Apart from the cost (both of solar panels and batteries), one of the biggest issues still remaining is energy density.
Diesel contains 47 MegaJoules per Kg, but your lead acid battery can only store 0.11. Thus you need 418 kg of batteries (plus the space to store them) for every 1kg of disel. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density
Being solar panelled, you would be constantly recharging (at least during sunny days), so you don't need enough charge for your whole journey, but you would still want enough spare capacity in your batteries to last for at least a few days without recharging (or low sunlight, say during a storm).
One very useful tool when learning to program, at least for me, was an intergrated debugger.
The ability to step through the code line by line, looking the values of variables at each stage and see how the code branches is a great for internalizing the logic of how a language or algorithm works, and learn to run through the code in your head just like a debugger.
< Opps forgot I can't use without encoding them %gt;
Wi-Fi / bluetooth support with built in file sharing.
PC Dude: Hey man, what you listening to... Mac Dude: An old favourite, Assemblage 23 PC Dude: You mind if I listen... Mac Dude: Sharing ear-buds is so last millenium, but watch this... Mac Dude: < clicks button > PC Dude: < clicks button > PC Dude: < looks down to see song plaing on his own iPod/buds > PC Dude: Cool !!! RIAA Dude: You guys can't do that, thats, like, stealing, man. RIAA Dude: Anyway, hows you all do that, I thought we had managed to ban all that stuff since the 60's like drugs, free love, sharing. RIAA Dude: Don't you know we are at war those damned commies, err, I mean terrorists Mac Dude: If I'm the Mac, and your the PC and Tux is there doing the filming thus is always out of the picture, what does that make him. Tux: He must be Sid, the Digital Restrictions Monster in disguise who trys to destroy all the cool toys. RIAA Dude: Mock me if you wish, but we will see who laughs last when I sue you for $150,000... per song... Tux: If you strike me down now I will become more powerful than you can ever imagine... Tux: Hey wait, didn't the last guy to use that line get killed shortly after... RMS: Look you signed up to this. GPLv3, Section 7 says "Give me libery or give me death" RMS: I know we tend to focus more on the liberty bit than the death bit, but hey thats where the intrest is... RMS: But it would really help if you could submit a patch, once you have finished getting that death thing completed, that is... RIAA Dude: Hey, I'm the RIAA and I demand to have the last word. Tux: OK
Wi-Fi / bluetooth support with built in file sharing.
PC Dude: Hey man, what you listening to... Mac Dude: An old favourite, Assemblage 23 PC Dude: You mind if I listen... Mac Dude: Sharing ear-buds is so last millenium, but watch this... Mac Dude: PC Dude: PC Dude: PC Dude: Cool !!! RIAA Dude: You guys can't do that, thats, like, stealing, man. RIAA Dude: Anyway, hows you all do that, I thought we had managed to ban all that stuff since the 60's like drugs, free love, sharing. RIAA Dude: Don't you know we are at war those damned commies, err, I mean terrorists Mac Dude: If I'm the Mac, and your the PC and Tux is there doing the filming thus is always out of the picture, what does that make him. Tux: He must be Sid, the Digital Restrictions Monster in disguise who trys to destroy all the cool toys. RIAA Dude: Mock me if you wish, but we will see who laughs last when I sue you for $150,000... per song... Tux: If you strike me down now I will become more powerful than you can ever imagine... Tux: Hey wait, didn't the last guy to use that line get killed shortly after... RMS: Look you signed up to this. GPLv3, Section 7 says "Give me libery or give me death" RMS: I know we tend to focus more on the liberty bit than the death bit, but hey thats where the intrest is... RMS: But it would really help if you could submit a patch, once you have finished getting that death thing completed, that is... RIAA Dude: Hey, I'm the RIAA and I demand to have the last word. Tux: OK
While the article says they "asked" MS, I bet there are a bunch of patents on HD decryption, and that was the most important bit of leaverage they had to enforce the requirements of DRM.
While MS could have called their bluff, refused to licence and threatened to torpedo their new format though not supporting it.
However MS's intrests are more aligned with those of the media companies than they are to those of Joe User. They want to get into home entertainment market, not creating content but otherwise owning the market from the media companies down ( content delevery, playback platform and hardware ), but they still need the media companies as the first rung on the ladder.
This step doesn't really hurt MS, few joe users are likely to jump ship over this (the people who care about these issues have already jumped ship or are planning to). It adds an extra level of dependancy, limits competition, and may initiate a forced upgrade (which generates an extra sale of windows and office). MS's stratergy is not about being the best there is, its about being the default choice, being "good-enough", being what everyone else uses and then making the cost of migrating away (time, cost, compatability) far higher than the cost of staying with MS.
A better solution is redundancy, have a second one around so that if the first one is taken out of action, you have the time to fix it without having to worry where your next shit is going to go.
While attaching the review/metadata to the file would it would be one way of doing it, an alternitive approach would be a wiki that uses the md5 keys as page names.
The core issue here is scarcity vs abundance economics as well as the definition of wealth.
Western economics is based on scarcity, demand is usually greater than supply (think money, oil, land). Fortunes can be made simply by controling the supply. The natural instinct when faced with scarcity is to hoarde (which in turn also reduces the overall supply). Status in this society is usually based on who can hoarde the biggest pile of scarce resources.
Abundance economics, as in free software, says that scarcity reduces the overall true value of an item - to maximize value supply should be greater than demand. The natural instinct when faced with abundance is to share. Status in this society is based on who makes the biggest contrubutions to the community, who can give away the most, a person who hoardes is not rich (as he keeps it all to himself).
A copy will have its own intrinsic value, but it is not limited by scarcity and thus the two systems have two incompatable definitions of value. Its the classic question: Which is more valuable, diamonds or air?
With the dawn of the information age and invention of replicators, you are correct that system of scarcity based economics will quickly become obsolete (but not for lack of trying by those who whish to keep it alive). But you also forget that when can create all your material needs at the touch of a button, why will you still need money except to barter for the few nessecities/luxuries that can't be replicated and are still considered scarce.
Its not about the 99.9% of the time when you are concentrating and not making a mistake, but those few minutes on that one bad day in a blue moon when you attention slips.
I'm reminded of the self-replicating gcc exploit.
Once the complier was compiled, it would check to see if it was recompiling gcc, and even if the exploit had been removed from the source in a future version, the complier would add it back in. To remove it you had to go back and recompile using a version from before the exploit.
You can only trust the source to the extent that you can trust your toolchain and in turn it depends on being able to trust your hardware.
When I was last in India, I met up with Jitendra Shar, who was leading a development of an indian version of Linux http://www.indictrans.org. This not only involved localizing applications such as openoffice, but also having to create new fonts and support for RTL (right to left) languages and deal with extra quirks of the various indian languages, such as combining letters (there are over 20 major languages on the sub-continent).
They where also involved in setting up a computer lab in a village on the outskirts of Bombay, and teaching them how to use computers. One of the major excuses employers use for refusing to hire people of lower castes is that they don't know how to use a computer. Another issue facing the villergers is that in many nearby villages, there had been forced evictions to make room for new building projects - the people where suppost to get compensation, but this was often not paid out and the census information was very poor (its hard to get compensation if you don't exist in the goverment records). The villagers where using the computers to help create a census of who had been evicted and use that data to help claim some of the money that was owed to them.
One trick to getting out a fixed term contract (without penalties) is when they change the terms and conditions of service on you. This works in the UK at least.
You signed up under the old T&Cs, so legally you do not have accept the revised T&Cs, usually you have a window of about 14 days to phone up and ask to cancel you contract because you are unhappy with the new T&Cs and pick at least one change that you consider to be totally unacceptable (even if its a very minor point like only giving you a weeks notice about future changes to the T&Cs rather than 14 days.)
Well I live on a boat. I have a 240v power supply from the marina, but I can fall back to a UPS (and laptop battery) initally, an inverter running off the ships 12v batteries would easily last several hours and I can fall back to recharging the batteries by running a diesel generator or the engine for a couple of hours.
You don't really need to have a backup grid, but if a few hours of downtime due to a power cut is going to hit your business hard, then is it really that difficult to rig up a backup generator to keep you going until the grid comes back online - extra points for a UPS system that will cover you for the 15 minutes it takes to run down the basement and start the generator up.
I also would be curious as to how they unforce the one copy limit, the only way that makes sense to me is to force the user to be online and do some type of validating with their servers, otherwise just making a copy of the file before burning it would be able to get around the one copy limit since they would have to edit the file in some way to recognize it as "used".
You don't need to modifiy the file itself. Assuming a user is not going to buy the same movie twice, each time you burn a disk, take a note of the movie title and/or file checksum, add it somewhere deep and dark in the registery and then run a lookup on this list each time you want to burn a new downloaded DVD. This could be bypassed by modifing the registry.
Though chances are they do use remote authentication, verifing the server via a pgp key (to avoid bypassing the server by modifing the hosts file to a fake 'yes man' server). It also serves a second purpose of giving the marketing department lots of lovley stats on useage info (like how long between downloading a buring, what percentage try to burn more than once, what time of day to people burn).
From what I've heard (an article in the Ecologist), this organ harvisting and increase in death penalties is happening in China, mostly for organ-exports / medical-tourists from the west (in the range of £10,000 to £100,000 per organ).
One of the reasons the price is so high, is that especially for organs like a heart, there is a very limited window between death/removal and the new implant. In practice this means only doners are victims who have suffered brain death but still have a beating heart - there is a chronic shortage of certian organs (and its illegal to sell organs for money in most countries).
If we could keep all organs in suspended animation, the supply problem would be solved. The big problems come when there is short (legal) supply and the question becomes (quite literally), what is the price of a human life compared to stripping the body down for spares.
Slashdot Mirror
Apart from the cost (both of solar panels and batteries), one of the biggest issues still remaining is energy density.
Diesel contains 47 MegaJoules per Kg, but your lead acid battery can only store 0.11. Thus you need 418 kg of batteries (plus the space to store them) for every 1kg of disel.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density
Being solar panelled, you would be constantly recharging (at least during sunny days), so you don't need enough charge for your whole journey, but you would still want enough spare capacity in your batteries to last for at least a few days without recharging (or low sunlight, say during a storm).
Though if it was only half that price, it would be a bargin. New legs for old.
One very useful tool when learning to program, at least for me, was an intergrated debugger. The ability to step through the code line by line, looking the values of variables at each stage and see how the code branches is a great for internalizing the logic of how a language or algorithm works, and learn to run through the code in your head just like a debugger.
I sent a picture of a transvestite hen.
< Opps forgot I can't use without encoding them %gt;
Wi-Fi / bluetooth support with built in file sharing.
PC Dude: Hey man, what you listening to...
Mac Dude: An old favourite, Assemblage 23
PC Dude: You mind if I listen...
Mac Dude: Sharing ear-buds is so last millenium, but watch this...
Mac Dude: < clicks button >
PC Dude: < clicks button >
PC Dude: < looks down to see song plaing on his own iPod/buds >
PC Dude: Cool !!!
RIAA Dude: You guys can't do that, thats, like, stealing, man.
RIAA Dude: Anyway, hows you all do that, I thought we had managed to ban all that stuff since the 60's like drugs, free love, sharing.
RIAA Dude: Don't you know we are at war those damned commies, err, I mean terrorists
Mac Dude: If I'm the Mac, and your the PC and Tux is there doing the filming thus is always out of the picture, what does that make him.
Tux: He must be Sid, the Digital Restrictions Monster in disguise who trys to destroy all the cool toys.
RIAA Dude: Mock me if you wish, but we will see who laughs last when I sue you for $150,000... per song...
Tux: If you strike me down now I will become more powerful than you can ever imagine...
Tux: Hey wait, didn't the last guy to use that line get killed shortly after...
RMS: Look you signed up to this. GPLv3, Section 7 says "Give me libery or give me death"
RMS: I know we tend to focus more on the liberty bit than the death bit, but hey thats where the intrest is...
RMS: But it would really help if you could submit a patch, once you have finished getting that death thing completed, that is...
RIAA Dude: Hey, I'm the RIAA and I demand to have the last word.
Tux: OK
Wi-Fi / bluetooth support with built in file sharing.
PC Dude: Hey man, what you listening to...
Mac Dude: An old favourite, Assemblage 23
PC Dude: You mind if I listen...
Mac Dude: Sharing ear-buds is so last millenium, but watch this...
Mac Dude:
PC Dude:
PC Dude:
PC Dude: Cool !!!
RIAA Dude: You guys can't do that, thats, like, stealing, man.
RIAA Dude: Anyway, hows you all do that, I thought we had managed to ban all that stuff since the 60's like drugs, free love, sharing.
RIAA Dude: Don't you know we are at war those damned commies, err, I mean terrorists
Mac Dude: If I'm the Mac, and your the PC and Tux is there doing the filming thus is always out of the picture, what does that make him.
Tux: He must be Sid, the Digital Restrictions Monster in disguise who trys to destroy all the cool toys.
RIAA Dude: Mock me if you wish, but we will see who laughs last when I sue you for $150,000... per song...
Tux: If you strike me down now I will become more powerful than you can ever imagine...
Tux: Hey wait, didn't the last guy to use that line get killed shortly after...
RMS: Look you signed up to this. GPLv3, Section 7 says "Give me libery or give me death"
RMS: I know we tend to focus more on the liberty bit than the death bit, but hey thats where the intrest is...
RMS: But it would really help if you could submit a patch, once you have finished getting that death thing completed, that is...
RIAA Dude: Hey, I'm the RIAA and I demand to have the last word.
Tux: OK
When sharing is outlawed only outlaws will share
Assuming that the reciepient wasted 1 second dealing with each of his emails 5,000,000 emails = 60s * 60m * 24h * 57.87037 days ~ 2 months approx
While the article says they "asked" MS, I bet there are a bunch of patents on HD decryption, and that was the most important bit of leaverage they had to enforce the requirements of DRM.
While MS could have called their bluff, refused to licence and threatened to torpedo their new format though not supporting it.
However MS's intrests are more aligned with those of the media companies than they are to those of Joe User. They want to get into home entertainment market, not creating content but otherwise owning the market from the media companies down ( content delevery, playback platform and hardware ), but they still need the media companies as the first rung on the ladder.
This step doesn't really hurt MS, few joe users are likely to jump ship over this (the people who care about these issues have already jumped ship or are planning to). It adds an extra level of dependancy, limits competition, and may initiate a forced upgrade (which generates an extra sale of windows and office). MS's stratergy is not about being the best there is, its about being the default choice, being "good-enough", being what everyone else uses and then making the cost of migrating away (time, cost, compatability) far higher than the cost of staying with MS.
A better solution is redundancy, have a second one around so that if the first one is taken out of action, you have the time to fix it without having to worry where your next shit is going to go.
While attaching the review/metadata to the file would it would be one way of doing it, an alternitive approach would be a wiki that uses the md5 keys as page names.
Its been "comming soon" for so long that until I actually see a physical copy, my money is still on Duke Nukem Forever.
The core issue here is scarcity vs abundance economics as well as the definition of wealth.
Western economics is based on scarcity, demand is usually greater than supply (think money, oil, land). Fortunes can be made simply by controling the supply. The natural instinct when faced with scarcity is to hoarde (which in turn also reduces the overall supply). Status in this society is usually based on who can hoarde the biggest pile of scarce resources.
Abundance economics, as in free software, says that scarcity reduces the overall true value of an item - to maximize value supply should be greater than demand. The natural instinct when faced with abundance is to share. Status in this society is based on who makes the biggest contrubutions to the community, who can give away the most, a person who hoardes is not rich (as he keeps it all to himself).
A copy will have its own intrinsic value, but it is not limited by scarcity and thus the two systems have two incompatable definitions of value. Its the classic question: Which is more valuable, diamonds or air?
With the dawn of the information age and invention of replicators, you are correct that system of scarcity based economics will quickly become obsolete (but not for lack of trying by those who whish to keep it alive). But you also forget that when can create all your material needs at the touch of a button, why will you still need money except to barter for the few nessecities/luxuries that can't be replicated and are still considered scarce.
There are only two types of people I can't stand, those who don't respect other peoples cultures... and the dutch.
Its not about the 99.9% of the time when you are concentrating and not making a mistake, but those few minutes on that one bad day in a blue moon when you attention slips.
I'm reminded of the self-replicating gcc exploit. Once the complier was compiled, it would check to see if it was recompiling gcc, and even if the exploit had been removed from the source in a future version, the complier would add it back in. To remove it you had to go back and recompile using a version from before the exploit. You can only trust the source to the extent that you can trust your toolchain and in turn it depends on being able to trust your hardware.
When I was last in India, I met up with Jitendra Shar, who was leading a development of an indian version of Linux http://www.indictrans.org. This not only involved localizing applications such as openoffice, but also having to create new fonts and support for RTL (right to left) languages and deal with extra quirks of the various indian languages, such as combining letters (there are over 20 major languages on the sub-continent).
They where also involved in setting up a computer lab in a village on the outskirts of Bombay, and teaching them how to use computers. One of the major excuses employers use for refusing to hire people of lower castes is that they don't know how to use a computer. Another issue facing the villergers is that in many nearby villages, there had been forced evictions to make room for new building projects - the people where suppost to get compensation, but this was often not paid out and the census information was very poor (its hard to get compensation if you don't exist in the goverment records). The villagers where using the computers to help create a census of who had been evicted and use that data to help claim some of the money that was owed to them.
Iceland
Sharks with frikin' lasers on their heads, that a pretty UN-intelegent design if you ask me.
Attention to detail took a bit of a nose dive after the 5th day, but who can blame him, on the 5th day god created cannabis.
One trick to getting out a fixed term contract (without penalties) is when they change the terms and conditions of service on you. This works in the UK at least. You signed up under the old T&Cs, so legally you do not have accept the revised T&Cs, usually you have a window of about 14 days to phone up and ask to cancel you contract because you are unhappy with the new T&Cs and pick at least one change that you consider to be totally unacceptable (even if its a very minor point like only giving you a weeks notice about future changes to the T&Cs rather than 14 days.)
Well I live on a boat. I have a 240v power supply from the marina, but I can fall back to a UPS (and laptop battery) initally, an inverter running off the ships 12v batteries would easily last several hours and I can fall back to recharging the batteries by running a diesel generator or the engine for a couple of hours.
You don't really need to have a backup grid, but if a few hours of downtime due to a power cut is going to hit your business hard, then is it really that difficult to rig up a backup generator to keep you going until the grid comes back online - extra points for a UPS system that will cover you for the 15 minutes it takes to run down the basement and start the generator up.
French WW2 rifles for sale - excellent condition - only dropped once.
iPods don't mug people, people do.
You don't need to modifiy the file itself. Assuming a user is not going to buy the same movie twice, each time you burn a disk, take a note of the movie title and/or file checksum, add it somewhere deep and dark in the registery and then run a lookup on this list each time you want to burn a new downloaded DVD. This could be bypassed by modifing the registry.
Though chances are they do use remote authentication, verifing the server via a pgp key (to avoid bypassing the server by modifing the hosts file to a fake 'yes man' server). It also serves a second purpose of giving the marketing department lots of lovley stats on useage info (like how long between downloading a buring, what percentage try to burn more than once, what time of day to people burn).
From what I've heard (an article in the Ecologist), this organ harvisting and increase in death penalties is happening in China, mostly for organ-exports / medical-tourists from the west (in the range of £10,000 to £100,000 per organ).
One of the reasons the price is so high, is that especially for organs like a heart, there is a very limited window between death/removal and the new implant. In practice this means only doners are victims who have suffered brain death but still have a beating heart - there is a chronic shortage of certian organs (and its illegal to sell organs for money in most countries).
If we could keep all organs in suspended animation, the supply problem would be solved. The big problems come when there is short (legal) supply and the question becomes (quite literally), what is the price of a human life compared to stripping the body down for spares.