I would think the argument could be made as well that, as in Chicago, mass transit attracts crime because the criminals know there will be people there to rob. It also attracts taggers because they know there be something to spraypaint. Does wonders for the stores along the line selling nylons, ski masks and spraypaint cans.
So far the new light rail in Phoenix and Tempe seems to be bearing this idea out.
One thing to keep in mind is that capacitors are designed to pretty much discharge all at once in a blinding flash whereas the internal resistance of a battery will limit the current to something that might take at least minutes to discharge, if not longer.
What causes fires with lithium-ion batteries is an internal short. But still, there is enough resistance to limit the current to a dull glow.
A bus-sized ultracapacitor would need to be able to supply thousands of amps for many minutes. Roughly, as a minimum you might need 20 minutes times 4000 amps or 80,000 amp-minutes at hundreds of volts. You could get this from car batteries in series because 1200 amp-hours (about 80,000 amp-minutes) is a quite reasonable capacity for car batteries. The problem is, you can't get 4000 amps out of car batteries because of the internal resistance. Hence, an ultracapacitor to the rescue.
Except any fault in the electric supply means you have almost zero resistance feeding a short. Yes, it would almost certainly take out the bus with the resulting explosion. At least the capacitor would explode and maybe anything else connected to it in the circuit. Lots of vaporized metal.
Note: 4,0000 amps at 480 volts is what is required to move a electric subway car. I would guess you could get by with maybe half the total volt-amperes for a bus rather than a subway car. But maybe not as there is a lot less resistance to rolling a subway car on tracks than a bus with tires.
Why would you want to interview at a company that you spoke out publicly about in a negative manner? Might it be because you have no courage of your convictions and would grovel to anyone just to get a job?
If you can't put your name with your comments, maybe your comments don't mean anything at all. It take no courage to hide behind a "handle" and saw anything that comes to mind. Compare this to the folks during the America revolution that knew that speaking out could lead to execution but did it anyway. In public. Now those people had something behind their convictions.
I can't imagine a situation where someone would openly criticize a company and then want to work there. I can't imagine a situation where someone would not want their political beliefs known in hopes of getting a better job or better standing in the community.
People in Russia, at the height of the Soviet era wrote books that led to their imprisonment and many of them were doing so openly without trying to hide their identity. Far fewer tried to do the same anonymously. Guess which ones we remember today? The people that were locked away to die in prison or the people in hiding?
If you have something to say, great. Put your name on it. Otherwise, shut up and be a good citizen and do what you are told.
Let's see, what TVs are made in the US? Oh, yeah. None. None at all. The last US TV manufacturer I believe was Magnavox with the Quasar brand. Zenith bit the dust before that, as did RCA, GE, and every other single manufacturer of consumer electronics. None of this stuff is made in the US any longer because it is not cost effective to do so. Primarily because of labor costs - why pay someone $30,000 a year to build TV sets when the same job pays $1500 overseas?
Perhaps the jobs being referred to would be TV investigators. California could lead the nation in environmental impact jobs by employing people to ride bicycles around checking up on people's TVs and maybe other appliances. If they found larger than permitted TVs or other energy-wasting appliances they could be confiscated. That would lead to more jobs - people driving the trucks to collect these appliances and more people to... well, I guess sell them to other states.
The problem is, the electricity crisis is just about upon us. We hear constantly about large power companies proposing to build new coal generating plants to meet the growing demand. When was the last time you actually saw one of these plants being built? Maybe in the 1970s? Obama has vowed to tax such plants into oblivion also, so even if they got through the environmental regulations somehow they would never actually be built. Nuclear isn't happening in the US for political reasons - there are no real reasons not to build these plants - except it would take too long and we will be in a shortage of power long before any nuclear plant came on line.
So California might have the right idea with having applicance police. I seriously doubt they would actually do that, but someone is going to have to do something to stop the growth in electric power consumption. The population in the US keeps growing from immigration and we keep finding new and exciting ways to consume electricity.
24 lines? Uh, that is a T1. T1 is available everywhere, although it might get rather expensive in some places.
In general, a T1 seems to be much, much less latency than any DSL I have ever seen. A lot fewer routers in the way. End result is that a 1.5Mb T1 is a lot closer to 3Mb DSL, maybe 6Mb in some situations. Having had a business on DSL a couple of times but mostly on T1 connections this has proven itself several times.
Train vs. plane is certainly an option, except for track right-of-way.
Train vs. car has major problems in that once you are there, you need your car to get around. Usually this is the whole reason for taking the car in the first place.
Then there is the right-of-way problem. Trains were replaced by trucks for most freight in the US around 1960 or 1970. I believe there was some major deregulation that changed the cost structure for trucking about that time. This pretty much ended passenger rail service in the US which was supported by freight. Having to rely on just passenger fares led to massive cutbacks and absurd delays. I took a train once from Chicago, IL to Columbus OH in 1975 and it only took about eight hours longer than driving would have.
So they ripped up all the tracks. If you want to go from Phoenix to LA by train you have to take the bus to Flagstaff first. The land where the tracks were has been sold off and stuff built there in many cases. The day of the train is pretty much over in the US because of this. I suppose where there are tracks, mostly in the East, you could have some kind of faster rail service. But that is what they tried with the Acela - it isn't very good. Certainly not up to the standards in other countries where they have preserved the tracks from the 1800s.
Mostly the era of trains has been ended because there isn't anywhere to put the tracks into major cities any longer. We could probably have monorails combined with Interstate highways, but nobody has built a monorail in a long, long time - except maybe Disneyworld. We could dig tunnels for the trains, but that would be incredibly expensive with today's technology. Neither is very likely.
One way or another, the climate folks aren't going to shut up until there is actual proof. One way to get some proof - positive or negative - would be to cease passenger air travel. It is a luxury that we can give up in the name of gathering some real evidence. Sure, it is going to put millions of people out of work, but that might be a small price to pay when compared to some of the other ideas. So who knows, we might have to tear down miles and miles of buildings to rebuild the train tracks.
Oh come on, is that the best you can come up with? "undocumented, unfair functions (such as symbolic algebraic solving...)"
How about a reprogrammed calculator that simply stores answers? Looks like a calculator but is in fact a data retrieval device that holds all your crib notes. I'd say that is clearly a lot more useful to the exam taker in terms of cheating and would certainly be something that would be disallowed in an exam. Just like pulling out your iPhone would get you ejected from most serious exams.
There are certainly authors that just make stuff up. No question about that. And some of them are pretty good and even good to read. They have something to say well beyond the made-up science.
However, you are missing quite a bit if you stop there. Heinlein was first and formost an engineer and didn't just make stuff up. Some of what he wrote before 1960 certainly shows its age because virtually nobody could have foreseen the changes inspired by VLSI integrated circuits. And the role of technology is very clear in that it is something that people can rely on and use to improve their situation - it doesn't rescue them, though.
Larry Niven is another hard science fiction writer where the technology is well researched, thought out and described in significant detail. There are very few situations in his books where something drops in out of the sky and saves the day. Again, technology is there to be used but people are using their own skills to interact with it and win in the end.
Now today these sorts of writers aren't very popular because we have pretty much lost faith with both clever humans and technology. Instead of James Kirk we have George W. Bush as a leader. Instead of Colossus, we have Windows Vista. People have taken this to heart and figured out there isn't really any point to counting on people or technology as both are going to let them down.
This is the principle reason why we aren't going to be returning to the Moon or going to Mars anytime soon and why a few astronauts dying convince everyone that manned space flight is too dangerous. Ask any 15 year old boy in 1950 if going to space was a good idea, and then ask if it was a good idea even if his friend in the seat next to him died. In 1950 the answer would be yes without question - today the answer is "Of course not." There is clearly a message there.
I think we are coming to a major fork in the road. Since the 1980s anything digital has been pretty much fair game. With the addition of the Internet copying has become more and more prevalent. Today there are some folks (mostly over 40 or 50) that will pay for a concert or an original work.
The rest of society, mostly under 30, are used to the idea of getting stuff for free and see little difference between the "original" recording they can play on a high-end stereo system and a medium-quality MP3 they have on an iPod. Certainly when the difference is $20 between the two there is no value proposition for them that allows them to see the "original" recording has anywhere near a $20 value.
Copyright industrialists or not, creative works simply aren't worth as much as they used to. And when the 40+ folks die off there will be virtually nobody left that is going to pay when free is an option. So far, almost nobody has figured out a good way of making sure free isn't an option.
The only people that believe this sort of nonsense are those that have never actually seen a person without a well-paying job.
OK, let's say you were working somewhere and they paid healh insurance. You lose your job and now have no insurance. Better not get sick, right?
Well, as it turns out, it doesn't exactly work that way as all the poor people know. No insurance? Fine. Show up at the hospital ER and wait. You don't have a job, so you can wait, well, all day. And you probably will because everyone else is there for the same reason. No, you can't go to your private physician unless you can pay. But you can get the same treatment that the rest of the poor people get.
If you do not have some life-threatening condition when you show up at the ER in your nice suburban town, you may indeed be referred to a different hospital. If you have no way to get there, you will get transported there - without the rest of your family that came with you to wait. But you are going to end up at a hospital where you will receive appropriate care. It may not be convenient and it may not be efficient but we do not have poor people dying in the streets because they are kicked to the curb from hospitals because they can't pay.
Indeed, we do have people sitting at home going "Woe is me" in nice suburban towns because their private doctor wouldn't see them without getting paid and they were told to go to the County hospital in some nasty part of town when they showed up at the ER without insurance and a cut on their finger. They would never demean themselves to go to "County" because that is where the poor people go.
H&R Block employs housewives and other part-time workers to fill out tax forms. They go through a brief training period, something like 4 weeks at their own expense. They are then "qualified" to work in an H&R Block office preparing tax returns.
If using H&R Block has only cost you $600, you are lucky indeed unless your income is less than maybe $30,000. Anything more than that, especially with anything that is even remotely complicated - like multiple states, rental property, etc. you are playing with fire trusting H&R Block.
A real tax preparer would be paying the $600 in fines if they screwed up. A real tax preparer wouldn't have made the mistake in the first place. It does not require a CPA to fill out tax forms as CPA is something entirely different. You need someone that is good at tax preparation. Often these people are also a CPA but being a CPA doesn't mean they know anything about taxes.
Every year you are required to pay tribute to the government and doing it improperly can result in jail time. Do you really want to trust that to some part-time worker that managed to pay the fee to take the H&R Block class?
The biggest single problem with UAC is that there are thousands of applications written for Windows pre-Vista that appear to work fine, except they incessantly prompt the user for UAC elevation. Or, forcing elevation (Run as administrator) is required.
In a sane implementation that blew off all compatibilty, these applications would simple fail, as obsolete applications do on Mac and Linux platforms. Instead, we have partial compatibility with the base OS but without "security" compatibility so the applications can still be used. But used in a way that inspires reviews of how UAC is troublesome and broken.
Clearly, an example is the single-user with administrative rights. Nobody in their right mind would set up a Linux machine in this manner - you just don't run things as root. I am not sure what the corrallary might be for a Mac, but you wouldn't do it there either. That this was a reasonable configuration for Windows 98 meant it wasn't unworkable for XP, but perhaps not a great idea. It is an awful way to set the machine up for Vista and the first-time use script should make it clear that you should set up accounts for every user of the machine.
I currently have that T-Mobile plan. It is extremely short-sighted of them and will eventually mean the end of T-Mobile (aka Deutsch Telecom) because of how it works.
I have a wireless router at home, the daughter's house, at the office and pretty much have access whereever I go. The only time I am using the cell service minutes, of which I pay for only a very few each month, is when I am in a car.
Sounds good, right? Except each and every call I make costs T-Mobile money. I would say that no matter how little this cost is, it means that I am costing way more than the $200 a month I pay for five phone lines if I make hundreds of calls. So they are losing money every month on my service.
Repeat for probably 20% of their subscriber base. This is insanity. It sounded cool but turning this on was silly and does nothing but cost them money. I think they were betting on people not having access to wireless connections everywhere they went and the $10 a month they charge for the option would easily pay for the few phone calls placed. This is no longer the case as I can save hundreds of dollars in cell service billing by buying a $50 router. So can every other T-Mobile customer with a phone that supports this.
No, it doesn't work very well for the company. I'm sure they are going to turn it off eventually. It certainly isn't a model for anyone else to emulate.
Bio-Diesel from waste oil works only as long as the holders of the waste oil are stupid. You go to your neighborhood McDonalds and make a deal with them for their waste oil and it might work, for a while. Yes, they were paying to dispose of a dangerous, contaiminated waste product that is illegal to dispose of in any other way.
The problem is, the second person comes to the same McDonalds wanting their waste oil. Anyone with a brain (which admittedly does leave out most McDonalds managers) begins to realize that their waste oil is no longer a dangerous contaiminated waste product to be disposed of as cheaply as possible but is now a valuable commodity which can be sold to the highest bidder.
The time between these two points of view can be days or years depending on the interest level in waste oil, but there is absolutely no way out of the conversion from one to the other. Today, bio-diesel from waste oil is completely impractical if you have to buy the waste oil for anything close to what it would be worth.
So what you have left is waste oil collectors are preying on the stupidity and ignorance of restaurant managers. Feels good, doesn't it?
Flashy graphics might look sexy, but that wasn't what sponsored the move away from a mainframe-centric organization. The mainframe programmers were not able to provide data in a form the users wanted it in a timely manner. In most organizations the users would ask for a 10,000 page report to be printed out in 30 minutes, look at the first page and say "That isn't really want I wanted" and start the whole process over agin.
PC software vendors, including Microsoft, would woo users with cute demonstrtions of how they could call up the same information on a PC and spend hours adjusting column widths and fonts so it would look just the way they wanted it. Of course, some of their calculations didn't match up to what the "official" business rules were so their output wouldn't match up with mainframe reports. Convenience beat out accuracy, so in case of conflict the mainframe report was often scrapped.
This battle was being fought in the 1980s, long before Windows 3.1, Windows 95 or anything like it. Today the "data center" staff is busily regaining control through servers and thin clients and accuracy (and reproducibility) is beginning to trump convenience. It kind of scared some people when they realized the business was being run based on Lotus spreadsheets that there was no backup for and no auditing of the calculations.
Biggest benefit of the mainframe system was went something failed it would pretty much call out the part. If you have 100 servers today and something fails where most people are is throwing parts at the problem until it goes away. Really high availabilty requirements means the data and the server are separate and the whole server is swapped. We are starting to reach the level of data transfer rates that mainframes were at 20 years ago, but still nothing really beats a real mainframe system with data channels for data throughput.
Give it 10 years more and the server farm will be able to process as much data in 24 hours as could be done by an IBM mainframe in 1985.
Everything adapts. Software will be something you rent on the Internet and never resides on your computer.
Music? The situation in China has "evolved" to the point where there is no more recorded music sold (or produced). In the West check your local radio stations... what is selling there is oldies. What will continue to "sell" will be music from the previous century and the Internet will be dominated by garage bands offering stuff for free in hopes of landing a gig.
Movies? Eliminate digital distribution (DVDs) and you eliminate the problem. If it is going to be on DVD, lots of people will just download it for free. You want a theatrical release? It is going to have to be in theaters only, for years. Maybe sell DVDs years later, maybe never because once released on DVD the revenue stream ends.
User generated content? Check out YouTube for that, especially ShayTards and Magibon. This is the height of user-generated content and people are starting to discover (realize?) that it is crap. All crap, all the time. No, that isn't going to be the future of entertainment.
What most people don't understand is we've grown an entire generation that believes it all should be free and will never, ever pay. This is going to require a major adaptation that most "media" and "entertainment" isn't going to survive, but the adaptation will eventually succeed.
No, only in your fantasy will it really all be free. Someone has to pay, and patronage doesn't work. So we all have to pay for what we consume.
The meal preparation people staff the cafeteria. Patients sometimes visit the cafeteria.
When someone pukes in Radiology, the janitor often gets called to mop up.
There is no telling who they are going to run into the hallway going to the bathroom, entering or leaving. Might be better if it didn't work that way, but I have worked in hospital IT and you would be amazed at who you might be sharing an elevator with. And the IT department was in a different building but the data center was in the main building.
The problem is that people respond to public figures as authorities. Completley out of their field. So you have comedians giving medical advice and pastors giving biology lessons. The problem is that people take their authoritative position into account when assigning credibility.
So Bill Maher comes off as a reliable expert on everything because he is on TV. Period. Don't blame me, it is the way "people" are wired.
The end result is that if you have a public platform, people are going to listen. When the listen to stupid advice because you are some sort of public figure, I agree there should be some responsibility on the part of the public figure. They should know better. If they don't, they shouldn't be offering advice - note, not an opinion, real advice. I guess they would only be 50% responsible for stupid advice.
Why would Google do that? Google right now has all the stories, all the content without paying anyone for it. I can look at the content (either a snippit or the whole story) without ever bothering a News Corp. web site through the use of Google.
So Google has the best of all worlds - nothing to pay for and all the content. Why would they ever do anything different?
Now the question is, since they have the content and are using it, should they be paying for it? Obviously, they cannot as it would destroy their business model.
The real problem is simply answered. Can I, through the use of Google obtain Rupert Murdoch's content without ever visiting his site or seeing ads on his site?
If the answer is no, then someone doesn't understand.
If the answer is yes, then there is a real problem. I tend to think that the answer is yes on a couple of levels. First off, can I use a "Murdoch" headline and then read the content somewhere else? Yup, I am sure I can do that. Secondly, can I use Google to grab "Murdoch" content without visiting any of his sites? Yup, I can use the Google cache and never touch the original site.
Finally, doesn't Google show enough of the text to let me know if I really want to look at the whole article on the site?
No, this isn't anywhere near as simple as just using robots.txt to deter Google from indexing. This is using a service from Google to preempt other sites.
Your average PC hardware has utterly no way to "test" it. You can sort of test RAM - to the point of identifying there is a failure somewhere in the memory. OK, if you have four DIMMs what does that mean? Well, it means you have a RAM problem somewhere.
Motherboard? Not really any sort of testing possible. There are some "pretend" diagnostic tools that will try to tell you if something fails, but what exactly does that mean? Nothing. If you have a ATAPI DVD drive and a SATA hard drive I assure you that a failing drive can easily appear as creating a failure to some "motherboard" test.
There is no clear isolation of the hardware whatsoever, and no ability for the hardware to meaningfully participate in any sort of testing. So you are left with changing parts - more or less what I like to call "throw parts at the problem". Today this isn't terribly practical as most everything is on the motherboard. If you are a skilled screwdriver user you could replace the motherboard, but for most people it is just getting a new computer.
Even if you take a computer to a "computer shop" you are likely to see very little in the way of diagnostics or fault isolation. They will pull out something and replace it with something they have lying around to see if that "fixes" the problem. Often they will do this blindly without much real thought in the process. The end result for the customer is that their computer works again but nobody really knows what the problem was. And, by the way, here is the bill for the parts that we replaced.
There are some external hardware parts that are pretty simple to diagnose and replace. The power supply is probably the most prone to failure and is pretty obvious - the machine is dead with no lights. A CD or DVD drive is pretty simple to sort out as well with most common failures because it either works or it does not. In either case it is a few connectors and a few screws and you have the part in your hand. Both are going to be less than $100 to replace and well worth doing it.
The lack of any real diagnostic ability - or even ability to verify proper operation - is a serious limitation in the PC world. If you move up to real server hardware you see all sorts of diagnostic and fault isolation capabilities. Things like the memory test telling you what DIMM is bad or that a hard drive is failing. But the real gem of hardware diagnostics seems to be reserved for mainframe systems. It tells you a part is going to fail, tells you where the part is and you can confirm that it fails specific tests and a new part passes the same tests.
You assume there is in fact a simple download gateway. What if you have to register first? What if there are three different options to choose from instead of a single download? And worse, what if it changes in the future?
This way it is a web location to display to start the process of getting the alternative browser.
Sorry, you can't remove it. The rendering engine, which is what displays text and has whatever risks associated with it you might think there are, is used to display all the help information. With Vista it is also used to format many of the displays such as the Windows Update and Backup and Restore Center displays.
HTML is deeply integrated into Windows now and there is no getting rid of it. It has nothing to with with web browsing but the HTML rendering is going to be there and callable via COM.
Everyone seems to think that the distribution of physical books is somehow expensive and troublesome. It isn't.
The publisher puts the books into boxes and ships the box full of books (maybe 25 of them) for $10. That works out to be around $0.40 per book, delivered to the store.
The cost of printing a softcover/paperback book is less than $2. You can have your very own book printed in small quantities for this price. So where does all the money go for a $20 currently popular book?
You ever think it might go to the publisher that fronted the author money, paid for the editors, marketed the book and promoted it? Gosh, those costs might not change for an eBook at all.
Guess what? Physical books aren't that expensive to distribute, and eBooks have almost identical costs. Sure on a $20 book you might save $2.50 but only $2.50. Waiting for the $1 currently popular eBook? You will be waiting a long time.
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I would think the argument could be made as well that, as in Chicago, mass transit attracts crime because the criminals know there will be people there to rob. It also attracts taggers because they know there be something to spraypaint. Does wonders for the stores along the line selling nylons, ski masks and spraypaint cans.
So far the new light rail in Phoenix and Tempe seems to be bearing this idea out.
One thing to keep in mind is that capacitors are designed to pretty much discharge all at once in a blinding flash whereas the internal resistance of a battery will limit the current to something that might take at least minutes to discharge, if not longer.
What causes fires with lithium-ion batteries is an internal short. But still, there is enough resistance to limit the current to a dull glow.
A bus-sized ultracapacitor would need to be able to supply thousands of amps for many minutes. Roughly, as a minimum you might need 20 minutes times 4000 amps or 80,000 amp-minutes at hundreds of volts. You could get this from car batteries in series because 1200 amp-hours (about 80,000 amp-minutes) is a quite reasonable capacity for car batteries. The problem is, you can't get 4000 amps out of car batteries because of the internal resistance. Hence, an ultracapacitor to the rescue.
Except any fault in the electric supply means you have almost zero resistance feeding a short. Yes, it would almost certainly take out the bus with the resulting explosion. At least the capacitor would explode and maybe anything else connected to it in the circuit. Lots of vaporized metal.
Note: 4,0000 amps at 480 volts is what is required to move a electric subway car. I would guess you could get by with maybe half the total volt-amperes for a bus rather than a subway car. But maybe not as there is a lot less resistance to rolling a subway car on tracks than a bus with tires.
Why would you want to interview at a company that you spoke out publicly about in a negative manner? Might it be because you have no courage of your convictions and would grovel to anyone just to get a job?
If you can't put your name with your comments, maybe your comments don't mean anything at all. It take no courage to hide behind a "handle" and saw anything that comes to mind. Compare this to the folks during the America revolution that knew that speaking out could lead to execution but did it anyway. In public. Now those people had something behind their convictions.
I can't imagine a situation where someone would openly criticize a company and then want to work there. I can't imagine a situation where someone would not want their political beliefs known in hopes of getting a better job or better standing in the community.
People in Russia, at the height of the Soviet era wrote books that led to their imprisonment and many of them were doing so openly without trying to hide their identity. Far fewer tried to do the same anonymously. Guess which ones we remember today? The people that were locked away to die in prison or the people in hiding?
If you have something to say, great. Put your name on it. Otherwise, shut up and be a good citizen and do what you are told.
Let's see, what TVs are made in the US? Oh, yeah. None. None at all. The last US TV manufacturer I believe was Magnavox with the Quasar brand. Zenith bit the dust before that, as did RCA, GE, and every other single manufacturer of consumer electronics. None of this stuff is made in the US any longer because it is not cost effective to do so. Primarily because of labor costs - why pay someone $30,000 a year to build TV sets when the same job pays $1500 overseas?
Perhaps the jobs being referred to would be TV investigators. California could lead the nation in environmental impact jobs by employing people to ride bicycles around checking up on people's TVs and maybe other appliances. If they found larger than permitted TVs or other energy-wasting appliances they could be confiscated. That would lead to more jobs - people driving the trucks to collect these appliances and more people to ... well, I guess sell them to other states.
The problem is, the electricity crisis is just about upon us. We hear constantly about large power companies proposing to build new coal generating plants to meet the growing demand. When was the last time you actually saw one of these plants being built? Maybe in the 1970s? Obama has vowed to tax such plants into oblivion also, so even if they got through the environmental regulations somehow they would never actually be built. Nuclear isn't happening in the US for political reasons - there are no real reasons not to build these plants - except it would take too long and we will be in a shortage of power long before any nuclear plant came on line.
So California might have the right idea with having applicance police. I seriously doubt they would actually do that, but someone is going to have to do something to stop the growth in electric power consumption. The population in the US keeps growing from immigration and we keep finding new and exciting ways to consume electricity.
24 lines? Uh, that is a T1. T1 is available everywhere, although it might get rather expensive in some places.
In general, a T1 seems to be much, much less latency than any DSL I have ever seen. A lot fewer routers in the way. End result is that a 1.5Mb T1 is a lot closer to 3Mb DSL, maybe 6Mb in some situations. Having had a business on DSL a couple of times but mostly on T1 connections this has proven itself several times.
Train vs. plane is certainly an option, except for track right-of-way.
Train vs. car has major problems in that once you are there, you need your car to get around. Usually this is the whole reason for taking the car in the first place.
Then there is the right-of-way problem. Trains were replaced by trucks for most freight in the US around 1960 or 1970. I believe there was some major deregulation that changed the cost structure for trucking about that time. This pretty much ended passenger rail service in the US which was supported by freight. Having to rely on just passenger fares led to massive cutbacks and absurd delays. I took a train once from Chicago, IL to Columbus OH in 1975 and it only took about eight hours longer than driving would have.
So they ripped up all the tracks. If you want to go from Phoenix to LA by train you have to take the bus to Flagstaff first. The land where the tracks were has been sold off and stuff built there in many cases. The day of the train is pretty much over in the US because of this. I suppose where there are tracks, mostly in the East, you could have some kind of faster rail service. But that is what they tried with the Acela - it isn't very good. Certainly not up to the standards in other countries where they have preserved the tracks from the 1800s.
Mostly the era of trains has been ended because there isn't anywhere to put the tracks into major cities any longer. We could probably have monorails combined with Interstate highways, but nobody has built a monorail in a long, long time - except maybe Disneyworld. We could dig tunnels for the trains, but that would be incredibly expensive with today's technology. Neither is very likely.
One way or another, the climate folks aren't going to shut up until there is actual proof. One way to get some proof - positive or negative - would be to cease passenger air travel. It is a luxury that we can give up in the name of gathering some real evidence. Sure, it is going to put millions of people out of work, but that might be a small price to pay when compared to some of the other ideas. So who knows, we might have to tear down miles and miles of buildings to rebuild the train tracks.
Oh come on, is that the best you can come up with? "undocumented, unfair functions (such as symbolic algebraic solving ...)"
How about a reprogrammed calculator that simply stores answers? Looks like a calculator but is in fact a data retrieval device that holds all your crib notes. I'd say that is clearly a lot more useful to the exam taker in terms of cheating and would certainly be something that would be disallowed in an exam. Just like pulling out your iPhone would get you ejected from most serious exams.
There are certainly authors that just make stuff up. No question about that. And some of them are pretty good and even good to read. They have something to say well beyond the made-up science.
However, you are missing quite a bit if you stop there. Heinlein was first and formost an engineer and didn't just make stuff up. Some of what he wrote before 1960 certainly shows its age because virtually nobody could have foreseen the changes inspired by VLSI integrated circuits. And the role of technology is very clear in that it is something that people can rely on and use to improve their situation - it doesn't rescue them, though.
Larry Niven is another hard science fiction writer where the technology is well researched, thought out and described in significant detail. There are very few situations in his books where something drops in out of the sky and saves the day. Again, technology is there to be used but people are using their own skills to interact with it and win in the end.
Now today these sorts of writers aren't very popular because we have pretty much lost faith with both clever humans and technology. Instead of James Kirk we have George W. Bush as a leader. Instead of Colossus, we have Windows Vista. People have taken this to heart and figured out there isn't really any point to counting on people or technology as both are going to let them down.
This is the principle reason why we aren't going to be returning to the Moon or going to Mars anytime soon and why a few astronauts dying convince everyone that manned space flight is too dangerous. Ask any 15 year old boy in 1950 if going to space was a good idea, and then ask if it was a good idea even if his friend in the seat next to him died. In 1950 the answer would be yes without question - today the answer is "Of course not." There is clearly a message there.
I think we are coming to a major fork in the road. Since the 1980s anything digital has been pretty much fair game. With the addition of the Internet copying has become more and more prevalent. Today there are some folks (mostly over 40 or 50) that will pay for a concert or an original work.
The rest of society, mostly under 30, are used to the idea of getting stuff for free and see little difference between the "original" recording they can play on a high-end stereo system and a medium-quality MP3 they have on an iPod. Certainly when the difference is $20 between the two there is no value proposition for them that allows them to see the "original" recording has anywhere near a $20 value.
Copyright industrialists or not, creative works simply aren't worth as much as they used to. And when the 40+ folks die off there will be virtually nobody left that is going to pay when free is an option. So far, almost nobody has figured out a good way of making sure free isn't an option.
The only people that believe this sort of nonsense are those that have never actually seen a person without a well-paying job.
OK, let's say you were working somewhere and they paid healh insurance. You lose your job and now have no insurance. Better not get sick, right?
Well, as it turns out, it doesn't exactly work that way as all the poor people know. No insurance? Fine. Show up at the hospital ER and wait. You don't have a job, so you can wait, well, all day. And you probably will because everyone else is there for the same reason. No, you can't go to your private physician unless you can pay. But you can get the same treatment that the rest of the poor people get.
If you do not have some life-threatening condition when you show up at the ER in your nice suburban town, you may indeed be referred to a different hospital. If you have no way to get there, you will get transported there - without the rest of your family that came with you to wait. But you are going to end up at a hospital where you will receive appropriate care. It may not be convenient and it may not be efficient but we do not have poor people dying in the streets because they are kicked to the curb from hospitals because they can't pay.
Indeed, we do have people sitting at home going "Woe is me" in nice suburban towns because their private doctor wouldn't see them without getting paid and they were told to go to the County hospital in some nasty part of town when they showed up at the ER without insurance and a cut on their finger. They would never demean themselves to go to "County" because that is where the poor people go.
H&R Block employs housewives and other part-time workers to fill out tax forms. They go through a brief training period, something like 4 weeks at their own expense. They are then "qualified" to work in an H&R Block office preparing tax returns.
If using H&R Block has only cost you $600, you are lucky indeed unless your income is less than maybe $30,000. Anything more than that, especially with anything that is even remotely complicated - like multiple states, rental property, etc. you are playing with fire trusting H&R Block.
A real tax preparer would be paying the $600 in fines if they screwed up. A real tax preparer wouldn't have made the mistake in the first place. It does not require a CPA to fill out tax forms as CPA is something entirely different. You need someone that is good at tax preparation. Often these people are also a CPA but being a CPA doesn't mean they know anything about taxes.
Every year you are required to pay tribute to the government and doing it improperly can result in jail time. Do you really want to trust that to some part-time worker that managed to pay the fee to take the H&R Block class?
The biggest single problem with UAC is that there are thousands of applications written for Windows pre-Vista that appear to work fine, except they incessantly prompt the user for UAC elevation. Or, forcing elevation (Run as administrator) is required.
In a sane implementation that blew off all compatibilty, these applications would simple fail, as obsolete applications do on Mac and Linux platforms. Instead, we have partial compatibility with the base OS but without "security" compatibility so the applications can still be used. But used in a way that inspires reviews of how UAC is troublesome and broken.
Clearly, an example is the single-user with administrative rights. Nobody in their right mind would set up a Linux machine in this manner - you just don't run things as root. I am not sure what the corrallary might be for a Mac, but you wouldn't do it there either. That this was a reasonable configuration for Windows 98 meant it wasn't unworkable for XP, but perhaps not a great idea. It is an awful way to set the machine up for Vista and the first-time use script should make it clear that you should set up accounts for every user of the machine.
I currently have that T-Mobile plan. It is extremely short-sighted of them and will eventually mean the end of T-Mobile (aka Deutsch Telecom) because of how it works.
I have a wireless router at home, the daughter's house, at the office and pretty much have access whereever I go. The only time I am using the cell service minutes, of which I pay for only a very few each month, is when I am in a car.
Sounds good, right? Except each and every call I make costs T-Mobile money. I would say that no matter how little this cost is, it means that I am costing way more than the $200 a month I pay for five phone lines if I make hundreds of calls. So they are losing money every month on my service.
Repeat for probably 20% of their subscriber base. This is insanity. It sounded cool but turning this on was silly and does nothing but cost them money. I think they were betting on people not having access to wireless connections everywhere they went and the $10 a month they charge for the option would easily pay for the few phone calls placed. This is no longer the case as I can save hundreds of dollars in cell service billing by buying a $50 router. So can every other T-Mobile customer with a phone that supports this.
No, it doesn't work very well for the company. I'm sure they are going to turn it off eventually. It certainly isn't a model for anyone else to emulate.
Bio-Diesel from waste oil works only as long as the holders of the waste oil are stupid. You go to your neighborhood McDonalds and make a deal with them for their waste oil and it might work, for a while. Yes, they were paying to dispose of a dangerous, contaiminated waste product that is illegal to dispose of in any other way.
The problem is, the second person comes to the same McDonalds wanting their waste oil. Anyone with a brain (which admittedly does leave out most McDonalds managers) begins to realize that their waste oil is no longer a dangerous contaiminated waste product to be disposed of as cheaply as possible but is now a valuable commodity which can be sold to the highest bidder.
The time between these two points of view can be days or years depending on the interest level in waste oil, but there is absolutely no way out of the conversion from one to the other. Today, bio-diesel from waste oil is completely impractical if you have to buy the waste oil for anything close to what it would be worth.
So what you have left is waste oil collectors are preying on the stupidity and ignorance of restaurant managers. Feels good, doesn't it?
Flashy graphics might look sexy, but that wasn't what sponsored the move away from a mainframe-centric organization. The mainframe programmers were not able to provide data in a form the users wanted it in a timely manner. In most organizations the users would ask for a 10,000 page report to be printed out in 30 minutes, look at the first page and say "That isn't really want I wanted" and start the whole process over agin.
PC software vendors, including Microsoft, would woo users with cute demonstrtions of how they could call up the same information on a PC and spend hours adjusting column widths and fonts so it would look just the way they wanted it. Of course, some of their calculations didn't match up to what the "official" business rules were so their output wouldn't match up with mainframe reports. Convenience beat out accuracy, so in case of conflict the mainframe report was often scrapped.
This battle was being fought in the 1980s, long before Windows 3.1, Windows 95 or anything like it. Today the "data center" staff is busily regaining control through servers and thin clients and accuracy (and reproducibility) is beginning to trump convenience. It kind of scared some people when they realized the business was being run based on Lotus spreadsheets that there was no backup for and no auditing of the calculations.
Biggest benefit of the mainframe system was went something failed it would pretty much call out the part. If you have 100 servers today and something fails where most people are is throwing parts at the problem until it goes away. Really high availabilty requirements means the data and the server are separate and the whole server is swapped. We are starting to reach the level of data transfer rates that mainframes were at 20 years ago, but still nothing really beats a real mainframe system with data channels for data throughput.
Give it 10 years more and the server farm will be able to process as much data in 24 hours as could be done by an IBM mainframe in 1985.
Everything adapts. Software will be something you rent on the Internet and never resides on your computer.
Music? The situation in China has "evolved" to the point where there is no more recorded music sold (or produced). In the West check your local radio stations... what is selling there is oldies. What will continue to "sell" will be music from the previous century and the Internet will be dominated by garage bands offering stuff for free in hopes of landing a gig.
Movies? Eliminate digital distribution (DVDs) and you eliminate the problem. If it is going to be on DVD, lots of people will just download it for free. You want a theatrical release? It is going to have to be in theaters only, for years. Maybe sell DVDs years later, maybe never because once released on DVD the revenue stream ends.
User generated content? Check out YouTube for that, especially ShayTards and Magibon. This is the height of user-generated content and people are starting to discover (realize?) that it is crap. All crap, all the time. No, that isn't going to be the future of entertainment.
What most people don't understand is we've grown an entire generation that believes it all should be free and will never, ever pay. This is going to require a major adaptation that most "media" and "entertainment" isn't going to survive, but the adaptation will eventually succeed.
No, only in your fantasy will it really all be free. Someone has to pay, and patronage doesn't work. So we all have to pay for what we consume.
You have a funny idea of jobs in a hospital.
The meal preparation people staff the cafeteria. Patients sometimes visit the cafeteria.
When someone pukes in Radiology, the janitor often gets called to mop up.
There is no telling who they are going to run into the hallway going to the bathroom, entering or leaving. Might be better if it didn't work that way, but I have worked in hospital IT and you would be amazed at who you might be sharing an elevator with. And the IT department was in a different building but the data center was in the main building.
But when they come into contact with people that have not been vaccinated (such as small children) they pose a direct risk to other people's health.
I'd say that goes a long way past just selfish.
The problem is that people respond to public figures as authorities. Completley out of their field. So you have comedians giving medical advice and pastors giving biology lessons. The problem is that people take their authoritative position into account when assigning credibility.
So Bill Maher comes off as a reliable expert on everything because he is on TV. Period. Don't blame me, it is the way "people" are wired.
The end result is that if you have a public platform, people are going to listen. When the listen to stupid advice because you are some sort of public figure, I agree there should be some responsibility on the part of the public figure. They should know better. If they don't, they shouldn't be offering advice - note, not an opinion, real advice. I guess they would only be 50% responsible for stupid advice.
Why would Google do that? Google right now has all the stories, all the content without paying anyone for it. I can look at the content (either a snippit or the whole story) without ever bothering a News Corp. web site through the use of Google.
So Google has the best of all worlds - nothing to pay for and all the content. Why would they ever do anything different?
Now the question is, since they have the content and are using it, should they be paying for it? Obviously, they cannot as it would destroy their business model.
The real problem is simply answered. Can I, through the use of Google obtain Rupert Murdoch's content without ever visiting his site or seeing ads on his site?
If the answer is no, then someone doesn't understand.
If the answer is yes, then there is a real problem. I tend to think that the answer is yes on a couple of levels. First off, can I use a "Murdoch" headline and then read the content somewhere else? Yup, I am sure I can do that. Secondly, can I use Google to grab "Murdoch" content without visiting any of his sites? Yup, I can use the Google cache and never touch the original site.
Finally, doesn't Google show enough of the text to let me know if I really want to look at the whole article on the site?
No, this isn't anywhere near as simple as just using robots.txt to deter Google from indexing. This is using a service from Google to preempt other sites.
Your average PC hardware has utterly no way to "test" it. You can sort of test RAM - to the point of identifying there is a failure somewhere in the memory. OK, if you have four DIMMs what does that mean? Well, it means you have a RAM problem somewhere.
Motherboard? Not really any sort of testing possible. There are some "pretend" diagnostic tools that will try to tell you if something fails, but what exactly does that mean? Nothing. If you have a ATAPI DVD drive and a SATA hard drive I assure you that a failing drive can easily appear as creating a failure to some "motherboard" test.
There is no clear isolation of the hardware whatsoever, and no ability for the hardware to meaningfully participate in any sort of testing. So you are left with changing parts - more or less what I like to call "throw parts at the problem". Today this isn't terribly practical as most everything is on the motherboard. If you are a skilled screwdriver user you could replace the motherboard, but for most people it is just getting a new computer.
Even if you take a computer to a "computer shop" you are likely to see very little in the way of diagnostics or fault isolation. They will pull out something and replace it with something they have lying around to see if that "fixes" the problem. Often they will do this blindly without much real thought in the process. The end result for the customer is that their computer works again but nobody really knows what the problem was. And, by the way, here is the bill for the parts that we replaced.
There are some external hardware parts that are pretty simple to diagnose and replace. The power supply is probably the most prone to failure and is pretty obvious - the machine is dead with no lights. A CD or DVD drive is pretty simple to sort out as well with most common failures because it either works or it does not. In either case it is a few connectors and a few screws and you have the part in your hand. Both are going to be less than $100 to replace and well worth doing it.
The lack of any real diagnostic ability - or even ability to verify proper operation - is a serious limitation in the PC world. If you move up to real server hardware you see all sorts of diagnostic and fault isolation capabilities. Things like the memory test telling you what DIMM is bad or that a hard drive is failing. But the real gem of hardware diagnostics seems to be reserved for mainframe systems. It tells you a part is going to fail, tells you where the part is and you can confirm that it fails specific tests and a new part passes the same tests.
You assume there is in fact a simple download gateway. What if you have to register first? What if there are three different options to choose from instead of a single download? And worse, what if it changes in the future?
This way it is a web location to display to start the process of getting the alternative browser.
Sorry, you can't remove it. The rendering engine, which is what displays text and has whatever risks associated with it you might think there are, is used to display all the help information. With Vista it is also used to format many of the displays such as the Windows Update and Backup and Restore Center displays.
HTML is deeply integrated into Windows now and there is no getting rid of it. It has nothing to with with web browsing but the HTML rendering is going to be there and callable via COM.
Everyone seems to think that the distribution of physical books is somehow expensive and troublesome. It isn't.
The publisher puts the books into boxes and ships the box full of books (maybe 25 of them) for $10. That works out to be around $0.40 per book, delivered to the store.
The cost of printing a softcover/paperback book is less than $2. You can have your very own book printed in small quantities for this price. So where does all the money go for a $20 currently popular book?
You ever think it might go to the publisher that fronted the author money, paid for the editors, marketed the book and promoted it? Gosh, those costs might not change for an eBook at all.
Guess what? Physical books aren't that expensive to distribute, and eBooks have almost identical costs. Sure on a $20 book you might save $2.50 but only $2.50. Waiting for the $1 currently popular eBook? You will be waiting a long time.