When companies report that their solar solution costs $X a watt, is this figure a steady watt/hour figure (e.g 1000W = 1kw/h) during which time the sun is shining on the pannels, or watts generated per hour of direct sunlight, 8 hrs of direct sunlight, every odd Tuesday, what?
Watt is a unit of power, not energy. So its watts (presumably, in some specified lighting conditions), not "watt/hour".
I always assumed it's a steady watt/hour figure but in this case $1000 would give you 1KWH while they were running, which gives you (assuming you have a battery storage solution) a production of 180KW/H a month (assuming 6hrs of "good" sunlight a day for 30 days.)
Assuming it was average output per 6 hours of usable time a day (which its probably not, its more likely the peak at the best conditions), and presuming also that surface area limits are not an issue (which they may well be), and that $1/watt was the current cost, rather than an estimate of what the technology would eventually provide, yes, $1000 would get you panels that would produce ~$180 kW-h (not kW/h) per month.
So what charity gets the money? Is it the usual suspects--sick kids and Africa?
I dunno. Is it?
Why not the EFF, or FSF? Why not Wikipedia?
Shouldn't you do the work to find out that it isn't those things before you whine about it not being them?
Anyhow, here's the deal: you come up with something that people are willing to pay money for you and that you are willing to donate the proceeds from to charity, and you can decide which charity it goes to.
It's my understanding that the recent anti-child porn bill would enforce civil penalties of $300k per instance in cases where a company actually honors such a contract on finding child porn - or images of naked children, or cartoons of naked children (watch out, Simpsons Movie rippers), or images of statues of naked children (David, get out your ID).
If they honored a contract guaranteeing privacy, it would be impossible for them to find the material in the first place, since they wouldn't be examining any images, etc., unnecessary to the repair of the computer.
But, yes, a contract term requiring someone not report evidence of crime to the authorities is likely to be without effect as contrary to public policy, except where it simply makes adherence to existing privacy laws/regulations that restrict certain disclosures, even to law enforcement, a condition of the contract.
I don't know what it is about these cars of tomorrow, but they do not look attractive at all.
Its a matter of taste, I guess, but that's actually one of the most attractive cars I've seen in a while. I suppose if your idea of "attractive" is "looks exactly like every other car on the road", that wouldn't be the case.
Apparently the people who buy these cars feel like they need to announce to the world that they just bought an overly expensive golf-cart all under the guise of saving the planet.
The car in the article neither looks nor seems to perform anything like any golf cart I've ever heard of, so I can't see your point at all.
I am. You, clearly, aren't. PDF e-books are doing quite well. Dedicated readers, less so, though each successive generation of readers is addressing some the reasons that made the last generation of dedicated readers unsuccessful. Will this generation be the one that makes dedicated e-book readers ubiquitous? Probably not, IMO.
in 6 months, eat crow
I doubt it. E-books have been getting more popular all the time. If they vanish in 6 months, sure, I'll be wrong. But that's not going to happen.
this is not the first time ebooks were attempted
No, its the most recent round of dedicated readers hoping to capitalize on the popularity of electronic books, which are not "being attempted", they are well-established. And, as I said, I'm not really impressed by the current round of dedicated readers, but its sheer willful ignorance or dishonesty to say that e-books don't offer any advantages over paper. (Which is not to say paper doesn't have advantages of its own, too; there is no reason one medium must be universally better rather than each having utility.)
and they perennially appeal to those who don't get it
IOW: e-books are increasingly popular and successful in the market, due to people who have different preferences than you, and for some reason you resent this.
the best book reader is wood pulp, pressed and cut into pages
The questions was the best e-book reader, not the best book reader.
eBooks to me are like electronic voting or verbally asking computers natural language questions rather than using a keyboard: weird technofetishist fantasies that don't improve upon existing technology
E-books certainly improve on paper books in information density and (with certain reader software and devices) search functionality, at a bare minimum. Whether those are important features for any given user or not will depend on the user (and will often very from use-to-use even for the same user.)
To say simply that they "don't improve on existing technology" seems to me to be a weird technophobic self-delusion.
you watch, kindle, and the sony reader will be forgotten in 6 months, like all the previous eBook tech that came with great fanfare and disappeared
I dunno about that "all the previous eBook tech" thing: "Laptop+Acrobat Reader" doesn't seem to have disappeared. Neither has "Desktop+Acrobate Reader". For my money, those are still the best e-book readers (laptop being more portable, but the desktop with the 20.1" display is better otherwise.)
Dedicated readers are still mostly too small for the things I'd prefer to use them for (paperback-sized readers are fine for novels, but there are reasons that technical books tend to be larger in paper, and those concerns don't go away when you switch medium), and really I'd prefer a non-dedicated letter-sized tablet PC with a full color, e-ink-type display as an e-book reader. So I won't be surprised if this round of dedicated readers fails, too.
eBooks don't improve upon real books folks, they simply don't
Repeating the same claim ad nauseum won't make it true. There are clearly some features that eBooks have (or at least, can have) that hardcopy books do not support (search, hyperlinks), and these features are clearly of utility to at least some people.
eBooks may not be better for you: it may be that for every use you have for books, the advantages of the dead-tree medium outweigh the features available in the electronic medium that the dead-tree version lacks. But that's certainly not the case for every reader.
All your solutions seem to include throwing away about $50.
His first point is "use coated inkjet paper, not plain paper". While that may slightly increase the per page costs, it avoids ruining, and thus throwing out, the ink cartridges.
The ones that involve throwing out the ink cartridges only involve doing so once your usage pattern has resulted in them being useless for consistent printing. He does leave out the obvious corollary "If your usage pattern has you reaching the point where cartridges need to be thrown out because they won't perform well on a regular basis, you need to consider getting something other than an inkjet printer."
As he points out, when printer manufacturers didn't have cartridges that nagged or simply quit, the lack of consumer education resulted, instead, in rampant banding problems with inkjet printers. There is a point where, whether the printer will try to print with it or not, having ink in a cartridge does not mean the cartridge is usable.
(1) Photos [yeah, you've been able to send them out for processing since digital cameras were available, you still get the most flexibility with your own printer.] (2) Variety of available special-purpose/project papers, etc. (3) Lower fixed costs
There is a *lot* more oil in the ground than we have used up to this point.
How much oil is in the ground is immaterial to, well, just about anything.
We can manufacture oil today (using other energy sources.)
Yes, and from the right stocks we can even do it so that the energy cost to do so is less than the energy extractable from the oil, so its even potentially useful, but that too is largely immaterial.
Oil Energy is a small fraction of our economy (less than 1/20th).
It may be a small fraction of the economy, but its rather strongly entrenched in its role. Additionally, oil is rather strongly entrenched for other uses (plastics, etc.) Increases in the price of oil (including those which would make substitutes more viable) have the a strong effect on other prices in the economy.
We use oil because it's portable but most other energy sources are cheaper.
We use oil for the things we use it for because all (short-run) costs considered, its the cheapest for those uses. Coal may be cheaper in bulk per BTU, but that hardly makes it cheaper in practice unless you are looking for fuel for a large power plant.
If there where a real oil shortage on the horizon we would be looking into coal powered cars
We call those electric (including plug-in hybrid cars), since coal is the primary fuel for large scale electricity generation. Surprisingly enough, "we", or at least GM, Ford, Toyota and several other automakers, are "looking into" these, and indeed several have announced plans to have them on the road in the next couple of years.
but there is still 20+ years of cheep oil
What, oil that makes sounds like chicks do? I don't think there is any of that.
20+ years of "cheap" oil may require a fairly loose understanding of "cheap", especially as many significant oil exporters are themselves rapidly developing, increasing domestic demand to the point where they will soon not be exporting oil. In fact, many people would say that current oil prices (seen--when inflation is considered--previously only during the oil crisis of the late 1970s and early 1980s and, prior to that, only in the late 19th century when oil's utility was first realized but both the locations and technology to extract it were still being discovered) are not at all "cheap" to start with.
The price of oil will increase and make alternatives feasible.
The increase in the price of oil may contribute to making alternatives feasible, but what that really means is that the number of hours of human labor that need to be exchanged for energy in any form will increase, which increases the cost of, pretty much, everything compared to labor.
The rate of consumption will also peak, it just lags production.
No, it will be in lockstep with production; there aren't substantial stockpiles to draw down, and there isn't substantial use of stockpiled fuel, so consumption is pretty tightly chained to production.
Oil prices skyrocket as demand out paces supply, we switch to alternatives, oil prices crash as supply now out paces demand.
Unlikely. The only reason demand (not consumption which is "quantity demand", a different thing from the demand curve) changes lag behind supply (not production, which is "quantity supplied") changes is that there are transition costs and barriers on the demand side. And that's what drives the price increases. Even as those are overcome, its more likely that demand approximately catches up to supply, dropping prices back from their peak to something like the prior levels with ongoing gradual increase than that things switch over and demand radically plummets.
Air travel now uses mostly high-bypass-ratio turbofans, which aren't suitable for even supersonic speeds, and not because supersonic engines aren't available, but because the trade-off between economy and speed favors such engines.
Scramjets for air travel sound nice, but the economics most likely won't support it except perhaps as a Concord-like showpiece that is mostly irrelevant.
Tell me - why would Apple accept Microsoft's money unless they ***NEEDED*** it?
Because it was money?
Supposedly, they were deadly enemies.
Corporations are rarely (though, still, it happens) anything like "deadly enemies" outside of the mind of their respective fanboys. They were, of course, competitors in some markets, but MS was also the vendor of a software package that Apple felt was important for its platform. They weren't "deadly enemies", they were companies that were each trying to make money. Apple would take MS's money because it was money, and the strings attached didn't outweight the utility of the cash.
Which, I suspect, is why the best shows on the air (my personal vote is for "The Wire" and "Dexter") have been HBO/showcase et. al., 1 hour timeslot really means basically 1 hour that way.
1 hour slots on HBO/Showtime tend to have less than one hour of show in them, by several minutes, though its not as far short of the full hour as on commercial networks. And the filler is in institials at the ends of the time slot, rather than interruptions in the flow of the show.
The easy solution rather then removing IE - why not just include two browsers on your operating system? I seriously think most users would like for the 'e' on their desktop regardless.
Especially since, if they had to include two browsers, MS would include IE and the least attractive browser to the average user they could find. Probably Lynx.
The question is this, which is poorly phrased in the summary:
When in a stressful event, does our perception of time actually slow down in such a way that we can experience more?
I am aware that that is the question. I am saying that, insofar as any such effect on the perception of time has been inferred to exist based on anecdotal experience, it has always been intimately linked to focussing attention on the stressor event which is suggested to produce the effect, so a test which measures the ability to track events unrelated to the stressor event is a poor test which cannot be expected to be of much utility in disproving or confirming the existence of such an hypothesized effect.
The whole experiment seems misguided. I mean, to the extent that such an effect has been suggested to exist at all, it seems to be described as being tied to attention focussed on a stressing event that produces an adrenaline rush and which concentrates attention on that event. It doesn't seem reasonable to expect that you'd be able to detect the effect by seeing how fast people can read off numbers unrelated to the stressing event; sure, you might see an increase in the speed there if the effect was real, you might also see no effect, or see a decrease if the effect on focussing attention on specific events outweighed the perceptual "slowdown".
While, of course, the slowdown being an artifact of memory rather than a change in perception that actually happens in real time is a reasonable speculation, the experiment described doesn't seem to be one that would reliably differentiate between the two cases.
I know "US Government Caught Manipulating Wikipedia" is a cool title, but seriously, does anyone think the US government, the CIA or the Vatican would be stupid enough to get caught if they actually wanted to influence a wikipedia article?
Why not? Its hardly as if the US government hasn't gotten cuaght doing lots of things where it had a much greater interest in avoiding being caught.
Once you understand it, Javascript is an awesome language.
...if you like that kind of thing.
It's C/C++/Java-like syntax hides its fundamentally functional underpinnings.
I like functional underpinnings. They can make for an awesome language.
I'm not all that fond of hiding them behind "C/C++/Java-like syntax", which is pretty much the opposite of "awesome". Nothing against C or Java, those are fine languages in their own areas; their syntax is appropriate to their nature.
Newbie. Many of us remember well the times before AOL and MSN dumped their user mass onto Internet. When they were proprietary BBS networks, everthing was well in the world. Spam was almost non-existent, you didn't have to explain everything to the users, who were clever enough to figure out that inability to ping vax.ox.ac.uk didn't mean you had to reinstall your OS or call a guy in Bangalore to help you. The lion was grazing with the sheep. Or at least devouring them quietly.
No, before AOL, everyone in internet discussion forums (mostly, Usenet newsgroups) complained about, e.g., all the problems caused by FIDOnetters instead of AOLers, and talking, in much the same way you talk about the time before AOL/MSN, about the time before FIDOnet
Until OOXML is ubiquitous, which will not happen for several years, there is no reason to not push ODF instead, particularly because ODF's got quite a bit of momentum internationally.
More, any effort wasted making a F/OSS office application a second-class alternative to MSOffice 2007 by trying to implement OOXML is not being used implementing compelling features in F/OSS office applications that would give people a reason to choose the F/OSS application over MS Office.
MS Office isn't well entrenched in industry yet, so the compelling course for F/OSS competitors should be to give people a good reason to "upgrade" from Office 2003 and previous to the F/OSS offering, not providing a transition path from Office 2007.
Slashdot Mirror
Watt is a unit of power, not energy. So its watts (presumably, in some specified lighting conditions), not "watt/hour".
Assuming it was average output per 6 hours of usable time a day (which its probably not, its more likely the peak at the best conditions), and presuming also that surface area limits are not an issue (which they may well be), and that $1/watt was the current cost, rather than an estimate of what the technology would eventually provide, yes, $1000 would get you panels that would produce ~$180 kW-h (not kW/h) per month.
I dunno. Is it?
Shouldn't you do the work to find out that it isn't those things before you whine about it not being them?
Anyhow, here's the deal: you come up with something that people are willing to pay money for you and that you are willing to donate the proceeds from to charity, and you can decide which charity it goes to.
If they honored a contract guaranteeing privacy, it would be impossible for them to find the material in the first place, since they wouldn't be examining any images, etc., unnecessary to the repair of the computer.
But, yes, a contract term requiring someone not report evidence of crime to the authorities is likely to be without effect as contrary to public policy, except where it simply makes adherence to existing privacy laws/regulations that restrict certain disclosures, even to law enforcement, a condition of the contract.
Its a matter of taste, I guess, but that's actually one of the most attractive cars I've seen in a while. I suppose if your idea of "attractive" is "looks exactly like every other car on the road", that wouldn't be the case.
The car in the article neither looks nor seems to perform anything like any golf cart I've ever heard of, so I can't see your point at all.
Perhaps because, while you prefer a webmail client, you want to be able to add features on your own, and have control of your own server. From TFS:
Probably not a compelling reason for most Gmail users to switch, but this is Slashdot, not a forum directed at the average user.
I am. You, clearly, aren't. PDF e-books are doing quite well. Dedicated readers, less so, though each successive generation of readers is addressing some the reasons that made the last generation of dedicated readers unsuccessful. Will this generation be the one that makes dedicated e-book readers ubiquitous? Probably not, IMO.
I doubt it. E-books have been getting more popular all the time. If they vanish in 6 months, sure, I'll be wrong. But that's not going to happen.
No, its the most recent round of dedicated readers hoping to capitalize on the popularity of electronic books, which are not "being attempted", they are well-established. And, as I said, I'm not really impressed by the current round of dedicated readers, but its sheer willful ignorance or dishonesty to say that e-books don't offer any advantages over paper. (Which is not to say paper doesn't have advantages of its own, too; there is no reason one medium must be universally better rather than each having utility.)
IOW: e-books are increasingly popular and successful in the market, due to people who have different preferences than you, and for some reason you resent this.
The questions was the best e-book reader, not the best book reader.
E-books certainly improve on paper books in information density and (with certain reader software and devices) search functionality, at a bare minimum. Whether those are important features for any given user or not will depend on the user (and will often very from use-to-use even for the same user.)
To say simply that they "don't improve on existing technology" seems to me to be a weird technophobic self-delusion.
I dunno about that "all the previous eBook tech" thing: "Laptop+Acrobat Reader" doesn't seem to have disappeared. Neither has "Desktop+Acrobate Reader". For my money, those are still the best e-book readers (laptop being more portable, but the desktop with the 20.1" display is better otherwise.)
Dedicated readers are still mostly too small for the things I'd prefer to use them for (paperback-sized readers are fine for novels, but there are reasons that technical books tend to be larger in paper, and those concerns don't go away when you switch medium), and really I'd prefer a non-dedicated letter-sized tablet PC with a full color, e-ink-type display as an e-book reader. So I won't be surprised if this round of dedicated readers fails, too.
Repeating the same claim ad nauseum won't make it true. There are clearly some features that eBooks have (or at least, can have) that hardcopy books do not support (search, hyperlinks), and these features are clearly of utility to at least some people.
eBooks may not be better for you: it may be that for every use you have for books, the advantages of the dead-tree medium outweigh the features available in the electronic medium that the dead-tree version lacks. But that's certainly not the case for every reader.
In what theory, exactly?
His first point is "use coated inkjet paper, not plain paper". While that may slightly increase the per page costs, it avoids ruining, and thus throwing out, the ink cartridges.
The ones that involve throwing out the ink cartridges only involve doing so once your usage pattern has resulted in them being useless for consistent printing. He does leave out the obvious corollary "If your usage pattern has you reaching the point where cartridges need to be thrown out because they won't perform well on a regular basis, you need to consider getting something other than an inkjet printer."
As he points out, when printer manufacturers didn't have cartridges that nagged or simply quit, the lack of consumer education resulted, instead, in rampant banding problems with inkjet printers. There is a point where, whether the printer will try to print with it or not, having ink in a cartridge does not mean the cartridge is usable.
(1) Photos [yeah, you've been able to send them out for processing since digital cameras were available, you still get the most flexibility with your own printer.]
(2) Variety of available special-purpose/project papers, etc.
(3) Lower fixed costs
How much oil is in the ground is immaterial to, well, just about anything.
Yes, and from the right stocks we can even do it so that the energy cost to do so is less than the energy extractable from the oil, so its even potentially useful, but that too is largely immaterial.
It may be a small fraction of the economy, but its rather strongly entrenched in its role. Additionally, oil is rather strongly entrenched for other uses (plastics, etc.) Increases in the price of oil (including those which would make substitutes more viable) have the a strong effect on other prices in the economy.
We use oil for the things we use it for because all (short-run) costs considered, its the cheapest for those uses. Coal may be cheaper in bulk per BTU, but that hardly makes it cheaper in practice unless you are looking for fuel for a large power plant.
We call those electric (including plug-in hybrid cars), since coal is the primary fuel for large scale electricity generation. Surprisingly enough, "we", or at least GM, Ford, Toyota and several other automakers, are "looking into" these, and indeed several have announced plans to have them on the road in the next couple of years.
What, oil that makes sounds like chicks do? I don't think there is any of that.
20+ years of "cheap" oil may require a fairly loose understanding of "cheap", especially as many significant oil exporters are themselves rapidly developing, increasing domestic demand to the point where they will soon not be exporting oil. In fact, many people would say that current oil prices (seen--when inflation is considered--previously only during the oil crisis of the late 1970s and early 1980s and, prior to that, only in the late 19th century when oil's utility was first realized but both the locations and technology to extract it were still being discovered) are not at all "cheap" to start with.
Well, unless you look at the turning radius, in which case they aren't very much the same at all.
No one said we were. So what?
The increase in the price of oil may contribute to making alternatives feasible, but what that really means is that the number of hours of human labor that need to be exchanged for energy in any form will increase, which increases the cost of, pretty much, everything compared to labor.
No, it will be in lockstep with production; there aren't substantial stockpiles to draw down, and there isn't substantial use of stockpiled fuel, so consumption is pretty tightly chained to production.
Unlikely. The only reason demand (not consumption which is "quantity demand", a different thing from the demand curve) changes lag behind supply (not production, which is "quantity supplied") changes is that there are transition costs and barriers on the demand side. And that's what drives the price increases. Even as those are overcome, its more likely that demand approximately catches up to supply, dropping prices back from their peak to something like the prior levels with ongoing gradual increase than that things switch over and demand radically plummets.
Air travel now uses mostly high-bypass-ratio turbofans, which aren't suitable for even supersonic speeds, and not because supersonic engines aren't available, but because the trade-off between economy and speed favors such engines.
Scramjets for air travel sound nice, but the economics most likely won't support it except perhaps as a Concord-like showpiece that is mostly irrelevant.
Because it was money?
Corporations are rarely (though, still, it happens) anything like "deadly enemies" outside of the mind of their respective fanboys. They were, of course, competitors in some markets, but MS was also the vendor of a software package that Apple felt was important for its platform. They weren't "deadly enemies", they were companies that were each trying to make money. Apple would take MS's money because it was money, and the strings attached didn't outweight the utility of the cash.
Huh?
MiG 29 - Mach 2.3
F-14 - Mach 2.5+
Kfir - Mach 2.3
JAS 39 Gripen - Mach 2.0
1 hour slots on HBO/Showtime tend to have less than one hour of show in them, by several minutes, though its not as far short of the full hour as on commercial networks. And the filler is in institials at the ends of the time slot, rather than interruptions in the flow of the show.
Especially since, if they had to include two browsers, MS would include IE and the least attractive browser to the average user they could find. Probably Lynx.
I am aware that that is the question. I am saying that, insofar as any such effect on the perception of time has been inferred to exist based on anecdotal experience, it has always been intimately linked to focussing attention on the stressor event which is suggested to produce the effect, so a test which measures the ability to track events unrelated to the stressor event is a poor test which cannot be expected to be of much utility in disproving or confirming the existence of such an hypothesized effect.
The whole experiment seems misguided. I mean, to the extent that such an effect has been suggested to exist at all, it seems to be described as being tied to attention focussed on a stressing event that produces an adrenaline rush and which concentrates attention on that event. It doesn't seem reasonable to expect that you'd be able to detect the effect by seeing how fast people can read off numbers unrelated to the stressing event; sure, you might see an increase in the speed there if the effect was real, you might also see no effect, or see a decrease if the effect on focussing attention on specific events outweighed the perceptual "slowdown".
While, of course, the slowdown being an artifact of memory rather than a change in perception that actually happens in real time is a reasonable speculation, the experiment described doesn't seem to be one that would reliably differentiate between the two cases.
Why not? Its hardly as if the US government hasn't gotten cuaght doing lots of things where it had a much greater interest in avoiding being caught.
I like functional underpinnings. They can make for an awesome language.
I'm not all that fond of hiding them behind "C/C++/Java-like syntax", which is pretty much the opposite of "awesome". Nothing against C or Java, those are fine languages in their own areas; their syntax is appropriate to their nature.
No, Internetia est omnis divisa in partes tres....
No, before AOL, everyone in internet discussion forums (mostly, Usenet newsgroups) complained about, e.g., all the problems caused by FIDOnetters instead of AOLers, and talking, in much the same way you talk about the time before AOL/MSN, about the time before FIDOnet
More, any effort wasted making a F/OSS office application a second-class alternative to MSOffice 2007 by trying to implement OOXML is not being used implementing compelling features in F/OSS office applications that would give people a reason to choose the F/OSS application over MS Office.
MS Office isn't well entrenched in industry yet, so the compelling course for F/OSS competitors should be to give people a good reason to "upgrade" from Office 2003 and previous to the F/OSS offering, not providing a transition path from Office 2007.