Technically, if you (or the labs of any major electrical appliance manufacturer) could produce an incandescent bulb of sufficient efficiency, it would still be allowed to be sold.
Additionally, it's an example of much improved intelligence in lawmaking - legislating the result instead of the process. The actual subject of the law aside, it makes for a great precedent.
Even if someone couldn't talk their way around this "I represent a small business and want these phones for my employees / I have an extended family; everyone's getting phones at the next reunion with each other's numbers preprogrammed in; they've made their choices from the catalog and I need one of each of the following models," there's no reason they couldn't hit one phone store after another across a city.
Man, it's a good thing there's absolutely no way an odometer or one of these boxes (or its sensors) could be faked out, right? Because there wouldn't be any profit in doing that AT ALL.
Or are they going to track via inertia or GPS? In which case they wouldn't just be recording miles traveled, they'd be recording exactly where every car had ever gone over its entire life.
It must be to protect freedom. From terrorists. For the children.
Or you could sell cheap pre-paid phones without requesting any form of ID.
That doesn't seem to be an option in some countries - there's apparently a mandatory requirement to request and record ID on purchase of any cellular phone. I'm tempted to pay a bum twenty bucks to pick up my next phone for me. Or get together with twenty other people to make a bulk purchase under someone else's name.
Plus make the prosecution prove that they can stump up the 10% if necessary, on pain of immediately having their case thrown out and massive fines applied?
Hmm... perhaps 10% for corporations, 1% for individuals. Minus a fixed amount so that people with absolutely no funds could still technically bring lawsuits to a certain degree. Maybe make the amount somewhere in the five-figure range.
Perhaps the inconvenience of circumventing the paywall is enough to get some people to pay for access. Others will find ways around it
- and the majority of if-it's-not-loaded-in-one-second-screw-it websurfers will simply never bother trying to access it at all, or to consider the NYT as a news source.
There are a thousand free news sources. Is the NYT really that much better than ALL of them?
Easier to put them in the few yards of road leading up to traffic lights, and in parking spaces. Cars are more likely to be sitting there for minutes or hours, and it won't involve digging up every mile of main road.
Some toll roads might consider putting in linear inductors during construction, but only if they were hugely cheap per mile, didn't leak power to anywhere but cars, and there was a way to track and charge individual vehicles which drew on the power (and a way to deny it to anyone without authorization).
Still, a way to recharge at 80mph, especially on long interstate trips, could be very useful. If only there was a cheap way to do it - tearing up and retrofitting a million miles of highway ain't cheap. It's a pity that there isn't yet a type of road marker paint which could do the job. A strip of transparent, hardwearing, solar-absorbing, inductive-recharging-from-two-feet-away paint down the middle of each lane of blacktop might be just what the doctor ordered.
If they can work out a quick-charge method, it'll be a lot easier to roll out to absolutely everywhere. All an electrical refuelling station would need would be a capacitor or battery bank. It could be placed anywhere at all which was on the electrical grid, including any place where fuel trucks couldn't necessarily get to and any place which didn't have room for a huge set of underground tanks. You could have recharging stations in car parks (including multistory), in rented vacant lots, in private residences if you really wanted. Moving a gas station from A to B wouldn't involve six months' construction at point B, it would just be a semitrailer forklifting up the capacitors from A, trucking them to B, and dropping them off. One connection to the grid and a cheap modular micro-mart later, and you could be up and running in 24 hours.
A trickle-charge point (every bay in a car park, for example) would be even easier. One power point with retractable cord (and driveaway tension protector), one credit card swipe machine, that's it. You could manufacture and sell drop-in conversion units so carpark operators could convert one bay at a time.
Well, it's a shortage in those resources or a shortage in oil. Which one are various countries able to handle better?
The networks can be upgraded, too. And at least it's a centralized problem then. Perhaps it could be at least partially funded from the savings in road wear (tanker trucks and people driving to/from gas stations) and environmental costs?
Could be fun. Pull up to a station, buy a new cylindrical plate/mesh, unlock and pull the old one out of the side of your car, shove the new one in and twist to lock, throw the old one into the recycle bin next to the car, drive off.
You could even carry a spare one in the car itself, if they were small and light enough.
I wonder if it would be possible to lock the reactants into place inside the replaceable cell so that they wouldn't move around after oxidation and could therefore be more easily recharged? Garage power cell rechargers might be an option, then...
Or you'd have something in the garage which trickle-charged overnight and on weekends. (Induction chargers would be fun; you wouldn't need to remember to plug them in.) Even if you were burning through the entire range of the car every day, ten amps would be enough, and if you weren't, you could get away with proportionally less.
I suspect that people will use a combination of garage chargers and top-ups from public chargers at first, until the grid and fledgling garage charger industry adjust to swing things more that way and the electric vehicles start needing even less juice.
What could be interesting is it might boost interest in solar panels for charging - solar patches on cars, garages, houses, and car parks. This in turn could increase demand and interest in solar technology. It might also be interesting to insulate cars and put a thermocouple between inside and outside to harness the thermal effects of being parked in the sun.
Web surfing and replying to articles (including on Facebook). Gaming involving not getting fingermarks all over the screen, or any collaborative gaming which makes heavy use of typing. Size maybe, although some laptops do fold down into a tablet configuration. Or you could plug in some video glasses... although the resolution on those things still isn't really great these days until you get to the five-figure price range. Still, they work in even more cramped places than a tablet, so there's that going for them.
On top of that - writing articles. Taking notes. Blogging. Text-chatting, including Twittering. Creating business documents. Playing external media. Running/switching between OSes and applications of choice...
I can take my tablet on the subway and read things on it
I can take a book on the subway and do the same thing. I can also drop the book onto the subway platform without damaging it, read it in the open in any subway station without having it stolen, and from the day I buy it it won't cost me a dime in electricity or repairs. Not to mention that as long as I don't severely mistreat it, I'll still be able to read it perfectly well fifty years from now, or sell it in ten for 1/10 the original shelf price. I can even loan it to a friend for a couple of months without worrying too much over it.
As a bonus feature, Steve Jobs won't be releasing a thinner version of my book next year.
I wouldn't mind moving my library to an ebook which was waterproof, shockproof (dropping off a 20-storey building), could be read forever without needing to be charged, was cheap and ubiquitous enough that no-one would bother trying to steal it in the subway or from the front seat of a car, and whose contents were wholly and solely controlled by me. I've got most of that already (barring the waterproofing), and the only advantages of an ebook for me is that my library would take up a lot less space and I could carry multiple books on long flights without going over the carryon limit (I could even shove it in my pocket and have no carryon at all).
Honestly, there's no reason that a book should come in any format except text and RLE-image. Maybe an embeddable font. The only software should be a file organiser/selector and a page rendering engine, which itself should be as simple and bug-proof as humanly possible. They certainly shouldn't be able to have their software altered or their contents deleted from anywhere other than the book itself.
Well, let's see. Canada's successfully invaded the US. Canada's special forces are reckoned to be pretty much world's best. Canada's located close by, and relations are mostly good. Canada knows how to keep its military budget under 2% of GDP, instead of wasting ten times that much. Canada has a wonderful international reputation. Canada doesn't throw away trillions of dollars invading other countries. Canadian troops don't commit suicide by the thousands because they're choking on their own government's stupidity. No-one's attempted to invade Canada in the last three hundred years except the US, and they got their asses handed to them. No-one intelligent has attempted to invade Canada at all.
No-one in the world needs the US military. In fact, no-one in the world WANTS the US military except the US military and its contractors. If the US spontaneously disappeared up its own fundament tomorrow, countries currently allied to it would be more likely to heave a sigh of relief that they weren't being dragged into brain-dead expensive illegal invasions all over the place.
Given that Canada is not bleeding itself dry committing mass murder of civilians on the other side of the planet, is generally regarded as a good international neighbor, has half the percentage of GDP owed in debt, and is world-renowned for being significantly more badass than the USA - possibly because it doesn't spend half its budget trying to desperately convince everyone how badass it is - it's the ideal authority to take over and straighten out those functions that the US has proved it can't handle.
Come to think of it, Canada should probably step in to sort out the US's banking and financial system as well, because the US hasn't been able to do that properly either.
Oh, and healthcare.
And learning to use firearms properly.
And elections.
Lessons in not being a third-rate asshole generator probably wouldn't go astray, either.
Slashdot Mirror
Assuming you're not driving something from Rinspeed, of course. :)
Technically, if you (or the labs of any major electrical appliance manufacturer) could produce an incandescent bulb of sufficient efficiency, it would still be allowed to be sold.
Additionally, it's an example of much improved intelligence in lawmaking - legislating the result instead of the process. The actual subject of the law aside, it makes for a great precedent.
Exactly. If the game-prize-refilling company can get hold of a couple hundred prepaid phones, there's no reason anyone else can't.
Even if someone couldn't talk their way around this "I represent a small business and want these phones for my employees / I have an extended family; everyone's getting phones at the next reunion with each other's numbers preprogrammed in; they've made their choices from the catalog and I need one of each of the following models," there's no reason they couldn't hit one phone store after another across a city.
Man, it's a good thing there's absolutely no way an odometer or one of these boxes (or its sensors) could be faked out, right? Because there wouldn't be any profit in doing that AT ALL.
Or are they going to track via inertia or GPS? In which case they wouldn't just be recording miles traveled, they'd be recording exactly where every car had ever gone over its entire life.
It must be to protect freedom. From terrorists. For the children.
Did some marketing department tell you that? :)
Or you could sell cheap pre-paid phones without requesting any form of ID.
That doesn't seem to be an option in some countries - there's apparently a mandatory requirement to request and record ID on purchase of any cellular phone. I'm tempted to pay a bum twenty bucks to pick up my next phone for me. Or get together with twenty other people to make a bulk purchase under someone else's name.
Plus make the prosecution prove that they can stump up the 10% if necessary, on pain of immediately having their case thrown out and massive fines applied?
Hmm... perhaps 10% for corporations, 1% for individuals. Minus a fixed amount so that people with absolutely no funds could still technically bring lawsuits to a certain degree. Maybe make the amount somewhere in the five-figure range.
Perhaps the inconvenience of circumventing the paywall is enough to get some people to pay for access. Others will find ways around it
- and the majority of if-it's-not-loaded-in-one-second-screw-it websurfers will simply never bother trying to access it at all, or to consider the NYT as a news source.
There are a thousand free news sources. Is the NYT really that much better than ALL of them?
Now I can't stop thinking about a Jesus ghost with a huge cross under its sheet.
That's OK - there'll be an app for that. :)
Easier to put them in the few yards of road leading up to traffic lights, and in parking spaces. Cars are more likely to be sitting there for minutes or hours, and it won't involve digging up every mile of main road.
Some toll roads might consider putting in linear inductors during construction, but only if they were hugely cheap per mile, didn't leak power to anywhere but cars, and there was a way to track and charge individual vehicles which drew on the power (and a way to deny it to anyone without authorization).
Still, a way to recharge at 80mph, especially on long interstate trips, could be very useful. If only there was a cheap way to do it - tearing up and retrofitting a million miles of highway ain't cheap. It's a pity that there isn't yet a type of road marker paint which could do the job. A strip of transparent, hardwearing, solar-absorbing, inductive-recharging-from-two-feet-away paint down the middle of each lane of blacktop might be just what the doctor ordered.
If they can work out a quick-charge method, it'll be a lot easier to roll out to absolutely everywhere. All an electrical refuelling station would need would be a capacitor or battery bank. It could be placed anywhere at all which was on the electrical grid, including any place where fuel trucks couldn't necessarily get to and any place which didn't have room for a huge set of underground tanks. You could have recharging stations in car parks (including multistory), in rented vacant lots, in private residences if you really wanted. Moving a gas station from A to B wouldn't involve six months' construction at point B, it would just be a semitrailer forklifting up the capacitors from A, trucking them to B, and dropping them off. One connection to the grid and a cheap modular micro-mart later, and you could be up and running in 24 hours.
A trickle-charge point (every bay in a car park, for example) would be even easier. One power point with retractable cord (and driveaway tension protector), one credit card swipe machine, that's it. You could manufacture and sell drop-in conversion units so carpark operators could convert one bay at a time.
Well, it's a shortage in those resources or a shortage in oil. Which one are various countries able to handle better?
The networks can be upgraded, too. And at least it's a centralized problem then. Perhaps it could be at least partially funded from the savings in road wear (tanker trucks and people driving to/from gas stations) and environmental costs?
Could be fun. Pull up to a station, buy a new cylindrical plate/mesh, unlock and pull the old one out of the side of your car, shove the new one in and twist to lock, throw the old one into the recycle bin next to the car, drive off.
You could even carry a spare one in the car itself, if they were small and light enough.
I wonder if it would be possible to lock the reactants into place inside the replaceable cell so that they wouldn't move around after oxidation and could therefore be more easily recharged? Garage power cell rechargers might be an option, then...
Or you'd have something in the garage which trickle-charged overnight and on weekends. (Induction chargers would be fun; you wouldn't need to remember to plug them in.) Even if you were burning through the entire range of the car every day, ten amps would be enough, and if you weren't, you could get away with proportionally less.
I suspect that people will use a combination of garage chargers and top-ups from public chargers at first, until the grid and fledgling garage charger industry adjust to swing things more that way and the electric vehicles start needing even less juice.
What could be interesting is it might boost interest in solar panels for charging - solar patches on cars, garages, houses, and car parks. This in turn could increase demand and interest in solar technology. It might also be interesting to insulate cars and put a thermocouple between inside and outside to harness the thermal effects of being parked in the sun.
Lock up your wimmin! Sit on the front porch with your shotgun! Make loud statements about foreigners! :)
Web surfing and replying to articles (including on Facebook). Gaming involving not getting fingermarks all over the screen, or any collaborative gaming which makes heavy use of typing. Size maybe, although some laptops do fold down into a tablet configuration. Or you could plug in some video glasses... although the resolution on those things still isn't really great these days until you get to the five-figure price range. Still, they work in even more cramped places than a tablet, so there's that going for them.
On top of that - writing articles. Taking notes. Blogging. Text-chatting, including Twittering. Creating business documents. Playing external media. Running/switching between OSes and applications of choice...
Personally, I think I forgot to read past "soaking wet Asian girls". What were we discussing again?
I can take my tablet on the subway and read things on it
I can take a book on the subway and do the same thing. I can also drop the book onto the subway platform without damaging it, read it in the open in any subway station without having it stolen, and from the day I buy it it won't cost me a dime in electricity or repairs. Not to mention that as long as I don't severely mistreat it, I'll still be able to read it perfectly well fifty years from now, or sell it in ten for 1/10 the original shelf price. I can even loan it to a friend for a couple of months without worrying too much over it.
As a bonus feature, Steve Jobs won't be releasing a thinner version of my book next year.
Given that PDAs can play voice files, I wonder if there'll be an app for that?
I wouldn't mind moving my library to an ebook which was waterproof, shockproof (dropping off a 20-storey building), could be read forever without needing to be charged, was cheap and ubiquitous enough that no-one would bother trying to steal it in the subway or from the front seat of a car, and whose contents were wholly and solely controlled by me. I've got most of that already (barring the waterproofing), and the only advantages of an ebook for me is that my library would take up a lot less space and I could carry multiple books on long flights without going over the carryon limit (I could even shove it in my pocket and have no carryon at all).
Honestly, there's no reason that a book should come in any format except text and RLE-image. Maybe an embeddable font. The only software should be a file organiser/selector and a page rendering engine, which itself should be as simple and bug-proof as humanly possible. They certainly shouldn't be able to have their software altered or their contents deleted from anywhere other than the book itself.
Orwelltech CO2 detector sees you, citizen.
Oddly enough, this wittering about Moore's Law breaking down Real Soon Now is somehow not a repeat from, oh, I dunno, EVER.
Seriously, was there ever a year when someone wasn't ranting on a street corner that Technology Cannot Progress Further and The World Is Doomed?
Well, let's see. Canada's successfully invaded the US. Canada's special forces are reckoned to be pretty much world's best. Canada's located close by, and relations are mostly good. Canada knows how to keep its military budget under 2% of GDP, instead of wasting ten times that much. Canada has a wonderful international reputation. Canada doesn't throw away trillions of dollars invading other countries. Canadian troops don't commit suicide by the thousands because they're choking on their own government's stupidity. No-one's attempted to invade Canada in the last three hundred years except the US, and they got their asses handed to them. No-one intelligent has attempted to invade Canada at all.
No-one in the world needs the US military. In fact, no-one in the world WANTS the US military except the US military and its contractors. If the US spontaneously disappeared up its own fundament tomorrow, countries currently allied to it would be more likely to heave a sigh of relief that they weren't being dragged into brain-dead expensive illegal invasions all over the place.
Given that Canada is not bleeding itself dry committing mass murder of civilians on the other side of the planet, is generally regarded as a good international neighbor, has half the percentage of GDP owed in debt, and is world-renowned for being significantly more badass than the USA - possibly because it doesn't spend half its budget trying to desperately convince everyone how badass it is - it's the ideal authority to take over and straighten out those functions that the US has proved it can't handle.
Come to think of it, Canada should probably step in to sort out the US's banking and financial system as well, because the US hasn't been able to do that properly either.
Oh, and healthcare.
And learning to use firearms properly.
And elections.
Lessons in not being a third-rate asshole generator probably wouldn't go astray, either.