What's more profitable to BP? William Randolph Hearst could have switched to cheaper hemp-based paper for his newspapers in the 1920s, but because of his massive investments in timber and paper-making, it was more profitable to him to attack hemp-based paper instead. He chose to do it by using his media empire to demonize hemp and marijuana instead of through patent-warfare, but it's no different.
Powerful people always attack new technology that threatens their investments, even if that new technology might benefit for society as a whole.
BP has 2 choices, it can adopt the future technology of solar and be just one player among thousands, or it can cling to it's massive oil land investments by fighting against the future of solar (though patents) and remain one of the top players for at least long enough for the current board of directors to get a nice fat retirement check.
How would you tell the difference between BP-owned submarine patents, or just some pie-in-the-sky solar corporation that ran out of capital and died before releasing any products (that still managed to file patents before dying).
From the outside, both cases would look identical. A brand-new company files article of incorporation, registers some patents, and then nothing is ever heard from them again.
It does not matter if you use fossil fuel heat if the electric controls don't work.
Milli-volt gas valves.
If you use natural gas for heat and have a system with a pilot flame, this setup will guarantee you have heat no matter what happens with the power. It uses a thermopile to generate a very small voltage direct from the pilot flame, and this is enough voltage to power the milli-volt gas valve. They work best with mechanical thermostats, the digital ones will need a battery in the thermostat.
Someone, at some point in the distant past, had installed one of these on the main boiler in my house, which totally saved us when we lost power for an entire week when it was still 30-40F outside.
They could have patented them under a completely independant shell company. Just because you did the research doesn't mean you have to be the one to patent it, especially if you are just trying to stop other research.
New study shows that parents who lack parenting skills (and can't control their kids) admit to giving their kids more soda than parents who know better
It wasn't the fact that they sent something that is purely for entertainment, the problem is that the entertainment chosen isn't usable by anyone who is currently up there. The doll is Japanese-only, and none of them speak Japanese.
I just thought they would have been better off with a few pounds of chocolate or something, instead of a toy that none of them can use.
It costs $5000-$10,000 per pound to ship things into space, and they sent a talking companion robot that doesn't even speak the same language as any of the astronauts?
Obviously, the more mass of fuel you feed into the engine, the more mass of exhaust you will get out of it, but it's not the raw volume of exhaust that matters, it's the particular toxicity and enviromental impact of each pollutant. Carbon Monoxide (CO) is toxic at 700 parts per million, while Carbon Dioxide (CO2, converted from CO by the catalytic converter) isn't toxic until 20,000 parts per million. You can't really count CO2 as a pollutant, since it is essentially non-toxic and the amount produced by every car on earth is miniscule compared to the amount produced by every non-plant life form on earth, so once you subtract the CO2 (and water, also produced by the cat) from the total exhaust, motorcycles produce more toxic/reactive pollution per mile than cars.
This isn't to say that motorcycles couldn't be designed better and beat cars in every category of emission, but it would be too heavy, bulky, and expensive to be commercially viable. There is barely enough room for a decent muffler already as it is.
You can't reload with a custom rom if the phone uses a signed bootloader (which motorola is notorious for doing), or in the case of the article's author, you are "banned" from doing so by your employer (his employer bans rooted phones from accessing active sync)
The mythbusters tests were run using bikes and cars from the 80s, 90s, and 2000s. The poor aerodynamics and a lack of a catalytic converter on any of the bikes offset any "savings" gained by having a lighter vehicle. Just because it's smaller doesn't automatically mean it pollutes less.
What is so "rubbery" about these stats: "the motorcycle used 28% less fuel than the comparable decade car and emitted 30% fewer carbon dioxide emissions, but it emitted 416% more hydrocarbons, 3,220% more oxides of nitrogen and 8,065% more carbon monoxide."
Now, if you HAD compared an early 1950s Harley with a car from that same time period, the Harley would probably come out better, because neither one had pollution controls and it would work out exactly as you say (less weight=less pollution)
Are velomobiles allowed on bike paths? because they certainly aren't allowed on freeways.
There are places in Minnesota where the ONLY bridges that cross a river are either freeway or bike path, which sucks for someone like me who rides a moped (which is banned from both freeways AND bike paths). For example, the only way to get from Burnsville to Bloomington by city street is to detour through Shakopee, which adds an extra 22 miles to what would otherwise be a 7 mile drive in a car.
Don't forget the joy of being in a small office (with windows that don't open) where half of your co-workers show up hot, sweaty and stinky, because they rode a bike 10 miles in 80F weather.
Using an electric motor pretty much removes the need for a transmission at all.
Electric motors have massive amounts of torque compared to combustion engines (meaning you don't need the low gears) and have much higher maximum RPM (so you don't need the high gears either)
The important part isn't the membrane, it's the fact that the hole was smaller than the wavelength of the sound, which,according to conventional theories about wave propagation, should not have allowed any sound though, membrane or no membrane
I'd like to see those sysadmin having a problem with their checks and being told "no no, you can't talk to anyone in HR or the payroll department directly, are you crazy? Please open a ticket and wait for a reply, an intern will get back to you in 24 hours or less".
Most of the places I have worked at had this exact setup, usually because payroll/HR was in a completely different state, thousands of miles away. (They would let the managers do the initial interviewing/hiring, but all other HR-related stuff had to be done over the phone)
Takes years of neglect and careful abandonment to make a BOFH. You have to be exposed to the worst of human behavior, on a daily basis, for years, with no possible outlet, and no compensation / consideration, before a BOFH is born.
If this is true, then I was already a BOFH by the time I was 14. It's truly a wonder that I didn't turn into some sort of homicidal maniac (there is always the future though...).
[If you are curious, I grew up in a small town (2500 people) and went to a small K-12 school (80-120 students per grade). I was picked on, teased, and made to be the butt of every joke, non-stop by 90% of my "peers", from kindergarten all the way though 11th grade (it was the same group of "peers" for the whole 12 years). Even the few people who had been my friends at a young age had become my tormenters by the time we hit junior high. There is nothing worse than being tormented daily by people who know you well enough to know the very best ways to make you suffer. The recent rash of school shootings in the US proves that my childhood situation wasn't entirely unique (and shows that the problem is getting worse), the only difference in my case being a lack of easy access to weapons. I still get bad anxiety in social situations even now, at age 34, due to being ridiculed and rejected so often as a child. This isn't the typical "social anxiety" that many people seem to suffer from, I have no problem with large crowds or total strangers, it's only the small "friendly" social groups (workplace, bar, etc) that make me want to hide/run away, because I feel as though I will never be able to fit in or be accepted by the group.]
Rich Saudis in need of organ transplants have the work done in hospitals operated by Israel.
Actually, most Rich Saudis come to the US for major medical procedures, specifically the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN. It has gotten so bad that many of the hotels and taxi services in Rochester now have their storefront signs in both English and Arabic.
If you are looking for enemies of Israel, the LAST place you should look is the US.
The US (and it's WWII allies), are the ones responsible for creating Israel in the first place, and without CONSTANT military support from the US, Israel would quickly cease to exist.
If a bunch of crazy Jewish terrorists WANT to attack the US, I'm all for it. Hopefully it will wake people up and make them question why we have been propping up a failed ideal (and pissing off the Arabs) for the last 60 years.
It's the new sleeper-agent model, it's designed to to age naturally so that doesn't look suspicious after living in the same neighborhood for 20 years (common problem with androids and immortals)
Just because China or Russia would do it too (given the chance) doesn't make it right. The US needs to stop interfering with the rest of the world's affairs. The US especially needs to tell Israel to go get stuffed. They have been wasting money (and making enemies) for over 60 years, protecting a bunch of people who most definitely don't need (or deserve) protecting. The Jews need to either make peace with their neighbors, or go find someplace else to hide, preferably somewhere that isn't someone else's ancient holy land.
I can't imagine what those people were thinking when they set up Israel where they did, were they TRYING to piss off the Arabs?. It would be like a bunch of Gaelic Pagans suddenly deciding that the Vatican City now belongs to the Irish, and staging a permanent hostile takeover (backed up by the most powerful military in the world).
The US IS the sole cause of all the current evils in the world. (not counting the crazyness that is North Korea)
Every enemy that the US currently faces was created by US foreign policy. The Arabs wouldn't be pissed at the US if it wasn't for the US support of Israel, Mexico and South America wouldn't be in a constant state of civil war if it wasn't for the US war on drugs, and Asia wouldn't be the garbage pile that it is if US Trade Policy favored US labor instead of corporate profits.
I was with you right up until you said "hacking the brain with radio",
Unless by "radio" you really meant "television", and by "hacking the brain" you really meant "turning it into mush with mindless reality TV shows", in which case you would be totally correct.
Slashdot Mirror
What's more profitable to BP? William Randolph Hearst could have switched to cheaper hemp-based paper for his newspapers in the 1920s, but because of his massive investments in timber and paper-making, it was more profitable to him to attack hemp-based paper instead. He chose to do it by using his media empire to demonize hemp and marijuana instead of through patent-warfare, but it's no different.
Powerful people always attack new technology that threatens their investments, even if that new technology might benefit for society as a whole.
BP has 2 choices, it can adopt the future technology of solar and be just one player among thousands, or it can cling to it's massive oil land investments by fighting against the future of solar (though patents) and remain one of the top players for at least long enough for the current board of directors to get a nice fat retirement check.
How would you tell the difference between BP-owned submarine patents, or just some pie-in-the-sky solar corporation that ran out of capital and died before releasing any products (that still managed to file patents before dying).
From the outside, both cases would look identical. A brand-new company files article of incorporation, registers some patents, and then nothing is ever heard from them again.
It does not matter if you use fossil fuel heat if the electric controls don't work.
Milli-volt gas valves.
If you use natural gas for heat and have a system with a pilot flame, this setup will guarantee you have heat no matter what happens with the power. It uses a thermopile to generate a very small voltage direct from the pilot flame, and this is enough voltage to power the milli-volt gas valve. They work best with mechanical thermostats, the digital ones will need a battery in the thermostat.
Someone, at some point in the distant past, had installed one of these on the main boiler in my house, which totally saved us when we lost power for an entire week when it was still 30-40F outside.
They could have patented them under a completely independant shell company. Just because you did the research doesn't mean you have to be the one to patent it, especially if you are just trying to stop other research.
New study shows that parents who lack parenting skills (and can't control their kids) admit to giving their kids more soda than parents who know better
"Tell me, Slashdot, how difficult would it be to rewrite an insurance billing system to aggregate a policyholder's out-of-pocket costs?"
you forget the part about needing to run on a PDP-11 and interface with an existing billing system written in the early 1970s
It wasn't the fact that they sent something that is purely for entertainment, the problem is that the entertainment chosen isn't usable by anyone who is currently up there. The doll is Japanese-only, and none of them speak Japanese.
I just thought they would have been better off with a few pounds of chocolate or something, instead of a toy that none of them can use.
It costs $5000-$10,000 per pound to ship things into space, and they sent a talking companion robot that doesn't even speak the same language as any of the astronauts?
Obviously, the more mass of fuel you feed into the engine, the more mass of exhaust you will get out of it, but it's not the raw volume of exhaust that matters, it's the particular toxicity and enviromental impact of each pollutant. Carbon Monoxide (CO) is toxic at 700 parts per million, while Carbon Dioxide (CO2, converted from CO by the catalytic converter) isn't toxic until 20,000 parts per million. You can't really count CO2 as a pollutant, since it is essentially non-toxic and the amount produced by every car on earth is miniscule compared to the amount produced by every non-plant life form on earth, so once you subtract the CO2 (and water, also produced by the cat) from the total exhaust, motorcycles produce more toxic/reactive pollution per mile than cars.
This isn't to say that motorcycles couldn't be designed better and beat cars in every category of emission, but it would be too heavy, bulky, and expensive to be commercially viable. There is barely enough room for a decent muffler already as it is.
You can't reload with a custom rom if the phone uses a signed bootloader (which motorola is notorious for doing), or in the case of the article's author, you are "banned" from doing so by your employer (his employer bans rooted phones from accessing active sync)
The mythbusters tests were run using bikes and cars from the 80s, 90s, and 2000s. The poor aerodynamics and a lack of a catalytic converter on any of the bikes offset any "savings" gained by having a lighter vehicle. Just because it's smaller doesn't automatically mean it pollutes less.
What is so "rubbery" about these stats: "the motorcycle used 28% less fuel than the comparable decade car and emitted 30% fewer carbon dioxide emissions, but it emitted 416% more hydrocarbons, 3,220% more oxides of nitrogen and 8,065% more carbon monoxide."
Now, if you HAD compared an early 1950s Harley with a car from that same time period, the Harley would probably come out better, because neither one had pollution controls and it would work out exactly as you say (less weight=less pollution)
Are velomobiles allowed on bike paths? because they certainly aren't allowed on freeways.
There are places in Minnesota where the ONLY bridges that cross a river are either freeway or bike path, which sucks for someone like me who rides a moped (which is banned from both freeways AND bike paths). For example, the only way to get from Burnsville to Bloomington by city street is to detour through Shakopee, which adds an extra 22 miles to what would otherwise be a 7 mile drive in a car.
Don't forget the joy of being in a small office (with windows that don't open) where half of your co-workers show up hot, sweaty and stinky, because they rode a bike 10 miles in 80F weather.
Using an electric motor pretty much removes the need for a transmission at all.
Electric motors have massive amounts of torque compared to combustion engines (meaning you don't need the low gears) and have much higher maximum RPM (so you don't need the high gears either)
The important part isn't the membrane, it's the fact that the hole was smaller than the wavelength of the sound, which,according to conventional theories about wave propagation, should not have allowed any sound though, membrane or no membrane
I'd like to see those sysadmin having a problem with their checks and being told "no no, you can't talk to anyone in HR or the payroll department directly, are you crazy? Please open a ticket and wait for a reply, an intern will get back to you in 24 hours or less".
Most of the places I have worked at had this exact setup, usually because payroll/HR was in a completely different state, thousands of miles away. (They would let the managers do the initial interviewing/hiring, but all other HR-related stuff had to be done over the phone)
Takes years of neglect and careful abandonment to make a BOFH. You have to be exposed to the worst of human behavior, on a daily basis, for years, with no possible outlet, and no compensation / consideration, before a BOFH is born.
If this is true, then I was already a BOFH by the time I was 14. It's truly a wonder that I didn't turn into some sort of homicidal maniac (there is always the future though...).
[If you are curious, I grew up in a small town (2500 people) and went to a small K-12 school (80-120 students per grade). I was picked on, teased, and made to be the butt of every joke, non-stop by 90% of my "peers", from kindergarten all the way though 11th grade (it was the same group of "peers" for the whole 12 years). Even the few people who had been my friends at a young age had become my tormenters by the time we hit junior high. There is nothing worse than being tormented daily by people who know you well enough to know the very best ways to make you suffer. The recent rash of school shootings in the US proves that my childhood situation wasn't entirely unique (and shows that the problem is getting worse), the only difference in my case being a lack of easy access to weapons.
I still get bad anxiety in social situations even now, at age 34, due to being ridiculed and rejected so often as a child. This isn't the typical "social anxiety" that many people seem to suffer from, I have no problem with large crowds or total strangers, it's only the small "friendly" social groups (workplace, bar, etc) that make me want to hide/run away, because I feel as though I will never be able to fit in or be accepted by the group.]
Rich Saudis in need of organ transplants have the work done in hospitals operated by Israel.
Actually, most Rich Saudis come to the US for major medical procedures, specifically the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN. It has gotten so bad that many of the hotels and taxi services in Rochester now have their storefront signs in both English and Arabic.
If you are looking for enemies of Israel, the LAST place you should look is the US.
The US (and it's WWII allies), are the ones responsible for creating Israel in the first place, and without CONSTANT military support from the US, Israel would quickly cease to exist.
If a bunch of crazy Jewish terrorists WANT to attack the US, I'm all for it. Hopefully it will wake people up and make them question why we have been propping up a failed ideal (and pissing off the Arabs) for the last 60 years.
The US is backing ALL the sides, in the hope that they will just kill each other off.
Religion is nothing more than (barely) controlled insanity. Especially Islam.
There must be something in the water (or the sand) in the Middle East that makes people crazy.
It's the new sleeper-agent model, it's designed to to age naturally so that doesn't look suspicious after living in the same neighborhood for 20 years (common problem with androids and immortals)
Just because China or Russia would do it too (given the chance) doesn't make it right. The US needs to stop interfering with the rest of the world's affairs. The US especially needs to tell Israel to go get stuffed. They have been wasting money (and making enemies) for over 60 years, protecting a bunch of people who most definitely don't need (or deserve) protecting. The Jews need to either make peace with their neighbors, or go find someplace else to hide, preferably somewhere that isn't someone else's ancient holy land.
I can't imagine what those people were thinking when they set up Israel where they did, were they TRYING to piss off the Arabs?. It would be like a bunch of Gaelic Pagans suddenly deciding that the Vatican City now belongs to the Irish, and staging a permanent hostile takeover (backed up by the most powerful military in the world).
The US IS the sole cause of all the current evils in the world. (not counting the crazyness that is North Korea)
Every enemy that the US currently faces was created by US foreign policy. The Arabs wouldn't be pissed at the US if it wasn't for the US support of Israel, Mexico and South America wouldn't be in a constant state of civil war if it wasn't for the US war on drugs, and Asia wouldn't be the garbage pile that it is if US Trade Policy favored US labor instead of corporate profits.
I was with you right up until you said "hacking the brain with radio",
Unless by "radio" you really meant "television", and by "hacking the brain" you really meant "turning it into mush with mindless reality TV shows", in which case you would be totally correct.