My game consoles spend more time streaming Netflix then playing games these days.
Well, there goes the 'sell below cost and recoup the money on game licensing fees' business model.
Yep, I've spent about $700 on PS3 hardware (2 consoles, 2 extra controllers, camera) and maybe $150 on game titles since I got the first one in 2007. Too bad that the hardware is such crap too - early unit howled like a vacuum cleaner and consumed 300W+ all the time, new unit is quieter and cooler and the disc drive crapped out almost immediately.
Still, I like my $100 in hard drive based games (GT5 and a pile of kids' games and demos), and Netflix streaming keeps it in the living room. When the 2nd unit dies, I don't think I'll be getting a 3rd - already pissed at them for killing my Linux installation, and there's just not that much I really like on the console that I can't get just as well somewhere else.
Starting with the original Atari game console, game consoles were cheap computers that could play games. Now you can buy a Raspberry Pi with HDMI out and about a gagillion times the processing power of the original Atari game console for $25 (more like $75 by the time you have a case, power supply, cables, etc.) Sure, it sucks for "the latest" games - give it 5 or 10 years and a $50 computer will play today's latest games better than your bleeding edge rig from 2010.
Better still, propose a bill requiring members of congress to serve 40 hours per week, 50 weeks per year, with full accountability of their whereabouts and activities during those periods.
They're on salary. Make them work at least 50 hours per week, carry a pager(cellphone, you know what I mean), pay for their own meals, drive themselves to work, have working knowledge for anything they have a decision on etc. Otherwise they won't have any idea what it's like working in IT. Actually, I don't think they have any idea what it's like being an normal person trying to earn a living.
I don't mind them doing the job that they say they are doing, how they say they are currently doing it. I do mind the lack of transparency and accountability that they work under, especially given how important their work product is to my daily life.
If a Congressman says what he does, and does what he says, that's all I really expect from an elected official. If, on the other hand, he lies about his whereabouts, who he is meeting with in an official capacity, etc. I'd like that to be grounds for immediate dismissal.
Also, if they spend time on blackout "matters of national security," that should be independently verified, preferably by members of the opposing party.
bio-compatible materials exist that wires can be made of
Bio-compatible implantable wires are a good deal more complex, failure prone, and expensive than a titanium can. The wires need to stretch with the body and be fully insulated. Stainless steel coils inside silicon sheaths are used - it's not as simple or robust as the 18 gauge romex in your house. The junction from wire to implant can is also a problem that you can't solve with wire-nuts.
Wires in the body are bad. Very bad when you get an MRI. The problem with wireless is that it takes batteries to make it go, batteries wear out, wireless communication makes batteries wear out faster. Most implantables only use wireless for brief, occasional communication. The surgery required to replace batteries (which, to the glee of the CEOs, always means replacing the entire implant), is risky and inconvenient. So, unless an implant can be sited directly on the structure(s) it wants to electrically stimulate/sense, it will have wires. They're supposed to ask you about your implants before you get an MRI. With the millions of MRIs given every year, mistakes are made. On rare occasions, the tips of the implanted wires get hot, tissue damaging hot. Unfortunately, the most common place for an implanted wire tip to be located is on the heart... the victims don't usually die, right away, although some do need to get their pacing lead re-sited. ("right away" is a joke, everybody dies eventually.)
Here in the UK that's apparently the legal minimum.
Signs of my employer being generous are that I get 7.5% of my salary paid into my pension plan. It was 5% last year, but they put it up this year for some reason.
In Germany, starting workers get six weeks paid vacation per year, and it increases over time.
IT workers propose bill requiring citizen referendum on any congressional pay raises
Better still, propose a bill requiring members of congress to serve 40 hours per week, 50 weeks per year, with full accountability of their whereabouts and activities during those periods.
I mean, who really complained about the absurdly expensive data plans and two year contracts to have smart phones?
Um... call me Scottish (cheap), but I _still_ do not have a smartphone because $30/month/phone is too much for a limited data plan.
I'd happily fork out $600 or more out of pocket to have a smartphone, but spend $1200+ per year for unlimited data plans for me and my spouse? My last cell phone lasted 5 years, I'd rather not spend $3000 on a smartphone.
The locals mostly hate the trucks that come with a bottled water operation, the actual water loss is fairly trivial compared to "flood the field" agriculture.
The recent rash of sinkholes around Lakeland were directly traceable to the strawberry growers "protecting their crop" from a freeze event... some tradeoff: potentially protect a few million $ in strawberries while causing tens of millions $ worth of unpredictable sinkholes, under I-4, several local roads, and houses.
And, the article talks about toads detecting high positive ionic concentration in their water three days before the quake. Three days before tremors are detected. Call it detection if you want, but three days before a tremor is pretty good prediction in my book.
I don't know about Virginia, but Florida has been overpumping for decades now, killing coastal forests with saltwater intrusion and killing wet-dry swampy areas by keeping them wet year round with ag runoff.
In Sarasota county, they impose no-car-wash and alternate Thursday lawn watering restrictions, and still the tomato farmers use more water than then entire residential and commercial population. (No, tomato farming is not a major component in Sarasota County's economy, just it's water problems.)
Composting being mandatory is a good thing. Our landfills are filling up quickly and something has to be done about it
I agree with this, but, generating less waste in the first place is a better place to look.
Anybody else have a problem with cardboard box accumulation? It seems to have really taken off after my significant other moved into the house, they all seem to arrive via UPS and FedEx....
Delayed greens reduce roadway capacity, I have seen major intersections that insanely seem to give green to one side while amber is still showing to the cross traffic - I hope that's not intentional, but if it is intentional, it's some highway engineer trying to increase throughput without additional pavement. It works, right up to the point that you start causing accidents and reducing capacity with the cleanup time.
There's a reason that police "profile" people - it works, most of the time. Sadly, they sometimes forget that you also have to commit the infraction to be charged, not just look like you are going to and probably did just before they caught sight of you anyway.
Thanks for the history - I spent a week in London a few years after my Atari 800 got retired to the attic, and I got the distinct impression that things were "different" on that side of the pond with respect to hobby computers.
Cool - I remember something about Atari Jaguar being much more widespread in the UK than the US, but, then, today I can't even put my finger on what exactly the Jaguar was - I had an 800, plus a couple of 400s when they dropped to clearance price ($99 or less..), and then one of the Atari 16 bit machines that finally died when its internal floppy drive belt stretched out (OS was always loaded from floppy, so....)
Actually, a few hundred thousand homo sapiens suffice. That is how many of us are estimated to have lived concurrently with the Neandertal men. We won.
Somehow, I don't really care about the shape of our eyebrows in 10,000 years, I'm a little more concerned with maintaining the ability to organize in groups of thousands and millions to accomplish a common goal - like space travel.
How do you propose to capture methane dribbling out over hundreds of thousands of sq. miles/km of land and sea? It's definitely better to convert methane to CO2 and water than to leave it as methane.
Not for burning, but genetically engineered saltwater algae would probably do the trick, what could possibly go wrong?
The problem with DC back in Edison's day was that you couldn't easily step it up or down.
There's also the problem that, at reasonable transmission voltages, if you shock yourself on 60Hz AC, you're likely to spasm off the terminals within a few cycles, but a DC shock is more likely to cause your muscles to lock you onto the source where you will stay until fried extra crispy, unless helped off by a bystander.
Since DC can't really travel far at all without significant losses
AC/DC doesn't matter wrt distance, voltage does. High voltage transmits the same power with less current (more current = more loss), thus the 380VDC system proposed in the article, even though the machines themselves use 12, 5, and lower DC voltages.
As the globe continues to warm, eventually the Northwest Passage will be a viable route for less ice-hardy vessels more times out of the year, providing economic benefit for those who could utilize the shipping routes.
Yes, but a Northwest Passage is a lot less meaningful today than it would have been when Lewis and Clark were looking for it.
I imagine there are lobbies that would love to see this happen. This is speculation, for I do now know if people actively encourage warming.
With a national population of 300 million, I am virtually certain that there are lobbies that would love to see almost anything happen. The trick, as a representative of your constituents, is to only listen to those lobbyists who are pushing an idea that will benefit the majority of your constituents without completely screwing some of them. At the national level, this is generally too complicated to evaluate by a mere Congressional staff office, thus explaining the propensity of our representatives to support lobbies that support their re-election campaign instead.
Looking at the CO2 data and its positive correlation to the mean global temperature increase, it seems we may see that route in our lifetime.
Looking at the "consensus curve" of warming estimates since 1990, I don't see any oscillations or pullbacks, only continuous upward revision across the board. I can only surmise that future estimates of future warming will, based on this meta-analysis of the estimating trend, be higher than today's estimates for some time to come.
Living in Florida and expecting my children to die around the year 2080, I'm most interested in sea level rise estimation. Sadly, it does not look like my children will be enjoying my parent's waterfront property in their later life.
Also as the permafrost disappears, another side affect is a cascading result in the loss of surface ice/snow pack. As the surface area of the snow/ice/arctic shelf shrinks, the Earth's regional albedo will be reduced, ie there will be less radiational cooling and more energy absorbed by the surface. Cycles such as this create feedback loops in the environment that cause these affects to amplify. Lower albedo -> less permafrost/snow/ice/glacier coverage -> more heat -> lower albedo -> ad inifinitum.
Sooner or later, we will also discover serious mitigating effects, such as increased algal blooms in the ocean that act to sequester carbon, or similar things.
I am not a meteorologist, but based on some cursory research these seem to be realistic eventualities.
I don't think the coming generation will escape the Chinese curses: "May you live in interesting times," nor "May the government be aware of you." But since this generation (and the previous) has mostly experienced the worst one: "May your wishes be granted," the next generation or two may be spared that one.
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To configure your active queue management, the first thing I need to know is: do you have a push system, or a pull system?
Neither, sir, we have a suck system.
1) Game controllers can be (and are) bluetooth connected accessories
2) You can already HDMI out from some phones and drive 1080p
3) HDMI out to an 80" plasma, if you've got the bucks
4) see 1) re: touchscreens don't need to be used.
My game consoles spend more time streaming Netflix then playing games these days.
Well, there goes the 'sell below cost and recoup the money on game licensing fees' business model.
Yep, I've spent about $700 on PS3 hardware (2 consoles, 2 extra controllers, camera) and maybe $150 on game titles since I got the first one in 2007. Too bad that the hardware is such crap too - early unit howled like a vacuum cleaner and consumed 300W+ all the time, new unit is quieter and cooler and the disc drive crapped out almost immediately.
Still, I like my $100 in hard drive based games (GT5 and a pile of kids' games and demos), and Netflix streaming keeps it in the living room. When the 2nd unit dies, I don't think I'll be getting a 3rd - already pissed at them for killing my Linux installation, and there's just not that much I really like on the console that I can't get just as well somewhere else.
Starting with the original Atari game console, game consoles were cheap computers that could play games. Now you can buy a Raspberry Pi with HDMI out and about a gagillion times the processing power of the original Atari game console for $25 (more like $75 by the time you have a case, power supply, cables, etc.) Sure, it sucks for "the latest" games - give it 5 or 10 years and a $50 computer will play today's latest games better than your bleeding edge rig from 2010.
Better still, propose a bill requiring members of congress to serve 40 hours per week, 50 weeks per year, with full accountability of their whereabouts and activities during those periods.
They're on salary. Make them work at least 50 hours per week, carry a pager(cellphone, you know what I mean), pay for their own meals, drive themselves to work, have working knowledge for anything they have a decision on etc. Otherwise they won't have any idea what it's like working in IT. Actually, I don't think they have any idea what it's like being an normal person trying to earn a living.
I don't mind them doing the job that they say they are doing, how they say they are currently doing it. I do mind the lack of transparency and accountability that they work under, especially given how important their work product is to my daily life.
If a Congressman says what he does, and does what he says, that's all I really expect from an elected official. If, on the other hand, he lies about his whereabouts, who he is meeting with in an official capacity, etc. I'd like that to be grounds for immediate dismissal.
Also, if they spend time on blackout "matters of national security," that should be independently verified, preferably by members of the opposing party.
Optical implantable leads will be a good thing, if they can ever get the transciever efficiency up.
bio-compatible materials exist that wires can be made of
Bio-compatible implantable wires are a good deal more complex, failure prone, and expensive than a titanium can. The wires need to stretch with the body and be fully insulated. Stainless steel coils inside silicon sheaths are used - it's not as simple or robust as the 18 gauge romex in your house. The junction from wire to implant can is also a problem that you can't solve with wire-nuts.
Wires in the body are bad. Very bad when you get an MRI. The problem with wireless is that it takes batteries to make it go, batteries wear out, wireless communication makes batteries wear out faster. Most implantables only use wireless for brief, occasional communication. The surgery required to replace batteries (which, to the glee of the CEOs, always means replacing the entire implant), is risky and inconvenient. So, unless an implant can be sited directly on the structure(s) it wants to electrically stimulate/sense, it will have wires. They're supposed to ask you about your implants before you get an MRI. With the millions of MRIs given every year, mistakes are made. On rare occasions, the tips of the implanted wires get hot, tissue damaging hot. Unfortunately, the most common place for an implanted wire tip to be located is on the heart... the victims don't usually die, right away, although some do need to get their pacing lead re-sited. ("right away" is a joke, everybody dies eventually.)
Proof: I get four weeks paid vacation.
Here in the UK that's apparently the legal minimum.
Signs of my employer being generous are that I get 7.5% of my salary paid into my pension plan. It was 5% last year, but they put it up this year for some reason.
In Germany, starting workers get six weeks paid vacation per year, and it increases over time.
IT workers propose bill requiring citizen referendum on any congressional pay raises
Better still, propose a bill requiring members of congress to serve 40 hours per week, 50 weeks per year, with full accountability of their whereabouts and activities during those periods.
I mean, who really complained about the absurdly expensive data plans and two year contracts to have smart phones?
Um... call me Scottish (cheap), but I _still_ do not have a smartphone because $30/month/phone is too much for a limited data plan.
I'd happily fork out $600 or more out of pocket to have a smartphone, but spend $1200+ per year for unlimited data plans for me and my spouse? My last cell phone lasted 5 years, I'd rather not spend $3000 on a smartphone.
The locals mostly hate the trucks that come with a bottled water operation, the actual water loss is fairly trivial compared to "flood the field" agriculture.
The recent rash of sinkholes around Lakeland were directly traceable to the strawberry growers "protecting their crop" from a freeze event... some tradeoff: potentially protect a few million $ in strawberries while causing tens of millions $ worth of unpredictable sinkholes, under I-4, several local roads, and houses.
And, the article talks about toads detecting high positive ionic concentration in their water three days before the quake. Three days before tremors are detected. Call it detection if you want, but three days before a tremor is pretty good prediction in my book.
I don't know about Virginia, but Florida has been overpumping for decades now, killing coastal forests with saltwater intrusion and killing wet-dry swampy areas by keeping them wet year round with ag runoff.
In Sarasota county, they impose no-car-wash and alternate Thursday lawn watering restrictions, and still the tomato farmers use more water than then entire residential and commercial population. (No, tomato farming is not a major component in Sarasota County's economy, just it's water problems.)
Aside from ionosphere disturbances, nature has a number of ways that signify an earthquake's arrival far earlier than an iPhone can.
Not if the iPhone is tied into the toad network.
Composting being mandatory is a good thing. Our landfills are filling up quickly and something has to be done about it
I agree with this, but, generating less waste in the first place is a better place to look.
Anybody else have a problem with cardboard box accumulation? It seems to have really taken off after my significant other moved into the house, they all seem to arrive via UPS and FedEx....
Delayed greens reduce roadway capacity, I have seen major intersections that insanely seem to give green to one side while amber is still showing to the cross traffic - I hope that's not intentional, but if it is intentional, it's some highway engineer trying to increase throughput without additional pavement. It works, right up to the point that you start causing accidents and reducing capacity with the cleanup time.
There's a reason that police "profile" people - it works, most of the time. Sadly, they sometimes forget that you also have to commit the infraction to be charged, not just look like you are going to and probably did just before they caught sight of you anyway.
Thanks for the history - I spent a week in London a few years after my Atari 800 got retired to the attic, and I got the distinct impression that things were "different" on that side of the pond with respect to hobby computers.
Cool - I remember something about Atari Jaguar being much more widespread in the UK than the US, but, then, today I can't even put my finger on what exactly the Jaguar was - I had an 800, plus a couple of 400s when they dropped to clearance price ($99 or less..), and then one of the Atari 16 bit machines that finally died when its internal floppy drive belt stretched out (OS was always loaded from floppy, so....)
Can anyone familiar with the BBC Micro give a comparison to the contemporary 6502 computers from the States?
Was the Beeb available before the Apple ][ ? Was it more or less expensive in the UK?
I get the feeling that the BBC Micro enjoyed a kind of tax protected status, the way American made pickup trucks do in the US.
Actually, a few hundred thousand homo sapiens suffice. That is how many of us are estimated to have lived concurrently with the Neandertal men. We won.
Somehow, I don't really care about the shape of our eyebrows in 10,000 years, I'm a little more concerned with maintaining the ability to organize in groups of thousands and millions to accomplish a common goal - like space travel.
How do you propose to capture methane dribbling out over hundreds of thousands of sq. miles/km of land and sea? It's definitely better to convert methane to CO2 and water than to leave it as methane.
Not for burning, but genetically engineered saltwater algae would probably do the trick, what could possibly go wrong?
The problem with DC back in Edison's day was that you couldn't easily step it up or down.
There's also the problem that, at reasonable transmission voltages, if you shock yourself on 60Hz AC, you're likely to spasm off the terminals within a few cycles, but a DC shock is more likely to cause your muscles to lock you onto the source where you will stay until fried extra crispy, unless helped off by a bystander.
Since DC can't really travel far at all without significant losses
AC/DC doesn't matter wrt distance, voltage does. High voltage transmits the same power with less current (more current = more loss), thus the 380VDC system proposed in the article, even though the machines themselves use 12, 5, and lower DC voltages.
As the globe continues to warm, eventually the Northwest Passage will be a viable route for less ice-hardy vessels more times out of the year, providing economic benefit for those who could utilize the shipping routes.
Yes, but a Northwest Passage is a lot less meaningful today than it would have been when Lewis and Clark were looking for it.
I imagine there are lobbies that would love to see this happen. This is speculation, for I do now know if people actively encourage warming.
With a national population of 300 million, I am virtually certain that there are lobbies that would love to see almost anything happen. The trick, as a representative of your constituents, is to only listen to those lobbyists who are pushing an idea that will benefit the majority of your constituents without completely screwing some of them. At the national level, this is generally too complicated to evaluate by a mere Congressional staff office, thus explaining the propensity of our representatives to support lobbies that support their re-election campaign instead.
Looking at the CO2 data and its positive correlation to the mean global temperature increase, it seems we may see that route in our lifetime.
Looking at the "consensus curve" of warming estimates since 1990, I don't see any oscillations or pullbacks, only continuous upward revision across the board. I can only surmise that future estimates of future warming will, based on this meta-analysis of the estimating trend, be higher than today's estimates for some time to come.
Living in Florida and expecting my children to die around the year 2080, I'm most interested in sea level rise estimation. Sadly, it does not look like my children will be enjoying my parent's waterfront property in their later life.
Also as the permafrost disappears, another side affect is a cascading result in the loss of surface ice/snow pack. As the surface area of the snow/ice/arctic shelf shrinks, the Earth's regional albedo will be reduced, ie there will be less radiational cooling and more energy absorbed by the surface. Cycles such as this create feedback loops in the environment that cause these affects to amplify. Lower albedo -> less permafrost/snow/ice/glacier coverage -> more heat -> lower albedo -> ad inifinitum.
Sooner or later, we will also discover serious mitigating effects, such as increased algal blooms in the ocean that act to sequester carbon, or similar things.
I am not a meteorologist, but based on some cursory research these seem to be realistic eventualities.
I don't think the coming generation will escape the Chinese curses: "May you live in interesting times," nor "May the government be aware of you." But since this generation (and the previous) has mostly experienced the worst one: "May your wishes be granted," the next generation or two may be spared that one.