You're right. Their plane didn't weigh half a ton and have a 133HP engine. It weigned a bit over 600 pounds and had a whopping 12HP.
I'm not sure that ligher weight has anything to do with safety though. I can take my 385 pound motorcycle and hit a cement wall at 150MPH after all. I can take a 12HP scooter and hit the same wall at 60-70MPH too.
Generally you weaken a structure when reducing weight. I'd immagine this helicopter is probaby more sturdy than the Flyer I.
Keep in mind you can learn more about planes, trains and automobiles (and helicopters) in a 15 minute internet search than the entire world knew in 1903. I bet the second-hand civic engine is more reliable than the flyer I's one-off custom hand built (in a mere 6 weeks) engine.
Kudos to the kid. He's done what the vast majority of/.ers haven't and probably couldn't. Yes, I'd be hesitant to go for a ride but really. If a kid in Nigeria can build a working helicopter it shows how pathetic the rest of the world has become. I'm still stuck riding a train to work every day that's late one out of 15 trips on average.
In case you haven't noticed, the vast majority of TV is never directly paid for by the viewers anyway.
My POINT was, this is something people want. Instead of providing it, the movie and record companies sue everyone to prevent it. I never said they shouldn't wrap a business model around it and make money. I'm *NOT* stupid. I understand it costs money to make TV shows.
You should take notice that your reality check bounced. The vast majority of revenue comes from commercials. Guess what the tv studios could include in their free downloads? Oh. Right.
Just because their current business model no longer suits the enviornment they're trying to use it in, that's no reason they should be able to sue everyone to MAKE it work. For millions of years it's been 'adapt or die'. It's time they learned the same lesson.
Obviously this is something the general public like and want.
Obviously big business > the public. As usual.
Big business fails to provide, public finds elsewhere. Big business thorws a hissy fit. Someone gets arrested. People lose what they want, big business goes one step further towards hell.
Erm, now i'm not going to claim to be a file sharing expert (i'm not that dumb) so feel free to dismiss this comment out of hand.
Few, if any current file sharing programs actually upload the FILE. Most send basic infomation ABOUT the file (e.g. hash, name, time/date stamp). The file never actually goes to (or through, usually) the P2P server.
I also think 'making available' needs to be tested in detail. I can think of a dozen examples where something is 'made available' but the person/company/entity who does so is not held responsible.
1. Wrong. Faster and higher density flash cells have LOWER lifetimes. It varies a fair amount but you're looking at more like 100k writes. 2. This exists in virtually all flash drives for the past several years. Wear leveling - writes are spread around the flash drive and the controller remaps sectors on the fly if errors are found via ECC. Note that most flash drives have an extra 10-20% capacity that's not directly accessible for exactly this reason. 3. MTBF != life expectency. Still, SSDD have predicted lifetimes of 10-20 years. Drives vary in speed. The two I have do about 25MB/sec. 25MB/sec on 32GB with 100k writes works out to about 4 years of constant writing at the drive's max rate. (100k * (32GB/25MB sec))/(60 * 60 * 24 * 365) = 4.06Years 4. It's already viable, just expensive. I've had two of them for a few months. Dell sells them for the D420/D430 series laptops. They're expensive at ~$500 each though.
They act just like platter drives. The only difference is there's no spin up, ~=0 seek time, lower power consumption, and no gyroscopic effect if you hold one while it's powered up.
The is no difference to the OS or BIOS. The built in controller handles the wear leveling so it's totally transparant to the OS, BIOS, user, etc.
Yep, i've got 2 of the nifty 32GB dell drives. Unfortunately it's got the stupid flex-connector and not a standard interface so I can't try one in a desktop PC. It seems to work quite nicely in teh D420/D430 laptops though.
Noticable improvement in boot time and app response. Small benefit to battery life. I'd love to put one in an external USB bay. Then it can life in my backpack without fear of "bad things". Speaking of...i should go poke ebay:)
Since wear leveling has been addressed (repeatedly) in reply i'll skip it.
Instead let's talk about how your 3 year old U320 drive will kick the crap out of bla bla bla.
In raw transfer speed probably. SSDD do fall behind by varying degrees in raw transfer. However, raw transfer is rarely the most important aspect of a hard drive.
Far more important is seek time. That's why your fancy SCSI drives spin at 10k or 15k RPM. The 4mS average seek gives them a bid advantage over the 7-10mS in standard desktop hard drives. What's the seek time on SSDDs? Generally around 100uS or 0.1mS. So if you sacrifice 2/3 of your drive capacity (1TB vs 150-300GB for 15k) to halve your seek time what would you sacrifice to improve it by at least an order of magnitude?
Random seek is critically important for most servers and also for many home uses. In testing with SSDDs windows boot time improved by about 20-30% depending on the situation. App load times also showed substantial improvements. Try throwing a sizable DB on a SSDD and you'll be amazed at the performance even without caching.
So yes. For raw backup, very high data rate streaming, etc. Your SCSI drives might win out. For the majority of applications SSDD > U320 15K SCSI.
>give me nine months and a cooperative woman to help, and I can create one for you, no advanced technology required
But that is NOT true. A go master is a combination of years of training/practice, the mental capacity, the education (influences how a person things), the way a person's mind is 'wired'. By your example I should be able to pop out the next grandmaster on demand. We know that's not the case. Still, i'm sure you wouldnt mind trying (repeatedly) to prove your point if the woman was attractive:)
The big difference with computers is repeatability. If you design, build and program a grandmaster chess computer then I can build an identical one that will behave the same way. Ask anyone with a couple children if they all produce identical results given the same problem.
In light of the current 'one cent' stupidity on/.'s front page I think someone should charge the german police with possession of child pron. They clearly downloaded it off the interweb and AOL has the logs showing their username to "prove" it, right?
Ok, so the article reads like any other piece of "news" drivel.
The guy pulls numbers out of his ass (despite references, he still makes most of it up).
Idiotic claims like "OS was 5% of a PC cost x years ago and now is 50%". Well enjoy the idiot award. because *ONE* court case in europe managed to quote ONE example of where they claimed the cost was 50% does not mean that's what it is for EVERY PC.
Good god. Take and apply to and...well...oh yeah! Slashdot news. Right.
The MAFIAA get paid by the radio stations to broadcast the songs (which, in turn is paid by advertizing) based on whatever magical contract they sign. If every person in that shop had a radio with earphones it's fine. If one is playing through a PA you have the same audience (for both hearing the song and hearing the commercials). I fail to see how the MAFIAA is losing anything here. Well anything other than additional royalties that i think are scandelous.
See now, this is just playing with words. Lingual masturbation? anyhow...
I can definitely 100% guarantee this ship is unsinkable in most circumstances. GP is correct - REDUCE != PREVENT. You're using them in a different context and trying to equate the meanings.
You can reduce the incidence of *all* GTA but you can not prevent *all* GTA.
You can prevent a *portion* of GTA by locking your car doors.
And finally, do you think that locking your car doors really prevents you car from being stolen? Locks, keys, alarms, etc. serve to prevent CASUAL or PETTY crime (swiping the change from your ash tray or the leather jacket in your back seat). Any serious criminal that wants to steal your new mercedes is going to. The key, engine kill, alarm, remote starter, and on-star will prevent a joyride. But a professional simply pops the hood and cuts out the battery and then flat-beds the car to a chop shop.
Same thing with terrorism. You're going to spend trillions of dollars and hurt millions of people preventing negligable crimes (compared to say, homicide) while the "real" terrorists will still likely accomplish whatever they set out to.
Nonononono. We've already CLEARLY proven that underclocking produces undesirable results. e.g. country music, "war on terror", wardrobe malfunction paranoia, and "for the children!!!11!1one1oneone" movement.
[quote] for just shoplifting the damned thing[/quote]
And this is my problem. You potentially face a worse 'punishment' by downloading dookie (knee-slap greenday) than you do if you went into wal-mart picked up the CD and walked straight out the door.
Shoplifting is what, a class C misdemeanor? Potentially 30 days in county jail... varies by state/jurisdiction. That assumes the judge throws the book at you. Without a substantial prior record you're probably looking at 40-100 horus of community service, maybe 6 months probation if the judge feels the need to keep an eye on you, possibly a 'don't steal shit' class.
So let's compare to the $9250 PER SONG that was recently awarded (yes, i know civil vs. criminal but we're comparing the impact to someone's life). Dookie has 14 tracks * $9250 = $129,500. Now, unless you make > $1,295.00 per hour i'd take 100 hours of community service. That's enough to bankrupt a large portion of adults and at a minimum totally ruin them financially. You don't want to even thing about the numbers for WILLFUL copyright infringement. I mean, stealing IS willful if you want to compare evenly.
So let's compare worst case:
misdemeanor conviction (not a felony, you don't report it on job apps) 30 days in couty jail (with prior record and a PMSing judge) 6 months probation 100hrs community service 'don't steal' class, maybe 40 hours...probably way less
vs.
no criminal conviction (ok, nifty) $9,250 per song via recent case, $220,000 per song if judged WILLFUL theft bankruptcy potential loss of house, car(s), possessions, bank accounts, inventments, etc. Financial ruin for most adults - especially @ $220,000/song. Unless you have gobs of spare case, you're fucked financially for life
I'm gunna start stealing CDs like my friends did in high school.
Wow, a greasemonkey that worships a dealer now? That's a backwards twist if i've ever heard one.
I've yet to find an honest dealership. Yes, there are a ton of dishonest 'corner mechanics' but hanging a dealership sigh just means the naieve new car buyers are guaranteed to flock to you. Factory trained techs? Erm. But no. Besides the fact that i *highly* doubt they've gone to the factory to train... building != troubleshooting and repair.
What I find strange is you claim you can't find the spark plugs on your engine (yes, probably no spark plug wires anymore - many engines put an individual coil on top of each plug) but you're posting on/. - clearly you should know of the existance of "google". 5 minutes on there should get you step-by-step to replace plugs or any other semi-common maintenance or medium complexity repair.
Heck, if you're good at searching you can find acutal repair manuals for free of a couple bucks. Those will take you through a full engine rebuild.
Oh, and if you really can't change the oil in a car then i call BS on your claim to have rebuilt carburators. The only thing more complicated than it was 25 years ago is the 200 brands and types of designer oil at the store.
Because gun and racing nutts are as sane as/. users right?
Kettle, meet pot.
Anyhow, I'd believe there may be minimal effect on the alignment of molecules by using cryogenic freezing. That would be easy enough to prove with an electron microscope. The difference something like that would have on sound should either be entirely measurable or entirely made up. I'd lean towards the second.
Oh, and how about the idiots spending $700 on a power cord (http://www.positive-feedback.com/Issue23/vhaudio_airsine.htm) claiming it makes amazing changes to their setup. Granted that thing looks like my last attempt at making a power cord (@ less than $700) but they're still plugging into the same "dirty" house power. With "disgusting" oxygen-laden copper hiding in their walls. Running to the "filthy" circuit breaker. That goes out through the "distorting" power meter and over the "garbage" power lines the electric company uses.
Wait, are all these guys using an ac-dc-ac power inverter to create a perfect sine power supply? Otherwise garbage in garbage out.
Now, I think $100 for a 1 meter pair of speaker cables is insane. 16-14ga lamp cord is easy, i did my car sub amp with 8ga mains wiring (the kind you need pliars to bend) and it works perfectly fine.
I understand spending substantially more for a tiny improvement if you're talking about a hobby. Are the $3000 guitars $2900 better than the one i can buy in target? Doubful. But for a hobbiest RIO is skewed in the extreme.
That said, I'd put up my own fortune that there's no effective difference between those fancy cables and any decently made speaker wire. They're just playing to the same extreme case hobbiests where cost is far secondary to performance. My problem is I honestly don't think there's any performance difference.
How about the "burning in" they do to these cables? Copper shouldn't be changing as you send a current through it...unless you melt it at least.
If they were serious, show me a wave form analysis with the difference between this and another cable.
Well when the noise level is already so high, passing any intelligible information takes an even stronger signal.
Unfortunately that generally causes more noise.
I find it ironic - if the ozone hole was 30% BIGGER this year they'd be crying gloom and doom. No mention of a 'randomly low year not related to the overall trend' in that situation. Amazing how "news" can be twisted and presented totally differently depending on your intended goal.
The lack of nuclear terorist attacks this year was zero. However, the past 100 years have been a fluke and we can expect the exponential trending to return next year. Beware the 100's of nuclear attacks coming! lol.
If by "long term when we switch to nuclear/solar/wind" you mean when the sun goes out...sure. At least in the US I don't see us making substantial progress towards that change any time in the next 25 years.
Everyone's caught up in this clause on the contract but no one even things twice about the binding arbitration clause in almost every contract (including this one).
They usually read something like "you agree never to sue us. Ever. If you're ever unhappy you agree to use binding arbitration (usually with a clause requiring phone, email, or mail settlement and barring in-person) with our chosen arbitration company xyz" ATT actually makes brief mention of small claims court but that's about it.
Now, i know our court systems are horribly abused but it seems that a legitimate use for them "They billed my checking account for 12 months of service when it never worked according to their advertised bla bla bla" can never actually come to fruition.
As for the clause everyone's complaining about: Would you let someone run a website/blog bashing your hosting company ON one of their servers? If you hate ATT enough that you'd publicly bash them, why would you use their servers to do it?
I think this whole topic is a waste of time.
person a "I want to be able to post my website and say whatever i want" person b "well i know ISP XYZ censors what you post" person a "Oh, ok. I won't go there then. There's only 14 million other hosting copmanies and plenty of ISP's"
See now, I was about to consider this an intelligent comment and reply in turn but then you went calling names. Unlucky for me i'm bored enough at work to reply anyway...
The iPhone is not compatible with any 3rd party apps that i'm aware of, not compatible with BES, not compatible with any wireless contacts/calendar sync. Yes, it's "compatible" with windows and Mac. Linux? Not sure.
To dig into your point, technically everything is compatible...with the specific designated things it was built around. I'm talking about compatibility with...anything other than what's on the phone when you buy it.
As for paying more for ring tones: Yes, obviously people find value in it. The valued service is nothing more than chopping apart a song. Something that can be done with freeware fairly easily. Heck, if the iphone was "open" someone could write an app to do that for you and avoid the per-song fee. Oops! Personally I refuse to pay for ringtones, i've got tons of MP3s (heck, even legal!) that i will.
My theory on selling apps mightnot hold water based on history, but historically apple has never sold a phone. I'm not puffing anything, i'm pointing out that apple/att are quite happily keeping the iphone ibricked so they can sell more.
I'll stick with my blackberry TYVM. Go ahead and call me an ass, i paid 1/2-1/3 for equivilant functionality.
Slashdot Mirror
You're right. Their plane didn't weigh half a ton and have a 133HP engine. It weigned a bit over 600 pounds and had a whopping 12HP.
/.ers haven't and probably couldn't. Yes, I'd be hesitant to go for a ride but really. If a kid in Nigeria can build a working helicopter it shows how pathetic the rest of the world has become. I'm still stuck riding a train to work every day that's late one out of 15 trips on average.
I'm not sure that ligher weight has anything to do with safety though. I can take my 385 pound motorcycle and hit a cement wall at 150MPH after all. I can take a 12HP scooter and hit the same wall at 60-70MPH too.
Generally you weaken a structure when reducing weight. I'd immagine this helicopter is probaby more sturdy than the Flyer I.
Keep in mind you can learn more about planes, trains and automobiles (and helicopters) in a 15 minute internet search than the entire world knew in 1903. I bet the second-hand civic engine is more reliable than the flyer I's one-off custom hand built (in a mere 6 weeks) engine.
Kudos to the kid. He's done what the vast majority of
In case you haven't noticed, the vast majority of TV is never directly paid for by the viewers anyway.
My POINT was, this is something people want. Instead of providing it, the movie and record companies sue everyone to prevent it. I never said they shouldn't wrap a business model around it and make money. I'm *NOT* stupid. I understand it costs money to make TV shows.
You should take notice that your reality check bounced. The vast majority of revenue comes from commercials. Guess what the tv studios could include in their free downloads? Oh. Right.
Just because their current business model no longer suits the enviornment they're trying to use it in, that's no reason they should be able to sue everyone to MAKE it work. For millions of years it's been 'adapt or die'. It's time they learned the same lesson.
How sad.
Obviously this is something the general public like and want.
Obviously big business > the public. As usual.
Big business fails to provide, public finds elsewhere. Big business thorws a hissy fit. Someone gets arrested. People lose what they want, big business goes one step further towards hell.
Status quo, nothing to see here. Moving along...
Erm, now i'm not going to claim to be a file sharing expert (i'm not that dumb) so feel free to dismiss this comment out of hand.
Few, if any current file sharing programs actually upload the FILE. Most send basic infomation ABOUT the file (e.g. hash, name, time/date stamp). The file never actually goes to (or through, usually) the P2P server.
I also think 'making available' needs to be tested in detail. I can think of a dozen examples where something is 'made available' but the person/company/entity who does so is not held responsible.
1. Wrong. Faster and higher density flash cells have LOWER lifetimes. It varies a fair amount but you're looking at more like 100k writes. /(60 * 60 * 24 * 365) = 4.06Years
2. This exists in virtually all flash drives for the past several years. Wear leveling - writes are spread around the flash drive and the controller remaps sectors on the fly if errors are found via ECC. Note that most flash drives have an extra 10-20% capacity that's not directly accessible for exactly this reason.
3. MTBF != life expectency. Still, SSDD have predicted lifetimes of 10-20 years. Drives vary in speed. The two I have do about 25MB/sec. 25MB/sec on 32GB with 100k writes works out to about 4 years of constant writing at the drive's max rate. (100k * (32GB/25MB sec))
4. It's already viable, just expensive. I've had two of them for a few months. Dell sells them for the D420/D430 series laptops. They're expensive at ~$500 each though.
They act just like platter drives. The only difference is there's no spin up, ~=0 seek time, lower power consumption, and no gyroscopic effect if you hold one while it's powered up.
The is no difference to the OS or BIOS. The built in controller handles the wear leveling so it's totally transparant to the OS, BIOS, user, etc.
Basically plug and forget...
Yep, i've got 2 of the nifty 32GB dell drives. Unfortunately it's got the stupid flex-connector and not a standard interface so I can't try one in a desktop PC. It seems to work quite nicely in teh D420/D430 laptops though.
:)
Noticable improvement in boot time and app response. Small benefit to battery life. I'd love to put one in an external USB bay. Then it can life in my backpack without fear of "bad things". Speaking of...i should go poke ebay
Since wear leveling has been addressed (repeatedly) in reply i'll skip it.
Instead let's talk about how your 3 year old U320 drive will kick the crap out of bla bla bla.
In raw transfer speed probably. SSDD do fall behind by varying degrees in raw transfer. However, raw transfer is rarely the most important aspect of a hard drive.
Far more important is seek time. That's why your fancy SCSI drives spin at 10k or 15k RPM. The 4mS average seek gives them a bid advantage over the 7-10mS in standard desktop hard drives. What's the seek time on SSDDs? Generally around 100uS or 0.1mS. So if you sacrifice 2/3 of your drive capacity (1TB vs 150-300GB for 15k) to halve your seek time what would you sacrifice to improve it by at least an order of magnitude?
Random seek is critically important for most servers and also for many home uses. In testing with SSDDs windows boot time improved by about 20-30% depending on the situation. App load times also showed substantial improvements. Try throwing a sizable DB on a SSDD and you'll be amazed at the performance even without caching.
So yes. For raw backup, very high data rate streaming, etc. Your SCSI drives might win out. For the majority of applications SSDD > U320 15K SCSI.
>give me nine months and a cooperative woman to help, and I can create one for you, no advanced technology required
:)
But that is NOT true. A go master is a combination of years of training/practice, the mental capacity, the education (influences how a person things), the way a person's mind is 'wired'. By your example I should be able to pop out the next grandmaster on demand. We know that's not the case. Still, i'm sure you wouldnt mind trying (repeatedly) to prove your point if the woman was attractive
The big difference with computers is repeatability. If you design, build and program a grandmaster chess computer then I can build an identical one that will behave the same way. Ask anyone with a couple children if they all produce identical results given the same problem.
In light of the current 'one cent' stupidity on /.'s front page I think someone should charge the german police with possession of child pron. They clearly downloaded it off the interweb and AOL has the logs showing their username to "prove" it, right?
Erm...you mean .542? 21.646/40 ~= 0.5 by my math
Ok, so the article reads like any other piece of "news" drivel.
The guy pulls numbers out of his ass (despite references, he still makes most of it up).
Idiotic claims like "OS was 5% of a PC cost x years ago and now is 50%". Well enjoy the idiot award. because *ONE* court case in europe managed to quote ONE example of where they claimed the cost was 50% does not mean that's what it is for EVERY PC.
Good god. Take and apply to and...well...oh yeah! Slashdot news. Right.
Is it me or is this double dipping?
The MAFIAA get paid by the radio stations to broadcast the songs (which, in turn is paid by advertizing) based on whatever magical contract they sign. If every person in that shop had a radio with earphones it's fine. If one is playing through a PA you have the same audience (for both hearing the song and hearing the commercials). I fail to see how the MAFIAA is losing anything here. Well anything other than additional royalties that i think are scandelous.
See now, this is just playing with words. Lingual masturbation? anyhow...
I can definitely 100% guarantee this ship is unsinkable in most circumstances. GP is correct - REDUCE != PREVENT. You're using them in a different context and trying to equate the meanings.
You can reduce the incidence of *all* GTA but you can not prevent *all* GTA.
You can prevent a *portion* of GTA by locking your car doors.
And finally, do you think that locking your car doors really prevents you car from being stolen? Locks, keys, alarms, etc. serve to prevent CASUAL or PETTY crime (swiping the change from your ash tray or the leather jacket in your back seat). Any serious criminal that wants to steal your new mercedes is going to. The key, engine kill, alarm, remote starter, and on-star will prevent a joyride. But a professional simply pops the hood and cuts out the battery and then flat-beds the car to a chop shop.
Same thing with terrorism. You're going to spend trillions of dollars and hurt millions of people preventing negligable crimes (compared to say, homicide) while the "real" terrorists will still likely accomplish whatever they set out to.
Nonononono. We've already CLEARLY proven that underclocking produces undesirable results. e.g. country music, "war on terror", wardrobe malfunction paranoia, and "for the children!!!11!1one1oneone" movement.
...if that means we can start overclocking our brains too.
:)
I can't wait to see people walking around with heat sinks sticking out of their skull. Will they have designer ones?
[quote] for just shoplifting the damned thing[/quote]
... varies by state/jurisdiction. That assumes the judge throws the book at you. Without a substantial prior record you're probably looking at 40-100 horus of community service, maybe 6 months probation if the judge feels the need to keep an eye on you, possibly a 'don't steal shit' class.
And this is my problem. You potentially face a worse 'punishment' by downloading dookie (knee-slap greenday) than you do if you went into wal-mart picked up the CD and walked straight out the door.
Shoplifting is what, a class C misdemeanor? Potentially 30 days in county jail
So let's compare to the $9250 PER SONG that was recently awarded (yes, i know civil vs. criminal but we're comparing the impact to someone's life). Dookie has 14 tracks * $9250 = $129,500. Now, unless you make > $1,295.00 per hour i'd take 100 hours of community service. That's enough to bankrupt a large portion of adults and at a minimum totally ruin them financially. You don't want to even thing about the numbers for WILLFUL copyright infringement. I mean, stealing IS willful if you want to compare evenly.
So let's compare worst case:
misdemeanor conviction (not a felony, you don't report it on job apps)
30 days in couty jail (with prior record and a PMSing judge)
6 months probation
100hrs community service
'don't steal' class, maybe 40 hours...probably way less
vs.
no criminal conviction (ok, nifty)
$9,250 per song via recent case, $220,000 per song if judged WILLFUL theft
bankruptcy
potential loss of house, car(s), possessions, bank accounts, inventments, etc.
Financial ruin for most adults - especially @ $220,000/song.
Unless you have gobs of spare case, you're fucked financially for life
I'm gunna start stealing CDs like my friends did in high school.
I'll take Lary Niven's Star currency.
I miss known space.
Wow, a greasemonkey that worships a dealer now? That's a backwards twist if i've ever heard one.
... building != troubleshooting and repair.
/. - clearly you should know of the existance of "google". 5 minutes on there should get you step-by-step to replace plugs or any other semi-common maintenance or medium complexity repair.
I've yet to find an honest dealership. Yes, there are a ton of dishonest 'corner mechanics' but hanging a dealership sigh just means the naieve new car buyers are guaranteed to flock to you. Factory trained techs? Erm. But no. Besides the fact that i *highly* doubt they've gone to the factory to train
What I find strange is you claim you can't find the spark plugs on your engine (yes, probably no spark plug wires anymore - many engines put an individual coil on top of each plug) but you're posting on
Heck, if you're good at searching you can find acutal repair manuals for free of a couple bucks. Those will take you through a full engine rebuild.
Oh, and if you really can't change the oil in a car then i call BS on your claim to have rebuilt carburators. The only thing more complicated than it was 25 years ago is the 200 brands and types of designer oil at the store.
Because gun and racing nutts are as sane as /. users right?
Kettle, meet pot.
Anyhow, I'd believe there may be minimal effect on the alignment of molecules by using cryogenic freezing. That would be easy enough to prove with an electron microscope. The difference something like that would have on sound should either be entirely measurable or entirely made up. I'd lean towards the second.
Oh, and how about the idiots spending $700 on a power cord (http://www.positive-feedback.com/Issue23/vhaudio_airsine.htm) claiming it makes amazing changes to their setup. Granted that thing looks like my last attempt at making a power cord (@ less than $700) but they're still plugging into the same "dirty" house power. With "disgusting" oxygen-laden copper hiding in their walls. Running to the "filthy" circuit breaker. That goes out through the "distorting" power meter and over the "garbage" power lines the electric company uses.
Wait, are all these guys using an ac-dc-ac power inverter to create a perfect sine power supply? Otherwise garbage in garbage out.
What's the ROI on a ferrari vs. a honda civic?
Now, I think $100 for a 1 meter pair of speaker cables is insane. 16-14ga lamp cord is easy, i did my car sub amp with 8ga mains wiring (the kind you need pliars to bend) and it works perfectly fine.
I understand spending substantially more for a tiny improvement if you're talking about a hobby. Are the $3000 guitars $2900 better than the one i can buy in target? Doubful. But for a hobbiest RIO is skewed in the extreme.
That said, I'd put up my own fortune that there's no effective difference between those fancy cables and any decently made speaker wire. They're just playing to the same extreme case hobbiests where cost is far secondary to performance. My problem is I honestly don't think there's any performance difference.
How about the "burning in" they do to these cables? Copper shouldn't be changing as you send a current through it...unless you melt it at least.
If they were serious, show me a wave form analysis with the difference between this and another cable.
Well when the noise level is already so high, passing any intelligible information takes an even stronger signal.
Unfortunately that generally causes more noise.
I find it ironic - if the ozone hole was 30% BIGGER this year they'd be crying gloom and doom. No mention of a 'randomly low year not related to the overall trend' in that situation. Amazing how "news" can be twisted and presented totally differently depending on your intended goal.
The lack of nuclear terorist attacks this year was zero. However, the past 100 years have been a fluke and we can expect the exponential trending to return next year. Beware the 100's of nuclear attacks coming! lol.
If by "long term when we switch to nuclear/solar/wind" you mean when the sun goes out...sure. At least in the US I don't see us making substantial progress towards that change any time in the next 25 years.
Everyone's caught up in this clause on the contract but no one even things twice about the binding arbitration clause in almost every contract (including this one).
They usually read something like "you agree never to sue us. Ever. If you're ever unhappy you agree to use binding arbitration (usually with a clause requiring phone, email, or mail settlement and barring in-person) with our chosen arbitration company xyz" ATT actually makes brief mention of small claims court but that's about it.
Now, i know our court systems are horribly abused but it seems that a legitimate use for them "They billed my checking account for 12 months of service when it never worked according to their advertised bla bla bla" can never actually come to fruition.
As for the clause everyone's complaining about: Would you let someone run a website/blog bashing your hosting company ON one of their servers? If you hate ATT enough that you'd publicly bash them, why would you use their servers to do it?
I think this whole topic is a waste of time.
person a "I want to be able to post my website and say whatever i want"
person b "well i know ISP XYZ censors what you post"
person a "Oh, ok. I won't go there then. There's only 14 million other hosting copmanies and plenty of ISP's"
See now, I was about to consider this an intelligent comment and reply in turn but then you went calling names. Unlucky for me i'm bored enough at work to reply anyway...
The iPhone is not compatible with any 3rd party apps that i'm aware of, not compatible with BES, not compatible with any wireless contacts/calendar sync. Yes, it's "compatible" with windows and Mac. Linux? Not sure.
To dig into your point, technically everything is compatible...with the specific designated things it was built around. I'm talking about compatibility with...anything other than what's on the phone when you buy it.
As for paying more for ring tones: Yes, obviously people find value in it. The valued service is nothing more than chopping apart a song. Something that can be done with freeware fairly easily. Heck, if the iphone was "open" someone could write an app to do that for you and avoid the per-song fee. Oops! Personally I refuse to pay for ringtones, i've got tons of MP3s (heck, even legal!) that i will.
My theory on selling apps mightnot hold water based on history, but historically apple has never sold a phone. I'm not puffing anything, i'm pointing out that apple/att are quite happily keeping the iphone ibricked so they can sell more.
I'll stick with my blackberry TYVM. Go ahead and call me an ass, i paid 1/2-1/3 for equivilant functionality.