I figured everyone outside the US bought the "International Edition" at 1/5 the cost of the US edition. I can't imagine they are selling the International Editon at a loss. Why should the US edition cost $120 and the International edition cost $20? I wish I had been ballsy enough in college to just borrow everyone elses books. I know a couple of guys that made it a principle to not buy *any* books. They both graduated too.
I don't know what they do with the slag. It's not an easy problem. The ash, however, is usually very plentiful (I'm talking mountains of ash here). If it is relatively "clean" (no heavy metals) it gets spread on farmland for the phosphate content. In many cases they mix it with concrete or asphalt as a filler. It has to be of a certain type for this though; if the ash isn't right the concrete/asphalt will crumble. Also, a lot of this is subject to the rules of the state/local government. So things that are fine in some states are strictly forbidden in others (with very steep fines). I once worked for a plant that was fined over $200,000 for not covering their ash pile with a tarp/building. But in other states they just spread it onto farmland.
The standard conversion is actually closer to 1MW per 1000 homes (1kW per home) on average. When you're running the drier or the electric stove, sure it's a lot more. But if you're just watching TV with a few lights on it is probably closer to a 400W load. The big problem happens around 4:45PM. Businesses are still open, but people have gone home and turned all the lights on. So the load usually peaks around that time. Obviously the grid has more capacity than 1kW per home, but on average this is about the average usage. What does your monthly bill say? If it is around 650-800 kW-hr then you only use about 1kW on average.
(I have worked for a large utility and now work for a turbine manufacturer)
Google has a fairly dominating position in the US, but other places it varies considerably. Most Japanese cell phones have a Yahoo! button on them (not a google button) and in China they use Baidu. I think the 4 different ways of writing in Japanese are probably not Google's strength.
WAR addresses everything I didn't like about WOW. You can queue for Battlegrounds (scenarios) anywhere. When you are done, you are returned to where you left off. You can hook up with random people and do public quests easilly and quickly. These are basically uninstanced mini-dungeons. Gold farming isn't very useful, since I have yet to find a use for all the gold I have collected (still level 18 though). They also seem to be stamping down on the gold sellers pretty hard. You get comparable XP for PVE and PVP. Its NOT a giagantic time-sink, but its fun to play. Tactics and skill matter much more than gear. In PVP areas and battlegrounds, levels are boosted for low-level characters so skill can matter more than level.
The only things I don't like are there seem to be too many classes. Since I haven't played all of them, I can't look at a character and always tell what it is, much less know their weaknesses. I also wish I could play level 1-10 PVP scenario maps after level 10. Some of these maps make me want to keep creating characters just to play them. The game lacks a little polish, and character animations seem low quality for the amount of CPU/GPU power my system has. Some of this I expect to be corrected in time. Its still a very new game.
I canceled my Verizon Wireless yesterday (for other reasons). If you want out of your contract with no questions asked, print out This page and take it in with you to the verizon office. Tell them this is a change to your contract and that you would like to cancel. Ask them to waive the cancel fee. Done. You even get to keep your phone (they told me to sell it on Ebay). This assumes that you were a customer back in April.
3. You're not allowed to use phones on airplanes because of paranoid ignoramuses and the insightful people who realize how bad it could get when people in a flying bomb know what's going on (and how annoying cell phones are).
This only half the story. There are a couple technical limitations also.
1. Airplanes are metal tubes. Ever try to make a call in an elevator? A singlewide trailer? It's difficult or impossible.
2. Even if you could get a signal in a plane, you're several tens of thousand feet up. You can see dozens of cell towers but go into and out of their range very quickly at 600mph. Cell tower networks aren't designed for this.
I think the real problem areas are businesses that went from NT to 2000 (its a big improvement) and are still running it. They wanted to skip XP but now they're left with an 2000, which is starting to show its age or Vista, which isn't an option for many businesses for various reasons. Vista sucks and upgrading to XP, an OS nearing the end of its lifetime too, doesn't make a huge amount of sense either.
The grid can handle this. Millions of cars aren't going to be plugged in overnight. Yes, it takes years for a large power plant projects and big high-voltage lines to be planned, designed, and installed. It also takes years for a new car to become a significant percentage of cars on the road. When you consider that the economy is starting to squeeze people, its pretty clear that millions of people aren't going to run out and buy a new car just because its shiny.
In my experience, excel is also rarely used for anything serious outside of US. Maybe its an indictment of how lazy, slow witted and easily misled our pool of talent is becoming.
I recently spent some time in Japan in a design group for a large Japanese company. I was showed the massive spreadsheet used to calculate power plant capacity and consumption. I almost cried. The whole sheet was based upon one large circular reference. Nobody understood it and it referenced steam tables through a plugin but didn't show the output of these calculations.
The US is not alone in using Excel for things it wasn't meant to do. Now please excuse me while I run a couple monte carlo simulations in Excel.
Get bandwidth expensive enough and we could just do local neighborhood p2p filesharing. Imagine a 10.0.0.0/8 wifi network covering a neighborhood and sharing the big popular downloads among themselves. Also would make the **AA goons job a lot harder.
This is most any college campus in the last 5 years. The only problem comes when it becomes obvious that the campus IT guy is still using 10mb hubs instead of switches.
Everyone has different needs and tastes. Some want a smaller package at the cost of features and screen size. Some of us want a little more hardware available and can't see a 7" screen anyhow. Many Japanese would be happy with a 4" netbook even if it had a 200Mhz arm processor. Most Americans would complain. This is why Asus etc have so many models and sizes. Trying to jam everyone into one model is like Henry Ford with the model T. He lost market share because he thought one car would be enough choice for everyone.
My last job had some files from the 1890's. The company had moved from New York to New Jersey to Houston in all that time. I can't imagine that material would ever need to be used, or would be called up during a legal investigation. Even if it were, would the authorities penalize a company for files that were that old??? At some point, everything is trashable or museum material.
This company occasionally needed blueprints from the 1930s/1940s (great lakes ships), but none of their ships went back much further than that.
I worked at a 100% remote plant for a short time. We were onsite during the day, but at night if the turbines needed to start they ran them from another state. At that time, the liklihood of turbines running at night wasn't very large, but it did happen once a week or so.
"Or are you implying that all Senators are in collusion and fighting only for lower text-messaging costs?"
No. They are all going after populist minor problems that everyone can agree on, but aren't major issues. Most of the time, the problems they examine aren't solvable by congress directly anyway and its a huge waste of time. Congress has examined Exxon multiple times, but usually only in an election year. They are letting the real problems slide in order to get re-elected more easily. The entire process has become circular. "If I vote for this my critics will tear me apart and I won't be re-elected to solve problems in the future". Sound familiar?
" 'Their industry is not very familiar with hacking and hackers in general."
The policy of most utility plants is to never connect any type of machinery control to the internet. If you have left yourself open like this, you are not following industry practices.
A. the universe always existed
B. it popped into existence due to something, we don't know what - we may never find out
C. it was created by someone, and we call that someone God.
Many people would also argue for a different option- D. It doesn't matter. We can never know what happened before the big bang since there is nothing to measure. We can rewind the tape to the beginning but we can't flip it over and listen to the other side.
The flettner rotors are interesting yes, but mostly useless. The concept has been around since the 1920s and has been studied by many college students and professional researchers. And yet, somehow, all of our ships today are powered by propellors, impellors, or perhaps sails. The device is not practical for a number of reasons. It has all the disadvantages of sails, but no advantages. It also requires power to operate, a further disadvantage over plain old sails. The only real thing it has going for it is that an automated control system might be somewhat easier to implement compared to a sail.
High school is not a place to train job skills. Rather, it is almost intended to weed out the productive members of society from the unproductive. It is almost a test- if you can go to school regularly and complete coursework, you will probably be reasonably successful in life. You probably have the capacity to go to work regularly and complete your duties there. If you can't do this, chances are very good (though not definite) that your list of life accomplishments has already been completed.
In short, teach how to learn new things and solve problems. The actual material will be again outdated in a couple years anyway. Job training should be done by employers.
This has been the case for years and isn't an inherent problems with wind farms. Many areas (California, Connecticut) are full of NIMBY people and large amounts of power must be imported. Quebec and New Brunswick Canada, have been exporting to us for a long time. One of the biggest problems is that some generation companies are also in the transmission business.
If area A has a surplus but area B needs power, and the lines cannot handle the transmission, then the price for electricity in B goes up. This is a complex case of supply and demand. The grid is a lot more fragile than it appears. In many places there is a desperate need for more generation/transmission, but the anti-infrastructure people are driving up the cost of electricity by not allowing infrastructure improvements to be made.
I worked at one plant that had to erect a huge sound wall around the entire plant. It worked great, but cost around $2 million including all the sound studies etc. The people next door claimed they never knew when the plant was operating (clear exhaust). We CAN build large power plants in your backyard, and you won't even know they are there- aside from the plant staff spending it up in local businesses.
Take the idea of a car racing game with cute characters driving. Miyamoto's gone to that well multiple times, but nobody else has scored big with it, even though it isn't a copyrightable or patentable thing. He's got a team that gets the details right.
I thought Diddy Kong Racing was pretty good. A lot of other people did too, from the article. Miyamoto is a good game designer, but he isn't the only one.
Slashdot Mirror
I figured everyone outside the US bought the "International Edition" at 1/5 the cost of the US edition. I can't imagine they are selling the International Editon at a loss. Why should the US edition cost $120 and the International edition cost $20? I wish I had been ballsy enough in college to just borrow everyone elses books. I know a couple of guys that made it a principle to not buy *any* books. They both graduated too.
You mean you have to use your hands?? Thats like a baby's toy!
I don't know what they do with the slag. It's not an easy problem. The ash, however, is usually very plentiful (I'm talking mountains of ash here). If it is relatively "clean" (no heavy metals) it gets spread on farmland for the phosphate content. In many cases they mix it with concrete or asphalt as a filler. It has to be of a certain type for this though; if the ash isn't right the concrete/asphalt will crumble. Also, a lot of this is subject to the rules of the state/local government. So things that are fine in some states are strictly forbidden in others (with very steep fines). I once worked for a plant that was fined over $200,000 for not covering their ash pile with a tarp/building. But in other states they just spread it onto farmland.
The standard conversion is actually closer to 1MW per 1000 homes (1kW per home) on average. When you're running the drier or the electric stove, sure it's a lot more. But if you're just watching TV with a few lights on it is probably closer to a 400W load. The big problem happens around 4:45PM. Businesses are still open, but people have gone home and turned all the lights on. So the load usually peaks around that time. Obviously the grid has more capacity than 1kW per home, but on average this is about the average usage. What does your monthly bill say? If it is around 650-800 kW-hr then you only use about 1kW on average. (I have worked for a large utility and now work for a turbine manufacturer)
Google has a fairly dominating position in the US, but other places it varies considerably. Most Japanese cell phones have a Yahoo! button on them (not a google button) and in China they use Baidu. I think the 4 different ways of writing in Japanese are probably not Google's strength.
WAR addresses everything I didn't like about WOW. You can queue for Battlegrounds (scenarios) anywhere. When you are done, you are returned to where you left off. You can hook up with random people and do public quests easilly and quickly. These are basically uninstanced mini-dungeons. Gold farming isn't very useful, since I have yet to find a use for all the gold I have collected (still level 18 though). They also seem to be stamping down on the gold sellers pretty hard. You get comparable XP for PVE and PVP. Its NOT a giagantic time-sink, but its fun to play. Tactics and skill matter much more than gear. In PVP areas and battlegrounds, levels are boosted for low-level characters so skill can matter more than level.
The only things I don't like are there seem to be too many classes. Since I haven't played all of them, I can't look at a character and always tell what it is, much less know their weaknesses. I also wish I could play level 1-10 PVP scenario maps after level 10. Some of these maps make me want to keep creating characters just to play them. The game lacks a little polish, and character animations seem low quality for the amount of CPU/GPU power my system has. Some of this I expect to be corrected in time. Its still a very new game.
I like them too, but you can't get them anymore. I thought the Miata hidden headlamps were pretty slick but safety regulations made them go away.
I canceled my Verizon Wireless yesterday (for other reasons). If you want out of your contract with no questions asked, print out This page and take it in with you to the verizon office. Tell them this is a change to your contract and that you would like to cancel. Ask them to waive the cancel fee. Done. You even get to keep your phone (they told me to sell it on Ebay). This assumes that you were a customer back in April.
3. You're not allowed to use phones on airplanes because of paranoid ignoramuses and the insightful people who realize how bad it could get when people in a flying bomb know what's going on (and how annoying cell phones are).
This only half the story. There are a couple technical limitations also.
1. Airplanes are metal tubes. Ever try to make a call in an elevator? A singlewide trailer? It's difficult or impossible.
2. Even if you could get a signal in a plane, you're several tens of thousand feet up. You can see dozens of cell towers but go into and out of their range very quickly at 600mph. Cell tower networks aren't designed for this.
There is nothing particularly special about the breast.
3 billion men beg to differ.
I think the real problem areas are businesses that went from NT to 2000 (its a big improvement) and are still running it. They wanted to skip XP but now they're left with an 2000, which is starting to show its age or Vista, which isn't an option for many businesses for various reasons. Vista sucks and upgrading to XP, an OS nearing the end of its lifetime too, doesn't make a huge amount of sense either.
The grid can handle this. Millions of cars aren't going to be plugged in overnight. Yes, it takes years for a large power plant projects and big high-voltage lines to be planned, designed, and installed. It also takes years for a new car to become a significant percentage of cars on the road. When you consider that the economy is starting to squeeze people, its pretty clear that millions of people aren't going to run out and buy a new car just because its shiny.
In my experience, excel is also rarely used for anything serious outside of US. Maybe its an indictment of how lazy, slow witted and easily misled our pool of talent is becoming.
I recently spent some time in Japan in a design group for a large Japanese company. I was showed the massive spreadsheet used to calculate power plant capacity and consumption. I almost cried. The whole sheet was based upon one large circular reference. Nobody understood it and it referenced steam tables through a plugin but didn't show the output of these calculations.
The US is not alone in using Excel for things it wasn't meant to do. Now please excuse me while I run a couple monte carlo simulations in Excel.
Get bandwidth expensive enough and we could just do local neighborhood p2p filesharing. Imagine a 10.0.0.0/8 wifi network covering a neighborhood and sharing the big popular downloads among themselves. Also would make the **AA goons job a lot harder.
This is most any college campus in the last 5 years. The only problem comes when it becomes obvious that the campus IT guy is still using 10mb hubs instead of switches.
Everyone has different needs and tastes. Some want a smaller package at the cost of features and screen size. Some of us want a little more hardware available and can't see a 7" screen anyhow. Many Japanese would be happy with a 4" netbook even if it had a 200Mhz arm processor. Most Americans would complain. This is why Asus etc have so many models and sizes. Trying to jam everyone into one model is like Henry Ford with the model T. He lost market share because he thought one car would be enough choice for everyone.
My last job had some files from the 1890's. The company had moved from New York to New Jersey to Houston in all that time. I can't imagine that material would ever need to be used, or would be called up during a legal investigation. Even if it were, would the authorities penalize a company for files that were that old??? At some point, everything is trashable or museum material.
This company occasionally needed blueprints from the 1930s/1940s (great lakes ships), but none of their ships went back much further than that.
I worked at a 100% remote plant for a short time. We were onsite during the day, but at night if the turbines needed to start they ran them from another state. At that time, the liklihood of turbines running at night wasn't very large, but it did happen once a week or so.
"Or are you implying that all Senators are in collusion and fighting only for lower text-messaging costs?"
No. They are all going after populist minor problems that everyone can agree on, but aren't major issues. Most of the time, the problems they examine aren't solvable by congress directly anyway and its a huge waste of time. Congress has examined Exxon multiple times, but usually only in an election year. They are letting the real problems slide in order to get re-elected more easily. The entire process has become circular. "If I vote for this my critics will tear me apart and I won't be re-elected to solve problems in the future". Sound familiar?
" 'Their industry is not very familiar with hacking and hackers in general."
The policy of most utility plants is to never connect any type of machinery control to the internet. If you have left yourself open like this, you are not following industry practices.
Anything much over 10 hours and the user is going to run out of juice long before the laptop does.
A. the universe always existed B. it popped into existence due to something, we don't know what - we may never find out C. it was created by someone, and we call that someone God.
Many people would also argue for a different option- D. It doesn't matter. We can never know what happened before the big bang since there is nothing to measure. We can rewind the tape to the beginning but we can't flip it over and listen to the other side.
The flettner rotors are interesting yes, but mostly useless. The concept has been around since the 1920s and has been studied by many college students and professional researchers. And yet, somehow, all of our ships today are powered by propellors, impellors, or perhaps sails. The device is not practical for a number of reasons. It has all the disadvantages of sails, but no advantages. It also requires power to operate, a further disadvantage over plain old sails. The only real thing it has going for it is that an automated control system might be somewhat easier to implement compared to a sail.
High school is not a place to train job skills. Rather, it is almost intended to weed out the productive members of society from the unproductive. It is almost a test- if you can go to school regularly and complete coursework, you will probably be reasonably successful in life. You probably have the capacity to go to work regularly and complete your duties there. If you can't do this, chances are very good (though not definite) that your list of life accomplishments has already been completed.
In short, teach how to learn new things and solve problems. The actual material will be again outdated in a couple years anyway. Job training should be done by employers.
This has been the case for years and isn't an inherent problems with wind farms. Many areas (California, Connecticut) are full of NIMBY people and large amounts of power must be imported. Quebec and New Brunswick Canada, have been exporting to us for a long time. One of the biggest problems is that some generation companies are also in the transmission business.
If area A has a surplus but area B needs power, and the lines cannot handle the transmission, then the price for electricity in B goes up. This is a complex case of supply and demand. The grid is a lot more fragile than it appears. In many places there is a desperate need for more generation/transmission, but the anti-infrastructure people are driving up the cost of electricity by not allowing infrastructure improvements to be made.
I worked at one plant that had to erect a huge sound wall around the entire plant. It worked great, but cost around $2 million including all the sound studies etc. The people next door claimed they never knew when the plant was operating (clear exhaust). We CAN build large power plants in your backyard, and you won't even know they are there- aside from the plant staff spending it up in local businesses.
Why yes, I do work in the power industry.
Take the idea of a car racing game with cute characters driving. Miyamoto's gone to that well multiple times, but nobody else has scored big with it, even though it isn't a copyrightable or patentable thing. He's got a team that gets the details right.
I thought Diddy Kong Racing was pretty good. A lot of other people did too, from the article. Miyamoto is a good game designer, but he isn't the only one.