Many cars do not have remote starting. It is available on some 3rd party alarms though.
GM was the first to introduce it. Why, I dunno, since it had been available from 3rd parties for some time.
As to the 2nd part, I blew it, I see how the situation happened, how the prof would make that statement (he was prompted). But having a 390MHz transmitter on hand. Unlikely.
And as I said, the systems are very secure, at least in design.
How did the situation arise, the professor bringing this up?
And a student who could do it was in the class? And the student happened to have his programmable 390MHz transmitter with him?
And then, he managed to pop it open and start the engine, something you can't do from the remote on any car except a few Chevys? All in a few minutes, despite the enormous keyspaces car security systems use?
I'm sorry, I'm calling BS on this story at first glance. Do you happen to have more details?
Cars use similar systems to garage door openers. They are immune to pure replay attacks. And they have a 48-bit keyspace, only about 6 bits worth of which is active at a time (about 30 or so codes out of the keyspace will work at a time).
So you are looking at hitting a 1 in 2^42, or 1 in 4 trillion needle in a haystack.
Even if you rifle through codes, you're not going to hit one soon.
And if the system is designed to lock out after 3 failures, and make you wait 5 seconds to try another key, that means you won't stand much of a chance of rifling through the codes in your lifetime.
So, if these systems have flaws right now, it's in implementation, not design, and it'll be rapidly fixed.
BTW, for about 15 years there were only about 40 different door keys on all GM cars. We happened to have two at once that had the same door key (although they didn't use the same ignition key, GM used a two key system at the time). So this electronic system is still pretty much better, the only downside, is there is no deterrent to sitting a few feet from a car and trying to open it electronically versus putting a key in the door of the car and trying to turn it.
As long as Apple doesn't allow me to choose Yahoo! (or other) in Safari, I don't see how MS needs to defend not offering their customers a choice either.
On the PC, I've pretty much switched to Firefox anyway, and I'm kind of sliding that way on the Mac too, because of the damn search bar.
In concept, there is a separate protocol and implementation of X. But the source has been available under a very permissive license since the very beginning. Because of this, the only thing I've ever seen that was reimplemented was the server (window server), everything else has just been compiled directly from the reference sources.
And even those window servers are compiled from sources derived from the reference sources, with patches.
Do you actually know of any implementations of X other than the two you mentioned? I tried to search for some and couldn't find any.
There's not much you can do. Perhaps say "Mac sucks" and hope they go the other way?
If you get hung up on what other people think, and that keeps you from buying a Mac, then it's your problem and I don't think any advertisement can really do much about it.
Me, I use Macs because they work better for some things. I am posting this on a Mac while I launch Oblivion on the PC next to it.
(I said) "Greenpeace is really only involved in the baby seal hunting, not the people wearing fur end"
(you said) Ah, yet another thing I bet you wish you could untype. I wasn't refuting anyhting here, genius. I was giving the background to my statement and...GASP...agreeing wiht you.
Which is funny because when I said:
(I said) "They more get involved on the production side, not the wearing side. And fur-wise, they only get involved with baby seals, not furs in general."
(you said) Ok, firts, that wrong. Second, I was referring to the incident where Greenpeace dyed baby seals, subsequently making them eaiser prey and limiting their ability to tolerate cold.
If you were not refuting me, why did you say "Ok, firts, that wrong"?
If you think that your sentences conveyed you agreeing with me, then uou're not only a terrible debater, you're a terrible communicator too.
For responding to your other (strident but nearly incoherent) post with a reasoned response. I was unaware you were an idiot. Please accept my sincerest apologies for taking you seriously, and please carry on with your being an idiot at your soonest convenience.
As to your straw man stuff, you said they can't be environmentalists, because they burn diesel fuel in their ship. You said that, not me. You said that makes them hypocrites and thus blunts their position. I reject your argument.
As to baby seals. Um, I said baby seals. you said "people wearing fur". The only fur being worn here is baby seal fur, and it's being worn by baby seals! As I said, Greenpeace is really only involved in the baby seal hunting, not the people wearing fur end. You backed up my argument, not refuted it.
You are a terrible debater. You misrepresent your own positions while bolstering mine, and then you declare victory.
And you do realize you can't edit posts on slashdot, right?
Greenpeace doesn't really get involved with people who wear fur. They more get involved on the production side, not the wearing side. And fur-wise, they only get involved with baby seals, not furs in general. I think you're thinking of PETA.
And your practicality argument is just plain stupid. They are doing a necessary thing, in order to accomplish a certain goal. That's what he's referring to. It is completely absurd to say that a person who believes in the environment cannot use any fossil fuels. How would they fly to a conference? Or maybe they'd video conference, if none of the components in the equipment was made out of plastic and the power to run it came from the wind! There simply is no way right now to completely avoid using fossil fuels to accomplish a goal. So are you merely arguing that no person should bother to do as much as they can?
It is not practical at this time to fill a ship's bunkers with biodiesel. A ship could take upwards of 10,000 gallons of fuel at once. Sourcing that much biodiesel is not easy, or perhaps even possible. Over time, perhaps this will change. I too would like to see wind used to power ships again. But it'll really be most useful on the open ocean. To maneuver (say, to block harpoons) will require burning fuel, because the wind doesn't always cooperate.
I am no fan of Greenpeace, honestly, I see them as terrorists. But I find your argument that practical limits mean one shouldn't try to improve some aspects of our enviroment to be foolish.
Those most surprised by this are those who pay the least attention. The White House Correspondents Dinner is similar to this every year. Last year the first lady roasted Bush.
This year's commentary was a bit more biting than usual, and it actually targetted the correspondents (and not Bush) a bit more than usual. Net result: a wash.
Ever notice that when you see the statement even [...] must agree..., it is always followed by a bald-faced assertion that everyone is never going to agree on?
If you find yourself making this statement, maybe you should just stop right there and rethink what you are about to say.
The artists don't pay for fallout. I'm not sure why. The artists don't pay for shrink either, but that's probably because the record labels have rigged it so they don't have to pay for shrink either. The retailer pays for shrink, because if a retailer accepts a CD from the distributor/labels, they must pay for it or return it within a certain time (60 days I think). If shrink were to occur, the retailer could not return it, and the retailer would be left holding the bag, and actually the artist (and label) get paid for the shrink as if the copy were sold.
To be honest, the primary reason artists pay for breakage is because the labels can get away with it. They hold most of the power during the contract negotiations and so they stick the artists with plenty of fees/costs. Yeah, the labels have some excuse about not paying royalties to artists for stuff that isn't actually sold, but it's an excuse. Breakage is just a cost of doing business. In a rational system, the label would end up paying for it.
You see breakage and think of broken records. It's not really that way.
If a product is manufactured, but it isn't suitable for sale (defective), and destroyed at the factory, it is fallout. If a product is manufactured, sold wholesale, shipped out but doesn't set sold to a retailer, it is breakage. If a product is manufactured, sold wholesale, shipped out and purchased by a retailer but the retailer never sells it to a customer, it is shrink.
So, basically, if a Teamster steals, loses or destroys something on the way from the factory to the retailer, it is breakage. If it gets lost on the shelves, shoplifted or becomes unsellable in the store for other reasons, it is shrink.
So, there still could be breakage, if there were fraud/theft in the digital delivery chain. For example, every sale through allofmp3 could in a way be considered breakage, since the record labels aren't getting paid for it.
But I have to say, a 15% charge seems ridiculously high. If the fraud level is that high, then it could only be because the labels want it to be so for some reason. Cause most of the fraud/theft during delivery can be stopped in the digital domain.
if I had mod points, I mod you down.
on
Store Your Own Juice
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Instead, I'll mention you cannot store shit for power in a file cabinet. And batteries are a terrible way to store large amounts of power. You could store 7KWh of power in this thing. That's about $1.00 worth of power, at the highest rates. And lets say you can get it for $0.10 at night. So you can save a whopping $0.90 per day. To pay back the $10K cost, it'd take 11,000 days, or 30 years. And that doesn't count batteries which aren't included in the price and will go out every 2-3 years.
Look at it this way: The utilities like to make money. If they could effectively store their power at night when it isn't worth as much and sell it the next day when it is worth more, they'd do it.
They don't, because it is not effective to do this. There are only a few ways to do this, and none of them fit in a file cabinet.
Your blind defense of a stupid idea is worthless. This is being attacked because it doesn't make any sense. By defending it, you fail to make sense also.
Your first sentence shows the problem. We have no limits. So how does this get enforced? One company takes money to not log a forest or burn fossil fuel, and instead another company does it.
If we had a total cap, and this removed emissions from the cap, I'd be all for it. The EPA has pollution trading like this. You can buy emissions on that market and then never emit them, that reduces emissions.
But there is no overall EPA cap on CO2, and so I don't see how this can be effective.
I don't believe in no-till farming as a CO2 reducing method, BTW. As a soil erosion thing, great. For lots of reasons, great. But I don't think that that CO2 fixed in the soil will actually stay long-term. Once the concentration gets high enough, it'll seep out some other way.
Me too. End of story, Blu-Ray will be around. And while it's around, why not put movies on it anyway?
Blu-Ray supports higher-end compression schemes than just MPEG-2.
There's no reason we can't have more storage and better compression.
As to lasers getting cheap, it won't take long to make those Blu-Ray pickups cheap. It simply won't be a problem by 2007.
LaserDisc never got cheap, mostly because it wasn't intended to. Even when DVD came on the scene, everyone know DVD would kill LD. But LDs remained $40-$50 ($70 for special editions!) even when DVDs started at $35 and rapidly plunged to $25. I don't think LD could be considered a failure. It did what it was supposed to do, which was offer a high-priced, high-quality format for those who wanted to pay for it. DVD is of course an enormous success, and largely because (as you say) it was a different time, and the potential market for a high-quality format had broadened significantly.
I don't agree DVDs were high tech VCRs. For starters, they couldn't record. And they were at least as successful in the beginning as a data format for PCs and a carrier of 5.1 sound (which VCRs never could do) than as a medium with higher quality pictures. Universal sell-through pricing (which VHS never enjoyed during its peak years) helped a lot too.
Peltier coolers are so inefficient, they are terrible at cooling anything. You note no one uses one on any heatsinks right now, don't you?
Peltier coolers are incredibly inefficient, and the power they waste turns directly into heat (of course), so you end up heating up the thing you wanted to cool down.
I think what you're seeing is good intentions, but people who don't understand the marketplace and don't really have any kind of R&D money to make any real efficiency breakthroughs.
So these companies all just removing everything from the car. Making a car lighter improves its efficiency, as auto racers have known for 50+ years now. The problem is, the vehicle you end up with is no more practical than a race car either. It becomes a one trick pony.
So over and over you see these companies using two tricks: Making a vehicle that is so expensive no one would buy it (put $50K worth of Lithium-Ion batteries in it). Or make a vehicle that is basically a faired-in motorcycle. Basically, remove all storage, space and safety equipment.
Why do they do it? Because when you show a vehicle, no one pays attention. They do something the automakers were all capable of all along, yet is useless, but they can issue a press release and garner attention anyway.
Obviously nothing will come of this, a market which already has shown a tendency to not buy 44mpg Toyota Corollas isn't going to suddently roll over and snap up even smaller cars just because of a few more mpg. But watch those Corolla sales figures, and the Chevy Aveo, and the Honda Civic HX. If you see those take off, the market might be shifting and even smaller and slower vehicles might become marketable.
Buying carbon credits would be great, if it reduces pollution.
But how does it do that?
Supposedly it takes a certain amount of carbon emission "off the market". But that implies the amount of carbon emitted is controlled somehow. But funny thing, I drive by a firewood vendor sometimes on the way to work. He doesn't seem to be closed some days because he's exceeded his quota of carbon he could sell. And on weekends my neighbors all start up their lawnmowers (mine is electric) and start emitting CO2 into the air. I don't see them having limits on how often they can do this.
Maybe the limits are at the pump then? They can't buy the fuel to burn, thus limiting the carbon? I can't remember the last time I saw even one gas station closed due to "exceeded carbon limits", let alone enough of them to make a difference.
I don't see how buying these credits actually reduces carbon pollution in a major way.
Also, the planting a grove of trees thing is essentially a scam too. Unless the money you're paying buys the land and establishes an ownership trust in perpetuity (like a gravesite), the carbon is only being temporarily held in those trees. Because as soon as they are cut down and burned, it's released again.
When people were having nightmares with their cable modems (esp. Excite @ Home) I had DSL. And it was up all the time, and still is.
If I say reliable, do you think of your cable service or your phone service first?
The phone company(ies) had been providing 99.999% reliable service for years before broadband came about. And in the same time cable companies had been earning a reputation that made them the natural business for Dr. Evil to specialize in (joke from the first Austin Powers). So it isn't surprising to me that the initial broadband offerings from the phone companies greatly outclassed the cable companies' efforts.
Perhaps it's because your Sempron 2500 is a socket 754 chip, so cannot use dual-channel memory. The AMD64 has a faster FSB, and it's dual-channel.
Many people (including yourself it seems) misunderstand HT. It isn't the FSB, an Athlon 64 has no FSB. HT is only used to communicate non-memory I/O and to synchronize caches between processors when doing memory I/O. So it's rather unlikely that HT could make your context switches 3X faster. Best thing for that would be a bigger cache, which your AMD64 probably has also.
Let's say I'm running at 1W (max for 1800/1900, half max for 850/900). I'm transmitting 1/8th of the time (due to TDMA slotting).
Thus I would use 1/8Wh per hour just to transmit. My phone has a 3Wh battery (800mAh @ 3.8V). So I would have a talk time of 24h, if my phone didn't use power for anything else at all. It does, so the talk time on my phone is 8H.
Now, let's try out your version. I'm using 22W when transmitting, 1/8th of the time. So I'm using 2.8Wh per hour. So, if my phone did nothing else, I would get just over 1 hour talk time.
Except my phone is rated at 8 hours, and tests show 9.
This would be impossible if you were correct.
The way a PLL actually works, yes, a small amount of circuitry in the PLL runs at many times the actual output frequency. But all the circuitry it is designed to drive, which is attached to the output of the PLL runs only at the actual frequency.
In the system I use, the entire power consumed by a PLL is 0.4mW. If they increased the efficiency infinite-fold due to lowering clock rates inside the PLL, it would take 0mW, and the resulting reduction in power used would still be insignificant, because the rate the circuitry the PLL is driving would still be running at the same speed and thus using the same amount of power.
Basically, it appears to completely fail to understand what a PLL is and why it is different from clock-skipping.
Again, because GSM was made to be incompatible, and then enforced by law (plus some other, more positive things), the EU forced their system out there. This would have been fine if it were compatible, US companies would have switched to GSM in 1995 simply for the capacity. Most of their customers were on AMPS, not IS-136, so they could have made the digital solution GSM. Except GSM was incompatible, so they had to choose between their current customer and GSM, a system that provided more capacity and more features (whether they wanted to provide them or not).
If the systems were compatible, my father wouldn't be switching today, he would have had a GSM phone when he went digital in the late 90s. Then rural Michigan and Ohio wouldn't be chock-a-block with towers that only do IS-136 and AMPS. So even if he got a digital-only phone (very likely nowadays), he would have his choice of towers that did GSM and AMPS. And he wouldn't have coverage problems. It isn't the fragmentation that killed him, it's the consolidation, the failure of IS-136 as a viable system and the replacement of it with GSM, and again, the fact that GSM cannot provide even analog compatibility during that switchover)
I don't feel Europe made a mistake choosing GSM. I feel that legislating it (especially today) is a disaster given its incompatibility. I strongly feel making it incompatible was a mistake. CDMA 2000 (even IS-95) provides more available call capacity than GSM (per MHz) and is compatible with AMPS. There was no reason to make the new digital systems incompatible with existing AMPS/TAC (or NMT, sorry about that mistake, I thought Lapland used AMPS, not AMPS/TAC).
Really, Europe had such a strong need for a digital system, because given the cost of landlines, the need for larger numbers of cell phones fast was very evident. In the US, it took years for companies to put people on IS-136 and IS-95. When I bought my first digital phone (in 1997, http://press.nokia.com/PR/199708/778136_5.html, I can't believe I had my analog phone for 4 years!) GTE (nee Verizon) only sold digital to business customers. I had to go through my employer as a front to get a digital phone! Of course, by this time, GSM had been serving customers in Europe for several years, providing much more bandwidth than the AMPS GTE was pushing on over 90% of their customers. (Note that Cellular One nee AT&T had IS-54 in 1992 selling Motorola "aqua phones" to business customers only also). The US could wait for digital cellular to evolve, Europe really couldn't.
A few items related to the argument, but not argumentative: Lapland is in Finland, not Sweden. I'm sure Sweden (Ericsson) had a lot of NMT too, but I was referring to Finland (Nokia). Lapland is notable because it was the first application of fixed wireless (the 450 MHz version of NMT would be great for this, it could span longer distances than GSM can at any frequency), and was a huge success showing how wireless can reduce the "last mile" problem in very sparsely populated areas. Since it was a roaring success and did what GSM couldn't do, it was the last system to tumble to GSM (in the late 90s I believe) in Europe.
IS-136 is a compatible follow on to IS-54 (IS-54B) that provided what is referred to in the US as "PCS". PCS was a marketing term created to encompass basically what GSM brought to the table, which was voice mail notification, text messages and caller ID (although voice mail notification and caller ID were grafted into NAMPS and even AMPS!). IS-54B and IS-136 provided the ability to offer digital cellular (with 3X capacity and much longer standby times) over the same systems as AMPS. They were wildly successful, the first true national digital coverage in the US was with Cellular One over IS-136. This allowed Cellular One to offer nationwide roaming that actually worked and revolutionized the market. They are not best described as just "digital AMPS", even though IS-54 was marketed as such for a while. IS-136
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Many cars do not have remote starting. It is available on some 3rd party alarms though.
GM was the first to introduce it. Why, I dunno, since it had been available from 3rd parties for some time.
As to the 2nd part, I blew it, I see how the situation happened, how the prof would make that statement (he was prompted). But having a 390MHz transmitter on hand. Unlikely.
And as I said, the systems are very secure, at least in design.
How did the situation arise, the professor bringing this up?
And a student who could do it was in the class? And the student happened to have his programmable 390MHz transmitter with him?
And then, he managed to pop it open and start the engine, something you can't do from the remote on any car except a few Chevys? All in a few minutes, despite the enormous keyspaces car security systems use?
I'm sorry, I'm calling BS on this story at first glance. Do you happen to have more details?
Cars use similar systems to garage door openers. They are immune to pure replay attacks. And they have a 48-bit keyspace, only about 6 bits worth of which is active at a time (about 30 or so codes out of the keyspace will work at a time).
So you are looking at hitting a 1 in 2^42, or 1 in 4 trillion needle in a haystack.
Even if you rifle through codes, you're not going to hit one soon.
And if the system is designed to lock out after 3 failures, and make you wait 5 seconds to try another key, that means you won't stand much of a chance of rifling through the codes in your lifetime.
So, if these systems have flaws right now, it's in implementation, not design, and it'll be rapidly fixed.
BTW, for about 15 years there were only about 40 different door keys on all GM cars. We happened to have two at once that had the same door key (although they didn't use the same ignition key, GM used a two key system at the time). So this electronic system is still pretty much better, the only downside, is there is no deterrent to sitting a few feet from a car and trying to open it electronically versus putting a key in the door of the car and trying to turn it.
As long as Apple doesn't allow me to choose Yahoo! (or other) in Safari, I don't see how MS needs to defend not offering their customers a choice either.
On the PC, I've pretty much switched to Firefox anyway, and I'm kind of sliding that way on the Mac too, because of the damn search bar.
In concept, there is a separate protocol and implementation of X. But the source has been available under a very permissive license since the very beginning. Because of this, the only thing I've ever seen that was reimplemented was the server (window server), everything else has just been compiled directly from the reference sources.
And even those window servers are compiled from sources derived from the reference sources, with patches.
Do you actually know of any implementations of X other than the two you mentioned? I tried to search for some and couldn't find any.
There's not much you can do. Perhaps say "Mac sucks" and hope they go the other way?
If you get hung up on what other people think, and that keeps you from buying a Mac, then it's your problem and I don't think any advertisement can really do much about it.
Me, I use Macs because they work better for some things. I am posting this on a Mac while I launch Oblivion on the PC next to it.
(I said) "Greenpeace is really only involved in the baby seal hunting, not the people wearing fur end"
(you said) Ah, yet another thing I bet you wish you could untype. I wasn't refuting anyhting here, genius. I was giving the background to my statement and...GASP...agreeing wiht you.
Which is funny because when I said:
(I said) "They more get involved on the production side, not the wearing side. And fur-wise, they only get involved with baby seals, not furs in general."
(you said) Ok, firts, that wrong. Second, I was referring to the incident where Greenpeace dyed baby seals, subsequently making them eaiser prey and limiting their ability to tolerate cold.
If you were not refuting me, why did you say "Ok, firts, that wrong"?
If you think that your sentences conveyed you agreeing with me, then uou're not only a terrible debater, you're a terrible communicator too.
For responding to your other (strident but nearly incoherent) post with a reasoned response. I was unaware you were an idiot. Please accept my sincerest apologies for taking you seriously, and please carry on with your being an idiot at your soonest convenience.
Thank you.
As to your straw man stuff, you said they can't be environmentalists, because they burn diesel fuel in their ship. You said that, not me. You said that makes them hypocrites and thus blunts their position. I reject your argument.
As to baby seals. Um, I said baby seals. you said "people wearing fur". The only fur being worn here is baby seal fur, and it's being worn by baby seals! As I said, Greenpeace is really only involved in the baby seal hunting, not the people wearing fur end. You backed up my argument, not refuted it.
You are a terrible debater. You misrepresent your own positions while bolstering mine, and then you declare victory.
And you do realize you can't edit posts on slashdot, right?
Greenpeace doesn't really get involved with people who wear fur. They more get involved on the production side, not the wearing side. And fur-wise, they only get involved with baby seals, not furs in general. I think you're thinking of PETA.
And your practicality argument is just plain stupid. They are doing a necessary thing, in order to accomplish a certain goal. That's what he's referring to. It is completely absurd to say that a person who believes in the environment cannot use any fossil fuels. How would they fly to a conference? Or maybe they'd video conference, if none of the components in the equipment was made out of plastic and the power to run it came from the wind! There simply is no way right now to completely avoid using fossil fuels to accomplish a goal. So are you merely arguing that no person should bother to do as much as they can?
It is not practical at this time to fill a ship's bunkers with biodiesel. A ship could take upwards of 10,000 gallons of fuel at once. Sourcing that much biodiesel is not easy, or perhaps even possible. Over time, perhaps this will change. I too would like to see wind used to power ships again. But it'll really be most useful on the open ocean. To maneuver (say, to block harpoons) will require burning fuel, because the wind doesn't always cooperate.
I am no fan of Greenpeace, honestly, I see them as terrorists. But I find your argument that practical limits mean one shouldn't try to improve some aspects of our enviroment to be foolish.
Those most surprised by this are those who pay the least attention. The White House Correspondents Dinner is similar to this every year. Last year the first lady roasted Bush.
u ra-bush-comments_x.htm
http://www.usatoday.com/life/people/2005-05-01-la
This year's commentary was a bit more biting than usual, and it actually targetted the correspondents (and not Bush) a bit more than usual. Net result: a wash.
Ever notice that when you see the statement even [...] must agree..., it is always followed by a bald-faced assertion that everyone is never going to agree on?
If you find yourself making this statement, maybe you should just stop right there and rethink what you are about to say.
The artists don't pay for fallout. I'm not sure why. The artists don't pay for shrink either, but that's probably because the record labels have rigged it so they don't have to pay for shrink either. The retailer pays for shrink, because if a retailer accepts a CD from the distributor/labels, they must pay for it or return it within a certain time (60 days I think). If shrink were to occur, the retailer could not return it, and the retailer would be left holding the bag, and actually the artist (and label) get paid for the shrink as if the copy were sold.
To be honest, the primary reason artists pay for breakage is because the labels can get away with it. They hold most of the power during the contract negotiations and so they stick the artists with plenty of fees/costs. Yeah, the labels have some excuse about not paying royalties to artists for stuff that isn't actually sold, but it's an excuse. Breakage is just a cost of doing business. In a rational system, the label would end up paying for it.
You see breakage and think of broken records. It's not really that way.
If a product is manufactured, but it isn't suitable for sale (defective), and destroyed at the factory, it is fallout.
If a product is manufactured, sold wholesale, shipped out but doesn't set sold to a retailer, it is breakage.
If a product is manufactured, sold wholesale, shipped out and purchased by a retailer but the retailer never sells it to a customer, it is shrink.
So, basically, if a Teamster steals, loses or destroys something on the way from the factory to the retailer, it is breakage. If it gets lost on the shelves, shoplifted or becomes unsellable in the store for other reasons, it is shrink.
So, there still could be breakage, if there were fraud/theft in the digital delivery chain. For example, every sale through allofmp3 could in a way be considered breakage, since the record labels aren't getting paid for it.
But I have to say, a 15% charge seems ridiculously high. If the fraud level is that high, then it could only be because the labels want it to be so for some reason. Cause most of the fraud/theft during delivery can be stopped in the digital domain.
Instead, I'll mention you cannot store shit for power in a file cabinet. And batteries are a terrible way to store large amounts of power. You could store 7KWh of power in this thing. That's about $1.00 worth of power, at the highest rates. And lets say you can get it for $0.10 at night. So you can save a whopping $0.90 per day. To pay back the $10K cost, it'd take 11,000 days, or 30 years. And that doesn't count batteries which aren't included in the price and will go out every 2-3 years.
e lectricity
Look at it this way:
The utilities like to make money. If they could effectively store their power at night when it isn't worth as much and sell it the next day when it is worth more, they'd do it.
They don't, because it is not effective to do this. There are only a few ways to do this, and none of them fit in a file cabinet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydro
Your blind defense of a stupid idea is worthless. This is being attacked because it doesn't make any sense. By defending it, you fail to make sense also.
Those systems have an advantage, that is they are effective. But they won't fit in a file cabinet.
The system described in the article is stupid.
Your first sentence shows the problem. We have no limits. So how does this get enforced? One company takes money to not log a forest or burn fossil fuel, and instead another company does it.
If we had a total cap, and this removed emissions from the cap, I'd be all for it. The EPA has pollution trading like this. You can buy emissions on that market and then never emit them, that reduces emissions.
But there is no overall EPA cap on CO2, and so I don't see how this can be effective.
I don't believe in no-till farming as a CO2 reducing method, BTW. As a soil erosion thing, great. For lots of reasons, great. But I don't think that that CO2 fixed in the soil will actually stay long-term. Once the concentration gets high enough, it'll seep out some other way.
50GB?
Me too. End of story, Blu-Ray will be around. And while it's around, why not put movies on it anyway?
Blu-Ray supports higher-end compression schemes than just MPEG-2.
There's no reason we can't have more storage and better compression.
As to lasers getting cheap, it won't take long to make those Blu-Ray pickups cheap. It simply won't be a problem by 2007.
LaserDisc never got cheap, mostly because it wasn't intended to. Even when DVD came on the scene, everyone know DVD would kill LD. But LDs remained $40-$50 ($70 for special editions!) even when DVDs started at $35 and rapidly plunged to $25. I don't think LD could be considered a failure. It did what it was supposed to do, which was offer a high-priced, high-quality format for those who wanted to pay for it. DVD is of course an enormous success, and largely because (as you say) it was a different time, and the potential market for a high-quality format had broadened significantly.
I don't agree DVDs were high tech VCRs. For starters, they couldn't record. And they were at least as successful in the beginning as a data format for PCs and a carrier of 5.1 sound (which VCRs never could do) than as a medium with higher quality pictures. Universal sell-through pricing (which VHS never enjoyed during its peak years) helped a lot too.
Peltier coolers are so inefficient, they are terrible at cooling anything. You note no one uses one on any heatsinks right now, don't you?
Peltier coolers are incredibly inefficient, and the power they waste turns directly into heat (of course), so you end up heating up the thing you wanted to cool down.
I think what you're seeing is good intentions, but people who don't understand the marketplace and don't really have any kind of R&D money to make any real efficiency breakthroughs.
So these companies all just removing everything from the car. Making a car lighter improves its efficiency, as auto racers have known for 50+ years now. The problem is, the vehicle you end up with is no more practical than a race car either. It becomes a one trick pony.
So over and over you see these companies using two tricks:
Making a vehicle that is so expensive no one would buy it (put $50K worth of Lithium-Ion batteries in it).
Or make a vehicle that is basically a faired-in motorcycle. Basically, remove all storage, space and safety equipment.
Why do they do it? Because when you show a vehicle, no one pays attention. They do something the automakers were all capable of all along, yet is useless, but they can issue a press release and garner attention anyway.
Obviously nothing will come of this, a market which already has shown a tendency to not buy 44mpg Toyota Corollas isn't going to suddently roll over and snap up even smaller cars just because of a few more mpg. But watch those Corolla sales figures, and the Chevy Aveo, and the Honda Civic HX. If you see those take off, the market might be shifting and even smaller and slower vehicles might become marketable.
Buying carbon credits would be great, if it reduces pollution.
But how does it do that?
Supposedly it takes a certain amount of carbon emission "off the market". But that implies the amount of carbon emitted is controlled somehow. But funny thing, I drive by a firewood vendor sometimes on the way to work. He doesn't seem to be closed some days because he's exceeded his quota of carbon he could sell. And on weekends my neighbors all start up their lawnmowers (mine is electric) and start emitting CO2 into the air. I don't see them having limits on how often they can do this.
Maybe the limits are at the pump then? They can't buy the fuel to burn, thus limiting the carbon? I can't remember the last time I saw even one gas station closed due to "exceeded carbon limits", let alone enough of them to make a difference.
I don't see how buying these credits actually reduces carbon pollution in a major way.
Also, the planting a grove of trees thing is essentially a scam too. Unless the money you're paying buys the land and establishes an ownership trust in perpetuity (like a gravesite), the carbon is only being temporarily held in those trees. Because as soon as they are cut down and burned, it's released again.
Notorious for downtime.
When people were having nightmares with their cable modems (esp. Excite @ Home) I had DSL. And it was up all the time, and still is.
If I say reliable, do you think of your cable service or your phone service first?
The phone company(ies) had been providing 99.999% reliable service for years before broadband came about. And in the same time cable companies had been earning a reputation that made them the natural business for Dr. Evil to specialize in (joke from the first Austin Powers). So it isn't surprising to me that the initial broadband offerings from the phone companies greatly outclassed the cable companies' efforts.
Perhaps it's because your Sempron 2500 is a socket 754 chip, so cannot use dual-channel memory. The AMD64 has a faster FSB, and it's dual-channel.
Many people (including yourself it seems) misunderstand HT. It isn't the FSB, an Athlon 64 has no FSB. HT is only used to communicate non-memory I/O and to synchronize caches between processors when doing memory I/O. So it's rather unlikely that HT could make your context switches 3X faster. Best thing for that would be a bigger cache, which your AMD64 probably has also.
20W in use? Give me a break.
Let's say I'm running at 1W (max for 1800/1900, half max for 850/900). I'm transmitting 1/8th of the time (due to TDMA slotting).
Thus I would use 1/8Wh per hour just to transmit. My phone has a 3Wh battery (800mAh @ 3.8V). So I would have a talk time of 24h, if my phone didn't use power for anything else at all. It does, so the talk time on my phone is 8H.
Now, let's try out your version. I'm using 22W when transmitting, 1/8th of the time. So I'm using 2.8Wh per hour. So, if my phone did nothing else, I would get just over 1 hour talk time.
Except my phone is rated at 8 hours, and tests show 9.
This would be impossible if you were correct.
The way a PLL actually works, yes, a small amount of circuitry in the PLL runs at many times the actual output frequency. But all the circuitry it is designed to drive, which is attached to the output of the PLL runs only at the actual frequency.
In the system I use, the entire power consumed by a PLL is 0.4mW. If they increased the efficiency infinite-fold due to lowering clock rates inside the PLL, it would take 0mW, and the resulting reduction in power used would still be insignificant, because the rate the circuitry the PLL is driving would still be running at the same speed and thus using the same amount of power.
Basically, it appears to completely fail to understand what a PLL is and why it is different from clock-skipping.
Again, because GSM was made to be incompatible, and then enforced by law (plus some other, more positive things), the EU forced their system out there. This would have been fine if it were compatible, US companies would have switched to GSM in 1995 simply for the capacity. Most of their customers were on AMPS, not IS-136, so they could have made the digital solution GSM. Except GSM was incompatible, so they had to choose between their current customer and GSM, a system that provided more capacity and more features (whether they wanted to provide them or not).
If the systems were compatible, my father wouldn't be switching today, he would have had a GSM phone when he went digital in the late 90s. Then rural Michigan and Ohio wouldn't be chock-a-block with towers that only do IS-136 and AMPS. So even if he got a digital-only phone (very likely nowadays), he would have his choice of towers that did GSM and AMPS. And he wouldn't have coverage problems. It isn't the fragmentation that killed him, it's the consolidation, the failure of IS-136 as a viable system and the replacement of it with GSM, and again, the fact that GSM cannot provide even analog compatibility during that switchover)
I don't feel Europe made a mistake choosing GSM. I feel that legislating it (especially today) is a disaster given its incompatibility. I strongly feel making it incompatible was a mistake. CDMA 2000 (even IS-95) provides more available call capacity than GSM (per MHz) and is compatible with AMPS. There was no reason to make the new digital systems incompatible with existing AMPS/TAC (or NMT, sorry about that mistake, I thought Lapland used AMPS, not AMPS/TAC).
Really, Europe had such a strong need for a digital system, because given the cost of landlines, the need for larger numbers of cell phones fast was very evident. In the US, it took years for companies to put people on IS-136 and IS-95. When I bought my first digital phone (in 1997, http://press.nokia.com/PR/199708/778136_5.html, I can't believe I had my analog phone for 4 years!) GTE (nee Verizon) only sold digital to business customers. I had to go through my employer as a front to get a digital phone! Of course, by this time, GSM had been serving customers in Europe for several years, providing much more bandwidth than the AMPS GTE was pushing on over 90% of their customers. (Note that Cellular One nee AT&T had IS-54 in 1992 selling Motorola "aqua phones" to business customers only also). The US could wait for digital cellular to evolve, Europe really couldn't.
A few items related to the argument, but not argumentative:
Lapland is in Finland, not Sweden. I'm sure Sweden (Ericsson) had a lot of NMT too, but I was referring to Finland (Nokia). Lapland is notable because it was the first application of fixed wireless (the 450 MHz version of NMT would be great for this, it could span longer distances than GSM can at any frequency), and was a huge success showing how wireless can reduce the "last mile" problem in very sparsely populated areas. Since it was a roaring success and did what GSM couldn't do, it was the last system to tumble to GSM (in the late 90s I believe) in Europe.
IS-136 is a compatible follow on to IS-54 (IS-54B) that provided what is referred to in the US as "PCS". PCS was a marketing term created to encompass basically what GSM brought to the table, which was voice mail notification, text messages and caller ID (although voice mail notification and caller ID were grafted into NAMPS and even AMPS!). IS-54B and IS-136 provided the ability to offer digital cellular (with 3X capacity and much longer standby times) over the same systems as AMPS. They were wildly successful, the first true national digital coverage in the US was with Cellular One over IS-136. This allowed Cellular One to offer nationwide roaming that actually worked and revolutionized the market. They are not best described as just "digital AMPS", even though IS-54 was marketed as such for a while. IS-136