we hear about once and never again?
Personally, I think simplicity is an important feature in machines; it means they cost less to make and cost less to fix. A beautiful example of this is in the form of some motorcyles, elegant minimalism. If you would add a cabin to one of these for foul weather, it should achieve 90% of what the technical side of this project hopes.
It's even possible to say Turin did not kill himself, but rather died of insanity.
Turing (most likely) killed himself because he was found guilty of the crime of being a homosexual. He was consequently stripped of his security clearance and given female hormones as a "cure," causing him to grow breasts. A story almost as fucked up as whatever is really going on with Reiser.
I'm waiting until unbundled dsl is available here and then I'll probably downgrade to dsl-lite or something.
I called the local telephone monopoly (AT&T, I think) before I moved in about naked dsl. They wanted to charge me $55 a month for a 768K line, then had the gall to say it was a good deal because the line was dedicated. Insight charges $40 a month for standalone 10M, and it may as well be dedicated since I never see any slowdown.
Hope your telephone company ends up being less greedy and arrogant than the one here.
Sorry about the bad luck with Insight. I have service through them at my apartment in Lafayette, and have been pretty satisfied. Of course, they sold business here to comcast so I expect the service to go to shit in a few months.
See for yourself. Call your own credit card company, on their 800 number, and ask them if you could get a credit for the charges if you ordered a hard drive and it didn't work. Or if you ordered a hard drive and got a brick. You may have a better credit card company than I do. Or you may not.
The cardholder's agreement for at least one of my cards says that they will refund the charge (presumably sticking it to the merchant) if the merchant will not accept a return. There may be a $50 minimum. I think that's a pretty standard clause.
If the system is stable, you iterate until the error is negligible. If it's unstable, you spend your grant money on hookers, blow, and a ticket to Mexico, though perhaps not in that order.
With that in mind, I'm sick and tired of hearing how RSI is a racket because it's not diagnosed as often as it used to be. It's an issue, it's just that we figured out how to deal with it. Not only that, but it's something that everyone needs to know about if they work with computers.
My comment was directed at the medical industry as a whole rather than the RSI specific segment. My experience has been that they charge outrageous prices while often providing worse service than half an hour of googling.
My only predisposition is girly-man wrists. So yeah, some people can use lousy keyboards and do just fine. But saying bad keyboards don't cause CTS/RSI is like saying smoking only causes cancer in people who are predisposed to it.
So, I guess science is telling us that RSI ain't CTS.
There are different flavors of RSI. CTS is a pinched nerve in the carpal tunnel in the wrist that makes your hand tingly and numb. I assumed my problem was tendinitis since my only symptom was pain. All the doctors I saw were too incompetent to tell me anything but "Well, you're not crying in agony, so obviously there's nothing wrong with you," but I'm not bitter or anything.
Slashdot Mirror
If you don't want "butt jewelry" as they call it, finding something under $2500 should be easy. Of course if you can only ride it half the year, it's probably not worth the extra cost of insurance, titling, and capital other than for sake of entertainment.
The "next big thing" for IC engines will probably be rotary valves or camless engines. You are right, though, that future changes will almost surely be incremental.
An institutional Gentoo installation would probably have one or two compile/test machines to produce packages, then just install the binary packages on all the production machines. At least that's how Purdue's CS department seems to do it.
Your right. I just filled out a form on Discover's web site and they reversed the charge within a few days. Granted it was only about $30, putting it well below the cost of finding a replacement customer. However, since the chargebacks are usually passed straight back to the merchant, the amount of the charge shouldn't too be significant.
Where do you live? My understanding was that in the US the merchant agreements with the credit card companies prevented differential pricing. I think I read though that Australia passed legislating preventing this type of agreement and allowing differential prices.
In the form of higher prices due to interchange fees, higher prices I'd pay even if I used cash. Using a credit card is a no-brainer. Take the 30-day interest free loan and a refund of 1-5% of the interchange fee. Of course, actually carrying a balance is equally a no-brainer; don't do it.
Government supports education because education is a Public Good. Federal support lets more students go to college which makes them more productive which ultimately benefits everybody. At least that's the theory.
I'd say it has more to do with the increasing demand for a college education. A generation ago, a person could get along just fine with only a high school diploma. Today, life without a college degree would be pretty rough. The increase in demand would necessarily drive up the cost.
The Web and Email let you connect with other people? Amazing!
Seriously, I don't really see anything too spectacular with the walled-garden social networking sites. They do some maybe useful munging of data, and they allow for the click-and-drool usage pattern. Really though, they're nothing you couldn't already do ten years ago.
Con Ed sells waste heat from its power plants as steam for heating in Manhattan. Kind of a neat trick for efficiency.
For competitive industries like retail and restaurants, that's exactly how it should work. However, cable is a natural monopoly or at best an oligopoly. Without sufficient competition, the customer will get screwed. Furthermore, it'd be rather difficult to go laying copper everywhere without some cooperation from the local government.
The (almost) proper analogy here is the financial services industry, which is highly regulated yet fiercely competitive. The regulation of that industry is good because it promotes competition. Compare that to the regulation of the medical industry which has choked off the supply of service providers and makes switching providers very inconvenient.
Because it would be inefficient to have two sets of wires going to each house, some type of regulation is required to make up for the lack of competition. As has already been suggested, the most appropriate and obvious solution is to decouple the physical layer from all network layers above it. Thus, the physical layer could be handled by the designated and regulated monopoly or, dare I say, socialized, while all network layers above could be opened to competition.
Per my example, if you'd replace the chain drive on a Honda 750 nighthawk with a belt, the only required maintenance would be an oil change every 4000 miles, and there is hardly a part on it that isn't necessary. Yes electric motors require essentially zero maintenance, but this is not just an electric car. It needs additional actuators to fold up.
Call me crazy, but I'm not fan of the proliferation of black box microcontrollers. It's probably a one-off design, and the lawyers surely won't let you have the source. If it breaks, your stuck paying the assuredly outrageous cost to the OEM for a replacement. At least with mechanical parts you can see what's broken and there are often more reasonably priced aftermarket parts.
On second thought though, the modularity of each wheel in their design might actually reduce complexity. Also, the main cost of an electric car isn't the motor, it's the battery.
Check out the book "Normal Accidents." Complexity leads to unpredicted interactions which cause cascading failures./blockquote.
Let's create a vehicle twice as complex as anything out there. Oh, and while we're at it, let's change the whole social structure of car ownership. Now, if this actually goes anywhere, super and good for them, but how many of these radical concept cars do we hear about once and never again?
Personally, I think simplicity is an important feature in machines; it means they cost less to make and cost less to fix. A beautiful example of this is in the form of some motorcyles, elegant minimalism. If you would add a cabin to one of these for foul weather, it should achieve 90% of what the technical side of this project hopes.
Turing (most likely) killed himself because he was found guilty of the crime of being a homosexual. He was consequently stripped of his security clearance and given female hormones as a "cure," causing him to grow breasts. A story almost as fucked up as whatever is really going on with Reiser.
I called the local telephone monopoly (AT&T, I think) before I moved in about naked dsl. They wanted to charge me $55 a month for a 768K line, then had the gall to say it was a good deal because the line was dedicated. Insight charges $40 a month for standalone 10M, and it may as well be dedicated since I never see any slowdown.
Hope your telephone company ends up being less greedy and arrogant than the one here.
Sorry about the bad luck with Insight. I have service through them at my apartment in Lafayette, and have been pretty satisfied. Of course, they sold business here to comcast so I expect the service to go to shit in a few months.
The cardholder's agreement for at least one of my cards says that they will refund the charge (presumably sticking it to the merchant) if the merchant will not accept a return. There may be a $50 minimum. I think that's a pretty standard clause.
Ssshhh... Don't tell the State of Indiana. I'm almost done with the education they've been paying for.
If the system is stable, you iterate until the error is negligible. If it's unstable, you spend your grant money on hookers, blow, and a ticket to Mexico, though perhaps not in that order.
This is what Indiana does. There's a special section on your state taxes to report out of state purchases. You can guess how effective it is.
Unless you see a specialist with experience in RSI, this may not be too helpful. The two general practitioners I saw were totally worthless.
Non-profit works super for credit unions. Insurance isn't that different.
My comment was directed at the medical industry as a whole rather than the RSI specific segment. My experience has been that they charge outrageous prices while often providing worse service than half an hour of googling.
My only predisposition is girly-man wrists. So yeah, some people can use lousy keyboards and do just fine. But saying bad keyboards don't cause CTS/RSI is like saying smoking only causes cancer in people who are predisposed to it.
There are different flavors of RSI. CTS is a pinched nerve in the carpal tunnel in the wrist that makes your hand tingly and numb. I assumed my problem was tendinitis since my only symptom was pain. All the doctors I saw were too incompetent to tell me anything but "Well, you're not crying in agony, so obviously there's nothing wrong with you," but I'm not bitter or anything.
Same keyboard I use. One product line they managed to get right. Now if only I could make all those extra buttons work in X.