Does anyone remember the rechargable ankalines that came out in the mid-90s?
Well I do have a box of recharable "Pure Energy" AAA batteries. They are maby 1/2 the price of NiMH.. sure they only get 50-100 charges, but they are great for things like my MP3 player, where the NiMH would sit so long it would self-discharge substantially.
C'mon...let's step back and accept some risks in our lives.
I couldn't agree more. I'm from British Columbia but live in Ontario, so I fly back and forth several times a year. The flight is tedious enough, I'll take my chances with the terrorists in exchange for quick security screening. I can see banning steak knives, guns and lighters, but forks and drinks? Give me a break. I'm much more likely to die either on the 401 on my way to Pearson, or on one of the mountian passes in BC anyway.
I thought the same thing until I got used to WinXP then had to use some Win2k machines. The improvements are small, but nice - boot time really is much better in XP and you can do more configuration changes (esp networking) without a reboot. The UI changes also do save time once you get used to them. While I realize that they are VERY similar (and XP is marginally less stable than 2k) it does have lots of little refinements.
At this point can we just admit we are all screwed?! Cheap abundant oil is vanishing and there is no plan B.
I'm already driving plan B: a Hyundai Accent.
Cars don't get any cheeper, it's got pleny of room unless you have kids (& more headroom than a lot of cars costing twice as much) and gets 7-8L/100km (I think thats around 40mpg for Americans). When gas gets up around $4/L ($14/Gallon) it will start to cost more than my insurance. I'm pretty sure that for that price we can find some sort of fuel for many years to come.
I realize not everyone WANTS to drive an Accent (or other small car) but really, the world won't come crashing down if gas gets more expensive. People who need a big vehicle will either have to decide they don't really 'need' it, or get a runabout for day-to-day driving and leave the F-350 in the garage when it isn't hauling anything.
Especially if gay marriage takes off. Then, how do you decide who's name to take? Flip a coin?
Yes, some people might flip a coin. Others chose too keep thier names or hyphenate. For people who don't plan to have kids (a somewhat easier choice for those of us who can't have fully biological children) hypenation isn't such a problem. Finally there is the fact that in many (definetly not all) gay relationships one parter is, in some sense 'the man' and for some couples it is natural to take that person's last name.
Personally, when I get married (I'm engaged now) my partner is planning to take my last name, and I will make his last name my 2nd middle name.
No World Police? What's the UN supposed to be then?
Just because the UN has lofty goals, doesn't mean it is an effective institution. Lets not forget that China was sitting with veto powers in the Security Council during the Tiananmen Square massacre. The UN is a nice idea, but it is structured to avoid offending anyone, so when anything serious happens, the UN sits on it's hands until it's all over.
Common law is that the finder of a lost item could claim the right to possess the item against any other person in the world except the true owner.
If that's true in the US, I'm glad I'm Canadian. Here (and in the UK believe) if you find an item and keep it, you must make 'reasonable' efforts to return the item before it becomes yours. (One easy way to do this it to give it to the local police, if no one clames it after some time period, it's yours.) Once you are in contact with the 'true' owner, you are obliged to care for the item until the owner claims it (or for some time limit such as 90 days) and may be liable for any damage to the item while it is in your care.
I'd like to see most medications tested for at least 2 generations before being released -- it wouldn't halt everything, but it might stop a reoccurance of Thalidimide
Did it occur to you that the benifit of releasing new drugs more rapidly out weights the risks? Take for example anti-HIV/AIDS medication. If we tested it for two generations not even the most primitive types would be available and there whould be a lot fewer people still living with HIV/AIDS. As another example consider new antibiotics - lifesavers that we can't develop fast enough, would cost a lot of lives to delay them any more (my mom is a Nurse and tells me all about it).
Yeah, but when is the last time you saw ANY software that actually echoed passwords to the screen?
Have you ever used something 'secure' on palmOS. I regularly use an SSH client on it; the password is shown on screen by default (and I leave it that way) because 'typos' are too easy to make with a stylus. Ditto a couple of other apps that require a password.
A pump like this can work - and does - but it will cool the air down.
Because the system wants to go to a state of lower Entropy?
I would have though this sort of thing would be obvious from observations of everything from rivers, to whistles, to water pistols
In rivers if you constrict the flow, you get faster flow because you have backed up the water, therefore you have more drop at the constricted area giving more energy (by reducing the drop & energy used at some other point in the river). Most whistles I've don't taper to a constricted area, so I don't see the relationship there. Water pistols do what they do becuase they allow your finger to move more slowly at a relitively high level of force, not by cooling down the water.
The problem with that idea is that it doesn't REALLY work.
It sounds nice, but "tapering at the end" doesn't increase the ammount of energy you captured in the first place. Since you have no more energy and the same mass of air, you can't accelerate the air at all with no extra energy. To think of it another way, that 'taper' is actually pushing back against the air. This is a case of doing some "common sense" physics instead of physics that obeys things like conservation of energy.
Ram-Jet pumps work on a similar pricipal (for water) but the 'secret' is that a 90% efficient pump going up 100' with a 10' drop only pumps 9% of the water up, the rest drains out the bottom.
What you called the money multiplier is actually the reserve ratio, the money multiplier is 1 over that number. There are 2 reasons for a reserve 1. To make sure they have correct change for withrawals at each brach. 2. So that they have money if more people than expected want to make a withdrawal.
If part 1 fails people get pissed off and switch banks. If part 2 fails the bank genearally has to "call loans" to get money, which is very destablising.
Minimum reserve ratio's are primarily designed to prevect #2. In Canada there is no legal requirement for a reserve because any big bank can borrow massive ammounts from the bank of Canada if needed (the bank pays a penalty for this) . To maximize profits banks here typically have a reserve ratio of about 5%.
That doesn't change the fact that Canadian hospitals have waiting lists that are insane. Not private business would say "Sorry about the heart problem, come back in 6 months" because you would to to another hospital - and long waiting lists only save money if people DIE before they get thier operation!
My mother (and she isn't rich) forked out several thousand a while ago for a "grey-market" MRI here in Canada because that cost less than losing another 6 MONTHS of work waiting of our public care. Frankly, for 'minor' scans and treatments, anyone making better than minimum wage can afford better treatment than our public system provides. It's only major surgery where you really get any benifit.
A while ago there was an uproar because in Vancouver you could get your pet a CAT scan (no pun intended) in 48 hours, while the waiting list for people FOR THE EXACT SAME MACHINE was several months. Because you could pay to have your pet scanned after-hours.
When it comes to prof's, there are two meanings of 'self-censor':
1. If it means that prof should not be free to express his/her oppinion, then it's a bad thing.
2. If it means that a prof should still teach material that he/she disagrees with in order to present a balanced argument and should grade papers in an unbiased way, then it's a good thing.
If a prof or teacher can't say "I believe X but I will do my best to mark you fairly if you chose to support Y in your paper" then he/she has no buisness trying to educate anyone, much less people paying a great deal of money to be there.
I agree, the DRM and to a lesser extent price is what really kills e-books. Since ebooks (should) cost nearly nothing to produce, I don't expect to pay a lot more than the copyright fee when I buy one. Further, 'buying' something with DRM is really just like borrowing it, since you can only use in approved ways, and only so long as you have the same computer, credit card, or however else they locked it. I can borrow books from the library for free, so I'd only be willing to pay for convienience.. say $5 CAD for anything with DRM.
The problem with handling freenet protocols is that you'd need some sort of freenet gateway.. and last time I ran one of those at home it used up around 120Mb of RAM and a significant portion of my broadband connection 24x7.
I suppose the plugin could redirect you to some other gateway, but that's just URL rewritng, seems like a better candidate for a greasemonkey script than a full plugin.
Many of the books I need (and I am a Uni. Student) I can already download without DRM. Textbooks are a pain to read online however, so I always have to buy the dead-tree version anyway. If won't trade a $100+ hard-copy for a free e-book, how many people will do it for only a 30% discount?
supply and demand asserts that if most people who want big memory systems also want lots of CPU and disc, then the price for a single CPU motherboard may actually be MORE expensive (because there's less demand)
Supply and Demand says that if more people want x, x will be MORE expensive. This only applies to systems with fixed supply (note that short term supply of many items is fixed).
Economies of scale says that if more x is produced/consumed then x will be less expensive. This only applies up to a point where diseconomies of scale come into play - but this is a/. post not Econ 101.
True, but I think that from a legal standpoint it is slightly harder to abuse analog copying, since you inherently lose quality, bolstering your fair-use defense. Of course if you just move to Canada you can get all the music you want in exchange for paying more for media.
> The goverment should be involved in ONLY ESSENTIAL services.
The government is involved in all infastructure projects. They may not pay your electric, phone, or gas bill, but some level of government has decided which companies to allow to build lines into your home.
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Does anyone remember the rechargable ankalines that came out in the mid-90s?
Well I do have a box of recharable "Pure Energy" AAA batteries. They are maby 1/2 the price of NiMH.. sure they only get 50-100 charges, but they are great for things like my MP3 player, where the NiMH would sit so long it would self-discharge substantially.
C'mon...let's step back and accept some risks in our lives.
I couldn't agree more. I'm from British Columbia but live in Ontario, so I fly back and forth several times a year. The flight is tedious enough, I'll take my chances with the terrorists in exchange for quick security screening. I can see banning steak knives, guns and lighters, but forks and drinks? Give me a break. I'm much more likely to die either on the 401 on my way to Pearson, or on one of the mountian passes in BC anyway.
They pretty much hit the nail on the head with 2k
I thought the same thing until I got used to WinXP then had to use some Win2k machines. The improvements are small, but nice - boot time really is much better in XP and you can do more configuration changes (esp networking) without a reboot. The UI changes also do save time once you get used to them. While I realize that they are VERY similar (and XP is marginally less stable than 2k) it does have lots of little refinements.
At this point can we just admit we are all screwed?! Cheap abundant oil is vanishing and there is no plan B.
I'm already driving plan B: a Hyundai Accent.
Cars don't get any cheeper, it's got pleny of room unless you have kids (& more headroom than a lot of cars costing twice as much) and gets 7-8L/100km (I think thats around 40mpg for Americans). When gas gets up around $4/L ($14/Gallon) it will start to cost more than my insurance. I'm pretty sure that for that price we can find some sort of fuel for many years to come.
I realize not everyone WANTS to drive an Accent (or other small car) but really, the world won't come crashing down if gas gets more expensive. People who need a big vehicle will either have to decide they don't really 'need' it, or get a runabout for day-to-day driving and leave the F-350 in the garage when it isn't hauling anything.
Probably still usin EBCDIC to avoid problems with thier punch cards caused by the evil ASCII (and just forget UTF-x).
Yes, some people might flip a coin. Others chose too keep thier names or hyphenate. For people who don't plan to have kids (a somewhat easier choice for those of us who can't have fully biological children) hypenation isn't such a problem. Finally there is the fact that in many (definetly not all) gay relationships one parter is, in some sense 'the man' and for some couples it is natural to take that person's last name.
Personally, when I get married (I'm engaged now) my partner is planning to take my last name, and I will make his last name my 2nd middle name.
- Vive le Canada
Just because the UN has lofty goals, doesn't mean it is an effective institution. Lets not forget that China was sitting with veto powers in the Security Council during the Tiananmen Square massacre. The UN is a nice idea, but it is structured to avoid offending anyone, so when anything serious happens, the UN sits on it's hands until it's all over.
If that's true in the US, I'm glad I'm Canadian. Here (and in the UK believe) if you find an item and keep it, you must make 'reasonable' efforts to return the item before it becomes yours. (One easy way to do this it to give it to the local police, if no one clames it after some time period, it's yours.) Once you are in contact with the 'true' owner, you are obliged to care for the item until the owner claims it (or for some time limit such as 90 days) and may be liable for any damage to the item while it is in your care.
Did it occur to you that the benifit of releasing new drugs more rapidly out weights the risks? Take for example anti-HIV/AIDS medication. If we tested it for two generations not even the most primitive types would be available and there whould be a lot fewer people still living with HIV/AIDS. As another example consider new antibiotics - lifesavers that we can't develop fast enough, would cost a lot of lives to delay them any more (my mom is a Nurse and tells me all about it).
Have you ever used something 'secure' on palmOS. I regularly use an SSH client on it; the password is shown on screen by default (and I leave it that way) because 'typos' are too easy to make with a stylus. Ditto a couple of other apps that require a password.
Because the system wants to go to a state of lower Entropy?
I would have though this sort of thing would be obvious from observations of everything from rivers, to whistles, to water pistols
In rivers if you constrict the flow, you get faster flow because you have backed up the water, therefore you have more drop at the constricted area giving more energy (by reducing the drop & energy used at some other point in the river). Most whistles I've don't taper to a constricted area, so I don't see the relationship there. Water pistols do what they do becuase they allow your finger to move more slowly at a relitively high level of force, not by cooling down the water.
Ever see the little formula Energy = 0.5 * mass * velocity^2 ?
You just said that we take the same ammount of air (hold mass constant) and increase the velocity but don't change Energy. Did you miss grade 5 math?
The problem with that idea is that it doesn't REALLY work.
It sounds nice, but "tapering at the end" doesn't increase the ammount of energy you captured in the first place. Since you have no more energy and the same mass of air, you can't accelerate the air at all with no extra energy. To think of it another way, that 'taper' is actually pushing back against the air. This is a case of doing some "common sense" physics instead of physics that obeys things like conservation of energy.
Ram-Jet pumps work on a similar pricipal (for water) but the 'secret' is that a 90% efficient pump going up 100' with a 10' drop only pumps 9% of the water up, the rest drains out the bottom.
The problem is
>The first eight Sony blu-ray discs..
Joe Consumer: So this blu-ray thing will work with my stuff?
Sales: Of course, it even comes with [less-protected disc], bring it back if it doesn't work.
Joe Consumer buys the player and then wonders why everything except that first disc looks like crap.
What you called the money multiplier is actually the reserve ratio, the money multiplier is 1 over that number. There are 2 reasons for a reserve
1. To make sure they have correct change for withrawals at each brach.
2. So that they have money if more people than expected want to make a withdrawal.
If part 1 fails people get pissed off and switch banks.
If part 2 fails the bank genearally has to "call loans" to get money, which is very destablising.
Minimum reserve ratio's are primarily designed to prevect #2. In Canada there is no legal requirement for a reserve because any big bank can borrow massive ammounts from the bank of Canada if needed (the bank pays a penalty for this) . To maximize profits banks here typically have a reserve ratio of about 5%.
That doesn't change the fact that Canadian hospitals have waiting lists that are insane. Not private business would say "Sorry about the heart problem, come back in 6 months" because you would to to another hospital - and long waiting lists only save money if people DIE before they get thier operation!
My mother (and she isn't rich) forked out several thousand a while ago for a "grey-market" MRI here in Canada because that cost less than losing another 6 MONTHS of work waiting of our public care. Frankly, for 'minor' scans and treatments, anyone making better than minimum wage can afford better treatment than our public system provides. It's only major surgery where you really get any benifit.
A while ago there was an uproar because in Vancouver you could get your pet a CAT scan (no pun intended) in 48 hours, while the waiting list for people FOR THE EXACT SAME MACHINE was several months. Because you could pay to have your pet scanned after-hours.
When it comes to prof's, there are two meanings of 'self-censor':
1. If it means that prof should not be free to express his/her oppinion, then it's a bad thing.
2. If it means that a prof should still teach material that he/she disagrees with in order to present a balanced argument and should grade papers in an unbiased way, then it's a good thing.
If a prof or teacher can't say
"I believe X but I will do my best to mark you fairly if you chose to support Y in your paper"
then he/she has no buisness trying to educate anyone, much less people paying a great deal of money to be there.
I agree, the DRM and to a lesser extent price is what really kills e-books. Since ebooks (should) cost nearly nothing to produce, I don't expect to pay a lot more than the copyright fee when I buy one. Further, 'buying' something with DRM is really just like borrowing it, since you can only use in approved ways, and only so long as you have the same computer, credit card, or however else they locked it. I can borrow books from the library for free, so I'd only be willing to pay for convienience.. say $5 CAD for anything with DRM.
The problem with handling freenet protocols is that you'd need some sort of freenet gateway.. and last time I ran one of those at home it used up around 120Mb of RAM and a significant portion of my broadband connection 24x7.
I suppose the plugin could redirect you to some other gateway, but that's just URL rewritng, seems like a better candidate for a greasemonkey script than a full plugin.
Many of the books I need (and I am a Uni. Student) I can already download without DRM. Textbooks are a pain to read online however, so I always have to buy the dead-tree version anyway. If won't trade a $100+ hard-copy for a free e-book, how many people will do it for only a 30% discount?
supply and demand asserts that if most people who want big memory systems also want lots of CPU and disc, then the price for a single CPU motherboard may actually be MORE expensive (because there's less demand)
/. post not Econ 101.
Supply and Demand says that if more people want x, x will be MORE expensive. This only applies to systems with fixed supply (note that short term supply of many items is fixed).
Economies of scale says that if more x is produced/consumed then x will be less expensive. This only applies up to a point where diseconomies of scale come into play - but this is a
True, but I think that from a legal standpoint it is slightly harder to abuse analog copying, since you inherently lose quality, bolstering your fair-use defense. Of course if you just move to Canada you can get all the music you want in exchange for paying more for media.
The government is involved in all infastructure projects. They may not pay your electric, phone, or gas bill, but some level of government has decided which companies to allow to build lines into your home.