The power company shouldn't be able to directly control when you run your appliances and whatnot, but you've plenty of freedom to act when the prices are known. You just need equipment to set max-price cutoff and for variable equipment, like water heaters, price-usage function.
You should be able to decide, "Yeah, I'm willing to pay extra for A/C at an acceptable level, I just won't watch television at the same time during peak pricing" Heck, the current price per usage could even be displayed for high-power devices, allowing you to directly make decisions based on power pricing.
Like, "normally I wouldn't use the AC, but I'm willing to pay a little extra because I have guests."
The real problem is that with constant pricing, the variable costs are hidden from you, which promotes a usage profile that abuses those costs.
Woah woah woah.. Who decided that 78 degrees is the target here and that less than that is "unacceptable?"
Humans are most comfortable at a "room temperature" of 72 degrees, on average. At 78, you're going to have nearly one standard deviation of people that are actually sweating (and not necessarily just the fatties, either). I think we can all agree that office stench is also important to keep down.
The problem is manifold, as like I often say, "You can always put on another sweater. You can't take off more clothes than all of 'em."
an amp is useless unless you have one at both ends. If you transmit at 10W or 100W, plenty of people will be able to hear you that you won't be able to hear unless they also are transmitting at 10W or 100W. (and if you can hear them, then you didn't need the full power for them to hear you.)
Now you *could* use a very fancy antenna system, and combine a high-power dipole with an array (or virtual array using DSP) of highly directional antennas with overlapping coverage over the same area as your dipole.
It's not even an analogy. It's literally the pricing scheme adopted by the ISPs.
They charge "per person" with the expectation that the average person will take only so much. But that assumption goes all to heck if people start sub-letting their buffet plates.
If you wanted "all you (and everone you want to call 'friend') can eat," you should have bought that plan. Not the "all you can eat" plan, which assumes that you'll be the only one doing the eating.
And how, exactly, is it supposed to make us feel better about a country that "making a foreign power with a very large, competent military quite nervous about our martial capabilities and intentions" is a popularity enhancing move?
Look, I'm as racist as the next guy. But in this case it's Jackson, specifically, that I object to. I'm not suggesting that the role is a stretch. Rather, precisely the opposite: it's like he gets all the parts like this.
to paraphrase the tagline from another of his movies, I'm sick and tired of all the MF'in MF'ers being played by SL"MF'in"J.
I mean, I'm getting a little tired of every badass, comic-booky character getting played by Samuel L. "Motherf***ing" Jackson. It wasn't even his wallet.
I mean, he got is own specially gay coloured lightsaber in the Star Wars films.
So.. Props for being lucky enough to have been in Pulp Fiction, but enough, already. There're probably a thousand guys stoically auditioning for things that would be better choices than him. I don't even see the characters of the films he's in any more. I just see, SLJ doing stuff.
In the movie version, the Mk. III Iron Man suit runs a proprietary OS with a voice-activated expert system with implausibly good semantic understanding.
You don't have the ability though. Your neighbors' wi-fi leaks onto your property, probably a half dozen or so shock-jock in the morning, generic pop in the evening FM radio shows going through your property all the time.
Not to mention the medium wave radiation given off by the various political commentators.
What are you going to do, erect a giant Faraday cage around your property?
Yeah, but the conversion factor from angstroms to nanometers is a factor of ten. 1 deca-angstrom = 1 nm. The conversion factor from ergs to joules is a similar constant factor.
The conversion factor between "look at me, I'm a clever engineer binary almost-prefixes" and standard SI prefixes varies depending on the prefix. And the difference is only going to get worse as we increase the number. For instance, a yottabyte in the binary notation of 2^10n is 2^240 = 1,766,847,064,778,384,329,583,297,500, 742,918,515,827,483,896,875,618,958,121,606,201,292,619,776
but, unfortunately, 2^239 = 883,423,532,389,192,164,791,648,750,371,459,257,913,741,948, 437,809,479,060,803,100,646,309,888
more closely approximates the SI yottabyte, so which one will you use?
Further, only OS and RAM designers have any history of using the binary prefixes. In every other area, SI prefixes were already established as standard. Processor speed in megacycles? Communications industry already used SI prefixes, for about a hundred years.
We get it. They were a clever little trick that joked about computers using binary arithmetic. That in no way means they should be accepted as a standard for commerce. It's about communication, as you say, and it is better for communication not to have to explain domain specific use of words that have standard use.
I was under the impression that 2x4s are, in fact, actually 2in by 4in when cut wet, but shrink to the standard size when seasoned. Or, at least, did at some point in their history of manufacture.
Wrong question. Why is it that everyone assumes the hard drive manufacturers are doing the dumb thing. They are using the prefixes as SI intended, after all.
They should really sue the OS distributors for under-reporting both the size of the disk, and the size of the files on the disk.
A kilobyte is 10^3 bytes. You are thinking of a Kibibyte (kilo_binary-byte) where kilo_binary takes advantage of the fact that 2^10 is very close to 10^3. Unfortunately it gets worse for mega, giga, etc, which is why SI finally ruled on the standards.
I believe it's customary to include a relevant xkcd
They secretly don't like rich people and want to make them sit first so their heads will be about ass-level when the unwashed masses walk by.
Lots of things about first class don't make any sense. Seat first?? how is that a privilege? No matter how comfy those seats are, they can't possibly be more comfortable than the first class lounge in the terminal.
It was extremely unlikely IMO to have been in the grid that was searched. It is said he was looking for a nice flat location to shoot for a new land speed record, but the ground in the search grid was anything but, and plainly obvious to even an untrained eye. Expanding the map did not indicate that flat areas were just within range, either. It was pretty far up in the rockies.
Step one if I was in charge of the search would be to look at some topo maps and find all the listed relatively flat areas within the plane's range, regardless of the direction anyone claimed he was heading in, And search expanding swatches along the paths to each.
There's the problem. The only way we're going to improve the economy, is if people stop producing and working so much.
No, that's what the governments in 1984 thought. They tried to make sure that only just enough wealth to survive was produced and no more, and kept ongoing wars to make sure that any surplus production was thoroughly used up. That's why the chocolate ration kept going down (and probably other rations not mentioned): they found that the level they were providing was sufficient, and tried the next lower level in an iterative process to find the minimum needed.
The problem is, it's not a recipe for prosperity or quality of life for a society. It's a prescription for population control. In the real world, society as a whole benefits from every bit of economic production. The more overall wealth that is produced, the more wealth that any individual person can enjoy.
Now, there are good reasons not to work a 100 hour week (though 60-70 hours with no commute is not so bad compared to straight 40 with a long commute. A commute is really unpaid overtime when you think about it.) For instance, in many jobs, there are about three hours where you do your best work, and the rest of the time you're really just woolgathering. And you certainly oughtn't work harder than you need to for the life you want. You need to be able to enjoy the fruits of your labors.
But let's not pretend that people would be better off economically if they didn't work so hard.
So.. authors should make up their own language then? and their own glyphs to represent that language? and write the book entirely in that language, with custom copyright notice In the made up language? And come up with a new way of creating paper and ink, applying the ink to the paper (or better yet, some concept that's new. ink is already thought of), a new way of binding the book, and indeed, a new literary element (books have already been thought of)...
Slashdot Mirror
That's the dumb version of a very good idea:
Variable pricing.
The power company shouldn't be able to directly control when you run your appliances and whatnot, but you've plenty of freedom to act when the prices are known. You just need equipment to set max-price cutoff and for variable equipment, like water heaters, price-usage function.
You should be able to decide, "Yeah, I'm willing to pay extra for A/C at an acceptable level, I just won't watch television at the same time during peak pricing" Heck, the current price per usage could even be displayed for high-power devices, allowing you to directly make decisions based on power pricing.
Like, "normally I wouldn't use the AC, but I'm willing to pay a little extra because I have guests."
The real problem is that with constant pricing, the variable costs are hidden from you, which promotes a usage profile that abuses those costs.
Woah woah woah.. Who decided that 78 degrees is the target here and that less than that is "unacceptable?"
Humans are most comfortable at a "room temperature" of 72 degrees, on average. At 78, you're going to have nearly one standard deviation of people that are actually sweating (and not necessarily just the fatties, either). I think we can all agree that office stench is also important to keep down.
The problem is manifold, as like I often say, "You can always put on another sweater. You can't take off more clothes than all of 'em."
No it isn't. You have to build dams for that, which the environmentalists will also object to.
At least, the preview wasn't. The preview was quite clearly for a movie about F-Zero.
To be fair, very few British cops know how to use guns. At least, if the gun control advocates on my side of the pond can be believed.
an amp is useless unless you have one at both ends. If you transmit at 10W or 100W, plenty of people will be able to hear you that you won't be able to hear unless they also are transmitting at 10W or 100W. (and if you can hear them, then you didn't need the full power for them to hear you.)
Now you *could* use a very fancy antenna system, and combine a high-power dipole with an array (or virtual array using DSP) of highly directional antennas with overlapping coverage over the same area as your dipole.
But that gets expensive rather quicly.
Actually, I think it may be the 'r' on the end of the last word that makes all the difference.
Yes, precisely like a buffet.
It's not even an analogy. It's literally the pricing scheme adopted by the ISPs.
They charge "per person" with the expectation that the average person will take only so much. But that assumption goes all to heck if people start sub-letting their buffet plates.
If you wanted "all you (and everone you want to call 'friend') can eat," you should have bought that plan. Not the "all you can eat" plan, which assumes that you'll be the only one doing the eating.
And how, exactly, is it supposed to make us feel better about a country that "making a foreign power with a very large, competent military quite nervous about our martial capabilities and intentions" is a popularity enhancing move?
Look, I'm as racist as the next guy. But in this case it's Jackson, specifically, that I object to. I'm not suggesting that the role is a stretch. Rather, precisely the opposite: it's like he gets all the parts like this.
to paraphrase the tagline from another of his movies, I'm sick and tired of all the MF'in MF'ers being played by SL"MF'in"J.
Superman Returns was terrible, but also hillarious.
Especially as it introduced his new power, fresh from Krypton:
Super Stalking!
Man, they made superman one creepy guy in that film.
Yeah, I was disappointed with that, too.
I mean, I'm getting a little tired of every badass, comic-booky character getting played by Samuel L. "Motherf***ing" Jackson. It wasn't even his wallet.
I mean, he got is own specially gay coloured lightsaber in the Star Wars films.
So.. Props for being lucky enough to have been in Pulp Fiction, but enough, already. There're probably a thousand guys stoically auditioning for things that would be better choices than him. I don't even see the characters of the films he's in any more. I just see, SLJ doing stuff.
In the movie version, the Mk. III Iron Man suit runs a proprietary OS with a voice-activated expert system with implausibly good semantic understanding.
So presumably, it could run linux.
That seems like a moral thing to do, until you realize that it is exactly the kind of "market segmentation" goal that gave us region encoded DVDs.
You don't have the ability though. Your neighbors' wi-fi leaks onto your property, probably a half dozen or so shock-jock in the morning, generic pop in the evening FM radio shows going through your property all the time.
Not to mention the medium wave radiation given off by the various political commentators.
What are you going to do, erect a giant Faraday cage around your property?
Well there's an easy way to find out. Take a calipers with you and ask the closest lumber mill to give you a tour. Then, measure the rough-cut 2x4s.
Yeah, but the conversion factor from angstroms to nanometers is a factor of ten. 1 deca-angstrom = 1 nm. The conversion factor from ergs to joules is a similar constant factor.
The conversion factor between "look at me, I'm a clever engineer binary almost-prefixes" and standard SI prefixes varies depending on the prefix. And the difference is only going to get worse as we increase the number. For instance, a yottabyte in the binary notation of 2^10n is 2^240 = 1,766,847,064,778,384,329,583,297,500,
742,918,515,827,483,896,875,618,958,121,606,201,292,619,776
but, unfortunately, 2^239 = 883,423,532,389,192,164,791,648,750,371,459,257,913,741,948,
437,809,479,060,803,100,646,309,888
more closely approximates the SI yottabyte, so which one will you use?
Further, only OS and RAM designers have any history of using the binary prefixes. In every other area, SI prefixes were already established as standard. Processor speed in megacycles? Communications industry already used SI prefixes, for about a hundred years.
We get it. They were a clever little trick that joked about computers using binary arithmetic. That in no way means they should be accepted as a standard for commerce. It's about communication, as you say, and it is better for communication not to have to explain domain specific use of words that have standard use.
At what point were hard disks ever sold in clever-binary-kludge units?
I was under the impression that 2x4s are, in fact, actually 2in by 4in when cut wet, but shrink to the standard size when seasoned. Or, at least, did at some point in their history of manufacture.
Wrong question. Why is it that everyone assumes the hard drive manufacturers are doing the dumb thing. They are using the prefixes as SI intended, after all.
They should really sue the OS distributors for under-reporting both the size of the disk, and the size of the files on the disk.
A kilobyte is 10^3 bytes. You are thinking of a Kibibyte (kilo_binary-byte) where kilo_binary takes advantage of the fact that 2^10 is very close to 10^3. Unfortunately it gets worse for mega, giga, etc, which is why SI finally ruled on the standards.
I believe it's customary to include a relevant xkcd
They secretly don't like rich people and want to make them sit first so their heads will be about ass-level when the unwashed masses walk by.
Lots of things about first class don't make any sense. Seat first?? how is that a privilege? No matter how comfy those seats are, they can't possibly be more comfortable than the first class lounge in the terminal.
It was extremely unlikely IMO to have been in the grid that was searched. It is said he was looking for a nice flat location to shoot for a new land speed record, but the ground in the search grid was anything but, and plainly obvious to even an untrained eye. Expanding the map did not indicate that flat areas were just within range, either. It was pretty far up in the rockies.
Step one if I was in charge of the search would be to look at some topo maps and find all the listed relatively flat areas within the plane's range, regardless of the direction anyone claimed he was heading in, And search expanding swatches along the paths to each.
No, that's what the governments in 1984 thought. They tried to make sure that only just enough wealth to survive was produced and no more, and kept ongoing wars to make sure that any surplus production was thoroughly used up. That's why the chocolate ration kept going down (and probably other rations not mentioned): they found that the level they were providing was sufficient, and tried the next lower level in an iterative process to find the minimum needed.
The problem is, it's not a recipe for prosperity or quality of life for a society. It's a prescription for population control. In the real world, society as a whole benefits from every bit of economic production. The more overall wealth that is produced, the more wealth that any individual person can enjoy.
Now, there are good reasons not to work a 100 hour week (though 60-70 hours with no commute is not so bad compared to straight 40 with a long commute. A commute is really unpaid overtime when you think about it.) For instance, in many jobs, there are about three hours where you do your best work, and the rest of the time you're really just woolgathering. And you certainly oughtn't work harder than you need to for the life you want. You need to be able to enjoy the fruits of your labors.
But let's not pretend that people would be better off economically if they didn't work so hard.
So.. authors should make up their own language then? and their own glyphs to represent that language? and write the book entirely in that language, with custom copyright notice In the made up language? And come up with a new way of creating paper and ink, applying the ink to the paper (or better yet, some concept that's new. ink is already thought of), a new way of binding the book, and indeed, a new literary element (books have already been thought of)...
Good luck getting anyone to read that.