Since I use stand-alone Digital Video Recorders, I record two different channels' simultaneous offerings on Friday nights. Even if we're home, there is sometimes something else to watch while the "regular" shows are recorded, so we never have to choose. I think this is why SciFi has put the "*gate sweepstakes" in: to encourage Nielsen-compatible viewing. Since our DVRs control the set-top boxes, we would show as a watching both of the channels (on our single monitor), if there's any feedback from the STBs. In reality, we FF or commercial skip during playback.
We set this up because SciFi uses Fridays for the most of its shows that I watch, "Firefly" used to be on Friday (which was really stupid because it attracted the same audience as SciFi), and a local PBS station puts "BritComs" on Friday, so we recorded two and watched one. The setup is still useful as I sometimes record both F1 and "Adult Swim".
You've obviously had too many to be able to read or think (assuming that you could before it all).
My post discussed low-alcohol brews, which Guinness doesn't sell in the 'States, or even make, AFAICT, http://www.guinness.com/us_en/beer/default.aspx/ so your comment is simple stupid trolling, but I'm going to try to educate you anyway. Please re-read this post and my original when straight and sober.
For starters, I will use the term brew, rather than beer, since not all of the former are the latter.
Not everyone can drink a brew with significant alcohol. My wife likes brews (Harp being one of her favorites), but alcohol conflicts with her medication. Sometimes I like to have "a bit" of brew when I know I am going to be on my Duc' or driving, and that's not really very intelligent.
I have had brews of various types in Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, England, and Canada, including brews that were "domestic" in their respective countries, plus the US of A, so I have some personal experience. We have tried "real" beers of various types (mass production and craft) and the stuff major US of A manufacturers call beer, wheat beers, stouts, ales, malt liquors, porters,...
We have also tried every low-alcohol brew we can find. None of them have tasted as good to us as the better of the alcohol-containing varieties, but the Clausthaler and others previously listed are acceptable (recommendations accepted).
You refer to an on-line rating service? That is as stupid as buying a mail-order bride rather than meeting and getting to know someone before marriage. Beer is not as expensive as a car, nor as infrequently replaced as tires, so there's no excuse for on-line rating services. Buy a bottle and try it, then decide whether, or not, YOU like it. If you're not legally able to purchase alcohol-containing beverages, then give us all a break and wait thirty or forty years before you post again.
I happen to like Guinness, 'specially when sitting in the "Dubh Linn Gate" at the Pan Pacific in Whistler, BC, where they fly it in daily for freshness and I'm not driving. OTOH, if your mental state is the result of significant consumption, I may have to give it up to prevent the same happening to me.
I have found two real (according to the Germans) beers at Trader Joe's that are essentially alcohol-free and that we like. "Clausthaler" http://us.clausthaler.com/ has two flavors (we prefer the amber). There are others that we have also found consumable: "Haake Beck" and "Sharp's". Calories are in the range of sugared drinks, so you don't want to load up on them unless you burn it off, but definitely preferable to "corn syrup" or sugar substitutes in soft drinks.
If ammonia were used in a fuel cell, rather than a carbon compound, there is one potential advantage: rather than CO2 or Cx (graphite) being left after the hydrogen is stripped for the actual fuel, what could be left was either NOx (bad) or, if the cell can be properly configured, N2, which makes up about 70% of the atmosphere already. This would make the fueling of cars truly carbon-neutral.
I did some looking around, but where (other than the outer Solar System), is there a good source of ammonia? Can it be created from atmospheric N2 and water? If so, and all of the energy used to create it is solar, wind, or water generated, why isn't this the top of the everyone's alternative fuel list?
Every potential fuel is problematic in one way or another.
Even if you have some "pristine" source of electricity, the storage mechanisms are toxic stews, and the process of "refueling" is much too slow for real usability outside of a limited commute. Those fantasy 300 mile range cars do not give that range in LA traffic with the air conditioner, lights, music system, GPS, and power assist for the steering and brakes. There was a crash at an electric car race a Phoenix a few years back; several miles around the track were evacuated and the HazMat team called in to clean up. Picture that in any major city's highway system or (favorite trick of the hysteria-prone) "near a school".
Hydrogen gas transport, storage, and transfer from dispenser to car are nightmares, and the liquid is worse.
Gasoline and diesel only really work when combusted, and gasoline is hard to make from anything but fossil fuels (oil and coal), plus is a bit toxic. Diesel can be made from bio-sources more easily than gasoline, is less explosive in transport and storage, and has more energy density than gasoline. We already have the infrastructure to distribute and use them.
Methane and propane have some storage issues, but we have some experience using them in cars, trucks, and buses. They are still fossil fuels, unless we can recapture methane from bioreactions of animal waste.
All hydrocarbon fuels will almost certainly have CO or CO2 as products. Regardless of the efficiency by which they are created, it will almost impossible for them to be "carbon-neutral".
Ammonia may be toxic, but none of the others are strictly non-toxic and non-hazardous. It can be transported and transferred as some combination of compressed gas and not-so-cold liquid, using most of our existing fossil fuel infrastructure. Combustion of it always seems to generate the NOx products, but a fuel cell with N2 as the product has no harmful emissions. In theory (as I said, more references, please), it can be produced from air, water, and clean energy. Why is this not perfect?
Yeah, the fact that you can and bother to spell the words in a posting is a clear indication that you are not an American (as in U.S. of A., not the Americans to the north or south of us).
My cookies files and folders are read-only. Every time I shut down the browser (at least daily), all cookies are gone. Works great with cookies-required sites, since they're still enabled, but leaves no trail beyond the session. If there's a cookie that I REALLY wanted (so far, none), I could include it manually, while the browser is closed, and return the file/folder to read-write.
I've never met a human who can defeat a squadron of Protoss carriers. The "counters" (science vessels to disable the shields and any combination of cruisers and valkyries to inflict the damage) take too much effort for toggling between them and target selection. Giving the the Protoss an even more "uber" weapon makes no sense. Unless Blizzard have found a way to improve the "embedded intelligence" of the counter weapons, StarCraft II will be just as biased to the Protoss as BroodWar.
I know the Korean champ won with Terrans, but it was a REALLY quick victory, one on one, not a multiplayer, multirace melee like the LAN party games I play. The computer players, so far, are never smart enough to build sufficient carriers (or Blizzard simply prevented them) so the game appears balanced, but it is not.
realistic receiver connectivity and bandwidth
on
Rerouting the Networks
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
In the article, I need to transmit all three messages to all receivers and the transmitter/intermediate node link has been fabricated as an obvious bottleneck. How often, in a real network, are the receivers going to have that much connectivity and bandwidth? Also, where is the knowledge that all receiver links are up? The loss of any receiver link means that it will get NO messages, since no complete message is routed of any of its links. If I add enough parity data to allow reconstruction of partial messages, I've just consumed a significant fraction of the supposedly free bandwidth and imposed a higher processing cost at the receiver, which is likely to be the a lower-performance device.
Great way to create battlefield targets, though. Take out any one intermediate link and lots of the troops at the receiver end are cut off.
The movie is regionally-priced because it requires your physical presence.
M$-Windows is NOT cheaper because it is usable elsewhere.
Examples:
Sell a French-language version cheaply in West Africa, the Caribbean, South Pacific, or Guiana and it will end up on computers in Canada, the US (Louisiana has a significant French-speaking population), and France. Why couldn't a French company with offices in Ivory Coast simply buy all of their M$ software through that office? For that matter, I use a Sun UNIX-International keyboard on my desktop, and I could certainly use the French version for all that I do with M$-Windows, which is play games.
Spanish-language versions from Central and South America would certainly work well for the people of Spain, as well as the extensive US Spanish-speaking population.
I'm not defending Microsoft. In fact, I'd like to see the company seized under the RICO act (it is a convicted felon and ongoing criminal enterprise, after all) and all of operating systems and tools source code free (or media cost) at the Library of Congress, and the rest of it sold at auction. Your pricing argument doesn't really work.
It is not the details of what you do that is important for them to know, but the (idealized, admittedly) process that you use.
Children accumulate fantastic amounts of data (behavior/socialization even more than "education"). Science offers them another way to test the data for integration into their lives. Teach them the processes of hypothesis and experiment, learning from (positively and negatively) existing publication, and open, rigorous discussion, and the value of free thought that expands the boundaries of inquiry.
Big words for a 4 year old, but they are already doing some of it informally, even unconsciously. "My father says..." is an example of authoritative citation, after all. Explain to them that there is a usable system for doing it "on purpose".
Your occupation is to use those principles to explore some subset of the universal information space and acquire it for humans.
This "coffee" that you're discussing: it that anything like the brown/black stuff in the big pots in the mess hall? Can't say that I really care for that stuff.;-)
So, instead of falling into the star, she went into orbit. OK, but how did she bloat to 22 earth-mass? Are there that many hot-fudge sundaes in near-stellar environments?
Adding a more-powerful electric motor/generator (compared to a "starter-only" motor), battery pack, and control electronics will be free? I call pferd-merde (German-French combination denoting the output of the northbound end of a southbound equine).
Even if the smog controls cost more than now, you will still need to have them, so there's no significant savings on those. If a smaller hydrocarbon engine is used than the non-hybrid case there would be some reduction of catalyst mass, but not enough to pay for everything else. The overall drive train is still as massive (or more), so there's no savings there.
Given the extra environmental cost of the toxics-laden batteries, both in production and any recycling, hybrids are not even very "green". They can provide a small reduction in hydrocarbon fuel use IN THE VEHICLE, but what about the extra fuel used to create and move the additional components during manufacturing and when the worn-out battery packs have to be disposed/recycled?
Other than making some ignoramuses "feel good", and giving some chiselers a "bye" into the carpool lanes, hybrids are a sad joke on society. Get a diesel or a motorcycle or a Smart. My bike uses less fuel than a hybrid, and takes up less space on the road making EVERYONE's commute more fuel-efficient than if I had a hybrid.
If we just instituted a hefty "space tax" based on how may square meters a vehicle consumes on the road, any shift to smaller vehicles would accomplish more good than getting everyone into hybrids. When you really need to transport six people, then a single vehicle for all six would be a lower tax than six individual vehicles, but the extra space freed by converting the Tundras (581 cm long ) to Yaris (381 cm long) would make traffic flow better, wasting a lot less fuel.
Our cell 'phones don't get a good signal at our house (seem to work OK elsewhere, though), but the land line works.
Long distance is cheaper on the land line, even with the flat rate overhead and fees.
What do you get charged for a cell 'phone conference call? How much more is that than the cost of picking up an extension on a land line?
Cell 'phones for emergencies are really, really cheap. Ours are less than $7 USD per month, and we don't even have the prepaid kind.
If there were two- or multi-line cradles into which I could drop cell 'phones at home, then answer an extension, I would be more inclined to even consider going cell-only, but the system would have to accept 'phones from whichever carrier I choose to use AND the 'phones would have to be portable, too. The lock-ins on cell 'phones are at least as obnoxious as anything the "Bell Gang" have done, besides the fact that you're dealing with a "Bell Gang" subsidiary or affiliate with most cell carriers.
The Pinto NOT the only car with tanks that exploded when rear-ended. As the parent said, it wasn't even the most likely to do so. Ford simply wasn't smart enough to destroy the documentation that they knew an explosion was technically possible.
As for the argument that "they knew, therefore they had to act"? Nonsense. If Ford spends the extra money to prevent the explosion in an accident, raising the price of the car, then customers would have bought the competing, cheaper cars that lacked the protection, dying in those instead. No lives saved, or injuries prevented, but Ford's shareholders and workers suffer lost income for nothing.
This article, as has been, and will be, pointed out throughout the comments is not news, very interesting, or likely to yield much of practical value.
Non-crankshaft-linked valve timing, whether through variation mechanisms that are in current street car use, or electric/pneumatic/hydraulic actuators, such as the F1 engines have used for years do not solve the problem of heat control. Burning fuel (which is why some parts of the combustion chamber are hotter than others; get a clue) generates heat. Some of that heat expands gases to push pistons (or rotors) and a lot of heat raises the temperature of the engine components. Without cooling the engine, the accumulated heat destroys the materials. This is why my air-cooled Ducati engine has a lower power output than the water-cooled Ducati engine of the same (roughly) displacement. The water-cooled engines can keep the components at a lower (and more consistent, I know) temperature, so they can use more air and fuel to generate more power (the extra valves are only usable because the additional heat can be managed).
The real solution is to use more of the chemical energy to provide power for moving the vehicle and less of it to heat the components. Trying to store the energy in rechargeable batteries will result in mostly short-range urban and novelty vehicles for a very long time, since the energy density of the storage, both in mass and volume, and recharge rate are pathetic compared to diesel, gasoline, or compressed propane/methane.
The "hydrogen solution", applied as an internal combustion fuel, has the same problems, plus the additional headaches of generating the hydrogen ("but solar is cheap" - and it will compete directly for surface area with homes, farms, and the large-scale installations needed to power your iPod's recharger since we'll be trading power between sunlit and darkened regions) and transferring it between fuel station storage and vehicle storage. Hydrogen fuel cells, still with the generating, storage, and transfer problems, are pretty good at converting between chemical and electrical energy, and electric motors are usably efficient at converting electrical energy into motion.
What we need are fuel cells that can handle ALL of the chemical energy in a hydrocarbon fuel, converting not just the stored hydrogen and oxygen from the air into water (2 H2 + O2 = 2 H2O; put energy in to break up the hydrogen and oxygen molecules then get energy back by combining the hydrogen and oxygen atoms into water), but also using the carbon atoms in the fuel molecules to make CO2 which gives a larger net energy output by mass of fuel.
As for "CO2 is a greenhouse gas": So what? We're already too far down the path. The paleohistoric record of ice-age cycles shows that we have already passed the inflection point to cooling while we're accelerating the heating. If you want to reduce the CO2 footprint of humans, along with ending overfishing of the oceans, sucking the deep aquifers dry, destruction of the rain forests for farmland, habitat destruction for either human use or by diversion of fresh water resources, pollution by agricultural runoff,..., reduce the number of humans by 6 billion, or so. Unless you do that, nothing else will matter. Additional terrestrial hydrocarbon fuel resources are becoming quite hard to reach and there's too much demand to get by easily on biological sources alone. Improving the efficiency by which we use the fuel helps us, regardless of the other issues.
Just as soon as you deliver the complete number as text, not a formula or algorithm, although all of the known digits might make even that a derivative work, such that you can only copyright the currently unknown value.
Lying about what I wrote is not well thought out, either. EVERY ONE of my examples of alternative payment systems happened and/or happens. None of them were "made up", and those were just a few of the possibilities.
Your arguments, OTOH, are mostly fantasy. The producer-dominated filters that you conveniently do not mention are every bit as egregious as any public works filter. The criteria are not "is this important/new/artistically valuable? (according to whom, BTW)", but "what's the ROI?" So we get manufactured mediocre music, stale rehashing of movies that weren't that interesting in the first place, and more drivel than even the fastest reader could wade through. Yes, there are a few gems, here and there, but those exceptions, in and of themselves, do not justify the systems that produce mostly dross.
Creators may just "do stuff", but they then spend a lot of time trying to find some producer's factor who will put it into production. Their work does not magically appear in retail outlets, just because it was created. Further, there is a lot of work that never makes it to retail, not because it is not worthy of notice, but because it doesn't meet the producers' formulas currently in vogue.
Your final paragraph distorts the reality, as well. Writers that have not yet established popularity do not always get paid more for additional sales, but may receive only a flat payment for the rights, and the amount is based on whatever guesstimate the producer has for the volume to assure their return on investment.
We live in an "internet age", so the cost of production could well be nil (or just the cost of bandwidth). Your "them and their word processors" (or instruments) could put samples of the work-in-progress in a blog or MySpace page (examples, not a complete list), both of which have demonstrated the ability to spread "buzz", selling subscriptions to the finished piece, and deliver the content electronically, rather than having to schlep through the rounds of "please, sir, publish for me". Even for those of us who prefer our books bound, the subscription could include a higher price for that. Despite the ??AA claims, subsequent unpaid distribution does not terminate the payment stream. Apple still sells songs that have been shared as MP3s. Nothing prevents me from buying an electronic form of a work after the subscription, and some people (not most, but how many of the others have the money, or would pay anyway?) do support artists, even after the work has been "cracked". OTOH, once a production run (book, CD, DVD,...) is finished, I cannot buy a new one, ever (or until the producer is no longer bound to pay royalties), so the creator is denied my contribution. Simple example: where can I buy an AUTHORIZED boxed set of MTV's "Daria" television series? As with the creators that get larger payments for subsequent works from the producers now, they would have larger subscription bases for those works, so more payment.
I am, but shouldn't be, sometimes amazed that otherwise possibly intelligent people fall for the "without copyrights (patents), nothing good would ever be written (invented)" nonsense. The evidence does not support the hypothesis.
Copyrights are a rather late concept, started because the London book publishers wanted control of and profit from this new thing called a "printing press". Did any of THEM pay patent licenses? Of course not. Similarly, British factory owners cranked up the patent system to be used by themselves.
Did Euripides have copyright law to protect his plays? Aristotle, patent law to protect his inventions? Was there no music before copyrights?
Nearly all of the advances in rocketry, up until the Second World War, were made by tinkerers and hobbyists. Look at all of the work leading up to powered flight that was done by determined amateurs. Dig back through the USENET, and other archives, and see how much software was created and distributed FOR FREE, often because "I needed this, so I wrote it.". For that matter, how much of the Gnome/KDE development is simple "in your face" from one camp to the other? Yes, I know there are commercial entities involved, but how much work is driven by pay and how much by passion?
Copyright and patent are tools of the age of mass production, intended to provide profits to those with the capital to PRODUCE, not create. A creator may make a bit from it, since the producers need to have something to produce and there are enough people on the planet that almost anything produced will find some audience, but royalties are only a side effect, to be minimized whenever possible with creative accounting.
There are other ways of funding creative activity, although most of these examples have been distorted by current law and practice.
An author/composer may have a position at a university, where publishing is essentially a mandatory task, so their salary "pays them" to create. Respected (and/or popular, which is rarely the same thing) authors will find offers to move to other universities (or raises at their current post), and bring their prestige with them because it attracts students and alumni support. Researchers and engineers can experience the same phenomenon. MIT, CalTech, Princeton, etc. could find themselves bidding to host the development team of some package at their campus.
We could offer government grants or public works contracts, which dropped a sou or two into M. Rodin's pocket.
Subscriptions have been used to provide prepayment for creative works. If you, and a few hundred thousand others, get an email offering a chance at a first edition of some author whose work you admire, the author will earn all of the subscription fees payed less the cost of production (placed by competitive bid, if the author has any sense) and distribution of that first edition, regardless of how many knock-off copies are created later.
Sometimes, the wealthy pay for creative works, simply for bragging rights, to ease their consciences, or because they really do want to see some creator's work accomplished.
Copyright is simply not required to have quality works created, but it is required for the marketdroids and lawyers to skim off a lot of money while contributing nothing. And, no, they don't help us find new, good creations nearly as often as passing along mediocre, or worse, because they are able to control the output of the artists, the advertising, and the production.
Mostly, this is circular reasoning. The GPL is needed BECAUSE we have copyrights.
> So that means the book I've written will eventually be written by someone else even though it's based on my unique experience and observations? I don't think so.
I could suggest that A: your experiences may not be as unique as you think and B: if it were never written, would it matter? Perhaps it really would, but lots of writing, whether in book or electronic form, will happen, regardless of copyright.
> Given BSD's history and head start, Linux should never have happened if you are correct.
Which is exactly my point. BSD was copyrighted and expensive for a large part of that history, including when Linus began coding. There would have been no need for it if Linus could have just used BSD without a huge (to him) expense. What he came up with wasn't really enough better than BSD was then to justify its creation from scratch. It was just (monetarily) free.
> There may be three decades of free software but it wasn't until Linux and the GPL attracted enough developers that FOSS actually became a viable contender for use on the desktop.
The GPL and really powerful desktop computers arrived at about the same time, so that is not a valid assumption. Correlation is not causality. Gosling's emacs, the proverbial straw that led to the GPL, was written for glass teletypes.
> Obviously something like the GPL is driving Linux faster than the BSD license drives BSD.
Another false assumption. Linux is growing faster on the desktop, at least some significant part, because the various *bsd developers don't usually give "a bit of string or a dead budgerigar" for the desktop. Look at their mission statements.
> Could be that the people who will contribute to a GPLed project won't release their work under a less restrictive license. If you look at the efforts to further tighten the GPL in GPLv3, you'll see that, if anything, contributors want to make sure that even quasi-legal use of their efforts like TiVo aren't allowed.
Some developers might just take the attitude "If some PHBs and marketdroids are going to profit from my code, I want to be there and get paid, too.", and I have no problem with that. Absent copyright, however, nothing stops me from decompiling a TiVo, tweaking it to my taste, and publishing the result. The source code could then either be reused on TiVo hardware, or used to build a work-alike (if I couldn't reverse-engineer away the existing protocol impediments) on a PC or Mac platform. In fact, I'd really like to rework the software in both my DVRs, if I had the time, and publish it back to the 'net, but I doubt either of the vendors would be pleased.
But, again, we use GPL to try to force corporate sharing, when it is copyright law that prevents us from reuse of THEIR code, so you're back to the circular argument.
This statement is utter "pferd merde": "I guess I should rephrase what I said and say that you can have free software without copyrights but just not for very long." It is not only disproved by more than three decades' experience (yes, there was free software for the PDP-11), but false in concept. While some inventors (flight, rockets, cars, radio, software) and artists are motivated by money, or, at least, would like to be able to "make a living" doing what they enjoy, there are also more than sufficient examples of those who would do, and have done, creative work for the pleasure and/or prestige of doing so. Music existed long before copyright (or patronage). Research was conducted by hobbyists and university students/professors in the fields previously listed without recompense, other than "bragging rights" (and grades and tenure). Free software was distributed through users' groups, BBSs, and USENET long before the GPL. Linux, itself, was not created in order to make Linus rich, but to save a university student money that he would have had to pay to buy an incredibly overpriced copyrighted operating system.
Nothing falling under copyright (or patent) law done by, or released through, businesses required the law to enable their creation. IMO, both should be abolished. Whatever "A" doesn't want to create without being paid will be created by "B", given that there are so many of "B" available, or it wasn't that important, anyway.
The coin was not, and could not be, the culprit, since it did nothing wrong, nor was there a culprit involved in any part of producing the coin. The culprit was the intelligence-challenged human who filed the report, in that the waste of time and money was the result of that action. Co-conspirators included everyone involved in propagating the stupidity and everyone who let any of THEM into government positions or contracts more complicated than roadside litter-collecting.
One would hope that the summary editors had some working familiarity with the language, but the evidence is strongly against the desire. On the same page, the term "post-WoW world" is used, but I have not seen any evidence that WoW has expired, so we currently experience a "WoW world".
> In the UK convictions (except in certain situations) expire after a while.
But the records are kept forever. "Never know when you might need them." What do you think happens to all of the motorway and street-corner camera and sound records? Automatically purged after no crime is reported for a year, or something?
> How would that end up being noticeable when he's flying?
TSA is a government agency. He'll be pulled from the security line for "special attention", if he's (a potential terrorist, remember) allowed to fly at all.
> And when he's renting etc - do members of the public have access to police records so that every chat is noted? Can I just phone the police in the States and pretend to be a landlord/prospective employer etc and find out every time you've been pulled over for having a faulty brake light?
Through licensed civilian investigators, yes. I did a contract for a computer security company that (reasonably, IMO) did a background check. Since the contract was executed in California, I was entitled to, and received, a copy of the results.
> No, but we should investigate potential threats to my safety.
How could any person with functional faculties regard this as a threat?
Even if so, the investigation itself triggers so many unconscionable consequences for the subject that it makes the rest of the citizenry complicit in state terrorism (mild in this case, so far, but an endpoint in the range of actions to the torture and murder of the presumably innocent until proven guilty that are all justified by the same excuses).
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Since I use stand-alone Digital Video Recorders, I record two different channels' simultaneous offerings on Friday nights. Even if we're home, there is sometimes something else to watch while the "regular" shows are recorded, so we never have to choose. I think this is why SciFi has put the "*gate sweepstakes" in: to encourage Nielsen-compatible viewing. Since our DVRs control the set-top boxes, we would show as a watching both of the channels (on our single monitor), if there's any feedback from the STBs. In reality, we FF or commercial skip during playback.
We set this up because SciFi uses Fridays for the most of its shows that I watch, "Firefly" used to be on Friday (which was really stupid because it attracted the same audience as SciFi), and a local PBS station puts "BritComs" on Friday, so we recorded two and watched one. The setup is still useful as I sometimes record both F1 and "Adult Swim".
You've obviously had too many to be able to read or think (assuming that you could before it all).
...
My post discussed low-alcohol brews, which Guinness doesn't sell in the 'States, or even make, AFAICT, http://www.guinness.com/us_en/beer/default.aspx/ so your comment is simple stupid trolling, but I'm going to try to educate you anyway. Please re-read this post and my original when straight and sober.
For starters, I will use the term brew, rather than beer, since not all of the former are the latter.
Not everyone can drink a brew with significant alcohol. My wife likes brews (Harp being one of her favorites), but alcohol conflicts with her medication. Sometimes I like to have "a bit" of brew when I know I am going to be on my Duc' or driving, and that's not really very intelligent.
I have had brews of various types in Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, England, and Canada, including brews that were "domestic" in their respective countries, plus the US of A, so I have some personal experience. We have tried "real" beers of various types (mass production and craft) and the stuff major US of A manufacturers call beer, wheat beers, stouts, ales, malt liquors, porters,
We have also tried every low-alcohol brew we can find. None of them have tasted as good to us as the better of the alcohol-containing varieties, but the Clausthaler and others previously listed are acceptable (recommendations accepted).
You refer to an on-line rating service? That is as stupid as buying a mail-order bride rather than meeting and getting to know someone before marriage. Beer is not as expensive as a car, nor as infrequently replaced as tires, so there's no excuse for on-line rating services. Buy a bottle and try it, then decide whether, or not, YOU like it. If you're not legally able to purchase alcohol-containing beverages, then give us all a break and wait thirty or forty years before you post again.
I happen to like Guinness, 'specially when sitting in the "Dubh Linn Gate" at the Pan Pacific in Whistler, BC, where they fly it in daily for freshness and I'm not driving. OTOH, if your mental state is the result of significant consumption, I may have to give it up to prevent the same happening to me.
I have found two real (according to the Germans) beers at Trader Joe's that are essentially alcohol-free and that we like. "Clausthaler" http://us.clausthaler.com/ has two flavors (we prefer the amber). There are others that we have also found consumable: "Haake Beck" and "Sharp's". Calories are in the range of sugared drinks, so you don't want to load up on them unless you burn it off, but definitely preferable to "corn syrup" or sugar substitutes in soft drinks.
If ammonia were used in a fuel cell, rather than a carbon compound, there is one potential advantage: rather than CO2 or Cx (graphite) being left after the hydrogen is stripped for the actual fuel, what could be left was either NOx (bad) or, if the cell can be properly configured, N2, which makes up about 70% of the atmosphere already. This would make the fueling of cars truly carbon-neutral.
I did some looking around, but where (other than the outer Solar System), is there a good source of ammonia? Can it be created from atmospheric N2 and water? If so, and all of the energy used to create it is solar, wind, or water generated, why isn't this the top of the everyone's alternative fuel list?
Every potential fuel is problematic in one way or another.
Even if you have some "pristine" source of electricity, the storage mechanisms are toxic stews, and the process of "refueling" is much too slow for real usability outside of a limited commute. Those fantasy 300 mile range cars do not give that range in LA traffic with the air conditioner, lights, music system, GPS, and power assist for the steering and brakes. There was a crash at an electric car race a Phoenix a few years back; several miles around the track were evacuated and the HazMat team called in to clean up. Picture that in any major city's highway system or (favorite trick of the hysteria-prone) "near a school".
Hydrogen gas transport, storage, and transfer from dispenser to car are nightmares, and the liquid is worse.
Gasoline and diesel only really work when combusted, and gasoline is hard to make from anything but fossil fuels (oil and coal), plus is a bit toxic. Diesel can be made from bio-sources more easily than gasoline, is less explosive in transport and storage, and has more energy density than gasoline. We already have the infrastructure to distribute and use them.
Methane and propane have some storage issues, but we have some experience using them in cars, trucks, and buses. They are still fossil fuels, unless we can recapture methane from bioreactions of animal waste.
All hydrocarbon fuels will almost certainly have CO or CO2 as products. Regardless of the efficiency by which they are created, it will almost impossible for them to be "carbon-neutral".
Ammonia may be toxic, but none of the others are strictly non-toxic and non-hazardous. It can be transported and transferred as some combination of compressed gas and not-so-cold liquid, using most of our existing fossil fuel infrastructure. Combustion of it always seems to generate the NOx products, but a fuel cell with N2 as the product has no harmful emissions. In theory (as I said, more references, please), it can be produced from air, water, and clean energy. Why is this not perfect?
Yeah, the fact that you can and bother to spell the words in a posting is a clear indication that you are not an American (as in U.S. of A., not the Americans to the north or south of us).
Oh, you meant "favourite"?
My cookies files and folders are read-only. Every time I shut down the browser (at least daily), all cookies are gone. Works great with cookies-required sites, since they're still enabled, but leaves no trail beyond the session. If there's a cookie that I REALLY wanted (so far, none), I could include it manually, while the browser is closed, and return the file/folder to read-write.
I've never met a human who can defeat a squadron of Protoss carriers. The "counters" (science vessels to disable the shields and any combination of cruisers and valkyries to inflict the damage) take too much effort for toggling between them and target selection. Giving the the Protoss an even more "uber" weapon makes no sense. Unless Blizzard have found a way to improve the "embedded intelligence" of the counter weapons, StarCraft II will be just as biased to the Protoss as BroodWar.
I know the Korean champ won with Terrans, but it was a REALLY quick victory, one on one, not a multiplayer, multirace melee like the LAN party games I play. The computer players, so far, are never smart enough to build sufficient carriers (or Blizzard simply prevented them) so the game appears balanced, but it is not.
In the article, I need to transmit all three messages to all receivers and the transmitter/intermediate node link has been fabricated as an obvious bottleneck. How often, in a real network, are the receivers going to have that much connectivity and bandwidth? Also, where is the knowledge that all receiver links are up? The loss of any receiver link means that it will get NO messages, since no complete message is routed of any of its links. If I add enough parity data to allow reconstruction of partial messages, I've just consumed a significant fraction of the supposedly free bandwidth and imposed a higher processing cost at the receiver, which is likely to be the a lower-performance device.
Great way to create battlefield targets, though. Take out any one intermediate link and lots of the troops at the receiver end are cut off.
The movie is regionally-priced because it requires your physical presence.
M$-Windows is NOT cheaper because it is usable elsewhere.
Examples:
Sell a French-language version cheaply in West Africa, the Caribbean, South Pacific, or Guiana and it will end up on computers in Canada, the US (Louisiana has a significant French-speaking population), and France. Why couldn't a French company with offices in Ivory Coast simply buy all of their M$ software through that office? For that matter, I use a Sun UNIX-International keyboard on my desktop, and I could certainly use the French version for all that I do with M$-Windows, which is play games.
Spanish-language versions from Central and South America would certainly work well for the people of Spain, as well as the extensive US Spanish-speaking population.
I'm not defending Microsoft. In fact, I'd like to see the company seized under the RICO act (it is a convicted felon and ongoing criminal enterprise, after all) and all of operating systems and tools source code free (or media cost) at the Library of Congress, and the rest of it sold at auction. Your pricing argument doesn't really work.
It is not the details of what you do that is important for them to know, but the (idealized, admittedly) process that you use.
..." is an example of authoritative citation, after all. Explain to them that there is a usable system for doing it "on purpose".
Children accumulate fantastic amounts of data (behavior/socialization even more than "education"). Science offers them another way to test the data for integration into their lives. Teach them the processes of hypothesis and experiment, learning from (positively and negatively) existing publication, and open, rigorous discussion, and the value of free thought that expands the boundaries of inquiry.
Big words for a 4 year old, but they are already doing some of it informally, even unconsciously. "My father says
Your occupation is to use those principles to explore some subset of the universal information space and acquire it for humans.
This "coffee" that you're discussing: it that anything like the brown/black stuff in the big pots in the mess hall? Can't say that I really care for that stuff. ;-)
So, instead of falling into the star, she went into orbit. OK, but how did she bloat to 22 earth-mass? Are there that many hot-fudge sundaes in near-stellar environments?
Adding a more-powerful electric motor/generator (compared to a "starter-only" motor), battery pack, and control electronics will be free? I call pferd-merde (German-French combination denoting the output of the northbound end of a southbound equine).
Even if the smog controls cost more than now, you will still need to have them, so there's no significant savings on those. If a smaller hydrocarbon engine is used than the non-hybrid case there would be some reduction of catalyst mass, but not enough to pay for everything else. The overall drive train is still as massive (or more), so there's no savings there.
Given the extra environmental cost of the toxics-laden batteries, both in production and any recycling, hybrids are not even very "green". They can provide a small reduction in hydrocarbon fuel use IN THE VEHICLE, but what about the extra fuel used to create and move the additional components during manufacturing and when the worn-out battery packs have to be disposed/recycled?
Other than making some ignoramuses "feel good", and giving some chiselers a "bye" into the carpool lanes, hybrids are a sad joke on society. Get a diesel or a motorcycle or a Smart. My bike uses less fuel than a hybrid, and takes up less space on the road making EVERYONE's commute more fuel-efficient than if I had a hybrid.
If we just instituted a hefty "space tax" based on how may square meters a vehicle consumes on the road, any shift to smaller vehicles would accomplish more good than getting everyone into hybrids. When you really need to transport six people, then a single vehicle for all six would be a lower tax than six individual vehicles, but the extra space freed by converting the Tundras (581 cm long ) to Yaris (381 cm long) would make traffic flow better, wasting a lot less fuel.
Our cell 'phones don't get a good signal at our house (seem to work OK elsewhere, though), but the land line works.
Long distance is cheaper on the land line, even with the flat rate overhead and fees.
What do you get charged for a cell 'phone conference call? How much more is that than the cost of picking up an extension on a land line?
Cell 'phones for emergencies are really, really cheap. Ours are less than $7 USD per month, and we don't even have the prepaid kind.
If there were two- or multi-line cradles into which I could drop cell 'phones at home, then answer an extension, I would be more inclined to even consider going cell-only, but the system would have to accept 'phones from whichever carrier I choose to use AND the 'phones would have to be portable, too. The lock-ins on cell 'phones are at least as obnoxious as anything the "Bell Gang" have done, besides the fact that you're dealing with a "Bell Gang" subsidiary or affiliate with most cell carriers.
The Pinto NOT the only car with tanks that exploded when rear-ended. As the parent said, it wasn't even the most likely to do so. Ford simply wasn't smart enough to destroy the documentation that they knew an explosion was technically possible.
As for the argument that "they knew, therefore they had to act"? Nonsense. If Ford spends the extra money to prevent the explosion in an accident, raising the price of the car, then customers would have bought the competing, cheaper cars that lacked the protection, dying in those instead. No lives saved, or injuries prevented, but Ford's shareholders and workers suffer lost income for nothing.
Maybe, while they're looking, they'll find Bender's head.
Of course, they'll have to rebury it to prevent changing the timeline.
This article, as has been, and will be, pointed out throughout the comments is not news, very interesting, or likely to yield much of practical value.
..., reduce the number of humans by 6 billion, or so. Unless you do that, nothing else will matter. Additional terrestrial hydrocarbon fuel resources are becoming quite hard to reach and there's too much demand to get by easily on biological sources alone. Improving the efficiency by which we use the fuel helps us, regardless of the other issues.
Non-crankshaft-linked valve timing, whether through variation mechanisms that are in current street car use, or electric/pneumatic/hydraulic actuators, such as the F1 engines have used for years do not solve the problem of heat control. Burning fuel (which is why some parts of the combustion chamber are hotter than others; get a clue) generates heat. Some of that heat expands gases to push pistons (or rotors) and a lot of heat raises the temperature of the engine components. Without cooling the engine, the accumulated heat destroys the materials. This is why my air-cooled Ducati engine has a lower power output than the water-cooled Ducati engine of the same (roughly) displacement. The water-cooled engines can keep the components at a lower (and more consistent, I know) temperature, so they can use more air and fuel to generate more power (the extra valves are only usable because the additional heat can be managed).
The real solution is to use more of the chemical energy to provide power for moving the vehicle and less of it to heat the components. Trying to store the energy in rechargeable batteries will result in mostly short-range urban and novelty vehicles for a very long time, since the energy density of the storage, both in mass and volume, and recharge rate are pathetic compared to diesel, gasoline, or compressed propane/methane.
The "hydrogen solution", applied as an internal combustion fuel, has the same problems, plus the additional headaches of generating the hydrogen ("but solar is cheap" - and it will compete directly for surface area with homes, farms, and the large-scale installations needed to power your iPod's recharger since we'll be trading power between sunlit and darkened regions) and transferring it between fuel station storage and vehicle storage. Hydrogen fuel cells, still with the generating, storage, and transfer problems, are pretty good at converting between chemical and electrical energy, and electric motors are usably efficient at converting electrical energy into motion.
What we need are fuel cells that can handle ALL of the chemical energy in a hydrocarbon fuel, converting not just the stored hydrogen and oxygen from the air into water (2 H2 + O2 = 2 H2O; put energy in to break up the hydrogen and oxygen molecules then get energy back by combining the hydrogen and oxygen atoms into water), but also using the carbon atoms in the fuel molecules to make CO2 which gives a larger net energy output by mass of fuel.
As for "CO2 is a greenhouse gas": So what? We're already too far down the path. The paleohistoric record of ice-age cycles shows that we have already passed the inflection point to cooling while we're accelerating the heating. If you want to reduce the CO2 footprint of humans, along with ending overfishing of the oceans, sucking the deep aquifers dry, destruction of the rain forests for farmland, habitat destruction for either human use or by diversion of fresh water resources, pollution by agricultural runoff,
Just as soon as you deliver the complete number as text, not a formula or algorithm, although all of the known digits might make even that a derivative work, such that you can only copyright the currently unknown value.
Lying about what I wrote is not well thought out, either. EVERY ONE of my examples of alternative payment systems happened and/or happens. None of them were "made up", and those were just a few of the possibilities.
...) is finished, I cannot buy a new one, ever (or until the producer is no longer bound to pay royalties), so the creator is denied my contribution. Simple example: where can I buy an AUTHORIZED boxed set of MTV's "Daria" television series? As with the creators that get larger payments for subsequent works from the producers now, they would have larger subscription bases for those works, so more payment.
Your arguments, OTOH, are mostly fantasy. The producer-dominated filters that you conveniently do not mention are every bit as egregious as any public works filter. The criteria are not "is this important/new/artistically valuable? (according to whom, BTW)", but "what's the ROI?" So we get manufactured mediocre music, stale rehashing of movies that weren't that interesting in the first place, and more drivel than even the fastest reader could wade through. Yes, there are a few gems, here and there, but those exceptions, in and of themselves, do not justify the systems that produce mostly dross.
Creators may just "do stuff", but they then spend a lot of time trying to find some producer's factor who will put it into production. Their work does not magically appear in retail outlets, just because it was created. Further, there is a lot of work that never makes it to retail, not because it is not worthy of notice, but because it doesn't meet the producers' formulas currently in vogue.
Your final paragraph distorts the reality, as well. Writers that have not yet established popularity do not always get paid more for additional sales, but may receive only a flat payment for the rights, and the amount is based on whatever guesstimate the producer has for the volume to assure their return on investment.
We live in an "internet age", so the cost of production could well be nil (or just the cost of bandwidth). Your "them and their word processors" (or instruments) could put samples of the work-in-progress in a blog or MySpace page (examples, not a complete list), both of which have demonstrated the ability to spread "buzz", selling subscriptions to the finished piece, and deliver the content electronically, rather than having to schlep through the rounds of "please, sir, publish for me". Even for those of us who prefer our books bound, the subscription could include a higher price for that. Despite the ??AA claims, subsequent unpaid distribution does not terminate the payment stream. Apple still sells songs that have been shared as MP3s. Nothing prevents me from buying an electronic form of a work after the subscription, and some people (not most, but how many of the others have the money, or would pay anyway?) do support artists, even after the work has been "cracked". OTOH, once a production run (book, CD, DVD,
I am, but shouldn't be, sometimes amazed that otherwise possibly intelligent people fall for the "without copyrights (patents), nothing good would ever be written (invented)" nonsense. The evidence does not support the hypothesis.
Copyrights are a rather late concept, started because the London book publishers wanted control of and profit from this new thing called a "printing press". Did any of THEM pay patent licenses? Of course not. Similarly, British factory owners cranked up the patent system to be used by themselves.
Did Euripides have copyright law to protect his plays? Aristotle, patent law to protect his inventions? Was there no music before copyrights?
Nearly all of the advances in rocketry, up until the Second World War, were made by tinkerers and hobbyists. Look at all of the work leading up to powered flight that was done by determined amateurs. Dig back through the USENET, and other archives, and see how much software was created and distributed FOR FREE, often because "I needed this, so I wrote it.". For that matter, how much of the Gnome/KDE development is simple "in your face" from one camp to the other? Yes, I know there are commercial entities involved, but how much work is driven by pay and how much by passion?
Copyright and patent are tools of the age of mass production, intended to provide profits to those with the capital to PRODUCE, not create. A creator may make a bit from it, since the producers need to have something to produce and there are enough people on the planet that almost anything produced will find some audience, but royalties are only a side effect, to be minimized whenever possible with creative accounting.
There are other ways of funding creative activity, although most of these examples have been distorted by current law and practice.
An author/composer may have a position at a university, where publishing is essentially a mandatory task, so their salary "pays them" to create. Respected (and/or popular, which is rarely the same thing) authors will find offers to move to other universities (or raises at their current post), and bring their prestige with them because it attracts students and alumni support. Researchers and engineers can experience the same phenomenon. MIT, CalTech, Princeton, etc. could find themselves bidding to host the development team of some package at their campus.
We could offer government grants or public works contracts, which dropped a sou or two into M. Rodin's pocket.
Subscriptions have been used to provide prepayment for creative works. If you, and a few hundred thousand others, get an email offering a chance at a first edition of some author whose work you admire, the author will earn all of the subscription fees payed less the cost of production (placed by competitive bid, if the author has any sense) and distribution of that first edition, regardless of how many knock-off copies are created later.
Sometimes, the wealthy pay for creative works, simply for bragging rights, to ease their consciences, or because they really do want to see some creator's work accomplished.
Copyright is simply not required to have quality works created, but it is required for the marketdroids and lawyers to skim off a lot of money while contributing nothing. And, no, they don't help us find new, good creations nearly as often as passing along mediocre, or worse, because they are able to control the output of the artists, the advertising, and the production.
Mostly, this is circular reasoning. The GPL is needed BECAUSE we have copyrights.
> So that means the book I've written will eventually be written by someone else even though it's based on my unique experience and observations? I don't think so.
I could suggest that A: your experiences may not be as unique as you think and B: if it were never written, would it matter? Perhaps it really would, but lots of writing, whether in book or electronic form, will happen, regardless of copyright.
> Given BSD's history and head start, Linux should never have happened if you are correct.
Which is exactly my point. BSD was copyrighted and expensive for a large part of that history, including when Linus began coding. There would have been no need for it if Linus could have just used BSD without a huge (to him) expense. What he came up with wasn't really enough better than BSD was then to justify its creation from scratch. It was just (monetarily) free.
> There may be three decades of free software but it wasn't until Linux and the GPL attracted enough developers that FOSS actually became a viable contender for use on the desktop.
The GPL and really powerful desktop computers arrived at about the same time, so that is not a valid assumption. Correlation is not causality. Gosling's emacs, the proverbial straw that led to the GPL, was written for glass teletypes.
> Obviously something like the GPL is driving Linux faster than the BSD license drives BSD.
Another false assumption. Linux is growing faster on the desktop, at least some significant part, because the various *bsd developers don't usually give "a bit of string or a dead budgerigar" for the desktop. Look at their mission statements.
> Could be that the people who will contribute to a GPLed project won't release their work under a less restrictive license. If you look at the efforts to further tighten the GPL in GPLv3, you'll see that, if anything, contributors want to make sure that even quasi-legal use of their efforts like TiVo aren't allowed.
Some developers might just take the attitude "If some PHBs and marketdroids are going to profit from my code, I want to be there and get paid, too.", and I have no problem with that. Absent copyright, however, nothing stops me from decompiling a TiVo, tweaking it to my taste, and publishing the result. The source code could then either be reused on TiVo hardware, or used to build a work-alike (if I couldn't reverse-engineer away the existing protocol impediments) on a PC or Mac platform. In fact, I'd really like to rework the software in both my DVRs, if I had the time, and publish it back to the 'net, but I doubt either of the vendors would be pleased.
But, again, we use GPL to try to force corporate sharing, when it is copyright law that prevents us from reuse of THEIR code, so you're back to the circular argument.
This statement is utter "pferd merde": "I guess I should rephrase what I said and say that you can have free software without copyrights but just not for very long." It is not only disproved by more than three decades' experience (yes, there was free software for the PDP-11), but false in concept. While some inventors (flight, rockets, cars, radio, software) and artists are motivated by money, or, at least, would like to be able to "make a living" doing what they enjoy, there are also more than sufficient examples of those who would do, and have done, creative work for the pleasure and/or prestige of doing so. Music existed long before copyright (or patronage). Research was conducted by hobbyists and university students/professors in the fields previously listed without recompense, other than "bragging rights" (and grades and tenure). Free software was distributed through users' groups, BBSs, and USENET long before the GPL. Linux, itself, was not created in order to make Linus rich, but to save a university student money that he would have had to pay to buy an incredibly overpriced copyrighted operating system.
Nothing falling under copyright (or patent) law done by, or released through, businesses required the law to enable their creation. IMO, both should be abolished. Whatever "A" doesn't want to create without being paid will be created by "B", given that there are so many of "B" available, or it wasn't that important, anyway.
The coin was not, and could not be, the culprit, since it did nothing wrong, nor was there a culprit involved in any part of producing the coin. The culprit was the intelligence-challenged human who filed the report, in that the waste of time and money was the result of that action. Co-conspirators included everyone involved in propagating the stupidity and everyone who let any of THEM into government positions or contracts more complicated than roadside litter-collecting.
One would hope that the summary editors had some working familiarity with the language, but the evidence is strongly against the desire. On the same page, the term "post-WoW world" is used, but I have not seen any evidence that WoW has expired, so we currently experience a "WoW world".
> Things can't always be this bad........
No, they are going to get MUCH, MUCH, worse.
> In the UK convictions (except in certain situations) expire after a while.
But the records are kept forever. "Never know when you might need them." What do you think happens to all of the motorway and street-corner camera and sound records? Automatically purged after no crime is reported for a year, or something?
> How would that end up being noticeable when he's flying?
TSA is a government agency. He'll be pulled from the security line for "special attention", if he's (a potential terrorist, remember) allowed to fly at all.
> And when he's renting etc - do members of the public have access to police records so that every chat is noted? Can I just phone the police in the States and pretend to be a landlord/prospective employer etc and find out every time you've been pulled over for having a faulty brake light?
Through licensed civilian investigators, yes. I did a contract for a computer security company that (reasonably, IMO) did a background check. Since the contract was executed in California, I was entitled to, and received, a copy of the results.
> No, but we should investigate potential threats to my safety.
How could any person with functional faculties regard this as a threat?
Even if so, the investigation itself triggers so many unconscionable consequences for the subject that it makes the rest of the citizenry complicit in state terrorism (mild in this case, so far, but an endpoint in the range of actions to the torture and murder of the presumably innocent until proven guilty that are all justified by the same excuses).