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User: FrameRotBlues

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  1. Re:When I Broadcast My Music... on Boston University Student Challenges RIAA · · Score: 1

    And the FCC has specific rules regulating the power output of those FM transmitters to something on the order of 100 milliwatts, or basically a 10-20 foot radius of the transmitting antenna. If you crank up the power, you get a visit from the FCC, who will confiscate your equipment and serve you with a court order. Pirate radio has been going against this for years, and there might even be some parallels to be drawn between the FCC and the RIAA.

  2. Re:Speed of Gravity on Matter Discovered Traveling at Near Light Speed · · Score: 1
    But how would you know until it happened? For the entire 8 minutes and 33 seconds, you'd still be seeing the sun as you've always seen it, feeling the effects of it's gravity as you've always felt it...

    Light only moves as fast as light can move, and telescopes only make it easier to see the same light your eyeball does. When stars a hundred light-years away go supernova, we don't know it for a hundred years. Same principle for our sun, just a shorter distance.

  3. Re:Blistering speeds? on Matter Discovered Traveling at Near Light Speed · · Score: 4, Funny

    You mean between ridiculous speed and ludicrous speed, right? Wasn't that the order on Spaceballs? Light Speed, Ridiculous Speed, Ludicrous Speed?

  4. Re:Ask a long-haul Trucker about NC taxes! on NC Man Fined For Using Vegetable Oil As Fuel · · Score: 1
    Mmmmmm...

    A trucker gets stopped by a trooper, or pulls over to a weigh station. He knows what's about to happen, so he flips the air valve to his fuel tank, which starts to inflate the bladder mentioned in the above post.

    Commercial vehicle enforcement officer opens the fuel tank...

    "Son, you've got diesel just pouring out of your tank, it's gushing out all over the ground. How'd you get it all in there? Now we'll have to ge the EPA out here to clean this up... Wait... what the hell is that balloon doing coming out of the tank?"

    Or better yet:

    Commercial vehicle enforcement officer doesn't open the fuel tank, and walks around the vehicle for 5 minutes looking at the marker lights, then walks up to the fuel tank about the time the bladder reaches 120 PSI and blows the cap off the tank, and all the fuel along with it.

    Heh heh heh. Nice theory, but... might need a little work to get it right.

  5. That's usually a place without Blinkenlights. on A "Bill of Lights" to Restrict LEDs on Gadgets? · · Score: 1
    Usually sound equipment is void of any excessive LEDs or indicators. The indicators that are there, are there for a good reason (see the router arguments above). Your comment makes me think of the Soundcraft Series Two input level indicators.

    Are you sure he wasn't just giving you an easy answer? I'm not saying it wouldn't happen, but I think the professional sound industry as a whole is less accepting of Blinkenlights.

  6. Slashdot Demographics on CBS Moving To Syndication Across the Internet · · Score: 1

    It's pretty easy to see that there aren't a lot of Slashdot users who care about television programming - check out the number of people commenting here vs. the teachers putting the students through a gun scare debate. Personally I don't watch TV, I use one as a graphical output for my DVD player. Judging by the response to this article, I'd be willing to say that I'm not alone.

  7. Re:ok wait a second on Jobs Responds to Greenpeace FUD · · Score: 1
    From the GP site, regarding computers and parts:

    When they're tossed, they usually end up at the fingertips of children in China, India and other developing-world countries. They dismantle them for parts, and are exposed to a dangerous toxic cocktail that threatens their health and the environment.


    Uh, I grew up an American kid, and I dismantled my Apple II+... somehow I don't think I was exposed to a "dangerous toxic cocktail" anymore than when I soldered wires together for my tube radio.

    But I still have some mercury tilt switches somewhere from when I took apart a couple of Honeywell thermostats. Do those kids in those "developing-world" countries want the same parts and goodies I had when I was a kid? Maybe they're just geeks-in-training...

  8. Re:what ever happened to no single point of failur on RIM Releases Reason for Blackberry Outage · · Score: 1

    Uh, I think the RIM BES runs constantly, 100% of the time. They'd have to update a live system, if they were going to update anything at all. Otherwise, depending on the frequency of updates, I'd imagine BB users would be pissed if they had fluky BBs for an hour every week. And the "centralization" aspect is what a lot of people are wondering about.

  9. Re:TAKS Test on RIAA Wants Student Deposed On School Day · · Score: 1
    Yeah, but unless you were in the barn, under the cow, squeezing the tit this morning, there's more to producing milk than just the cow. It gets to your grocery store somehow.

    I did have to laugh at that, tho. Good catch!

  10. Re:TAKS Test on RIAA Wants Student Deposed On School Day · · Score: 1

    ... make yourselves feel better about pirating music from hard-working artists. Considering the amount of actual labor involved per unit of payment, I think "hard-working artists" ranks right up there with "hard-working football players" and "hard-working actors." They're not wiping away the sweat and dirt from their forehead for $9.25 an hour, building a school for your kid, or barely making ends meet to produce the milk you drank for breakfast this morning.
  11. Drink gas, it's cheaper. on Montana Says No to Real ID, Passes Law to Deny It · · Score: 1

    Clearly people can't make intelligent decisions about pleasure vs a tradeoff with their health. And heroin and meth addicts are useless, and in the latter case, dangerous. We don't need to all of a sudden have 30 million of them. Yeah, we probably do. Not only would that require us to either teach our kids or lose them to a mindset of "drugs are cool", we'd eliminate a large portion of stupid people in society. I agree with the OP of your reply, parents need to start teaching their kids in a manner that the kids can respect, and it's my belief that drugs currently marked illegal in this country should be made legal, and taxed. The money from the taxes can go to drug education for children under 18, and those that choose the path of bad drugs will have been taught the consequences of their choices. Drinking gasoline is bad for you and will kill you, yet it's legal and we tax it. Everyone knows that drinking gasoline will kill you, yet if people make that choice, who are we to prevent them from being an idiot? You're almost right: Unintelligent people can't make decisions about pleasure vs. a tradeoff with their health. Intelligent people can. We know this because less than 100% of humans use "illegal" drugs.
  12. Re:Repeated exposure and practice = learning? on PowerPoint Bad For Learning · · Score: 1
    In many countries, this is a common practice, on all levels, from grade school to university. Some say that you don't really understand something until you actually explain it to Slashdot readers.

    Sound about right to some of you?

  13. Re:Bing! You win a prize on PowerPoint Bad For Learning · · Score: 1

    Experts on human learning seem to agree that people learn better if the environment in which they study changes.

    Hell Yes! I remember every field trip I was ever on in high school because it was so out of the norm. Same thing goes for my physics class: we did LOTS of hands-on experimentation that continues to stick with me.

  14. everyone learns differently. on PowerPoint Bad For Learning · · Score: 1

    I think the real issue is that people have different learning styles and not everyone learns best through the same classroom or presentation techniques. I don't think that most people have a good sense of self-awareness when it comes to knowing how they really learn best.

    Bravo. I was really waiting for someone to bring that up. Everyone learns differently, and some people live their whole lives not knowing how they learned what they learned over the years.

    If I was on /. long enough to give mod points, I'd have wild monkey mod with you.

  15. Re:Sending out notes ahead of time does not help on PowerPoint Bad For Learning · · Score: 1
    I think what he's saying is, "You get out of it what you put into it." That's true of anything: your job, your family, your education, hell, even your car (oil, tires & proper maintenance!).

    You may have a good point in saying,

    There's nothing you can do to help the people who don't want help, but it's still harsh to have those same people tell you that you suck at your job because they didn't pass the class or they got fired.
  16. Re:Who's at fault though? on PowerPoint Bad For Learning · · Score: 1

    I'm sure he did it just to get his kicks off of hearing the entire class sigh in exasperation. I had a teacher like that once. More annoying than insightful.

  17. Re:What the hell? on To Verizon, "Unlimited" Means 5 GB · · Score: 1
    I have a very similar scenario now, no land line but a cellphone, and I have Cingular GMRS. My max bandwidth is 5.5k, period. I've contacted them and got the run-around. Cingular says it's my SonyEricsson phone (a Z525A), and SonyEricsson says it's Cingular, and neither of them will help me because they point the finger at each other. It's so slow, and barely does GMail because the chat-enabling initially takes up 325K or so. I'm just going to have to bite the bullet and get wireless from a local provider.

    ISPs aren't really worth the $10 for 28.8k, but they're better than my extra $20 a month to Cingular for 5.5k. Ugh.

  18. Not everyone. on Daylight Saving Change Saved No Power · · Score: 1

    Uh, where I came from in a rural area, buses were sent off to different routes, to pick up each family's worth of kids. I had a 45-minute bus ride into school, and about a 30-minute ride home. Everybody got on at the same time, and off at around the same time (the different schools were short distance away). 30 buses made 1 route in the morning and 1 route in the evening. There were 6 buses for kids who had afterschool activities that zigzag'ed across standard routes to drop the kids off in the evening. I think I understand where you're coming from, but that probably only works where students live relatively close to their school. I lived 14 miles away 'as the crow flies', so it wouldn't have worked for us. There'd be more diesel burned just getting on the outer edge to pick up 20 kids than it's worth. JMHO.

  19. Chlorinate the pool. on Daylight Saving Change Saved No Power · · Score: 1

    ... There are always 10-20% of people who misunderstood, are naturally disagreeable, are stupid, have some social agenda- who knows, maybe genetically random behavior has a certain reward- ...

    That percentage seems really high to me, but I don't see a lot of different walks of life. Anyways, there was a joke to make about that:

    The problem with the gene pool is that there's no lifeguard!

  20. Really Comparing on X Prize For a 100-MPG Car · · Score: 1
    If you really want to compare gas vs. electric, here's some food for thought: In the pioneering days of gasoline, how'd the gasoline get into the car? They didn't have pumps that ran at 7 Gal./min. with digital readouts, they had cans and buckets. If they were lucky, they had spouts or funnels. Then someone invented the gasoline nozzle, and after decades of refining it, we've come up with the nozzle you use today: automatic shutoffs, variable flow deliveries, safety couplings, etc.

    That's where we're at right now: trying to get electricity into batteries via the standard power grid. It's probably NOT the most efficient way of doing it, but it's what we've got right now, so until someone invents something better (and they will!), we'll make the best of it. In the future, will we be using 60 Hz AC powerlines with bridge rectifiers to charge DC batteries? Who knows. I can't imagine the guy with a gas can in 1905 would know what the heck to do with a modern gas pump.

  21. Re:What about Electric on X Prize For a 100-MPG Car · · Score: 1
    Yes, that is not standard. But then, there's not a NEMA 5-15 receptacle at every parking lot space in the mall, or at your work, or wherever. And you wouldn't want multiple plugs for your car, you'd want just one trouble-free plug. In terms of using what we have right now, sure, you can only pull 120 volts at 15 amps for most normal residential outdoor receptacles. But if you're going to install all these connections in all over the place for electric cars as part of a massive new infrastructure, why go with something small and limiting? Why not go with something with more capacity, and then adapt the homes to that? Obviously 3-phase is then out of the question, or maybe not, if the electric car had a way to switch charging modes from single- to three-phase. The same connector could be used for both, since the neutral and ground could remain on their respective pins. Most homes have the capacity to run an electric range (most can do much more with 200A services the norm), 240v x 50a = 12000 watts. Why couldn't that connector be hooked up to residential services? It could be a NEMA L21-30, although it would only be rated for 30A instead of 50A. Hubbell makes this connector in a watertight Safety-Shroud version that'd be great for outdoor use.

    I'm not saying we should build electric cars and run them off whatever's convenient, because that's no better than what some pioneers are doing right now. There needs to be a whole infrastructure in place! That means engineering review boards created; standards drafted, written, and enforced; financing for all the installation; blah blah blah. Yeah, it takes time, but either ya do it right the first time, or you do it again. If the winning vehicle is worthy enough, the infrastructure will (in time) begin to build around that vehicle.

    Again, all this is assuming that you have a car that runs strictly off of batteries and cannot charge itself. I'm much more for the electric car that has a small diesel running a generator at a fixed speed, only when it needs to (i.e. the battery capacity drops to less than 50%). This allows the best of both worlds, not having to rely on hydrocarbons when you don't need to, but having it there if you do need it.

  22. Re:Changing percpetion on X Prize For a 100-MPG Car · · Score: 1

    3/4 ton is it's load capacity. Pickups come in 1/4-ton (Chevy S10), 1/2-ton (Ford F-150), 3/4-ton (F-250), 1-ton (F-350), etc. They weigh substantially more than their load capacity, and most have real-world loading capacities more than they're rated for. A 3/4-ton pickup probably weighs 2.5 tons, I don't have exact numbers for each pickup model, but that's how it works.

  23. Re:What about Electric on X Prize For a 100-MPG Car · · Score: 1
    I agree, I don't think many people will be interested in installing anything, unless they're feeling up to the challenge. I mentioned somewhere else in here that it will take several enterprising individuals to start up a pay-charge infrastructure, where all you have to do is park in the right spot at your work/at the mall/at your apartment and plug your dongle into the hole. Joe Blow doesn't want to mess around with wires, fuses and contactors; he just wants to whip it out, whip it in, and walk away. I mentioned elsewhere about an RFID tag on your car that would work like a toll road, so that you receive a monthly statement of where you 'charged' and for how long, all going on your VISA.


    And as far as the wattage rating, I guess that depends on how the batteries were sectioned, what voltages they operate at, how fast they can be recharged without exploding, etc. Yes, residential ratings would be lower, but then, the car stays at home while you sleep for 6 hours, doesn't it? At least, I can't say that for everyone, I'm just saying the majority of commuting Americans. Malls and other public locations usually have plenty of grid potential.


    All this assumes a fully-electric car. I have visions of a diesel-powered hybrid similar to today's locomotives that use a diesel driving a generator at a fixed speed, and regenerative braking. I mean, DC motors on each wheel can become DC generators just by letting them coast. That technology is there.

  24. Wait while you work, wait while you sleep. on X Prize For a 100-MPG Car · · Score: 1

    You're right, waiting sucks. Unless you're sleeping, or at work, or at the mall, or eating dinner, or doing homework, or watching TV, or any other point of the day where you could plug your car into an electrical outlet. You're also right about the infrastructure not being there. It will take several enterprising individuals to come up with the pay-charge stations that you'll park your car at at the mall, or at work, or at the train station, or at your apartment. Hell, they could even rig your car with an RFID tag and you'd just get a monthly statement saying where you charged your car, and for how long, working on the same operating principles as a toll road or other pay-as-you-go system.

  25. Re:sorry to troll, but... on X Prize For a 100-MPG Car · · Score: 1

    Dude, does your cellphone have a lead-acid battery that weighs 2 lbs.? Does it stink when you recharge it? I doubt it. Lithium technology is lightweight, and new chemical reactions (i.e. batteries) that give off electricity are being found all the time.