This reminds me of the expedition where a bunch of people died on Everest because they went up with no experience
That's funny. It reminds me of the expedition where a few early hominids climbed out of their tree and died because they tried to set up housekeeping in a nearby cave with no experience.
Fortunately, your ancestors failed to dissuade the others from trying again.
(Oh, and like Graham Chapman's ex-parrot, this thing wouldn't fly, blow up, or otherwise threaten what's left of your manhood if you put four thousand volts through it. It's a capsule, not a rocket.)
It's easier to forgive them for this one than it was for that metric/imperial screwup on the mars probe.
No, it isn't. Doppler calculations are one of the most fundamental EE tools used in terrestrial satellite system work. Even ham radio operators have to take it into account. This is a truly amazing engineering f***up -- it had to be made at the most fundamental level, where any newly-graduated BSEE should have been able to catch it. It's incredible that it made it into a multi-billion-dollar planetary probe.:-(
Unfortunately, the other posters are probably right -- this allocation will end up being carved from the Amateur spectrum. It's hard to justify giving us so much space that most of us don't use. I'm very surprised we still have 1296 MHz, for instance.
Any taxpayer can do the same thing. Simply form a corporation, and sell your stock to selected people (e.g., your employees whom you wish to reward) for less than its fair market value (i.e., what you could sell the same stock for on Wall Street).
The difference between the value of your stock and what the employee paid you for it is legitimately termed "compensation." Compensation to employees is a legitimate corporate expense that can be written off on yours, or my, or Microsoft's taxes. Why? Because the recipients of the compensation pay the tax.
You'd probably be a pretty unhappy camper if your employer cut your salary by 40% because they suddently lost the ability to write you off as a business expense. Stock-option compensation works exactly the same way. If you have a problem with this accounting rule, take it up with Congress, not Microsoft and Cisco. It's only a few hundred years old.
No, it's NOT like taking a cut of catalog revenues
on
High-Speed Greed
·
· Score: 5
You've inadvertently stumbled upon one of the major philosophical differences between a circuit-switched network and a packet-switched one.
In the case of a catalog order placed through an 800 number, Ma Bell is being paid to complete a physical circuit for a given amount of time, not to facilitate any particular transaction.
This analogy can't be used to justify AT&T's idea of charging e-commerce vendors for hits to their web sites. Those vendors are already paying for their bandwidth! Think of an Internet connection as an 800 line that's off the hook 24/7. A fat 'Net pipe already costs many thousands of dollars a month to maintain... just as those toll-free lines do. It is not reasonable for a carrier to impose content-based surcharges on packet-switched networks. They add no intrinsic value whatsoever to e-commerce transactions, and they have no reason to know or care what's in our packets, as long as the pipe is paid for.
A more appropriate analogy would be AT&T charging more for 800 calls that actually result in a sale, as distinguished from calls placed to inquire about a product or speak with tech support. I don't think that would fly in the Real World of direct-sales merchandising, and neither will this harebrained scheme.
When I was a kid, corporations paid three-quarters of the income taxes. Now, people pay almost all of the income taxes
Correct, which is exactly how MS's tax burden is paid: by the employees who benefited from exercising their stock options. Uncle Sam still gets his pound of flesh.
Or are you in favor of taxing the same gains twice?
You have to log in with a password before you can do anything like change your address. The one-click cookie only allows orders to be placed to your existing address.
"Security" is not a valid objection to one-click ordering. It's been used millions of times by now without a single reported unresolved abuse.
Where, exactly, is the "metamoderation" button or link located? I've never seen it -- all I can see at the top is the Slashdot/News For Nerds logo and the story icons. Your link to metamod.pl was the first and only time I've seen the metamod feature in action.
Mark this "Score -1, Stupid Question" if you like but this has been bugging me for awhile.:( I'm sure I'm just overlooking it somehow.
Some sources of Vitamin A, in descending order, are liver, carrots, sweet potato, spinach, apricots, winter squash, cantaloupe, broccoli, crab, peaches.
Now I, even I would celebrate
In rhymes unapt, the great
Immortal Syracusan rivalled nevermore
Who, in his wondrous lore
Passed on before
Left men his guidance
How to circles mensurate.
I disagree.... the differences in high-color and true-color representations of a given 24-bit RGB value are going to be vastly overshadowed by differences between the cheap consumer-grade SVGA monitors the pages are being viewed on.
It makes sense to obsess about a few LSBs of RGB data only if you know the display device is capable of rendering the difference meaningfully and consistently. That isn't the case when you're designing web pages for Joe Six-Pack.
This is basically paranoia. Last time I checked, anyone to whom you give a personal check has your bank account number.
PayPal is backed by more than one major international financial institution. It appears to be pretty safe -- I've used them for awhile now on ebay, with no problems.
At 32, I'm already something of an old fogie, relative to many of my peers in the PC game business. I've been a programmer ever since the day I first got my hands on an Apple ][+ at the age of 14. Even with the threat of encroaching senility on the horizon, I can still remember debating the merits of 8-bit home computers vis-a-vis the primitive game consoles of the day. Those debates sounded an awful lot like the debates we're having today. The ultimate answer back then was that most gamers were better off keeping both platforms handy. I think that's still true.
There were giants in the earth in those days. The "PC" platforms were the legendary 8-bit Apples, Ataris, and Commodores, while the "console" guys owned Colecovisions, Intellivisions, and Atari VCSs. The IBM PC platform hadn't made any significant inroads into consumer space by the early 80s, at least not in my neighborhood. Just as today, though, practically all of the people who had a home computer also owned a home videogame console. And just like today, you'd crank up your Atari if you wanted to play certain games (Missile Command, Space Invaders) and you'd boot your computer if you wanted to play others (Ultima, Castle Wolfenstein, MS Flight Simulator). I don't remember anyone complaining about not being able to play a decent game of Zork on their Colecovision or Kaboom! on their Apple. Games that required more than the 'twitch and dodge' level of user interaction were played on the home computer, while those that relied on bright, colorful animated sprites were a natural fit for the consoles of the time.
I was (and am) different, though -- I didn't own a console as a kid, and never felt the slightest stirrings of desire for one. Still don't. When I wasn't playing games on my Apple, I was either cracking their copy protection and disassembling them, or making lame-ass attempts at writing my own. I learned how the Bresenham line algorithm worked by poring over the entrails of Ultima II's DNGDRAW.OBJ, and Karateka taught me what good sound and animation code looked like. When my friends and I would discuss the relative merits of console versus PC gaming, it would always come down to that: my platform of choice was a genuine creativity tool, and the other was just a thing they hooked up to their TVs to play a bunch of games I sucked at.:)
I could not have become a professional programmer and game developer if my folks had bought me a Colecovision instead of an Apple for Christmas in 1982, and neither could Carmack, Romero, Garriott, or many of the other eminences grise currently duking it out on JeffK's SmartyMan Gaem Designar Survivor Island. We all got our start more or less the same way: by making the most of an open platform.
So it's with some regret that I see PC game developers flocking to the PS2s and XBoxen of the world, cheerfully paying Microsoft and Sony ten bucks a box or more in hopes of deliverance from the PC's tech-support hassles and platform variability. The magic of the Apple ][ was that it was a general-purpose computing device that could do anything you wanted -- you could run the assemblers and editors you needed to build your game on the exact same piece of hardware that Nasir Gebelli, Richard Garriott, or Ken Williams had on their desks. There were no excuses -- you could do anything those guys could do, assuming you didn't suck.
Fortunately, that's still true of the PC world today. Even though our machines are close to five orders of magnitude faster than the old 1 MHz 8-bit home computers, any high-school kid with a PC still has access to an inexpensive, ubiquitous, open platform fit for nurturing new talent. (Microsoft bashers may object to my application of the term 'open platform' to a Wintel PC, but as far as I'm concerned, any machine I can write and sell code on without paying platform royalties is 'open' enough.)
My lengthy rant will have served its purpose if it inspires some of the die-hard console advocates out there to give a second thought to their own history. Few games more interesting than Super Mario Brothers really owe their origins to the proprietary arcade/console side of the business. Almost all the good stuff came from some bored, geeky kid fooling around on a home computer, or from college students with more access to general-purpose computer hardware than their professors knew what to do with.
I don't think PC gamers and console gamers are genuinely trapped in an us-versus-them situation, but if I'm wrong, and we really do have to draw battle lines in the sand, I know what side I'm on.:)
You have a point. At first glance it's even more logical (and thus appealing to our essential 'geekhood') to suggest that the collective wisdom of humanity is what should guide our actions as individuals. After all, if two heads are better than one, all heads must be better than one as well, right?
If human nature were perfect (or at least more ant-like), you'd be right. Unfortunately, we 'libertarian' types have history on our side as testimony to the fact that human nature isn't perfect. Collective perfection is a great thing to strive for -- who knows what we could accomplish as individuals if we could all agree on a common direction? -- but in the real world, no one has found a way to implement economic, political, and moral collectivism without human leadership. Some humans will always insist that they're more 'equal' than others. It's just the way they're wired. The upshot, whenever collectivism has been imposed on imperfect humans by imperfect humans, has always been tyranny.
So it shouldn't surprise you when I resist your suggestion that we all sublimate our individual drives, desires, and political beliefs to that of an unknown, unknowable Nietzschian 'overman'. To use a programming metaphor, it's easy to write an abstract base class with no bugs -- the devil is in the implementation.:) Pure objectivism and pure subjectivism, pure libertarianism and pure fascism, pure individualism and pure collectivism... all of these are abstractions, and whenever human nature tries to implement them, you've gotta expect some bugs. As long as we remain human beings, we won't tolerate life at the extremes that either you, or your hardcore individualist/objectivist opponents, advocate. Philosophies that disregard human nature are pointless in theory and usually tragic in practice.
Unfortunately, I can't, in good conscience, join the NRA either. The NRA's president, Charlton Heston, is on record as accusing people in my industry (computer/video game development) of contributing to the (statistically nonexistent) rise in youth violence in the United States.
The Libertarian Party is the only medium-to-large political organization I've encountered that doesn't piss me off by taking howlingly stupid positions on issues like that.
At the organizational level, they're about as far from libertarian (either small-L or big-L) as you can get: a clique of holier-than-thou hypocrites who don't see any problem with defending certain civil liberties while attacking others. Unfortunately, it appears that relatively few of their members are aware of this.
I was actually interested in joining the ACLU awhile back -- there's a lot of overlap between what they claim to stand for and what I believe as a small-l libertarian. I'm not much into the protest scene, but some of the recent cases involving things like DeCSS, patent abuse, and Net censorship finally made me consider becoming more financially active in First Amendment causes. But then I ran across the following page on the ACLU's site:
I'm not a gun freak (don't own any, and am not particularly interested in doing so at the moment), but that page changed my mind in a hurry about signing up. The donation I was planning to make to the ACLU went to the EFF instead.
Trading one civil liberty (the Second Amendment) for another (the First Amendment) strikes me as a really, really bad idea. What's downright offensive is that an organization with a name like "American Civil Liberties Union" is using members' funds to promote such an agenda, when most of their members probably aren't aware they're doing so.
As far as I can tell, the ACLU's main page doesn't even link to this position paper -- the only way you can find it is if someone tells you it's there. Certainly "Gun Control" is conspicuously absent from the list of "Issues" on their front page. I'd be curious to know how many card-carrying ACLU members would object to this brand of sophistry on the part of their organization... an organization they joined in the mistaken belief that they were standing up for all of their Constitutional rights.
Please spare me the "but the Second Amendment was written for the National Guard" spiel -- if that's what you believe, then perhaps the ACLU is the right organization for you, and I'd say by all means, get involved. This isn't intended as flamebait, just a heads-up to people who might be thinking about joining the ACLU without getting the full story behind their political positions. Don't shoot (no pun intended) the messenger.:)
... are usually a sign that your TV isn't calibrated properly. Many people (including, probably 'Buffy') are running their sharpness and/or brightness controls too high for optimum DVD viewing quality.
Excessive brightness settings in particular are a great way to bring out those blotchy areas of semi-darkness that appear on many DVDs. If you're not into springing for a full ISF calibration of your setup, the next best thing would be renting or buying a copy of Video Essentials and following the directions that come with it.
The whole idea that people can control the actions of corporations by single-handedly not purchasing from them is ridiculous
No, it's perfectly rational. The opposite notion -- the idea that you and one or two other guys could control the actions of corporations -- is scary.
Think about it. If actions by isolated individuals had any real power, it would result in chaos. They (the big evil capitalistic orporations, oppressive Western governments, or whatever keeps you, personally, up at night) are organized for the purpose of achieving their goals. You have to be willing to do the same... or your desires will have no effect on the rest of us.
... that the link on the posted site goes directly to my project text description. If you visited the KE5FX site before I updated it with a link back to my home page, you probably didn't see the schematics, waveforms, and photos associated with the project. The correct link to the project site's front page is http://www.qsl.net/ke5fx. Sorry for any confusion.
All that link shows is that they went to my page and hit 'Save' (and without asking my permission to mirror it first, making it tough for me to update their copy with corrections, grrr.)
If the L0pht guys have actually built one of these puppies I'd love to hear from them -- AFAIK there has been only one successful duplication of my results so far.
Slashdot Mirror
Bollocks. It's called democracy.
Three wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner?
This reminds me of the expedition where a bunch of people died on Everest because they went up with no experience
That's funny. It reminds me of the expedition where a few early hominids climbed out of their tree and died because they tried to set up housekeeping in a nearby cave with no experience.
Fortunately, your ancestors failed to dissuade the others from trying again.
(Oh, and like Graham Chapman's ex-parrot, this thing wouldn't fly, blow up, or otherwise threaten what's left of your manhood if you put four thousand volts through it. It's a capsule, not a rocket.)
Which is fine, considering they won't know anything about me except the number of people in my household.
It's easier to forgive them for this one than it was for that metric/imperial screwup on the mars probe.
:-(
No, it isn't. Doppler calculations are one of the most fundamental EE tools used in terrestrial satellite system work. Even ham radio operators have to take it into account. This is a truly amazing engineering f***up -- it had to be made at the most fundamental level, where any newly-graduated BSEE should have been able to catch it. It's incredible that it made it into a multi-billion-dollar planetary probe.
What the fuck are you going to do with your very own spectrum? Hmm? Have you developed a technology that uses, say, 2.95 MHz - 3.3 MHz? Have you?
Yep.
Unfortunately, the other posters are probably right -- this allocation will end up being carved from the Amateur spectrum. It's hard to justify giving us so much space that most of us don't use. I'm very surprised we still have 1296 MHz, for instance.
Guess what? The risk was non-zero from the moment you poked your head out of your mother's crotch.
Either deal with it, or crawl back in your (metaphorical) cave. The rest of us have places to go and planets to see.
Any taxpayer can do the same thing. Simply form a corporation, and sell your stock to selected people (e.g., your employees whom you wish to reward) for less than its fair market value (i.e., what you could sell the same stock for on Wall Street).
The difference between the value of your stock and what the employee paid you for it is legitimately termed "compensation." Compensation to employees is a legitimate corporate expense that can be written off on yours, or my, or Microsoft's taxes. Why? Because the recipients of the compensation pay the tax.
You'd probably be a pretty unhappy camper if your employer cut your salary by 40% because they suddently lost the ability to write you off as a business expense. Stock-option compensation works exactly the same way. If you have a problem with this accounting rule, take it up with Congress, not Microsoft and Cisco. It's only a few hundred years old.
You've inadvertently stumbled upon one of the major philosophical differences between a circuit-switched network and a packet-switched one.
In the case of a catalog order placed through an 800 number, Ma Bell is being paid to complete a physical circuit for a given amount of time, not to facilitate any particular transaction.
This analogy can't be used to justify AT&T's idea of charging e-commerce vendors for hits to their web sites. Those vendors are already paying for their bandwidth! Think of an Internet connection as an 800 line that's off the hook 24/7. A fat 'Net pipe already costs many thousands of dollars a month to maintain... just as those toll-free lines do. It is not reasonable for a carrier to impose content-based surcharges on packet-switched networks. They add no intrinsic value whatsoever to e-commerce transactions, and they have no reason to know or care what's in our packets, as long as the pipe is paid for.
A more appropriate analogy would be AT&T charging more for 800 calls that actually result in a sale, as distinguished from calls placed to inquire about a product or speak with tech support. I don't think that would fly in the Real World of direct-sales merchandising, and neither will this harebrained scheme.
When I was a kid, corporations paid three-quarters of the income taxes. Now, people pay almost all of the income taxes
Correct, which is exactly how MS's tax burden is paid: by the employees who benefited from exercising their stock options. Uncle Sam still gets his pound of flesh.
Or are you in favor of taxing the same gains twice?
This whole story should be rated -1, Troll.
You have to log in with a password before you can do anything like change your address. The one-click cookie only allows orders to be placed to your existing address.
"Security" is not a valid objection to one-click ordering. It's been used millions of times by now without a single reported unresolved abuse.
Where, exactly, is the "metamoderation" button or link located? I've never seen it -- all I can see at the top is the Slashdot/News For Nerds logo and the story icons. Your link to metamod.pl was the first and only time I've seen the metamod feature in action.
:( I'm sure I'm just overlooking it somehow.
Mark this "Score -1, Stupid Question" if you like but this has been bugging me for awhile.
Some sources of Vitamin A, in descending order, are liver, carrots, sweet potato, spinach, apricots, winter squash, cantaloupe, broccoli, crab, peaches.
:(
Man, I'd be blind if it weren't for Centrum.
Now I, even I would celebrate
In rhymes unapt, the great
Immortal Syracusan rivalled nevermore
Who, in his wondrous lore
Passed on before
Left men his guidance
How to circles mensurate.
There -- now you know pi to 31 digits!
I disagree.... the differences in high-color and true-color representations of a given 24-bit RGB value are going to be vastly overshadowed by differences between the cheap consumer-grade SVGA monitors the pages are being viewed on.
It makes sense to obsess about a few LSBs of RGB data only if you know the display device is capable of rendering the difference meaningfully and consistently. That isn't the case when you're designing web pages for Joe Six-Pack.
This is basically paranoia. Last time I checked, anyone to whom you give a personal check has your bank account number.
PayPal is backed by more than one major international financial institution. It appears to be pretty safe -- I've used them for awhile now on ebay, with no problems.
http://www.deja.com/=dnc/home_ps.shtml -- same as it ever was.
At 32, I'm already something of an old fogie, relative to many of my peers in the PC game business. I've been a programmer ever since the day I first got my hands on an Apple ][+ at the age of 14. Even with the threat of encroaching senility on the horizon, I can still remember debating the merits of 8-bit home computers vis-a-vis the primitive game consoles of the day. Those debates sounded an awful lot like the debates we're having today. The ultimate answer back then was that most gamers were better off keeping both platforms handy. I think that's still true.
:)
:)
There were giants in the earth in those days. The "PC" platforms were the legendary 8-bit Apples, Ataris, and Commodores, while the "console" guys owned Colecovisions, Intellivisions, and Atari VCSs. The IBM PC platform hadn't made any significant inroads into consumer space by the early 80s, at least not in my neighborhood. Just as today, though, practically all of the people who had a home computer also owned a home videogame console. And just like today, you'd crank up your Atari if you wanted to play certain games (Missile Command, Space Invaders) and you'd boot your computer if you wanted to play others (Ultima, Castle Wolfenstein, MS Flight Simulator). I don't remember anyone complaining about not being able to play a decent game of Zork on their Colecovision or Kaboom! on their Apple. Games that required more than the 'twitch and dodge' level of user interaction were played on the home computer, while those that relied on bright, colorful animated sprites were a natural fit for the consoles of the time.
I was (and am) different, though -- I didn't own a console as a kid, and never felt the slightest stirrings of desire for one. Still don't. When I wasn't playing games on my Apple, I was either cracking their copy protection and disassembling them, or making lame-ass attempts at writing my own. I learned how the Bresenham line algorithm worked by poring over the entrails of Ultima II's DNGDRAW.OBJ, and Karateka taught me what good sound and animation code looked like. When my friends and I would discuss the relative merits of console versus PC gaming, it would always come down to that: my platform of choice was a genuine creativity tool, and the other was just a thing they hooked up to their TVs to play a bunch of games I sucked at.
I could not have become a professional programmer and game developer if my folks had bought me a Colecovision instead of an Apple for Christmas in 1982, and neither could Carmack, Romero, Garriott, or many of the other eminences grise currently duking it out on JeffK's SmartyMan Gaem Designar Survivor Island. We all got our start more or less the same way: by making the most of an open platform.
So it's with some regret that I see PC game developers flocking to the PS2s and XBoxen of the world, cheerfully paying Microsoft and Sony ten bucks a box or more in hopes of deliverance from the PC's tech-support hassles and platform variability. The magic of the Apple ][ was that it was a general-purpose computing device that could do anything you wanted -- you could run the assemblers and editors you needed to build your game on the exact same piece of hardware that Nasir Gebelli, Richard Garriott, or Ken Williams had on their desks. There were no excuses -- you could do anything those guys could do, assuming you didn't suck.
Fortunately, that's still true of the PC world today. Even though our machines are close to five orders of magnitude faster than the old 1 MHz 8-bit home computers, any high-school kid with a PC still has access to an inexpensive, ubiquitous, open platform fit for nurturing new talent. (Microsoft bashers may object to my application of the term 'open platform' to a Wintel PC, but as far as I'm concerned, any machine I can write and sell code on without paying platform royalties is 'open' enough.)
My lengthy rant will have served its purpose if it inspires some of the die-hard console advocates out there to give a second thought to their own history. Few games more interesting than Super Mario Brothers really owe their origins to the proprietary arcade/console side of the business. Almost all the good stuff came from some bored, geeky kid fooling around on a home computer, or from college students with more access to general-purpose computer hardware than their professors knew what to do with.
I don't think PC gamers and console gamers are genuinely trapped in an us-versus-them situation, but if I'm wrong, and we really do have to draw battle lines in the sand, I know what side I'm on.
You have a point. At first glance it's even more logical (and thus appealing to our essential 'geekhood') to suggest that the collective wisdom of humanity is what should guide our actions as individuals. After all, if two heads are better than one, all heads must be better than one as well, right?
:) Pure objectivism and pure subjectivism, pure libertarianism and pure fascism, pure individualism and pure collectivism... all of these are abstractions, and whenever human nature tries to implement them, you've gotta expect some bugs. As long as we remain human beings, we won't tolerate life at the extremes that either you, or your hardcore individualist/objectivist opponents, advocate. Philosophies that disregard human nature are pointless in theory and usually tragic in practice.
If human nature were perfect (or at least more ant-like), you'd be right. Unfortunately, we 'libertarian' types have history on our side as testimony to the fact that human nature isn't perfect. Collective perfection is a great thing to strive for -- who knows what we could accomplish as individuals if we could all agree on a common direction? -- but in the real world, no one has found a way to implement economic, political, and moral collectivism without human leadership. Some humans will always insist that they're more 'equal' than others. It's just the way they're wired. The upshot, whenever collectivism has been imposed on imperfect humans by imperfect humans, has always been tyranny.
So it shouldn't surprise you when I resist your suggestion that we all sublimate our individual drives, desires, and political beliefs to that of an unknown, unknowable Nietzschian 'overman'. To use a programming metaphor, it's easy to write an abstract base class with no bugs -- the devil is in the implementation.
Unfortunately, I can't, in good conscience, join the NRA either. The NRA's president, Charlton Heston, is on record as accusing people in my industry (computer/video game development) of contributing to the (statistically nonexistent) rise in youth violence in the United States.
The Libertarian Party is the only medium-to-large political organization I've encountered that doesn't piss me off by taking howlingly stupid positions on issues like that.
At the organizational level, they're about as far from libertarian (either small-L or big-L) as you can get: a clique of holier-than-thou hypocrites who don't see any problem with defending certain civil liberties while attacking others. Unfortunately, it appears that relatively few of their members are aware of this.
:)
I was actually interested in joining the ACLU awhile back -- there's a lot of overlap between what they claim to stand for and what I believe as a small-l libertarian. I'm not much into the protest scene, but some of the recent cases involving things like DeCSS, patent abuse, and Net censorship finally made me consider becoming more financially active in First Amendment causes. But then I ran across the following page on the ACLU's site:
http://www.aclu.org/library/aaguns.html
I'm not a gun freak (don't own any, and am not particularly interested in doing so at the moment), but that page changed my mind in a hurry about signing up. The donation I was planning to make to the ACLU went to the EFF instead.
Trading one civil liberty (the Second Amendment) for another (the First Amendment) strikes me as a really, really bad idea. What's downright offensive is that an organization with a name like "American Civil Liberties Union" is using members' funds to promote such an agenda, when most of their members probably aren't aware they're doing so.
As far as I can tell, the ACLU's main page doesn't even link to this position paper -- the only way you can find it is if someone tells you it's there. Certainly "Gun Control" is conspicuously absent from the list of "Issues" on their front page. I'd be curious to know how many card-carrying ACLU members would object to this brand of sophistry on the part of their organization... an organization they joined in the mistaken belief that they were standing up for all of their Constitutional rights.
Please spare me the "but the Second Amendment was written for the National Guard" spiel -- if that's what you believe, then perhaps the ACLU is the right organization for you, and I'd say by all means, get involved. This isn't intended as flamebait, just a heads-up to people who might be thinking about joining the ACLU without getting the full story behind their political positions. Don't shoot (no pun intended) the messenger.
... are usually a sign that your TV isn't calibrated properly. Many people (including, probably 'Buffy') are running their sharpness and/or brightness controls too high for optimum DVD viewing quality.
Excessive brightness settings in particular are a great way to bring out those blotchy areas of semi-darkness that appear on many DVDs. If you're not into springing for a full ISF calibration of your setup, the next best thing would be renting or buying a copy of Video Essentials and following the directions that come with it.
The whole idea that people can control the actions of corporations by single-handedly not purchasing from them is ridiculous
No, it's perfectly rational. The opposite notion -- the idea that you and one or two other guys could control the actions of corporations -- is scary.
Think about it. If actions by isolated individuals had any real power, it would result in chaos. They (the big evil capitalistic orporations, oppressive Western governments, or whatever keeps you, personally, up at night) are organized for the purpose of achieving their goals. You have to be willing to do the same... or your desires will have no effect on the rest of us.
It's pretty much gotta be that way.
FFA was by Daniel Keyes, if I remember right. Scary piece of work. Not off-topic at all, for those who've read it!
... that the link on the posted site goes directly to my project text description. If you visited the KE5FX site before I updated it with a link back to my home page, you probably didn't see the schematics, waveforms, and photos associated with the project.
The correct link to the project site's front page is http://www.qsl.net/ke5fx. Sorry for any confusion.
All that link shows is that they went to my page and hit 'Save' (and without asking my permission to mirror it first, making it tough for me to update their copy with corrections, grrr.)
If the L0pht guys have actually built one of these puppies I'd love to hear from them -- AFAIK there has been only one successful duplication of my results so far.