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For California, at least: CHiPs Detector

SETI would not be able to pick up our communication from 1ly. so..

http://www.satsig.net/seticalc...

http://stason.org/TULARC/scien...

It should be apparent then from these results that the detection of AM
radio, FM radio, or TV pictures much beyond the orbit of Pluto will be
extremely difficult even for an Arecibo-like 305 meter diameter radio
telescope! Even a 3000 meter diameter radio telescope could not
detect the "I Love Lucy" TV show (re-runs) at a distance of 0.01
Light-Years!

It is only the narrowband high intensity emissions from Earth
(narrowband radar generally) that will be detectable at significant
ranges (greater than 1 LY). Perhaps they'll show up very much like
the narrowband, short duration, and non-repeating, signals observed by
our SETI telescopes. Perhaps we should document all these
"non-repeating" detections very carefully to see if any long term
spatial detection patterns show up.

but who knows, maybe others are trying to send signals through their big horns too,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...

You are wrong ! A simple search shows that it was illegal until very recently.

The logo on it still said "Apple //e". This is what the one I owned looked like, and that was in 1984. The link you refer to says that the ][e was renamed to the //e when the //c came out, but the //c did not come out until 1985.

I also remember the splash startup logo on my //e saying "Apple //e" at the top of the screen, which differed distinctly from "APPLE ][+", which I had been used to seeing previously at school.

The early machines said ][ in the splash screen; the laters said //e. That was one way to know which ROM set you had.
http://stason.org/TULARC/pc/apple2/faq/01-010-What-is-an-Apple-II-The-Apple-e.html

There is no plural of Lego: http://stason.org/TULARC/games/mindstorms-lego/7-Plural-of-LEGO.html

.. 'or' it could be thermal recalibration: http://stason.org/TULARC/pc/pc_hardware_faq/3_14_What_is_Thermal_Recalibration.html
hard drives do get hotter with a lot of writing/reading. iirc, I noticed a difference of at least 5deg C.

Obviously you have never bought music by Ever Anime or Son May.

http://stason.org/TULARC/art/anime-music/24-Are-Son-May-Ever-Anime-Cds-Bootlegs.html

They were just about the only way to get Japanese CDs in the US for a while, but you can now order discs from Amazon:

http://www.amazon.co.jp/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?__mk_ja_JP=%83J%83%5E%83J%83i&url=search-alias%3Dpopular&field-keywords=sailor+moon&x=0&y=0

Sadly, even with as much as Amazon discounts stuff, Ever Anime discs are usually still cheaper.

and yet people claim that copyright doesn't hurt freedom of speach.

"no you can't show anyone those documents about us spying on people, we've copyrighted them"

It depends on if the US government created the cables or if it had some outside entity create them and assign the copyright.
http://stason.org/TULARC/business/copyright/3-6-Can-the-government-copyright-its-works.html

either way ask yourself this:
If some tinpot dictator started ethnic cleansing and the new york times got hold of documets about it and published them how would you feel about it? and would you think copyright law should give them the right to shut down the new york times or stop them from printing the information?

If some company was dumping toxic waste into american drinking water and documents about it got published online would you like the company to be able to use copyright law to suppress those documents and stop you from finding out about it?

you can't have it both ways.
screw over everyone else then apply the law one way then not have them use the same tactics against you.

No, Creative Labs made a Soundblaster 16 with a SCSI2 port.

According to this article, "If there are too many errors, the CD player will interpolate samples to get a reasonable value. This way you don't get nasty clicks and pops in your music, even if the CD is dirty and the errors are uncorrectable." Either Andy McFadden is full of shit, or you are.

It's not just US Dems. This kind of weird thinking seems to be common to most gun control lobbies.

Take Canada, for example. The restrictions on ownership (I'm not touching on carry here) are:

- no handguns or short-barreled rifles
- no full auto
- magazine of no more than 5 rounds for semi-autos (with a few exceptions for rarities and such; e.g. 8-round Garands are specifically okay'd by name)

Now those have some objective justification, whether one agrees with it or not. The limitation on handguns clearly aims to prevent concealed carry. Restriction of full auto is obvious. Magazine size restriction is another side of the same coin.

Now here comes the bullshit:

- magazine restriction applies to centerfire guns only; no limit for rimfire semi-autos ... as if you can't kill a man with .22? and there are larger rimfire cartridges out there...

And the funniest bit. In addition to all restrictions above, there is also a list of restricted and forbidden firearms on which they're listed by name. That list is long, but it includes, for example:

- AK and any derivative (even Saiga-12 ends up here)
- AR-15 and any derivative
- FAL
- G3

Now if you look closely at the guns that are on the list, and also consider some similar guns which are not there, the only common point for listed guns are that they "look scary", which, in most cases, seems to boil down to merely having pistol grip!

For example, FAL is on the list, while the just-as-capable M14 (and variations, such as M1S) is not - the latter is only subject to semi-auto-only and 5-round mag restrictions. And, ironically, because Canada does not restrict Chinese firearm import the way US does, you can buy a Norinco M14 knock-off - of a very decent quality, from what I've heard about the models from the last few years - for $400. And meanwhile Saiga-12 is banned (as an AK derivative). It's insane.

Also got an Apple II joystick from bulky waste (cheaper than eBay, but you need some luck ;) )

You can apparently make a DE-9 -> game port adapter relatively easily. That link isn't about an adapter, but a cable replacement. It might still be useful because the resistors are likely still needed when doing an adapter.

That's where I will stop (as I have plenty of hardware with game ports), but you can find off-the-shelf game port -> USB converters for an easy solution.

Good luck programming the PIC, I've heard that doing a proper USB interface implementation is quite challenging :)

I'm not entirely shocked that someone created a less than 40MB IDE drive, but i'm glad to know that. I really had never seen one before. The first IDE drive I had was in an ALR Research box that had swappable CPU cards - started as a 286-12 on the board, and you could slide in 386SX-20 and 486-25 boards into the CPU slot. Nifty box, really. From about 1988 or early 89. 40MB WD IDE. It was 3.5" half-height and some info on the drive is available here: http://stason.org/TULARC/pc/hard-drives-hdd/western-digital/WD-93048-X-40MB-3-5-HH-IDE-XT.html

Sure enough, it was produced in 20MB and 30MB versions, though I never saw one of them. At the time, ST-251 (40MB) MFM drives were cheap and common so I can't imagine much trade in 20MB IDE drives.

Thanks for the info, I always thought that newer IDE controllers are compatible with all older IDE drives.

They are with all *16-bit* IDE, or ATA, hard drives. But the drive in question is a 8-bit "XTA" hard drive, using a XT version of IDE. Some drives can be jumpered between the two, though not this one.

Does the controller need to be an 8bit ISA card or can it be a 16bit card, for example with integrated floppy controller and LPT/COM ports?

Most XTA or XT IDE cards were 8-bit ISA cards, I think. I found this using Google if you want to know what the jumpers are: http://stason.org/TULARC/pc/hard-drives-hdd/western-digital/WD-95044-X-43MB-5-25-HH-IDE-XT.html Note after you get it set up that XT hard drive controllers are different from AT hard drive controllers, and the BIOS and OS will have to be set up appropriately for that.

Further, I had no trouble finding plenty of citations that agree with me; a study is considered a blind study if either the participants are unaware of the study/hypothesis or are unaware of what group they are in. I maintain my original assertion that a study in which the children are unaware of the experiment and the researchers are unaware of which participants are in which group would be considered a double-blind study even by a strict definition of the term.

Ethernet signals travel at a very large fraction of the speed of light

0.59c isn't THAT large.

http://stason.org/TULARC/networking/lans-ethernet/3-11-What-is-propagation-delay-Ethernet-Physical-Layer.html

You can get 99 minute (880 MB) CD-R.

True, but compatibility is very flakey. AFAIK, the spirals on 99 minute CDs are very tightly packed, way beyond the CD spec, and some players won't read them because they're beyond the spec's absolute upper limit of 80 minutes.

IIRC 99 minute ones are worse than 90 minutes; probably not worth the hassle in either case.

I've also heard of proprietary methods that are able to squeeze more pits onto a standard CD, which are totally incompatible with ordinary CD players, and came out around the time DVDs were getting popular, so did nothing anyway. Interesting idea, though.

While that has happened hard disks have become only a little faster.

"A little faster" is a bit of an exaggeration...see a 1994 hard drive. 13MB/sec vs. 2009's 6000 MB/sec on SAS. In 1994, people were running what, 50Mhz PCs? They haven't improved by the same amount, nor has the speed or quantity of RAM in the typical machine.

One advantage with top-down planning is that you could simply have a rule that companies have to share lines - which is what they are trying for here.

We don't need more local control over telco's - can you imagine the management nightmare that would create? One rule in this city, one rule in that city etc etc - it would end up costing more money. If we had federally enforced standards over what telco's had to do there would be consistency and it would be cheaper/easier to implement.

Also on a side note - I love how conservatives are against welfare for all people, but some of the best examples of welfare have come from the most famous conservatives.

I don't know much about genes but I am rather familiar with different forms of psychosis experienced by positive-type shizophrenics, schizoaffectives and type one manic depressives alike and I can say with some authority that there is indeed a correlation between one's creativity and one's proximity to psychosis. Problem is, the super-psychotics among us are just too messed up to make it through the day (the affliction afflicting the patients in the most hospital beds is schizophrenia) that they are unable to unleash their creativity in contained forms that can be digested, documented and enjoyed by the rest of the world. You don't hear too many names you'd recognize except for the Pink Floyd drummer on the lists of famous people with schizophrenia.

But you do with manic depression probably because the treatment success rate, that is the chance you've got of getting a manic depressive patient to function in society, is in the nineties versus 40% [citation needed] for schizophrenia. Manic depressives, type one bipolar to be specific, get to shoot up into the same forms of psychosis positive typed schizophrenics perpetually are locked into, write an opera or a poem or whatever, come down from mania (either naturally or with drugs) and then try to market their psychotic product to whoever's interested. Or bipolar twos who ride just below the manic border, known as hypomania (think cocaine high), and can kind of do both at the same time (with the right handlers) like ODB and DMX and Axl Rose.

As for negative typed schizophrenics, catatonics, don't expect to get much Hemingway and Liszt out of them -- or their kids /if/ there is any specific heredity between the subtypes of schizophrenia. I don't know that part. But I will tell you this, more love should be shown to the crazies' diseases whose work you appreciate and enjoy regularly, work you admire and see in museums and have no idea that the artist behind it wasn't around before asylums turned into psychiatric hospitals and the drug lithium was born and applied to treating psychosis and soon after Thorazine and all the rest and they had a disaster of a life which in many cases ended in suicide. :(

Medicine has progressed much since those two drugs which might be a shame if you think that the medicines will squelch more creative genius from being contributed to the world's vault of precious art into the future.

Too bad this is an Equity I, and not an Equity II. The Equity II supported 1.2 floppies.

I have an alternative though; REALLY old floppy controllers dont know the difference between a 720k 2.5 inch drive, and a 360k 5.25 inch drive. You *CAN* format a 1.44 mb disk as a "360k" floppy, by running it through a bulk eraser, and then putting tape over the media hole. This works with old IBM XTs anyway. Never tried it on an Epson Equity I before though. The boon is that you can then pop that in a 1.44 drive, and it still reads. (shocking!)

The media is a bit more durable, and more available than 5.25in media.

Additionally, saddling that old beast with a LPT based ZIP 100 might be slightly satisfying as well. HDDs from that period were notoriously small and slow anyway, and there is an XT compatible driver for them floating around on PCjr enthusiast boards.

Another perk might be to install an OLD Intel AboveBoard.

Combined, you should be able to do MUCH more with that old XT era system.

As for indexing them, I can tell you one way not to do it. Don't do the thing that curators of classical music did.

With any decent metadata format, that kind of system (or even more complex) is perfectly fine. Every one of those is meaningful to someone, and maybe they want to search using it. For example, lots of cataloged materials have barcodes which would be a colossal pain to type in by hand (and no one would remember them anyway) -- but they're great for scanning in if you happen to have the thing in your hand and want to look it up.

You probably don't need to show all of the identifiers to most users, but if an item has six different identifiers, indexing them all is the Right Thing To Do.

On a system I'm working on, we've got records with lots of different identifiers (the source system catalog number, the item's barcode, the vendor id (if it was scanned or OCR'd by a vendor), possibly an id from flickr or other systems we've exported the image to, plus our own system's id (because you can't count on any of those others being there for every record)). And that's not counting descriptive fields like titles, call numbers, etc. that people might use to identify the records. They are all indexed and searchable from the default search box.

When you print (or read aloud for radio), you have to pick which identifiers/titles you want to use. I think classical music often errs on the side of including all of them when one would do. But if some people know a piece as "HWV 295" and some as "Organ Concerto #13" and others as "The Cuckoo and the Nightingale", and if a lot of the people were anal-retentive pedants with lots of free time to call up radio stations and complain about not using the "right" identifier, it might just be easier to read them all.

-Esme

Well, considering they host over 6,000 pdfs and the RFI is in PDF with the title of the document being "Microsoft Word - WvB RFI 6-24-09.doc" by Jason Crusan who used Acrobat Distiller 7.0.5(Windows), I think we know what everyone uses at NASA. Fine. I'm not going to bitch about that. Instead I'm going to point out that if you're already dependent on Adobe Acrobat Reader & Microsoft Word being around until the end of time supporting your old doctypes, you might as well release these in PDF from DOC sources too.

But, if I were doing this: Assuming these are all in images, put the images in whatever format you want and make a generic wiki page for each of them. Then let users log in (NASA fans should pour in) and translate the pages to annotated wiki pages with the footnotes (normally references) being all the side notes that were penciled in. They can categorize them by related missions and maybe even tag them ... you will need at least one or two people on your staff to administrate. Diagrams and drawings will probably need to be cropped and retained as images. Keep those in a lossless format but distribute whatever saves you bandwidth.

Once that's done, ideally you'd put it in some XML standards based format (ODF or OOXML, yeah, that's another argument to be had) that you will always be able to read even if you have to build your own viewer/converter. Keep these sources indexed and provide for people the rendered PDF/PS/PNG/whocares and then you could probably build scripts to rebuild all from sources if you want. New technology comes out or people want to view them in HTML 5--no problem, just build a neat little XSLT for them.

As for indexing them, I can tell you one way not to do it. Don't do the thing that curators of classical music did. Man, that's like speaking another language to me. Arrange the notes by mission or date if you can and any natural titles that arise for the favorites, add to it as an alias.

If I punch a hole through space via a wormhole and travel at 45mph on a moped through the wormhole to travel a normal space distance of 600 light-years... I just traveled FTL. and THAT does not violate causality.

Except that I have been told repeatedly that it does violate causality. Here are some references:

http://www.theculture.org/rich/sharpblue/archives/000089.html

http://stason.org/TULARC/education-books/startrek-relativity-FTL/8-2-How-FTL-Travel-Implies-Violation-of-Causality.html

http://sheol.org/throopw/tachyon-pistols.html

But I still don't grok it. Probably a good thing I'm not a physicist.

steveha

Have you SEEN the WENUS?

You're using the word `theory` really... well, you're not using it right. Check out this link for the difference between a theory, and a hypothesis.
A fact would be that we've observed the earth warming (oddly, we have).
A hypothesis would be that this warming is related to the number of viking raiders.
A theory would be if multiple lines of evidence supported the broad principle that the number of Fjords in Norway influenced global climate. It would be a) well vetted and b) predictive.

I guess my point is that in science, `theory` doesn't mean `thing I pulled out of my rectum.`

That wasn't the 6502's fault, it was Nibble Magazine's! They really shouldn't have been messing around with the DOS 3.3 disk catalog.

(Yes, DOS 3.3 kept its "Volume Table of Contents" (TOC) on track 17 (aka, $11). You know, I never really looked closely at this code. This code seems to be doing something wacky with an extended 80-column card. It's moving 1K worth of stuff to "AUXMEM" (the ext 80 column card space). Why? I don't know. I do know that POKEing the right location can move the VTOC's sector, and is a fun and cheap way to "protect" a disk from amateur eyes. I have a few of those that I made myself.)

Our govt is immune from copyright and patent infringement

I believe that the government has agreed to be sued for copyright and patent infringement.

IIRC, the only case involving copyrights where sovereign immunity was invoked was the specific sections of DMCA forbidding by-passing technological measures (and really, this case was where an *employee* of the government put those measures in place in the first place).

UK government is decidedly more authoritarian and I wouldn't be surprised if they decide to steal from their people, but as far as U.S. is concerned, we have such things as the Fifth Amendment that prohibits the government from taking private properties unjustly.

So I can run a website saying I am making heroin, illegal firearms and small children available for purchase, and that's fine right up until the money changes hands?

I'm not an attorney, but I do have some legal experience. Let me show you the imperfections in your analogy. (Note, none of this is legal advice; if you need that, hire a real lawyer).

Announcing on a website that "hey, I'm making heroin, I'll be selling it later" is not, of itself illegal. It's quite possibly probable cause for investigation, perhaps even a search warrant. If you actually were making heroin, you'll be charged with a crime. If you actually were planning to sell heroin, you'll be charged with a crime. If you did neither of those things, you'll end up with some hassle, but you've done nothing wrong.

Pay special attention to the "crime" portion of that explanation -- under most circumstances, copyright infringement is not a crime (see this article for an explanation) -- it's a civil matter.

My saying "hey, I have a Beatles CD that you could make a copy of" is legal. Making the copy is almost always legal. Actually giving the copy to someone is probably illegal, but not a crime -- if I'm Apple Records, I can file suit to get you to stop, and maybe I can even collect some damages.

Now, if you start selling the copy, now you might be in crime territory. If you sell enough copies, it could even be a felony. But simply announcing that you have them for sale isn't illegal, it's actually selling or attempting to sell (making a general offer like "I have some copied music I might be willing to sell" usually isn't enough, but making a specific offer like "give me $0.99 for this song copy" is probably enough to qualify as "selling").

US law is a murky, murky world; this is why lawyers are rich -- more money is made from advising people on how to interpret all the twisty little packages than is made on filing and defending lawsuits.

We've lost all the details on building the Saturn V rocket, and we lost that a long time ago.

That's a myth:
http://stason.org/TULARC/science-engineering/space/76-What-happened-to-the-saturn-v-plans.html

Since the link requires registration I can't actually RTFA. That said:

Even accepting at face value that stretching does weaken the muscle (which I do not without seeing the evidence), there are plenty of good reasons to stretch. Exercising without stretching will often limit your range of motion. This can have significant performance consequences as well as making one more prone to injury. Without stretching certain extreme movements (such as kicking high above your head - think dance or martial arts) are impossible for most people and they risk injury if they try. If you don't stretch, you might be stronger for a limited range of motion but you *will* be weaker at the extremes. It's a rare sport where you will not have to move at least some muscles through a full range of motion at some point.

For some good reading check out this FAQ about stretching. It's been around a while and not everything in it is gospel but it's a decent and approachable overview.

How about billing prisoners for their incarceration or torture? Apparently it's not just a fantasy from Brazil .

Don't fight it son, confess quickly. If you hold out too long, you could jeopardize your credit rating.

Here it discusses the earlier concern about water vapor in the stratosphere reducing ozone concentrations, and that this is no longer thought to be a problem. It goes on to suggest NOx from large numbers of SSTs, which was a worry even before the CFC problem was identified, is still considered a potential danger.

Mylex made EISA graphics cards too. For your computer history lesson today, here are some more:

http://stason.org/TULARC/pc/graphics-cards/EISA_t.html

to the best of my knowledge EISA was never used on video cards unless it was highly specialized.

You are incorrect.

I remember back when I got my first post-ISA graphics card - in order to get better kick my neighbors ass in Descent, IIRC.

Anyway, I distinctly remember having to chose between EISA and VLB (VESA). For whatever reason, I wound up going with a Tseng Labs ET4000 EISA card sporting 1MB of VRAM.

I also recall the salesman's shock at my asking what the speed was of the memory chips. He'd never had anyone ask that before... which was actually a bit surprising since the performance difference between the slow and fast memory chips was quite substantial.

Wikipedia's article on the ET4000 card even mentions an EISA version!

And here is a link to a specific ET4000 EISA card, although not the one I owned (and probably still have in a box in the basement).

>Given enough bandwidth, an SDTV stream's colors will be richer and more stable-- akin to those of a DVD

That is true for a raw SDTV capture, if the colours are mixed with the signal on the analog and there is noise and attenuation present (this is likely, so you do win a point on that!)

However, DVD being an MPEG 4:2:0 profile means lots less colour definition than the theoretical maximum of raw SDTV. Here's the gory details. Specifically, brightness is given a 720 x 480 resolution, whereas colour is given a 360 x 240 resolution, meaning colour gets 1/4 of the pixels dedicated to it as brightness gets. Professional MPEG broadcasts (like you might pull off an uplink) are in a 4:2:2 profile, which returns the same number of lines of colour resolution as brightness (the most important thing is usually lines in a broadcast like this, although horizontal resolution matters, it is technically infinite in an analog signal and that means it's unquantifiable... and not worth oversampling! :D ). At the 1/4 mark, that is about the same as, or perhaps less than what NTSC's colour system can do with a combined colour carrier. Colour separated out and in a lab environment, NTSC analog still beats all NTSC digital simulations.

Compare a DVD to a laserdisc and you will see how the above actually does make a difference... :-) IIRC, some early Criterion Collection DVDs are captured from the Criterion Collection laserdisc, nothing more than a pure NTSC analog signal (or PAL, depending on what standard they are encoding for).

Copyright violation is a civil matter, not typically a crime. http://stason.org/TULARC/business/copyright/3-3-Is -copyright-infringement-a-crime-or-a-civil-matter. html/

For example, IBM has:
http://stason.org/TULARC/pc/hard-drives-hdd/ibm/WD A-L42S-40MB-3-5-HH-IDE-AT.html :P

http://stason.org/TULARC/pc/hard-drives-hdd/ibm/WD A-L42S-40MB-3-5-HH-IDE-AT.html Hard Drive: IBM: WDA-L42S 40MB 3.5"/HH IDE / AT Cylinders: 1067 Heads: 2 Sectors per track: 39 Bytes per sector: 512 1067 * 2 * 39 * 512 = 42,611,712 bytes 42,611,712 / 1024 = 41613 kilobytes 41613 kilobytes = just over 40.6 megabytes This was sold as a 40MB drive. Not a 41MB, 42MB, or 43MB drive. A 40MB drive. And that's just what it was, a 40MB drive. So, I'm sorry to tell you, but lying about the drive's size was *NOT* always the way it was. This is just one example. And, no, I don't care for finding out exactly when manufacturers started lying about capacity. They did, and that's enough for me.

1. 12 Things to Do to Improve Your Site's Google Page Rank
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1. 12 Things to Do to Improve Your Site's Google Page Rank
   this article covers 12 techniques that will help raise your page rank and move your site to the top of the search hits.
   
2. 12 Things NOT to Do to Improve Your Site's Google Page Rank
   this article covers 12 techniques that must NOT be used if you want your site's Google page rank to be high (and not to get banned)
   

Unless this is a highly targetted and customised phishing attack. Collaborative filtering like cloudmark works amazingly well. You can stop a phishing attack spread within a few minutes. Here is more info on collaborative filtering or google for it.

You can't fight spam with heuristic filters. The only way to go is to use collaborative filtering, where millions of users participate in the filtering process and the outbreaks of spam, virus or phishing are detected and caught in a matter of minutes. Companies like Cloudmark provide this solution for free to end users, and several open source efforts are available as well.