To mass produce them? If they really want them to last that long, why only make two of them?
Because setting this up to be mass produced will mean a tremendous startup cost? I imagine it could take millions to set it up so you can crank them out for $100 (?) a piece. A machine to etch at that kind of scale is going to be a huge investment.
And for those (like me) who not only thought that was amusing, but also had the uncontrollable urge to check if it was correct (it seems to be): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_number
There are a lot of comments of "great, close the curtains during the day to generate electricity that you then need to power the lights - because the curtains are closed during the day!".
These are valid comments, but closing the curtains during the day (and missing out on the light) still makes sense during the week, for a large part of the population in the Developed World. In many (most?) households, the adults will be at work during the day and the kids at school. Lots of hours of sunlight where nobody is at home to care about light in the house.
Ok, except your plants:).
Many people also seem to dismiss 'marginal' savings like this out of hand, because they won't solve the growing demand and price of energy all by themselves. But I seriously doubt there is some magic bullet that will all by itself, suddenly make energy cheap and clean. I think it will have to be achieved in small steps and by combining lots of different solutions.
The point I take away from ideas like this: if we can produce such things efficiently (ie: they will produce more energy in their lifetime than they take to produce - and I also mean taking into account raw materials somehow), then great! Even if it is only a few percentage points of personal energy usage. A few percentage points of a huge amount, is still a large amount. And combining several such things (good insulation, an efficient heater, affordable personal solar power, etc) adds up.
At our current rate of 143 million barrels a week it would take 205 sq miles of manufacturing plants to satisfy our current needs. About the size of Chicago. Probably about the same square footage it you total up all the Walmarts. Very doable. I could not resist... Using the average size of a Wal-Mart Supercenter and just for simplicity, assuming the Discount Stores and Neighbourhood markets are the same size (they are a lot smaller). We get (as of the start of this year): 3550 Wal-Marts times 18302 square metres = 65 million square metres (rounded up) = 25.1 square miles.
So it actually takes eight times the square footage of all Wal-Mart stores in the USA.
Times change. It wasn't a problem in "the time before computers", because it was not possible (or at least not very practical) then to carry all your personal papers. And even then some people did travel, carrying private papers or letters. And I suspect back then you could reasonably expect these papers NOT to be "routinely" (an important phrase in this whole discussion) read by border 'gaurds' (people, Slashdot has an automated spell checker, use it, please). Because of changes in technology and society, people now can and often have to (business trips) store this kind of information on laptops.
Why should it be considered a routine matter for a border agent to be able to access all personal data, when it is not even a routine matter for the police to get this access? Yes yes, entering a country, import restrictions and all that. My point is that I agree with the EFF on this that it should not simply be considered equal to searching a briefcase or gas tank. This whole subject requires very careful consideration.
it eventually becomes obvious what your card PIN is because those numbers wear more, and the object itself becomes a security risk. This way, your software can ensure even use of buttons. Interesting point, I had never considered that. But there are much simpler ways of resolving that than going to a color locking scheme? Touch screen widget which cycles the placement of the numbers on the screen for example?
Although that would create other issues of course, many people (myself included) seem to remember PINs more by the 'gestures' (movement of my finger) than the number. I find I have to think real hard to come up with the PIN, but when I imagine typing it on a pad, it comes easy.
Hmm... I think I went far enough off topic now, sorry.
It's a fun project and a cool toy, but I hope it would never see serious application.
Considering that between 7% and 10% of men are red-green color blind (other types of color blindness at a few percentage points). This kind of lock could pose serious problems for a significant part of the population.
"What? You set the password to the garage door to Red Green Green Red? Guess I'm walking to work again..."
While they, obviously, abhorred the idea of someone being put to the death they saw nothing wrong with imprisoning someone without charges for 30 days. While 30 (or 42) days is way too long, in my opinion, at least there is still a time limit in the UK? Quite a few people in the US, including the president, apparently see nothing wrong with imprisoning certain people without charges indefinitely.
From that article:
The Act also contains provisions (often referred to as the "habeas provisions") removing access to the courts for any alien detained by the United States government who is determined to be an enemy combatant, or who is 'awaiting determination' regarding enemy combatant status. This allows the United States government to detain such aliens indefinitely without prosecuting them in any manner. Note I pass no judgement about the validity on the whole War on Terror. I just never understood why in order to effectively combat terrorism, it is considered necessary to have the ability to keep terrorism suspects without any charge, for years or even permanently.
Being from the Netherlands I thought this was ridiculous, 'we' hardly have any oil, proven reserves of less than half a year consumption. Quite a bit of natural gas though.
Looking at the numbers I was surprised to see indeed a fair amount of oil export. I guess most of the exports are simply due to the Netherlands (port of Rotterdam) being such a big trading hub - importing a lot of goods simply to export them again to the rest of Europe. Make no mistake, the Netherlands import far more oil than they export.
Oil - exports: 1.546 million bbl/day (2004) Oil - imports: 2.465 million bbl/day (2004)
According to the fueleconomy.gov site, the Tahoe will cost $3475/year @ 15k miles per year.
SNIP
Even if you bought a Prius (46mpg, $1282/yr) it'd take 65k miles, or 5.5 years, to make up the difference.
Moral of the story: keep the gas guzzler. I'd mod you up insightful, if I didn't also want to reply. Far too few people bother to do any kind of basic math like this. Or maybe they are unable to, but lets not go into that.
However, I do feel there are three caveats (?) to make...
First: 15k miles a year seems to me to be very low for many commuters, although it might be appropriate for soccer-moms. I live in the Netherlands (small country) and even here, 15k miles a year would be low for most regular commuters. I don't have statistics to back this up, but from anecdotal 'evidence' I'd say at least twice as much is the norm. I can only speculate that in the US this would be even higher. This would obviously mean you'd take a lot less time to make up the difference.
Second: this assumes that gas prices will not increase further. Many people, myself included, do not see this happening in the next few years.
Third: In the Netherlands at least, there is talk (or might already be implemented - I am too lazy to do the research, sorry) to put higher taxes on heavier vehicles ("guzzle-tax"). I can only see this trend increasing - so the cost of owning a SUV might increase even further, compared to owning a smaller vehicle.
Well, the facts show that agents regularly push their clients to accept less money that they could potentially get for their property. The book goes into detail why its in the agent's best financial interest to do this even though they work on a commission - but its too long to go into here. I haven't read the book, but this just seems common sense to me and the explanation extrely simple? Isn't it simply called the principle of diminishing returns?
Made up simplified example: if a realtor can sell a house for market value 100k (and get 7k in commission) with a month of effort, it is not worth it to him or her, to spend twice that time, in order to sell the house for 10k over market value, because that extra month of effort only earns him/her an additional 700.
Of course if it was their own house, putting in the same amount of extra effort would have netted all of that 10k, making it much more attractive to put in the extra work.
This issue has been brought up many times in the past and is certainly not specific for Japan. It has always made me feel like it is a complaint made by companies in general, that resent having to pay engineers higher salaries and instead try to put a spin on it of 'our education system is lacking'. It has been my experience that many companies somehow cannot bring themselves to pay their engineers more than the managers that oversee these engineers. My experience being project managers versus their software developers, but I guess it would be similar in other fields.
I always thought this is something that will correct itself, but it will have a significant lag time. Once good engineers regularly start getting the pay that reflects their 'rarity', the interest in these fields will pick up.
But according to educators, executives and young Japanese themselves, the young here are behaving more like Americans: choosing better-paying fields like finance and medicine Not trying to troll, but I suppose legislation must be added to finance and medicine as a 'better-paying field' for young Americans? Does anyone have any figures that compare numbers of 'science and engineering' students to law students? It would also be interesting to see what those numbers are for Japan (or Europe, for that matter).
Baen have put quite a few SF books online ( here and then choose Free Library). Read them online or download them to pretty much any e-reader out there.
It certainly allowed me to get into a few authors I might otherwise have 'overlooked'. I prefer the dead-tree variety so after sampling some of them like here, I Amazoned them.
Since apparently it only phones home at startup (?), just keep the game running indefinitely.
There, solved the whole issue with losing network connectivity at a later date or the activation servers going offline. Don't everyone mod me up at once please.
Mandatory dig:
...now if only it would run on an OS that reliably runs for more than ten days in a row...
It's not a silly question. The products are not just packaged in the same shape, they attempt to emulate the flavor of the meat product as well, although badly. But that wasnt the question, was it? "Why do vegetarians need to make their food (tofu pups, veggieburgers) LOOK like meat they simply wont eat?"
As for why as so many vegetarian options trying to emulate not just the shape but also the flavour of meat products, that seems to be rather an easy question? "Because so many people like the flavour of meat." Why do so many people use artificial sweeteners or drink 'light' drinks? Because they like sweet coffee or soda, but for whatever reasons have decided they don't want to consume sugar. Or would you not consider it a silly question why so many diet sodas try to emulate the flavour of the normal stuff (albeit badly...)?
I can't recall the comedian, but someone once noted "Why do vegetarians need to make their food (tofu pups, veggieburgers) look like meat they simply wont eat? A bit of a silly question, isn't it? (But I suppose that's why he's a comedian...). Why would the (implied) main reason be a need on the side of vegetarians to pretend they are eating meat?
When you think about it, why does so much meat need to be shaped like small discs? Or be stuffed into a sausage?
I think that it is mainly a convenient way to 'package' it... Its not as easy to fry, grill, barbecue or whatever a small heap of 'meat bits' than it is something in hamburger form. It is also quite a bit easier to make it uniform (portions that are exactly the same size and shape, so convienient for fast food places).
And just like all meat isn't consumed in burger/sausage/whatever shape, all vegetarian foods aren't 'shaped' like meat products either.
From the article: "The heart of the new system is the NXT brick, an autonomous 32-bit LEGO microprocessor that can be programmed using a PC, or for the first time in the retail offering, a Mac."
My apologies for going wildly off topic, but what's with the spammy, weird posts that appear very quickly after a new story is posted? Are there really bots out there checking for new topics and barfing their spam all over them? If they were advertisements or "click me!" links, I could understand, but some of them seem to be plain nonsense.
Too many 'prediction review' articles.
on
Tech Punditry In 2005
·
· Score: -1, Flamebait
Next year there will be another boatload of articles reviewing predictions made for 2006. And the year after that, someone will begin reviewing previous 'prediction review' articles.
Oh, and I predict this comment will not be modded insightful.
Unfortunately I don't have time to write the kind of reply this sort of nonsense deserves, so I'll keep it short.
> Guess what? A company does not, repeat, not revolve around an inexperienced, prima donna, overinflated programmer.
No, it apparently revolves around inexperienced, overinflated, grossly overpaid managers, who think of the people doing the actual work as 'resources'. Guess what? Management is just overhead. All companies need some of it, just like they need some chairs and desks and things.
> If I ever hear your name as a potential hire, I'll veto it.
I'd suggest to the guy that if he ever hears your name at a potential employer, to look for a better employer instead.
I have worked for four years for IBM in the Netherlands. I have personally witnessed two rounds of blanket 'early retirement' offers to any employee older than x (I believe it was 52 or something at the second round). The offer was good enough that you'd be crazy or a workaholic not to take it. I certainly would have, had I not been way too young.
It was just the easy solution to a head-count problem. Unfortunately, I really doubt that the responsible manager pinheads will get publicly beaten over this even when IBM itself publishes articles on what a bad idea this can be.
Slashdot Mirror
To mass produce them? If they really want them to last that long, why only make two of them?
Because setting this up to be mass produced will mean a tremendous startup cost? I imagine it could take millions to set it up so you can crank them out for $100 (?) a piece. A machine to etch at that kind of scale is going to be a huge investment.
And for those (like me) who not only thought that was amusing, but also had the uncontrollable urge to check if it was correct (it seems to be): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_number
There are a lot of comments of "great, close the curtains during the day to generate electricity that you then need to power the lights - because the curtains are closed during the day!".
These are valid comments, but closing the curtains during the day (and missing out on the light) still makes sense during the week, for a large part of the population in the Developed World. In many (most?) households, the adults will be at work during the day and the kids at school. Lots of hours of sunlight where nobody is at home to care about light in the house.
Ok, except your plants :).
Many people also seem to dismiss 'marginal' savings like this out of hand, because they won't solve the growing demand and price of energy all by themselves. But I seriously doubt there is some magic bullet that will all by itself, suddenly make energy cheap and clean. I think it will have to be achieved in small steps and by combining lots of different solutions.
The point I take away from ideas like this: if we can produce such things efficiently (ie: they will produce more energy in their lifetime than they take to produce - and I also mean taking into account raw materials somehow), then great! Even if it is only a few percentage points of personal energy usage. A few percentage points of a huge amount, is still a large amount. And combining several such things (good insulation, an efficient heater, affordable personal solar power, etc) adds up.
Yes, I meant through the Earth distance and yes I did manage to use the radius.
That will teach me to post before drinking my coffee...
of the time...
(Not counting those rich bastards who can afford taking a holiday on the ISS).
So it actually takes eight times the square footage of all Wal-Mart stores in the USA.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walmart
And using Google calculator for the conversion.
Now go ahead, mod me anal-retentive (using the colloquial meaning of the term of course: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anal_retentive).
Times change. It wasn't a problem in "the time before computers", because it was not possible (or at least not very practical) then to carry all your personal papers. And even then some people did travel, carrying private papers or letters. And I suspect back then you could reasonably expect these papers NOT to be "routinely" (an important phrase in this whole discussion) read by border 'gaurds' (people, Slashdot has an automated spell checker, use it, please). Because of changes in technology and society, people now can and often have to (business trips) store this kind of information on laptops.
Why should it be considered a routine matter for a border agent to be able to access all personal data, when it is not even a routine matter for the police to get this access? Yes yes, entering a country, import restrictions and all that. My point is that I agree with the EFF on this that it should not simply be considered equal to searching a briefcase or gas tank. This whole subject requires very careful consideration.
Although that would create other issues of course, many people (myself included) seem to remember PINs more by the 'gestures' (movement of my finger) than the number. I find I have to think real hard to come up with the PIN, but when I imagine typing it on a pad, it comes easy.
Hmm... I think I went far enough off topic now, sorry.
It's a fun project and a cool toy, but I hope it would never see serious application.
Considering that between 7% and 10% of men are red-green color blind (other types of color blindness at a few percentage points). This kind of lock could pose serious problems for a significant part of the population.
"What? You set the password to the garage door to Red Green Green Red? Guess I'm walking to work again..."
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorblindness
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Commissions_Act_of_2006
From that article: The Act also contains provisions (often referred to as the "habeas provisions") removing access to the courts for any alien detained by the United States government who is determined to be an enemy combatant, or who is 'awaiting determination' regarding enemy combatant status. This allows the United States government to detain such aliens indefinitely without prosecuting them in any manner. Note I pass no judgement about the validity on the whole War on Terror. I just never understood why in order to effectively combat terrorism, it is considered necessary to have the ability to keep terrorism suspects without any charge, for years or even permanently.
Being from the Netherlands I thought this was ridiculous, 'we' hardly have any oil, proven reserves of less than half a year consumption. Quite a bit of natural gas though.
Looking at the numbers I was surprised to see indeed a fair amount of oil export. I guess most of the exports are simply due to the Netherlands (port of Rotterdam) being such a big trading hub - importing a lot of goods simply to export them again to the rest of Europe. Make no mistake, the Netherlands import far more oil than they export.
Oil - exports:
1.546 million bbl/day (2004)
Oil - imports:
2.465 million bbl/day (2004)
Source CIA Factbook: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/nl.html
SNIP
According to the fueleconomy.gov site, the Tahoe will cost $3475/year @ 15k miles per year.
SNIP
Even if you bought a Prius (46mpg, $1282/yr) it'd take 65k miles, or 5.5 years, to make up the difference.
Moral of the story: keep the gas guzzler. I'd mod you up insightful, if I didn't also want to reply. Far too few people bother to do any kind of basic math like this. Or maybe they are unable to, but lets not go into that.
However, I do feel there are three caveats (?) to make...
First: 15k miles a year seems to me to be very low for many commuters, although it might be appropriate for soccer-moms. I live in the Netherlands (small country) and even here, 15k miles a year would be low for most regular commuters. I don't have statistics to back this up, but from anecdotal 'evidence' I'd say at least twice as much is the norm. I can only speculate that in the US this would be even higher. This would obviously mean you'd take a lot less time to make up the difference.
Second: this assumes that gas prices will not increase further. Many people, myself included, do not see this happening in the next few years.
Third: In the Netherlands at least, there is talk (or might already be implemented - I am too lazy to do the research, sorry) to put higher taxes on heavier vehicles ("guzzle-tax"). I can only see this trend increasing - so the cost of owning a SUV might increase even further, compared to owning a smaller vehicle.
Made up simplified example: if a realtor can sell a house for market value 100k (and get 7k in commission) with a month of effort, it is not worth it to him or her, to spend twice that time, in order to sell the house for 10k over market value, because that extra month of effort only earns him/her an additional 700.
Of course if it was their own house, putting in the same amount of extra effort would have netted all of that 10k, making it much more attractive to put in the extra work.
Baen have put quite a few SF books online ( here and then choose Free Library). Read them online or download them to pretty much any e-reader out there. It certainly allowed me to get into a few authors I might otherwise have 'overlooked'. I prefer the dead-tree variety so after sampling some of them like here, I Amazoned them.
Since apparently it only phones home at startup (?), just keep the game running indefinitely. There, solved the whole issue with losing network connectivity at a later date or the activation servers going offline. Don't everyone mod me up at once please.
...now if only it would run on an OS that reliably runs for more than ten days in a row...
Mandatory dig:
> and in Europe they think 100 miles is a long distance.
No we don't, but we do think 160.9 kilometers is a long distance.
This really surprises anyone? I thought terms like "ideal for a DYIer!" have always meant "about to collapse" ?
From the article: "The heart of the new system is the NXT brick, an autonomous 32-bit LEGO microprocessor that can be programmed using a PC, or for the first time in the retail offering, a Mac."
My apologies for going wildly off topic, but what's with the spammy, weird posts that appear very quickly after a new story is posted? Are there really bots out there checking for new topics and barfing their spam all over them? If they were advertisements or "click me!" links, I could understand, but some of them seem to be plain nonsense.
Next year there will be another boatload of articles reviewing predictions made for 2006. And the year after that, someone will begin reviewing previous 'prediction review' articles.
Oh, and I predict this comment will not be modded insightful.
Unfortunately I don't have time to write the kind of reply this sort of nonsense deserves, so I'll keep it short. > Guess what? A company does not, repeat, not revolve around an inexperienced, prima donna, overinflated programmer. No, it apparently revolves around inexperienced, overinflated, grossly overpaid managers, who think of the people doing the actual work as 'resources'. Guess what? Management is just overhead. All companies need some of it, just like they need some chairs and desks and things. > If I ever hear your name as a potential hire, I'll veto it. I'd suggest to the guy that if he ever hears your name at a potential employer, to look for a better employer instead.
I have worked for four years for IBM in the Netherlands. I have personally witnessed two rounds of blanket 'early retirement' offers to any employee older than x (I believe it was 52 or something at the second round). The offer was good enough that you'd be crazy or a workaholic not to take it. I certainly would have, had I not been way too young. It was just the easy solution to a head-count problem. Unfortunately, I really doubt that the responsible manager pinheads will get publicly beaten over this even when IBM itself publishes articles on what a bad idea this can be.