Why do all these stories seem to have a rubber stamp quality? Always has something revolutionary that breaks physical laws, they have millions availible from investors and they aren't quite ready to unviel but they have already had independent verification. It's like saying I have CU photos of Bigfoot but it'll take a few weeks to get them back from the one hour photo shop. There's always a delay in providing the goods to drag things out. Inspite of their "investors" I'm sure in the meantime they are willing to take additional investment dollars. 'Never mind the cord plugged into the wall we are actually pumping electricity back into the grid'. I thought Snake Oil went out in the 1800s?
Re:Cause or Risk Factor? (warning pro-smoking)
on
Safe Cigarettes?
·
· Score: 1
I take it you are also an executive with William Morrison. A tiny percentage can live to be 100 and smoke. The rest die early. I had a friend that died at 43 three years after he quit from lung cancer. I grew up with a father that smoked. In my teens I couldn't run a block without dropping to my knees and gasping for air. They thought I had ashma but I didn't and it remained a mystery, in the 70s you couldn't blame second hand smoke for such things. Oddly after I moved out the problem gradually got better. Now in my forties I can run a marathon. In the gym I put the 20 year old athletes to shame on the treadmill. Smoking isn't health food and can't cure kidney stones no matter what you think. They are caused by diet and a lack of exercise, period. I've had them myself cronically for years and only diet and exercise cured them not smoking. You need a serious reality check. I've known many people close to me that died from smoking related deseases. Lung cancer isn't normal. The two biggest causes are smoking and radon gas leaching up through the soil. It's a real problem, radon gas, in the northern states in basements and such. Also I'd question taking health advice from a physician that smokes two packs a day in this day and age. The jury isn't still out on smoking related health problems and it isn't out about second hand smoke. Those of us that grew up with it have known about it for years. It was only a mystery to doctors that knew it was a taboo subject. I went through endless painful tests only to be told my health troubles were a mystery when I'm fairly sure the doctors knew what the problem was but there used to be a code of silence about smoking issues. If you have some free time I hear the flat earth society is looking for new members?
Actually the reverse is true. The deeper waters have a very high oxygen content which deep sea creatures depend on. If you flood the deep ocean with CO2 you are likely to wipe out deep sea life which is thought to be the bedrock of ocean life. One of the reasons deep sea creatures die at the surface is suffication. It happens to larger animals like giant squid and coelocanths as well as the smaller fish. Flooding the deep waters with CO2 just so we can keep burning oil then hopefully coal after that runs out is an intensely bad idea and in 50 years they'll be talking about the ecological disaster that it caused and it just couldn't be forseen. It's like nuclear waste and chemical weapons. It used to be when they wanted to get rid of them they'd dump them in the ocean, the out of sight out of mind solution. Problem is it doesn't go away it just becomes a ticking time bomb. There was vast amount of nerve gas dumped into the ocean in steel drums. Millions of dollars have been spent trying to relocate and recover the nerve gas but most has yet to be found and the drums should start rusting through most any time now. Shortsighted is how the government and industry has handle everything. We're just now starting to pay the piper. In 10 to 25 years all these issues will have to be addressed and we are still handling things with no long term considerations. The three monkeys, see no evil hear no evil, speak no evil, should have been a cautionary tale not a political agenda.
Not to in anyway support US domination of the internet but didn't the US establish the internet then it expanded from there? If so isn't it like foreign governments now wanting some control of that infastructure? We built the roads and we let others use them and expand on them but now they want a vote in setting traffic laws. Overly simplified but essentially the case. I definately don't want foreign governments setting limitations on the US internet. It may sound rediculous but I could easily see China gaining enough power in 20 years to demand that the internet be regulated and offensive information restricted world wide as they do in China now. They could easily have the economic power to push the issue in 20 years. The presidents need to be set now and freedom be made fundemental or it's days are numbered. Foreign governments need to have access but just because the rest of the world finds it useful doesn't mean that the US has to automatically give away control. Say the US had been able to build a passage through the US instead of the Panama canal and it happened say twenty years ago. Well the rest of the world sees a major economic advantage and want some control of that Canal. Should they be allowed to control it? It's not that different. The argument is the internet lacks borders but that's not entirely true. The servers are in a country and the US was the country that established it. Obviously the rest of the world could establish a seperate internet but I'd say it was doomed to failure. The more reasonable stance is address individual concerns directly. The US needs to be more open. The obvious example on that was the boneheaded descision to not allow a.XXX address. You can't get rid of porn so why not give it a home that is easily blocked? Unfortunately for the puritan faction they would loose a lot of their ground to complain. The truth being that it's not only kids that they want to restrict access to but to everyone. Control is always about controlling some one else's behavior since you already control your own.
I'd love to see the cost reflect the savings and not be another tax on downloading. I remember the Stephen King novel they set up for download, The Plant. They priced it out so by the end it would cost the same as a novel. Excuse me but downloading text is dirt cheap. Most of the cost in a novel are production and distribution. It was a financial flop but for good reason, most would rather have a printed novel for the same price. To add insult to injury if you wanted multiple formats you had to pay for each one individually. If the costs are 50% lower then the costs should reflect that. Distribution is a massive cost in film and does at times reflect half the costs with advertising and such. Theater owners get roughly 50%, less the first week and gradually more over time. The costs of striking prints or producing DVDs should be roughly equal to the savings so say 50% of the costs of a movie ticket would be reasonable. Unfortunately greed will say yes but if we get the same as a theater ticket we double our take overnight. It's what happened with CD sales. We all bought into the higher cost of production early on and accepted the CD surcharge. Now CDs cost pennies to produce and the costs have continued to go up with artists percentages being fairly flat. It was industry wide price fixing and blatantly illegal.
Obvious point, most of the world's surface is water. Also there's a reason why many of the new projects are in or near water, the wind is more consistent. Perfect energy source? There is none, even fusion has downsides and byproducts. Wind has some of the fewest downsides next to solar. There are ways of limiting the bird damage which is one of the biggest downsides. The big plus of the floating planets would be flexsiblity. It's possible to move them in and out of bird migration routes even. The technology hasn't changed much in the last ten years but the costs of traditional energy sources keep going up where as alternative sources like wind are slowly going down. I'd rather see a thousand large windmills than one nuclear plant. A thousand years from now there won't be a trace of the windmills but we'll still have to store the nuclear waste. Windmills are a 100% recycleable. The only way to recycle most nuclear waste is in dirty bombs. If we produced 50% of our power with nuclear power we'd be hip deep in radioactive waste. If we produced 50% with alternative sources some people would complain about them being an eyesore. I've driven countless times past the windmills in the CA desert and they look more interesting than that stretch of desert so I think they are an improvement. I'll take eye sore over radioactive waste any day.
Beg to differ. Let's start programming and you drink spring water while I drink Red Bull and expresso and we'll see who's still functional in 72 hours. I've worked around people that do Cocaine and they get worthless after awhile but the caffine drinkers fair well. Different drugs effect the body in different ways. I do fine large amounts of caffine clear your head and can somewhat overcome a lack of sleep. I can't recommend it and ideally the best is 8 hours of good quality sleep but I find for various reasons it's not always possible. The bigger issue is exercise and trying to eat well. Caffine isn't the dangerous drug it was once made out to be and the body tolerates it fairly well. The biggest issue I can see with fermented coffee beverages is caffine is a dieretic and the body needs water to process the alcohol so you might find hang overs worse unless you drink extra water. If you are fantatical about your body I'd avoid sitting infront of a computer, drop your calorie intack below 1,000 a day and pick a career where you are kept physically active for 8 to 10 hours a day. Also go for a low stress lifestyle. Stress will do a hundred times the damage caffine will ever do and that is a fact. Outside of diet and exercise stress would be in the tope three for americans for contributing to ill health. If you are drinking Caca Cola I'd worry far more about the sugar than the caffine. I think the acid it contains would harm your health more than caffine. In coffee the cream and sugar are worse for you than the caffine. No one is perfect the idea is to do your best.
The irony is I agree but what is needed aren't weaker laws but stronger ones protecting the artists not the cartels. I'm an independent film maker and trust me the middle men make virtually all the money. The sad thing is the piracy is hitting the original artists far harder than the cartels. They always make money so to be sure of their percentage they have been cutting in deeper on the original artist's percentage. The real crime is to get work distributed you nearly have to give up all rights. The distributors demand all rights in a given market for such a long period of time you are in effect selling it outright. Whatever amount they are willing to pay is largely all you'll ever see. Musicians back in the 50s and 60s weren't allowed to keep any rights to their work especially the black ones. Some of those practises carried through into the 70s, remember Creedence Clear Water Revival? Their manager wound up owning everything. The law supports these criminal practises and does need to be changed but to strengthen the artists rights not weaken them. If artists take much more of a hit there won't be any incentive to produce more work. The middle men make the bulk of the money as it is. As you pointed out there are many levels of distributors. Most independent films go through two or more levels. There's generally some one that markets it then some one that buys it from them that sells to the chains that distribute it from there. Each of those levels wants their lion's share cut. Even if you are an independent producer you can find yourself making a few percent on the sale of a DVD that you made right up to the master. All the distributor did was market and ship them. Independents rarely get much advertising. They tend to be sold under blanket deals where distributor "X" provides say 25 films for say 100 grand per film. The end buyer doesn't buy individual films so much as whatever is availible from a given distributor. Others buy film by film but for low end films this isn't efficent for them. Artisits rarely get more than a few percent on album sales. You're probably aware that piracy was in part started by the record companies to stiff artists on the pathetic amount they were already recieving. About 15 years ago there was some heat over a bunch of pirates being struck from the original color seperations. Translated the company themselves were the only ones with access so they produced the pirates. The joke is they were selling them in major retail stores. I myself around that time bought a copy of the "Prisoner" sound track. I didn't think anything of it at the time. I bought it at a Warehouse store and inspite of it being mono assumed it was legit. A friend was looking at it and noticed that it had no copyright marks and infact had no company information on is save that it was printed in Greece. I doubt anyone involved receieve a dime on that one.
The problem is some one has to pay for the infastructure. If the phone companies stop making money at it they will stop maintaining the phone lines and expansion will cease. This won't be per se out of meanness or greed it will be from an inability to pay people to preform the tasks and to pay for wire and materials. The only real solution is to nationalize the wires both phone and cable. No one really wants that but it may be the only solution. The small amount they get from internet usage won't pay for the infastructure. Phone rates have been dropping like a rock for years and traditional phone companies are rapidly becoming unprofitable and may be unsustainable. People forget the bad old days before competition. Back in the sevenities almost anywhere you called was long distance and an hour long call could easily cost you $5, we're not talking adjusted dollars either. The average person now spends hundreds of hours, I'm guessing between 500 and 1,000 hours, a month on long distance. At 1970s rates in adjusted dollars that was more than most people would have made a month in total income, a couple of grand a month back then was really good money and $3.65 an hour was minimum wage. Phone rates have dropped radically and keep dropping. They are likely to continue to drop so I doubt traditional phone companies can survive. Before you say Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead imagine what will happen if it gets nationalized? Corporations tend to be more efficent, radically so, than government. The far better result would be for the corporations to survive but have stiff competition. I honestly can't see this happening without regulation that will enrage customers since they will see it as protecting corporate profits. It may in fact be mostly that but it's also protecting the infastructure. Before you cry BS imagine the next time your phone line or cable line goes down there's no one there to fix it? Your VOIP phone ain't gonna work then. It's a double edged sword. I hate the phone companies and they got fat in years past but we aren't better off if they go under. The lines may have been paid for decades ago but like roads they must be maintained and eventhough the right of way is public the lines are privately owned.
Pretty exciting for CG artists. My current monitor is an NEC 1970 GX. It's not a CRT but it still has one of the best images I've ever seen for a computer screen. The conrast and saturation is amazing. I can't wait to get a look at the combo monitor. Seems to solve the problems inherent to both systems. Also has the potential for once of a decent laptop screen. Most are pretty mediocre. My current laptop has a bad blue grey shift making it useless for color work. The price tag is daunting at this point but the price will drop. If they can get it down to a third of that price I'd buy. In truth I'd get mighty interested at half that price. Barring a lottery win it's out of my league for now. At least it's good to see things headed in that direction. The progress in LCD displays or the last five years has been remarkable. I still remember my first notebook 15 years ago. It had a passive matrix. I was impressed at the time but having the cursor disappear when you moved it too fast was a real pain. Also the video games of the time looked pretty terrible unless you used an external monitor. Personally I got tired of hauling 19" montors around. The new LCDs look amazing and are a fraction of the weight. The last Viewsonic CRT I had was a piece of junk. Sad to see Viewsonic fall. Their LCDs just can't compete with the NECs and really don't look any better than ones selling for dramatically less. The biggest problem I see with LCDs is the text tends to ghost badly. Mine looks good but some were so bad that you couldn't even read fine print.
People have gotten spoiled by cheap equipment. 20" plus pro level monitors used to run 5 or 6 grand back in the mid to late 90s. It's not for the average game player at this stage. Professional artists and photographers will happily pay the money for the quality. After a while the prices will drop and they will be approachable to gamers and the budget minded graphics people. The turnaround time has compressed in recent years. I bought a DVD burner four years ago. I paid $550 and was quite happy with the purchase. A month later the same one was $450. Three months later I saw it for $350. Now you can get one for $50 or less. It might have made sense to wait but A: I didn't know they would drop that fast and B: I got a lot of use out of it in those three months. Hopefully a year from now the new monitors will drop to half their initial price.
Not entirely true. Sex is one of many ways of catching the desease. Intraveinous drug use is a major one. Most of Africa got it not from sex but from doctors reusing needles. Nurses get it from needle pricks although transmission rate as dropped radically since they started drug treatment after accidental needle pricks. I believe it's a 100% effective if started within hours of the exposure. Transfusions used to be a major cause but testing has all but eliminated that source in the developed world. Accidental blood exposure is still a hazzard. Open cuts and sores are at risk if exposed to contaminated blood. Also potentially eyes, mouth and nasal cavities are a debateable risk. I don't think there's ever been a confirmed case but doctors still wear protection and the desease is still mutating so a new form could always be easier to transmit. Safe sex would radically reduce infection but not by 99%. The very existence of a genetic immunity does give hope that a vaccine is possible. Like most things prevention is the best cure. Although there are other means to contract it than sex if you practice safe sex and don't use intraveinous drugs you probably have a better chance of getting killed by lightning than contracting AIDs, a surprising number do die from lightning every year.
It reminds me of a system I ran onto years ago that a company was selling on the internet. Basically they were selling you sodium in ball form covered in plastic. It had a metal container filled with water and it sliced the pellets and dropped them into the water to split out hydrogen. Gee I wonder how much a kilowatt that process would cost? If you had a cheap source of sodium great. Then again if sodium was cheap and common this type of system would have been in every home years ago. It's the problem with fuel cells, they generally use platinum which is currently running twice the price of gold per ounce. They claim the price is competitive but 220 lbs of coated wire is going to run well north or $1 a lb. Even at a dollar a pound it would cost $220 a tank. The real price would likely be a grand. Sure you get part of it back as surplus wire to be reprocessed but it's hardly a cheap efficent system.
"It identifies the cow, then finds the udders, milks the cow, cleans it's undercarriage, and lets it go."
And in the old days we called them milk maids. Got to wonder how much of it is a true advancement and how much is simply replacing a minimum wage job with technology? At what point does replacing a ten grand a year employee with a 100 grand machine become impractical? Farm jobs actually don't fall under minimum wage laws or more to the point they have a seperate lower wage. 90% of the advances I'm quite sure are improvements but at some point I have to wonder if humans aren't more efficent than machines at certain jobs? A machine breaks down you repair it or buy another one. With minimum wage labor you hire another one. By simply creating technology to replace workers are we really improving things? You can call it survival of the fittest but that doesn't stop out of work people from breaking into your car or house to feed their families. The trick is balance and put the effort where it's really needed. Isn't food production a factory enough at this stage? We already have warehouses full of beakless tumor ridden chickens just to make sure there's a ready supply of cheap McNuggests. Personally I buy free range for a reason.
If my computer can still work with a dust bunny big enough to freak out Godzilla in it you'd think a probe that costs tens of billions would be fairly resilent. Then again it may be a survival of the fittest situation. Having been built in a clean room they are like bubble kids that have no resistence. Give them six months in my computer room and they'll build up their immune system.
I'll take pure functionality over bells and whistles any day. One of the reasons I hate XP is it constantly prompts to do things for me. 9 times out of 10 it's not what I want to do and it breaks my work flow to constantly tell it no. Palm PDAs are much like old DOS apps but that can be a good thing. I like streamline and functional. I use my PDA every single day. Half of it tends to be phone book and calender functions but I beg to differ with another poster that celphones and other devices have easier to use address books. Entering text into a celphone is a pain. I haven't bothered to enter more than a handful of numbers into mine because it's a massive clumsy hassle. I can enter detailed info including address, e-mail addresses and birthdays into mine in less time than I can enter a basic phone number with an abreviated name in a celphone. Most people will sacrific functionality for convience. I agree Ipods are more convienent for music but they are over priced considering for the same price I can get a PDA that does far more than just play music. There may be less memory but with a 1 gig card added how many hours of music do you need with you at any given time? Ipods are toys and PDAs are tools. Maybe that's the real difference and why the levels of success are different. People will by a toy far quicker than a tool. You grit your teeth and say I guess I have to when you buy a new stove for $500 but get excited when you pay $1,500 for a big screen TV. Human nature, it doesn't mean Ipods are superior just more fun. Personally I hate to waste that much on a device that only plays music. Next generation PDAs will probably have to incorporate the same kind of selection wheels and such that MP3 devices use just to compete. I hope they don't improve them to the point that they are no longer useful for their core purpose. I've seen it happen before.
I had the same reaction about video Ipods and responded to a post saying roughly the same thing a few days ago. They may lack the memory but I expanded mine to 1 gig and the storage is potentially unlimited by swaping cards, something you can't do with Ipods. Eventually the memory cards will match current Ipods for storage. Just how many songs do you need to store? Video is a bigger issue but you can already store two movies on a 1 gig memory card so you can keep movies on cards much like DVDs. I find I use all the features on my PDA constantly. My Zaire has built in sound, camera and video capibilites as well. I can play movies, listen to music or read a book on it. I got stuck somewhere right after I got it with nothing to do and found it even had a built in copy of Last of the Mohicans so I killed some time reading it. The biggest issues they have are limited memory and battery life. I've yet to use up my memory so it's not an issue but for longer video clips the battery life isn't up to the task. The one thing I'd love to have is an external battery pack. That one thing would make playing movies practical.
This could have a serious downside for serial killers. Just image the movie Scream if their telephone required facial recognition? It may sound like a good idea but such things often have unforseen problems like ruining storylines to "B" horror films.
Slashdot Mirror
Does this mean my deed is no good? I was planning to put a house up soon. Should have a hell of a view.
Why do all these stories seem to have a rubber stamp quality? Always has something revolutionary that breaks physical laws, they have millions availible from investors and they aren't quite ready to unviel but they have already had independent verification. It's like saying I have CU photos of Bigfoot but it'll take a few weeks to get them back from the one hour photo shop. There's always a delay in providing the goods to drag things out. Inspite of their "investors" I'm sure in the meantime they are willing to take additional investment dollars. 'Never mind the cord plugged into the wall we are actually pumping electricity back into the grid'. I thought Snake Oil went out in the 1800s?
I take it you are also an executive with William Morrison. A tiny percentage can live to be 100 and smoke. The rest die early. I had a friend that died at 43 three years after he quit from lung cancer. I grew up with a father that smoked. In my teens I couldn't run a block without dropping to my knees and gasping for air. They thought I had ashma but I didn't and it remained a mystery, in the 70s you couldn't blame second hand smoke for such things. Oddly after I moved out the problem gradually got better. Now in my forties I can run a marathon. In the gym I put the 20 year old athletes to shame on the treadmill. Smoking isn't health food and can't cure kidney stones no matter what you think. They are caused by diet and a lack of exercise, period. I've had them myself cronically for years and only diet and exercise cured them not smoking. You need a serious reality check. I've known many people close to me that died from smoking related deseases. Lung cancer isn't normal. The two biggest causes are smoking and radon gas leaching up through the soil. It's a real problem, radon gas, in the northern states in basements and such. Also I'd question taking health advice from a physician that smokes two packs a day in this day and age. The jury isn't still out on smoking related health problems and it isn't out about second hand smoke. Those of us that grew up with it have known about it for years. It was only a mystery to doctors that knew it was a taboo subject. I went through endless painful tests only to be told my health troubles were a mystery when I'm fairly sure the doctors knew what the problem was but there used to be a code of silence about smoking issues. If you have some free time I hear the flat earth society is looking for new members?
He may be the first Nobel prize winner to thank Big Bird and Elmo in his acceptance speech.
Actually the reverse is true. The deeper waters have a very high oxygen content which deep sea creatures depend on. If you flood the deep ocean with CO2 you are likely to wipe out deep sea life which is thought to be the bedrock of ocean life. One of the reasons deep sea creatures die at the surface is suffication. It happens to larger animals like giant squid and coelocanths as well as the smaller fish. Flooding the deep waters with CO2 just so we can keep burning oil then hopefully coal after that runs out is an intensely bad idea and in 50 years they'll be talking about the ecological disaster that it caused and it just couldn't be forseen. It's like nuclear waste and chemical weapons. It used to be when they wanted to get rid of them they'd dump them in the ocean, the out of sight out of mind solution. Problem is it doesn't go away it just becomes a ticking time bomb. There was vast amount of nerve gas dumped into the ocean in steel drums. Millions of dollars have been spent trying to relocate and recover the nerve gas but most has yet to be found and the drums should start rusting through most any time now. Shortsighted is how the government and industry has handle everything. We're just now starting to pay the piper. In 10 to 25 years all these issues will have to be addressed and we are still handling things with no long term considerations. The three monkeys, see no evil hear no evil, speak no evil, should have been a cautionary tale not a political agenda.
Not to in anyway support US domination of the internet but didn't the US establish the internet then it expanded from there? If so isn't it like foreign governments now wanting some control of that infastructure? We built the roads and we let others use them and expand on them but now they want a vote in setting traffic laws. Overly simplified but essentially the case. I definately don't want foreign governments setting limitations on the US internet. It may sound rediculous but I could easily see China gaining enough power in 20 years to demand that the internet be regulated and offensive information restricted world wide as they do in China now. They could easily have the economic power to push the issue in 20 years. The presidents need to be set now and freedom be made fundemental or it's days are numbered. Foreign governments need to have access but just because the rest of the world finds it useful doesn't mean that the US has to automatically give away control. Say the US had been able to build a passage through the US instead of the Panama canal and it happened say twenty years ago. Well the rest of the world sees a major economic advantage and want some control of that Canal. Should they be allowed to control it? It's not that different. The argument is the internet lacks borders but that's not entirely true. The servers are in a country and the US was the country that established it. Obviously the rest of the world could establish a seperate internet but I'd say it was doomed to failure. The more reasonable stance is address individual concerns directly. The US needs to be more open. The obvious example on that was the boneheaded descision to not allow a .XXX address. You can't get rid of porn so why not give it a home that is easily blocked? Unfortunately for the puritan faction they would loose a lot of their ground to complain. The truth being that it's not only kids that they want to restrict access to but to everyone. Control is always about controlling some one else's behavior since you already control your own.
I'd love to see the cost reflect the savings and not be another tax on downloading. I remember the Stephen King novel they set up for download, The Plant. They priced it out so by the end it would cost the same as a novel. Excuse me but downloading text is dirt cheap. Most of the cost in a novel are production and distribution. It was a financial flop but for good reason, most would rather have a printed novel for the same price. To add insult to injury if you wanted multiple formats you had to pay for each one individually. If the costs are 50% lower then the costs should reflect that. Distribution is a massive cost in film and does at times reflect half the costs with advertising and such. Theater owners get roughly 50%, less the first week and gradually more over time. The costs of striking prints or producing DVDs should be roughly equal to the savings so say 50% of the costs of a movie ticket would be reasonable. Unfortunately greed will say yes but if we get the same as a theater ticket we double our take overnight. It's what happened with CD sales. We all bought into the higher cost of production early on and accepted the CD surcharge. Now CDs cost pennies to produce and the costs have continued to go up with artists percentages being fairly flat. It was industry wide price fixing and blatantly illegal.
Obvious point, most of the world's surface is water. Also there's a reason why many of the new projects are in or near water, the wind is more consistent. Perfect energy source? There is none, even fusion has downsides and byproducts. Wind has some of the fewest downsides next to solar. There are ways of limiting the bird damage which is one of the biggest downsides. The big plus of the floating planets would be flexsiblity. It's possible to move them in and out of bird migration routes even. The technology hasn't changed much in the last ten years but the costs of traditional energy sources keep going up where as alternative sources like wind are slowly going down. I'd rather see a thousand large windmills than one nuclear plant. A thousand years from now there won't be a trace of the windmills but we'll still have to store the nuclear waste. Windmills are a 100% recycleable. The only way to recycle most nuclear waste is in dirty bombs. If we produced 50% of our power with nuclear power we'd be hip deep in radioactive waste. If we produced 50% with alternative sources some people would complain about them being an eyesore. I've driven countless times past the windmills in the CA desert and they look more interesting than that stretch of desert so I think they are an improvement. I'll take eye sore over radioactive waste any day.
Beg to differ. Let's start programming and you drink spring water while I drink Red Bull and expresso and we'll see who's still functional in 72 hours. I've worked around people that do Cocaine and they get worthless after awhile but the caffine drinkers fair well. Different drugs effect the body in different ways. I do fine large amounts of caffine clear your head and can somewhat overcome a lack of sleep. I can't recommend it and ideally the best is 8 hours of good quality sleep but I find for various reasons it's not always possible. The bigger issue is exercise and trying to eat well. Caffine isn't the dangerous drug it was once made out to be and the body tolerates it fairly well. The biggest issue I can see with fermented coffee beverages is caffine is a dieretic and the body needs water to process the alcohol so you might find hang overs worse unless you drink extra water. If you are fantatical about your body I'd avoid sitting infront of a computer, drop your calorie intack below 1,000 a day and pick a career where you are kept physically active for 8 to 10 hours a day. Also go for a low stress lifestyle. Stress will do a hundred times the damage caffine will ever do and that is a fact. Outside of diet and exercise stress would be in the tope three for americans for contributing to ill health. If you are drinking Caca Cola I'd worry far more about the sugar than the caffine. I think the acid it contains would harm your health more than caffine. In coffee the cream and sugar are worse for you than the caffine. No one is perfect the idea is to do your best.
Yeah and in the film industry we'd call it reimaging the same news. Recycling the same ole shit just doesn't have the same ring.
The irony is I agree but what is needed aren't weaker laws but stronger ones protecting the artists not the cartels. I'm an independent film maker and trust me the middle men make virtually all the money. The sad thing is the piracy is hitting the original artists far harder than the cartels. They always make money so to be sure of their percentage they have been cutting in deeper on the original artist's percentage. The real crime is to get work distributed you nearly have to give up all rights. The distributors demand all rights in a given market for such a long period of time you are in effect selling it outright. Whatever amount they are willing to pay is largely all you'll ever see. Musicians back in the 50s and 60s weren't allowed to keep any rights to their work especially the black ones. Some of those practises carried through into the 70s, remember Creedence Clear Water Revival? Their manager wound up owning everything. The law supports these criminal practises and does need to be changed but to strengthen the artists rights not weaken them. If artists take much more of a hit there won't be any incentive to produce more work. The middle men make the bulk of the money as it is. As you pointed out there are many levels of distributors. Most independent films go through two or more levels. There's generally some one that markets it then some one that buys it from them that sells to the chains that distribute it from there. Each of those levels wants their lion's share cut. Even if you are an independent producer you can find yourself making a few percent on the sale of a DVD that you made right up to the master. All the distributor did was market and ship them. Independents rarely get much advertising. They tend to be sold under blanket deals where distributor "X" provides say 25 films for say 100 grand per film. The end buyer doesn't buy individual films so much as whatever is availible from a given distributor. Others buy film by film but for low end films this isn't efficent for them. Artisits rarely get more than a few percent on album sales. You're probably aware that piracy was in part started by the record companies to stiff artists on the pathetic amount they were already recieving. About 15 years ago there was some heat over a bunch of pirates being struck from the original color seperations. Translated the company themselves were the only ones with access so they produced the pirates. The joke is they were selling them in major retail stores. I myself around that time bought a copy of the "Prisoner" sound track. I didn't think anything of it at the time. I bought it at a Warehouse store and inspite of it being mono assumed it was legit. A friend was looking at it and noticed that it had no copyright marks and infact had no company information on is save that it was printed in Greece. I doubt anyone involved receieve a dime on that one.
The problem is some one has to pay for the infastructure. If the phone companies stop making money at it they will stop maintaining the phone lines and expansion will cease. This won't be per se out of meanness or greed it will be from an inability to pay people to preform the tasks and to pay for wire and materials. The only real solution is to nationalize the wires both phone and cable. No one really wants that but it may be the only solution. The small amount they get from internet usage won't pay for the infastructure. Phone rates have been dropping like a rock for years and traditional phone companies are rapidly becoming unprofitable and may be unsustainable. People forget the bad old days before competition. Back in the sevenities almost anywhere you called was long distance and an hour long call could easily cost you $5, we're not talking adjusted dollars either. The average person now spends hundreds of hours, I'm guessing between 500 and 1,000 hours, a month on long distance. At 1970s rates in adjusted dollars that was more than most people would have made a month in total income, a couple of grand a month back then was really good money and $3.65 an hour was minimum wage. Phone rates have dropped radically and keep dropping. They are likely to continue to drop so I doubt traditional phone companies can survive. Before you say Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead imagine what will happen if it gets nationalized? Corporations tend to be more efficent, radically so, than government. The far better result would be for the corporations to survive but have stiff competition. I honestly can't see this happening without regulation that will enrage customers since they will see it as protecting corporate profits. It may in fact be mostly that but it's also protecting the infastructure. Before you cry BS imagine the next time your phone line or cable line goes down there's no one there to fix it? Your VOIP phone ain't gonna work then. It's a double edged sword. I hate the phone companies and they got fat in years past but we aren't better off if they go under. The lines may have been paid for decades ago but like roads they must be maintained and eventhough the right of way is public the lines are privately owned.
My computer is full of Gremlins. Does that count?
Pretty exciting for CG artists. My current monitor is an NEC 1970 GX. It's not a CRT but it still has one of the best images I've ever seen for a computer screen. The conrast and saturation is amazing. I can't wait to get a look at the combo monitor. Seems to solve the problems inherent to both systems. Also has the potential for once of a decent laptop screen. Most are pretty mediocre. My current laptop has a bad blue grey shift making it useless for color work. The price tag is daunting at this point but the price will drop. If they can get it down to a third of that price I'd buy. In truth I'd get mighty interested at half that price. Barring a lottery win it's out of my league for now. At least it's good to see things headed in that direction. The progress in LCD displays or the last five years has been remarkable. I still remember my first notebook 15 years ago. It had a passive matrix. I was impressed at the time but having the cursor disappear when you moved it too fast was a real pain. Also the video games of the time looked pretty terrible unless you used an external monitor. Personally I got tired of hauling 19" montors around. The new LCDs look amazing and are a fraction of the weight. The last Viewsonic CRT I had was a piece of junk. Sad to see Viewsonic fall. Their LCDs just can't compete with the NECs and really don't look any better than ones selling for dramatically less. The biggest problem I see with LCDs is the text tends to ghost badly. Mine looks good but some were so bad that you couldn't even read fine print. People have gotten spoiled by cheap equipment. 20" plus pro level monitors used to run 5 or 6 grand back in the mid to late 90s. It's not for the average game player at this stage. Professional artists and photographers will happily pay the money for the quality. After a while the prices will drop and they will be approachable to gamers and the budget minded graphics people. The turnaround time has compressed in recent years. I bought a DVD burner four years ago. I paid $550 and was quite happy with the purchase. A month later the same one was $450. Three months later I saw it for $350. Now you can get one for $50 or less. It might have made sense to wait but A: I didn't know they would drop that fast and B: I got a lot of use out of it in those three months. Hopefully a year from now the new monitors will drop to half their initial price.
Not entirely true. Sex is one of many ways of catching the desease. Intraveinous drug use is a major one. Most of Africa got it not from sex but from doctors reusing needles. Nurses get it from needle pricks although transmission rate as dropped radically since they started drug treatment after accidental needle pricks. I believe it's a 100% effective if started within hours of the exposure. Transfusions used to be a major cause but testing has all but eliminated that source in the developed world. Accidental blood exposure is still a hazzard. Open cuts and sores are at risk if exposed to contaminated blood. Also potentially eyes, mouth and nasal cavities are a debateable risk. I don't think there's ever been a confirmed case but doctors still wear protection and the desease is still mutating so a new form could always be easier to transmit. Safe sex would radically reduce infection but not by 99%. The very existence of a genetic immunity does give hope that a vaccine is possible. Like most things prevention is the best cure. Although there are other means to contract it than sex if you practice safe sex and don't use intraveinous drugs you probably have a better chance of getting killed by lightning than contracting AIDs, a surprising number do die from lightning every year.
I'm upgrading to lead foil.
It reminds me of a system I ran onto years ago that a company was selling on the internet. Basically they were selling you sodium in ball form covered in plastic. It had a metal container filled with water and it sliced the pellets and dropped them into the water to split out hydrogen. Gee I wonder how much a kilowatt that process would cost? If you had a cheap source of sodium great. Then again if sodium was cheap and common this type of system would have been in every home years ago. It's the problem with fuel cells, they generally use platinum which is currently running twice the price of gold per ounce. They claim the price is competitive but 220 lbs of coated wire is going to run well north or $1 a lb. Even at a dollar a pound it would cost $220 a tank. The real price would likely be a grand. Sure you get part of it back as surplus wire to be reprocessed but it's hardly a cheap efficent system.
And in the old days we called them milk maids. Got to wonder how much of it is a true advancement and how much is simply replacing a minimum wage job with technology? At what point does replacing a ten grand a year employee with a 100 grand machine become impractical? Farm jobs actually don't fall under minimum wage laws or more to the point they have a seperate lower wage. 90% of the advances I'm quite sure are improvements but at some point I have to wonder if humans aren't more efficent than machines at certain jobs? A machine breaks down you repair it or buy another one. With minimum wage labor you hire another one. By simply creating technology to replace workers are we really improving things? You can call it survival of the fittest but that doesn't stop out of work people from breaking into your car or house to feed their families. The trick is balance and put the effort where it's really needed. Isn't food production a factory enough at this stage? We already have warehouses full of beakless tumor ridden chickens just to make sure there's a ready supply of cheap McNuggests. Personally I buy free range for a reason.
If my computer can still work with a dust bunny big enough to freak out Godzilla in it you'd think a probe that costs tens of billions would be fairly resilent. Then again it may be a survival of the fittest situation. Having been built in a clean room they are like bubble kids that have no resistence. Give them six months in my computer room and they'll build up their immune system.
If they want a sexless crew does this mean they'll all be conservative Republicans?
I'll take pure functionality over bells and whistles any day. One of the reasons I hate XP is it constantly prompts to do things for me. 9 times out of 10 it's not what I want to do and it breaks my work flow to constantly tell it no. Palm PDAs are much like old DOS apps but that can be a good thing. I like streamline and functional. I use my PDA every single day. Half of it tends to be phone book and calender functions but I beg to differ with another poster that celphones and other devices have easier to use address books. Entering text into a celphone is a pain. I haven't bothered to enter more than a handful of numbers into mine because it's a massive clumsy hassle. I can enter detailed info including address, e-mail addresses and birthdays into mine in less time than I can enter a basic phone number with an abreviated name in a celphone. Most people will sacrific functionality for convience. I agree Ipods are more convienent for music but they are over priced considering for the same price I can get a PDA that does far more than just play music. There may be less memory but with a 1 gig card added how many hours of music do you need with you at any given time? Ipods are toys and PDAs are tools. Maybe that's the real difference and why the levels of success are different. People will by a toy far quicker than a tool. You grit your teeth and say I guess I have to when you buy a new stove for $500 but get excited when you pay $1,500 for a big screen TV. Human nature, it doesn't mean Ipods are superior just more fun. Personally I hate to waste that much on a device that only plays music. Next generation PDAs will probably have to incorporate the same kind of selection wheels and such that MP3 devices use just to compete. I hope they don't improve them to the point that they are no longer useful for their core purpose. I've seen it happen before.
I had the same reaction about video Ipods and responded to a post saying roughly the same thing a few days ago. They may lack the memory but I expanded mine to 1 gig and the storage is potentially unlimited by swaping cards, something you can't do with Ipods. Eventually the memory cards will match current Ipods for storage. Just how many songs do you need to store? Video is a bigger issue but you can already store two movies on a 1 gig memory card so you can keep movies on cards much like DVDs. I find I use all the features on my PDA constantly. My Zaire has built in sound, camera and video capibilites as well. I can play movies, listen to music or read a book on it. I got stuck somewhere right after I got it with nothing to do and found it even had a built in copy of Last of the Mohicans so I killed some time reading it. The biggest issues they have are limited memory and battery life. I've yet to use up my memory so it's not an issue but for longer video clips the battery life isn't up to the task. The one thing I'd love to have is an external battery pack. That one thing would make playing movies practical.
Doesn't seem very practical. There has to be a better way of moving atoms at that scale than wheeled robots? Physics are very different at that scale.
It's amazing how groups that are hypersensitive of their culture tend to be the ones intolerant of others.
This could have a serious downside for serial killers. Just image the movie Scream if their telephone required facial recognition? It may sound like a good idea but such things often have unforseen problems like ruining storylines to "B" horror films.