Also, it's just as bad when there is only one broadband company. If that company doesnt like your piracy or your napster use and cutd you off, there you are, disenfranchised,unable to reach much of the data and art and culture online.
That is why the FCC needs to classify them as common carriers. A common carrier can't cut your service or refuse to offer you service because of issues that are not directly related to the provision of the service. The telephone company and other common carriers must provide service to the CPUSA, NAMBLA and all other unpopular groups.
Re:the charming gumption of Americans...
on
The Modem Lives On
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· Score: 2
After pestering my cable company for access *every day* from xmas '97 to xmas '98, they made it available.
That's why the courts invented the restraining order.
Where I work, we have a tape degausser that is powerful enough to erase all of the credit cards in your wallet and stop your heart pacemaker if you are anywhere near it while it is in operation. It still isn't powerful enough to erase high coercivity media to NSA standards.
Re:Isn't it illegal to deface US currency?
on
Making Small Change
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· Score: 3
It used to be illegal to deface coins. You can see this in old jewelry where coins were held inside ring mounts to avoid drilling holes through the coins.
I saw one of these at the Smithsonian Institution. It was a coin-operated device that crushed thin metal tubes inside a coil. You inserted a quarter and the machine dropped a tube into the center of the coil. After the capacitors had been charged, the machine connected them to the coil, producing forces that crushed the tube. The crushed tube was then dropped down a chute into an area where it could be removed from the machine. It was very popular with the museum's visitors.
What made the Internet possible was the concept of the catenet (concatenated networks). It didn't matter if you were running X.25, SNA, DECnet or any other proprietary network, you could always use it to transport IP packets. It might not be pretty or efficient, but no one could stop you. The network can drop, duplicate and reorder packets. That's OK, IP was designed for the lowest common denominator. See IEN 48.
Explosives are widely used in satellites and launch vehicles. Any place you need to cut or detach something is a possible application for an explosive device. It isn't that scary when you think about all of the other things that can go wrong and blow up on a launch vehicle.
It is theoretically possible. Apple uses the ATI Rage 128 and Radeon AGP cards. These are OEM versions that include the Apple Display Connector (ADC). The problem is how to get one without ripping it out of a Macintosh. Another question is whether or not the drivers for the PC versions of the cards are compatible with the Mac versions of the cards.
It would be nice if PC vendors adopted the ADC. I'm not sure if there are any patent or licensing issues. When I got my Apple LCD display, I took it out of the box, put it on the desk and attached a single cable to the Mac. Turned on the Mac and everything worked perfectly.
You might want to look at the Apple LCD display. It uses a digital interface (Apple Display Connector) between the video card and display, avoiding the problems inherent in LCD displays that are driven by analog video.
We don't like the SAT test, since its results disagree with our vision of a fair and perfect world. Therefore, the test is defective and must be eliminated.
The next time the Doctor says my blood pressure is too high, I will tell him the test is unfair and that he should use an instrument that only produces normal readings.
NTFS is supposed to be able to handle a 16 exabyte partition. That shouldn't be difficult with a 64-bit block address. Do any of the common I/O interface schemes support such large block addresses? Another question is how well do the algorithms and data structures in the file system scale to really huge partition sizes.
I've always wondered what would happen if I opened a gourmet restaurant that served such dishes as rat burgers, calico cat stew and poodle steaks. What is the real difference between a cow and a dog? Do cats and dogs get special rights because they are "cute"?
There was a big controversy in California over the sale of horses to out-of-state slaughterhouses. Many people thought it was culturally incorrect to eat horse meat.
Are there better / cheaper converters out there that could probably use this?
Better? Probably. Cheaper? No.
The DTC-100 is the cheapest HDTV receiver on the market right now. Panasonic has a second generation receiver, but it is twice as expensive as the DTC-100. I doubt that the board would work in anything other than a DTC-100.
The DTC-100, like other first generation ATSC receivers, has severe problems dealing with multipath (ghosts on analog TV).
The second point isn't one of SI notation, but strictly computer notation. When talking about computers, counting is ALWAYS done in powers of two!
When dealing with communication channels, k=1000 and M=1E6. Bytes, or more properly, octets, are a unit for storage devices.
The usage of b=bit and B=byte is not universal. BPS, KBPS and MBPS refer to "bits per second", not "bytes per second". These were in widespread use long before bytes became a common unit.
The typical computer user does not want to be a system administrator, programmer or engineer. They want a reliable and easy to use tool.
They don't need to know about:
file systems
exe and dll files
disk partitions and drive letters
RAM, ROM, gigabytes and megahertz
BIOS setup
device drivers
IP addresses and DNS servers
config.sys, autoexec.bat or the registry.
Lest you think that I am prejudiced, UNIX/Linux systems are also severely deficient in these areas.
IBM had a good idea with their document centered user interface that was introduced in the OS/2 workplace shell. You didn't "run" the word processor, you manipulated documents and new documents were created by tearing a sheet off of a template pad.
The user should never be forced to understand or deal with the details of how the system's abstractions are implemented in hardware and software.
While computers and the Internet are useful tools, I think Katz has greatly exaggerated their importance. The best source of accurate and comprehensive information on most subjects is still the book. Games and instant messaging may have some social and recreational value, but there are plenty of non-computer based alternatives. Computers are not a "silver bullet" that will solve the problems in our families, educational systems and society.
It sounds like residential rates were being heavily subsidized by the commercial customers. This could have been the result of rational social policy or political self-interest on the part of the government. Based on my experience with utility regulation by state governments in the USA, I would pick political self-interest. Are artificially low residential rates really in the best long term interest of the country? Why conserve if you are shielded from the true costs of producing and distributing power?
Besides that, the environmental laws of CA are a red herring. The power plants that supply California don't have to be in that state (and many aren't), they just have to be on the same electrical grid.
Some would argue that this is just exporting the negative aspects of power generation, such as pollution, to neighboring states.
This can become a volatile political issue when citizens of other states believe that their state is, sometimes literally, becoming a dumping ground. Similar disputes over trash disposal are common where I live. Everyone wants trash collection, but put the landfill
out of sight and mind in some distant location.
An electrical grid also needs transmission facilities to transfer power between regions. The same people who killed the nuclear power industry with pseudo-scientific propaganda will do anything to keep high voltage transmission lines out of their neighborhood.
Re:My spam from that guy in Planet of the Apes
on
Spammer Gets Spammed
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· Score: 2
I used to get tons of junk mail from pro-gun control groups like HCI and NCBH, probably because I'm on some mailing lists that are associated with leftist tendencies.
As a gun owner and member of the NRA, I didn't appreciate Sarah Brady telling me that I was a pawn of Satan for owning a gun.
I sent them some NRA decals. That didn't work, they continued to send me their junk.
Then I filled the reply envelope with expended.22 rimfire shell casings and sent it back to them. That worked:-). I figure that they must have placed me on the "danger: psychotic gun owner" blacklist.
The NRA is pretty bad about sending out tons of direct mail solicitations.
I used to give money to the local public television station until they became extremely aggressive in sending out direct mail begging for more money. It seems that any donation results in getting put on the "soft touch with money" mailing list.
Why do people insist on pointless bitching, btw, about KDE and Gnome generally sucking? Why not instead suggest improvements in a non-flamebait way? Instead of saying "Well for one thing you could catch up with Windows!" why not explain what the !@#$ you actually mean?
It isn't that simple. I can say that a piece of music sucks, even though I am not a composer and know next to nothing about music theory. The same applies to user interfaces. I can know that the user interface sucks, even though I can't articulate exactly what is wrong with it.
Who is going to write the device drivers to support the five zillion different video cards, Ethernet cards, printers, motherboards, etc.?
If that wasn't bad enough, there are the laptops, with all sorts of weird and non-standard hardware and software.
Even Microsoft is having trouble getting some vendors to write drivers and applications for anything other than Windows 9X/ME.
Slashdot Mirror
That is why the FCC needs to classify them as common carriers. A common carrier can't cut your service or refuse to offer you service because of issues that are not directly related to the provision of the service. The telephone company and other common carriers must provide service to the CPUSA, NAMBLA and all other unpopular groups.
That's why the courts invented the restraining order.
Pat Schroeder is a Democrat. Therefore, she can do no wrong.
Remember kiddies...
Democrats GOOD
Republicans BAD
Where I work, we have a tape degausser that is powerful enough to erase all of the credit cards in your wallet and stop your heart pacemaker if you are anywhere near it while it is in operation. It still isn't powerful enough to erase high coercivity media to NSA standards.
It used to be illegal to deface coins. You can see this in old jewelry where coins were held inside ring mounts to avoid drilling holes through the coins.
I saw one of these at the Smithsonian Institution. It was a coin-operated device that crushed thin metal tubes inside a coil. You inserted a quarter and the machine dropped a tube into the center of the coil. After the capacitors had been charged, the machine connected them to the coil, producing forces that crushed the tube. The crushed tube was then dropped down a chute into an area where it could be removed from the machine. It was very popular with the museum's visitors.
What made the Internet possible was the concept of the catenet (concatenated networks). It didn't matter if you were running X.25, SNA, DECnet or any other proprietary network, you could always use it to transport IP packets. It might not be pretty or efficient, but no one could stop you. The network can drop, duplicate and reorder packets. That's OK, IP was designed for the lowest common denominator. See IEN 48.
Explosives are widely used in satellites and launch vehicles. Any place you need to cut or detach something is a possible application for an explosive device. It isn't that scary when you think about all of the other things that can go wrong and blow up on a launch vehicle.
It would be nice if PC vendors adopted the ADC. I'm not sure if there are any patent or licensing issues. When I got my Apple LCD display, I took it out of the box, put it on the desk and attached a single cable to the Mac. Turned on the Mac and everything worked perfectly.
You might want to look at the Apple LCD display. It uses a digital interface (Apple Display Connector) between the video card and display, avoiding the problems inherent in LCD displays that are driven by analog video.
http://www.BuffNET.net/release/
The next time the Doctor says my blood pressure is too high, I will tell him the test is unfair and that he should use an instrument that only produces normal readings.
NTFS is supposed to be able to handle a 16 exabyte partition. That shouldn't be difficult with a 64-bit block address. Do any of the common I/O interface schemes support such large block addresses? Another question is how well do the algorithms and data structures in the file system scale to really huge partition sizes.
There was a big controversy in California over the sale of horses to out-of-state slaughterhouses. Many people thought it was culturally incorrect to eat horse meat.
See this page.
USB is too slow for HDTV. You need about 19 megabit/sec of bandwidth for 1080i HDTV.
Better? Probably. Cheaper? No.
The DTC-100 is the cheapest HDTV receiver on the market right now. Panasonic has a second generation receiver, but it is twice as expensive as the DTC-100. I doubt that the board would work in anything other than a DTC-100.
The DTC-100, like other first generation ATSC receivers, has severe problems dealing with multipath (ghosts on analog TV).
When dealing with communication channels, k=1000 and M=1E6. Bytes, or more properly, octets, are a unit for storage devices.
The usage of b=bit and B=byte is not universal. BPS, KBPS and MBPS refer to "bits per second", not "bytes per second". These were in widespread use long before bytes became a common unit.
They don't need to know about:
Lest you think that I am prejudiced, UNIX/Linux systems are also severely deficient in these areas.
IBM had a good idea with their document centered user interface that was introduced in the OS/2 workplace shell. You didn't "run" the word processor, you manipulated documents and new documents were created by tearing a sheet off of a template pad.
The user should never be forced to understand or deal with the details of how the system's abstractions are implemented in hardware and software.
While computers and the Internet are useful tools, I think Katz has greatly exaggerated their importance. The best source of accurate and comprehensive information on most subjects is still the book. Games and instant messaging may have some social and recreational value, but there are plenty of non-computer based alternatives. Computers are not a "silver bullet" that will solve the problems in our families, educational systems and society.
It sounds like residential rates were being heavily subsidized by the commercial customers. This could have been the result of rational social policy or political self-interest on the part of the government. Based on my experience with utility regulation by state governments in the USA, I would pick political self-interest. Are artificially low residential rates really in the best long term interest of the country? Why conserve if you are shielded from the true costs of producing and distributing power?
Some would argue that this is just exporting the negative aspects of power generation, such as pollution, to neighboring states. This can become a volatile political issue when citizens of other states believe that their state is, sometimes literally, becoming a dumping ground. Similar disputes over trash disposal are common where I live. Everyone wants trash collection, but put the landfill out of sight and mind in some distant location.
An electrical grid also needs transmission facilities to transfer power between regions. The same people who killed the nuclear power industry with pseudo-scientific propaganda will do anything to keep high voltage transmission lines out of their neighborhood.
As a gun owner and member of the NRA, I didn't appreciate Sarah Brady telling me that I was a pawn of Satan for owning a gun.
I sent them some NRA decals. That didn't work, they continued to send me their junk. Then I filled the reply envelope with expended .22 rimfire shell casings and sent it back to them. That worked :-). I figure that they must have placed me on the "danger: psychotic gun owner" blacklist.
The NRA is pretty bad about sending out tons of direct mail solicitations.
I used to give money to the local public television station until they became extremely aggressive in sending out direct mail begging for more money. It seems that any donation results in getting put on the "soft touch with money" mailing list.
It isn't that simple. I can say that a piece of music sucks, even though I am not a composer and know next to nothing about music theory. The same applies to user interfaces. I can know that the user interface sucks, even though I can't articulate exactly what is wrong with it.
Even Microsoft is having trouble getting some vendors to write drivers and applications for anything other than Windows 9X/ME.