You don't encrypt to protect yourself from the NSA. If you're interesting to the NSA, they'll spend the resources to get the information they desire. And they'll get it one way or another involving a back door.
It should be about skills, both user skills and numerical skills. But numerical skills should be conservative: The base skills (before magical items are taken into account) should sum to the same number. Improving in one area comes at a cost of atrophy in another area, so that no matter how powerful your character becomes, there's always some kind of weakness that you need to overcome through cleverness or friends. Even magical items should always come with some kind of negative effect, even if it doesn't affect your stats.
Also, the RNG shouldn't be involved in the damage equation. The NPC move-decider, sure, but the damage equation should be deterministic based on the actions you and the thing you're fighting with decide upon.
Yes, and the reason resistive heating even approaches parity with other heat sources is that you use much less of it. A typical home on oil heat might have two or even one single zone. On electric heat, wherever there's a doorway, there's a new zone. Except, possibly, the closets. Yes, the half-bath is a separate heating zone in electric houses.
So you'll have a modest-sized home with seven or eight zones per floor, of which you use no more than three or four over the whole house at a time. The rest being set just high enough to make sure pipes won't freeze. And you'll usually have thicker outer walls, too, but that is an improvement that anyone can and probably should do regardless of heating source.
On the extra down-side, this makes programmable thermostats into a pretty crappy proposition for electric heat owners, even as programmable thermostats serve to benefit them the most: you could achieve some extremely fine control over each zone's heating with a simple PID controller, minimizing convective (T^3) and radiative (T^4) losses by never straying far above your comfort zone.
With heat-pump, you don't get the benefit of granular zones, but you spend closer to the same amount of money on heating a larger area, much like the oil and gas options. Straight-up resistive heating is a terrible option and should only be used where you need to maintain specific temperature tolerances.
If you have waste heat from your power plant as a heating option, resistive bulbs begin to make even less sense.
You would find less overall electricity usage by switching to CFL and using the difference in power to run a heat pump. Worst case scenario, the ground doesn't have any heat to give you and your pump defaults to standard resistance heating, which is where you are now. All other scenarios are improvements on that.
Unless, of course, you're not currently using electric resistance heating as your main heat supply. In which case, by answering the question, "why not," you will also know why you're not saving anything by relying on your lamps as auxiliary heat.
The moment I find these in stores I am IMMEDIATELY buying a few and replacing every bulb attached to a dimmer switch in my house. Ask anyone with a light dimmer who switched to CFL's, and this'll immediately be their biggest caveat with the tech.
The 'dimmer' cfls actually work pretty well, and the ones I have, have a better color temperature when dimmed than when full-on. Dimmed incandescents do very poorly when dimmed, shifting a lot of the energy into infra-red that you just can't see. Sure, you could save 25% of the power by getting 50% of the usable light*, but is that really efficiency?
*actually, I suspect it might be worse than that. That's just my first guess without doing any calculus.
No, what we need is some kind of pairing device. Your name ought to be a sufficient identifier, or your name plus a number if you couldn't think of an original name....
But if you want two groups to be able to share information on your behalf (say, a bank and a utility), there ought to be some kind of pairing process like with bluetooth, or SSL, or wireless networking...
Ideally, there would be some kind of smart device, possibly about the size of a library card so it would be convenient that could store and compute the "keys" to establish links.
The problem with a real ID card is that it would just be another number if we did it right now. Although the technology exists to do far better, the mindshare of cryptography is appallingly low.
We really need a "cryptology spokesman" with charisma to go out there and extol the virtues of not blabbing your freakin' financial information to everyone who asks. Or having a stupid number somewhere that does the same crap for you.
Not being careful with your personal data is like not being careful with your personal genitals. The more people you allow to access either, the more likely something very bad will happen.
Incredibly unlikely?? It's one in freaking three. 999999999 means only 1,000 million possible numbers, if the geographic coding didn't exist and the group coding didn't remove many numbers from the available number space, making things much, much worse. For a population of 300 million...
By my count, if there is no checking, the probability of collisions is incredibly high.
. The type of people who "can afford it" are the type of people who pay almost nothing. Hell even Warren Buffet [google.com] (who pays 17% tax whilst his assistant pays 30%) and Bill Gates (Sr.) [pbs.org] have been campaigning against the unfairness of how little they pay.
No they haven't. They've been using their own payment as an argument for raising how much YOU pay. If they really thought they weren't paying enough.... they'd pay more. It's not like the government doesn't accept donations.
How do you evaluate that statement of "better" ness?
Cost per dose of equivalent relief? Total mass of eq. relief? Weighted, combined, fraction of harmful dosages? some kind of measurable "harm" caused? long-term socio-economic impact? Hotness rating of the pharmaceutical reps?
I took a fair amount of tylenol as a youngster. It never worked, but my parents had been sold some kind of fear-mongering about aspirin and ibuprofen causing rickets or something. For years, I thought "pain relievers" were just supposed to reduce the pain by an unnoticeable amount and give you something to do when you had a headache to feel like you were doing something.
Anyway, the point is.. I couldn't say I knew Tylenol contains acetaminophen if you handed me the box with the word acetaminophen highlighted on the ingredients list.
There are other options, though. You *could* set up your thumb drive to appear as an attached network storage device, rather than as a simple block device. Then it really doesn't matter what the underlying filesystem is.
When you say $1/Watt, do you mean, at the installation time, or at end of life? The amount of degradation and its speed is particularly important. Also, is the $1/watt the peak power of the panel, or the average over a cloudless year at some reference lattitude?
With the schedule he's laid out, he barely has enough time to sleep. By my count, he's got just one hour a day to prepare meals, read a book, date...
You're going to get fat and lonely with a schedule like that, and the loneliness is only going to make you fatter as you try to fill the void with food, and the kind of food you'll have access to with only an hour to prepare and eat is not going to be very slimming, even if you use peapod.
If he can't change the 12-hour days, at least get a small apartment near the business, or even on premises. I guarantee that a company of any decent size is going to have an executive apartment somewhere that goes mostly unused. Even if he has to clear out half the time, that's still saving three hours of commute on every evening he can avoid going home. That's three hours you could be cooking, relaxing, working out, working out with a partner, keeping up on professional development, getting drunk, learning to sing... the list is literally endless.
Check the classified ads, also. Sometimes people are looking to rent a room, and the price is therefore pretty good (well, crappy for the sq. footage, but fine for "a place to get some sack time") They'll love you, because you won't even be around half the time, let alone making noise or commotion. Obviously, you need to be careful there, but it's not like you just start renting without even meeting the people first.
OEM doesn't mean it won't work on Mac. It just means that MS reduces its 30 days of crappy support to zero days of support. (e.g. you as the ostensible manufacturer, will be responsible for providing that support)
You can get OEM editions at newegg (if you're in the US. I don't know how you do it outside the US)
The encryption thing is bullshit. People aren't using their computers as typing machines any more. They're also using them as accounting machines and online shopping machines.
Which means that personal, financial information is getting written out to the storage medium. Whether accidentally or purposely saved, or unintentionally cached.
IOW, every machine needs to have some basic encryption functionality by default, just to mitigate the risk of thieves getting access to people's bank accounts when they steal their crappy old computers (and in this case, the older, the worse, because that means more time for you to use your computer for financial transaction or managing with actual account numbers.
Apple puts encryption on every desktop (not on by default, but nevertheless present). Why can't Microsoft?
I'm old enough to have actually had a class on typing. The caps lock key make sense whenever your string of caps'd letters will be about five characters or more, for the simple reason that the shift keys interfere with your touch-typing rhythm.
That said, I can see the benefit of sticking control in that position on a laptop. As long as you can attach a real keyboard when you need to do some serious typing, or issue a control sequence that enters you into a similar state.
I've always found laptop layouts to be a little constricting anyway, probably because of smaller keys or tighter spacing. Which is unfortunate, because the keys themselves are generally quite amenable to touch-typing. Much better than the rubber bubble keyboards that are impossible to avoid at consumer pricing levels now.
Good idea ditching the extra launch vehicles. Let someone else take the risk if you can.
But an international consortium? Did he even pay attention to station?
International consortiums are great, if your goal is "to work together with other nations towards a goal." But they tend to fail miserably if you have something you want to actually accomplish. You end up doing everything redundantly anyway, and somehow it costs even more than just the redundancy ought to account for.
The only upside to the consortium idea is also a huge downside: you can sort-of force certain milestones by making them treaty obligations. Unfortunately, then you have a pile of treaty obligations in your way if you need to scrap part of the project to go down a better avenue, or you just want to cut your losses and get out.
The difference between a Professional photographer and an amateur photographer has always been the number of pictures he throws away. Digital cameras close the gap somewhat (and widen it in other ways).
But it might even be worth it to save the crap pictures these days since it's so incredibly cheap. Sure, you want to make an album in iPhocassa with the 50 or so pictures out of that 500 that are actually interesting or provoke memories of the event they were supposed to immortalize, but the remaining 450 might still be good for something. A collage, perhaps.
Now, a service I'd like to see is the other way around from your service (scanned film never seemed to work for me, no matter who I took it to. Better just to skip the middleman and go straight to the CCD). Send in some digital images and get back microfiche slides or microfilm collection of the whole dealy. store that in a box with a dvd and you're golden; even if you forget to refresh the dvd, at least you'll retain some high-quality fairly-permanent easily-viewable copies of the most important memories.
I'm not doing it wrong. Four years is nothing. I've got bulbs from 10 years and three houses ago. MTBF is a cold hearted bitch when you've got a lot of 'em, and putting some in the bathroom sure didn't help.
Side note:
"not buying shitty bulbs" stopped being an option when GE and Philips outsourced their CFL production to the same overseas factories that were putting out the crappy bulbs in the first place. This was, in fact, one of the many reasons (or rather, many instances of pretty much the same reason) that I no longer shop at Wal Mart unless absolutely necessary.
If you've got a list of genuinely not crappy bulbs and where you can buy them, I'll be quite interested in it.
At the moment, though, you have to factor in the fact that we're about to hit some mondo inflation due to the money Obama's been printing. So, it's actually a good idea right now to get into things that aren't pegged to the actual dollars. This guy is basically buying his electricity up front before his $40k is worthless.
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You don't encrypt to protect yourself from the NSA. If you're interesting to the NSA, they'll spend the resources to get the information they desire. And they'll get it one way or another involving a back door.
It should be about skills, both user skills and numerical skills. But numerical skills should be conservative: The base skills (before magical items are taken into account) should sum to the same number. Improving in one area comes at a cost of atrophy in another area, so that no matter how powerful your character becomes, there's always some kind of weakness that you need to overcome through cleverness or friends. Even magical items should always come with some kind of negative effect, even if it doesn't affect your stats.
Also, the RNG shouldn't be involved in the damage equation. The NPC move-decider, sure, but the damage equation should be deterministic based on the actions you and the thing you're fighting with decide upon.
Yes, and the reason resistive heating even approaches parity with other heat sources is that you use much less of it. A typical home on oil heat might have two or even one single zone. On electric heat, wherever there's a doorway, there's a new zone. Except, possibly, the closets. Yes, the half-bath is a separate heating zone in electric houses.
So you'll have a modest-sized home with seven or eight zones per floor, of which you use no more than three or four over the whole house at a time. The rest being set just high enough to make sure pipes won't freeze. And you'll usually have thicker outer walls, too, but that is an improvement that anyone can and probably should do regardless of heating source.
On the extra down-side, this makes programmable thermostats into a pretty crappy proposition for electric heat owners, even as programmable thermostats serve to benefit them the most: you could achieve some extremely fine control over each zone's heating with a simple PID controller, minimizing convective (T^3) and radiative (T^4) losses by never straying far above your comfort zone.
With heat-pump, you don't get the benefit of granular zones, but you spend closer to the same amount of money on heating a larger area, much like the oil and gas options. Straight-up resistive heating is a terrible option and should only be used where you need to maintain specific temperature tolerances.
If you have waste heat from your power plant as a heating option, resistive bulbs begin to make even less sense.
You would find less overall electricity usage by switching to CFL and using the difference in power to run a heat pump. Worst case scenario, the ground doesn't have any heat to give you and your pump defaults to standard resistance heating, which is where you are now. All other scenarios are improvements on that.
Unless, of course, you're not currently using electric resistance heating as your main heat supply. In which case, by answering the question, "why not," you will also know why you're not saving anything by relying on your lamps as auxiliary heat.
The moment I find these in stores I am IMMEDIATELY buying a few and replacing every bulb attached to a dimmer switch in my house. Ask anyone with a light dimmer who switched to CFL's, and this'll immediately be their biggest caveat with the tech.
The 'dimmer' cfls actually work pretty well, and the ones I have, have a better color temperature when dimmed than when full-on. Dimmed incandescents do very poorly when dimmed, shifting a lot of the energy into infra-red that you just can't see. Sure, you could save 25% of the power by getting 50% of the usable light*, but is that really efficiency?
*actually, I suspect it might be worse than that. That's just my first guess without doing any calculus.
No, what we need is some kind of pairing device. Your name ought to be a sufficient identifier, or your name plus a number if you couldn't think of an original name....
But if you want two groups to be able to share information on your behalf (say, a bank and a utility), there ought to be some kind of pairing process like with bluetooth, or SSL, or wireless networking...
Ideally, there would be some kind of smart device, possibly about the size of a library card so it would be convenient that could store and compute the "keys" to establish links.
The problem with a real ID card is that it would just be another number if we did it right now. Although the technology exists to do far better, the mindshare of cryptography is appallingly low.
We really need a "cryptology spokesman" with charisma to go out there and extol the virtues of not blabbing your freakin' financial information to everyone who asks. Or having a stupid number somewhere that does the same crap for you.
Not being careful with your personal data is like not being careful with your personal genitals. The more people you allow to access either, the more likely something very bad will happen.
Incredibly unlikely?? It's one in freaking three. 999999999 means only 1,000 million possible numbers, if the geographic coding didn't exist and the group coding didn't remove many numbers from the available number space, making things much, much worse. For a population of 300 million...
By my count, if there is no checking, the probability of collisions is incredibly high.
You're not allowed to jam them, but you're under no obligation to return them.
. The type of people who "can afford it" are the type of people who pay almost nothing. Hell even Warren Buffet [google.com] (who pays 17% tax whilst his assistant pays 30%) and Bill Gates (Sr.) [pbs.org] have been campaigning against the unfairness of how little they pay.
No they haven't. They've been using their own payment as an argument for raising how much YOU pay. If they really thought they weren't paying enough.... they'd pay more. It's not like the government doesn't accept donations.
Yeah, but if you're "super rich" all that money invested gets you is more money. If you spend it on fun toys.. you get to have the fun toys.
How do you evaluate that statement of "better" ness?
Cost per dose of equivalent relief?
Total mass of eq. relief?
Weighted, combined, fraction of harmful dosages?
some kind of measurable "harm" caused?
long-term socio-economic impact?
Hotness rating of the pharmaceutical reps?
I took a fair amount of tylenol as a youngster. It never worked, but my parents had been sold some kind of fear-mongering about aspirin and ibuprofen causing rickets or something. For years, I thought "pain relievers" were just supposed to reduce the pain by an unnoticeable amount and give you something to do when you had a headache to feel like you were doing something.
Anyway, the point is.. I couldn't say I knew Tylenol contains acetaminophen if you handed me the box with the word acetaminophen highlighted on the ingredients list.
There are other options, though. You *could* set up your thumb drive to appear as an attached network storage device, rather than as a simple block device. Then it really doesn't matter what the underlying filesystem is.
Of course there is. The easy workaround is to automatically load all of the link background images. Then the server can't sniff anything.
When you say $1/Watt, do you mean, at the installation time, or at end of life? The amount of degradation and its speed is particularly important. Also, is the $1/watt the peak power of the panel, or the average over a cloudless year at some reference lattitude?
With the schedule he's laid out, he barely has enough time to sleep. By my count, he's got just one hour a day to prepare meals, read a book, date...
You're going to get fat and lonely with a schedule like that, and the loneliness is only going to make you fatter as you try to fill the void with food, and the kind of food you'll have access to with only an hour to prepare and eat is not going to be very slimming, even if you use peapod.
If he can't change the 12-hour days, at least get a small apartment near the business, or even on premises. I guarantee that a company of any decent size is going to have an executive apartment somewhere that goes mostly unused. Even if he has to clear out half the time, that's still saving three hours of commute on every evening he can avoid going home. That's three hours you could be cooking, relaxing, working out, working out with a partner, keeping up on professional development, getting drunk, learning to sing... the list is literally endless.
Check the classified ads, also. Sometimes people are looking to rent a room, and the price is therefore pretty good (well, crappy for the sq. footage, but fine for "a place to get some sack time") They'll love you, because you won't even be around half the time, let alone making noise or commotion. Obviously, you need to be careful there, but it's not like you just start renting without even meeting the people first.
Wait.. Are microsoft's european distributors paying the same import duties, too? Maybe it's not microsoft that's creating the problem here...
OEM doesn't mean it won't work on Mac. It just means that MS reduces its 30 days of crappy support to zero days of support. (e.g. you as the ostensible manufacturer, will be responsible for providing that support)
You can get OEM editions at newegg (if you're in the US. I don't know how you do it outside the US)
The encryption thing is bullshit. People aren't using their computers as typing machines any more. They're also using them as accounting machines and online shopping machines.
Which means that personal, financial information is getting written out to the storage medium. Whether accidentally or purposely saved, or unintentionally cached.
IOW, every machine needs to have some basic encryption functionality by default, just to mitigate the risk of thieves getting access to people's bank accounts when they steal their crappy old computers (and in this case, the older, the worse, because that means more time for you to use your computer for financial transaction or managing with actual account numbers.
Apple puts encryption on every desktop (not on by default, but nevertheless present). Why can't Microsoft?
I'm old enough to have actually had a class on typing. The caps lock key make sense whenever your string of caps'd letters will be about five characters or more, for the simple reason that the shift keys interfere with your touch-typing rhythm.
That said, I can see the benefit of sticking control in that position on a laptop. As long as you can attach a real keyboard when you need to do some serious typing, or issue a control sequence that enters you into a similar state.
I've always found laptop layouts to be a little constricting anyway, probably because of smaller keys or tighter spacing. Which is unfortunate, because the keys themselves are generally quite amenable to touch-typing. Much better than the rubber bubble keyboards that are impossible to avoid at consumer pricing levels now.
Good idea ditching the extra launch vehicles. Let someone else take the risk if you can.
But an international consortium? Did he even pay attention to station?
International consortiums are great, if your goal is "to work together with other nations towards a goal." But they tend to fail miserably if you have something you want to actually accomplish. You end up doing everything redundantly anyway, and somehow it costs even more than just the redundancy ought to account for.
The only upside to the consortium idea is also a huge downside: you can sort-of force certain milestones by making them treaty obligations. Unfortunately, then you have a pile of treaty obligations in your way if you need to scrap part of the project to go down a better avenue, or you just want to cut your losses and get out.
The difference between a Professional photographer and an amateur photographer has always been the number of pictures he throws away. Digital cameras close the gap somewhat (and widen it in other ways).
But it might even be worth it to save the crap pictures these days since it's so incredibly cheap. Sure, you want to make an album in iPhocassa with the 50 or so pictures out of that 500 that are actually interesting or provoke memories of the event they were supposed to immortalize, but the remaining 450 might still be good for something. A collage, perhaps.
Now, a service I'd like to see is the other way around from your service (scanned film never seemed to work for me, no matter who I took it to. Better just to skip the middleman and go straight to the CCD). Send in some digital images and get back microfiche slides or microfilm collection of the whole dealy. store that in a box with a dvd and you're golden; even if you forget to refresh the dvd, at least you'll retain some high-quality fairly-permanent easily-viewable copies of the most important memories.
I'm not doing it wrong. Four years is nothing. I've got bulbs from 10 years and three houses ago. MTBF is a cold hearted bitch when you've got a lot of 'em, and putting some in the bathroom sure didn't help.
Side note:
"not buying shitty bulbs" stopped being an option when GE and Philips outsourced their CFL production to the same overseas factories that were putting out the crappy bulbs in the first place. This was, in fact, one of the many reasons (or rather, many instances of pretty much the same reason) that I no longer shop at Wal Mart unless absolutely necessary.
If you've got a list of genuinely not crappy bulbs and where you can buy them, I'll be quite interested in it.
At the moment, though, you have to factor in the fact that we're about to hit some mondo inflation due to the money Obama's been printing. So, it's actually a good idea right now to get into things that aren't pegged to the actual dollars. This guy is basically buying his electricity up front before his $40k is worthless.