From Google cache of another page on the manufacturer's site:
Example Applications/ Industries:
* Advertising and Promotion, e.g.: trade shows; in-store displays; museum, movie and casino displays; theme parks.
* Collaborative Decision Making, e.g.: board meetings and presentations; command and control; architectural and engineering design; teleconferencing.
* Simulation & Training, e.g.: virtual targets; pre-operative planning.
* Consumer, e.g.: video games; home theatre.
Less Obvious Examples:
* Transparent teleprompter.
* Heads-up displays in new fields.
* Build one into a door jamb and have a walk through image or virtual privacy screen.
* An in-store end cap advertising display and demonstration through which the customer can reach and grab shown product.
* Build the Heliodisplay into furniture, e.g. project from desk.
Go with the shotcrete, man, unless the zoning allows rammed-earth, adobe, or maybe straw-bale-core construction. If you do the concrete thing don't skimp on dyes and and broken tile and/or glass to make it look nice. It gets hot out there, and it's hard to cool a regular stick or steel house off-grid. Another tactic is to make the house with a chimney for the summer and long underground air intakes to cool the air. There's thousands of good, cheap techniques out there for building liveable "green" dwellings once you start to look. There's also a fair number of them that looked cool in the old Whole Earth catalogs that later turned out to be a PITA.
Anyway, on the main topic of your post, everybody trying to live cheaply ought to have a copy of The Complete Tightwad Gazette by Amy Dacyczyn. 976 pages (lots of short articles), $13.59 new. Still #3,581 in Amazon sales after nearly 6 years on the market. You have to pick and choose how far to go with her suggestions - put a value on your free time, prioritize which stuff will do you the most good, and so forth, but most people could be living quite well on less than $5,000 per person/yr. + $5,000 for the household, even without dumpster-diving, gomi-grabbing or moving way out of the city.
It's a Hohmann transfer orbit, not "Holman". And you get a window for an Earth-Mars transfer orbit every 25+ months, not 26 years. And constant-thrust spacecraft are generally faster on interplanetary missions than high-thrust, brief impulse craft, with the exceptions being gravity assist manouvers and really low acceleration designs such as old-school ion thrusters, (which NASA only uses because they are scared to death of actually flying anything really innovative such as a VaSIMR or a magsail). Constant-acceleration designs are not used for manned missions yet because we havn't sent any manned missions far enough to take advantage of the method, but any manned interplanetary mission would be crazy not to use a magsail because it provides an artificial magnetosphere for charged-particle shielding while at the same time providing continuous thrust with minimal power consumption and no reaction mass by deflecting the solar wind.
Yeah, I ran Yggdrasil on a 386-40 too. That was the last x86 to have the bus running at the uP core speed, and it rocked. It was fast enough that Doom only caused mild motion sickness. Upgrading myself with Dramamine was cheaper than upgrading hardware.
I used that box from '91-'97, but only got linux on it for the last 18 mo. or so. It really needed more RAM to run xwindows properly. Linux was much cleaner and more usable back then, but the bootable CD distros like Knoppix still have a lot that flavor.
So what's your point? that sourcewatch link shows the Cato Institute to have overwhelmingly exemplary views on personal liberty and policies that affect liberty. It also shows only 16% of their income comes from foundations and corporations. Your second link consists of a few lines of unsupported name-calling plus some links to... whatever.
What support is there for your implication that this MIT professor is making "wild, unfounded" claims? I read his article, and found it well reasoned and informative.
Excellent article. Thanks. Beyond the sound scientific reasoning and data, The Gallup poll of climate scientists showing only 18% of scientists in the field believe global warming has been observed was especially revealing.
I would like to point out, though, that attributing nearly all of the greenhouse effect to water vapor isn't wild stuff at all. The fact that the only major greenhouse gas is water vapor is undisputed by both sides of the climate debate. In fact, the proponents of the anthropogenic global warming theory believe that the contribution of water vapor is even greater than the skeptics. The proponents believe that the warming caused by CO2 is magnified by the increased humidity, while the skeptics believe that there is either no positive feedback or perhaps negative feedback resulting from increased cloud cover when humidity temporarily rises.
Not to disagree too much with yor overall point, but it sounds as if you haven't yet been exposed to more current theories of the operation of science than those of Popper and Kuhn.
Science is a belief system, but not "just another" belief system. It is the belief system that is demonstrably in better accord with evidence than any other belief system. This is because it is not a belief in any particular a priori facts or theories but in the process of verification of the consistency of theory with all observations. This is not merely a process of falsification of inadequate theories. See Bayes' Theorem supplants positivism for more.
Insofar as "scientists" beliefs are based on science, they should be far more secure in those beliefs than "typical religious people", because by definition the evidence supports the scientific position, whereas religious positions have been forced back to asserting truth in a "metaphorical" sense, not because they have not claimed to be the literal truth for so long as anyone would believe them, but because they have in many crucial instances been proven false by the observations of science. While science won't and can't lead us to the whole truth, it will always provide stronger proof of its assertions than any competing way of knowing about reality.
This attack from Gentry is amusing in its unconscious self-reference: "What is most revealing about Wise's attempts to cast doubt on the primordial nature of these halos is that he repeatedly ignores the published scientific evidence which contradicts what he is attempting to establish."
Te simple fact is, Gentry starts with what he "knows" must be true and bends all facts to support his cranky thesis. If you read his explanation of the cosmic microwave backround as being due to a supposed shell of hot Hydrogen over 3 billion light-years away with the Earth at the precise center, his discredibility should be obvious.
Regardless of your comments knowledge, professional experience and intelligence do make one's opinions more reliable. In response to your objection that a single person with a geographically limited sample is no more qualified than anyone else to make judgements, I would point out that my father's experience was in six widely dispersed locations around the country and at one time he was the Coroner for half of Kansas. His experience is not a small or unrepresentative sample. You'll find further corroboration of his opinions in the government and insurance industry statistics in my other reply in this thread. On what personal knowledge or authenticated research is your opinion based? None, I suspect.
Driver deaths per million registered passenger vehicles 1-3 years old, 2003 Vehicle size Rate Car -- mini 142 Car -- small 108 Car -- midsize 66 Car -- large 61 Car -- very Large 70 Pickup -- small 124 Pickup -- large 115 Pickup -- very large 102 SUV -- small 75 SUV -- midsize 70 SUV -- large 64 SUV -- very large *
What may not be a coincidence is the lack of per-mile travelled fatality statistics for vehicle type, race and gender, despite the availability of that information on a national and per-state basis. I suspect that the higher absolute numbers of fatalities and accidents for whites and men would be erased and even reversed on a per-mile basis, as men and whites drive more than women and minorities. (See Table 23. Men drive nearly 70% more miles per driver per vehicle than women. This is the closest I could find in the report to a pure miles-driven stat. The report also shows, as expected, that lower income groups drive less, so a lower number of miles driven can be expected for minority groups than for whites.) The already lower per-mile fatality rate for the "pickup trucks vans and SUVs" category would almost certainly show a drastically lower fatality rate per-mile for SUVs if that vehicle type were broken out separately, given the much higher per-vehicle fatality rate for pickup trucks.
At any rate, the data are pretty persuasive that SUVs are at least somewhat safer than cars for their occupants and also that larger vehicles within a class are safer for their occupants than smaller vehicles.
...the size of your car doesn't make much difference if you say, hit a tree or a light post. That's a situation where you'd be better off in a Mini than a truck.
That is utter bullshit. Small cars are only modestly more manouverable than large cars, and you definitely want as much crumpling mass and hood length in front of you as you can get when you are in a collision, particularly a collision with an immovable object. Mass also prevents rolling over unless the center of gravity is unduly high.
My father started off with a cum laude Physics degree from an Ivy League university, then went on to become a pathologist and coroner. He has gone to hundreds of crash sites and done hundreds of autopsies of crash victims. What vehicle did he choose to carry his family? A Suburban - 15-20 years before they became popular. To give you some idea about his obsessiveness about car safety, he also had us all in car seats with 5-point harnesses until we were 10. When we were in a head-on collision with a pickup at about 30 mph, the Suburban survived and we were all uninjured. I drove that same '78 Suburban when I was a teenager, and it was actually nearly as nimble as a Crown Vic sedan.
In another accident in an '85 Suburban, my father was sideswiped by a Honda Civic. There was a barely perceptible shallow dent in the front quarter panel of the Suburban. The paint wasn't even broken - just slightly scuffed. The Civic rolled three times and was totaled. (The injuries to the seatbelted driver were minor.)
As for the supposedly overwhelming virtues of nimbleness, one day while driving me to school in a 3-year old mid-'80s BMW 7 series, just about the most nimble 4-door sedan on the market, a POS rustmobile suddenly darted out of a gas station less than 70 feet in front of us as we were going about 35 mph. We couldn't go left - that was the way that the car was turning in front of and toward us - and we couldn't go right - there was a curb and a telephone pole. No time to lose more than 10 or 15 mph, and that much or more was replaced by the other car's velocity. That BMW was crumpled around the front wheels like aluminum foil, and the frame was bent so the right side doors wouldn't open. Without all that crumple zone, I wouldn't have been as OK as I was - the whiplash didn't even set in until I was half way through my first-period Biology test. Nimbleness will often not help when idiots are trying to kill you.
Some cynics here may doubt the security of the system, but I'm sure none of the gaming vendors will hide any Easter eggs in their proprietary code. After all, if one can make software work reliably for something as complicated as counting votes, surely a simple application like a few hundred different kinds of casino games should be child's play to secure.
The GPL is ideal for my idea: "QuakeR <3", a pacifist, consensus-based, silent-meeting online community with gibs and railguns. OK, there are still some design issues to be worked out...
The GPL is ideal for my idea: "QuakeR 3", a pacifist, consensus-based, silent-meeting online community with gibs and railguns. (still some design issues to be worked out...)
True, but it seems to get worse instead of better for low poly counts until one gets into the intermediate range - after that it starts to get better. It's mostly noticable in backgrounds these days, but it becomes intrusive when the background element takes up a considerable portion of the display.
I also neglected to mention the stitching difficulties between NURBS surfaces which can sometimes be as annoying as polygon edges. That can usually be overcome with skiled modeling, though.
I should also have mentioned subdivision ("Sub-D") modeling as the best way to go since it has the fewest seams and allows a more adaptive display of details based on distance.
If you have thick steel like my Enermax tower, the difference is even greater. My case alone with no PS is about 45 lbs. It should stop unjacketed small-caliber handgun fire, though.
At least in Coke it's phosphoric acid, (not citric acid) which gives it a pH of 2.5 - by comparison vinegar is 2.9 and gastric acid is 2.0. Orthodontists use phoshoric acid to etch teeth before attaching braces. Nasty stuff.
Vinyl is not something you really want to ingest much either, but it's better than aluminum.
Is it just me or is this story the most blatant ad yet on Slashdot? Why was this story even accepted? Who cares about this story other than the people trying to sell this POS? This isn't even a particularly good case, and there is nothing news-worthy about it at all. Wake me when I can fit 8 HDDs in the thing, or when it shaves 20dB off the noise or does anything other than look half as cool as a 10 year-old NeXT box.
[Excellent Karma -> Ex-karma// oh, well - it's worth it]
The average daily solar irradiance in the sunniest desert areas is only 6kWh (gross). Given 2.56E6 m/mi^2 that is 1.53E11 kWh/day = 5.61E13 kWh/yr = 2E20 J/yr (gross) for a 10,000 mi^2 collector. Total US energy consumprion from all sources is around 1E17Btu (it was 94 quads in 1998) = about 1E20J/yr. So the 10,000 square mile array would be enough to displace all other forms of energy if it were perfectly thermodynamically efficient. If heat were shipped rather than electricity for those purposes that used heat directly, the 50% thermodynamic limit wouldn't apply to that part of the energy distribution. Still, a somewhat larger array than 10,000 miles would likely be needed to account for real-world inefficiencies, but certainly less than 40,000 mi^2 = 200 mi. on a side.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep - Kobe (Tajima) beef, from cattle fed on beer and given daily massages. $100/lb.
Not to mention Rudy Rucker's _Wetware_ and following novels with "Wendy meat".
From Google cache of another page on the manufacturer's site:
Example Applications/ Industries:
* Advertising and Promotion, e.g.: trade shows; in-store displays; museum, movie and casino displays; theme parks.
* Collaborative Decision Making, e.g.: board meetings and presentations; command and control; architectural and engineering design; teleconferencing.
* Simulation & Training, e.g.: virtual targets; pre-operative planning.
* Consumer, e.g.: video games; home theatre.
Less Obvious Examples:
* Transparent teleprompter.
* Heads-up displays in new fields.
* Build one into a door jamb and have a walk through image or virtual privacy screen.
* An in-store end cap advertising display and demonstration through which the customer can reach and grab shown product.
* Build the Heliodisplay into furniture, e.g. project from desk.
As guru Don Lancaster says: "Never be underbid"
About 1-3% of replacement cost for an item is about the right ballpark for surplus.
Some other amusing, but valuable advice on buing surplus: "use caution with any APPROXIMATE QUANTITY: ONE. Or if the word RESIDUE appears."
Go with the shotcrete, man, unless the zoning allows rammed-earth, adobe, or maybe straw-bale-core construction. If you do the concrete thing don't skimp on dyes and and broken tile and/or glass to make it look nice. It gets hot out there, and it's hard to cool a regular stick or steel house off-grid. Another tactic is to make the house with a chimney for the summer and long underground air intakes to cool the air. There's thousands of good, cheap techniques out there for building liveable "green" dwellings once you start to look. There's also a fair number of them that looked cool in the old Whole Earth catalogs that later turned out to be a PITA.
Anyway, on the main topic of your post, everybody trying to live cheaply ought to have a copy of
The Complete Tightwad Gazette by Amy Dacyczyn. 976 pages (lots of short articles), $13.59 new. Still #3,581 in Amazon sales after nearly 6 years on the market. You have to pick and choose how far to go with her suggestions - put a value on your free time, prioritize which stuff will do you the most good, and so forth, but most people could be living quite well on less than $5,000 per person/yr. + $5,000 for the household, even without dumpster-diving, gomi-grabbing or moving way out of the city.
I used to have one of those. You're being unduly generous in describing the TI 99/4A as a "computer".
It's a Hohmann transfer orbit, not "Holman". And you get a window for an Earth-Mars transfer orbit every 25+ months, not 26 years. And constant-thrust spacecraft are generally faster on interplanetary missions than high-thrust, brief impulse craft, with the exceptions being gravity assist manouvers and really low acceleration designs such as old-school ion thrusters, (which NASA only uses because they are scared to death of actually flying anything really innovative such as a VaSIMR or a magsail). Constant-acceleration designs are not used for manned missions yet because we havn't sent any manned missions far enough to take advantage of the method, but any manned interplanetary mission would be crazy not to use a magsail because it provides an artificial magnetosphere for charged-particle shielding while at the same time providing continuous thrust with minimal power consumption and no reaction mass by deflecting the solar wind.
Yeah, I ran Yggdrasil on a 386-40 too. That was the last x86 to have the bus running at the uP core speed, and it rocked. It was fast enough that Doom only caused mild motion sickness. Upgrading myself with Dramamine was cheaper than upgrading hardware.
I used that box from '91-'97, but only got linux on it for the last 18 mo. or so. It really needed more RAM to run xwindows properly. Linux was much cleaner and more usable back then, but the bootable CD distros like Knoppix still have a lot that flavor.
So what's your point? that sourcewatch link shows the Cato Institute to have overwhelmingly exemplary views on personal liberty and policies that affect liberty. It also shows only 16% of their income comes from foundations and corporations. Your second link consists of a few lines of unsupported name-calling plus some links to ... whatever.
What support is there for your implication that this MIT professor is making "wild, unfounded" claims? I read his article, and found it well reasoned and informative.
Excellent article. Thanks. Beyond the sound scientific reasoning and data, The Gallup poll of climate scientists showing only 18% of scientists in the field believe global warming has been observed was especially revealing.
I would like to point out, though, that attributing nearly all of the greenhouse effect to water vapor isn't wild stuff at all. The fact that the only major greenhouse gas is water vapor is undisputed by both sides of the climate debate. In fact, the proponents of the anthropogenic global warming theory believe that the contribution of water vapor is even greater than the skeptics. The proponents believe that the warming caused by CO2 is magnified by the increased humidity, while the skeptics believe that there is either no positive feedback or perhaps negative feedback resulting from increased cloud cover when humidity temporarily rises.
Not to disagree too much with yor overall point, but it sounds as if you haven't yet been exposed to more current theories of the operation of science than those of Popper and Kuhn.
Science is a belief system, but not "just another" belief system. It is the belief system that is demonstrably in better accord with evidence than any other belief system. This is because it is not a belief in any particular a priori facts or theories but in the process of verification of the consistency of theory with all observations. This is not merely a process of falsification of inadequate theories. See Bayes' Theorem supplants positivism for more.
Insofar as "scientists" beliefs are based on science, they should be far more secure in those beliefs than "typical religious people", because by definition the evidence supports the scientific position, whereas religious positions have been forced back to asserting truth in a "metaphorical" sense, not because they have not claimed to be the literal truth for so long as anyone would believe them, but because they have in many crucial instances been proven false by the observations of science. While science won't and can't lead us to the whole truth, it will always provide stronger proof of its assertions than any competing way of knowing about reality.
Here is a page with thorough refutations: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/po-halos/
This attack from Gentry is amusing in its unconscious self-reference: "What is most revealing about Wise's attempts to cast doubt on the primordial nature of these halos is that he repeatedly ignores the published scientific evidence which contradicts what he is attempting to establish."
Te simple fact is, Gentry starts with what he "knows" must be true and bends all facts to support his cranky thesis. If you read his explanation of the cosmic microwave backround as being due to a supposed shell of hot Hydrogen over 3 billion light-years away with the Earth at the precise center, his discredibility should be obvious.
That really is a cool hack. The timing must have been finicky, though - milimeter resoution at the speed of sound in steel is pretty impressive.
Regardless of your comments knowledge, professional experience and intelligence do make one's opinions more reliable. In response to your objection that a single person with a geographically limited sample is no more qualified than anyone else to make judgements, I would point out that my father's experience was in six widely dispersed locations around the country and at one time he was the Coroner for half of Kansas. His experience is not a small or unrepresentative sample. You'll find further corroboration of his opinions in the government and insurance industry statistics in my other reply in this thread. On what personal knowledge or authenticated research is your opinion based? None, I suspect.
For geographic data see: United States Department of Transportation - Federal Highway Administration / Deaths per 100M VMT. It appears that there is a strong correlation between voting Republican and vehicular death rate. Doubtless just a coincidence.
What may not be a coincidence is the lack of per-mile travelled fatality statistics for vehicle type, race and gender, despite the availability of that information on a national and per-state basis. I suspect that the higher absolute numbers of fatalities and accidents for whites and men would be erased and even reversed on a per-mile basis, as men and whites drive more than women and minorities. (See Table 23. Men drive nearly 70% more miles per driver per vehicle than women. This is the closest I could find in the report to a pure miles-driven stat. The report also shows, as expected, that lower income groups drive less, so a lower number of miles driven can be expected for minority groups than for whites.) The already lower per-mile fatality rate for the "pickup trucks vans and SUVs" category would almost certainly show a drastically lower fatality rate per-mile for SUVs if that vehicle type were broken out separately, given the much higher per-vehicle fatality rate for pickup trucks.
At any rate, the data are pretty persuasive that SUVs are at least somewhat safer than cars for their occupants and also that larger vehicles within a class are safer for their occupants than smaller vehicles.
That is utter bullshit. Small cars are only modestly more manouverable than large cars, and you definitely want as much crumpling mass and hood length in front of you as you can get when you are in a collision, particularly a collision with an immovable object. Mass also prevents rolling over unless the center of gravity is unduly high.
My father started off with a cum laude Physics degree from an Ivy League university, then went on to become a pathologist and coroner. He has gone to hundreds of crash sites and done hundreds of autopsies of crash victims. What vehicle did he choose to carry his family? A Suburban - 15-20 years before they became popular. To give you some idea about his obsessiveness about car safety, he also had us all in car seats with 5-point harnesses until we were 10. When we were in a head-on collision with a pickup at about 30 mph, the Suburban survived and we were all uninjured. I drove that same '78 Suburban when I was a teenager, and it was actually nearly as nimble as a Crown Vic sedan.
In another accident in an '85 Suburban, my father was sideswiped by a Honda Civic. There was a barely perceptible shallow dent in the front quarter panel of the Suburban. The paint wasn't even broken - just slightly scuffed. The Civic rolled three times and was totaled. (The injuries to the seatbelted driver were minor.)
As for the supposedly overwhelming virtues of nimbleness, one day while driving me to school in a 3-year old mid-'80s BMW 7 series, just about the most nimble 4-door sedan on the market, a POS rustmobile suddenly darted out of a gas station less than 70 feet in front of us as we were going about 35 mph. We couldn't go left - that was the way that the car was turning in front of and toward us - and we couldn't go right - there was a curb and a telephone pole. No time to lose more than 10 or 15 mph, and that much or more was replaced by the other car's velocity. That BMW was crumpled around the front wheels like aluminum foil, and the frame was bent so the right side doors wouldn't open. Without all that crumple zone, I wouldn't have been as OK as I was - the whiplash didn't even set in until I was half way through my first-period Biology test. Nimbleness will often not help when idiots are trying to kill you.
Some cynics here may doubt the security of the system, but I'm sure none of the gaming vendors will hide any Easter eggs in their proprietary code. After all, if one can make software work reliably for something as complicated as counting votes, surely a simple application like a few hundred different kinds of casino games should be child's play to secure.
The GPL is ideal for my idea: "QuakeR 3", a pacifist, consensus-based, silent-meeting online community with gibs and railguns. (still some design issues to be worked out...)
True, but it seems to get worse instead of better for low poly counts until one gets into the intermediate range - after that it starts to get better. It's mostly noticable in backgrounds these days, but it becomes intrusive when the background element takes up a considerable portion of the display.
I also neglected to mention the stitching difficulties between NURBS surfaces which can sometimes be as annoying as polygon edges. That can usually be overcome with skiled modeling, though.
I should also have mentioned subdivision ("Sub-D") modeling as the best way to go since it has the fewest seams and allows a more adaptive display of details based on distance.
If you have thick steel like my Enermax tower, the difference is even greater. My case alone with no PS is about 45 lbs. It should stop unjacketed small-caliber handgun fire, though.
At least in Coke it's phosphoric acid, (not citric acid) which gives it a pH of 2.5 - by comparison vinegar is 2.9 and gastric acid is 2.0. Orthodontists use phoshoric acid to etch teeth before attaching braces. Nasty stuff.
Vinyl is not something you really want to ingest much either, but it's better than aluminum.
Is it just me or is this story the most blatant ad yet on Slashdot? Why was this story even accepted? Who cares about this story other than the people trying to sell this POS? This isn't even a particularly good case, and there is nothing news-worthy about it at all. Wake me when I can fit 8 HDDs in the thing, or when it shaves 20dB off the noise or does anything other than look half as cool as a 10 year-old NeXT box.
// oh, well - it's worth it]
[Excellent Karma -> Ex-karma
I remember a past pie going out to the $40,000,000,000 face in about 0.5 sec. In Belgium.
[Mod me +5 - most gratuitous use of the word "face"]
The average daily solar irradiance in the sunniest desert areas is only 6kWh (gross). Given 2.56E6 m/mi^2 that is 1.53E11 kWh/day = 5.61E13 kWh/yr = 2E20 J/yr (gross) for a 10,000 mi^2 collector. Total US energy consumprion from all sources is around 1E17Btu (it was 94 quads in 1998) = about 1E20J /yr. So the 10,000 square mile array would be enough to displace all other forms of energy if it were perfectly thermodynamically efficient. If heat were shipped rather than electricity for those purposes that used heat directly, the 50% thermodynamic limit wouldn't apply to that part of the energy distribution. Still, a somewhat larger array than 10,000 miles would likely be needed to account for real-world inefficiencies, but certainly less than 40,000 mi^2 = 200 mi. on a side.