As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air however slight lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness. --- William O. Douglas, Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court
When I start ranting about this kind crap 20 years ago, everyone thoguht I was insanely paranoid.
Well, I guess now the shackle is on the other foot. Arbeit Mach Frie.
IMHO, I'm not so worried about a whole spanking new internet for China. In fact, as long as there is no gateway to the rest of the world's internet, the entire spam 'n hack attack problem may subside.
While I'm certain that many people receive valid email from China's residents, I have yet to receive any email from China that was not spam. I can't wait for the regular port trolling from.cn-held IP addresses.
I started using an IBM 360 model 67 in 67-68 or so. With a desk-sized keypunch machine. It was an awwesome site to watch my deck get eaten and have the printer spit back something I did. I eventually got my own Commodore 46, a 128, and later an Atari ST which I upgraded to a whole Megabyte of Ram! I got my first AT-compatible 286 in 1987 and have been moving right along in the intel world until the AMD came out with 386-40's. I haven't owned an intel-based box since then.
Whether or not you have an idiot talking over the track depends entirely upon which channel you listen too, not to all satellite radio. If you don't like the channel format, email them and bitch about it. You're paying for it. If you don't like what they're doing, bitch them out.
I've noticed that on XM, some of the channels have obnoxious perky dj's (who should be flailed and keelhauled) and others have dj's who tell you what played or maybe about playdates. I mainly listen to XM 74 "Bluesville." The DJ's there don't talk over the tracks.
As for sound quality, well, that very subjective and every person needs to evaluate that on their own. I find the "artifact" issue to be moot. I'm not an audiophile. I want decent, commercial-free music while I'm working. XM provides that for me. As well as CNN, BBC, old radio shows, etc. Some of the tunes I hear on XM, I can't buy because they're broadcast copies of 78's. The 78's are rare and priceless.
Satellite is the death knell for broadcast. This year, satellite radio is available in almost every new care. Die, Clearcast! Die!
Something that I haven't seen mentioned is the fact that RoboHelp will now belong to Adobe. Macromedia allowed the product to languish after they acquired it from eHelp. Not that eHelp did did anything worthwhile with it.
As long a there are applications, there's going to be a need for helptools, no matter what the delivery format. RoboHelp is probably best known for producing help for Windows platform applications, but it also produces help in Oracle Help, Flashhelp, Javahelp, and XML.
I'm not saying that it does this particularly well, nor am I saying it's a good product (it's slow, buggy as hell, designed for a single user, and support has sucked for many years), but it's been just about the only game in town for many years. Many a technical writer has spent an inordinate number of days trying to solve the Robohelp java search app problem, force the poorly coded javascript to work the way they needed, or to overcome the idiocy of the MS-centric style sheets.
It has the potential to be a decent product if Adobe would unleash some development dollars into fixing its limitations and making it a true enterprise application.
As far as Satellite radio is concerned the entire issue is moot. "Satellite Radio" no more caches the music than does your FM radio. Satellite Radios are _radios_.
IMHO, the pukebrains of the RIAA are once again concerned about web broadcasting and having paranoic delusions that people are saving _every_ song every played.
And, once more, they equate declining sales with the infamous downloaders rather than with crappy albums. Though in my case, I don't buy CDs any longer simply because I _do_ have satellite radio! I have three XM radios: One at work, one at home, and one in my car. I don't see any need to keep any music. Why? Saving music is like collecting porn pictures: Why bother hoarding when it's right there waiting for you?
I haven't even played a CD in over a year. Satellite radio may not be perfect as defined by some geeky audiophile, but again, who care? I can't tell the difference. Any deficiency is more than balanced by the fact that I don't hear those damned TrimSpa commercials and that I no longer have to listen to egomaniacal DJs sharing their crappy personalities with the world.
The days of regular terrestrial broadcast radio are definitely numbered. It doesn't matter if you use Sirius or XM, it's the last nails in broadcast's coffin.
Nope. Works fine. In a urban area it'd be less effective. The sound waves would be distorted enough to make exact location difficult to determine. If you've every driven in an area with many tall buildings, you'll notice that FM stations can be received wonderfully on one street and not at all on another, yet they are parallel and the ends of both may be blocked. RF and audio are both waves and both suffer from extreme distortion in urban setting. In manahattan, many times when you hear a siren, it's hard to tell which end of the street it's crossing on. One of the old financial firms ruined by Dow Jones and destroyed by Bridge was Telerate. They had the coolest financial page feed delivered via FM radio. Antenna placement was so crutical that sometimes the antenna would be placed an adjoining office, even though they had the same view.
Sounds nifty, but it's as practical as that whirly-gig laser that supposedly finds optic sights (filters, filters, filters) or the millimeter radar that tracks an incoming round (dust's a biatch).
Nothing that's relying on audio is practical. From 800 meters, it isn't going to pick up a suppressed weapon. By the time it IDs a possible hide, until a response can be directed, a competent shooter will have three rounds away and be half a dozen yards _gone_.
Ah, yes. I was just going to mention Baen. The man is a genius. Far from losing money, he has made his publishing company a force in the science fiction world through this policy.
The latest hardcover of the Honor Harrington serise, Honor's War, included a CD with the electronic version of every single novel written by David Weber for the "Honorverse," as well as all three of the Honorverse anthologies.
This isn't the action of someone worried about book piracy. Far from being worried, Baen has made proportionately made more books available in more formats that any other publisher. Baen has many of the top authors and uses those free novels as a come on to get you into reading the books.
I may someday cut that CD out of its holder to look through it and use the books. Right now, though, I spend 9-10 hours a day writing and really don't want to have to use a freaking computer to read for recreation. I carry two-three books in my bag to read on the subway and the bus. I normally read on book on the way in a nd one on the way home and have two more that I'm reading at home. If I could simply carry a _good_ wbook reader, one that could give me 35-40 hours of use between charging, that would be fantastic.
I noticed another post about $10 Palm III's. Maybe it's time to experiment with the html ebooks. Despite the small format, as long as I can page through it without stopping, it might work out.
First, display must be non-powered. That OLCD stuff already makes this possible. Either that or the plastic paper that was recently demo'ed.
Second, the battery must be long lasting. Lithium ion batteries will do the job.
The killer is going to be storage, of course, and DRM.
As mentioned if at least one other comment, one must be permitted to lend the "book" to a friend. Whether this means a one-off license that is part of an "uncopyable" file that transfers to the holder, or one that is keyed, but said key being transferable through some software means. I don't particularly care, but damn it, if I spend the money to buy the book, it's mine. It's future dispositon, whether I choose to retain the book for decades (yes, decades. I have a number of books purchased over 30 years ago.), whether I wish to give the book to a friend (permanently or a loan), or if I choose to resell the book, it's _mine" to do so as I wish, just as if I'd spent the money on a hardcopy book.
Personally, I think that a hardware book should have about the same formfactor as a paperback, that could allow you to load in several flash rams and able to store a couple of gigs, also loadable via USB would be nice. The management could be via computer for downloaded books, with the ability to "plug-in" a new purchase and add it to "permanent" storage later.
I don't know why there's such commotion over how to handle the distribution. Don't the publisher's read their own science fiction output? The "what form should it take" part has been hashed over and described for years.
The hardware is finally available. Now all we need is for some manufacturer and the publisher's to get together over something that is convenient to use and doesn't cost as much a damned laptop to own and operate.
For someone who reads a few thousand pages a month (like me), it needs to be cheap enough to own, and the books themselves should be significantly cheaper, too, what with the reduce production and distribution costs.
There is so much profit potential here that the mind boggles. The average large airport has three or four bookstores, and a handful of magazine/newstands? Can you imagine, instead, one having dozens of kiosks that can you with any of tens of thousands of titles on a flash ram? Think about it for a moment. There is only so much space in any transportation hub, and only so much time between flights. And, unfortunately, most bookstores in transportation centers carry the same new york times best-seller trash. Crap selections, crowded stores, and little time to shop.
If you could simple walk up to a little ATM sized kiosk, pick out a few titles, swipe a debit card and walk away with a ram card to put into a book, everyone would benefit. Hell, every 7/11 and Circle K in the world could be a bookstore.
Argghh,.... I wish I had the finances to get this launched. The group who gets this going is going to have more money that Bill Gates. There are literaly 10's of billions of dollars to be made with eBooks if only the right people would get their heads out of their asses.
Maybe now users of RoboHTML and RoboHelp will get some decent support.
Macromedia took Blue Sky's legacy of crap support to all new lows. Adobe's support is a hell of a lot better than Macromedia's. This is great news for the writing/publishing community.
The only Help product that came out of Macromedia that was of any great use (and not bug-ridden, bloated, and slow) was RoboHTML for Framemaker and they killed it off.
Maybe now Framemaker user's will get a decent FM to help system!
Great stuff, that. It won't connect. I even went so far as to use Opera to download a fresh copy of 1.0.3 and then uninstalled and rebooted, installed and it still doesn't work.
And guess what? Neither does 1.0.2! (Which is available here, BTW: http://mozilla.isc.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/rel eases/1.0.2/win32/en-US/Firefox%20Setup%201.0.2.ex e)
Lucky I still have a 1.0.
Needless to say, this is a less than inmpressive update as far as I'm concerned. Not that I'm going to stop using FireFox:-) But I sure wish it had been as smooth a process as the last couple updates were.
I used RBLs for quite a long time, until I actually sat down and calculatred how much spamcrap actually made it past the four I used. And then I started checking how much was probably legit, yet blocked as "collateral" damage.
RBLs make no effort to keep up with changes in IP assignments, despite the fact that each day, hundreds of IPs are re-assigned to web masters all over the world. You could be unlucky enough to have your web hosting company assign you an IP that is already blacklisted. You could be screwed right out of the box.
And then there the heinous practice of automatically black Listing dynamically-assigned/dial-up/DSL IP addresses. I won't start ranting about that topic now, though. My blood pressure is already climbing and I'm starting to see everything through a red haze.
The best solutions to spam?
1. Never, never ever buy a product that you have seen in a spam. Not only do not buy it from the spamming vendor, don't buy that product at all from anyone.
2. Use a hueristic spam blocker on the server. Not only is it faster, it's a hell of a lot more accurate. They work a damned site better than the DNSRBLs work. Spend a couple hours pointing one at spam and after that, it pretty much dumps all the spam to dev/null and you never need to deal with it. I use that for my four linux servers with email and also at a work where I have a plugin for to do blocking for MS outlook (Don't tell anyone, but I kinda like outlook 2003).
RBLs and spammers are both born of the same sack of runny horse turds.
Instructor-led classes are always more effective and the material is retained longer. Schools (particularly US military technical schools) that changed their curriculum to make heavy use of programmed instruction in the form of booklets in the late 60's early 70's, and later in an actual computer-based form, discovered that students eventually begin competing against the machine and each other to see who could finish the fastest.
Needless to say, once the the effort to learn was replaced by a speed contest, the level of retained instruction dropped dramatically.
It isn't the availability of the computer, just the implementation. The cheaper the program is to implement, the poorer the students retention is.
Well, it isn't the greed so much as it is an outright transfer of intellectual property to a company subsidized and controlled by the Chinese government.
Beyond the obvious foolishness of purchasing computer hardware built in a country who may become a combatant enemy, (don't start. it isn't red-baiting) the United States already has 160 billion dollar (USD$160,000,000,000) trade deficit with China.
But I guess it doesn't matter much nowadays. What with the US being morally bankrupt, we may as well become fiscally bankrupt to complete the picture while we slide into third-world country status.
All of the names will fit into the bottom third of the ad. "Trent The Thief" will be somewhere in there. I'm planning to buy a couple copies just for fun.
You know what is IMHO the best feature of XMPCR? Being able to skip off to other songs when one I like better is being played and being exposed to different artists.
I use XtremePCR for both my radios. The favorites alerts are great. I bet I know more song titles and artists that I enjoy now than I ever have in the last 45 years.
I'll never go back to broadcast radio. I've had more than my fill of C3 (clearchannelclones) stations. No more crap playlists and egomaniacal DJs.
The notifier needs to be configurable to have it open the browser you want opened. Not everyone can make Firefox or mozilla their default browser (work needs, company policies, etc.) and do not want IE to opening gmail.
But how much of it is unpopulated? I believe there is quite a bit of unpopulated desert and mountain, in that figure for the US, as well as huge tracts set aside as military reservations.
The phone/cable companies and FCC are responsible for the sad state of broadband in the US. Just as ISDN went down the crapper, so follows DSL and cable.
Slashdot Mirror
As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air however slight lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.
---
William O. Douglas, Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court
When I start ranting about this kind crap 20 years ago, everyone thoguht I was insanely paranoid.
Well, I guess now the shackle is on the other foot. Arbeit Mach Frie.
Oh, no!!! What will everyone do now that music is copy protected on a DVD!!! It's time to PANIC!!!!
Oh, wait, you're right, Oscar. It's "copy protected" on a "DVD." BWuuuaaahahahahahhahaahha!
Maybe if the prices on the CDs were better, they could boost sales? Whatdya think? 18.99 for a 30 year old Led Zepplin CD? Hehhehe...
Film at eleven!
.cn-held IP addresses.
IMHO, I'm not so worried about a whole spanking new internet for China. In fact, as long as there is no gateway to the rest of the world's internet, the entire spam 'n hack attack problem may subside.
While I'm certain that many people receive valid email from China's residents, I have yet to receive any email from China that was not spam. I can't wait for the regular port trolling from
I started using an IBM 360 model 67 in 67-68 or so. With a desk-sized keypunch machine. It was an awwesome site to watch my deck get eaten and have the printer spit back something I did. I eventually got my own Commodore 46, a 128, and later an Atari ST which I upgraded to a whole Megabyte of Ram! I got my first AT-compatible 286 in 1987 and have been moving right along in the intel world until the AMD came out with 386-40's. I haven't owned an intel-based box since then.
Whether or not you have an idiot talking over the track depends entirely upon which channel you listen too, not to all satellite radio. If you don't like the channel format, email them and bitch about it. You're paying for it. If you don't like what they're doing, bitch them out.
I've noticed that on XM, some of the channels have obnoxious perky dj's (who should be flailed and keelhauled) and others have dj's who tell you what played or maybe about playdates. I mainly listen to XM 74 "Bluesville." The DJ's there don't talk over the tracks.
As for sound quality, well, that very subjective and every person needs to evaluate that on their own. I find the "artifact" issue to be moot. I'm not an audiophile. I want decent, commercial-free music while I'm working. XM provides that for me. As well as CNN, BBC, old radio shows, etc. Some of the tunes I hear on XM, I can't buy because they're broadcast copies of 78's. The 78's are rare and priceless.
Satellite is the death knell for broadcast. This year, satellite radio is available in almost every new care. Die, Clearcast! Die!
Something that I haven't seen mentioned is the fact that RoboHelp will now belong to Adobe. Macromedia allowed the product to languish after they acquired it from eHelp. Not that eHelp did did anything worthwhile with it.
As long a there are applications, there's going to be a need for helptools, no matter what the delivery format. RoboHelp is probably best known for producing help for Windows platform applications, but it also produces help in Oracle Help, Flashhelp, Javahelp, and XML.
I'm not saying that it does this particularly well, nor am I saying it's a good product (it's slow, buggy as hell, designed for a single user, and support has sucked for many years), but it's been just about the only game in town for many years. Many a technical writer has spent an inordinate number of days trying to solve the Robohelp java search app problem, force the poorly coded javascript to work the way they needed, or to overcome the idiocy of the MS-centric style sheets.
It has the potential to be a decent product if Adobe would unleash some development dollars into fixing its limitations and making it a true enterprise application.
is all the protect we need from rogue robots.
Magnus rocked. He always kicked robot ass. Smashed them to bits. He even saved the earth from water stealing aliens! Whatta guy.
As far as Satellite radio is concerned the entire issue is moot. "Satellite Radio" no more caches the music than does your FM radio. Satellite Radios are _radios_.
IMHO, the pukebrains of the RIAA are once again concerned about web broadcasting and having paranoic delusions that people are saving _every_ song every played.
And, once more, they equate declining sales with the infamous downloaders rather than with crappy albums. Though in my case, I don't buy CDs any longer simply because I _do_ have satellite radio! I have three XM radios: One at work, one at home, and one in my car. I don't see any need to keep any music. Why? Saving music is like collecting porn pictures: Why bother hoarding when it's right there waiting for you?
I haven't even played a CD in over a year. Satellite radio may not be perfect as defined by some geeky audiophile, but again, who care? I can't tell the difference. Any deficiency is more than balanced by the fact that I don't hear those damned TrimSpa commercials and that I no longer have to listen to egomaniacal DJs sharing their crappy personalities with the world.
The days of regular terrestrial broadcast radio are definitely numbered. It doesn't matter if you use Sirius or XM, it's the last nails in broadcast's coffin.
There is a large difference between a 163-165 grain bullet and a 500 pound cruise missle...
Nope. Works fine. In a urban area it'd be less effective. The sound waves would be distorted enough to make exact location difficult to determine. If you've every driven in an area with many tall buildings, you'll notice that FM stations can be received wonderfully on one street and not at all on another, yet they are parallel and the ends of both may be blocked. RF and audio are both waves and both suffer from extreme distortion in urban setting. In manahattan, many times when you hear a siren, it's hard to tell which end of the street it's crossing on. One of the old financial firms ruined by Dow Jones and destroyed by Bridge was Telerate. They had the coolest financial page feed delivered via FM radio. Antenna placement was so crutical that sometimes the antenna would be placed an adjoining office, even though they had the same view.
For a wave, anything in the way is a bad thing.
Sounds nifty, but it's as practical as that whirly-gig laser that supposedly finds optic sights (filters, filters, filters) or the millimeter radar that tracks an incoming round (dust's a biatch).
Nothing that's relying on audio is practical. From 800 meters, it isn't going to pick up a suppressed weapon. By the time it IDs a possible hide, until a response can be directed, a competent shooter will have three rounds away and be half a dozen yards _gone_.
counter-sniping is an art.
Ah, yes. I was just going to mention Baen. The man is a genius. Far from losing money, he has made his publishing company a force in the science fiction world through this policy.
The latest hardcover of the Honor Harrington serise, Honor's War, included a CD with the electronic version of every single novel written by David Weber for the "Honorverse," as well as all three of the Honorverse anthologies.
This isn't the action of someone worried about book piracy. Far from being worried, Baen has made proportionately made more books available in more formats that any other publisher. Baen has many of the top authors and uses those free novels as a come on to get you into reading the books.
I may someday cut that CD out of its holder to look through it and use the books. Right now, though, I spend 9-10 hours a day writing and really don't want to have to use a freaking computer to read for recreation. I carry two-three books in my bag to read on the subway and the bus. I normally read on book on the way in a nd one on the way home and have two more that I'm reading at home. If I could simply carry a _good_ wbook reader, one that could give me 35-40 hours of use between charging, that would be fantastic.
I noticed another post about $10 Palm III's. Maybe it's time to experiment with the html ebooks. Despite the small format, as long as I can page through it without stopping, it might work out.
A few things will make the ebook rocket off:
First, display must be non-powered. That OLCD stuff already makes this possible. Either that or the plastic paper that was recently demo'ed.
Second, the battery must be long lasting. Lithium ion batteries will do the job.
The killer is going to be storage, of course, and DRM.
As mentioned if at least one other comment, one must be permitted to lend the "book" to a friend. Whether this means a one-off license that is part of an "uncopyable" file that transfers to the holder, or one that is keyed, but said key being transferable through some software means. I don't particularly care, but damn it, if I spend the money to buy the book, it's mine. It's future dispositon, whether I choose to retain the book for decades (yes, decades. I have a number of books purchased over 30 years ago.), whether I wish to give the book to a friend (permanently or a loan), or if I choose to resell the book, it's _mine" to do so as I wish, just as if I'd spent the money on a hardcopy book.
Personally, I think that a hardware book should have about the same formfactor as a paperback, that could allow you to load in several flash rams and able to store a couple of gigs, also loadable via USB would be nice. The management could be via computer for downloaded books, with the ability to "plug-in" a new purchase and add it to "permanent" storage later.
I don't know why there's such commotion over how to handle the distribution. Don't the publisher's read their own science fiction output? The "what form should it take" part has been hashed over and described for years.
The hardware is finally available. Now all we need is for some manufacturer and the publisher's to get together over something that is convenient to use and doesn't cost as much a damned laptop to own and operate.
For someone who reads a few thousand pages a month (like me), it needs to be cheap enough to own, and the books themselves should be significantly cheaper, too, what with the reduce production and distribution costs.
There is so much profit potential here that the mind boggles. The average large airport has three or four bookstores, and a handful of magazine/newstands? Can you imagine, instead, one having dozens of kiosks that can you with any of tens of thousands of titles on a flash ram? Think about it for a moment. There is only so much space in any transportation hub, and only so much time between flights. And, unfortunately, most bookstores in transportation centers carry the same new york times best-seller trash. Crap selections, crowded stores, and little time to shop.
If you could simple walk up to a little ATM sized kiosk, pick out a few titles, swipe a debit card and walk away with a ram card to put into a book, everyone would benefit. Hell, every 7/11 and Circle K in the world could be a bookstore.
Argghh,.... I wish I had the finances to get this launched. The group who gets this going is going to have more money that Bill Gates. There are literaly 10's of billions of dollars to be made with eBooks if only the right people would get their heads out of their asses.
VR will be cool when the technology exists create a direct neural interface. Without it, VR can't exist.
Maybe now users of RoboHTML and RoboHelp will get some decent support.
Macromedia took Blue Sky's legacy of crap support to all new lows. Adobe's support is a hell of a lot better than Macromedia's. This is great news for the writing/publishing community.
The only Help product that came out of Macromedia that was of any great use (and not bug-ridden, bloated, and slow) was RoboHTML for Framemaker and they killed it off.
Maybe now Framemaker user's will get a decent FM to help system!
I've just done the update to 1.0.3.
l eases/1.0.2/win32/en-US/Firefox%20Setup%201.0.2.ex e)
:-) But I sure wish it had been as smooth a process as the last couple updates were.
Great stuff, that. It won't connect. I even went so far as to use Opera to download a fresh copy of 1.0.3 and then uninstalled and rebooted, installed and it still doesn't work.
And guess what? Neither does 1.0.2! (Which is available here, BTW: http://mozilla.isc.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/re
Lucky I still have a 1.0.
Needless to say, this is a less than inmpressive update as far as I'm concerned. Not that I'm going to stop using FireFox
Ah, no. My mail servers have dedicated IPs. But sending an email through one of them while I'm sitting on a dynamic IP is close to impossible.
I used RBLs for quite a long time, until I actually sat down and calculatred how much spamcrap actually made it past the four I used. And then I started checking how much was probably legit, yet blocked as "collateral" damage.
RBLs make no effort to keep up with changes in IP assignments, despite the fact that each day, hundreds of IPs are re-assigned to web masters all over the world. You could be unlucky enough to have your web hosting company assign you an IP that is already blacklisted. You could be screwed right out of the box.
And then there the heinous practice of automatically black Listing dynamically-assigned/dial-up/DSL IP addresses. I won't start ranting about that topic now, though. My blood pressure is already climbing and I'm starting to see everything through a red haze.
The best solutions to spam?
1. Never, never ever buy a product that you have seen in a spam. Not only do not buy it from the spamming vendor, don't buy that product at all from anyone.
2. Use a hueristic spam blocker on the server. Not only is it faster, it's a hell of a lot more accurate. They work a damned site better than the DNSRBLs work. Spend a couple hours pointing one at spam and after that, it pretty much dumps all the spam to dev/null and you never need to deal with it. I use that for my four linux servers with email and also at a work where I have a plugin for to do blocking for MS outlook (Don't tell anyone, but I kinda like outlook 2003).
RBLs and spammers are both born of the same sack of runny horse turds.
Programmed instruction just does not work.
Instructor-led classes are always more effective and the material is retained longer. Schools (particularly US military technical schools) that changed their curriculum to make heavy use of programmed instruction in the form of booklets in the late 60's early 70's, and later in an actual computer-based form, discovered that students eventually begin competing against the machine and each other to see who could finish the fastest.
Needless to say, once the the effort to learn was replaced by a speed contest, the level of retained instruction dropped dramatically.
It isn't the availability of the computer, just the implementation. The cheaper the program is to implement, the poorer the students retention is.
Well, it isn't the greed so much as it is an outright transfer of intellectual property to a company subsidized and controlled by the Chinese government.
Beyond the obvious foolishness of purchasing computer hardware built in a country who may become a combatant enemy, (don't start. it isn't red-baiting) the United States already has 160 billion dollar (USD$160,000,000,000) trade deficit with China.
But I guess it doesn't matter much nowadays. What with the US being morally bankrupt, we may as well become fiscally bankrupt to complete the picture while we slide into third-world country status.
I can say that I've been there done that.
I donated. What the hell.
All of the names will fit into the bottom third of the ad. "Trent The Thief" will be somewhere in there. I'm planning to buy a couple copies just for fun.
You know what is IMHO the best feature of XMPCR? Being able to skip off to other songs when one I like better is being played and being exposed to different artists.
I use XtremePCR for both my radios. The favorites alerts are great. I bet I know more song titles and artists that I enjoy now than I ever have in the last 45 years.
I'll never go back to broadcast radio. I've had more than my fill of C3 (clearchannelclones) stations. No more crap playlists and egomaniacal DJs.
Satellite radio rocks the world.
No one has "hacked" XM Radio.
Several companies have come up with a way to add and PC-controlable tuner interface between the XM Direct radio. No big deal.
This issue does not concern the FCC since the service itself is not being stolen as was the case with sat TV service.
I own three of the XMPCR boxes. Two are in use, one at work and one at home, and the third is my spare (gotta have my XM.)
The notifier needs to be configurable to have it open the browser you want opened. Not everyone can make Firefox or mozilla their default browser (work needs, company policies, etc.) and do not want IE to opening gmail.
Yes, impressive area.
But how much of it is unpopulated? I believe there is quite a bit of unpopulated desert and mountain, in that figure for the US, as well as huge tracts set aside as military reservations.
The phone/cable companies and FCC are responsible for the sad state of broadband in the US. Just as ISDN went down the crapper, so follows DSL and cable.