Totally agree with the "crappy little screen" comment. I have a Nokia phone that supposedly has web access, but the damn thing, while letting me put all kinds of pretty colours and ring tones on it, won't let me adjust the damn font size. I'm 51, and my eyesight is getting progressively worse, but Nokia seems to think that 8 point fonts - and white outline fonts on a cream background, for crissake - are going to be perfectly legible to me. Hint: they are not, and it's a pain in the ass to have to haul out my reading glasses every time I want to make a phone call. Surfing the web with it is just not on; too slow, too hard to read, too infuriating an experience.
Man, do I get pissed when people quote Watts when they should be using kWh. And a quick Energy Star search showed that the average 18-19 cu. ft. refrigerator uses between 390 and 400 kWh per year. That's about 1.1 kWh per day, which means on a 25% duty cycle, your draw would be about 275 W for six hours a day. If you assume 2 billion refrigerators at 1.1 kWh/year, the annual draw would be about 2.2 TWh.
Actually, IIRC, the greatest single user of electricity in the US is air conditioning. Wikipedia gives an example of a Chicago 2000 sq.ft. home with an air conditioner rated at 10 SEER in operation for 125 days per year. That home uses over 4,000 kWh per year for air conditioning, or about 10 times as much energy as it uses for the refrigerator. I can't recall the source, but I do recall reading a few years back that if every air conditioner in the US was upgraded to 12 SEER (many older units are still operating at 6-8 SEER), the US would not have needed to build a single new power plant in the last decade.
And, of course, the majority of those A/C units use ambient outside air as their heat sink, which reduces efficiency. If more people adopted the policies of environmental criminal G.W. Bush, who uses deep groundwater to cool his Crawford, TX ranch, instead of the policies of Nobel prize and Oscar winner Al Gore, whose Nashville home uses a whopping 200,000 kWh/year, or between 17-20 times the national average, why, we might be able to shut down some coal fired plants.
Would you rather pay for one robot to automate everything you own, or would you rather buy a new robotic car, a new robotic kitchen, a new robotic vacuum, a new robotic mop, a new robotic lawnmower, and so on?
I seem to recall an ad from the 1890's or so depicting a "universal electric motor" which came with a variety of attachments to perform different tasks. As soon as people figured out how to make small and reliable electric motors, these universal motors died out. Think of how many motors you have in your house: the fridge, washer, dryer, dishwasher, garbage disposal, coffee grinder, food processor, central air, vacuum cleaner, fans, etc. I think the same thing will happen with robots. The CPU/RAM/ROM will be dirt cheap, and the robot will be optimized for a particular task.
Look at what's happening with cars. Already we have cars that can parallel park themselves without any anthropomorphic robot involved. In a few more years, I don't doubt we'll have cars that can move in high speed convoys on the interstates, using GPS, radar, and other sensors to drive the car, all being run by some redundant processors without the need for a human-looking robot.
The zombie jokes are funny, but did anyone actually RTFA? The estimates are for 1.7 million to die, and some 9 million to be hospitalized. That's less than 11 million people in a population of over 300 million, and the ill are likely to disproportionally older (i.e. retired), or very young. So 3% of the population is incapacitated, and that's going to ruin society? I used to work at a call centre as an analyst; we had some 15 teams, and on any given day, most teams had one person out for some reason or another (ill, doctor/dentist appointment, sick child, etc.), and yet we seemed to function just fine. If we were short two or three people per team (which would be 15-25% of most teams), I'm pretty sure we could continue our jobs, although we wouldn't probably make our sales targets.
The article is not complete BS; I don't doubt we'd run out of medicine, and the hospitals would certainly be overcrowded, but I don't buy the apocalyptic scenario.
Sorry, I don't buy this. Since I'm a geezer, I have a bit of perspective. Sir Terry Matthews, formerly head of Mitel and Newbridge, and now running March Networks (and a billionaire to boot), once said about PC's "Why would anyone invest $3,500 on a secretary's desktop?". Well, it took a while, but we eventually found out that those investments did make sense, which is why most executive assistants now support four to five managers, instead of one. Similarly, span of control for many firms has increased, as managers have found ways to use computers and networks to manage their time (and monitor their employees) more effectively. I remember when firms use to generate $50,000/employee; last year, IBM generated approximately $250,000/employee. Absolutely, some of that is due to inflation, but some of that is also due to better implementation of IT.
Wal-Mart's issue with RFID seems to be similar to Terry's mistake: not sure how to deploy the technology. Reading TFA, it seems they are refocusing to concentrate on the stores supplied directly from their RFID equipped distribution centres. This only makes sense to me; try it on a small and controlled scale and work the details and bugs out before you try to go national. I mean, I'm only an engineer, and not a full time/. reader, so this idea of trying something small, see if it works, and then see if it can scale is probably alien to many of you.
Finally, I can say that after many years of working at gas stations in my teens, and restaurants in my university years, I have never - well, hardly ever, like once or twice - seen a "case" of liquid cans (be it motor oil, soup, or brake fluid) where the case of 24 or 36 or 48 cans did *NOT* contain the requisite number of cans, and that was back in pre-electronic days. I mean, they can hardly contain more (they wouldn't fit!), and any shortages would be immediately obvious. I've watched so many episodes on Food Network and Discovery of how items are produced and packaged, that I think they are very accurate in filling their cases , and I doubt very much that Wal-Mart is worried about the possibility of missing a can of soup. (One would think that they would simply measure pallets coming in by weight, but again, giving the reliability of suppliers, that might even be too expensive; a simple check of every 10,000 cases might be sufficient.)
In short, like most pioneers, Wal-Mart is finding their way. I'm sure Henry Ford made mistakes; I'm sure Alfred Sloan did as well. But by the late 1930's, the US assembly lines were the most efficient in the world, and once they were drawn into WWII, the Axis defeat was inevitable. I'm equally sure Wal-Mart has made mistakes in RFID deployment, but let's remember this, shall we? Wal-Mart is a pure service provider, in that they don't manufacture their own goods (Great Value products are produced by other firms under contract to Wal-Mart). Surely, all of us will benefit if the cost of distribution goes down, and as other firms adopt Wal-Mart's technologies, just as GM, Chrysler, and AMC all adopted Ford's techniques to drive down the cost of cars, the final cost to consumers will drop.
I understand why so many/. people hate M$ products that offer lousy security, limited backups, and incompatibilty (and I say that despite running XP S.2 with Office 2002 for about five years now with no serious problems) but why in the heck do you hate Wal-Mart? They don't make the products - they just try to provide them to you at the lowest possible price. If you don't like their stuff, don't buy it - it's not like M$ where if you some of their stuff, you end up buying a lot of their stuff just to get full functionality. If I buy a book at Wal-Mart, I can lend it to my brother or sister to read; if I buy Monopoly, I can invite anyone I want to play it; if my 12 year old daughter buys clothes, she can share/trade them with her friends.
The biggest complaint I hear about Wal-Mart is they offer lousy health-care benefits. So why
If they were really smart, they'd have been spending the last few years creating collaterized mortgage obligations (a not very difficult matrix algebra equation), and recomputing risks for sub-prime mortgages, again easy to do if you don't mind fudging some assumptions and outright lying about some others (hi, AGW fans!). Then they would have made billions, and once the scam was revealed, they'd be bailed out by Ben Bernanke, the Fed, and every European central bank. Manipulation of financial assets beats manipulation of physical assets every time.
The next when I saw him, there was no pretense, he used a few expletives but claimed that in the "after glow" phase he actually had what one might refer to as a religious experience.
and the motivation for the politicians passing the law appears to have been cash bribes?
Please give us your undisclosed background information supporting this slur. Since this bill passed with all party support, are you suggesting that every single MP in Canada is corrupt? Which MP's received bribes? How much did they get? I can assure you, a million dollar book is available if you have proof.
Let me try it this way: suppose you invented a fabulous new drink - the "Flaming Moe". Everybody loved it, and since no one knew your secret recipe, you were making a lot of cash. Now let's consider two cases:
1 - I break in one night, steal a batch of "Flaming Moes" (unflamed, of course), and bring them home to share with friends. Now, this is theft, and you're out the retail value of those FM's. You catch me, I get charged with theft, I suffer criminal charges and penalties (jail, fines, etc.), and you can recover the retail value against me in civil court. Fair enough, right?
2 - I break in one night, and steal the recipe for the "Flaming Moe". Before you even know that the recipe has been stolen, it's been distributed over the Internet, and your secret (and cash stream) are gone for ever. How do you recover damages from me? How do you even compute them? Are you forced, pace the Goldman family, to let me publish my book "If I did it.." in order to recover what some third party has calculated are requisite damages?
Again, I'm not supporting the **AA in everything they are trying to accomplish. If you buy a CD, DVD, whatever, then I think you should be able to use that recording for your personal use (making backups, making copies for your car, office, MP3 player, whatever). But let's recognize that the world has changed, shall we? Laws that were designed when concepts like "theft" were based on physical goods that moved at a snail like speeds are not necessarily effective or appropriate when goods are ephemeral and move at the speed of light. Do you think they had speeding laws in the 1600's? Different sea laws for sail or steam powered ships in the 1700's? Spectrum interference laws in the 1800's? New technologies often create the need for new laws. You may need to study some of Marshall Macluhan's work to truly understand this concept.
Let me give you one final example: MS released Halo 3 to its much-awaited fans yesterday. I'm not a big fan of shoot-em-up games myself, so I have no personal ax to grind here. But MS's share price went up about 3% in one day, and MS expects to make a ton of money out of Halo 3. Are you suggesting that it's OK to buy one copy of Halo 3, make as many copies as you want, and then sell or give them away to others? You might get away with it, and even make some money yourself, but here's the important point: do this, and *THERE WILL BE NO HALO 4*. I'm a libertarian, and I'm no fan of excessive government intervention, but I also realize that if there is no effective way to protect property rights, society will either collapse into anarchy, or stagnate (who will bother to innovate if their years of hard work will be stolen within 24 hours?). Please try to think this through, and give me some carefully reasoned responses.
Please, come on. This legislation was supported by all parties, which in the current Canadian political climate is virtually impossible. The reason it passed so quickly is it's simply correct. There is no inherent right to enter to a place of public performance and make an unauthorized recording, and *IT SAYS SO ON THE BACK OF YOUR TICKET*. So, by making such a recording, you are already breaching the contract you agreed to when you bought your ticket. This bill simply added some penalties if you succeeded in making such a recording, and started selling or distributing copies.
Don't get me wrong - I'm against DRM, the DMCA, etc. If I buy a CD (or vinyl or cassette), I figure I've paid the record company and the artist, and if I want to copy the music or video to an iPod or my hard drive, or so I can have a copy in my car without having to drag my entire CD collection every time I saddle up, that's my right. I paid to have a permanent copy of the work.
But live performance is something different - I haven't contracted to have anything beyond that performance, and I don't feel I've paid for the right to make a copy. I doubt you'll see any kind of DMCA act pass nearly as quickly; in fact, I doubt it will pass it all, and that's regardless of who's shacked up with who.
People, surely you should know by now, DON'T wear or carry anything unusual at all when you're flying. Airport Security are deadly serious people.
I'm actually surprised they didn't just shoot her at the point that she ignored questioning and walked away.
I am amazed at how many posters here either didn't RTFA, or can't understand it. This girl was NOT approached by airport security, nor did she ignore any questions from people who actually have authority. She was asked one question by a freakin' TICKET AGENT, which she ignored, and may not have heard. The only people with badges who talked to her were cops with their guns drawn.
Or that your typical TSA screener with a room-temperature IQ is even going to know what a protoboard IS?
Er, questioning the IQ of TSA screeners is a bit rich, coming from someone who clearly can't comprehend THAT SHE DIDN'T GO NEAR TSA SCREENERS. It was a ticket agent who reported her to the cops.
Guess you come from a country with a low literacy rate. I guess I was just being a silly American when I actually read the damn article which states they DID ask questions first, which she ignored.
Your literacy skills are equally suspect. The only person who asked her about the device was a ticket agent - a clerk. I would feel no compunction to answer questions from a glorified typist. She didn't have a ticket, as she wasn't flying, so she wouldn't be allowed through the security gates. The first people of any authority to question her were the cops, and she did exactly as she was told. I'm not saying what the cops did was unjustified (it could have been a bomb, after all), but charging her with a crime is just ridiculous.
I agree that the cops had to check the girl out, but charging her with the lamest law I've ever seen "carrying a hoax device"? Once she explained what it was, the police should have just said "OK, move along". I can't wait to see what happens in court. Whatever ADA that gets to prosecute this case is going to feel like a major asshat.
1 - The did ask her what she was doing, without guns, and she walked away saying nothing
Did you RTFA? It was a ticket clerk - a f***ing clerk - not someone in what I would call a position of authority, who made the complaint to police. Simpson asked about the arrival of her boyfriend's flight, got her answer, and then the clerk asked her what she wearing. I would have ignored her too. When the cops showed up, Simpson answered all their questions. Of course, having a loaded gun pointed at you tends to get your attention.
If I were a passenger whose flight was delayed by this moron, I'd want her doing hard time to set an example for others.
Why would your flight be delayed? If you had RTFA, she wasn't flying, and so would not be admitted to the secure area. She was just waiting for her boyfriend.
I doubt that any flights were affected. There was no mention in the article of any shutdown. This girl was completely innocent of any crime. The only morons were the ticket agent (and since when does this clerical person count as an authority figure?), and the police for charging her with having "a hoax device" (and how does one define that anyway?).
Sorry, but I still have to call "shenanigans".. there's absolutely nothing in the reasons you've given for denial of health care claims. There has to be something else that either he didn't disclose to you, or you haven't disclosed to me. There is no provision in any Canadian province for denial of health care coverage based on education or job or salary. It is strictly based on residency and citizenship status.
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Totally agree with the "crappy little screen" comment. I have a Nokia phone that supposedly has web access, but the damn thing, while letting me put all kinds of pretty colours and ring tones on it, won't let me adjust the damn font size. I'm 51, and my eyesight is getting progressively worse, but Nokia seems to think that 8 point fonts - and white outline fonts on a cream background, for crissake - are going to be perfectly legible to me. Hint: they are not, and it's a pain in the ass to have to haul out my reading glasses every time I want to make a phone call. Surfing the web with it is just not on; too slow, too hard to read, too infuriating an experience.
So they really knew how to fuck themselves?
Actually, IIRC, the greatest single user of electricity in the US is air conditioning. Wikipedia gives an example of a Chicago 2000 sq.ft. home with an air conditioner rated at 10 SEER in operation for 125 days per year. That home uses over 4,000 kWh per year for air conditioning, or about 10 times as much energy as it uses for the refrigerator. I can't recall the source, but I do recall reading a few years back that if every air conditioner in the US was upgraded to 12 SEER (many older units are still operating at 6-8 SEER), the US would not have needed to build a single new power plant in the last decade.
And, of course, the majority of those A/C units use ambient outside air as their heat sink, which reduces efficiency. If more people adopted the policies of environmental criminal G.W. Bush, who uses deep groundwater to cool his Crawford, TX ranch, instead of the policies of Nobel prize and Oscar winner Al Gore, whose Nashville home uses a whopping 200,000 kWh/year, or between 17-20 times the national average, why, we might be able to shut down some coal fired plants.
I seem to recall an ad from the 1890's or so depicting a "universal electric motor" which came with a variety of attachments to perform different tasks. As soon as people figured out how to make small and reliable electric motors, these universal motors died out. Think of how many motors you have in your house: the fridge, washer, dryer, dishwasher, garbage disposal, coffee grinder, food processor, central air, vacuum cleaner, fans, etc. I think the same thing will happen with robots. The CPU/RAM/ROM will be dirt cheap, and the robot will be optimized for a particular task.
Look at what's happening with cars. Already we have cars that can parallel park themselves without any anthropomorphic robot involved. In a few more years, I don't doubt we'll have cars that can move in high speed convoys on the interstates, using GPS, radar, and other sensors to drive the car, all being run by some redundant processors without the need for a human-looking robot.
No, it's "your", not "you're". The OP had it right, and is not an idiot. You, however, may be an imbecile.
I've always wanted to be a Beta. I would never want to be an Alpha.
Blipverts?
Exactly. And why isn't Zik-Zak a choice on the current poll?!
The article is not complete BS; I don't doubt we'd run out of medicine, and the hospitals would certainly be overcrowded, but I don't buy the apocalyptic scenario.
Er, the people at FedEx, UPS, and DHL might disagree with you. And the US government stopped paying subsidies to the Post Office in 1982.
ahref=http://www.nalc.org/postal/perform/selfsufficient.html%23subsidizerel=url2html-7424http://www.nalc.org/postal/perform/selfsufficient.html#subsidize>
Wal-Mart's issue with RFID seems to be similar to Terry's mistake: not sure how to deploy the technology. Reading TFA, it seems they are refocusing to concentrate on the stores supplied directly from their RFID equipped distribution centres. This only makes sense to me; try it on a small and controlled scale and work the details and bugs out before you try to go national. I mean, I'm only an engineer, and not a full time /. reader, so this idea of trying something small, see if it works, and then see if it can scale is probably alien to many of you.
Finally, I can say that after many years of working at gas stations in my teens, and restaurants in my university years, I have never - well, hardly ever, like once or twice - seen a "case" of liquid cans (be it motor oil, soup, or brake fluid) where the case of 24 or 36 or 48 cans did *NOT* contain the requisite number of cans, and that was back in pre-electronic days. I mean, they can hardly contain more (they wouldn't fit!), and any shortages would be immediately obvious. I've watched so many episodes on Food Network and Discovery of how items are produced and packaged, that I think they are very accurate in filling their cases , and I doubt very much that Wal-Mart is worried about the possibility of missing a can of soup. (One would think that they would simply measure pallets coming in by weight, but again, giving the reliability of suppliers, that might even be too expensive; a simple check of every 10,000 cases might be sufficient.)
In short, like most pioneers, Wal-Mart is finding their way. I'm sure Henry Ford made mistakes; I'm sure Alfred Sloan did as well. But by the late 1930's, the US assembly lines were the most efficient in the world, and once they were drawn into WWII, the Axis defeat was inevitable. I'm equally sure Wal-Mart has made mistakes in RFID deployment, but let's remember this, shall we? Wal-Mart is a pure service provider, in that they don't manufacture their own goods (Great Value products are produced by other firms under contract to Wal-Mart). Surely, all of us will benefit if the cost of distribution goes down, and as other firms adopt Wal-Mart's technologies, just as GM, Chrysler, and AMC all adopted Ford's techniques to drive down the cost of cars, the final cost to consumers will drop.
I understand why so many /. people hate M$ products that offer lousy security, limited backups, and incompatibilty (and I say that despite running XP S.2 with Office 2002 for about five years now with no serious problems) but why in the heck do you hate Wal-Mart? They don't make the products - they just try to provide them to you at the lowest possible price. If you don't like their stuff, don't buy it - it's not like M$ where if you some of their stuff, you end up buying a lot of their stuff just to get full functionality. If I buy a book at Wal-Mart, I can lend it to my brother or sister to read; if I buy Monopoly, I can invite anyone I want to play it; if my 12 year old daughter buys clothes, she can share/trade them with her friends.
The biggest complaint I hear about Wal-Mart is they offer lousy health-care benefits. So why
If they were really smart, they'd have been spending the last few years creating collaterized mortgage obligations (a not very difficult matrix algebra equation), and recomputing risks for sub-prime mortgages, again easy to do if you don't mind fudging some assumptions and outright lying about some others (hi, AGW fans!). Then they would have made billions, and once the scam was revealed, they'd be bailed out by Ben Bernanke, the Fed, and every European central bank. Manipulation of financial assets beats manipulation of physical assets every time.
I saw that one! Then Homer met a talking wolf...
Please give us your undisclosed background information supporting this slur. Since this bill passed with all party support, are you suggesting that every single MP in Canada is corrupt? Which MP's received bribes? How much did they get? I can assure you, a million dollar book is available if you have proof.
Or are you just talking through your (ass)hat?
2 - I break in one night, and steal the recipe for the "Flaming Moe". Before you even know that the recipe has been stolen, it's been distributed over the Internet, and your secret (and cash stream) are gone for ever. How do you recover damages from me? How do you even compute them? Are you forced, pace the Goldman family, to let me publish my book "If I did it.." in order to recover what some third party has calculated are requisite damages?
Again, I'm not supporting the **AA in everything they are trying to accomplish. If you buy a CD, DVD, whatever, then I think you should be able to use that recording for your personal use (making backups, making copies for your car, office, MP3 player, whatever). But let's recognize that the world has changed, shall we? Laws that were designed when concepts like "theft" were based on physical goods that moved at a snail like speeds are not necessarily effective or appropriate when goods are ephemeral and move at the speed of light. Do you think they had speeding laws in the 1600's? Different sea laws for sail or steam powered ships in the 1700's? Spectrum interference laws in the 1800's? New technologies often create the need for new laws. You may need to study some of Marshall Macluhan's work to truly understand this concept.
Let me give you one final example: MS released Halo 3 to its much-awaited fans yesterday. I'm not a big fan of shoot-em-up games myself, so I have no personal ax to grind here. But MS's share price went up about 3% in one day, and MS expects to make a ton of money out of Halo 3. Are you suggesting that it's OK to buy one copy of Halo 3, make as many copies as you want, and then sell or give them away to others? You might get away with it, and even make some money yourself, but here's the important point: do this, and *THERE WILL BE NO HALO 4*. I'm a libertarian, and I'm no fan of excessive government intervention, but I also realize that if there is no effective way to protect property rights, society will either collapse into anarchy, or stagnate (who will bother to innovate if their years of hard work will be stolen within 24 hours?). Please try to think this through, and give me some carefully reasoned responses.
Thanks.
Yes. What do with the cat shit.
Don't get me wrong - I'm against DRM, the DMCA, etc. If I buy a CD (or vinyl or cassette), I figure I've paid the record company and the artist, and if I want to copy the music or video to an iPod or my hard drive, or so I can have a copy in my car without having to drag my entire CD collection every time I saddle up, that's my right. I paid to have a permanent copy of the work.
But live performance is something different - I haven't contracted to have anything beyond that performance, and I don't feel I've paid for the right to make a copy. I doubt you'll see any kind of DMCA act pass nearly as quickly; in fact, I doubt it will pass it all, and that's regardless of who's shacked up with who.
They asked Bill, and he said "Why would anyone ever need more than 65k rows?".
Somewhere, Arthur C. Clarke is angry at both of you.
I am amazed at how many posters here either didn't RTFA, or can't understand it. This girl was NOT approached by airport security, nor did she ignore any questions from people who actually have authority. She was asked one question by a freakin' TICKET AGENT, which she ignored, and may not have heard. The only people with badges who talked to her were cops with their guns drawn.
Er, questioning the IQ of TSA screeners is a bit rich, coming from someone who clearly can't comprehend THAT SHE DIDN'T GO NEAR TSA SCREENERS. It was a ticket agent who reported her to the cops.
Your literacy skills are equally suspect. The only person who asked her about the device was a ticket agent - a clerk. I would feel no compunction to answer questions from a glorified typist. She didn't have a ticket, as she wasn't flying, so she wouldn't be allowed through the security gates. The first people of any authority to question her were the cops, and she did exactly as she was told. I'm not saying what the cops did was unjustified (it could have been a bomb, after all), but charging her with a crime is just ridiculous.
I agree that the cops had to check the girl out, but charging her with the lamest law I've ever seen "carrying a hoax device"? Once she explained what it was, the police should have just said "OK, move along". I can't wait to see what happens in court. Whatever ADA that gets to prosecute this case is going to feel like a major asshat.
Did you RTFA? It was a ticket clerk - a f***ing clerk - not someone in what I would call a position of authority, who made the complaint to police. Simpson asked about the arrival of her boyfriend's flight, got her answer, and then the clerk asked her what she wearing. I would have ignored her too. When the cops showed up, Simpson answered all their questions. Of course, having a loaded gun pointed at you tends to get your attention.
Why would your flight be delayed? If you had RTFA, she wasn't flying, and so would not be admitted to the secure area. She was just waiting for her boyfriend.
I doubt that any flights were affected. There was no mention in the article of any shutdown. This girl was completely innocent of any crime. The only morons were the ticket agent (and since when does this clerical person count as an authority figure?), and the police for charging her with having "a hoax device" (and how does one define that anyway?).
Sorry, but I still have to call "shenanigans".. there's absolutely nothing in the reasons you've given for denial of health care claims. There has to be something else that either he didn't disclose to you, or you haven't disclosed to me. There is no provision in any Canadian province for denial of health care coverage based on education or job or salary. It is strictly based on residency and citizenship status.