Every single UK broadband subscriber will be taxed / fined an extra £25 per year, to prop up the film and music industry.
Nice work if you can get it.
Why not subsidise the fax industry as well, and the cassette tape industry, and while we are at it, how about the buggy whip manufacturing industry?
Business has a thing called "externalisation", what it boils down to is putting as much cost as possible outside the business, a classic example is a textile mill that externalises the cost of polluting, simply by dumping the pollutants into the local river. Someone else, downstream, can pick up the tab.
The justification for this is that allegedly the latest Star Trek movie was downloaded 11 million times in 2009.
Around 150 million visits to the cinema per year happen in the UK, if you take the alleged 11 million star treks, add in the harry potters, avatars (holds hand up) etc etc it is no stretch of the imagination to claim that 150 million movie downloads happened in the UK in 2009.
According to this metric, and the false logic employed, if downloading was banned, cinema attendances would double.
Bullshit.
Here is why;
1. There is the false logic assumption that if I had not downloaded Avatar, I would have gone to the cinema and paid to see it. This is utterly false. You would have to pay me at least £5 to set foot in a cinema, to compensate me for the travel, mobile phones, noisy bastards, no smoking or drinking, inability to pause, crap seats, etc etc.
2. There is the false logic assumption that people like me with 46 1080p screens who prefer the comforts of our own homes would substitute the video rental shop for the cinema. Rubbish. The video rental shops don't have anything new, or anything good, or much choice of anything, and quite apart from that I have no interest in watching a Blu-ray that does not let me skip past 15 minutes of promo crap.
3. There is a false logic assumption that the media in question (whether it is cinema or rental) is value for money, I am simply not prepared to pay £5 per head for a cinema ticket, or £5 a night for a DVD, for 90 minutes of "entertainment" It is just way too expensive.
4. There is a false logic assumption, in short, that the 11 million downloads of Star Trek represent even 1 single lost cinema sale or DVD rental... You are reading this because it is free, would you pay £5 to read it? Stupid question. Would you pay £0.01 to read it? Stupid question.
5. There is a false logic assumption that the decline in cinema attendance figures, record sales, etc, say compared to 1970, is due to a change in people's attitudes, we have suddenly become a nation of thieves. Simply not true. These EXACT SAME ARGUMENTS were made about the compact audio cassette.
6. There is a false logic assumption that it is acceptable to impose a fine / tax / tariff on EVERYONE, that would be like mandating that I must buy a television licence, even though I haven't watched television for 20 years.
7. There is a false logic assumption that the technologies that they are going to deploy are actually going to catch people illegally sharing copyright material, ONLY, and NO-ONE ELSE, and indeed this is implicitly acknowledged in the desire to fine / tax / tariff ALL users of broadband, irrespective of what they do.
8. There is a false logic assumption that we are dealing with a static target, the ever evolving technology means that it really does not matter what methods you use to counter copyright violations (NOT copyright theft, no one is stealing your actual copyright, and no one is depriving anyone else of their use) because within the month (and I am being generous) they will be cracked.
No, I watched 40 minutes, then skimmed through the rest.
I watched in in full 1080p rez on at 46" RGB LED backlit Samsung LCD, same a Crysis, wasn't a cam rip, was full imax rip, never said it was cam or low rez, only a fanboi would try to intimate that it was.
I have just had the misfortune / bad judgement to try to sit through Avatar.
By 40 minutes in I could stand it no more, and starting flicking forwards, within another 10 minutes I'd skipped to the end.
Spoilers?
Nope, you can't give spoilers on something that has a plot thinner than Debbie Does Duluth, there is no story there, period, what there is is CGI.
If you are of an age to remember Roger Dean (Yes album covers amongst other things) then you have basically seen the stuff that the CGI was clearly designed upon, laws of gravity do not apply, laws of physics do not apply, laws of biology and locomotion do not apply.
I'm not talking fanciful creatures and landscapes, I'm talking totally impossible, acid trip inspired creatures and landscapes.
The only spoiler I can think of is, and I kid you not, the basic plot-line centres around a mining operation on an alien planet, mining an ore called "unobtanium"... yeah... the only thing rarer than unobtanium is a decent script.
One might think that multimillion dollar budgets + CGI + Roger Dean would create something of great aesthetic beauty at least, even if it were great beauty utterly devoid of a plot, but sadly, that isn't the case.
If they had rendered still scenes, yes, you'd have some great poster art or album covers, but the instant they went for motion it just ruined the whole thing, Roger Dean was never meant to be in motion.
Frankly the whole film smacks of a bunch of CGI geeks being given an unlimited budget and no rules, the desktop publishing equivalent of producing a parish magazine that uses 11,000 different fonts and every single piece of clip art on disk.
The semi-cameo role of Sig Weaver and the whole space mining theme (all of which is revealed in the first 10 minutes) means that you simply can't watch Avatar and not be strongly reminded of Alien (1) and this is yet another fatal wound for what is an already dead and decomposing corpse of a movie.
Alien had real (huge) sets, and the visual effect was stunning, not just because of Giger, but because of depth of focus, Avatar was done with green background and motion cap in someone's garden shed, plus a moonshot's worth of computers running CGI, and it looks utterly fake and feeble.
I have no idea what cinemas charge nowadays, it is irrelevant when films are as truly, horrendously awful, and this film was. It did not cost me a penny, and of course no popcorn, travelling time, shitty adverts or previews, and I managed to skip through the whole thing in 50 minutes, and I want those 50 minutes of my life back.
The new (a couple of years old at least) series of Captain Scarlet (also done in CGI) is quite honestly nothing less than three or four orders of magnitude better than Avatar on every single level imaginable.
As for the Avatar lead species, the hominids themselves, think the illegitimate love child of Jar Jar Binks and Pikachu, yes, really, that implausible, ridiculous, and vile. Kill it, kill it now, with (digital) fire.
I have a revelation for you.
Hollywood is dead.
Really, for less money than it would cost to take two kids to see this steaming pile of crap, you could go out and buy Crysis, which will provide about 40 hours of gameplay (sans god mode), a far better plot, a far more immersive and entertaining experience, and better and more realistic physics.
Seriously, whatever you do this Christmas, do not get talked into sitting through Avatar, do not get talked into paying for anyone else (kids) to see it, and, if you value your kids minds more than marshmallow, do not let your kids anywhere near it.
I'm not writing this just to take a contrary position.
I've been around and while, and around the IT scene a while. (understatements)
Internship is just a way to get some loser for peanuts, while not being bound by any of the regular employment Law.
If you work for 8 bucks and hour then 8 bucks an hour is all you are worth.
Go to Burger King, the money is better, and you will at least have some hope of persuading a future employer that...
a/ you have some self respect.
b/ you will work hard for money, you will not eat shit for money.
Back in my day, there was no such thing as interns, because frankly nobody in Personnel had the balls to try and sell it, and nobody who was a worker would consider it for an instant as anything less than a total insult.
Why not just rent your ass out? and ask/. what we think about that as a career idea?
It won't work because for 90% of internet users their monthly bill will go DOWN, a LOT.
I use an old Samsung pre-pay mobile, my average monthly cost is less than 2 dollars.
Which is why telco's LOVE stuff like line rental, monthly plans, etc etc etc.
The whole cost of bandwidth thing is just arbitrary bullshit, the actual physical cost of running a given pipe at 0% capacity, and the same pipe at 100% capacity, is measured in cents worth of electricity per hour.
I'm older than you (not a lot) and I can empathise 100%
In my day as a child I grew up, slowly, day by day, gaining experience of the world.
Today it is the opposite, kids are (allegedly) shielded from everything, effectively cut off from society and so cut off from any opportunity to grow and learn naturally.
Agreed, and you have the same hierarchy within an engineering / machine shop, within a hospital, within a building services company, within electricians shops, on board a ship.... you name it.
What ***___IS___*** different now is that back in the old days the only route to being top dog was to work your way up through all the other levels and disciplines.
Now you just take a degree course in engineering and get to be a manager put in charge of people who, for example, use a hacksaw every day of their lives, even though you yourself have never even held one.
I could tell you uncounted real world stories in engineering like this, guys who have literally never held a spanner, but have a degree in hydraulic engineering, designing hydraulic machinery that LITERALLY cannot be made, due to elementary mistakes like insufficient room between unions to fit the spanner to secure said unions, etc etc etc.
This is why all these type think they are better than the "workers", because they lack clue #1 about the workers actual daily job and skills.
That last paragraph, what a doozy... if you want to know why the business world is going to hell in a handcart, that last paragraph is your answer, this is the sort of people we are employing now as Directors and Manager and Department Heads.
He thinks he is so much better than plumbers, electricians and mechanics, because the plumber does not design the 22mm copper tee, the sparky does not design the RCD breaker, and the mechanic does not design the spark exhaust manifold.
He, however, is vastly superior, being a coder...
Wait... does he write his own coding language, e.g. does he create new programming languages? Does he create his own x86 instruction set and assembly language?
Or does he simply grab the "tools" available and use recognisable individual components and constructs like elbows and tees, breakers and distribution boxes, manifolds and sparkplugs?
Do I simply use the tools available, the lexicon of the English language, when writing this, or do I create my own language for each article I write?
I'd really like to know how the plumber fitting a new central heating system, deciding where and how to route the pipework so it works and doesn't water hammer or creak, is not a creative professional.
I'd really like to know how the electrician fitting a new ring main, deciding where and how to route the cables and what components to use, is not a creative professional.
I'd really like to know how the mechanic fitting the Rover V8 into the Ford Cortina, deciding how to mount the engine and where to route the exhaust etc, is not a creative professional.
Yes, putting a DC battery in between the DC output of the PSU and the DC input of the mobo will have a UPS / Laptop battery effect on temporary mains voltage loss.
The problem is very few mobos only have 12VDC input. This won't take care of the vast majority of mobos that also require 5VDC
5VDC isn't practicably doable from lead-acid @ around 2 VDC per cell.
Yes, there are ways around this, but the only practical ones are external DC-DC conversion, *or* 12VDC only mobos, which use on board internal DC-DC concersion.
ALL mobos use some form of onboard DC-DC conversion, even if only for the CPU.
If you want to buy a 12VDC mobo, do a google for industrial computer mobos.
The system you have works solidly, and has worked solidly for seven years.
I, personally, am TOTALLY in agreement with the ethos of whoever designed it, a single box for each service.
Frankly, with the cost of modern hardware, you could triple the capacity of what you have now just by gradually swapping out for newer hardware over the next few months, and keeping the shite old boxen for fallback.
Virtualisation is, IMHO, *totally* inappropriate for 99% of cases where it is used, ditto *cloud* computing.
It sounds to me like you are more interested in making your own mark, than actually taking an objective view. I may of course be wrong, but usually that is the case in stories like this.
In my experience, everyone who tries to make their own mark actually degrades a system, and simply discounts the ways that they have degraded it as being "obsolete" or "no longer applicable"
Frankly, based on your post alone, I'd sack you on the spot, because you sound like the biggest threat to the system to come along in seven years.
These are NOT your computers, if you want a system just so, build it yourself with your own money in your own home.
This advice / opinion is of course worth exactly what it cost.
Apologies in advance if I have misconstrued your approach. (but I doubt that I have)
Your "method" involves breaking https handshaking, and I don't care what definition you use, any method that involves extra protocol handshaking that my port 443 application does not recognise is both delaying it and breaking it.
What you are doing is not HTTP, it is not HTTPS either.
He asked a perfectly sensible question. It's called context, something most of us have understood implicitly since childhood.
Apparently not in your case.
The US power grid had broken many, many, many times, for many, many, many reasons, in that CONTEXT asking questions about supposed boogeymen is anything but SENSIBLE, it is in fact HYSTERICAL.
In case you can't be bothered to look around, you've logged into and posted on an American website. Yes, it may have an international readership, but it is located in America, run by Americans, and the post is made by another American. If you got your head out of our self-righteous ass perhaps you'd make less of ass yourself when browsing non-UK sites.
Some points to make here.
"USA" != "America", USA is a subset of North America which is a subset of America.
If you "yanks" don't was the rest of the world accessing your websites, you can take your heads out of your self-righteous asses and simply block us, I am sure even "yanks" can manage to do that.
If you choose not to block us, if you, in fact, choose to INVITE us to participate, which/. does by the way, then you don't get to act like some red-neck jerk as soon as someone says something that could possibly, somewhere, somehow, sometime, be interpreted, if you squint, cock your head sideways and look just *so*, as being un-american.
If you ever seek an answer as to why so many US citizens find themselves being treated rudely by "foreigners", then you only have to look at your own behaviour here.
As for *our* grid (I happen to reside in the UK btw, but unlike you at least know enough not to lambast the British for posting British-centric questions on British Websites, or Americans for posting American-centric questions on) American websites) here in the UK, yes, we might not be as vulnerable to single-point failures or software hackery as those in the states, but given *our* current lack of a coherent energy policy, we are vulnerable to having zero electricity for extended periods of time in the coming years, due to insufficient power to meet *our* needs. So if I were you I'd be a little less cocky.
Really, blow it our your ass with the straw man arguments.
NOWHERE in the original question was any mention made of the vulnerability of the US grid with those of other countries, you know, that CONTEXT thing you were on about.
The FACTS are that the UK power grid in terms not just of uptime, but also voltage tolerances, is actually, by any standards, pretty damn good.
Leaving out your boogeyman claims that the UK grid is subject to extended power outages at some point in the future, which, frankly is pure chicken little the sky is falling crap, if you live in the UK then you would be aware that we have just given the green light to build TEN new nuke power stations, and if you knew anything about the UK grid you would know that it interconnects to the EU grid, and in fact this is a closer analogy to the whole US grid, rather than simply comparing the US and UK grids, because the UK grid is a single entity.
In closing, if I were to behave like you, I would be asking how you like our free healthcare. But I'm not like you, you come here, you pay taxes, you are welcome here.
I'm writing from the UK, so no matter what happens to *your* power grid, it won't affect *our* power grid.
Before you can get a sensible answer, you need to learn to ask a sensible question.
In any event, *your* power grid has already proven to be incredibly vulnerable to everything from single points of failure to social engineering for profit (Enron) so, quite frankly, worrying about the vulnerability of *your* power grid to hacking is like wondering about the vulnerability of a shiny new laptop left unattended on a car front seat to hacking... you have other issues to need to address first.
It is like wondering how vulnerable *your* road bridges and infrastructure are to hacking, while completely ignoring the fact that they are falling down by themselves due to lack of maintenance.
Racial Differences in Bone Density between Young Adult Black and White Subjects Persist after Adjustment for Anthropometric, Lifestyle, and Biochemical Differences1,2 Bruce Ettinger, Stephen Sidney, Steven R. Cummings, Cesar Libanati, Daniel D. Bikle, Irene S. Tekawa, Kimberly Tolan and Peter Steiger
Division of Research (B.E., S.S., I.S.T., K.T.), Kaiser Permanente Medical Care Program, Oakland 94611; Department of Medicine (S.R.C.), University of California, San Francisco 94143; Division of Endocrinology (C.L.), Department of Medicine, Veterans Administration Medical Center, Loma Linda 92357; Mineral Metabolism Unit (D.D.B.), Veterans Administration Medical Center, San Francisco, California 94121; Hologic, Inc. (P.S.), Waltham, Massachusetts 02154
Address correspondence and reprint requests to Bruce Ettinger, MD, Division of Research, Kaiser Permanente Medical Care Program, 3505 Broadway, Oakland, California 94611-5714.
This study tested whether racial differences in bone density can be explained by differences in bone metabolism and lifestyle. A cohort of 402 black and white men and women, ages 25-36 yr, was studied at the Kaiser Permanente Medical Care Program in Northern California, a prepaid health plan. Body composition (fat, lean, and bone mineral density) was measured using a Hologic-2000 dual-energy x-ray densitometer. Muscle strength, blood and urine chemistry values related to calcium metabolism, bone turnover, growth factors, and level of sex and adrenal hormones were also measured. Medical history, physical activity, and lifestyle were assessed. Statistical analyses using t- and chi-square tests and multiple regression were done to determine whether racial difference in bone density remained after adjustment for covariates. Bone density at all skeletal sites was statistically significantly greater in black than in white subjects; on average, adjustment for covariates reduced the percentage density differences by 42% for men and 34% for women. Adjusted bone density at various skeletal sites was 4.5-16.1% higher for black than for white men and was 1.2-7.3% higher for black than for white women. We concluded that racial differences in bone mineral density are not accounted for by clinical or biochemical variables measured in early adulthood.
Basically ALL electrical wiring, home or hotel or workplace, has to meet the standard.
Yes, UK plugs have fuses, sockets have switches, L/N are shielded, the plug has a cable anchor, and if you REALLY pull the wires out of the plug it is designed so the live, being shortest, comes out first.
But before the power gets to the socket it has to go through the "consumer unit" which carries RCD AND (over current) Breakers for each wiring loop.
People dying of electrocution in the UK is so rare I can't remember the last incident.
The thing is, with electricity generation you have something known as "baseline demand" which you can think of as a water table or the level of the sea a low tide.
You absolutely HAVE to have this generating capacity 24/365, no if's, but's or maybe's.
The problem with wind (and solar, and wave, etc) is that generating capacity can be anywhere from zero on up, if there is no wind, or even just light winds, generating capacity is effectively zero.
What this means is that if you are an electricity grid planner, it doesn't matter how much theoretical wind turbine generating capacity you have, NONE of it is applicable to your baseline demand.
This means the only things that you can use for baseline demand are coal powered, oil powered, nuke powered or hydro powered "traditional" generating stations.
The nature of "traditional" power stations is such that like the car doing 60mph down the freeway, there is a fair bit more power on tap, 24/365, so in fact, due to the nature of grid demand, by definition, the "traditional" power stations that are REQUIRED to meet baseline capacity can, in 99.9% of cases, ALSO supply peak demand (think of this as high tide).
So, the ONLY thing you can use wind power for, assuming the wind is blowing, is peak demand.
Now that you can only use it for peak demand, and given that you have an electrical grid, the only time you will ACTUALLY use one power source over another is if one is CHEAPER per giga-watt-hour than another.
Fact is, wind power loses out here too, UNLESS you heavily subsidise it, and that is no longer a level playing field.
The grid itself is also a problem, although a high tension grid can transfer useful power 1,000 miles, when you start talking about reasonable losses and efficiency in the grid, you are down to 250 miles, so it is not like you can put offshore wind farms *here* and connect them via the grid to a demand *here* 1,200 miles away, even with the wind power subsidies, it still does not make economic sense.
All you have to remember, is this.
The purpose of a wind turbine manufacturer is to sell wind turbines.
They really could not care one way or another if the installed turbines make economic sense on a level playing field.
Slashdot Mirror
So, vote BNP or anything else you like EXCEPT lab/con...
According to this fluff piece in the Times.
What's a poor citizen to do?
Every single UK broadband subscriber will be taxed / fined an extra £25 per year, to prop up the film and music industry.
Nice work if you can get it.
Why not subsidise the fax industry as well, and the cassette tape industry, and while we are at it, how about the buggy whip manufacturing industry?
Business has a thing called "externalisation", what it boils down to is putting as much cost as possible outside the business, a classic example is a textile mill that externalises the cost of polluting, simply by dumping the pollutants into the local river. Someone else, downstream, can pick up the tab.
The justification for this is that allegedly the latest Star Trek movie was downloaded 11 million times in 2009.
Around 150 million visits to the cinema per year happen in the UK, if you take the alleged 11 million star treks, add in the harry potters, avatars (holds hand up) etc etc it is no stretch of the imagination to claim that 150 million movie downloads happened in the UK in 2009.
According to this metric, and the false logic employed, if downloading was banned, cinema attendances would double.
Bullshit.
Here is why;
1. There is the false logic assumption that if I had not downloaded Avatar, I would have gone to the cinema and paid to see it. This is utterly false. You would have to pay me at least £5 to set foot in a cinema, to compensate me for the travel, mobile phones, noisy bastards, no smoking or drinking, inability to pause, crap seats, etc etc.
2. There is the false logic assumption that people like me with 46 1080p screens who prefer the comforts of our own homes would substitute the video rental shop for the cinema. Rubbish. The video rental shops don't have anything new, or anything good, or much choice of anything, and quite apart from that I have no interest in watching a Blu-ray that does not let me skip past 15 minutes of promo crap.
3. There is a false logic assumption that the media in question (whether it is cinema or rental) is value for money, I am simply not prepared to pay £5 per head for a cinema ticket, or £5 a night for a DVD, for 90 minutes of "entertainment" It is just way too expensive.
4. There is a false logic assumption, in short, that the 11 million downloads of Star Trek represent even 1 single lost cinema sale or DVD rental... You are reading this because it is free, would you pay £5 to read it? Stupid question. Would you pay £0.01 to read it? Stupid question.
5. There is a false logic assumption that the decline in cinema attendance figures, record sales, etc, say compared to 1970, is due to a change in people's attitudes, we have suddenly become a nation of thieves. Simply not true. These EXACT SAME ARGUMENTS were made about the compact audio cassette.
6. There is a false logic assumption that it is acceptable to impose a fine / tax / tariff on EVERYONE, that would be like mandating that I must buy a television licence, even though I haven't watched television for 20 years.
7. There is a false logic assumption that the technologies that they are going to deploy are actually going to catch people illegally sharing copyright material, ONLY, and NO-ONE ELSE, and indeed this is implicitly acknowledged in the desire to fine / tax / tariff ALL users of broadband, irrespective of what they do.
8. There is a false logic assumption that we are dealing with a static target, the ever evolving technology means that it really does not matter what methods you use to counter copyright violations (NOT copyright theft, no one is stealing your actual copyright, and no one is depriving anyone else of their use) because within the month (and I am being generous) they will be cracked.
9. T
I don't actually care what you believe, nor do I feel any need to share my sources.
No, I watched 40 minutes, then skimmed through the rest.
I watched in in full 1080p rez on at 46" RGB LED backlit Samsung LCD, same a Crysis, wasn't a cam rip, was full imax rip, never said it was cam or low rez, only a fanboi would try to intimate that it was.
Fail
I have just had the misfortune / bad judgement to try to sit through Avatar.
By 40 minutes in I could stand it no more, and starting flicking forwards, within another 10 minutes I'd skipped to the end.
Spoilers?
Nope, you can't give spoilers on something that has a plot thinner than Debbie Does Duluth, there is no story there, period, what there is is CGI.
If you are of an age to remember Roger Dean (Yes album covers amongst other things) then you have basically seen the stuff that the CGI was clearly designed upon, laws of gravity do not apply, laws of physics do not apply, laws of biology and locomotion do not apply.
I'm not talking fanciful creatures and landscapes, I'm talking totally impossible, acid trip inspired creatures and landscapes.
The only spoiler I can think of is, and I kid you not, the basic plot-line centres around a mining operation on an alien planet, mining an ore called "unobtanium"... yeah... the only thing rarer than unobtanium is a decent script.
One might think that multimillion dollar budgets + CGI + Roger Dean would create something of great aesthetic beauty at least, even if it were great beauty utterly devoid of a plot, but sadly, that isn't the case.
If they had rendered still scenes, yes, you'd have some great poster art or album covers, but the instant they went for motion it just ruined the whole thing, Roger Dean was never meant to be in motion.
Frankly the whole film smacks of a bunch of CGI geeks being given an unlimited budget and no rules, the desktop publishing equivalent of producing a parish magazine that uses 11,000 different fonts and every single piece of clip art on disk.
The semi-cameo role of Sig Weaver and the whole space mining theme (all of which is revealed in the first 10 minutes) means that you simply can't watch Avatar and not be strongly reminded of Alien (1) and this is yet another fatal wound for what is an already dead and decomposing corpse of a movie.
Alien had real (huge) sets, and the visual effect was stunning, not just because of Giger, but because of depth of focus, Avatar was done with green background and motion cap in someone's garden shed, plus a moonshot's worth of computers running CGI, and it looks utterly fake and feeble.
I have no idea what cinemas charge nowadays, it is irrelevant when films are as truly, horrendously awful, and this film was. It did not cost me a penny, and of course no popcorn, travelling time, shitty adverts or previews, and I managed to skip through the whole thing in 50 minutes, and I want those 50 minutes of my life back.
The new (a couple of years old at least) series of Captain Scarlet (also done in CGI) is quite honestly nothing less than three or four orders of magnitude better than Avatar on every single level imaginable.
As for the Avatar lead species, the hominids themselves, think the illegitimate love child of Jar Jar Binks and Pikachu, yes, really, that implausible, ridiculous, and vile. Kill it, kill it now, with (digital) fire.
I have a revelation for you.
Hollywood is dead.
Really, for less money than it would cost to take two kids to see this steaming pile of crap, you could go out and buy Crysis, which will provide about 40 hours of gameplay (sans god mode), a far better plot, a far more immersive and entertaining experience, and better and more realistic physics.
Seriously, whatever you do this Christmas, do not get talked into sitting through Avatar, do not get talked into paying for anyone else (kids) to see it, and, if you value your kids minds more than marshmallow, do not let your kids anywhere near it.
I am NOT joking.
99.9% of all laptop li-on batteries are made up from individual 3.3 VDC 18650 cells, 18mm diameter, 65 mm long.
Ipods and phone are made with prismatic li-on batteries.
the 18650 Li-on cell is the D cell of the li-on world.
Panasonic and Moli used to be the world's biggest manufacturers.
I used the buy new, bare, 18650 li-on cells for less than 2 bucks each, to rebuild laptop batteries with.
Generic li-on laptop batteries are available at the factory gates in china for around a buck per 175 mAh
HTH etc
Simple as that.....
This just to beat lameness filter.
I'm not writing this just to take a contrary position.
I've been around and while, and around the IT scene a while. (understatements)
Internship is just a way to get some loser for peanuts, while not being bound by any of the regular employment Law.
If you work for 8 bucks and hour then 8 bucks an hour is all you are worth.
Go to Burger King, the money is better, and you will at least have some hope of persuading a future employer that...
a/ you have some self respect.
b/ you will work hard for money, you will not eat shit for money.
Back in my day, there was no such thing as interns, because frankly nobody in Personnel had the balls to try and sell it, and nobody who was a worker would consider it for an instant as anything less than a total insult.
Why not just rent your ass out? and ask /. what we think about that as a career idea?
It won't work because for 90% of internet users their monthly bill will go DOWN, a LOT.
I use an old Samsung pre-pay mobile, my average monthly cost is less than 2 dollars.
Which is why telco's LOVE stuff like line rental, monthly plans, etc etc etc.
The whole cost of bandwidth thing is just arbitrary bullshit, the actual physical cost of running a given pipe at 0% capacity, and the same pipe at 100% capacity, is measured in cents worth of electricity per hour.
It is artificial scarcity, no more.
I'm older than you (not a lot) and I can empathise 100%
In my day as a child I grew up, slowly, day by day, gaining experience of the world.
Today it is the opposite, kids are (allegedly) shielded from everything, effectively cut off from society and so cut off from any opportunity to grow and learn naturally.
We are breeding hot house flowers.
I am a time-served engineer.
I do not think tradesmen are dirty, or beneath me.
Fact is at what he does, because he does it all day every day, the (good) tradesman will be faster and more efficient and more knowledgeable than me.
Agreed, and you have the same hierarchy within an engineering / machine shop, within a hospital, within a building services company, within electricians shops, on board a ship.... you name it.
What ***___IS___*** different now is that back in the old days the only route to being top dog was to work your way up through all the other levels and disciplines.
Now you just take a degree course in engineering and get to be a manager put in charge of people who, for example, use a hacksaw every day of their lives, even though you yourself have never even held one.
I could tell you uncounted real world stories in engineering like this, guys who have literally never held a spanner, but have a degree in hydraulic engineering, designing hydraulic machinery that LITERALLY cannot be made, due to elementary mistakes like insufficient room between unions to fit the spanner to secure said unions, etc etc etc.
This is why all these type think they are better than the "workers", because they lack clue #1 about the workers actual daily job and skills.
Well...
That last paragraph, what a doozy... if you want to know why the business world is going to hell in a handcart, that last paragraph is your answer, this is the sort of people we are employing now as Directors and Manager and Department Heads.
He thinks he is so much better than plumbers, electricians and mechanics, because the plumber does not design the 22mm copper tee, the sparky does not design the RCD breaker, and the mechanic does not design the spark exhaust manifold.
He, however, is vastly superior, being a coder...
Wait... does he write his own coding language, e.g. does he create new programming languages? Does he create his own x86 instruction set and assembly language?
Or does he simply grab the "tools" available and use recognisable individual components and constructs like elbows and tees, breakers and distribution boxes, manifolds and sparkplugs?
Do I simply use the tools available, the lexicon of the English language, when writing this, or do I create my own language for each article I write?
I'd really like to know how the plumber fitting a new central heating system, deciding where and how to route the pipework so it works and doesn't water hammer or creak, is not a creative professional.
I'd really like to know how the electrician fitting a new ring main, deciding where and how to route the cables and what components to use, is not a creative professional.
I'd really like to know how the mechanic fitting the Rover V8 into the Ford Cortina, deciding how to mount the engine and where to route the exhaust etc, is not a creative professional.
Yes, computers operate on DC.
Yes, putting a DC battery in between the DC output of the PSU and the DC input of the mobo will have a UPS / Laptop battery effect on temporary mains voltage loss.
The problem is very few mobos only have 12VDC input. This won't take care of the vast majority of mobos that also require 5VDC
5VDC isn't practicably doable from lead-acid @ around 2 VDC per cell.
Yes, there are ways around this, but the only practical ones are external DC-DC conversion, *or* 12VDC only mobos, which use on board internal DC-DC concersion.
ALL mobos use some form of onboard DC-DC conversion, even if only for the CPU.
If you want to buy a 12VDC mobo, do a google for industrial computer mobos.
Get real, for 150 users at WRT54 will do DNS etc....
Want a bit more poke, VIA EPIA + small flash disk.
"buy a server".. jeez, you work for IBM sales dept?
The system you have works solidly, and has worked solidly for seven years.
I, personally, am TOTALLY in agreement with the ethos of whoever designed it, a single box for each service.
Frankly, with the cost of modern hardware, you could triple the capacity of what you have now just by gradually swapping out for newer hardware over the next few months, and keeping the shite old boxen for fallback.
Virtualisation is, IMHO, *totally* inappropriate for 99% of cases where it is used, ditto *cloud* computing.
It sounds to me like you are more interested in making your own mark, than actually taking an objective view. I may of course be wrong, but usually that is the case in stories like this.
In my experience, everyone who tries to make their own mark actually degrades a system, and simply discounts the ways that they have degraded it as being "obsolete" or "no longer applicable"
Frankly, based on your post alone, I'd sack you on the spot, because you sound like the biggest threat to the system to come along in seven years.
These are NOT your computers, if you want a system just so, build it yourself with your own money in your own home.
This advice / opinion is of course worth exactly what it cost.
Apologies in advance if I have misconstrued your approach. (but I doubt that I have)
YMMV.
Please DO NOT usurp port 443 for you own ends.
Your "method" involves breaking https handshaking, and I don't care what definition you use, any method that involves extra protocol handshaking that my port 443 application does not recognise is both delaying it and breaking it.
What you are doing is not HTTP, it is not HTTPS either.
Please bugger off to some other Port, maybe 61482
Apparently not in your case.
The US power grid had broken many, many, many times, for many, many, many reasons, in that CONTEXT asking questions about supposed boogeymen is anything but SENSIBLE, it is in fact HYSTERICAL.
In case you can't be bothered to look around, you've logged into and posted on an American website. Yes, it may have an international readership, but it is located in America, run by Americans, and the post is made by another American. If you got your head out of our self-righteous ass perhaps you'd make less of ass yourself when browsing non-UK sites.
Some points to make here.
"USA" != "America", USA is a subset of North America which is a subset of America.
If you "yanks" don't was the rest of the world accessing your websites, you can take your heads out of your self-righteous asses and simply block us, I am sure even "yanks" can manage to do that.
If you choose not to block us, if you, in fact, choose to INVITE us to participate, which /. does by the way, then you don't get to act like some red-neck jerk as soon as someone says something that could possibly, somewhere, somehow, sometime, be interpreted, if you squint, cock your head sideways and look just *so*, as being un-american.
If you ever seek an answer as to why so many US citizens find themselves being treated rudely by "foreigners", then you only have to look at your own behaviour here.
As for *our* grid (I happen to reside in the UK btw, but unlike you at least know enough not to lambast the British for posting British-centric questions on British Websites, or Americans for posting American-centric questions on) American websites) here in the UK, yes, we might not be as vulnerable to single-point failures or software hackery as those in the states, but given *our* current lack of a coherent energy policy, we are vulnerable to having zero electricity for extended periods of time in the coming years, due to insufficient power to meet *our* needs. So if I were you I'd be a little less cocky.
Really, blow it our your ass with the straw man arguments.
NOWHERE in the original question was any mention made of the vulnerability of the US grid with those of other countries, you know, that CONTEXT thing you were on about.
The FACTS are that the UK power grid in terms not just of uptime, but also voltage tolerances, is actually, by any standards, pretty damn good.
Leaving out your boogeyman claims that the UK grid is subject to extended power outages at some point in the future, which, frankly is pure chicken little the sky is falling crap, if you live in the UK then you would be aware that we have just given the green light to build TEN new nuke power stations, and if you knew anything about the UK grid you would know that it interconnects to the EU grid, and in fact this is a closer analogy to the whole US grid, rather than simply comparing the US and UK grids, because the UK grid is a single entity.
In closing, if I were to behave like you, I would be asking how you like our free healthcare. But I'm not like you, you come here, you pay taxes, you are welcome here.
I'm writing from the UK, so no matter what happens to *your* power grid, it won't affect *our* power grid.
Before you can get a sensible answer, you need to learn to ask a sensible question.
In any event, *your* power grid has already proven to be incredibly vulnerable to everything from single points of failure to social engineering for profit (Enron) so, quite frankly, worrying about the vulnerability of *your* power grid to hacking is like wondering about the vulnerability of a shiny new laptop left unattended on a car front seat to hacking... you have other issues to need to address first.
It is like wondering how vulnerable *your* road bridges and infrastructure are to hacking, while completely ignoring the fact that they are falling down by themselves due to lack of maintenance.
Racial Differences in Bone Density between Young Adult Black and White Subjects Persist after Adjustment for Anthropometric, Lifestyle, and Biochemical Differences1,2
Bruce Ettinger, Stephen Sidney, Steven R. Cummings, Cesar Libanati, Daniel D. Bikle, Irene S. Tekawa, Kimberly Tolan and Peter Steiger
Division of Research (B.E., S.S., I.S.T., K.T.), Kaiser Permanente Medical Care Program, Oakland 94611; Department of Medicine (S.R.C.), University of California, San Francisco 94143; Division of Endocrinology (C.L.), Department of Medicine, Veterans Administration Medical Center, Loma Linda 92357; Mineral Metabolism Unit (D.D.B.), Veterans Administration Medical Center, San Francisco, California 94121; Hologic, Inc. (P.S.), Waltham, Massachusetts 02154
Address correspondence and reprint requests to Bruce Ettinger, MD, Division of Research, Kaiser Permanente Medical Care Program, 3505 Broadway, Oakland, California 94611-5714.
This study tested whether racial differences in bone density can be explained by differences in bone metabolism and lifestyle. A cohort of 402 black and white men and women, ages 25-36 yr, was studied at the Kaiser Permanente Medical Care Program in Northern California, a prepaid health plan. Body composition (fat, lean, and bone mineral density) was measured using a Hologic-2000 dual-energy x-ray densitometer. Muscle strength, blood and urine chemistry values related to calcium metabolism, bone turnover, growth factors, and level of sex and adrenal hormones were also measured. Medical history, physical activity, and lifestyle were assessed. Statistical analyses using t- and chi-square tests and multiple regression were done to determine whether racial difference in bone density remained after adjustment for covariates. Bone density at all skeletal sites was statistically significantly greater in black than in white subjects; on average, adjustment for covariates reduced the percentage density differences by 42% for men and 34% for women. Adjusted bone density at various skeletal sites was 4.5-16.1% higher for black than for white men and was 1.2-7.3% higher for black than for white women. We concluded that racial differences in bone mineral density are not accounted for by clinical or biochemical variables measured in early adulthood.
Replying to myself...
The flipside is white people can run, just not as well as black people, for the same bone / skeleton reasons.
(human racism has always seemed to me like a labrador and a retriever arguing who us best... )
We typed: 'Why can't...'
Google suggests: '...black people swim?'
Answer: There is no answer to this question. It's demented to even ask it.
In fact, not quite so stupid, black people can swim, just not as well as white people, and it is all due to average density and skeleton formation.
The word you are looking for is not "print" or "tattoo", it is "brand" as in burn.
http://www.theiet.org/publishing/books/wir-reg/17th-edition.cfm
Basically ALL electrical wiring, home or hotel or workplace, has to meet the standard.
Yes, UK plugs have fuses, sockets have switches, L/N are shielded, the plug has a cable anchor, and if you REALLY pull the wires out of the plug it is designed so the live, being shortest, comes out first.
But before the power gets to the socket it has to go through the "consumer unit" which carries RCD AND (over current) Breakers for each wiring loop.
People dying of electrocution in the UK is so rare I can't remember the last incident.
The thing is, with electricity generation you have something known as "baseline demand" which you can think of as a water table or the level of the sea a low tide.
You absolutely HAVE to have this generating capacity 24/365, no if's, but's or maybe's.
The problem with wind (and solar, and wave, etc) is that generating capacity can be anywhere from zero on up, if there is no wind, or even just light winds, generating capacity is effectively zero.
What this means is that if you are an electricity grid planner, it doesn't matter how much theoretical wind turbine generating capacity you have, NONE of it is applicable to your baseline demand.
This means the only things that you can use for baseline demand are coal powered, oil powered, nuke powered or hydro powered "traditional" generating stations.
The nature of "traditional" power stations is such that like the car doing 60mph down the freeway, there is a fair bit more power on tap, 24/365, so in fact, due to the nature of grid demand, by definition, the "traditional" power stations that are REQUIRED to meet baseline capacity can, in 99.9% of cases, ALSO supply peak demand (think of this as high tide).
So, the ONLY thing you can use wind power for, assuming the wind is blowing, is peak demand.
Now that you can only use it for peak demand, and given that you have an electrical grid, the only time you will ACTUALLY use one power source over another is if one is CHEAPER per giga-watt-hour than another.
Fact is, wind power loses out here too, UNLESS you heavily subsidise it, and that is no longer a level playing field.
The grid itself is also a problem, although a high tension grid can transfer useful power 1,000 miles, when you start talking about reasonable losses and efficiency in the grid, you are down to 250 miles, so it is not like you can put offshore wind farms *here* and connect them via the grid to a demand *here* 1,200 miles away, even with the wind power subsidies, it still does not make economic sense.
All you have to remember, is this.
The purpose of a wind turbine manufacturer is to sell wind turbines.
They really could not care one way or another if the installed turbines make economic sense on a level playing field.