If all it ultimately does is send some current to 16 or so places at the same time (the explosive charges around the sphere to be imploded) then that isn't hard to replicate.
When "at the same time" resolves to pretty much exactly the same wavefront within +/- femtoseconds (10e-15), and where said device and design absolutely has to work the first time and the only time, and you have zero testing opportunity, and even the length and placement and coupling of the wires affects the timing, yeah, actually, it is that hard to replicate. If the timing is insufficient to the task, the implosion is misshapen, and that generally means the weapon won't go critical -- you just end up with a bunch of bomb debris.
We know that U.S. nukes have many, many security features to make them unable to detonate unless a large number of conditions are met.
No, "we" don't know that. You just assume that because you have been watching too many movies.
Well, actually, the subset of "we" who have taken the time to actually inform ourselves about these matters do know that. But hey, don't let that interfere with your hysteria.
A corporation has to ask you for your data, and you can say no -- at which point the corporation is SOL, regardless of your perceived goodness or badness of that corporate use. In addition, the corporation has at least some stake in your continued good will, and so they are likely to give you something back in return if in fact you choose to opt in. But if what they do makes people opt out... without customers, the corporation will cease to exist.
A government can -- and in the case of the US government, already will, the Canadians are well behind us -- take your data. Once it has it, it can, and will, jail you, take your life, and so on. They don't have to give you anything back, and typically, they won't. They have no significant investment in your good will. You can bitch all you want, but you can't opt out and they won't stop existing because they're annoying some of the citizens. Nor is there any hope of them annoying enough of the citizens for such a thing to happen.
You're been taught that corporations that do not know right from wrong are bad, thoughtless entities, and they certainly are, but they are nothing compared to a government that does not know right from wrong.
Also, in the final analysis, it is the government that enables or prevents any particular corporate behavior. If you get control of the government (good luck, too late in the USA.. but Canada... perhaps not) then you get control of the corporations.
You'll be lucky to get 100W average out of that thing, perhaps if you put it on a 50m tower.
It isn't about height, except indirectly and then only when you don't have sufficient wind speed @GL in the first place, which we do. It's all about wind speed and duration. This area has plenty of small wind turbines at moderate heights (just above the rooftops, generally); we're very satisfied with how well they work. Sorry, but you're simply wrong.
How is this relevant? You need 100 million tons of such high-tech gadgetry for a country as small as Germany.
Good grief, How many ways do I need to explain this so you can understand it? The tech to do this is NOT HERE TODAY, so you CAN'T ESTIMATE THE WEIGHT using today's tech.
These questions are currently unanswered: How many farads will ultracaps be at that point? What voltage will they allow at that point? How much will they weigh at that point? What volume will they occupy at that point?
Therefore, your numbers -- in fact, any attempt you make to to specifically quantify the issue in any way -- are complete nonsense. Got that?
In closing, I made a general statement, which I will paraphrase for you: WHEN (not if) ultracaps exceed battery capacity vs cost, THEN they will be the energy storage mechanism of choice. I further assert that this is almost a certainty, based on the fact that production ultracaps are improving in both cost and capacity quite rapidly, though they are STILL behind batteries at this time, and batteries are moving targets in terms of capacity as well.
UC cost, while higher up front, is not what it seems, because in the vast majority of cases (bad units and casualties of other hardware failures excepted) you won't have to replace them until several several human lifetimes have passed -- by which time, for comparison, you would have consumed many, many batteries in the same role. Furthermore, in many storage applications, the ultracap's ability to take -- and release -- charge thousands of times faster than batteries without wear or loss completely trumps battery tech anyway. So even if known, the volume and weight and dollar issues don't adequately reflect the actual "cost of batteries" vs. "cost of UC's." But -- as I said -- we don't know those numbers anyway, because the tech to meet my general notion isn't here yet.
Now, if you want to write a VALID counter to my post, explain why it is that you think ultracaps will never, or can never, get to the point IN THE FUTURE I indicated: Where they outperform batteries in storage applications. If you have such information, I'm interested. Otherwise, I'm not.
Nonsense. Maxwell and other manufacturers mass produce them right now. There are so many out there you can buy them on EBay, for crying out loud. And they can be paralleled and stacked in series ad nauseum for any voltage / capacity you require, AND they can be fused / controlled in any geometric arrangement that is convenient, so if by scale, you meant in high power arrays, no. You can do it now. It's just more expensive and volume consuming than it needs to be for a.consumer level practical storage system. But the ratios have been constantly changing in our favor and show no signs at all of slowing down.
Even lab samples of experimental ultra caps store no more than 85 kWh/ton.
[stares] I specifically said Right now, UC's are below battery storage capacities... when they pass batteries, they'll be the tech to use... The only issue is capacity, and that is rising steadily. Just how comprehension challenged are you?
In order to store 3.5TWh you would need 100 million tons of capacitors
Sigh. Look, this problem only rationally gets solved -- financially, installation-wise -- at the house level, not at the national level. No nation stores power in one installation, nor are statistics that imply any such thing worth paying attention to. It's like observing the US has 255,917,664 passenger vehicles, so assuming 40 lbs lbs for each car battery, that means the US has invested in a battery weight of 10,236,706,560 lbs (five million tons+), which of course is a vast underestimate because there are all those non-passenger vehicles and other battery users. Yeah, it's a big number, but no, it isn't particularly meaningful or a significant roadblock. And you should keep in mind that the batteries all are dying from day one, whereas the UCs can last so much longer they're effectively immortal. You could literally will the ones in your first car, bought when you were a teenager, to your kids. Nor are estimates of UC weight today particularly relevant when you're replying to an assertion that IN THE FUTURE, the rising curve of storage capacity will cause UCs to beat batteries.
which is just enough for short-term variations of Germany (about 1% of world population).
The hundreds of millions of vehicles with tanks full of highly explosive fuel blowing up every day prove that... oh, wait. They just prove that your understanding of risk is on the level of superstition.
However, reduce the difference in temperature to 50 degrees -- like you see between groundwater and an hot summer day in the US, and the heat engine won't run.
No. With a simple passive reflector and just a little bit of area, you can achieve temperatures more than sufficient to melt steel, and any temperature in between ambient and there.
The problem with heat engines isn't efficiency at all -- it's mechanical durability. Live steam, for instance, is corrosive as heck, and machines with moving parts wear unless they are kept in near optimum repair, lubricated and balanced and otherwise made and maintained to exacting and expensive specifications. When you're talking about a power plant turbine, economies of scale let you do the required maintainance and buy the required precision; when you're talking about a heat engine in the yard... you can't pull off the same tricks without a net loss of capital.
As an engineer, can I build a steam engine / generator combo sufficient to run my home without becoming a net consumer of any kind of significant consumables (water, fuel, etc.) or adding heat to the environment in backyard-class square footage?
Sure, you bet. Hardly even a challenge, given, say, 20 grand to do it with and a decent machine shop. Can I build it so it'll still be running next year? No. Too much moving crap.
So, what, then? This: Stable, environmentally robust (meaning, completely hail resistant) solar cells, plus ultracaps, plus conversion electronics. That's the future of single-home energy independence. Everything else is almost certainly a wrong-path boondoggle.
and those little toys you see people put on their roof is a complete joke.
Completely wrong. Those "little toys", in conjunction with storage, can supply a house's worth of energy, which is exactly what they are for. You can get a 600 watt turbine for $722 USD with free shipping from Amazon right now. Ten of them (6 kw for ~$7200) plus storage would suffice to supply an average household - heck, I'm a profligate power user, but only have a standard 10 kw service here and have *never* come close to 6 kw average use. We have the wind, too - I'm in Montana. And with electric bills in the triple digits, the payback would be very fast. All you need is a little room, the proper controllers to feed that energy into the house and/or the grid, and you'd find that "those toys" were worth every penny.
Add some solar, leave the grid connected so the power company can pay you as your meter runs backwards... "toys", not.
The bulk will inevitably need to be some derivative of hydrogen, probably methane (for much easier storage).
Nah. It'll inevitably be ultracaps. Capacity is coming up steadily, and when they pass batteries, they'll be the tech to use. Why? Extremely long lifetime; extremely high charge and discharge rates; excellent environmental operating ranges; modular nature and ease of swapping components as they improve or require maintainance; relatively low cost (partially because of life expectancy, partially because they simply aren't that hard to make, at least so far.)
Right now, UC's are below battery storage capacities and all the hype is about batteries, but that's to be expected. I guarantee you that at some point, all else - pumped storage, molten salt, batteries, flywheels... will fall by the wayside. Ultracaps are the way storage should be done, period. The only issue is capacity, and that is rising steadily. It's coming. Inevitable.
Apple does not need its OS updates to be PROFITABLE! It uses its OS to push its shiny $2000 boxes!! Why do people still not understand this difference???
...that would be because by far the most of its "boxes" sell in the $600 (mini) -- $1200 (imac) range.
See the Apple Store for current prices of current "boxes."
***Full disclosure: I own, among other Apple machines, an Apple box that was, in fact, well over $3k -- an 8-core, 3 GHz, 6-monitor, 32 GB Macpro; and the reasons I made that purchase include previous experience with lower priced Apple hardware (excellent, I wanted more) and Apple's OS X, which I am an unabashed fan of, at least until the recent attempt to meld with iOS, which I hope they'll get over when they realize they're responding to the wrong stimulus (iOS isn't popular because it's simple; it's popular because it's capable... and it's simple because the iP*ds have very limited hardware resources. iOS should grow towards OS X, rather than OS X towards iOS, and OS X should continue to improve in the usual desktop fashion, adding power, not simplifying. For example, iOS desperately needs a real filesystem, folders, and multitasking, and when Android gets there first because Apple is going the wrong way, and people begin to move so as to get at that power, Apple will be forced to follow, instead of wandering blindly along this silly path they appear to have chosen. And then I will be happy again. 3 cheers for competition.)
Mary was no virgin; Jesus was just a man; it's a horrible tale about deception, greed and lust for power; the taking advantage of people's gullibility, fear and inability to think critically. Jesus catches out Judas using GPS, buttonhole cameras, and bribed Roman constabulary. Three stars; needed more CGI, and story seems at least partially cribbed from the Egyptian Book of the Dead [a Warner Bros. title.]
Given that the user can change backdrop and/or font colors and intensities on any decent reader, I've been wondering: Does image embedding in the standard support alpha, such as PNG?
Because if you make a formula, for instance, or a table, on a fixed white backdrop, there's only one setting where that'll look good: Where the user has the colors matching those used in the image. But if the formula/table is rendered in [color] over alpha, that will work for a lot of cases (although it still fails with [color] backdrops and [other color] text... which is the bottom line use case for "you need typesetting."
When the image is traditional linear content, such as a portrait or a woodland scene, alpha at the edges is sufficient no matter what the user chooses for backdrop, although the quality is still higher if the edge blend color matches the backdrop, or at least its brightness.
E-Book publishing must deal with non-constant "page" sizes. Even on individual devices - when a tablet reader rotates 90 degrees, the book contents must reflow to deal with the new "page" width. Furthermore, users now expect to be able to change fonts and font sizes at will while reading. Rendering needs to be done in the reader software, not during file preparation.
Tailor-made for HTML. You can specify paragraphs, sections, underline, bold, italic, embed images, hyperlinks... all with reflow and user-specified fonts and sizes and colors.
RANT: That was the original intent of HTML: That the user had control over the look and feel, and the author provided content. It's only been in the last few years that websites started screwing up the whole idea of content following browser resizing -- one of the worst design mistakes made, IMHO, because it wastes the user's expensive desktop space in favor of the designer's "idea." If you're any good, you'll design so you get "that look" at a particular size, then the user can find that and stay there if they want to, rather than being stuck with a hard-coded 1024x window or something like that. You can do some pretty clever things along this line with CSS, but hardly anyone does.
It's gotten to the point where if your content reflows the way it should, a lot of people think you're doing it "wrong." Amazing, really./RANT
I think that depends on your mail volume. I manage quite a few websites and email identities, and receive on the order of fifty to a hundred legitimate emails a day. I'm very happy with the service. YMMV.
Google, for all its email faults, (and it has some real doozies -- some of them drive me batty) hasn't thrown a good email into spam in many months. I probably see an actual spam in the inbox perhaps once a week, which I delight in marking as spam to help other gmail users. That's pretty darned good; I compulsively check both the inbox and the spambox, and I am *extremely* satisfied with Google's ability to discriminate.
I haven't used Hotmail in years, so it's impossible for me to say they're better or worse, but I am dead certain that Google is "good enough" here.
I guess the French philosophers and the Founding Fathers (who frequently quoted the French)... were just idiots, (Thomas Paine, etc.)
Yes, in some ways, they were idiots. They expected the government to honor the constitution, and they didn't put any penalties into the constitution to cover the eventuality that politicians would break their oaths. Many of them believed in a god or gods of some sort, primitive superstition without any basis in reality. Many kept slaves, and thought that this was perfectly ok. Many of them eschewed reality for philosophical nonsense; this also is common today. Reality is what it is. You want rights to mean anything but "I have an idea", then you need an enforcement structure. Thinking otherwise is, yes, idiotic. And it is worth noting that these same people felt it was absolutely necessary to create a written set of rules in order to try and see to it that these "inalienable" rights actually meant something other than poetry -- which has been my point all along. Rights are meaningless without an enforcement structure. Any philosophical bent that leads you to think otherwise is no more than an exercise in self-deception.
it's just that they have not understood what the Enlightenment took hundreds of years to produce.
That would be the TSA, the casting into irrelevance of almost the entire bill of rights; a 100-mile "constitution-free" zone all around the border of the USA; the breaking and entering of people's homes by government agents, the shooting of their pets, jailing people and ruining families and lives in order to attempt to violently coerce the public into abdicating personal choice on what entertaining substances they can ingest; the invasive and pervasive searches of our papers, our banking, our communications; the placement, in stealth, of citizen's names on "no fly", "no buy", and "scare the children" lists; the fact that "real estate" now means you don't actually own your property that you paid for, coupled with the lovely fact that the government now will take your land by force in order to develop more profitable commercial enterprises on it; Inalienable rights? Hardly.
You can go on all day about inalienable rights, but in fact they've been well and truly alienated... you literally aren't protected by them any longer. So they're very much alienable. Those are the facts. But if it makes you happy to think they aren't, while you live in a world where they literally are, fine. Me, I prefer reality to sugar-coated philosophical blundering about in the dark.
You're confusing statutory rights with inherent rights.
I'm not confusing anything. I'm telling you that when something you call a "right" that has no supporting power behind it, then it simply has no value in protecting you from anyone or anything. This is a fact -- you cannot get around it with words.
You can call these ideas anything you want -- my point is that without supporting power, they are worthless. You can either try to change the situation so they have supporting power, or these ideas will not benefit you in any significant manner when a question comes up of what you can or cannot do. This is the basis for the fact that without power, and a will to use it in your stead in order to enforce an idea... the idea doesn't rise to the standard of having worth in shielding your actions or your speech from anyone or anything. At that point, calling it a right is simply applying a label to a toothless idea. Without backing power and supporting will, rights are meaningless.
Slashdot Mirror
When "at the same time" resolves to pretty much exactly the same wavefront within +/- femtoseconds (10e-15), and where said device and design absolutely has to work the first time and the only time, and you have zero testing opportunity, and even the length and placement and coupling of the wires affects the timing, yeah, actually, it is that hard to replicate. If the timing is insufficient to the task, the implosion is misshapen, and that generally means the weapon won't go critical -- you just end up with a bunch of bomb debris.
Naw, I'm just happy to see you, that's all.
Well, actually, the subset of "we" who have taken the time to actually inform ourselves about these matters do know that. But hey, don't let that interfere with your hysteria.
Underrated -- even if it gets to +5
The net effect isn't the same.
A corporation has to ask you for your data, and you can say no -- at which point the corporation is SOL, regardless of your perceived goodness or badness of that corporate use. In addition, the corporation has at least some stake in your continued good will, and so they are likely to give you something back in return if in fact you choose to opt in. But if what they do makes people opt out... without customers, the corporation will cease to exist.
A government can -- and in the case of the US government, already will, the Canadians are well behind us -- take your data. Once it has it, it can, and will, jail you, take your life, and so on. They don't have to give you anything back, and typically, they won't. They have no significant investment in your good will. You can bitch all you want, but you can't opt out and they won't stop existing because they're annoying some of the citizens. Nor is there any hope of them annoying enough of the citizens for such a thing to happen.
You're been taught that corporations that do not know right from wrong are bad, thoughtless entities, and they certainly are, but they are nothing compared to a government that does not know right from wrong.
Also, in the final analysis, it is the government that enables or prevents any particular corporate behavior. If you get control of the government (good luck, too late in the USA.. but Canada... perhaps not) then you get control of the corporations.
Oh, no, your spelling was fine. "brake" is indeed an adventure in correct spelling. It was simply the wrong word.
Data plan? All iPads have wifi -- which means unlimited free streaming.
Data plans are great if you want to pay dividends to telephone company stockholders, but otherwise, not so much.
It isn't about height, except indirectly and then only when you don't have sufficient wind speed @GL in the first place, which we do. It's all about wind speed and duration. This area has plenty of small wind turbines at moderate heights (just above the rooftops, generally); we're very satisfied with how well they work. Sorry, but you're simply wrong.
Good grief, How many ways do I need to explain this so you can understand it? The tech to do this is NOT HERE TODAY, so you CAN'T ESTIMATE THE WEIGHT using today's tech.
These questions are currently unanswered: How many farads will ultracaps be at that point? What voltage will they allow at that point? How much will they weigh at that point? What volume will they occupy at that point?
Therefore, your numbers -- in fact, any attempt you make to to specifically quantify the issue in any way -- are complete nonsense. Got that?
In closing, I made a general statement, which I will paraphrase for you: WHEN (not if) ultracaps exceed battery capacity vs cost, THEN they will be the energy storage mechanism of choice. I further assert that this is almost a certainty, based on the fact that production ultracaps are improving in both cost and capacity quite rapidly, though they are STILL behind batteries at this time, and batteries are moving targets in terms of capacity as well.
UC cost, while higher up front, is not what it seems, because in the vast majority of cases (bad units and casualties of other hardware failures excepted) you won't have to replace them until several several human lifetimes have passed -- by which time, for comparison, you would have consumed many, many batteries in the same role. Furthermore, in many storage applications, the ultracap's ability to take -- and release -- charge thousands of times faster than batteries without wear or loss completely trumps battery tech anyway. So even if known, the volume and weight and dollar issues don't adequately reflect the actual "cost of batteries" vs. "cost of UC's." But -- as I said -- we don't know those numbers anyway, because the tech to meet my general notion isn't here yet.
Now, if you want to write a VALID counter to my post, explain why it is that you think ultracaps will never, or can never, get to the point IN THE FUTURE I indicated: Where they outperform batteries in storage applications. If you have such information, I'm interested. Otherwise, I'm not.
And this is relevant how? Oh, wait, it isn't. Just like the rest of your responses to me.
Nonsense. Maxwell and other manufacturers mass produce them right now. There are so many out there you can buy them on EBay, for crying out loud. And they can be paralleled and stacked in series ad nauseum for any voltage / capacity you require, AND they can be fused / controlled in any geometric arrangement that is convenient, so if by scale, you meant in high power arrays, no. You can do it now. It's just more expensive and volume consuming than it needs to be for a .consumer level practical storage system. But the ratios have been constantly changing in our favor and show no signs at all of slowing down.
[stares] I specifically said Right now, UC's are below battery storage capacities... when they pass batteries, they'll be the tech to use... The only issue is capacity, and that is rising steadily. Just how comprehension challenged are you?
Sigh. Look, this problem only rationally gets solved -- financially, installation-wise -- at the house level, not at the national level. No nation stores power in one installation, nor are statistics that imply any such thing worth paying attention to. It's like observing the US has 255,917,664 passenger vehicles, so assuming 40 lbs lbs for each car battery, that means the US has invested in a battery weight of 10,236,706,560 lbs (five million tons+), which of course is a vast underestimate because there are all those non-passenger vehicles and other battery users. Yeah, it's a big number, but no, it isn't particularly meaningful or a significant roadblock. And you should keep in mind that the batteries all are dying from day one, whereas the UCs can last so much longer they're effectively immortal. You could literally will the ones in your first car, bought when you were a teenager, to your kids. Nor are estimates of UC weight today particularly relevant when you're replying to an assertion that IN THE FUTURE, the rising curve of storage capacity will cause UCs to beat batteries.
No one needs more than 64k of RAM. :o/
The hundreds of millions of vehicles with tanks full of highly explosive fuel blowing up every day prove that... oh, wait. They just prove that your understanding of risk is on the level of superstition.
No. With a simple passive reflector and just a little bit of area, you can achieve temperatures more than sufficient to melt steel, and any temperature in between ambient and there.
The problem with heat engines isn't efficiency at all -- it's mechanical durability. Live steam, for instance, is corrosive as heck, and machines with moving parts wear unless they are kept in near optimum repair, lubricated and balanced and otherwise made and maintained to exacting and expensive specifications. When you're talking about a power plant turbine, economies of scale let you do the required maintainance and buy the required precision; when you're talking about a heat engine in the yard... you can't pull off the same tricks without a net loss of capital.
As an engineer, can I build a steam engine / generator combo sufficient to run my home without becoming a net consumer of any kind of significant consumables (water, fuel, etc.) or adding heat to the environment in backyard-class square footage?
Sure, you bet. Hardly even a challenge, given, say, 20 grand to do it with and a decent machine shop. Can I build it so it'll still be running next year? No. Too much moving crap.
So, what, then? This: Stable, environmentally robust (meaning, completely hail resistant) solar cells, plus ultracaps, plus conversion electronics. That's the future of single-home energy independence. Everything else is almost certainly a wrong-path boondoggle.
Completely wrong. Those "little toys", in conjunction with storage, can supply a house's worth of energy, which is exactly what they are for. You can get a 600 watt turbine for $722 USD with free shipping from Amazon right now. Ten of them (6 kw for ~$7200) plus storage would suffice to supply an average household - heck, I'm a profligate power user, but only have a standard 10 kw service here and have *never* come close to 6 kw average use. We have the wind, too - I'm in Montana. And with electric bills in the triple digits, the payback would be very fast. All you need is a little room, the proper controllers to feed that energy into the house and/or the grid, and you'd find that "those toys" were worth every penny.
Add some solar, leave the grid connected so the power company can pay you as your meter runs backwards... "toys", not.
Nah. It'll inevitably be ultracaps. Capacity is coming up steadily, and when they pass batteries, they'll be the tech to use. Why? Extremely long lifetime; extremely high charge and discharge rates; excellent environmental operating ranges; modular nature and ease of swapping components as they improve or require maintainance; relatively low cost (partially because of life expectancy, partially because they simply aren't that hard to make, at least so far.)
Right now, UC's are below battery storage capacities and all the hype is about batteries, but that's to be expected. I guarantee you that at some point, all else - pumped storage, molten salt, batteries, flywheels... will fall by the wayside. Ultracaps are the way storage should be done, period. The only issue is capacity, and that is rising steadily. It's coming. Inevitable.
See the Apple Store for current prices of current "boxes."
***Full disclosure: I own, among other Apple machines, an Apple box that was, in fact, well over $3k -- an 8-core, 3 GHz, 6-monitor, 32 GB Macpro; and the reasons I made that purchase include previous experience with lower priced Apple hardware (excellent, I wanted more) and Apple's OS X, which I am an unabashed fan of, at least until the recent attempt to meld with iOS, which I hope they'll get over when they realize they're responding to the wrong stimulus (iOS isn't popular because it's simple; it's popular because it's capable... and it's simple because the iP*ds have very limited hardware resources. iOS should grow towards OS X, rather than OS X towards iOS, and OS X should continue to improve in the usual desktop fashion, adding power, not simplifying. For example, iOS desperately needs a real filesystem, folders, and multitasking, and when Android gets there first because Apple is going the wrong way, and people begin to move so as to get at that power, Apple will be forced to follow, instead of wandering blindly along this silly path they appear to have chosen. And then I will be happy again. 3 cheers for competition.)
Mary was no virgin; Jesus was just a man; it's a horrible tale about deception, greed and lust for power; the taking advantage of people's gullibility, fear and inability to think critically. Jesus catches out Judas using GPS, buttonhole cameras, and bribed Roman constabulary. Three stars; needed more CGI, and story seems at least partially cribbed from the Egyptian Book of the Dead [a Warner Bros. title.]
Great pointer, thank you!
Given that the user can change backdrop and/or font colors and intensities on any decent reader, I've been wondering: Does image embedding in the standard support alpha, such as PNG?
Because if you make a formula, for instance, or a table, on a fixed white backdrop, there's only one setting where that'll look good: Where the user has the colors matching those used in the image. But if the formula/table is rendered in [color] over alpha, that will work for a lot of cases (although it still fails with [color] backdrops and [other color] text... which is the bottom line use case for "you need typesetting."
When the image is traditional linear content, such as a portrait or a woodland scene, alpha at the edges is sufficient no matter what the user chooses for backdrop, although the quality is still higher if the edge blend color matches the backdrop, or at least its brightness.
Tailor-made for HTML. You can specify paragraphs, sections, underline, bold, italic, embed images, hyperlinks... all with reflow and user-specified fonts and sizes and colors.
RANT: That was the original intent of HTML: That the user had control over the look and feel, and the author provided content. It's only been in the last few years that websites started screwing up the whole idea of content following browser resizing -- one of the worst design mistakes made, IMHO, because it wastes the user's expensive desktop space in favor of the designer's "idea." If you're any good, you'll design so you get "that look" at a particular size, then the user can find that and stay there if they want to, rather than being stuck with a hard-coded 1024x window or something like that. You can do some pretty clever things along this line with CSS, but hardly anyone does.
It's gotten to the point where if your content reflows the way it should, a lot of people think you're doing it "wrong." Amazing, really. /RANT
I think that depends on your mail volume. I manage quite a few websites and email identities, and receive on the order of fifty to a hundred legitimate emails a day. I'm very happy with the service. YMMV.
Google, for all its email faults, (and it has some real doozies -- some of them drive me batty) hasn't thrown a good email into spam in many months. I probably see an actual spam in the inbox perhaps once a week, which I delight in marking as spam to help other gmail users. That's pretty darned good; I compulsively check both the inbox and the spambox, and I am *extremely* satisfied with Google's ability to discriminate.
I haven't used Hotmail in years, so it's impossible for me to say they're better or worse, but I am dead certain that Google is "good enough" here.
Yes, in some ways, they were idiots. They expected the government to honor the constitution, and they didn't put any penalties into the constitution to cover the eventuality that politicians would break their oaths. Many of them believed in a god or gods of some sort, primitive superstition without any basis in reality. Many kept slaves, and thought that this was perfectly ok. Many of them eschewed reality for philosophical nonsense; this also is common today. Reality is what it is. You want rights to mean anything but "I have an idea", then you need an enforcement structure. Thinking otherwise is, yes, idiotic. And it is worth noting that these same people felt it was absolutely necessary to create a written set of rules in order to try and see to it that these "inalienable" rights actually meant something other than poetry -- which has been my point all along. Rights are meaningless without an enforcement structure. Any philosophical bent that leads you to think otherwise is no more than an exercise in self-deception.
That would be the TSA, the casting into irrelevance of almost the entire bill of rights; a 100-mile "constitution-free" zone all around the border of the USA; the breaking and entering of people's homes by government agents, the shooting of their pets, jailing people and ruining families and lives in order to attempt to violently coerce the public into abdicating personal choice on what entertaining substances they can ingest; the invasive and pervasive searches of our papers, our banking, our communications; the placement, in stealth, of citizen's names on "no fly", "no buy", and "scare the children" lists; the fact that "real estate" now means you don't actually own your property that you paid for, coupled with the lovely fact that the government now will take your land by force in order to develop more profitable commercial enterprises on it; Inalienable rights? Hardly.
You can go on all day about inalienable rights, but in fact they've been well and truly alienated... you literally aren't protected by them any longer. So they're very much alienable. Those are the facts. But if it makes you happy to think they aren't, while you live in a world where they literally are, fine. Me, I prefer reality to sugar-coated philosophical blundering about in the dark.
I prefer to think of it as muddy thinking. Because it is. Try again, this time more carefully.
I'm not confusing anything. I'm telling you that when something you call a "right" that has no supporting power behind it, then it simply has no value in protecting you from anyone or anything. This is a fact -- you cannot get around it with words.
You can call these ideas anything you want -- my point is that without supporting power, they are worthless. You can either try to change the situation so they have supporting power, or these ideas will not benefit you in any significant manner when a question comes up of what you can or cannot do. This is the basis for the fact that without power, and a will to use it in your stead in order to enforce an idea... the idea doesn't rise to the standard of having worth in shielding your actions or your speech from anyone or anything. At that point, calling it a right is simply applying a label to a toothless idea. Without backing power and supporting will, rights are meaningless.