Heck, there's a railroad bridge in the town where I work that was built in 1880. It's still completely fine and will probably stand at least another 100 years without anyone touching it at all. Maybe more; it's built out of hard rock (versus softer rock, iron or concrete) so may last like the aquaducts. In fact they'd kind of like to widen it a bit but they don't really want to touch it since it's such an awesome bridge and it's 130 years old.
Yes, the wind IS mechanically attached to the cars. Unless you're in a vacuum, the molecules in the gasses in the atmosphere are slamming into you constantly. Something hitting you IS mechanically attached, just as much as if someone were bouncing tennis balls off you a few hundred times a second.
The turbine would be slowing down the wind in the direction of the cars, so the cars will have to work that much harder to push against the wind. Ride a bike into a 20 MPH headwind sometime and tell me that the wind speed doesn't affect the power that has to be put into a vehicle to make it go because it's "not mechanically attached."
Even better: ride a bike with a 20 MPH tailwind on a road through open fields. Now ride that road as it goes into the woods, and the trees are blocking the wind so you don't have that tailwind anymore. The trees are taking the energy from the wind, and that's making you have to work harder.
I think it will cause a drag. I ride a bike to work, and I can tell you that when a car passes you, riding gets a little easier. If a string of cars passes you, riding gets a lot easier for longer than you'd think. I've always heard that to get benefit of drafting, you've got to be extremely close. But honestly, a half dozen cars blow by, you can go faster on a bike in their wake until they're probably 1/4 to 1/3 mile past you. The effect lasts a long time.
I think on a road where there is a constant string of cars, they've got to have a beneficial effect on one another.
Perhaps if they put these in places where cars are slowing down anyway, like approaching toll booths or sharp bends or offramps, it would use otherwise-wasted energy.
www.inksupply.com I don't know about your specific printer, but they have a lot of solutions. 3rd party empty carts, different inks, continuous flow ink systems, etc. I've used them now for HP, Epson, and Canon for many years and their inks have never caused me any trouble.
Really? Because mine isn't. It's a piezoelectric print head which theoretically can keep going for a very long time. Thermal is what HP and some others use. Epson and Canon use piezo. I've seen Canon printers that were many years old that had been through hundreds of ink carts and were still printing fine with their original print heads. As long as you don't get an ink clog in there, the print head should keep going indefinitely.
Thermal print heads don't last very long; that's why HP carts are ink plus print head. I used to have an HP, and you could only refill them about 2 or 3 times before the print head fizzled out. My Canon is on at least 50 full sets of refills now and no problems with the print head.
Now if they'd just release Linux drivers for it. It's one of the last things keeping me from running Linux full time.
You just need to be careful to buy a printer with carts that are easily refillable. When I had an HP, it was a little messy. When I had an Epson, it was stupidly messy, bottom fill, poppet valves that leaked, ink all over. I now have a Canon and it's rare for me to spill a single drop.
Lower quality means you've been using crappy 3rd party ink. Buy from a company that formulates ink properly per manufacturer. IMHO good 3rd party inks are at least as good as OEM inks. It's not like the OEMs have some secret process for making ink.
Heh, that's straight out of an episode of All in the Family I remember. A couple of guys broke into the Bunker's house to rob it, and one said "Just like white people. Tiny house, not much here, but there's a big 'ole fancy color TV right in the middle of it."
I have had a Canon i960 for several years. It was about 3 years before I even bought a new cart. I refill myself, have never had a problem, never get any kind of clog or even have to do an ink prime cycle other than the one the printer does itself when it first starts after a cart switch. It has actual optical sensors so it doesn't complain about low ink until the ink is actually low. After a few years (probably 30 refills) the felt sponge inside got kind of clogged up (I'd probably let it run too dry too many times and it got lots of dried ink in it) so I had to start actually replacing carts. But when one color would act up, I'd replace that cart once, and then get another 30 or so refills out of it.
I guess I can't say whether original Canon ink is better or worse, because it's been years since I had a printer full of Canon ink. I know there are some crappy ink suppliers out there, so I use one that I've had good luck with and which has special formulations for each manufacturer. I've tried putting that manufacturer's Epson ink in my Canon (I used to have an Epson and had some leftover ink) - it worked but the colors were way off. So I'd guess that any ink maker that has a "one size fits all" ink formulation is going to be universally mediocre.
I am sad that apparently Canon has gone to putting chips in their carts. I guess I'm going to have to keep my i960 running forever.
Heh, I think I'd just whack the side of one of the cans with a big stick. It'd crumple, and then the other three would too. A little screeching of metal would then get the car off.
Here's what concerns me though; what if their ATMs are no more secure or well-designed than their voting machines? The voting machines were exposed as insecure due to public scrutiny. Who's buying ATMs and reverse-engineering them looking for holes? I think it's fairly likely that the ATMs only continue to run fairly well due to either being locked down fairly well, or due to being interfaced with the bank's systems that won't allow too much crap to go down, or due to having been designed back in the day when their standards were better.
Emulate the hardware, or monitor the chip internals. It's been done before; many of the satellite TV hacks were discovered by people that drilled/dissolved the plastic off the chips and probed the internals. Access to electron microscopes is pretty widespread too. Lots of university students can get access to them.
That's not the target. The reason people would be working from home is that in the case of a highly infectious pandemic, one of the most effective methods of controlling spread is social isolation. Part of the proposed pandemic plans includes shutting down schools for up to 3 months, and isolating workers as much as possible. Part of the problem with this is that it disproportionately impacts lower income people who are both more in service jobs that can't be carried out remotely, and are less likely to have the equipment to even if they have jobs that could be done remotely.
There were two towns in the US that experienced ZERO fatality or illness in the 1918 pandemic. They did it by closing down traffic in and out of their town for the duration. Physical isolation is a highly effective tool, but it can be devastating from an economic point of view.
The other problem is that the US has developed a strong social stigma against staying home from work unless you're horribly ill. It only takes one infected bonehead to decide to "tough it out" and come to work, touch a doorknob with a snotty hand and start an outbreak in a whole population.
They've already taken the most effective possible anti-piracy method they could with Vista. They made it such a piece of crud that I wouldn't pick it up off the ground except to get it into a proper waste container. Seriously, I wouldn't put it on my machine if they were paying me to do it. I am running Windows, but they haven't put anything in Windows that I care about since W2K.
I have never seen a motion sensor that isn't just an on/off relay. Are you talking about ones that are built into wall switches? I've never used one of those so maybe that's it.
Well, like I said, it's possible to fix these problems. I guess I've only seen the cheap LEDs.
Besides, the numbers I've seen list fluorescent as being more efficient than all but the most cutting-edge LED systems, and the price of both pretty much guarantees that the payback on LED area lighting never happens; you can buy new CF lights when they burn out for the rest of your life and never pay for that LED bank.
Eventually of course LED will get cheaper, but for right now it's a novelty.
The optical scanner systems that are in use here print out a total sheet, there's no memory card. The system is too stupid to really hold any hacked software, it's just a dumb counter with enough smarts to know "only allow at most X of these Y boxes to be checked or it's bad". The key is to have idiotic systems that are too dumb to be hacked. It's easy to hack a computer. It's a lot harder to make a calculator do things you aren't expecting. It's VERY hard to make an abacus jigger the numbers without someone noticing.
The counters are tested, cleared and run under the supervision of both parties.
Yeah, they flicker even more and have weirder color balance. Honestly, fluorescents don't bother me at all, I have them in almost every fixture in my house, except for a couple of low-wattage desk lamps. But one of the biggest gripes about fluorescent is color balance and flicker, and LEDs are worse in both respects. It's possible to overcome both with LEDs but I haven't seen many fixtures that actually do.
FYI, the Diebold Accu-vote optical scan machines are widely used around here. The election officials I've all talked to, who have investigated all kinds of voting systems, still claim that optical scan is the best voting system currently on the market or even being discussed.
Remember, the basis for a democracy is that people must be able to trust the vote. IMHO, that means that the voting mechanisms must be transparent. In order to achieve that, every single stage of the voting must be understandable by everyone. The minute you put a computer into the mix, you lose that, and you will always have some percentage of the population that doesn't trust the vote for that reason. Sure, there are people who won't trust the vote regardless, but that's no reason to give up on trust altogether.
It absolutely does catch those cases. The optical ballot machines we use here will detect absolutely any mark whatsoever within a few mm of the box. If it results in an overvote, it kicks out the ballot. A few years ago I mismarked a box, and I erased the mark. I erased the HELL out of it and then marked the other box. When I was done, neither I nor the election monitor could tell that the box had ever been marked, but the machine refused to take it due to overvote. They had to mark the ballot as spoiled and issue me another one.
There is the possibility that you intended to undervote but accidentally made a mark in one of the boxes you didn't intend to vote for. This is very unlikely and I doubt this would result in any more error from the voter's intention than electronic voting would.
Optical scan does away with this if properly administered. We put our ballots directly into the scanning machine ourselves. If there's an irregularity, it spits the ballot back out again. There's not really any possibility of having a hard-to-interpret ballot. The machines will reject overvoting, and are sensitive to marks that go more than halfway between one box and the next, and in the case of the machines used in my precinct (Diebold Accu-vote) will reject a ballot that's been marked and then erased. I know a guy who's worked elections for decades, and he says they can run the ballots through 5 times and get the same exact count on every box 5 times in a row.
We do have one machine that's available for disabled folks to use to generate their ballot, but he says nobody's ever used it. We live in a rural community, and honestly anyone who would have to use that probably would have a hard time getting to the voting location anyway, and probably votes absentee.
I was thinking about this the other day, how are we going to store HD content that's downloaded at 20G per movie?
Then I thought, 250 GB drives are $60 these days. That's 12 movies, or $5 per movie for storage. That's not too bad really. Just keep them on a stack of hard drives. OK, to be practical they need to be either in cheap USB cases or slide rails; so add $15, that puts the cost at about $6-$7 per movie.
Yes, they're going to continue to do stuff like this, because as a society we've given the green light; we don't care. This woman had been driving in a completely irresponsible way, and didn't get any kind of serious penalty until she'd killed someone, and even they what'd she get? A fine.
Until society treats doing idiotic driving actions like this in exactly the same way as it would if you were walking down the street yakking on a phone and waving a loaded shotgun around (IE: criminal negligence while handling a lethal weapon) people will continue to do this. When we start to see people get their license pulled for 6 months and a few thousand dollar fine for continually wandering out of their lanes while talking on a phone, then maybe people will start to change their behavior.
Until then, one of your most likely ways to die is at the hands of a moron behind the wheel doing something besides paying attention to the road. Enjoy.
If it wasn't for the 5-year warranty, I'd be looking elsewhere.
I decided to start ignoring the warranty on drives.
I mean honestly, if I have a drive fail, the LAST thing I'm worried about is whether I'll get my pissin' $70 back for a 250G drive. I want my DATA not a few bucks.
I recently had my first real, hard, unpredicted (no SMART warnings) failure EVER out of dozens of drives from every manufacturer, and it was a 4 month old Seagate SATA drive. HP sent me a replacement, I put it in last night, and after 4 hours use the SMART data reads 4 hours spin time and 54 hardware ECC hits. I have 5 year old Maxtors (with 1 year warranties) that don't have 54 ECC hits.
I don't care if they have a 100 year warranty; I don't care if they're giving them away for free; I'm not going to use drives I can't trust.
I'm not buying any more Seagate for a while. Maxtor either since Seagate bought them. I think I'll buy WD for a while; I just picked up 2 of them and they're spinning nicely and behaving.
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Heck, there's a railroad bridge in the town where I work that was built in 1880. It's still completely fine and will probably stand at least another 100 years without anyone touching it at all. Maybe more; it's built out of hard rock (versus softer rock, iron or concrete) so may last like the aquaducts. In fact they'd kind of like to widen it a bit but they don't really want to touch it since it's such an awesome bridge and it's 130 years old.
Yes, the wind IS mechanically attached to the cars. Unless you're in a vacuum, the molecules in the gasses in the atmosphere are slamming into you constantly. Something hitting you IS mechanically attached, just as much as if someone were bouncing tennis balls off you a few hundred times a second.
The turbine would be slowing down the wind in the direction of the cars, so the cars will have to work that much harder to push against the wind. Ride a bike into a 20 MPH headwind sometime and tell me that the wind speed doesn't affect the power that has to be put into a vehicle to make it go because it's "not mechanically attached."
Even better: ride a bike with a 20 MPH tailwind on a road through open fields. Now ride that road as it goes into the woods, and the trees are blocking the wind so you don't have that tailwind anymore. The trees are taking the energy from the wind, and that's making you have to work harder.
I think it will cause a drag. I ride a bike to work, and I can tell you that when a car passes you, riding gets a little easier. If a string of cars passes you, riding gets a lot easier for longer than you'd think. I've always heard that to get benefit of drafting, you've got to be extremely close. But honestly, a half dozen cars blow by, you can go faster on a bike in their wake until they're probably 1/4 to 1/3 mile past you. The effect lasts a long time.
I think on a road where there is a constant string of cars, they've got to have a beneficial effect on one another.
Perhaps if they put these in places where cars are slowing down anyway, like approaching toll booths or sharp bends or offramps, it would use otherwise-wasted energy.
www.inksupply.com
I don't know about your specific printer, but they have a lot of solutions. 3rd party empty carts, different inks, continuous flow ink systems, etc. I've used them now for HP, Epson, and Canon for many years and their inks have never caused me any trouble.
it's a thermal printhead which will burn out.
Really? Because mine isn't. It's a piezoelectric print head which theoretically can keep going for a very long time. Thermal is what HP and some others use. Epson and Canon use piezo. I've seen Canon printers that were many years old that had been through hundreds of ink carts and were still printing fine with their original print heads. As long as you don't get an ink clog in there, the print head should keep going indefinitely.
Thermal print heads don't last very long; that's why HP carts are ink plus print head. I used to have an HP, and you could only refill them about 2 or 3 times before the print head fizzled out. My Canon is on at least 50 full sets of refills now and no problems with the print head.
Now if they'd just release Linux drivers for it. It's one of the last things keeping me from running Linux full time.
I think it would be fun to put this number on the back of a DeCSS shirt, so you'd be illegal coming and going.
You just need to be careful to buy a printer with carts that are easily refillable. When I had an HP, it was a little messy. When I had an Epson, it was stupidly messy, bottom fill, poppet valves that leaked, ink all over.
I now have a Canon and it's rare for me to spill a single drop.
Lower quality means you've been using crappy 3rd party ink. Buy from a company that formulates ink properly per manufacturer. IMHO good 3rd party inks are at least as good as OEM inks. It's not like the OEMs have some secret process for making ink.
Heh, that's straight out of an episode of All in the Family I remember. A couple of guys broke into the Bunker's house to rob it, and one said "Just like white people. Tiny house, not much here, but there's a big 'ole fancy color TV right in the middle of it."
I have had a Canon i960 for several years. It was about 3 years before I even bought a new cart. I refill myself, have never had a problem, never get any kind of clog or even have to do an ink prime cycle other than the one the printer does itself when it first starts after a cart switch.
It has actual optical sensors so it doesn't complain about low ink until the ink is actually low.
After a few years (probably 30 refills) the felt sponge inside got kind of clogged up (I'd probably let it run too dry too many times and it got lots of dried ink in it) so I had to start actually replacing carts. But when one color would act up, I'd replace that cart once, and then get another 30 or so refills out of it.
I guess I can't say whether original Canon ink is better or worse, because it's been years since I had a printer full of Canon ink. I know there are some crappy ink suppliers out there, so I use one that I've had good luck with and which has special formulations for each manufacturer. I've tried putting that manufacturer's Epson ink in my Canon (I used to have an Epson and had some leftover ink) - it worked but the colors were way off. So I'd guess that any ink maker that has a "one size fits all" ink formulation is going to be universally mediocre.
I am sad that apparently Canon has gone to putting chips in their carts. I guess I'm going to have to keep my i960 running forever.
Heh, I think I'd just whack the side of one of the cans with a big stick. It'd crumple, and then the other three would too. A little screeching of metal would then get the car off.
Here's what concerns me though; what if their ATMs are no more secure or well-designed than their voting machines? The voting machines were exposed as insecure due to public scrutiny. Who's buying ATMs and reverse-engineering them looking for holes?
I think it's fairly likely that the ATMs only continue to run fairly well due to either being locked down fairly well, or due to being interfaced with the bank's systems that won't allow too much crap to go down, or due to having been designed back in the day when their standards were better.
Emulate the hardware, or monitor the chip internals. It's been done before; many of the satellite TV hacks were discovered by people that drilled/dissolved the plastic off the chips and probed the internals.
Access to electron microscopes is pretty widespread too. Lots of university students can get access to them.
That's not the target. The reason people would be working from home is that in the case of a highly infectious pandemic, one of the most effective methods of controlling spread is social isolation. Part of the proposed pandemic plans includes shutting down schools for up to 3 months, and isolating workers as much as possible. Part of the problem with this is that it disproportionately impacts lower income people who are both more in service jobs that can't be carried out remotely, and are less likely to have the equipment to even if they have jobs that could be done remotely.
There were two towns in the US that experienced ZERO fatality or illness in the 1918 pandemic. They did it by closing down traffic in and out of their town for the duration. Physical isolation is a highly effective tool, but it can be devastating from an economic point of view.
The other problem is that the US has developed a strong social stigma against staying home from work unless you're horribly ill. It only takes one infected bonehead to decide to "tough it out" and come to work, touch a doorknob with a snotty hand and start an outbreak in a whole population.
They've already taken the most effective possible anti-piracy method they could with Vista. They made it such a piece of crud that I wouldn't pick it up off the ground except to get it into a proper waste container.
Seriously, I wouldn't put it on my machine if they were paying me to do it. I am running Windows, but they haven't put anything in Windows that I care about since W2K.
I have never seen a motion sensor that isn't just an on/off relay. Are you talking about ones that are built into wall switches? I've never used one of those so maybe that's it.
Well, like I said, it's possible to fix these problems. I guess I've only seen the cheap LEDs.
Besides, the numbers I've seen list fluorescent as being more efficient than all but the most cutting-edge LED systems, and the price of both pretty much guarantees that the payback on LED area lighting never happens; you can buy new CF lights when they burn out for the rest of your life and never pay for that LED bank.
Eventually of course LED will get cheaper, but for right now it's a novelty.
The optical scanner systems that are in use here print out a total sheet, there's no memory card. The system is too stupid to really hold any hacked software, it's just a dumb counter with enough smarts to know "only allow at most X of these Y boxes to be checked or it's bad". The key is to have idiotic systems that are too dumb to be hacked. It's easy to hack a computer. It's a lot harder to make a calculator do things you aren't expecting. It's VERY hard to make an abacus jigger the numbers without someone noticing.
The counters are tested, cleared and run under the supervision of both parties.
Yeah, they flicker even more and have weirder color balance.
Honestly, fluorescents don't bother me at all, I have them in almost every fixture in my house, except for a couple of low-wattage desk lamps. But one of the biggest gripes about fluorescent is color balance and flicker, and LEDs are worse in both respects. It's possible to overcome both with LEDs but I haven't seen many fixtures that actually do.
FYI, the Diebold Accu-vote optical scan machines are widely used around here. The election officials I've all talked to, who have investigated all kinds of voting systems, still claim that optical scan is the best voting system currently on the market or even being discussed.
Remember, the basis for a democracy is that people must be able to trust the vote. IMHO, that means that the voting mechanisms must be transparent. In order to achieve that, every single stage of the voting must be understandable by everyone. The minute you put a computer into the mix, you lose that, and you will always have some percentage of the population that doesn't trust the vote for that reason. Sure, there are people who won't trust the vote regardless, but that's no reason to give up on trust altogether.
It absolutely does catch those cases. The optical ballot machines we use here will detect absolutely any mark whatsoever within a few mm of the box. If it results in an overvote, it kicks out the ballot. A few years ago I mismarked a box, and I erased the mark. I erased the HELL out of it and then marked the other box. When I was done, neither I nor the election monitor could tell that the box had ever been marked, but the machine refused to take it due to overvote. They had to mark the ballot as spoiled and issue me another one.
There is the possibility that you intended to undervote but accidentally made a mark in one of the boxes you didn't intend to vote for. This is very unlikely and I doubt this would result in any more error from the voter's intention than electronic voting would.
Optical scan does away with this if properly administered. We put our ballots directly into the scanning machine ourselves. If there's an irregularity, it spits the ballot back out again. There's not really any possibility of having a hard-to-interpret ballot. The machines will reject overvoting, and are sensitive to marks that go more than halfway between one box and the next, and in the case of the machines used in my precinct (Diebold Accu-vote) will reject a ballot that's been marked and then erased. I know a guy who's worked elections for decades, and he says they can run the ballots through 5 times and get the same exact count on every box 5 times in a row.
We do have one machine that's available for disabled folks to use to generate their ballot, but he says nobody's ever used it. We live in a rural community, and honestly anyone who would have to use that probably would have a hard time getting to the voting location anyway, and probably votes absentee.
I was thinking about this the other day, how are we going to store HD content that's downloaded at 20G per movie?
Then I thought, 250 GB drives are $60 these days. That's 12 movies, or $5 per movie for storage. That's not too bad really. Just keep them on a stack of hard drives. OK, to be practical they need to be either in cheap USB cases or slide rails; so add $15, that puts the cost at about $6-$7 per movie.
Yes, they're going to continue to do stuff like this, because as a society we've given the green light; we don't care. This woman had been driving in a completely irresponsible way, and didn't get any kind of serious penalty until she'd killed someone, and even they what'd she get? A fine.
Until society treats doing idiotic driving actions like this in exactly the same way as it would if you were walking down the street yakking on a phone and waving a loaded shotgun around (IE: criminal negligence while handling a lethal weapon) people will continue to do this. When we start to see people get their license pulled for 6 months and a few thousand dollar fine for continually wandering out of their lanes while talking on a phone, then maybe people will start to change their behavior.
Until then, one of your most likely ways to die is at the hands of a moron behind the wheel doing something besides paying attention to the road. Enjoy.
If it wasn't for the 5-year warranty, I'd be looking elsewhere.
I decided to start ignoring the warranty on drives.
I mean honestly, if I have a drive fail, the LAST thing I'm worried about is whether I'll get my pissin' $70 back for a 250G drive. I want my DATA not a few bucks.
I recently had my first real, hard, unpredicted (no SMART warnings) failure EVER out of dozens of drives from every manufacturer, and it was a 4 month old Seagate SATA drive. HP sent me a replacement, I put it in last night, and after 4 hours use the SMART data reads 4 hours spin time and 54 hardware ECC hits. I have 5 year old Maxtors (with 1 year warranties) that don't have 54 ECC hits.
I don't care if they have a 100 year warranty; I don't care if they're giving them away for free; I'm not going to use drives I can't trust.
I'm not buying any more Seagate for a while. Maxtor either since Seagate bought them. I think I'll buy WD for a while; I just picked up 2 of them and they're spinning nicely and behaving.
When I say "challenging" I mean "impossible". I thought that was understood. At least at our school it was.
If not "impossible" then "not reasonably do-able in the time allowed, given that you have to eat and sleep and go to other classes."