So why is the UK, and Europe in general, not a hot bed of solar/electric/green technology? You'd think with such high gas prices there would be a HUGE incentive to develop alternatives...
Err it is? But what does that have to do with gas? Gas is not used to make electricity, and electricity use in manufacture is not a significant part of gas prices.
Gas taxes raise prices, which lowers demand thus forcing before-tax prices down. The tax income can be used to lower harmful taxes like income taxes. What is not to like?
Just 5 years of "high" oil prices have forced the car industry to make vastly more efficient cars -- maybe even 20% on the basis of similar 2007 and 2012 cars. Even more if you consider that people switch to smaller cars. Imagine if a united Western world had mandated 15 years ago that gas prices must go up just 4% every year, either from a rise in oil prices or a rise in gas tax.
It sounds like the other divisions were losing money. Why was it bad for them to be divested? Getting large dividends for 10 years beats getting nothing for 50 years. (I don't know if Kodak actually paid dividends at the time. They should have done at least.)
They weren't arrogant so much as incompetent when it comes to electronics. There is nothing wrong with being a one-trick-pony as long as you know when to give up. It is not necessarily best for society if companies survive forever, sometimes it is better to let the old ones die and new ones appear.
The market didn't change, it disappeared and was replaced with a new market. Kodak tried to switch to that new market, but since it had no particular advantage over its competitors, it failed.
Kodak had two real strengths, its chemical products and its widespread distribution where people could always get their film to somewhere who could develop them and get the finished prints/slides back. Suddenly it is producing electronics and the distribution network is mostly a hindrance rather than a help.
The prudent way to handle such a situation is to extract as much profit from the existing market as possible, give as much money to the shareholders as possible, and downsize operations as the market shrinks. The shareholders can then reinvest in companies which are competitive in the new market. Doing this is not a failure, it is simply good business sense and good for society as a whole.
Some cars already come with battery heating systems which prevent the problem, unless you park for an extended length of time in -30C without connecting power.
It seems that people living in areas where -30C is common are rather good at dealing with the challenges of gasoline/diesel engines at those temperatures. I am sure that they will find creative solutions for getting electric vehicles running too.
And if no solution is found in the next 10 years, that is probably ok too. If we switch everyone else to electric vehicles, we can probably allow Canada and Finland to continue burning a bit of fuel.
Look, straight from first hit on Google, the turbine mentioned is rated for 600W at 12.5m/s. If you have average winds of 12.5m/s this turbine will work great, but then you are in a very lucky (or unlucky, depending on your point of view) location. In most places you are lucky to have half that on an average day, and since turbine power output is proportional to the cube of wind speed, that leaves you with 75W.
If you do have 12.5m/s on average you should put up a real wind turbine and start making money.
600W is peak. The rotor diameter is a complete joke at 0.65m. You'll be lucky to get 100W average out of that thing, perhaps if you put it on a 50m tower.
And just for clarities sake, because it's something that has mislead a lot of people: they didn't decide to shut down their power plants without building any replacement, they first decided to keep open plats which where scheduled to be shut down and then reversed again.
They decided to extend the life of power plants instead of building new ones. Then they reversed the decision but still did not build replacements (mostly because power plants don't just get built overnight). It may have been a multi-step decision process, most large decisions are. The end result is the same: they shut down power plants without building replacements.
Luckily the cold spell was in clear weather (as is often the case), so solar power helped a lot.
It is highly unlikely that solar will take over enough of the market for that to be a problem. Even then, if electricity prices suddenly go very low at mid-day, many cars would be able to charge at that time instead. Also, if lack of base load capacity does become a problem, by all means add nuclear. If you have a stable load 24x7, nothing beats nuclear power except in a few lucky places like Norway and Iceland.
No, you can't hear a difference between this $5000 speaker and this $150 speaker.
Of course you can. The $5000 speakers won't necessarily sound better, but they will sound different. Speakers are the one audio component which are still imperfect enough to really matter.
Most audio can be done digitally, amplifiers can be made practically linear, but speakers are a mess. Hopefully it will soon be over when active digitally-compensated speakers take over the market.
wonder whether the reason so many pop songs vocals are so overwrought, but only come out sounding like near-beer blues is that without the dimension of loudness to work with, vocalists have to rely more on ornamental notes or manipulating the timbre of their voice.
I don't think loudness is causing that particular problem. Most of that is Autotune, I bet.
People are only up half the time. Well a bit more, but load during the day is much higher than at night. Solar power is BETTER than base load in sunny areas, it actually does load-following.
Nuclear can do load-following, but since a nuclear plant costs approximately the same to keep at full output and at 10%, there is no point.
Just like France makes good money selling electricity to the UK and Germany (as those two countries have somewhat of a nuclear-phobia, that seems to be increasing).
I happened to check that today. Lately the link UK France has been almost constantly saturated at 2GW from UK to France.
The problem is that nuclear reactors provide base load, but consumption is variable. This means that you are stuck with too much power at night and high peak prices. This gets even worse because people switch to electric heating since electricity is usually cheap. Then a cold spell happens and the nuclear power plants can't suddenly double their output. Right now France is DESPERATE for power, to the point that they are importing from Germany! Germany itself is desperate for power because they decided to shut down power plants without building replacements, but they are apparently still better off than France.
That's nothing, in Denmark the Supreme court has determined that a router passing packets from one interface to another is doing copying covered by copyright laws ("eksemplarfremstilling").
Until April 2014, when IE 6 passes out of extended support, one can't assume that all supported browsers support CSS max-width.
Who the fuck cares whether Slashdot renders on IE6?!
Although to be fair, it does seem like that is the only browser that Slashdot does care about. All the others probably spend more time supporting Slashdot than Slashdot spends supporting them.
I'm sorry, but while I'm down for having every script that is actually used, and every script that has been decoded, I don't see why we should have all of these pictographs
If they are or were in use in real programs, it sucks to not have them in the standard. Unicode started out as a quite political project (e.g. Han Unification) but it has become much more pragmatic over time.
We need the emoji and the other junk in the standard so that we are able to use Unicode as a credible archiving format.
I'm not sure if a word borrowed from classical Latin into modern English should use Neo-Latin forms, at least not when there are already perfectly serviceable English forms available.
I completely agree with you about English. Viruses both looks and sounds fine. There is no reason to go for something more exotic.
In Danish there are 3 correct plurals of virus: virusser, virus, and vira. The first is too ugly to live and the second is annoying because it's the same as the singular, so vira is in common use.
Put two good CRTs next to two good LCDs and you may just notice
...that on the LCD the colours actually line up and that the pixels are the same size at the top and at the bottom and that the display does not flicker. And all this stays true even after you move the monitor around, without fiddling any knobs!
God I hated CRT's. The only decent ones I've ever tried were Sun's 21" black-and-white. They were absolutely gorgeous and my eyes never strained. Alas, neither the SGI rebadged Sony Trinitrons nor the Sun colour monitors were anywhere near as good.
Give me decent resolution, correct geometry, and no flickering. If that means sticking with black and white, so be it.
It is tricky to do what you propose. First, there will never be enough space, because people will want to store more than 1/4 (if you require 4 copies) of the space they provide. Second, it will be overrun by child pornography if it can be used anonymously. Third, it will be very difficult to verify that your content is actually stored in 4 places at once. Fourth, it can take an inordinate amount of time to retrieve content if it happens to be stored far away or on bad connections.
Freenet solves 1) and 3) by not guaranteeing anything, 2) by everyone closing their eyes, and 4) by being so slow that it doesn't matter whether content is on a fast or a slow server.
Would it have been clearer to you if it had been FORTH code in the option ROM, like Openfirmware? Would you agree that it would be possible to run such code in a sandbox?
Now replace the FORTH interpreter with an x86 bytecode interpreter and you're done. Yes it takes up a bit more space than a FORTH interpreter would, but it is not THAT bad.
Slashdot Mirror
Everything was lost here:
Why won't my fucking Linux computer print?
The rest could have been easily avoided by doing a kick/ban at that point.
So why is the UK, and Europe in general, not a hot bed of solar/electric/green technology? You'd think with such high gas prices there would be a HUGE incentive to develop alternatives...
Err it is? But what does that have to do with gas? Gas is not used to make electricity, and electricity use in manufacture is not a significant part of gas prices.
Gas taxes raise prices, which lowers demand thus forcing before-tax prices down. The tax income can be used to lower harmful taxes like income taxes. What is not to like?
Just 5 years of "high" oil prices have forced the car industry to make vastly more efficient cars -- maybe even 20% on the basis of similar 2007 and 2012 cars. Even more if you consider that people switch to smaller cars. Imagine if a united Western world had mandated 15 years ago that gas prices must go up just 4% every year, either from a rise in oil prices or a rise in gas tax.
It sounds like the other divisions were losing money. Why was it bad for them to be divested? Getting large dividends for 10 years beats getting nothing for 50 years. (I don't know if Kodak actually paid dividends at the time. They should have done at least.)
They weren't arrogant so much as incompetent when it comes to electronics. There is nothing wrong with being a one-trick-pony as long as you know when to give up. It is not necessarily best for society if companies survive forever, sometimes it is better to let the old ones die and new ones appear.
They failed to react to changes in their market.
The market didn't change, it disappeared and was replaced with a new market. Kodak tried to switch to that new market, but since it had no particular advantage over its competitors, it failed.
Kodak had two real strengths, its chemical products and its widespread distribution where people could always get their film to somewhere who could develop them and get the finished prints/slides back. Suddenly it is producing electronics and the distribution network is mostly a hindrance rather than a help.
The prudent way to handle such a situation is to extract as much profit from the existing market as possible, give as much money to the shareholders as possible, and downsize operations as the market shrinks. The shareholders can then reinvest in companies which are competitive in the new market. Doing this is not a failure, it is simply good business sense and good for society as a whole.
Some cars already come with battery heating systems which prevent the problem, unless you park for an extended length of time in -30C without connecting power.
It seems that people living in areas where -30C is common are rather good at dealing with the challenges of gasoline/diesel engines at those temperatures. I am sure that they will find creative solutions for getting electric vehicles running too.
And if no solution is found in the next 10 years, that is probably ok too. If we switch everyone else to electric vehicles, we can probably allow Canada and Finland to continue burning a bit of fuel.
Look, straight from first hit on Google, the turbine mentioned is rated for 600W at 12.5m/s. If you have average winds of 12.5m/s this turbine will work great, but then you are in a very lucky (or unlucky, depending on your point of view) location. In most places you are lucky to have half that on an average day, and since turbine power output is proportional to the cube of wind speed, that leaves you with 75W.
If you do have 12.5m/s on average you should put up a real wind turbine and start making money.
A thorium reactor will produce U-233. U-233 is fine for bombs.
600W is peak. The rotor diameter is a complete joke at 0.65m. You'll be lucky to get 100W average out of that thing, perhaps if you put it on a 50m tower.
And just for clarities sake, because it's something that has mislead a lot of people: they didn't decide to shut down their power plants without building any replacement, they first decided to keep open plats which where scheduled to be shut down and then reversed again.
They decided to extend the life of power plants instead of building new ones. Then they reversed the decision but still did not build replacements (mostly because power plants don't just get built overnight). It may have been a multi-step decision process, most large decisions are. The end result is the same: they shut down power plants without building replacements.
Luckily the cold spell was in clear weather (as is often the case), so solar power helped a lot.
It is highly unlikely that solar will take over enough of the market for that to be a problem. Even then, if electricity prices suddenly go very low at mid-day, many cars would be able to charge at that time instead. Also, if lack of base load capacity does become a problem, by all means add nuclear. If you have a stable load 24x7, nothing beats nuclear power except in a few lucky places like Norway and Iceland.
No, you can't hear a difference between this $5000 speaker and this $150 speaker.
Of course you can. The $5000 speakers won't necessarily sound better, but they will sound different. Speakers are the one audio component which are still imperfect enough to really matter.
Most audio can be done digitally, amplifiers can be made practically linear, but speakers are a mess. Hopefully it will soon be over when active digitally-compensated speakers take over the market.
wonder whether the reason so many pop songs vocals are so overwrought, but only come out sounding like near-beer blues is that without the dimension of loudness to work with, vocalists have to rely more on ornamental notes or manipulating the timbre of their voice.
I don't think loudness is causing that particular problem. Most of that is Autotune, I bet.
People are only up half the time. Well a bit more, but load during the day is much higher than at night. Solar power is BETTER than base load in sunny areas, it actually does load-following.
Nuclear can do load-following, but since a nuclear plant costs approximately the same to keep at full output and at 10%, there is no point.
Just like France makes good money selling electricity to the UK and Germany (as those two countries have somewhat of a nuclear-phobia, that seems to be increasing).
I happened to check that today. Lately the link UK France has been almost constantly saturated at 2GW from UK to France.
The problem is that nuclear reactors provide base load, but consumption is variable. This means that you are stuck with too much power at night and high peak prices. This gets even worse because people switch to electric heating since electricity is usually cheap. Then a cold spell happens and the nuclear power plants can't suddenly double their output. Right now France is DESPERATE for power, to the point that they are importing from Germany! Germany itself is desperate for power because they decided to shut down power plants without building replacements, but they are apparently still better off than France.
That's nothing, in Denmark the Supreme court has determined that a router passing packets from one interface to another is doing copying covered by copyright laws ("eksemplarfremstilling").
Until April 2014, when IE 6 passes out of extended support, one can't assume that all supported browsers support CSS max-width.
Who the fuck cares whether Slashdot renders on IE6?!
Although to be fair, it does seem like that is the only browser that Slashdot does care about. All the others probably spend more time supporting Slashdot than Slashdot spends supporting them.
I'm sorry, but while I'm down for having every script that is actually used, and every script that has been decoded, I don't see why we should have all of these pictographs
If they are or were in use in real programs, it sucks to not have them in the standard. Unicode started out as a quite political project (e.g. Han Unification) but it has become much more pragmatic over time.
We need the emoji and the other junk in the standard so that we are able to use Unicode as a credible archiving format.
I'm not sure if a word borrowed from classical Latin into modern English should use Neo-Latin forms, at least not when there are already perfectly serviceable English forms available.
I completely agree with you about English. Viruses both looks and sounds fine. There is no reason to go for something more exotic.
In Danish there are 3 correct plurals of virus: virusser, virus, and vira. The first is too ugly to live and the second is annoying because it's the same as the singular, so vira is in common use.
Put two good CRTs next to two good LCDs and you may just notice
...that on the LCD the colours actually line up and that the pixels are the same size at the top and at the bottom and that the display does not flicker. And all this stays true even after you move the monitor around, without fiddling any knobs!
God I hated CRT's. The only decent ones I've ever tried were Sun's 21" black-and-white. They were absolutely gorgeous and my eyes never strained. Alas, neither the SGI rebadged Sony Trinitrons nor the Sun colour monitors were anywhere near as good.
Give me decent resolution, correct geometry, and no flickering. If that means sticking with black and white, so be it.
I think you are not quite doing justice to the subject. The Latin Language Forum has a rather longer treatment of it.
In Neo-Latin the plural is vira.
It is tricky to do what you propose. First, there will never be enough space, because people will want to store more than 1/4 (if you require 4 copies) of the space they provide. Second, it will be overrun by child pornography if it can be used anonymously. Third, it will be very difficult to verify that your content is actually stored in 4 places at once. Fourth, it can take an inordinate amount of time to retrieve content if it happens to be stored far away or on bad connections.
Freenet solves 1) and 3) by not guaranteeing anything, 2) by everyone closing their eyes, and 4) by being so slow that it doesn't matter whether content is on a fast or a slow server.
FreeNet is one. It is better for storing files than /dev/zero.
Would it have been clearer to you if it had been FORTH code in the option ROM, like Openfirmware? Would you agree that it would be possible to run such code in a sandbox?
Now replace the FORTH interpreter with an x86 bytecode interpreter and you're done. Yes it takes up a bit more space than a FORTH interpreter would, but it is not THAT bad.