It would never happen. As soon as the analog signal from your telephone reaches the telephone company's central office, it is converted from analog to 64 kbps PCM (8-bit samples at 8 kHz sample rate). From that point, it travels over 64 kbps digital channels until it reaches the central office of the person you are connected to. At that point, it is converted back to analog. The whole telephone company infrastructure is built around 64 kbps channels. It would be insanely expensive to change it to something else.
The sound quality could be greatly improved for voice if a more modern encoding/decoding algorithm replaced the current standard. That wouldn't help modems and it would be incompatible with everything now in use.
The limitation on modem speed was not a lack of imagination on the part of modem designers, it was a matter of cost. For example, a 9600 bps full-duplex modem in 1976 cost about $10,000. It replaced a 2400 bps full-duplex modem that used up half of a 19" rack. The availability of cheap, high-speed modems is directly related to improvements in integrated circuit density, speed and cost. Modern V.34 modems are the result of cheap, high-speed digital signal processor (DSP) technology.
There is no magic bullet that will make modems run significantly faster that 33.6 kbps. For a given bandwidth and signal-to-noise ratio, you can push only so many bits through a channel. V.90 technology cheats this by exploiting the fact that a subscriber's telephone line is not limited to 3 kHz of bandwidth, and is directly connected to a CODEC (coder/decoder) at a modern central office switch. If that isn't true, you are going to have to live with V.34 class speeds.
Amateur radio has been hurt by the popularity of computers and the Internet. The urbanization of the United States has also caused problems. It is difficult or impossible for many people to put up external antennas and towers due to space constraints, zoning regulations and home owner's association restrictions. Advances in technology have made it more difficult to build or home brew equipment. The average age of amateur radio licensees has been creeping upward for many years. The relaxation of the anachronistic morse code requirement should help the situation, but it isn't a cure.
Some can be found here. Peter Kuran made a film, Trinity and Beyond, that has some very impressive restored footage of nuclear weapons tests. A trailer can be viewed here.
Mr. Katz, if you aren't too busy singing the praises of Jose Bove, you might take a minute to remember Ms. Laurence Turbec, a McDonald's employee in Quevert, France, who was killed by a bomb placed outside the McDonald's restaurant where she worked. Was she an "acceptable loss" in the battle against corporatism and Le Big Mac?
An electron is a particle with mass and electric charge. A photon is a massless particle that is the carrier of the electromagnetic field. Both electrons and photons produce interference patterns, the wave-particle duality you mentioned, in double slit experiments. Electric current is a flow of charge carriers, which are not necessarily electrons, but could be ionized atoms or molecules. Electric current is not the same thing as electrical energy. Electrical energy is electromagnetic waves (photons).
I just bought a Microsoft optical mouse for my Mac. It was the cheapest ($30) of the three models in the store. It has two buttons and a wheel widget. It does not have the side panel buttons like the more expensive models, a feature that I didn't want.
I actually liked the Apple hockey puck mouse. The reason I replaced it was that gunk would collect on the internal rollers and prevent the mouse from moving smoothly.
I am not familiar with the incident in the news story. I do know that mission critical data communications at NASA are carried over a private Internet that is not connected to the public Internet. There is a separate IP network for administrative and non-critical activities that is connected to the public Internet. That is where you find *.nasa.gov systems. What may have happened is that a cracker disrupted a computer that was connected to the public Internet. If it really was a mission critical system, it should have been on the private Internet.
I'm not a Physicist, but I think that it is electromagnetic waves, not electrons, that travel at a significant fraction (velocity factor) of the speed of light in an electronic circuit. The electrons actually move at a very slow speed.
I think someone got confused about the difference between general purpose microprocessors and power/motor controller chips. Some of these controller chips are fairly complex and sophisticated. Better electric motor controllers chips can save substantial amounts of electricity, not in the controller chip itself but by more efficient use of electricity in the electric motor.
Finally, don't forget the War On Drugs, although it's not nearly as bad as in the US due to the lack of guns.
I recently ran across an interesting paper, Fear and Loathing in Whitehall: Bolshevism and the Firearms Act of 1920, that argues that the Firearms Act of 1920, the first law that seriously restricted gun ownership and the carrying of guns in Britain, was passed due to a fear of Bolshevik revolution, not because of the misuse of firearms by criminals. As in the United States, a bogeyman was used to justify a law that turned a right into a privilege that was granted at the convenience of the state.
The protected classes are limited to those explicitly listed in the law by Congress. There may be state or local laws that cover more areas, such as sexual preference. In some areas, such as hiring or lending money, a practice can be prohibited if it has a "disparate impact" on a protected class.
Therefore, would requireing a credit card not count as discrimination? At that point, you're not keeping kids out, which is legal, you're keeping anybody who doesn't have a piece of plastic out, which seems to me to be an artifical exclusion, which, again, seems to me to be illegal.
It may be stupid and unfair, but it isn't illegal. It would be illegal to discriminate against a protected class, such as by gender, race, religion etc. The applicable federal law can be found here.
In the bad old days of high fidelity audio equipment, there was a contest among the manufacturers and retailers to see who could write the most misleading ads for audio amplifiers. You would see ads for a 500 Watt audio amplifier, which meant that the amplifier produced 500 Watts, in one channel, for 10 milliseconds, at 90% total harmonic distortion, with a 1% duty cycle. This was unfair to ethical companies that advertised realistic power ratings. The FTC cracked down on the audio industry and made everyone use realistic measurement techniques.
It was a joint operation of the 8th Air Force and Bomber Command. Most of the civilian casualties resulted from the RAF night incendiary bombing of 1945-02-14 and the resulting fire storm. See this web page for the details.
The Forces and Means Employed by the Allies in the Bombing of Dresden:
23. In the Dresden bombing attacks of 14-15 February 1945 the American Eighth Air Force and the RAF Bomber Command together employed a total of 1299 bomber aircraft (527 from the Eighth Air Force, 722 from the RAF Bomber Command) for a total weight, on targets, of 3906.9 tons. Of this tonnage, 1247.6 tons were expanded by the Eighth Air Force, 2659.3 tons by the RAF Bomber Command. The Americans employed 953.3 tons of high explosive bombs and 294.3 tons of incendiary bombs--all aimed at the Dresden Marshalling Yards. The British employed 1477.7 tons of high explosive bombs and 1181.6 tons of incendiary bombs--all aimed against the Dresden city area.42 The American aircraft used H2X (radar) bombing method, with visual assists, and the British used the marker and visual method.43
Let's hear it for European culture. It produced Shakespeare, Bach, Mozart and Goethe. In more recent years, the Battle of the Somme, Bolshevism, the incineration of Dresden, and Treblinka. Guess we have some catching up to do.
I don't see anything wrong with it. This is standard practice for large corporations. It is called "competitive intelligence" and involves collecting and analyzing information on competing companies. It is perfectly legal, as long as you don't break the law when collecting the information. Most of the information can be collected from public sources, you just need an analyst to turn the scraps of information into a useful description of the competitor's costs, plans, strengths and weaknesses.
Slashdot Mirror
And we had to walk 10 miles to school through the snow :-).
The sound quality could be greatly improved for voice if a more modern encoding/decoding algorithm replaced the current standard. That wouldn't help modems and it would be incompatible with everything now in use.
It's a limit on transmit power to prevent crosstalk.
As a friend of mine says, the description politically ambitious prosecutor is redundant.
Firewire (and USB) support isochronous transfers, needed for multimedia, Ethernet doesn't.
Just as an example, I live in a medium density suburban area and my modem is 6300 meters away from the central office.
The average local loop length is much longer in the United States than in Europe.
There is no magic bullet that will make modems run significantly faster that 33.6 kbps. For a given bandwidth and signal-to-noise ratio, you can push only so many bits through a channel. V.90 technology cheats this by exploiting the fact that a subscriber's telephone line is not limited to 3 kHz of bandwidth, and is directly connected to a CODEC (coder/decoder) at a modern central office switch. If that isn't true, you are going to have to live with V.34 class speeds.
N3DMC
Some can be found here. Peter Kuran made a film, Trinity and Beyond, that has some very impressive restored footage of nuclear weapons tests. A trailer can be viewed here.
Mr. Katz, if you aren't too busy singing the praises of Jose Bove, you might take a minute to remember Ms. Laurence Turbec, a McDonald's employee in Quevert, France, who was killed by a bomb placed outside the McDonald's restaurant where she worked. Was she an "acceptable loss" in the battle against corporatism and Le Big Mac?
I found a web page, "ELECTRICITY" MISCONCEPTIONS IN TEXTBOOKS, that does a good job of explaining the difference between electric current and electric energy.
I actually liked the Apple hockey puck mouse. The reason I replaced it was that gunk would collect on the internal rollers and prevent the mouse from moving smoothly.
I am not familiar with the incident in the news story. I do know that mission critical data communications at NASA are carried over a private Internet that is not connected to the public Internet. There is a separate IP network for administrative and non-critical activities that is connected to the public Internet. That is where you find *.nasa.gov systems. What may have happened is that a cracker disrupted a computer that was connected to the public Internet. If it really was a mission critical system, it should have been on the private Internet.
I'm not a Physicist, but I think that it is electromagnetic waves, not electrons, that travel at a significant fraction (velocity factor) of the speed of light in an electronic circuit. The electrons actually move at a very slow speed.
I think someone got confused about the difference between general purpose microprocessors and power/motor controller chips. Some of these controller chips are fairly complex and sophisticated. Better electric motor controllers chips can save substantial amounts of electricity, not in the controller chip itself but by more efficient use of electricity in the electric motor.
I recently ran across an interesting paper, Fear and Loathing in Whitehall: Bolshevism and the Firearms Act of 1920, that argues that the Firearms Act of 1920, the first law that seriously restricted gun ownership and the carrying of guns in Britain, was passed due to a fear of Bolshevik revolution, not because of the misuse of firearms by criminals. As in the United States, a bogeyman was used to justify a law that turned a right into a privilege that was granted at the convenience of the state.
No.
The protected classes are limited to those explicitly listed in the law by Congress. There may be state or local laws that cover more areas, such as sexual preference. In some areas, such as hiring or lending money, a practice can be prohibited if it has a "disparate impact" on a protected class.
It may be stupid and unfair, but it isn't illegal. It would be illegal to discriminate against a protected class, such as by gender, race, religion etc. The applicable federal law can be found here.
In the bad old days of high fidelity audio equipment, there was a contest among the manufacturers and retailers to see who could write the most misleading ads for audio amplifiers. You would see ads for a 500 Watt audio amplifier, which meant that the amplifier produced 500 Watts, in one channel, for 10 milliseconds, at 90% total harmonic distortion, with a 1% duty cycle. This was unfair to ethical companies that advertised realistic power ratings. The FTC cracked down on the audio industry and made everyone use realistic measurement techniques.
GSM is obsolete. The next international wireless phone standard is going to be based on CDMA technology, and will use a different frequency band.
Let's hear it for European culture. It produced Shakespeare, Bach, Mozart and Goethe. In more recent years, the Battle of the Somme, Bolshevism, the incineration of Dresden, and Treblinka. Guess we have some catching up to do.
Not always true. If the warrant authorizes a search for an automobile, they can't use the goat porn in your desk drawer as evidence against you.
I don't see anything wrong with it. This is standard practice for large corporations. It is called "competitive intelligence" and involves collecting and analyzing information on competing companies. It is perfectly legal, as long as you don't break the law when collecting the information. Most of the information can be collected from public sources, you just need an analyst to turn the scraps of information into a useful description of the competitor's costs, plans, strengths and weaknesses.