There's nothing a graphing calculator can do on a test question that you couldn't do faster with a regular scientific calculator and some clever thinking. They're not only overpriced, they're a crutch that directly hinders college prep classes.
Wrong. The whole point to removing shoes is to sell more loafers.
It's all a conspiracy, but look at the facts: untying and removing shoes, then retying them is a hassle, especially frustrating for people who don't want to hold up the line. Frequent travelers will therefore "independently" come to the conclusion that they should wear a shoe that's easy to slip on and slip off. A shoe with no laces. But is still kinda dressy. Velcro sneakers just doesn't make for a good impression at a sales meeting.
I think it's time we seriously look into the corrupt influence of Big Shoe on DHS policy makers.
If you have access to unlimited energy, it's going to get used. The problem is that although your "infinite energy source" may itself be thermally stable, the things you do with it are not. Everything you do, even useful work, adds heat to the environment. If there is no limit to your activity, it's going to get pretty warm.
I'm no environmentalist, but even I would be opposed to a cheap, perfectly clean source of infinite energy. Unless it came with a cheap, perfectly clean, readily available infinite heat-sink.
Their loans get bought out by other lenders and the proceeds are used to repair the depositors. Since not all of the money is recoverable, the depositors still don't get everything back, but they can expect to get *something*.
Smaller planes. If the planes aren't big enough to be particularly dramatic weapons, then you don't need all the security on the front end. Just get rid of the huge terminal model and switch to a lot of smaller, more spread out, boutique airports.
Computer drives your car, leaving YOU free to man the turret. If Phone-y McSoccerMom gets too close, Blast her with a holosonic warning, "quit emailing movies of jr. or quit putting on makeup. Better yet, Both! Also, pay attention to the road. Unsevered necks don't grow on trees, you know." Then take a picture on your iiiPhone and email it to traffic control.
Further, what makes you think you can react to road dangers faster than a radar-equipped mesh-networking auto-bot?
Domain names are cheap. Just pick your registrar, write down a list of your desired domains (with a pen), and attempt to register one by one until you get one or run out of names. There's no reason to check for its availability first, if it's not available, you won't be able to buy it, anyway. Unless they sell you a domain that already belongs to someone else. But then they'd be committing fraud and I'd wager you'd have a pretty good basis for suit, or even pressing criminal charges.
You're arguing the wrong thing. TSA doesn't have constitutional authority to do *anything* they do. (except, maybe the sniffer, depending on how invasive it is.)
The big irony is that the airport search queues were perfectly legal when the airlines were running it: they have the right to specify the terms and conditions of ticket sales as long as you're informed of those terms before purchase. Obviously, there are certain rights you still couldn't sign away (like, an unlimited liability waiver), but I somehow doubt anyone would consider it unreasonable that they ask you to prove you aren't putting other passengers at risk. But as a routine measure for domestic flights, the government really has no authority (except what it has usurped) to violate people's right to be secure in their persons and papers. Unless you're going to argue that routine air travel is sufficient cause to issue a warrant for such search.
I often wonder what the result would be if, when they requested you show them something, you simply said, "No, thank you." And handed them a copy of the Bill of Rights if they demanded action. Sadly, my own cowardice regarding the results prevents me from trying it.
Another words, they choose the resolution that ensures the icons and texts don't get so small it's an eye sore.
I think you mean, "In other words..."
But more importantly, I think it's important to note that you're basically saying that monitor resolutions are being chosen to compensate for a failure of OS gui designers: There is a still natural font-size in pixels for each of the OSs, and although they allow you to resize display fonts, things just don't quite work right except at the default size. (at least, on all Windowses I've tried, 3.1,95,98,ME,XP and all the linuxes I've tried, Mandrake 5ish-8ish, Red Hat something, and Ubuntu Hoary through Gutsy)
Further, icons are still stored as small raster files instead of either vector-graphics files or larger raster files. Gone are the days where icons have to be super-small to conserve disk space, and where it didn't matter anyway because 640x480 was considered a relatively high-resolution display.
I never liked.28 dot pitch. I'd prefer a much smaller dot pitch, but arbitrarily sized text and graphics, for a super-sharp display. Font blockiness is one of the reasons that people print web pages if there is a lot to read: the higher resolution fonts are quite a bit easier on the eyes.
Personally, I think my ideal display would be something like 5000x3750 pixels and 300-500 hz refresh rate, in a size suitable for the application I'm using it for. ~21" diagonal for a desktop, a bit larger for a media room. Hopefully, by the time display technology is in danger of reaching that rather lofty standard, OS technology will be able to properly support it.
If, say, 50GB flash drives were sufficiently cheap to produce, the Blu-Ray/HDDVD format war would be over. The winner: USB-movies. That move would have significant advantage. For instance, imagine not having to worry about scratches, heat, or accidentally putting your film through the wash&dry (I, stupidly, did this once, and was quite pleasantly surprised).
Further, imagine being able to fit a large movie collection on a small shelf near the player and being able to carry movies around in your pocket.
Imagine players not bound by the medium: as larger capacities are available, they just plug in like everything else. No need for complicated gearing and lasers and whatnot. Obviously, eventually the transfer rate will be insufficient, but the processing power will probably also need to be upgraded to match newer codecs, so that's not really a problem.
Further, USB is pretty future proof. It's so useful, ubiquitous now and doesn't take up much space really, that legacy ports are likely to be included for decades.
Players already have USB ports, and the drives of 50GB capacity already exist. You can do each of the things I've mentioned individually with either flash or small hard disks, but it just hasn't been put together, and the price of ICs hasn't come down enough for a "thumb-drive" release to be viable.
I often wonder what it would cost to produce a custom read-only "thumb-drive" if you anticipated a production run of the order of a blockbuster DVD release.
I'm glad you enjoy your purchase, but although it is currently the best solution on the market, it remains far from the most efficient use of the various technologies in question. Although you're transferring 10.2Gbps of data over your HDMI link, you are not transferring 10.2Gbps of information.
If the information is coming from a BRD, then the rate is somewhere around 35-60 Mbps, and if it's from OTA digital, it's somewhere around 24 Mbps. Note that these two numbers are within an order of magnitude, although the disk contains quite a bit more information.
Based on what I've seen of PS3 games, I'd say that the actual information is considerably less than 35 Mbps, though it is less clear how to send only the good stuff, since it is not already in compressed form. This compares well with the observation that CGI films are not rendered in realtime on PS3s at the movie theater, but on huge render farms, taking more than 30 CPU-minutes per frame, before compressing into the various distribution formats.
Absolutely NO ONE is sending out full HDMI data streams of movies in any format. A two-hour film would occupy 9 terabytes at that rate. I used IMAX spools as an exaggeration, but I think you can clearly see how the weight of a movie collection would very quickly exceed the capacity of the average living room floor storing films of that size using existing media.
Anyway, the point is that you don't need to talk about whether you can send the full 10.2Gbps over wireless for a wireless link to be extremely useful. In fact, there is already plenty of capacity over existing wireless technologies to fully support movie watching, generated content from PS3, Xbox360, or computers notwithstanding. I don't think anyone was suggesting forgoing the physical link entirely, but rather opening up more connection options for people to avoid tangled wires and overpriced cables.
I look forward to seeing pictures of your to-be-built giant spool room and buggy-whip collection.
Just because you've already bought into the infant technology, doesn't mean that it's the best way to go about doing things, or that the better ways will make your bit useless. Other people could still benefit from looking at the problem from a different angle.
Data-rate is a non-argument for shooting down lower-bandwidth solutions than HDMI currently because there is no source of 10.2 Gbps information in the home at the moment.
Further, the OTA signal and the BRD format are both no more complicated than H.264, so your television is *already* capable of decompressing all of the High-Definition input options (and one of those, without modification) available (and if it doesn't, you bought it early enough that you knew you were basically beta testing), it's just not wired in a way that makes this accessible.
No matter which option you choose, no more than O(35 Mbps) of actual information makes it to your TV. Which is technically within range of fast ethernet or 802.11g networking, and well within the range of GigE. If any disks are encoded below the broadcast-standard bandwidth, they could be transmitted to the television on an empty channel, much like those FM radio thingies so popular amongst the portable music players, except with no degradation of signal.
I know they keep saying that, but aren't BluRay disks still essentially 12 cm polycarbonate disks with a reflective layer and a pitted layer?
Is the process really so different that it's easier to build an entire new plant rather than retool an existing DVD plant?
Harder than HD-DVD I can understand, but assuming BRD has won the format war (especially depressing as consumers haven't really had a say yet), I find it hard to believe DVD plants will basically be gutted and replaced as they phase out and BRD phases in.
And where are you getting this 10.2 Gbps signal, anyway? From a 50 GB Blu-ray disk? That's what, almost a minute?
If you put the decompressor in the set, what's the problem? You don't have anywhere near 10.2 Gbps of actual information coming into anyone's house via any method at the moment.*
*Ok, except maybe people with some kind of IMAX sized spools coming in by forklift. But I don't know many houses that are equipped to handle that kind of equipment.
BTW, OTA digital broadcast ranges from SD, all the way up to 1080p60 depending on the station. It's not compressed by reducing the pixels, but by reducing the detail, preferentially both in time and space.
The main flaw in the AC's plan is the question of whether or not good H.264 compressors can work in real time.
How about encrypting the link between your keyboard and PC? Your monitor?... Looks like you've just invented Palladium.
I meant encryption that you, as the user, have control over. Keyboard and monitor encryption are actually not bad ideas. They prevent a certain kind of invasion of privacy that is unlikely, but the cost of implementing them would also be low, so the cost is in line with the risk. As long as YOU can decide if you want it, and you can still use a the full capabilities of a monitor that doesn't support it.
I'm confused. Why is an antibiotic being used topically? Skin cells are already dead. Shouldn't they be using something a bit harsher? Maybe not bleach, but at least alcohol. If religious concerns are the problem, tough. Especially if it's the doctor's religious concerns.
A physical note would be stupid. It'd get torn off and tossed and forgotten about.
They should just do what the wireless servers at a lot of hotels do: redirect all http requests to an internal page server. Only instead of going to a billing page, if no password is set, the first page is the setup page.
ASIDE: Come to think of it, why is only the wireless bit encrypted? Shouldn't the wired links also be encrypted? It's not like that's compute expensive anymore.
Of course, then they'd have to remember set the password on their laptops...
Maybe some kind of "pairing," like in bluetooth, would be a better answer.
Yeah, automation wins, hands down. The purpose of a company isn't to provide some nebulous "jobs" for people. It's to create products or provide services. If fewer people are required to do those jobs, those people are freed up to make or do something else. The result is more wealth for everybody. I know it doesn't feel that way when your "source of income" is no longer necessary, but society as a whole benefits much more from automation than from maintaining "jobs."
The US auto industry is a prime example of it, but not in the way YOU think. In the US, labor held back a lot of automation, and as a result, most people are now buying cars from a country that embraced automation because they are not only safer and more efficient, but they're often cheaper as well. People are able to have cars that couldn't, or have better cars than they would otherwise be able to afford because of Japanese automation.
This kind of thing has been suggested for use in high-power spacecraft, and it's not necessarily sodium salt that's the storage mechanism.
I don't see why you'd lose much efficiency. You'd chose a salt that was molten over the operating range, and no matter what, you cannot exceed the temperature limitations of the other materials you've built the thing from, so that's your design temp. Because of the T(t) smoothing effects, you'd be able to run the generator at maximum efficiency for most of the time. Thus, you can size your machinery to the average capacity rather than the peak available solar input. Not spooling the generator up and down as the sun waxes and wanes is great for efficiency.
For instance, you might pick a salt that has a liquid-solid transition just below your desired T_hot, ensuring even temperature until all the salt solidifies. This has the added benefit that, depending on the expansion characteristics of the salt in question, you have a number of ways to evaluate the remaining generating capacity.
With good insulation, and a fixed installation can be made arbitrarily well insulated, you would lose a lot less energy than storage in batteries, and it scales very well: the larger the installation, the thinner the needed insulation is relative to the total volume.
The main loss would be radiation from the absorption patch. Presumably you'd mitigate this by having some kind of louver or hatch that you could close to insulate that during the night and overcast days. You could also take advantage of the much lower-than-the-sun temperatures, and use a covering that is transparent to visible light, but reflective to lower frequency light. Although there would still be a fair bit of radiation in the visible at reasonably efficient temperatures.
Just carry a gun, already. The odds that the bad guys are going to continue to lock you in the "assorted dangerous chemicals and useful tools room" without searching your pockets are pretty low. I recommend a P90, the clear plastic magazine looks really neat.
Well, in this case, in a sense, the government isn't really subsidizing television watching, but buying out analog television viewers. The switchover reduces the utility of the existing equipment for many people and hits poor people hardest. It's a very regressive tax, in a sense, and it doesn't matter whether they buy a receiver or not. Either they're out the cost of the receiver, or they're out the programming. It's up to the individual to decide which is worth more.
So, the coupons aren't quite as bad as real socialism, provided they are more than paid for by utilization of the freed-up spectrum, whether that means a bandwidth lease or civil service divying up, or what have you. Though it's easiest to determine the value of a bandwidth lease*: it's what someone pays for it.
*I really wish they wouldn't call it a bandwidth sale. It would be incredibly foolish to grant irrevocable permanent exclusive rights to a private entity to exploit such a pervasive public resource, and incredibly difficult to properly value it. A lease makes much more sense from a practical perspective, and it's what the politicians mean when they say sale, anyway.
Which is why Boeing will turn out to have been surprisingly prescient in not building an A380 competitor. The future of air travel is smaller, more numerous, more direct flights, (which happen to be less threatening to buildings as a bonus) as evidenced by the fact that Southwest regularly posts profit, while Delta does not.
Yeah, but those guys didn't manipulate rockets to attack people. They wanted to build rockets, and the only people buying rockets wanted to attack other people.
After the war we paid them to build even bigger rockets, for pretty much the same purpose, except we wisely realized we could showcase our precision guidance and heavy-lift capability with a seemingly innocuous exploration and science mission.
Phone phreakers didn't necessarily know enough about the phone system to actually create anything.
Slashdot Mirror
There's nothing a graphing calculator can do on a test question that you couldn't do faster with a regular scientific calculator and some clever thinking. They're not only overpriced, they're a crutch that directly hinders college prep classes.
Wrong. The whole point to removing shoes is to sell more loafers.
It's all a conspiracy, but look at the facts: untying and removing shoes, then retying them is a hassle, especially frustrating for people who don't want to hold up the line. Frequent travelers will therefore "independently" come to the conclusion that they should wear a shoe that's easy to slip on and slip off. A shoe with no laces. But is still kinda dressy. Velcro sneakers just doesn't make for a good impression at a sales meeting.
I think it's time we seriously look into the corrupt influence of Big Shoe on DHS policy makers.
If you have access to unlimited energy, it's going to get used. The problem is that although your "infinite energy source" may itself be thermally stable, the things you do with it are not. Everything you do, even useful work, adds heat to the environment. If there is no limit to your activity, it's going to get pretty warm.
I'm no environmentalist, but even I would be opposed to a cheap, perfectly clean source of infinite energy. Unless it came with a cheap, perfectly clean, readily available infinite heat-sink.
Just try and imagine the lance that would compose UPP (universal parallel port) if constructed in the same way....
Their loans get bought out by other lenders and the proceeds are used to repair the depositors. Since not all of the money is recoverable, the depositors still don't get everything back, but they can expect to get *something*.
Smaller planes. If the planes aren't big enough to be particularly dramatic weapons, then you don't need all the security on the front end. Just get rid of the huge terminal model and switch to a lot of smaller, more spread out, boutique airports.
Computer drives your car, leaving YOU free to man the turret. If Phone-y McSoccerMom gets too close, Blast her with a holosonic warning, "quit emailing movies of jr. or quit putting on makeup. Better yet, Both! Also, pay attention to the road. Unsevered necks don't grow on trees, you know." Then take a picture on your iiiPhone and email it to traffic control.
Further, what makes you think you can react to road dangers faster than a radar-equipped mesh-networking auto-bot?
Domain names are cheap. Just pick your registrar, write down a list of your desired domains (with a pen), and attempt to register one by one until you get one or run out of names. There's no reason to check for its availability first, if it's not available, you won't be able to buy it, anyway. Unless they sell you a domain that already belongs to someone else. But then they'd be committing fraud and I'd wager you'd have a pretty good basis for suit, or even pressing criminal charges.
You're arguing the wrong thing. TSA doesn't have constitutional authority to do *anything* they do. (except, maybe the sniffer, depending on how invasive it is.)
The big irony is that the airport search queues were perfectly legal when the airlines were running it: they have the right to specify the terms and conditions of ticket sales as long as you're informed of those terms before purchase. Obviously, there are certain rights you still couldn't sign away (like, an unlimited liability waiver), but I somehow doubt anyone would consider it unreasonable that they ask you to prove you aren't putting other passengers at risk. But as a routine measure for domestic flights, the government really has no authority (except what it has usurped) to violate people's right to be secure in their persons and papers. Unless you're going to argue that routine air travel is sufficient cause to issue a warrant for such search.
I often wonder what the result would be if, when they requested you show them something, you simply said, "No, thank you." And handed them a copy of the Bill of Rights if they demanded action. Sadly, my own cowardice regarding the results prevents me from trying it.
But more importantly, I think it's important to note that you're basically saying that monitor resolutions are being chosen to compensate for a failure of OS gui designers: There is a still natural font-size in pixels for each of the OSs, and although they allow you to resize display fonts, things just don't quite work right except at the default size. (at least, on all Windowses I've tried, 3.1,95,98,ME,XP and all the linuxes I've tried, Mandrake 5ish-8ish, Red Hat something, and Ubuntu Hoary through Gutsy)
Further, icons are still stored as small raster files instead of either vector-graphics files or larger raster files. Gone are the days where icons have to be super-small to conserve disk space, and where it didn't matter anyway because 640x480 was considered a relatively high-resolution display.
I never liked
Personally, I think my ideal display would be something like 5000x3750 pixels and 300-500 hz refresh rate, in a size suitable for the application I'm using it for. ~21" diagonal for a desktop, a bit larger for a media room. Hopefully, by the time display technology is in danger of reaching that rather lofty standard, OS technology will be able to properly support it.
If, say, 50GB flash drives were sufficiently cheap to produce, the Blu-Ray/HDDVD format war would be over. The winner: USB-movies. That move would have significant advantage. For instance, imagine not having to worry about scratches, heat, or accidentally putting your film through the wash&dry (I, stupidly, did this once, and was quite pleasantly surprised).
Further, imagine being able to fit a large movie collection on a small shelf near the player and being able to carry movies around in your pocket.
Imagine players not bound by the medium: as larger capacities are available, they just plug in like everything else. No need for complicated gearing and lasers and whatnot. Obviously, eventually the transfer rate will be insufficient, but the processing power will probably also need to be upgraded to match newer codecs, so that's not really a problem.
Further, USB is pretty future proof. It's so useful, ubiquitous now and doesn't take up much space really, that legacy ports are likely to be included for decades.
Players already have USB ports, and the drives of 50GB capacity already exist. You can do each of the things I've mentioned individually with either flash or small hard disks, but it just hasn't been put together, and the price of ICs hasn't come down enough for a "thumb-drive" release to be viable.
I often wonder what it would cost to produce a custom read-only "thumb-drive" if you anticipated a production run of the order of a blockbuster DVD release.
I'm glad you enjoy your purchase, but although it is currently the best solution on the market, it remains far from the most efficient use of the various technologies in question. Although you're transferring 10.2Gbps of data over your HDMI link, you are not transferring 10.2Gbps of information.
If the information is coming from a BRD, then the rate is somewhere around 35-60 Mbps, and if it's from OTA digital, it's somewhere around 24 Mbps. Note that these two numbers are within an order of magnitude, although the disk contains quite a bit more information.
Based on what I've seen of PS3 games, I'd say that the actual information is considerably less than 35 Mbps, though it is less clear how to send only the good stuff, since it is not already in compressed form. This compares well with the observation that CGI films are not rendered in realtime on PS3s at the movie theater, but on huge render farms, taking more than 30 CPU-minutes per frame, before compressing into the various distribution formats.
Absolutely NO ONE is sending out full HDMI data streams of movies in any format. A two-hour film would occupy 9 terabytes at that rate. I used IMAX spools as an exaggeration, but I think you can clearly see how the weight of a movie collection would very quickly exceed the capacity of the average living room floor storing films of that size using existing media.
Anyway, the point is that you don't need to talk about whether you can send the full 10.2Gbps over wireless for a wireless link to be extremely useful. In fact, there is already plenty of capacity over existing wireless technologies to fully support movie watching, generated content from PS3, Xbox360, or computers notwithstanding. I don't think anyone was suggesting forgoing the physical link entirely, but rather opening up more connection options for people to avoid tangled wires and overpriced cables.
I look forward to seeing pictures of your to-be-built giant spool room and buggy-whip collection.
Just because you've already bought into the infant technology, doesn't mean that it's the best way to go about doing things, or that the better ways will make your bit useless. Other people could still benefit from looking at the problem from a different angle.
Data-rate is a non-argument for shooting down lower-bandwidth solutions than HDMI currently because there is no source of 10.2 Gbps information in the home at the moment.
Further, the OTA signal and the BRD format are both no more complicated than H.264, so your television is *already* capable of decompressing all of the High-Definition input options (and one of those, without modification) available (and if it doesn't, you bought it early enough that you knew you were basically beta testing), it's just not wired in a way that makes this accessible.
No matter which option you choose, no more than O(35 Mbps) of actual information makes it to your TV. Which is technically within range of fast ethernet or 802.11g networking, and well within the range of GigE. If any disks are encoded below the broadcast-standard bandwidth, they could be transmitted to the television on an empty channel, much like those FM radio thingies so popular amongst the portable music players, except with no degradation of signal.
I know they keep saying that, but aren't BluRay disks still essentially 12 cm polycarbonate disks with a reflective layer and a pitted layer?
Is the process really so different that it's easier to build an entire new plant rather than retool an existing DVD plant?
Harder than HD-DVD I can understand, but assuming BRD has won the format war (especially depressing as consumers haven't really had a say yet), I find it hard to believe DVD plants will basically be gutted and replaced as they phase out and BRD phases in.
And where are you getting this 10.2 Gbps signal, anyway? From a 50 GB Blu-ray disk? That's what, almost a minute?
If you put the decompressor in the set, what's the problem? You don't have anywhere near 10.2 Gbps of actual information coming into anyone's house via any method at the moment.*
*Ok, except maybe people with some kind of IMAX sized spools coming in by forklift. But I don't know many houses that are equipped to handle that kind of equipment.
BTW, OTA digital broadcast ranges from SD, all the way up to 1080p60 depending on the station. It's not compressed by reducing the pixels, but by reducing the detail, preferentially both in time and space.
The main flaw in the AC's plan is the question of whether or not good H.264 compressors can work in real time.
I meant encryption that you, as the user, have control over. Keyboard and monitor encryption are actually not bad ideas. They prevent a certain kind of invasion of privacy that is unlikely, but the cost of implementing them would also be low, so the cost is in line with the risk. As long as YOU can decide if you want it, and you can still use a the full capabilities of a monitor that doesn't support it.
I'm confused. Why is an antibiotic being used topically? Skin cells are already dead. Shouldn't they be using something a bit harsher? Maybe not bleach, but at least alcohol. If religious concerns are the problem, tough. Especially if it's the doctor's religious concerns.
A physical note would be stupid. It'd get torn off and tossed and forgotten about.
They should just do what the wireless servers at a lot of hotels do: redirect all http requests to an internal page server. Only instead of going to a billing page, if no password is set, the first page is the setup page.
ASIDE: Come to think of it, why is only the wireless bit encrypted? Shouldn't the wired links also be encrypted? It's not like that's compute expensive anymore.
Of course, then they'd have to remember set the password on their laptops...
Maybe some kind of "pairing," like in bluetooth, would be a better answer.
Yeah, automation wins, hands down. The purpose of a company isn't to provide some nebulous "jobs" for people. It's to create products or provide services. If fewer people are required to do those jobs, those people are freed up to make or do something else. The result is more wealth for everybody. I know it doesn't feel that way when your "source of income" is no longer necessary, but society as a whole benefits much more from automation than from maintaining "jobs."
The US auto industry is a prime example of it, but not in the way YOU think. In the US, labor held back a lot of automation, and as a result, most people are now buying cars from a country that embraced automation because they are not only safer and more efficient, but they're often cheaper as well. People are able to have cars that couldn't, or have better cars than they would otherwise be able to afford because of Japanese automation.
This kind of thing has been suggested for use in high-power spacecraft, and it's not necessarily sodium salt that's the storage mechanism.
I don't see why you'd lose much efficiency. You'd chose a salt that was molten over the operating range, and no matter what, you cannot exceed the temperature limitations of the other materials you've built the thing from, so that's your design temp. Because of the T(t) smoothing effects, you'd be able to run the generator at maximum efficiency for most of the time. Thus, you can size your machinery to the average capacity rather than the peak available solar input. Not spooling the generator up and down as the sun waxes and wanes is great for efficiency.
For instance, you might pick a salt that has a liquid-solid transition just below your desired T_hot, ensuring even temperature until all the salt solidifies. This has the added benefit that, depending on the expansion characteristics of the salt in question, you have a number of ways to evaluate the remaining generating capacity.
With good insulation, and a fixed installation can be made arbitrarily well insulated, you would lose a lot less energy than storage in batteries, and it scales very well: the larger the installation, the thinner the needed insulation is relative to the total volume.
The main loss would be radiation from the absorption patch. Presumably you'd mitigate this by having some kind of louver or hatch that you could close to insulate that during the night and overcast days. You could also take advantage of the much lower-than-the-sun temperatures, and use a covering that is transparent to visible light, but reflective to lower frequency light. Although there would still be a fair bit of radiation in the visible at reasonably efficient temperatures.
Just carry a gun, already. The odds that the bad guys are going to continue to lock you in the "assorted dangerous chemicals and useful tools room" without searching your pockets are pretty low. I recommend a P90, the clear plastic magazine looks really neat.
Well, in this case, in a sense, the government isn't really subsidizing television watching, but buying out analog television viewers. The switchover reduces the utility of the existing equipment for many people and hits poor people hardest. It's a very regressive tax, in a sense, and it doesn't matter whether they buy a receiver or not. Either they're out the cost of the receiver, or they're out the programming. It's up to the individual to decide which is worth more.
So, the coupons aren't quite as bad as real socialism, provided they are more than paid for by utilization of the freed-up spectrum, whether that means a bandwidth lease or civil service divying up, or what have you. Though it's easiest to determine the value of a bandwidth lease*: it's what someone pays for it.
*I really wish they wouldn't call it a bandwidth sale. It would be incredibly foolish to grant irrevocable permanent exclusive rights to a private entity to exploit such a pervasive public resource, and incredibly difficult to properly value it. A lease makes much more sense from a practical perspective, and it's what the politicians mean when they say sale, anyway.
Which is why Boeing will turn out to have been surprisingly prescient in not building an A380 competitor. The future of air travel is smaller, more numerous, more direct flights, (which happen to be less threatening to buildings as a bonus) as evidenced by the fact that Southwest regularly posts profit, while Delta does not.
Yeah, but those guys didn't manipulate rockets to attack people. They wanted to build rockets, and the only people buying rockets wanted to attack other people.
After the war we paid them to build even bigger rockets, for pretty much the same purpose, except we wisely realized we could showcase our precision guidance and heavy-lift capability with a seemingly innocuous exploration and science mission.
Phone phreakers didn't necessarily know enough about the phone system to actually create anything.