Comcast likely contracts out their customer service, and the contract probably has target hold times written into it (and it also probably has provisions for the contractor to charge more if there is a huge spike in usage). Believe it or not, most companies want their customers to be at least mildly happy, and most successful companies will pay attention to any sudden shifts in customer service calls. Also, customer service costs a lot more than the $5-10 suggested by the GP.
They're not being sued, they're being prosecuted. It's a whole other ball game. At least in the US, the presumption is that once a case has been vetted by a grand jury and prosecutor, it's worth pursuing, and thus influences public sentiment a little bit, whereas with suing, anybody can sue for anything, and thus the effect is exclusively on publicity and not sentiment.
Yes, the good-ol-days were good, but ice cream that has perfect texture and lasts that way in the freezer is good too. Fresh ice cream is grand, but it loses its texture fairly quickly, especially in the sort of second-rate freezer in a rental house like mine.
Given Google's tendency to play "smart" and share your private info with people it has calculated you would like to share it with - it doesn't mean a whole lot. Still, for the time being, you have the option of encrypting all of your data, which means until that changes you still need the key to see it. It has really simplified my laptop/desktop workflow.
...not Bill Gates and Microsoft. Anybody making that misattribution clearly didn't even read the headline of the actual article, let alone the chunk of text quoted in the summary.
It does not actually require a carrying case... this will fit into the pockets of my cargo pants. It fits a little awkwardly, but there is nothing like watching people's eyes bulge out of their face when you pull a laptop out of your pocket ^.^
Being an EEE user myself, I have to disagree. If I was in the market for a 15" laptop I would have gone with a Dell. However, I commute to school by bike (uphill both ways!) and weight is hugely important. This machine is light, tiny, durable, cheap, full-featured, and comes with a 2-year warranty. Where else can I get that?
Your analogy does not apply. If the US allowed online sales of cannabis internally and did not allow companies in the Netherlands to sell cannabis online to US consumers, then that would be comparable to this situation.
The US allows various types of online gambling (such as betting on horse races and sporting events) that are operated by US companies, but does not allow competition from companies like Antigua. That's the issue - we are in clear violation of free trade treaties.
Anyway, this will never fly in the US - I can guarantee that the big utilities will lobby congress and FUD it to death.
Some of the biggest utilities in the US are nuclear companies... Nuclear plants cost billions to build and tear down! It's impossible to have a small nuclear utility. Think of Entergy, Exelon, and Edison. Big power loves nuclear, they would love it if they could build a backbone of advanced nuclear plants like france has with, say, natural gas as peaking plants. Those are reliable technologies that, in combination, can be used to produce exactly the megawatts you need to produce, unlike solar and wind, which are a lot more difficult to integrate into the grid.
There are currently plans in the works for several new plants, including a huge one in texas which I think is relatively far along in the process.
Your comparison of the cost savings of the kite to a percentage of the operation costs of the boat is disingenuous. If this kite is a clear money-saver, it will eventually be implemented, whether it saves 10% or 0.1% You don't get to be an international shipping company by ignoring technological improvements in efficiency, you get gobbled up by the nimbler companies who have implemented 20 different things which save them 0.5% and suddenly they're operating at a noticeably greater efficiency.
Of course, the $1600/day is in ideal wind conditions. But the great thing about alternative energy is we can just sit back and wait for petroleum to get more expensive, and suddenly the alternative energy technology has become that much more desirable.
surely there is some time to be trimmed with only slightly higher acceleration but much higher top speeds
Yes - but with high fuel costs: [from wikipedia]
Assuming a constant drag coefficient, drag will vary as the square of velocity. Thus, the resultant power needed to overcome this drag will vary as the cube of velocity.
I think that we can get a much better bang for our buck improving airport logistics than airplane topspeed. Waiting two hours in lines only to have your flight be an hour late or get canceled is a much bigger time sink than practical topspeeds of conventional jet technology.
According to this whitepaper, typical desktop PSU efficiency is 60-70%. While it makes sense that laptop transformers would operate at a little bit higher efficiency, I think it's safe to assume they're in the same ballpark. So let's call laptop transformers about 80% efficient. Now that 500 watts required to charge the battery is going to need 625 going into the transformer, with 125 watts of waste heat.
But now let's consider the efficiency of the battery itself - at nominal charge speed for lithium ion batteries they get an efficiency of about 90% and at 5 times nominal they get an efficiency of 85% (see this paper. If this battery's profile is anything like a lithium ion battery, let's say it gets 90% efficiency, then we'll need 555 watts going into the battery, and thus about 700 watts going into the transformer, with 150 watts of waste heat from the transformer and 50 watts of waste from the battery.
These are all ballpark figures and my math may be questionable... but the takeaway is still there: dealing with the waste heat from this charging process will be a MAJOR issue.
Maybe cell phones should have a "power emergency" mode in which the processor is sharply downclocked, the only radio that is turned on is the GSM, and it boots into a low-demand OS which just has a contact list and dialing interface (and maybe SMS too). And it has strict power-saving, with the screen and radio turning off after x seconds of disuse. Maybe you could hook a crank up to the vibrator motor to generate a weak current.
Cell coverage could be provided in a disaster by a fleet of blimps. That wouldn't work in stormy conditions, but it would probably be great following a nice big California earthquake. How cool would that be... look on the horizon, see this fleet of blimps powering your way, and think "finally! the blimps are here, so everything's all right!"
Bar codes aren't high-tech, but applying them to a number of discrete objects in a highly variable environment with a lot of occlusions and weird angles to solve a very relevant medical problem IS novel and definitely worthwhile.
You make an excellent point. Unfortunately, I still want to have a facebook account, I just want facebook to be less intrusive. Facebook does have the monopoly on college social networking, like it or not, and I like being able to use it (that's a problem for another day - how to let social networks interoperate).
So, given the restriction that I don't want to drop facebook, how else can I influence their behavior? By helping to cut off their revenue source. Facebook generates revenue from Beacon because Kongregate.com (and others) pays them for that service. If I and everybody else sends angry emails to facebook's sponsors, then maybe that sponsor will think twice about renewing their contract. If the money starts drying up, maybe facebook will consider the lost goodwill too great an expense.
It's very timely to see your comment, as I just got done emailing kongregate.com. I let them know, in a short and sweet email, that their partnership with facebook and participation in the Beacon program meant that I would no longer be patronizing their site. There are plenty of game sites on the internet, and they will only participate in a program like Beacon if it gives them a competitive advantage.
Let them know that Beacon is making them LOSE users, not gain them.
It's not just Verizon... with Cingular/ATT (not even sure which it is right now), what used to be the menu button now opens a service that charges me money, I can't use mp3 songs as ringtones without slicing up the file on my computer first, and 3 of the 9 options on the main menu are ways for me to spend money with them (while obscure functions like "calculator" are 9 clicks away if you know the number shortcuts, 18 if you don't.)
Your comment may have been tongue-in-cheek, but commercial nuclear power in the US is not the kind of place where you get radiation poisoning: dosages are strictly monitored. I interned at a nuclear plant one summer. The ambient radiation working in the plant but outside the restricted zones will only be something like triple background (although background varies geographically by a huge amount).
Working inside the restricted zones, dosage is carefully monitored, with strictly enforced limits: workers carry both digital and analog radiation detectors; the electronic PED (personal electronic dosimeter) would come programmed with set radiation limits for a work job, and it would warn you when you reached your limit for the day, and upload exposure data back to the database to enforce long-term exposure limits. To ensure that workers haven't picked up any solid particles that will stick with them and give them concentrated doses, they are required to pass a full-body scan before being allowed to leave the restricted zone, and if any residual radiation is detected, the particles will be swiftly attended to. Safety standards are very conservative, and very strictly enforced.
"Enforce" is used very deliberately here; many nuclear workers are paid far better than the equivalent positions in other industries, so they definitely try to aim for overtime hours to rake in the big bucks - dosimeter fraud, trying to reduce the recorded radiation exposure so as to qualify for more hours, is a much more serious problem than lax standards.
Our training materials contained accounts of many of the known cases of radiation poisoning in commercial nuclear energy; in almost all cases it was due to somebody doing something ridiculous (picking up and handling a chunk of metal from a restricted zone) or from workers concealing the amount of radiation they had been exposed to. Of course, maybe it was slanted, but they definitely supplied workers with the info needed to be safe.
FaceBook provides a secondary method of opting out, just like you can control lots of privacy tweaks already. There's a nice new option for "External Websites: You can edit your privacy settings for external websites sending stories to your profile."
This is only partly true: the secondary opt-out only applies to stories created after the opt-out. Facebook will continue to publish stories that were created before opting out.
I know this from personal experience after I tried the primary opt-out but was too slow (I stopped to try and figure out what I was opting out of, and then it published it while I was still trying to figure out what was going on!) Then I tried the secondary opt-out after hunting for it, and discovered that didn't stop the story from being published either.
Your eye transfers raw data to your brain similar to a bitmap/RAW file.
No. While the bulk of the signal processing is performed in what is theorized to be a 4-layer neural network, the retina is actually able to perform a substantial amount of processing on its own. For example, lateral inhibition between receptors highlights edges - at the edge of black and white, the data that is sent to the brain actually shows the black as more black and the white as more white. There are also thought to be motion detectors in the retina, color processing (our "red" and "green" cones are actually very, very close in their wavelength responses, and both even overlap with the "blue" response curve, so it requires some processing to actually separate the colors out), and far more that we still don't understand. The actual rods and cones make up a small part of the complicated network that is the retina.
Even though your eyes are able to see colour even in your peripheral vision, the brain doesn't think that the information of colour is as important as the outline/shape of the object.
No. You can't see color in your peripheral vision because the periphery of your retina is optimized for motion and brightness, ie it contains mostly rods instead of cones. There is also a higher convergence of individual receptors onto ganglia.
Talking about the eye as it related to a pixellated display is meaningless, because the eye does not see in, strictly, pixels, and the eye's receptors show significant spatial variation. Higher resolution will still translate into smoother curves, finer motions, and so on, and that will still have some effect on our subjective perception of the display.
Agreed. When I worked for a university, the only company that accepted POs from us were the laboratory supply companies that surely get a large portion of their income from the academic market.
University POs are disastrous; the average processing time was about a month and sometimes they never got paid at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Comcast likely contracts out their customer service, and the contract probably has target hold times written into it (and it also probably has provisions for the contractor to charge more if there is a huge spike in usage). Believe it or not, most companies want their customers to be at least mildly happy, and most successful companies will pay attention to any sudden shifts in customer service calls. Also, customer service costs a lot more than the $5-10 suggested by the GP.
They're not being sued, they're being prosecuted. It's a whole other ball game. At least in the US, the presumption is that once a case has been vetted by a grand jury and prosecutor, it's worth pursuing, and thus influences public sentiment a little bit, whereas with suing, anybody can sue for anything, and thus the effect is exclusively on publicity and not sentiment.
Yes, the good-ol-days were good, but ice cream that has perfect texture and lasts that way in the freezer is good too. Fresh ice cream is grand, but it loses its texture fairly quickly, especially in the sort of second-rate freezer in a rental house like mine.
Given Google's tendency to play "smart" and share your private info with people it has calculated you would like to share it with - it doesn't mean a whole lot. Still, for the time being, you have the option of encrypting all of your data, which means until that changes you still need the key to see it. It has really simplified my laptop/desktop workflow.
...not Bill Gates and Microsoft. Anybody making that misattribution clearly didn't even read the headline of the actual article, let alone the chunk of text quoted in the summary.
It does not actually require a carrying case... this will fit into the pockets of my cargo pants. It fits a little awkwardly, but there is nothing like watching people's eyes bulge out of their face when you pull a laptop out of your pocket ^.^
Being an EEE user myself, I have to disagree. If I was in the market for a 15" laptop I would have gone with a Dell. However, I commute to school by bike (uphill both ways!) and weight is hugely important. This machine is light, tiny, durable, cheap, full-featured, and comes with a 2-year warranty. Where else can I get that?
Your analogy does not apply. If the US allowed online sales of cannabis internally and did not allow companies in the Netherlands to sell cannabis online to US consumers, then that would be comparable to this situation. The US allows various types of online gambling (such as betting on horse races and sporting events) that are operated by US companies, but does not allow competition from companies like Antigua. That's the issue - we are in clear violation of free trade treaties.
There are currently plans in the works for several new plants, including a huge one in texas which I think is relatively far along in the process.
Your comparison of the cost savings of the kite to a percentage of the operation costs of the boat is disingenuous. If this kite is a clear money-saver, it will eventually be implemented, whether it saves 10% or 0.1% You don't get to be an international shipping company by ignoring technological improvements in efficiency, you get gobbled up by the nimbler companies who have implemented 20 different things which save them 0.5% and suddenly they're operating at a noticeably greater efficiency.
Of course, the $1600/day is in ideal wind conditions. But the great thing about alternative energy is we can just sit back and wait for petroleum to get more expensive, and suddenly the alternative energy technology has become that much more desirable.
I think that we can get a much better bang for our buck improving airport logistics than airplane topspeed. Waiting two hours in lines only to have your flight be an hour late or get canceled is a much bigger time sink than practical topspeeds of conventional jet technology.
According to this whitepaper, typical desktop PSU efficiency is 60-70%. While it makes sense that laptop transformers would operate at a little bit higher efficiency, I think it's safe to assume they're in the same ballpark. So let's call laptop transformers about 80% efficient. Now that 500 watts required to charge the battery is going to need 625 going into the transformer, with 125 watts of waste heat.
But now let's consider the efficiency of the battery itself - at nominal charge speed for lithium ion batteries they get an efficiency of about 90% and at 5 times nominal they get an efficiency of 85% (see this paper. If this battery's profile is anything like a lithium ion battery, let's say it gets 90% efficiency, then we'll need 555 watts going into the battery, and thus about 700 watts going into the transformer, with 150 watts of waste heat from the transformer and 50 watts of waste from the battery. These are all ballpark figures and my math may be questionable... but the takeaway is still there: dealing with the waste heat from this charging process will be a MAJOR issue.
Maybe cell phones should have a "power emergency" mode in which the processor is sharply downclocked, the only radio that is turned on is the GSM, and it boots into a low-demand OS which just has a contact list and dialing interface (and maybe SMS too). And it has strict power-saving, with the screen and radio turning off after x seconds of disuse. Maybe you could hook a crank up to the vibrator motor to generate a weak current. Cell coverage could be provided in a disaster by a fleet of blimps. That wouldn't work in stormy conditions, but it would probably be great following a nice big California earthquake. How cool would that be... look on the horizon, see this fleet of blimps powering your way, and think "finally! the blimps are here, so everything's all right!"
Bar codes aren't high-tech, but applying them to a number of discrete objects in a highly variable environment with a lot of occlusions and weird angles to solve a very relevant medical problem IS novel and definitely worthwhile.
You make an excellent point. Unfortunately, I still want to have a facebook account, I just want facebook to be less intrusive. Facebook does have the monopoly on college social networking, like it or not, and I like being able to use it (that's a problem for another day - how to let social networks interoperate). So, given the restriction that I don't want to drop facebook, how else can I influence their behavior? By helping to cut off their revenue source. Facebook generates revenue from Beacon because Kongregate.com (and others) pays them for that service. If I and everybody else sends angry emails to facebook's sponsors, then maybe that sponsor will think twice about renewing their contract. If the money starts drying up, maybe facebook will consider the lost goodwill too great an expense.
It's very timely to see your comment, as I just got done emailing kongregate.com. I let them know, in a short and sweet email, that their partnership with facebook and participation in the Beacon program meant that I would no longer be patronizing their site. There are plenty of game sites on the internet, and they will only participate in a program like Beacon if it gives them a competitive advantage.
Let them know that Beacon is making them LOSE users, not gain them.
It's not just Verizon... with Cingular/ATT (not even sure which it is right now), what used to be the menu button now opens a service that charges me money, I can't use mp3 songs as ringtones without slicing up the file on my computer first, and 3 of the 9 options on the main menu are ways for me to spend money with them (while obscure functions like "calculator" are 9 clicks away if you know the number shortcuts, 18 if you don't.)
Your comment may have been tongue-in-cheek, but commercial nuclear power in the US is not the kind of place where you get radiation poisoning: dosages are strictly monitored. I interned at a nuclear plant one summer. The ambient radiation working in the plant but outside the restricted zones will only be something like triple background (although background varies geographically by a huge amount).
Working inside the restricted zones, dosage is carefully monitored, with strictly enforced limits: workers carry both digital and analog radiation detectors; the electronic PED (personal electronic dosimeter) would come programmed with set radiation limits for a work job, and it would warn you when you reached your limit for the day, and upload exposure data back to the database to enforce long-term exposure limits. To ensure that workers haven't picked up any solid particles that will stick with them and give them concentrated doses, they are required to pass a full-body scan before being allowed to leave the restricted zone, and if any residual radiation is detected, the particles will be swiftly attended to. Safety standards are very conservative, and very strictly enforced.
"Enforce" is used very deliberately here; many nuclear workers are paid far better than the equivalent positions in other industries, so they definitely try to aim for overtime hours to rake in the big bucks - dosimeter fraud, trying to reduce the recorded radiation exposure so as to qualify for more hours, is a much more serious problem than lax standards.
Our training materials contained accounts of many of the known cases of radiation poisoning in commercial nuclear energy; in almost all cases it was due to somebody doing something ridiculous (picking up and handling a chunk of metal from a restricted zone) or from workers concealing the amount of radiation they had been exposed to. Of course, maybe it was slanted, but they definitely supplied workers with the info needed to be safe.
FaceBook provides a secondary method of opting out, just like you can control lots of privacy tweaks already. There's a nice new option for "External Websites: You can edit your privacy settings for external websites sending stories to your profile."
This is only partly true: the secondary opt-out only applies to stories created after the opt-out. Facebook will continue to publish stories that were created before opting out.
I know this from personal experience after I tried the primary opt-out but was too slow (I stopped to try and figure out what I was opting out of, and then it published it while I was still trying to figure out what was going on!) Then I tried the secondary opt-out after hunting for it, and discovered that didn't stop the story from being published either.
Your eye transfers raw data to your brain similar to a bitmap/RAW file.
No. While the bulk of the signal processing is performed in what is theorized to be a 4-layer neural network, the retina is actually able to perform a substantial amount of processing on its own. For example, lateral inhibition between receptors highlights edges - at the edge of black and white, the data that is sent to the brain actually shows the black as more black and the white as more white. There are also thought to be motion detectors in the retina, color processing (our "red" and "green" cones are actually very, very close in their wavelength responses, and both even overlap with the "blue" response curve, so it requires some processing to actually separate the colors out), and far more that we still don't understand. The actual rods and cones make up a small part of the complicated network that is the retina.
Even though your eyes are able to see colour even in your peripheral vision, the brain doesn't think that the information of colour is as important as the outline/shape of the object.
No. You can't see color in your peripheral vision because the periphery of your retina is optimized for motion and brightness, ie it contains mostly rods instead of cones. There is also a higher convergence of individual receptors onto ganglia.
Talking about the eye as it related to a pixellated display is meaningless, because the eye does not see in, strictly, pixels, and the eye's receptors show significant spatial variation. Higher resolution will still translate into smoother curves, finer motions, and so on, and that will still have some effect on our subjective perception of the display.
Agreed. When I worked for a university, the only company that accepted POs from us were the laboratory supply companies that surely get a large portion of their income from the academic market.
University POs are disastrous; the average processing time was about a month and sometimes they never got paid at all.