My favorite mandatory handicap spots were at a waterski park, I had been going there for a few years, then, one day, 10 of 16 first row parking spots were converted to 6 handicapped spots - at a waterski park. In the following year I never saw a single spot used.
You don't go to jail for a trivial infraction, you might go to jail for being a habitual scofflaw, based on some anecdotes I've heard, that would require hundreds of tickets... the lack of license plate is a pretty effective legal block to accumulating hundreds of proven tickets.
If we can not prevent it than the only thing we can do is to try to lessen its consequences. First we must try to get as many people out of it path and the only way I can see is to build underground at a depth of say a 1,000 feet. Second we will need a power supply and the only thing I can see is fusion power. Third we need to be able to burn away the dust in the atmosphere and the only thing I could think of is giant mirrors in outer space to redirect sunlight to burn dust away. If it happened 300,000 years ago than human survived it than without our present day technology so we should be able to survive it again with a lot more people.
Thanks for your reply. my question is why would the pipe only to pull energy from lava a few meters away from itself? If I am extracting energy from the lava underneath, it seems like conduction would mean I'd be pulling from a much larger area. I'm not looking to drain all of the energy in one day or one year. Just enough to keep the system in some type of equilibrium. If the numbers I found for Mt. St Helen are correct, and even if I assume that this volcano is a thousand times larger, it doesn't seem like you'd need to extract that much energy over a period of a century (these suckers form really slow) to maintain an equiibirum position.
Again, I will admit I am nowhere near to being an expert on this... I'd love to find out why I'm wrong.
Well, I was proposing pulling heat from a 30 meter radius of rock into a pipe 15cm in radius, so a 40,000:1 ratio - if you're vaporizing water to steam, you're not going to make much of a dent in heat content of 40,000x the volume of rock (at 2.5g/cc density vs. steam at about 0.0016g/cc @ 50psi) so 62 million times the mass, but over days and days, you will bring the temperature down a little - but, at the same time, that rock will be being heated from below....
And, remember, to cover the whole area at this 62 million to 1 mass ratio will require 1.3 million pipes...
I am coming at this from an uneducated viewpoint, but would appreciate an answer from someone a bit more educated...
If we were to drill into this forming volcano, use geothermal energy to create electricity, could you delay, decrease or prevent the volcano from erupting? It seems like a really good win/win situation where you get almost free energy and prevent a small country from getting obliterated.
70km across (35,000m radius, about 4 billion square meters)... you were planning on extracting energy using maybe 30cm diameter pipes? Say, generously, these pipes can pull heat energy from lava up to 30m away from themselves (3000 square meters), To drain heat energy from just 1% of the surface of the dome, you'd need 13,000 pipes - how deep are you planning to sink them to have an effect? Even if you solidify the cap to a depth of 5km, I'm not sure that the forces underneath would be contained, they'd probably just divert to somewhere nearby, and likely explode with even greater force from a smaller area.
It would be a big project - if you put all the oil drillers in the western hemisphere on the job, you might make an ineffective cooling "cap" a few km deep within a few hundred years - all that heat being dumped into the ocean (unless you have a preferable heat sink?) would have a devastating effect on thousands of square km of sea life, and sure, there'd be "free" geothermal energy until the volcano blew, but only as far as you could transmit it.
If electricity were free, where's my incentive to not just buy a (massively inefficient) $500 wall unit A/C
Require all new units to be efficient, and maybe offer a trade-in on old ones to encourage people to upgrade and give those on lower incomes a buffer from the additional cost of efficient models.
Say that in the rural U.S.A. and you might get lynched.
would have been far cheaper to get an extra ton of capacity in the unit instead of paying the labor for insulation installation
Again regulation on new houses, but also in the UK we offer free insulation to the elderly and people on benefits. It could be extended. There are actually lots of things you can do to insulate a house that cost very little, such as draught excluders and window film, and you can install them yourself.
I'd like Google, or a similar corporation with more disposable income than many state governments, to start an experimental neighborhood renovation program (as a charitable exercise, don't look for profits in this), where they buy houses from the open market at fair market value, and renovate them for energy efficiency, insulating them to high standards, putting in efficient windows and A/C units, installing solar panels (PV and/or water heating) where appropriate, etc., maybe using low-maintenance roofing and siding materials where appropriate, then turning around and selling the houses, on the open market, for whatever fair market value is. I would fully expect the program to run at a loss, with the improvements costing more than the market is willing to pay, but what I'm really interested in is the impact to the local environment and economy. There would be an artificial economic boost due to the money flowing into the construction industry, it would probably lead to local growth if you kept the program going for several years. Residents of the improved homes would have more disposable income due to lower energy costs, the local environment would be improved by reduced coal burning (probably more than offset by the population growth from the economic boost), all in all I'm not really sure what would come of it, but it would be an interesting case study to back up or refute "obvious" regulations about how houses should be built, and it certainly seems like it falls under the "not evil" mantra, unless you're a Google shareholder, but, again, such a program should cost a tiny fraction of a percent of their income, less than 1% of profits in a good quarter, and the PR potential is huge. And. I suppose, if they do it an area where the local government could give them tax breaks, it could be sold as a win-win...
Looked plenty green when the Legislature signed it, might have even looked a little green when the next election came around. I have the same frustration with simple waste disposal in my county. They won't take certain (arbitrarily enforced, so make sure to take care of your garbagemen come Christmastime) waste at curbside pickup, so you get a truck, load it up and take it to the local (5 miles away) substation, which might allow you to leave it, or, if they feel like it, that waste could look like construction materials, or tires, or a dozen other things on their list (which seems to change monthly) to them, so they might not - in which case you need to drive it another 10 miles to the County central depot where you must pay by the pound for disposal, and by the way, keeps mostly opposite hours from the substations, so when you get there, they just closed (you know the drill: MW 10A-6P, Thu 7A-3P, F 9A-4P, Sat 8A-Noon, Closed Sunday and Tuesday, and daily from Noon-1 for lunch, with exceptions and variations for recognized holidays...) Now, driving 15 miles home along deserted county roads, you understand completely where all the roadside dumping comes from... 60 miles in a truck, roughly 5 gallons in gas, plus maintenance, plus a $2.37 disposal fee collected by a $11/hour county employee operating a very expensive double truck weighing scale, for the waste to end up in EXACTLY the same place it would if the garbagemen would have let the automated can lifter put it up into their truck and not pulled it out by hand and left it on the curb.
Seriously. Electricity to residential users should be free (up to a consumption level)... this could encourage the move to electricity in other areas currently using other fuel sources, like automobiles. Electric cars are cheaper to operate now, but what if it was FREE?
Seems like something to think about.
I live in Florida. I just spent $9K on a new AC unit because the old one was slightly under-powered and massively inefficient. Our summertime electric bills dropped from $350/month to under $100 a month. If electricity were free, where's my incentive to not just buy a (massively inefficient) $500 wall unit A/C to band-aid my 20 year old central A/C and limp it along for another 10 or 15 years, boosting my electricity consumption by a factor of 3x? (Northern Florida, it does get cold occasionally, during particularly cold months the old unit would cost $500+ running in heat-pump mode, the new one less than $200 and keeps the house warmer too...) Also, I upgraded the attic insulation from R-19 to R-38 (partly responsible for the system efficiency) - would have been far cheaper to get an extra ton of capacity in the unit instead of paying the labor for insulation installation....
If I could charge an electric car for FREE, I'd already have a hybrid converted for plug-in charging... but since my electricity comes from a coal fired plant down the road, that wouldn't even be good for the local environment.
That giant dark red glob where yellowstone is pretty foreboding... I assume that 90% of the stuff you hear in all of the shows about a mass extinction event following a yellowstone "supervolcano" eruption is just hype to get people to watch, but still.
It's just hype until it happens. There are geological markers indicating a Yellowstone eruption every N million years, fairly regularly for a half dozen cycles or so... we are currently about N * 1.6 million years since the last eruption.
WindowsME was an improvement, but it was so similar to Win98 that it could have been called "Win98 Service Pack 3":)
Everyone seemed to be 100% sure that WinME was crap, even though they had never seen a machine running it.... except mine. It ran great on my computer... so it must have been the one exception.
I agree about ME==98-SP3...
I don't love MS and believe they deserve more bad press than they get, but in the case of ME, I think it got a disproportionate amount of bad press and somehow popular sentiment backlashed at it worse than it deserved, at least relative to their contemporary products that got less bad press and popular resentment than ME.
Depends on what you are trying to do. If you want a BASIC (or BASIC like) program that inputs three numbers as text and then prints the product of those three numbers to the screen - I think that's actually harder today. Although, since Qt and Creator came out, it's starting to reach parity with the TRS-80...
Most of what's relatively easy today was simply impossible then, although, I'd like to see a serious effort put into a "modern" software development kit for the Apple II / Atari 800 / C64 generation of 8bit machines, I bet they were actually capable of a great deal more than they delivered.
I've found AutoIT to be good enough for my limited interest in programming. Simple enough to get it to accept input and display output via msgbox's, or you could dump output to console. Additionally you can make it "do useful stuff" by simply having it drive the GUI in other programs: http://www.autoitscript.com/site/
I'm sure there are a lot of tools out there that are easier than TRS-80 Basic, but, back in the day, when you powered the machine on, you were booted straight to the program interpreter command line - a hell of a lot easier than tracking down and installing a good tool, it "just worked";-)
I wanted to like Slackware back in about '96 - wanted to so badly that I subscribed to the CD distro... it just wasn't ready for prime time, while my Winsock was ticking over like a champ, Linux would boot once, exactly once, and have a working modem connection to the internet, then it would break itself and never connect again. Sure, it was a configuration error. Sure, with enough knowledge, (research done on the Internet from my Windows machine),, I could have learned what script was responsible and recoded it myself to work for my esoteric application, because, hell, nobody used dialup back in '96/97, did they? Yeah, DSL was at least a year out at that point.
XP made Linux look really bad when it came out. It took a long time (2004ish for me, true native 64 bit addressing in Gentoo) before Linux had anything remotely compelling to get me to switch, and even then, there were hobbyist versions of 64 bit XP floating around that were probably easier to deal with than Gentoo - but I found the free gcc compiler a compelling alternative to the licensing BS around Visual Studio...
Depends on what you are trying to do. If you want a BASIC (or BASIC like) program that inputs three numbers as text and then prints the product of those three numbers to the screen - I think that's actually harder today. Although, since Qt and Creator came out, it's starting to reach parity with the TRS-80...
Most of what's relatively easy today was simply impossible then, although, I'd like to see a serious effort put into a "modern" software development kit for the Apple II / Atari 800 / C64 generation of 8bit machines, I bet they were actually capable of a great deal more than they delivered.
My ME machine was fine, as soon as I disabled all the automatic trying to be helpful stuff like disk defrag starting itself, etc. Same thing they got wrong with Vista.
Damn straight. I got a Gateway Solo 5350 PIII Notebook with 256MB of RAM and Windows ME on it - anybody want to buy it?
Actually, at the time, I bought it on purpose to get a non-XP machine due to FUD regarding whether or not XP would serve me as well as '95 and friends had for the previous 5 years. Apparently, XP had about twice the run, and '95 had about twice the effective run of 3.1, and before Windows 3.1, I seem to remember a raft of 99% backward compatible DOS versions, more than one a year back in '91-'92.
Is this a Moore's Law inversion? Each successive generation of an OS will last twice as long as its' predecessor.
"If we, as a culture, were willing to pay 25 to 50% more for our basic food (grains, fruits, vegetables, meat, dairy), there would be no reason to take the risks of persistent pesticides and the other "necessities" of monoculture farming."
False.
We would loose over 25% to 100% of our available food, depending on the specific item. That means 200+ percent increase. "will reap bigger savings in areas like nutritional health" also false.
And food is cheap, DEPENDS on location. But hey, lets return to the bad ol' days of famine, disease, and food poisoning.
To listen to the "Vanishing Bees" editorial, back in the day of small farms with varied crops and NO pesticides whatsoever, crop loss ran about 33% on average (and, yes, there was more variation in yield from year to year, more bad years due to drought, etc.) Today, with Gaucho and other persistent pesticides - that are illegal in much of Europe due to their effects on bees - we still lose about 33% of our crop to pests, with the difference being, if we suddenly stop using the pesticides and still plant 100,000 contiguous acres of a single species of corn, we could well lose 100% of that plot to a single pest population explosion.
if there is a cost-benefit advantage, the cost will rise until there isn't.
I'd be reluctant to talk about college students from the home economus point of view. A lot of them enter college without the tools to do a proper cost/benefit analysis of their college experience. And a lot of them leave college without those tools as well.
They may not have the tools, but, often, the ones that are getting bankrolled to go to a "name" school are being bankrolled by parents or other relatives who either do have the ability to crunch the numbers, or have enough life experience to know the value without a spreadsheet.
require major changes to farming practice (which, maybe, are needed).
If we, as a culture, were willing to pay 25 to 50% more for our basic food (grains, fruits, vegetables, meat, dairy), there would be no reason to take the risks of persistent pesticides and the other "necessities" of monoculture farming.
But what would actually happen is the 25 to 50% would go into the pockets of corporations and they would continue shoveling crap to the public. What we really need to do is get the general public to give a crap about what they eat, and not just "healthier == $$".
True, that is what is happening with Nestle's organic brands... the general public may actually give a crap what they eat, but it's damn difficult to do anything about it. We participate in a "farm share" - for vegetables and fruit, it's cute, it redirects maybe 20% of our grocery budget away from the supermarket, but I doubt they've even noticed or will do anything about it in real terms (like changing their product offerings).
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My favorite mandatory handicap spots were at a waterski park, I had been going there for a few years, then, one day, 10 of 16 first row parking spots were converted to 6 handicapped spots - at a waterski park. In the following year I never saw a single spot used.
I think it stems more from a vague desire at anonymity... yes, he could make his own parking space wherever he wanted, at Apple, but not around town.
You don't go to jail for a trivial infraction, you might go to jail for being a habitual scofflaw, based on some anecdotes I've heard, that would require hundreds of tickets... the lack of license plate is a pretty effective legal block to accumulating hundreds of proven tickets.
If we can not prevent it than the only thing we can do is to try to lessen its consequences. First we must try to get as many people out of it path and the only way I can see is to build underground at a depth of say a 1,000 feet. Second we will need a power supply and the only thing I can see is fusion power. Third we need to be able to burn away the dust in the atmosphere and the only thing I could think of is giant mirrors in outer space to redirect sunlight to burn dust away. If it happened 300,000 years ago than human survived it than without our present day technology so we should be able to survive it again with a lot more people.
Ever watch Dr. Strangelove?
We'd only need one pipe to 5km then throw some nukes down it to open up a relief hole.
Sounds like a job for Bruce Willis.
Thanks for your reply. my question is why would the pipe only to pull energy from lava a few meters away from itself? If I am extracting energy from the lava underneath, it seems like conduction would mean I'd be pulling from a much larger area. I'm not looking to drain all of the energy in one day or one year. Just enough to keep the system in some type of equilibrium. If the numbers I found for Mt. St Helen are correct, and even if I assume that this volcano is a thousand times larger, it doesn't seem like you'd need to extract that much energy over a period of a century (these suckers form really slow) to maintain an equiibirum position.
Again, I will admit I am nowhere near to being an expert on this... I'd love to find out why I'm wrong.
Well, I was proposing pulling heat from a 30 meter radius of rock into a pipe 15cm in radius, so a 40,000:1 ratio - if you're vaporizing water to steam, you're not going to make much of a dent in heat content of 40,000x the volume of rock (at 2.5g/cc density vs. steam at about 0.0016g/cc @ 50psi) so 62 million times the mass, but over days and days, you will bring the temperature down a little - but, at the same time, that rock will be being heated from below....
And, remember, to cover the whole area at this 62 million to 1 mass ratio will require 1.3 million pipes...
I am coming at this from an uneducated viewpoint, but would appreciate an answer from someone a bit more educated...
If we were to drill into this forming volcano, use geothermal energy to create electricity, could you delay, decrease or prevent the volcano from erupting? It seems like a really good win/win situation where you get almost free energy and prevent a small country from getting obliterated.
70km across (35,000m radius, about 4 billion square meters)... you were planning on extracting energy using maybe 30cm diameter pipes? Say, generously, these pipes can pull heat energy from lava up to 30m away from themselves (3000 square meters), To drain heat energy from just 1% of the surface of the dome, you'd need 13,000 pipes - how deep are you planning to sink them to have an effect? Even if you solidify the cap to a depth of 5km, I'm not sure that the forces underneath would be contained, they'd probably just divert to somewhere nearby, and likely explode with even greater force from a smaller area.
It would be a big project - if you put all the oil drillers in the western hemisphere on the job, you might make an ineffective cooling "cap" a few km deep within a few hundred years - all that heat being dumped into the ocean (unless you have a preferable heat sink?) would have a devastating effect on thousands of square km of sea life, and sure, there'd be "free" geothermal energy until the volcano blew, but only as far as you could transmit it.
If electricity were free, where's my incentive to not just buy a (massively inefficient) $500 wall unit A/C
Require all new units to be efficient, and maybe offer a trade-in on old ones to encourage people to upgrade and give those on lower incomes a buffer from the additional cost of efficient models.
Say that in the rural U.S.A. and you might get lynched.
would have been far cheaper to get an extra ton of capacity in the unit instead of paying the labor for insulation installation
Again regulation on new houses, but also in the UK we offer free insulation to the elderly and people on benefits. It could be extended. There are actually lots of things you can do to insulate a house that cost very little, such as draught excluders and window film, and you can install them yourself.
I'd like Google, or a similar corporation with more disposable income than many state governments, to start an experimental neighborhood renovation program (as a charitable exercise, don't look for profits in this), where they buy houses from the open market at fair market value, and renovate them for energy efficiency, insulating them to high standards, putting in efficient windows and A/C units, installing solar panels (PV and/or water heating) where appropriate, etc., maybe using low-maintenance roofing and siding materials where appropriate, then turning around and selling the houses, on the open market, for whatever fair market value is. I would fully expect the program to run at a loss, with the improvements costing more than the market is willing to pay, but what I'm really interested in is the impact to the local environment and economy. There would be an artificial economic boost due to the money flowing into the construction industry, it would probably lead to local growth if you kept the program going for several years. Residents of the improved homes would have more disposable income due to lower energy costs, the local environment would be improved by reduced coal burning (probably more than offset by the population growth from the economic boost), all in all I'm not really sure what would come of it, but it would be an interesting case study to back up or refute "obvious" regulations about how houses should be built, and it certainly seems like it falls under the "not evil" mantra, unless you're a Google shareholder, but, again, such a program should cost a tiny fraction of a percent of their income, less than 1% of profits in a good quarter, and the PR potential is huge. And. I suppose, if they do it an area where the local government could give them tax breaks, it could be sold as a win-win...
So... how green is that?
Looked plenty green when the Legislature signed it, might have even looked a little green when the next election came around. I have the same frustration with simple waste disposal in my county. They won't take certain (arbitrarily enforced, so make sure to take care of your garbagemen come Christmastime) waste at curbside pickup, so you get a truck, load it up and take it to the local (5 miles away) substation, which might allow you to leave it, or, if they feel like it, that waste could look like construction materials, or tires, or a dozen other things on their list (which seems to change monthly) to them, so they might not - in which case you need to drive it another 10 miles to the County central depot where you must pay by the pound for disposal, and by the way, keeps mostly opposite hours from the substations, so when you get there, they just closed (you know the drill: MW 10A-6P, Thu 7A-3P, F 9A-4P, Sat 8A-Noon, Closed Sunday and Tuesday, and daily from Noon-1 for lunch, with exceptions and variations for recognized holidays...) Now, driving 15 miles home along deserted county roads, you understand completely where all the roadside dumping comes from... 60 miles in a truck, roughly 5 gallons in gas, plus maintenance, plus a $2.37 disposal fee collected by a $11/hour county employee operating a very expensive double truck weighing scale, for the waste to end up in EXACTLY the same place it would if the garbagemen would have let the automated can lifter put it up into their truck and not pulled it out by hand and left it on the curb.
If they don't, they're missing a greenportunity.
Seriously. Electricity to residential users should be free (up to a consumption level)... this could encourage the move to electricity in other areas currently using other fuel sources, like automobiles. Electric cars are cheaper to operate now, but what if it was FREE?
Seems like something to think about.
I live in Florida. I just spent $9K on a new AC unit because the old one was slightly under-powered and massively inefficient. Our summertime electric bills dropped from $350/month to under $100 a month. If electricity were free, where's my incentive to not just buy a (massively inefficient) $500 wall unit A/C to band-aid my 20 year old central A/C and limp it along for another 10 or 15 years, boosting my electricity consumption by a factor of 3x? (Northern Florida, it does get cold occasionally, during particularly cold months the old unit would cost $500+ running in heat-pump mode, the new one less than $200 and keeps the house warmer too...) Also, I upgraded the attic insulation from R-19 to R-38 (partly responsible for the system efficiency) - would have been far cheaper to get an extra ton of capacity in the unit instead of paying the labor for insulation installation....
If I could charge an electric car for FREE, I'd already have a hybrid converted for plug-in charging... but since my electricity comes from a coal fired plant down the road, that wouldn't even be good for the local environment.
That giant dark red glob where yellowstone is pretty foreboding... I assume that 90% of the stuff you hear in all of the shows about a mass extinction event following a yellowstone "supervolcano" eruption is just hype to get people to watch, but still.
It's just hype until it happens. There are geological markers indicating a Yellowstone eruption every N million years, fairly regularly for a half dozen cycles or so... we are currently about N * 1.6 million years since the last eruption.
WindowsME was an improvement, but it was so similar to Win98 that it could have been called "Win98 Service Pack 3" :)
Everyone seemed to be 100% sure that WinME was crap, even though they had never seen a machine running it.... except mine. It ran great on my computer... so it must have been the one exception.
I agree about ME==98-SP3...
I don't love MS and believe they deserve more bad press than they get, but in the case of ME, I think it got a disproportionate amount of bad press and somehow popular sentiment backlashed at it worse than it deserved, at least relative to their contemporary products that got less bad press and popular resentment than ME.
Software development is MUCH easier nowadays.
Depends on what you are trying to do. If you want a BASIC (or BASIC like) program that inputs three numbers as text and then prints the product of those three numbers to the screen - I think that's actually harder today. Although, since Qt and Creator came out, it's starting to reach parity with the TRS-80...
Most of what's relatively easy today was simply impossible then, although, I'd like to see a serious effort put into a "modern" software development kit for the Apple II / Atari 800 / C64 generation of 8bit machines, I bet they were actually capable of a great deal more than they delivered.
I've found AutoIT to be good enough for my limited interest in programming. Simple enough to get it to accept input and display output via msgbox's, or you could dump output to console. Additionally you can make it "do useful stuff" by simply having it drive the GUI in other programs:
http://www.autoitscript.com/site/
I'm sure there are a lot of tools out there that are easier than TRS-80 Basic, but, back in the day, when you powered the machine on, you were booted straight to the program interpreter command line - a hell of a lot easier than tracking down and installing a good tool, it "just worked" ;-)
Huh. I have a PhD and can still recite the whole first trilogy. So I think you are unscientifically extrapolating from your personal experiences.
I hope by "first trilogy" you mean episodes 4-6... I'd hate to guess what that Ph.D is in if you mean 1-3.
Recycled hardware can't handle the overhead of a modern OS like XP....
I wanted to like Slackware back in about '96 - wanted to so badly that I subscribed to the CD distro... it just wasn't ready for prime time, while my Winsock was ticking over like a champ, Linux would boot once, exactly once, and have a working modem connection to the internet, then it would break itself and never connect again. Sure, it was a configuration error. Sure, with enough knowledge, (research done on the Internet from my Windows machine),, I could have learned what script was responsible and recoded it myself to work for my esoteric application, because, hell, nobody used dialup back in '96/97, did they? Yeah, DSL was at least a year out at that point.
XP made Linux look really bad when it came out. It took a long time (2004ish for me, true native 64 bit addressing in Gentoo) before Linux had anything remotely compelling to get me to switch, and even then, there were hobbyist versions of 64 bit XP floating around that were probably easier to deal with than Gentoo - but I found the free gcc compiler a compelling alternative to the licensing BS around Visual Studio...
Software development is MUCH easier nowadays.
Depends on what you are trying to do. If you want a BASIC (or BASIC like) program that inputs three numbers as text and then prints the product of those three numbers to the screen - I think that's actually harder today. Although, since Qt and Creator came out, it's starting to reach parity with the TRS-80...
Most of what's relatively easy today was simply impossible then, although, I'd like to see a serious effort put into a "modern" software development kit for the Apple II / Atari 800 / C64 generation of 8bit machines, I bet they were actually capable of a great deal more than they delivered.
My ME machine was fine, as soon as I disabled all the automatic trying to be helpful stuff like disk defrag starting itself, etc. Same thing they got wrong with Vista.
Damn straight. I got a Gateway Solo 5350 PIII Notebook with 256MB of RAM and Windows ME on it - anybody want to buy it?
Actually, at the time, I bought it on purpose to get a non-XP machine due to FUD regarding whether or not XP would serve me as well as '95 and friends had for the previous 5 years. Apparently, XP had about twice the run, and '95 had about twice the effective run of 3.1, and before Windows 3.1, I seem to remember a raft of 99% backward compatible DOS versions, more than one a year back in '91-'92.
Is this a Moore's Law inversion? Each successive generation of an OS will last twice as long as its' predecessor.
IT's not, and it's been debunked. HInt: All alarmist 'documentaries' are alarmist and as such shouldn't be trusted as a source.
It has been banned, debunked is in the eye of the beholder:
http://www.newmediaexplorer.org/sepp/2003/11/26/millions_of_bees_dead_bayers_gaucho_blamed.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imidacloprid_affects_on_bees
Alarmist 'documentaries' tell another side of the story, not always further from the truth than Fox news.
"If we, as a culture, were willing to pay 25 to 50% more for our basic food (grains, fruits, vegetables, meat, dairy), there would be no reason to take the risks of persistent pesticides and the other "necessities" of monoculture farming."
False.
We would loose over 25% to 100% of our available food, depending on the specific item. That means 200+ percent increase.
"will reap bigger savings in areas like nutritional health"
also false.
And food is cheap, DEPENDS on location. But hey, lets return to the bad ol' days of famine, disease, and food poisoning.
To listen to the "Vanishing Bees" editorial, back in the day of small farms with varied crops and NO pesticides whatsoever, crop loss ran about 33% on average (and, yes, there was more variation in yield from year to year, more bad years due to drought, etc.) Today, with Gaucho and other persistent pesticides - that are illegal in much of Europe due to their effects on bees - we still lose about 33% of our crop to pests, with the difference being, if we suddenly stop using the pesticides and still plant 100,000 contiguous acres of a single species of corn, we could well lose 100% of that plot to a single pest population explosion.
if there is a cost-benefit advantage, the cost will rise until there isn't.
I'd be reluctant to talk about college students from the home economus point of view. A lot of them enter college without the tools to do a proper cost/benefit analysis of their college experience. And a lot of them leave college without those tools as well.
They may not have the tools, but, often, the ones that are getting bankrolled to go to a "name" school are being bankrolled by parents or other relatives who either do have the ability to crunch the numbers, or have enough life experience to know the value without a spreadsheet.
require major changes to farming practice (which, maybe, are needed).
If we, as a culture, were willing to pay 25 to 50% more for our basic food (grains, fruits, vegetables, meat, dairy), there would be no reason to take the risks of persistent pesticides and the other "necessities" of monoculture farming.
But what would actually happen is the 25 to 50% would go into the pockets of corporations and they would continue shoveling crap to the public. What we really need to do is get the general public to give a crap about what they eat, and not just "healthier == $$".
True, that is what is happening with Nestle's organic brands... the general public may actually give a crap what they eat, but it's damn difficult to do anything about it. We participate in a "farm share" - for vegetables and fruit, it's cute, it redirects maybe 20% of our grocery budget away from the supermarket, but I doubt they've even noticed or will do anything about it in real terms (like changing their product offerings).
On November 9th national communications will be disrupted...
A communications disruption can mean only one thing...
Yes, Invasion.
Seriously though, I'm so dis-connected from FEMA controlled broadcast media that I won't notice the disruption at all.