It's worse than that. Right now, even before the elimination of the penny, if you go to the post office to buy a three cent stamp, you only have to pay $0.03 and they give you the stamp TAX FREE! Yes, they don't charge you the 13% HST in Ontario! In BC, with only 12% HST, you can get $0.04 worth of stamps tax free! (Or any other items costing the same, of course.)
Doesn't sound like much, but when you're in a business that handles hundreds of thousands of transactions a day, that kind of difference can add up fast. 500K transactions = ~$2000 a day, ~$0.7m a year!
Strangely, other countries that have eliminated the penny don't seem to have suffered any ill effects due to this type of "problem". Maybe they were just lucky. Australia dropped the 1 and 2 cent coins back in 1991, but I suppose they are so backwards down under that nobody was bright enough to figure out an arbitrage method to rip people off....
If they make money from excess energy produced then wouldn't they want your business even more?
They probably make more money selling electricity to the roof owner than they do selling it to the utility, thus high electricity using owners are better clients. If the owner doesn't use enough electricity, there are not enough savings to offset the leasing costs, so their business model does not work for that client.
That is not correct. Re-read the article. They are trying to qualify output per area footprint. Per unit solar cell surface area, these designs are bunk. They are just relying on the excuse that cells are cheaper than a tracking system would be.
"Excuse" sounds a bit pejorative. If it is cheaper to stack cells then to use a tracking system, why would one want to do the later?
I agree about shadow effects. More comes into play though since more angles will be approximately normal to the panels more angles of light will still be in an effective region of the panel for collecting. In winter in the non-tropical regions the sun's maximum height can be pretty low in the sky giving you a very oblique angle to fixed panels against a roof (assuming a shallow slope on the roof). Making these suckers stick up means that the crossection exposed to the sun is larger even if the sun is lower in the sky.
That said two problems I see:
1) Roof top intallation will be weight. I have panels on my roof and they are about 100lb per sq yard. Stack twenty together and you'd be looking at 2000lb per sq yard. Not a good thing for the roof.
2) Ground based panels: you can put the panels on stands that can be adjusted, heck they can be motorized so they can track the sun through the day AND through the seasons. So why exactly would you by ~20X more panels (at about 200 a pop) when a $50 motor per panel (guessing), or an adjustable stand that someone goes out and tilts every month or so can have the same affect?
Those mostly parallel my thoughts when I first read the summary. On closer reflection though, I think the investigators do have a point. The cost of the whole solar system is starting to be dominated by the non-solar-cell components. As the cost of the cells drops, new designs become more attractive. Solar panel tracking involves more than just the addition of a motor - bearings, hinges, power, maintenance, etc. are all issues that you eliminate if you don't do sun tracking for example.
If you can mass produce solar systems in a factory and minimize the work needed to install them on site - you could end up with significant overall installed costs reductions. While the weight issues may be difficult to overcome, probably twenty levels of solar cells would not weigh twenty times the weight of a single solar panel system today. The light harvesting part of the panel is an almost insignificant part of the weight of a current solar panel.
>>> who are either malevolently trying to game the system
Example: The Penn State guy who produced a temperature that resembles a hockey stick. It was later discovered he had altered his numbers to give the result desired (and thus become famous to the public & funded by the government).
Or rather it was later *claimed* he had altered his numbers, etc. etc.
My understanding is that while there have been many criticisms of this work (the 1998 Nature journal Mann, Bradley and Hughes multiproxy study on "Global-scale temperature patterns and climate forcing over the past six centuries"), the vast majority of subsequent work has supported the majority of their conclusions, and all investigated claims of improper conduct have come to naught.
There have been numerous times that the plane I was on had to wait somewhere between leaving the gate and actually taking off, or between landing and reaching the gate, once for over an hour, but they still demand we keep all electronic devices off. 15 minutes I can handle, but being forced to stay seated for over an hour without at least having my kindle to read is all sorts of annoying.
Traveling with kids recently, I've been thrilled that they have turned on the seat-back entertainment system from the moment we have boarded until we have reached the gate (with pauses when announcements need to be made or safety features reviewed). It has made the whole experience so much more bearable to be able to actually finish watching the program rather than trying to keep ourselves entertained some other way.
Additionally, I've noticed that may of the adults are also more content - not getting frustrated at the long plane taxi to the gate, or the waiting in line to take off.
Even if they don't approve passenger provided devices, I would like to see more airlines keeping their own systems online for more of the time.
The majority of english speaking countries weren't totally metric until Canada changed. And yet, Canadians still measure everything in inches and feet. The only thing they switched to was kilometers and litres. For the normal person everything else is still imperial.
I don't know what you mean by "everything else" - what else doe people measure on a regular basis? Temps are all in C.
The things that Canadians do in non-metric units are pretty much limited to the infleuence of their largest trading partner doing so much in non-metric units. Baking and hardware store stuff is pretty much the only place the "average" person is forced to play with Imperial units.
I find myself more and more often tempted to state HH:MM p/a GMT.
Ah, yes - GMT (or UTC) as a worldwide standard for everyday living - the idea beloved of a cadre of Unix folks, but which will never even be taken seriously (or given any thought at all, really) by anyone else.
When the blanket's size grows and shrinks throughout the year, and the middle is attached to the side of the bed, it makes perfect sense.
Then skootch up in your sleeping position (or reattach blanket's middle to a more effective position, or cut off enough of one end and reattach to the other ONCE) until your feet are always covered by the bottom and fold over the top when it gets too long, no need to cut and sew any more!
I'm glad I have flexible work hours, because otherwise I'd be looking forward to a 10%-increased chance of having a heart attack tomorrow or the day after. So... if there are 2 million heart attacks per year in the US, I guess that means several hundred extra heart attacks just due to this effect?
The first snowfall shoveling fest also creates a spike in heart attacks. What I've never been able to find out (admittedly I haven't looked) is if these types of stats reflect an actual increase in the problem, or just a shifting of the timing of the incidents. Is that 10% increase a result of triggering a bunch of people who likely would have had troubles in the following weeks anyway, or is are these "new" cases? Do places with a DST shift have a higher rate when comparing the entire year, compared with those who do not have such a shift? If it is just shifting the events to a specific date, then that might actually be a good thing - you can have the hospitals and emergency responders ready and waiting, and schedule your vacation time for the lull after the event.
Some time ago, Google changed their default colour scheme so that when printed on a B&W laser, it is basically unusable, with no contrast between anything.
I seem to recall that Apple at the time still had a couple of billion in the bank as cash? Oh, I guess it was only $1.2 billion.
"Others have suggested Apple was just out of money and desperately needed Microsoft's help, ignoring the fact that Apple had just reported holding $1.2 billion in cash. Another $0.15 billion wasn't going to make any significant difference in the survival of the company."
If half of your commute is getting to the station, is that not an argument for changing the place where you live?
I understand the desire not to move (or change jobs), but in the long run, wouldn't you see tremendous benefits by not spending significant amounts of your time traveling between work and home? How much is your time worth? An hour commute each day for 50 weeks of work is 50x5 = 250 hours commuting! Does your current lifestyle give you such satisfaction that offsets spending more than ten day of your year traveling back and forth to work?
I think we all tend to just think the tradeoffs we made are pretty good, without often actually thinking about them very deeply. Yeah, the big house with the great yard way out of town is nice to look at and live in, but if you don't actually spend any time there due to a huge commute, are you really getting all the pleasure out of it that justifies that commute? Maybe a condo in town would make for a more satisfying existence?
In addition to funding agencies with open access requirements for research they fund, some fairly "big name" institutions in the US maintain documents produced by their faculty:
If courts in china decide that Apple has no right to the iPad name in China, this could mean that production could be blocked in China... And producing the iPad somewhere else would mean (much) higher costs.
Not at all. There is absolutely nothing to prevent Apple from building a device in one country and selling it in another country under a different name. Yes, Apple does not want to market their tablet product in China without using the iPad brand, but even if they were to lose (or be ruled not to own) the iPad trademark in China, they could still build it there. The trademark is for *trade*, not manufacture. So they sell the applePad in China, and the iPad everywhere else. Gmail seemed to do ok in the UK as "googlemail" until the IP rights got straightened out.
In Canada, 7-11's "Speakout Wireless" (fan website at http://www.speakoutwireless.ca/ official website at http://www.speakout7eleven.ca/ ) is really great - the prepaid money lasts in your account for 12 months, and gets extended life to 12 months for each top-up, so you can have months of virtually zero usage without loosing credits. Incoming texts are free. Costs per minute are a bit high ($0.25), but since the credits do not disappear at the end of the month, you can actually get complete usage from every dollar credit purchased, which very quickly for me at least means I spend less per month on average than any other plan I could find.
They sell SIM cards in stores and online, and top-ups can happen online too, so you don't even need to visit a 7-11 to purchase minutes. They are using Rogers network, so any phone from Rogers, or any unlocked phone, will work with a SpeakOut SIM, and of course any SpeakOut phone will work too.
For your kids, you could figure out what you are willing to pay for the year, and deposit that into each of their phones, and anything beyond that amount they would be responsible for themselves.
They also have some data plans and minutes/text/data bundles which might make sense in various situations.
Unfortunately their online usage tracking is virtually non-existant, so it is not easy to figure out your own usage patterns other than by tracking how much you spend on topping up.
IAMAL either, but have taken a busiless law class. In British Columbia, Canada (and I assume most other places), any contract containing ANY illegal obligations is 100% void and worth absolutely nothing.
Many contracts have a clause stating that if parts of it are unenforceable or not permitted in various jurisdictions, the rest are still in effect - presumably an attempt to get around this type of "whole contract void if one small part is bad" type of thing. I have no idea how well that works in practice, but it may serve to discourage people from trying to get out of the whole deal when one small part is questionable.
If the document wasn't notorized and they don't have witness signatures, they can't prove that you signed it.
You are arguing about the enforceability of the signature, rather than its validity. If called on it, to pretend it was not signed, the signer would have to commit some form of perjury. Sure, proving it was signed is probably difficult, but that does not mean that is was not signed.
For example, let's say this is Windoze software and you've got some COM+/MTS components in it. Don't have the main executable do anything other than the standard license checking. The DCOM/COM+ object will actually do the quiet validation, and if the licensing fails, it doesn't warn the user, it simply signals another DCOM/COM+ object to operate slightly differently, then that one does something wonky to screw up the experience.
This sounds like a nice sneaky solution, but only if you you do not care what these potential customers think about your software. If the software is widely copied and everyone gets the impression it doesn't work well, that probably is not good for your software's long-term reputation. At the very least it is probably worthwhile to have an available highly-functional demo to combat this loss of functionality in "craked" versions.
So remind me again why this EM effect is unworkable when scaled to the size of planets, moons, and suns? Simply because these astronomical bodies don't maintain charge?
Pretty much. Because each type of charge (positive and negative) repels like types of charges and attracts opposite types of charge, in order to get this type of attraction between two objects you need to cram a bunch of positives onto one object, and negatives onto the other. But those positives do not "want" to stay crammed onto the object - they don't "like" each other. Similarly for the negatives. If you get significant numbers of them together, they have a tendency to fly apart.
In contrast, "gravitational charges" (called "mass") are all the same type, and they all attract each other, so they easily clump together forming planets and suns, and continue to attract each other. Thus even though the electric force is in many ways "stronger" than the gravitational force (by something like 10^20), most of the time we don't even notice the electric force, while we do notice the force of gravity all the time - the earth is so huge.
Slashdot Mirror
It's worse than that. Right now, even before the elimination of the penny, if you go to the post office to buy a three cent stamp, you only have to pay $0.03 and they give you the stamp TAX FREE! Yes, they don't charge you the 13% HST in Ontario! In BC, with only 12% HST, you can get $0.04 worth of stamps tax free! (Or any other items costing the same, of course.)
Doesn't sound like much, but when you're in a business that handles hundreds of thousands of transactions a day, that kind of difference can add up fast. 500K transactions = ~$2000 a day, ~$0.7m a year!
Strangely, other countries that have eliminated the penny don't seem to have suffered any ill effects due to this type of "problem". Maybe they were just lucky. Australia dropped the 1 and 2 cent coins back in 1991, but I suppose they are so backwards down under that nobody was bright enough to figure out an arbitrage method to rip people off....
If they make money from excess energy produced then wouldn't they want your business even more?
They probably make more money selling electricity to the roof owner than they do selling it to the utility, thus high electricity using owners are better clients. If the owner doesn't use enough electricity, there are not enough savings to offset the leasing costs, so their business model does not work for that client.
that's sneaky. i like it.
That is not correct. Re-read the article. They are trying to qualify output per area footprint. Per unit solar cell surface area, these designs are bunk. They are just relying on the excuse that cells are cheaper than a tracking system would be.
"Excuse" sounds a bit pejorative. If it is cheaper to stack cells then to use a tracking system, why would one want to do the later?
I agree about shadow effects. More comes into play though since more angles will be approximately normal to the panels more angles of light will still be in an effective region of the panel for collecting. In winter in the non-tropical regions the sun's maximum height can be pretty low in the sky giving you a very oblique angle to fixed panels against a roof (assuming a shallow slope on the roof). Making these suckers stick up means that the crossection exposed to the sun is larger even if the sun is lower in the sky.
That said two problems I see:
1) Roof top intallation will be weight. I have panels on my roof and they are about 100lb per sq yard. Stack twenty together and you'd be looking at 2000lb per sq yard. Not a good thing for the roof.
2) Ground based panels: you can put the panels on stands that can be adjusted, heck they can be motorized so they can track the sun through the day AND through the seasons. So why exactly would you by ~20X more panels (at about 200 a pop) when a $50 motor per panel (guessing), or an adjustable stand that someone goes out and tilts every month or so can have the same affect?
Those mostly parallel my thoughts when I first read the summary. On closer reflection though, I think the investigators do have a point. The cost of the whole solar system is starting to be dominated by the non-solar-cell components. As the cost of the cells drops, new designs become more attractive. Solar panel tracking involves more than just the addition of a motor - bearings, hinges, power, maintenance, etc. are all issues that you eliminate if you don't do sun tracking for example.
If you can mass produce solar systems in a factory and minimize the work needed to install them on site - you could end up with significant overall installed costs reductions. While the weight issues may be difficult to overcome, probably twenty levels of solar cells would not weigh twenty times the weight of a single solar panel system today. The light harvesting part of the panel is an almost insignificant part of the weight of a current solar panel.
>>> who are either malevolently trying to game the system
Example: The Penn State guy who produced a temperature that resembles a hockey stick. It was later discovered he had altered his numbers to give the result desired (and thus become famous to the public & funded by the government).
Or rather it was later *claimed* he had altered his numbers, etc. etc.
My understanding is that while there have been many criticisms of this work (the 1998 Nature journal Mann, Bradley and Hughes multiproxy study on "Global-scale temperature patterns and climate forcing over the past six centuries"), the vast majority of subsequent work has supported the majority of their conclusions, and all investigated claims of improper conduct have come to naught.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockey_stick_controversy
There have been numerous times that the plane I was on had to wait somewhere between leaving the gate and actually taking off, or between landing and reaching the gate, once for over an hour, but they still demand we keep all electronic devices off. 15 minutes I can handle, but being forced to stay seated for over an hour without at least having my kindle to read is all sorts of annoying.
Traveling with kids recently, I've been thrilled that they have turned on the seat-back entertainment system from the moment we have boarded until we have reached the gate (with pauses when announcements need to be made or safety features reviewed). It has made the whole experience so much more bearable to be able to actually finish watching the program rather than trying to keep ourselves entertained some other way.
Additionally, I've noticed that may of the adults are also more content - not getting frustrated at the long plane taxi to the gate, or the waiting in line to take off.
Even if they don't approve passenger provided devices, I would like to see more airlines keeping their own systems online for more of the time.
The majority of english speaking countries weren't totally metric until Canada changed. And yet, Canadians still measure everything in inches and feet. The only thing they switched to was kilometers and litres. For the normal person everything else is still imperial.
I don't know what you mean by "everything else" - what else doe people measure on a regular basis? Temps are all in C.
The things that Canadians do in non-metric units are pretty much limited to the infleuence of their largest trading partner doing so much in non-metric units. Baking and hardware store stuff is pretty much the only place the "average" person is forced to play with Imperial units.
Not to defend Daisey, but monologists who get their stories covered by public radio shows do not sleep on big piles of money. Not even small piles.
Too lumpy.
It's deja-vu all over again.
I find myself more and more often tempted to state HH:MM p/a GMT.
Ah, yes - GMT (or UTC) as a worldwide standard for everyday living - the idea beloved of a cadre of Unix folks, but which will never even be taken seriously (or given any thought at all, really) by anyone else.
Well, China seems to handle a single time zone, though it geographically should be split into five: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_China
They probably would be happy for the entire world to adopt the same time zone.
When the blanket's size grows and shrinks throughout the year, and the middle is attached to the side of the bed, it makes perfect sense.
Then skootch up in your sleeping position (or reattach blanket's middle to a more effective position, or cut off enough of one end and reattach to the other ONCE) until your feet are always covered by the bottom and fold over the top when it gets too long, no need to cut and sew any more!
I'm glad I have flexible work hours, because otherwise I'd be looking forward to a 10%-increased chance of having a heart attack tomorrow or the day after. So... if there are 2 million heart attacks per year in the US, I guess that means several hundred extra heart attacks just due to this effect?
The first snowfall shoveling fest also creates a spike in heart attacks. What I've never been able to find out (admittedly I haven't looked) is if these types of stats reflect an actual increase in the problem, or just a shifting of the timing of the incidents. Is that 10% increase a result of triggering a bunch of people who likely would have had troubles in the following weeks anyway, or is are these "new" cases? Do places with a DST shift have a higher rate when comparing the entire year, compared with those who do not have such a shift? If it is just shifting the events to a specific date, then that might actually be a good thing - you can have the hospitals and emergency responders ready and waiting, and schedule your vacation time for the lull after the event.
Some time ago, Google changed their default colour scheme so that when printed on a B&W laser, it is basically unusable, with no contrast between anything.
I seem to recall that Apple at the time still had a couple of billion in the bank as cash? Oh, I guess it was only $1.2 billion.
"Others have suggested Apple was just out of money and desperately needed Microsoft's help, ignoring the fact that Apple had just reported holding $1.2 billion in cash. Another $0.15 billion wasn't going to make any significant difference in the survival of the company."
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Tech.Q1.07/592FE887-5CA1-4F30-BD62-407362B533B9.html
If half of your commute is getting to the station, is that not an argument for changing the place where you live?
I understand the desire not to move (or change jobs), but in the long run, wouldn't you see tremendous benefits by not spending significant amounts of your time traveling between work and home? How much is your time worth? An hour commute each day for 50 weeks of work is 50x5 = 250 hours commuting! Does your current lifestyle give you such satisfaction that offsets spending more than ten day of your year traveling back and forth to work?
I think we all tend to just think the tradeoffs we made are pretty good, without often actually thinking about them very deeply. Yeah, the big house with the great yard way out of town is nice to look at and live in, but if you don't actually spend any time there due to a huge commute, are you really getting all the pleasure out of it that justifies that commute? Maybe a condo in town would make for a more satisfying existence?
There is a list of a lot of "open access" repositories at:
http://roarmap.eprints.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROARMAP
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Open_access_archives
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArXiv
In addition to funding agencies with open access requirements for research they fund, some fairly "big name" institutions in the US maintain documents produced by their faculty:
Harvard Arts and Science - http://roarmap.eprints.org/75/
University of California - http://roarmap.eprints.org/55/
MIT - http://roarmap.eprints.org/122/
If you don't want to set up something like Amazon EC2, NearlyFreeSpeech has rates as low as $.20/GB for bandwidth, once you reach that tier.
https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/services/pricing
I like them too. Nice business/pricing model. Great at the low end, but maybe not so much for this higher data rate.
If courts in china decide that Apple has no right to the iPad name in China, this could mean that production could be blocked in China... And producing the iPad somewhere else would mean (much) higher costs.
Not at all. There is absolutely nothing to prevent Apple from building a device in one country and selling it in another country under a different name. Yes, Apple does not want to market their tablet product in China without using the iPad brand, but even if they were to lose (or be ruled not to own) the iPad trademark in China, they could still build it there. The trademark is for *trade*, not manufacture. So they sell the applePad in China, and the iPad everywhere else. Gmail seemed to do ok in the UK as "googlemail" until the IP rights got straightened out.
In Canada, 7-11's "Speakout Wireless" (fan website at http://www.speakoutwireless.ca/ official website at http://www.speakout7eleven.ca/ ) is really great - the prepaid money lasts in your account for 12 months, and gets extended life to 12 months for each top-up, so you can have months of virtually zero usage without loosing credits. Incoming texts are free. Costs per minute are a bit high ($0.25), but since the credits do not disappear at the end of the month, you can actually get complete usage from every dollar credit purchased, which very quickly for me at least means I spend less per month on average than any other plan I could find.
They sell SIM cards in stores and online, and top-ups can happen online too, so you don't even need to visit a 7-11 to purchase minutes. They are using Rogers network, so any phone from Rogers, or any unlocked phone, will work with a SpeakOut SIM, and of course any SpeakOut phone will work too.
For your kids, you could figure out what you are willing to pay for the year, and deposit that into each of their phones, and anything beyond that amount they would be responsible for themselves.
They also have some data plans and minutes/text/data bundles which might make sense in various situations.
Unfortunately their online usage tracking is virtually non-existant, so it is not easy to figure out your own usage patterns other than by tracking how much you spend on topping up.
ting.com certainly seems like they have a sane billing system, which makes them practically unique.
IAMAL either, but have taken a busiless law class. In British Columbia, Canada (and I assume most other places), any contract containing ANY illegal obligations is 100% void and worth absolutely nothing.
Many contracts have a clause stating that if parts of it are unenforceable or not permitted in various jurisdictions, the rest are still in effect - presumably an attempt to get around this type of "whole contract void if one small part is bad" type of thing. I have no idea how well that works in practice, but it may serve to discourage people from trying to get out of the whole deal when one small part is questionable.
If the document wasn't notorized and they don't have witness signatures, they can't prove that you signed it.
You are arguing about the enforceability of the signature, rather than its validity. If called on it, to pretend it was not signed, the signer would have to commit some form of perjury. Sure, proving it was signed is probably difficult, but that does not mean that is was not signed.
For example, let's say this is Windoze software and you've got some COM+/MTS components in it. Don't have the main executable do anything other than the standard license checking. The DCOM/COM+ object will actually do the quiet validation, and if the licensing fails, it doesn't warn the user, it simply signals another DCOM/COM+ object to operate slightly differently, then that one does something wonky to screw up the experience.
This sounds like a nice sneaky solution, but only if you you do not care what these potential customers think about your software. If the software is widely copied and everyone gets the impression it doesn't work well, that probably is not good for your software's long-term reputation. At the very least it is probably worthwhile to have an available highly-functional demo to combat this loss of functionality in "craked" versions.
So remind me again why this EM effect is unworkable when scaled to the size of planets, moons, and suns? Simply because these astronomical bodies don't maintain charge?
Pretty much. Because each type of charge (positive and negative) repels like types of charges and attracts opposite types of charge, in order to get this type of attraction between two objects you need to cram a bunch of positives onto one object, and negatives onto the other. But those positives do not "want" to stay crammed onto the object - they don't "like" each other. Similarly for the negatives. If you get significant numbers of them together, they have a tendency to fly apart.
In contrast, "gravitational charges" (called "mass") are all the same type, and they all attract each other, so they easily clump together forming planets and suns, and continue to attract each other. Thus even though the electric force is in many ways "stronger" than the gravitational force (by something like 10^20), most of the time we don't even notice the electric force, while we do notice the force of gravity all the time - the earth is so huge.