"equal rights to manage the Internet including in regard to the allotment, assignment and reclamation of Internet numbering." This could allow governments to render websites within their borders inaccessible, even via proxy servers or other countries. It also could allow for multinational pacts in which countries could terminate access to websites at each others' request
The idea of internal websites within a country's boarders doesn't sound like such a bad idea. Not really sure how they would stop you from accessing it via proxy. But can't you block access via geolocation already?
The second part is what worries me - the ability to terminate access to websites at each other's requests.
What gets me here is that they are proposing rules for things that there are already solutions for - geolocation and blocking at an ISP level or government level DNS addresses which would prevent access to websites.
Basically, it sounds like governments want to setup internal sites that people in their nation have access to while limiting access to the outside internet. Aren't there already tools that alow this?
Its actually true. Shoot, how much bandwidth do you think actually connects one city with the next? Then then owners of those lines lease those out to your ISPs.
What do you think would happen if everyone in Alaska decided to stream 1080p video at once?
Granted, i don't know how old these maps are.
Fiber to the house is a silly idea. Just because you have fiber to the house doesn't mean that you have a fiber connection to every server in the world. Fiber to the house is like having a Ferrari, but being stuck in rushhour traffic. It doesn't matter how fast your car is if the roads are congested.
This fiber buildout needs to be between major hubs - you need more bandwidth between the major cities, and more bandwidth to the outlying areas.
Fiber to the house makes no sense if you are in a rural area, if your ISP only has a T3 or a DS3 connection to their provider.
Want to test this out? Go to someplace like SpeakEasy and do a bandwidth test. Especially those of you with FIOS or some ISP with a 20Mbps or faster connection. Do a speed test to a relatively close city. What do you get? Now try something on the other side of the country. Now go across the continent. Then start going overseas. Try servers in South America, Scandanavia, Eastern Europe, the Middle East. What kind of speeds are you seeing?
Even more so, try these speed tests at different times of day. What do you see?
The problem isn't the bandwidth to your house, the problem is the bandwidth connecting cities with each other.
How do you figure its inflated? There is much more to the US than the East Coast and major metropolitan areas. I got relatives who live out in little towns in Central and West Texas, and some in North Texas - one town has 300 people, is an hour from the closest town of 20,000 people, and 3 hours from a major city. The only broadband they can get in the area is 1.5Mbps DSL, and that is if you live in the CITY - most of those 300 people are ranchers, and they are stuck with dialup or HughesNet. Another piece of myfamily lives in a city of about 1200, mostly ranchers and farmers, and even in the city, if you want broadand, you are stuck with satelite. They are an hour from the closest city of 100,000 people, and 3 hours from a major city. I got family out in North Texas in a town of about 300, which is so spread out and so rural, that they don't even have addresses - they drive into town to the post office to get their mail as there is no mail delivery in this town. They are 10 miles from the closest town of 5,000 people, and an hour and a half from Dallas. They all have HughesNet
How much do yoou think it is going to cost to run fiber out to these rural areas?There is a reason that no one - not AT&T, not Time Warner, no one, has run fiber out into these areas. There is a reason you can't get cable or DSL out there. It's not cost effective.
Most of the US is rural areas. Get out of the major cities and actually see the country. Drive through Kansas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, Oklahoma, Wyoming, Montana, etc. It is RURAL! 20,000 is considered to be a large town in many of these areas.Shoot, you have entire states out there that have a lower population than many of your East-Coast cities.
And then, what about trying to lay fiber out in the mountains? What about trying to cover Alaska?
I actually think $140 Billion is pretty conservative. I would have thought it would be much higher.
Has iTunes dropped DRM all together? I know last time I used them, it was kind of hit or miss if the music you were getting was DRM-free or not. I know in the past, I would sometimes have to burn the files I got off of iTunes to an audio CD, then rerip. Kinda defeats the purpose. However, I know that MANY (not all) of the songs I bought when I had an iPhone I was able to put on my Android (when I saw the light). I am sure there is probably some software out there that will convert all my iTunes tracks to MP3s, but I just haven't got around to looking.
Amazon Cloud has a similar service, although I don't think they have nearly as big of a library as itunes. Out of the 3,000 MP3s I put on my Amazon Cloud account, I think about 400 songs were upgraded.
i think both services, though, still limit to 256kbps, and Amazon is MP3 (while this works for compatability, its still an old losssy audio format). While this should be fine for most people, and more than fine enough if you are listening through earbuds, true audiophiles will probably still have issues with the fact that these are not lossless
I use my PS3 for most of my Blu-Ray playing, because EVERYTHING just works on it - EXCEPT.... I bought a concert DVD recently that crashed the PS3 every time I try to access the menu. I also created a Blu-Ray myself of some clips, and the first version worked fine in my Blu-Ray player but crashed in the PS3. The second played perfectly in the PS3, but had a couple of clips that didn't play right in a Blu-Ray player. I normally just burn AVCHD because the Blu-Ray specs are so restrictive.
Whenever I buy a game, the first thing I always do is head over and look for a crack. My discs end up all over the place, and I don't want to spend an hour hunting down the disc just to play. Now, if the disc comes with a code for Steam, I will load the game into Steam. That way, I don't have to get a crack or have to hunt down the disc. Sadly, that does require an internet connection, but this day and age, that is not really an issue.
I wonder if this also takes into account drivers who are temporaraly blinded at night by the flashes of the camera. Shoot, even on the highway, I am sometimes temporaraly blinded by a flash at an intersection on the access road. I would file a complaint, but don't know who to file it with.
Seriously, have you priced stuff at all? Unless you are going with cheap, Walmart brand televisions, your TVs alone can eat your budget.
DON'T TAKE IT DOWN TO THE STUDS!!! I was in a house for 10 years that needed some repair work. The first thing I did was take off the wood paneling in one of the rooms almost as soon as I moved in. Bad mistake - I bought the sheetrock, but hanging it was another issue. Then you have to texture. Oh, and you will probably have to put in new insullation. Took me forever to get it done, and it looked ugly because I really had no clue what I was doing.
With that kind of budget, you might be able to do the bathroom, and maybe the kitchen. If the bathroom is small (like the majority of American bathrooms), you may want to expand by knocking out a hall closet or something. Just do a bit of planning. Pay someone to do sheetrocking, then put up tile, tile the floors, replace shower and tub with something really nice, replace toilet (actually go to Home Depot and look at different toilets. It may sound something trivial, but might as well make "having to go" more enjoyable, and a nice toilet you can get out for under $100 on), replace sinks and vanity, replace mirrors, maybe wallpaper if the wife is into it.
That right there is probably about $5-10k, depending on how nice you want to go (you could probably get out for under $1000, but the parts you will be replacing with are probably not going to look as nice as what is already there).
Once you are FINISHED, then you can do the second bathroom.
Replace counter tops, cabinets and appliances in the kitchen. Maybe add an island and replace floor.
Your budget is gone. Forget televisions, forget bedrooms, forget the living room, forget wiring the house.
Seriously, watch a few television shows about people who flip houses. Especially try to catch a few episodes about first time flippers. People on those shows can easily sink $50k-$100k on a house half your size - and that doesn't include tech stuff.
Completely agree. I run pretty much a combination of the two. I do a lot of multimedia stuff, so I use Windows 7 as the OS, as well as a couple of Adobe products, but the majority of other software (Blu-Ray authoring, video converters and transcoders, etc) are either Freeware or Shareware. Granted, it is easy to pay a couple of grand for one software package that does everything, but I usually like to tinker with stuff a bit more, and so a dozen free software packages that do just one thing each is actually preferable to me, as I get better control every step of the way.
I have no issues paying for software, either, if its well written, it does something really useful, it is significantly better than free alternatives, and its reasonably priced. For example, I have paid for both Dreamweaver and Premiere in the past (with student discounts - not full price). However, I never bought Photoshop, because, as much as I like it (and actually prefer it), there is a great free alternative (Gimp). Encore I would buy if it actually worked right (I think its bundled with Premiere now, haven't upgraded in a while). Encore crashes if you look at it wrong, you can spend hours or days working on a project just to be told that you have some element that won't render right, etc. Other paid alternatives that actually work don't allow me as much customization (ie controlling bitrates, having different resolutions, or something). So I turned to free alternatives. Now if Encore would just work right, I would use it exclusively,as it really is DESIGNED to do what I want a piece of software to do, but the program is way too buggy (every single version has been. Piece of crap software).
BTW, my favorite piece of free software that I am currently using? Calibre! Man that software rocks!
Sorry, ADHD kicked in, where was I going with this? Oh, yeah, free software. So yeah, Free software has made an impact. It offers alternative, which drives down teh prices of proprietary stuff, the community support helps lead to innovation all the way around, but the proprietary stuff keeps educated people employed, drives the economy, and then offers funds tthat can be used for research and development. So proprietary software is not a bad thing. Overpriced proprietary software with heavy patents IS a bad thing.
High school chemistry was useless - and I LOVE science. Complete waste of a class time. Now, some science is good. But for things such as chemistry and high school physics, you should have like a half-semester or quarter semester course that exposes students to it, and then let then if they like it, they can study it in college.
Shoot, biology could probably be thrown into that as well. As interesting as it was, computing statistics in a genetic pool has never helped me in real life. Once again, expose students to it, give them an overview of it, but to waste an entire year and class period on it?
High school is to learn stuff that will help us in life and the real world, college is where you go into a course of study. Balancing chemistry equations has not helped me one iota in the real world. Knowing not to mix bleach and amonia has.
Now, if the high school wants to offer chemistry as an option, maybe for an advanced degree plan or as an AP college course, then that is one thing. I am all for that. Making all students take the course is pointless.
I started kindergarten in 1984 and graduated in 1997, and graduated college in 2001.
2nd grade year, we had ONE Apple ][ for the school. We had a little reading program
4th grade - we had a LAB of Apple ][s. We had some story composition programs and some math programs. Lovely green and black screens.
5th grade year - College for Kids - I took five classes - Computer Programming (Basic on a 286 - learned how to program the PC speaker and some graphics and animation in GWBasic), Typing (PC based), Physics, Video Production (Betamax), and Creative writing (my first exposer to Macs - the old lunchbox style ones - and mice and fonts).
Middle school - 7th grade year. IBM PS/2s. 286s. Windows 3.0. Some science programs.
8th grade year - computer lab at middle school got rid of the Commodore 64s and replaced with IBM PS/2s. Teacher barely knew how to use PC. She freaked out when I exited out of Dosshell once to go to Dos, and reported me to the principle saying that I was trying to hack the comptuers. Told the principle that she was an idiot, and obviously didn't know how to use a PC if she thought that "exiting to DOS" was hacking. The computer litteracy class was mostly learning to use Windows, and typing, although we did do a TAD bit of work with spredsheets in Works.
8th grade year also - My Dad had a PC at home. He had a CGA card that had an RCA output on it. He had a paint program and a screen capture program. I used the things to make a presentation that I outputted to VHS to take to class. As far as I know, this was before Powerpoint or that similar program that the Mac had.
8th grade year - buy my first modem, a 2400 baud, and start to get on BBSes. I get on the Internet. NCSA Mosaic is the only webbrowser out there, and you have to use a Dialer, then Trumpet / WinSock to connect to the internet.
9th grade year - high school. The school gets their first network - IBM / Novell Tokenring. 2 servers - Both 486s with 16 MEG of ram. I was one of the only people who had access to the modem bank (we had three modems). Each server would let 100 people on at once, and they had different applications on them, and did not talk to each other. The clients were 286s and 386s with no harddrives and 4 meg ram each. We would sometimes create boot discs to keep off the network to play games. Being no harddrives, Windows ran off of the server. Being tokenring as well, and only 16 meg of ram, pretty much, more than 2 people running Windows at a time brought the network to its knees. We had this system until until after my senior year - I think it was replaced in 1999, as I was actually contracted to help install the new system.
9th grade - I get my first CDRom and SVGA video card for Christmas. The 7th Guest is the hit game. Barely runs on my Dad's 386 / 387. Getting Sierra multimedia games to play is like pulling teeth - after you load your mouse, video and sound drivers, you do not have enough base memory to run the game. Litterally downloading new drivers and trying new versions of DOS trying to force stuff into HIMEM to free up a few K here and there to get games to run. DOS4GW was such a blessign when games started going to that!
10th grade year - Rummors that Comodore is coming back with a computer called The BeBox. I get my first 14.4k baud modem at a computer flea market. Me and my friends setup a BBS. We start with Tag, but after complaints about how hard it is, our parents buy us Wildcat. My friend Laura is the Sysop and provides the PC and the phone line, my friend Clay is in charge of ANSI graphics and Door Games, I am in charge of the file area and RIP graphics. We install a hidden DOS door so that we can do maintanance simply by dialing in.
11th grade - I start working, and, to my parents surprise, instead of buying a car, I buy a PC. $1800, Pentium 90, 16 meg ram, Sound Blaster Awe32, 1.2 gig harddrive, Windows 95, 28.8 modem. I was one of the first 5,000 people on MSN, which was so cool because I could download more than 1 thing at a time. It was so cool!
LifeChurch actually wrote one of the most popular Bible apps out there. My pastor at my church has started telling people to pull out their phones and tabletts for about a year now. I went with a friend to a very traditional church at one time, and the pastor there, in his 70s, was preaching from his phone. It's still the Bible, no matter what form it takes. The electronic form makes it easier to make notes, cross reference, post to Facebook and Twitter, look up stuff online, and easier to carry. I actually find myself reading it more as I can easily carry it with me in my phone. It is probably the greatest advancement to the Bible since the Guttenberg press, with the NIV and other translations being the second greatest advancement (which you can also get in the Bible apps)
Same here. I want to know how they are going to "print" my videos! I probably have 5k - 10k photos myself, and over 100 videos, and I have been on FB since 2004. I just downloaded my profile a couple of months ago, and it was about 4 gig
Of course, that is easily taken care of by using VPN through one of the many resources out there - iPredator is one that comes to mind https://www.ipredator.se/
And if you simply want to block out ads, that is easy to do as well, with AdBlocking extensions that is available for all the major browsers (yes, I have even used some for IE).
I am actually surprised at how many people are surprised at this. ISPs will redirect mistyped domains to their own search engines (if some squatter hasn't already bought the mistyped domain), they will often redirect search engines (my ISP has a bad habbit of this, but there is an option to switch back to your default search engine - its just annoying), and, shoot, NetZero and Juno practically back in the 90s came up with the whole idea that you get cheap internet by them pushing ads on you. As for the self-signed certs, yeah, you see that too, although not as often as other tricks.
So, yeah, if you are really concerned about security, use VPN through a trusted host. And certainly never trust that a website, even if it starts with https, is secure on an open hotspot.
There are some great discussions going on here, but too many people are saying stuff like XBMC or building PCs or some crap. Doesn't sound like what you are looking for.
I am no expert, but I could tell you what some of these devices that you talked about actually are.
First, you would probably need a customized motherboard which has HDMI output for both audio and video. As building your own motherboard would be costly, it sounds like you are going to need something like a microATX motherboard to start with. You probably don't need a ton of features on it - you are not going to be plugging in any cards, just mainly it needs to support HDMI, SATA harddrives, and USB. Also make sure that it has a good onboard video-card that has great video-hardware support for whatever OS you are going to throw on it
You may or may not need an x64 processor - if you want to do just 720p video, you could probably get away with an ARM processor, as my tablet is able to handle 720p mp4s just fine. If you are looking to do 1080p or higher, or Full3D (either Full SBS or whatever), you are probably going to have to go with a multi-core x64 processor. I will let you decide which one you are going to use.
The amount of ram is probably going to be dependant on how much you customize your kernel (on a Linux based system), or which OS you decide to use. I mean, you could easily throw Windows 7 on the thing and use Media Center, or some plugin for it, and end up having to do zero programming, you just have to setup the software. So, depending on what you want to do, you could go anywhere from, say, 512 meg of ram up to 4 gig (should be plenty).
If you do go windows 7, you could get Media Center to launch on startup, then get a Windows Media Center remote from amazon for like $20. You could either mount USB ports inside the case or try to do some custom wiring and see if you can get your USB device to connect to a USB port on the PC. You are going to need to do a bit of cutting to the front of the case to mount your IR sensor, then maybe put a piece of tinted glass in front of it to make it look cool.
Don't forget to mount your Harddrive.
You may need to use the DVI connection on the motherboard for the initial installation of software and setting up of the OS, but you should then be able to have it default to HDMI once its setup.
Setup networking on it to easily put files onto the device.
There are a few UIs out there that you can put on top of MediaCenter to customize the look and feel. This would require zero programming.
Now, if you want to use Linux or Android, it would require a bit more work, and would mean that you may have issues playing something like Blu-Ray content, but I don't think most of the media players you mentioned support that, either. Usually, you are throwing MKVs, AVIs, or movies at it, and many of the codecs you can get for Linux. I have been away from Linux for a while, though, and not sure how well hardware acceleration works now. The downside to using Linux or Android is that it WILL mean that you will have to do a bit more customization, but you could do more as well. You could add an LCD pannel, and a few other things.
In either Windows, Android, or Linux, you can change your splash screen when it powers up, so you don't HAVE to use the Windows Logo (not sure where to change it in Windows 7, but it was easy enough to do in XP) or the Android logo or whatever, and if you decide to write your own software, you could do whatever you want. In fact, you could probably even write your own UI for MediaCenter and have it use that cool front LCD panel if you want to.
Point is, you can get one up and running with zero programming skill, and even get it with a customized startup logo and a UI that you can download off the net with basic tinkering skills, and not really even have to worry about codecs because there is software out there already that takes care of it. Or you can spend the next 2-3 years of your life writing your own video-software and embedding
This really seems useless to me, and a waste of resources. The only thing this may be useful for is people who have their profiles set to be viewed by friends only. I guess it could be useful if you are trying to track someone who is on the run by monitoring IP addresses, and for the really dumb criminal, their check-ins, but a savory criminal would just need to use some VPN service or something else to mask their IP address. I mean, seriously, that seems to be the only bit of useful information in here at all is the IP address. It may also be useful for private messages (which now should include chat conversations), but, seriously, they asked for his pictures and videos? The average Facebook user has their profile set to be wide open where anyone can view it, and many who have set their privacy levels up higher still approve every single friend request they get.
Seems like it would be a lot easier to just subpeona Facebook for the IP address and private messages, as its really the only info of any use.
Trying to figure this out. It looks like maybe the title and the summery is badly written - it sounds like they do pay taxes - they are just trying to avoid paying a certain tax. Not too familer with how Taxes work in the UK - I just know that, living in the US, I get a huge discount when ordering from the UK because they take OFF the VAT. When I first read the article, it sounded like Amazon needed to refund hundreds of millions, if not billions, of VAT to customers, or give it to the government, but it sounds like the article is talking about some other tax.
I know one of the big issues in the United States is that many states are trying to sue Amazon for not paying sales taxes. Amazon seems to get away from charging sales taxes in the US by simply shipping an item you order from a warehouse in a state other than the one you live in, and its some type of federal law (sorry, been a long time since I took business law in college, so can't tell you exactly where its written) that you are not allowed to tax on interstate commerce. Some states like Texas say that items can still be taxed if the company has a physical presence inside of the state, which caused Amazon to close their Texas warehouse.
I am not trying to troll here, but seriously, what? I read the headline several times, and then read the article summery, and all I can say is that I don't have a clue what this is talking about. I clicked on the first link, and it left me even more confused. This was the entire body of the first link:
We examine the history of cake cutting mechanisms and discuss the efficiency of their allocations. In the case of piecewise uniform preferences, we define a game that in the presence of strategic agents has equilibria that are not dominated by the allocations of any mechanism. We identify that the equilibria of this game coincide with the allocations of an existing cake cutting mechanism.
Cutting a cake is a game? I mean, at first I thought it was some sort of distributed computing post, but that doesn't really make sense either - why would distributed computing over the internet have this sort of problem.
Once again, I am seriously not trying to be a troll, but can someone PLEASE explain wth this article is about, in layman's terms?
And this is really old news. It has been believed that fracking and seismic activity were related for a while now. I could have told you that anyways. Hadn't had earthquakes in my area for decades (probably close to the century mark, but I am too lazy to look it up for sure, and then it was only like one every few decades), but since they started drilling here a couple of years ago, we seem to get one every few months - or rather, one that is measurable. I think the number of really small quakes is actually considerably higher, just too small to register. We have a suspended projector at the chruch. Have for years. Never had any issues at all until they started pumping gas out of our area. Now, about once every couple of weeks, you will see the image on the screen just start shaking very slightly. First I thought it may be because we had the speakers too loud, but this sometimes happens before and after service, or in times of silence during the service. With a projected image 10 feet tall from a projector suspended from an arm attached to the roof of the building, this is probably the only reason I notice them at all - I mean, you really don't see lights shake or anything like that. Figured out that the shaking seems to coincide with the times that they are actually fracking in the area. So, yeah, I think that it actually causes probably more seismic activity than is actually being reported, its just that its on scales too small for most people to even notice.
Totally agree. Its not like CBS is shutting down production of Phase 2. They are just saying they can't use a script that has already been copyrighted. Its a perfectly valid argument. It may suck, but its valid.
I am no great programmer, but I am usually good pretty good at following logic in code. I can usually tweak a little code here and there to get the desired result. Many times, bugs in code comes from typos and / or poor documentation in the code. Pretty much, anyone with a year or two of programming in school can do some simple debugging.
Back in my Linux days, I helped with some of the early DVD software code. This was the days before DeCSS, so we were working on getting drivers and software working for a hardware decoder (for the life of me, I can't remember what it was called, but I think it was made by Creative Labs). Anyways, other people had gotten most of the functionality working, but there were bugs in things such as Subtitle colors and positioning, being able to read multi-angle discs, and being able to read chapters on a disc. The code was there, but some was commented out because it had bugs in it, some had the code but was improperly implementing it, etc. I just played around with the code for a couple of days, fixed the issue, and submitted my patch back to the community. And I learned a lot about how DVD actually worked.
Granted, I couldn't write a GUI to save my life, databases scare me, and I don't know many of the newer languages. But tackling a bug here and there is usually not as hard as one might think. You don't have to go through ten million lines of code, just work on a couple of hundred lines for a menu or an event or something. Play with it and see what happens. Once you learn how it works, then you can start working on bugs. And put comments left and right in the code, so that others can easily code as well.
Slashdot Mirror
"equal rights to manage the Internet including in regard to the allotment, assignment and reclamation of Internet numbering." This could allow governments to render websites within their borders inaccessible, even via proxy servers or other countries. It also could allow for multinational pacts in which countries could terminate access to websites at each others' request
The idea of internal websites within a country's boarders doesn't sound like such a bad idea. Not really sure how they would stop you from accessing it via proxy. But can't you block access via geolocation already?
The second part is what worries me - the ability to terminate access to websites at each other's requests.
What gets me here is that they are proposing rules for things that there are already solutions for - geolocation and blocking at an ISP level or government level DNS addresses which would prevent access to websites.
Basically, it sounds like governments want to setup internal sites that people in their nation have access to while limiting access to the outside internet. Aren't there already tools that alow this?
Its actually true. Shoot, how much bandwidth do you think actually connects one city with the next? Then then owners of those lines lease those out to your ISPs.
http://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/m.dodge/cybergeography/atlas/uunet_global_99_large.gif
http://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/m.dodge/cybergeography/atlas/att_backbone_large.gif
According to that map, AT&T has one DS3 line going to Alaska. How fast is DS3?
http://www.lageman.com/bandwidth.htm
http://www.t1rex.com/ds3.html
What do you think would happen if everyone in Alaska decided to stream 1080p video at once?
Granted, i don't know how old these maps are.
Fiber to the house is a silly idea. Just because you have fiber to the house doesn't mean that you have a fiber connection to every server in the world. Fiber to the house is like having a Ferrari, but being stuck in rushhour traffic. It doesn't matter how fast your car is if the roads are congested.
This fiber buildout needs to be between major hubs - you need more bandwidth between the major cities, and more bandwidth to the outlying areas.
Fiber to the house makes no sense if you are in a rural area, if your ISP only has a T3 or a DS3 connection to their provider.
Want to test this out? Go to someplace like SpeakEasy and do a bandwidth test. Especially those of you with FIOS or some ISP with a 20Mbps or faster connection. Do a speed test to a relatively close city. What do you get? Now try something on the other side of the country. Now go across the continent. Then start going overseas. Try servers in South America, Scandanavia, Eastern Europe, the Middle East. What kind of speeds are you seeing?
Even more so, try these speed tests at different times of day. What do you see?
The problem isn't the bandwidth to your house, the problem is the bandwidth connecting cities with each other.
How do you figure its inflated? There is much more to the US than the East Coast and major metropolitan areas. I got relatives who live out in little towns in Central and West Texas, and some in North Texas - one town has 300 people, is an hour from the closest town of 20,000 people, and 3 hours from a major city. The only broadband they can get in the area is 1.5Mbps DSL, and that is if you live in the CITY - most of those 300 people are ranchers, and they are stuck with dialup or HughesNet. Another piece of myfamily lives in a city of about 1200, mostly ranchers and farmers, and even in the city, if you want broadand, you are stuck with satelite. They are an hour from the closest city of 100,000 people, and 3 hours from a major city. I got family out in North Texas in a town of about 300, which is so spread out and so rural, that they don't even have addresses - they drive into town to the post office to get their mail as there is no mail delivery in this town. They are 10 miles from the closest town of 5,000 people, and an hour and a half from Dallas. They all have HughesNet
How much do yoou think it is going to cost to run fiber out to these rural areas?There is a reason that no one - not AT&T, not Time Warner, no one, has run fiber out into these areas. There is a reason you can't get cable or DSL out there. It's not cost effective.
Most of the US is rural areas. Get out of the major cities and actually see the country. Drive through Kansas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, Oklahoma, Wyoming, Montana, etc. It is RURAL! 20,000 is considered to be a large town in many of these areas.Shoot, you have entire states out there that have a lower population than many of your East-Coast cities.
And then, what about trying to lay fiber out in the mountains? What about trying to cover Alaska?
I actually think $140 Billion is pretty conservative. I would have thought it would be much higher.
Has iTunes dropped DRM all together? I know last time I used them, it was kind of hit or miss if the music you were getting was DRM-free or not. I know in the past, I would sometimes have to burn the files I got off of iTunes to an audio CD, then rerip. Kinda defeats the purpose. However, I know that MANY (not all) of the songs I bought when I had an iPhone I was able to put on my Android (when I saw the light). I am sure there is probably some software out there that will convert all my iTunes tracks to MP3s, but I just haven't got around to looking.
Amazon Cloud has a similar service, although I don't think they have nearly as big of a library as itunes. Out of the 3,000 MP3s I put on my Amazon Cloud account, I think about 400 songs were upgraded.
i think both services, though, still limit to 256kbps, and Amazon is MP3 (while this works for compatability, its still an old losssy audio format). While this should be fine for most people, and more than fine enough if you are listening through earbuds, true audiophiles will probably still have issues with the fact that these are not lossless
Good points.
I use my PS3 for most of my Blu-Ray playing, because EVERYTHING just works on it - EXCEPT.... I bought a concert DVD recently that crashed the PS3 every time I try to access the menu. I also created a Blu-Ray myself of some clips, and the first version worked fine in my Blu-Ray player but crashed in the PS3. The second played perfectly in the PS3, but had a couple of clips that didn't play right in a Blu-Ray player. I normally just burn AVCHD because the Blu-Ray specs are so restrictive.
Whenever I buy a game, the first thing I always do is head over and look for a crack. My discs end up all over the place, and I don't want to spend an hour hunting down the disc just to play. Now, if the disc comes with a code for Steam, I will load the game into Steam. That way, I don't have to get a crack or have to hunt down the disc. Sadly, that does require an internet connection, but this day and age, that is not really an issue.
Here you go
2. Websites that insist on posting useless bandwidth-hogging 'talking head' videos rather than posting a simple photo and a text summary.
So I see I am not the only one who visits foxnews.com
I wonder if this also takes into account drivers who are temporaraly blinded at night by the flashes of the camera. Shoot, even on the highway, I am sometimes temporaraly blinded by a flash at an intersection on the access road. I would file a complaint, but don't know who to file it with.
Seriously, have you priced stuff at all? Unless you are going with cheap, Walmart brand televisions, your TVs alone can eat your budget.
DON'T TAKE IT DOWN TO THE STUDS!!! I was in a house for 10 years that needed some repair work. The first thing I did was take off the wood paneling in one of the rooms almost as soon as I moved in. Bad mistake - I bought the sheetrock, but hanging it was another issue. Then you have to texture. Oh, and you will probably have to put in new insullation. Took me forever to get it done, and it looked ugly because I really had no clue what I was doing.
With that kind of budget, you might be able to do the bathroom, and maybe the kitchen. If the bathroom is small (like the majority of American bathrooms), you may want to expand by knocking out a hall closet or something. Just do a bit of planning. Pay someone to do sheetrocking, then put up tile, tile the floors, replace shower and tub with something really nice, replace toilet (actually go to Home Depot and look at different toilets. It may sound something trivial, but might as well make "having to go" more enjoyable, and a nice toilet you can get out for under $100 on), replace sinks and vanity, replace mirrors, maybe wallpaper if the wife is into it.
That right there is probably about $5-10k, depending on how nice you want to go (you could probably get out for under $1000, but the parts you will be replacing with are probably not going to look as nice as what is already there).
Once you are FINISHED, then you can do the second bathroom.
Replace counter tops, cabinets and appliances in the kitchen. Maybe add an island and replace floor.
Your budget is gone. Forget televisions, forget bedrooms, forget the living room, forget wiring the house.
Seriously, watch a few television shows about people who flip houses. Especially try to catch a few episodes about first time flippers. People on those shows can easily sink $50k-$100k on a house half your size - and that doesn't include tech stuff.
Completely agree. I run pretty much a combination of the two. I do a lot of multimedia stuff, so I use Windows 7 as the OS, as well as a couple of Adobe products, but the majority of other software (Blu-Ray authoring, video converters and transcoders, etc) are either Freeware or Shareware. Granted, it is easy to pay a couple of grand for one software package that does everything, but I usually like to tinker with stuff a bit more, and so a dozen free software packages that do just one thing each is actually preferable to me, as I get better control every step of the way.
I have no issues paying for software, either, if its well written, it does something really useful, it is significantly better than free alternatives, and its reasonably priced. For example, I have paid for both Dreamweaver and Premiere in the past (with student discounts - not full price). However, I never bought Photoshop, because, as much as I like it (and actually prefer it), there is a great free alternative (Gimp). Encore I would buy if it actually worked right (I think its bundled with Premiere now, haven't upgraded in a while). Encore crashes if you look at it wrong, you can spend hours or days working on a project just to be told that you have some element that won't render right, etc. Other paid alternatives that actually work don't allow me as much customization (ie controlling bitrates, having different resolutions, or something). So I turned to free alternatives. Now if Encore would just work right, I would use it exclusively,as it really is DESIGNED to do what I want a piece of software to do, but the program is way too buggy (every single version has been. Piece of crap software).
BTW, my favorite piece of free software that I am currently using? Calibre! Man that software rocks!
Sorry, ADHD kicked in, where was I going with this? Oh, yeah, free software. So yeah, Free software has made an impact. It offers alternative, which drives down teh prices of proprietary stuff, the community support helps lead to innovation all the way around, but the proprietary stuff keeps educated people employed, drives the economy, and then offers funds tthat can be used for research and development. So proprietary software is not a bad thing. Overpriced proprietary software with heavy patents IS a bad thing.
High school chemistry was useless - and I LOVE science. Complete waste of a class time. Now, some science is good. But for things such as chemistry and high school physics, you should have like a half-semester or quarter semester course that exposes students to it, and then let then if they like it, they can study it in college.
Shoot, biology could probably be thrown into that as well. As interesting as it was, computing statistics in a genetic pool has never helped me in real life. Once again, expose students to it, give them an overview of it, but to waste an entire year and class period on it?
High school is to learn stuff that will help us in life and the real world, college is where you go into a course of study. Balancing chemistry equations has not helped me one iota in the real world. Knowing not to mix bleach and amonia has.
Now, if the high school wants to offer chemistry as an option, maybe for an advanced degree plan or as an AP college course, then that is one thing. I am all for that. Making all students take the course is pointless.
I started kindergarten in 1984 and graduated in 1997, and graduated college in 2001.
2nd grade year, we had ONE Apple ][ for the school. We had a little reading program
4th grade - we had a LAB of Apple ][s. We had some story composition programs and some math programs. Lovely green and black screens.
5th grade year - College for Kids - I took five classes - Computer Programming (Basic on a 286 - learned how to program the PC speaker and some graphics and animation in GWBasic), Typing (PC based), Physics, Video Production (Betamax), and Creative writing (my first exposer to Macs - the old lunchbox style ones - and mice and fonts).
Middle school - 7th grade year. IBM PS/2s. 286s. Windows 3.0. Some science programs.
8th grade year - computer lab at middle school got rid of the Commodore 64s and replaced with IBM PS/2s. Teacher barely knew how to use PC. She freaked out when I exited out of Dosshell once to go to Dos, and reported me to the principle saying that I was trying to hack the comptuers. Told the principle that she was an idiot, and obviously didn't know how to use a PC if she thought that "exiting to DOS" was hacking. The computer litteracy class was mostly learning to use Windows, and typing, although we did do a TAD bit of work with spredsheets in Works.
8th grade year also - My Dad had a PC at home. He had a CGA card that had an RCA output on it. He had a paint program and a screen capture program. I used the things to make a presentation that I outputted to VHS to take to class. As far as I know, this was before Powerpoint or that similar program that the Mac had.
8th grade year - buy my first modem, a 2400 baud, and start to get on BBSes. I get on the Internet. NCSA Mosaic is the only webbrowser out there, and you have to use a Dialer, then Trumpet / WinSock to connect to the internet.
9th grade year - high school. The school gets their first network - IBM / Novell Tokenring. 2 servers - Both 486s with 16 MEG of ram. I was one of the only people who had access to the modem bank (we had three modems). Each server would let 100 people on at once, and they had different applications on them, and did not talk to each other. The clients were 286s and 386s with no harddrives and 4 meg ram each. We would sometimes create boot discs to keep off the network to play games. Being no harddrives, Windows ran off of the server. Being tokenring as well, and only 16 meg of ram, pretty much, more than 2 people running Windows at a time brought the network to its knees. We had this system until until after my senior year - I think it was replaced in 1999, as I was actually contracted to help install the new system.
9th grade - I get my first CDRom and SVGA video card for Christmas. The 7th Guest is the hit game. Barely runs on my Dad's 386 / 387. Getting Sierra multimedia games to play is like pulling teeth - after you load your mouse, video and sound drivers, you do not have enough base memory to run the game. Litterally downloading new drivers and trying new versions of DOS trying to force stuff into HIMEM to free up a few K here and there to get games to run. DOS4GW was such a blessign when games started going to that!
10th grade year - Rummors that Comodore is coming back with a computer called The BeBox. I get my first 14.4k baud modem at a computer flea market. Me and my friends setup a BBS. We start with Tag, but after complaints about how hard it is, our parents buy us Wildcat. My friend Laura is the Sysop and provides the PC and the phone line, my friend Clay is in charge of ANSI graphics and Door Games, I am in charge of the file area and RIP graphics. We install a hidden DOS door so that we can do maintanance simply by dialing in.
11th grade - I start working, and, to my parents surprise, instead of buying a car, I buy a PC. $1800, Pentium 90, 16 meg ram, Sound Blaster Awe32, 1.2 gig harddrive, Windows 95, 28.8 modem. I was one of the first 5,000 people on MSN, which was so cool because I could download more than 1 thing at a time. It was so cool!
LifeChurch actually wrote one of the most popular Bible apps out there. My pastor at my church has started telling people to pull out their phones and tabletts for about a year now. I went with a friend to a very traditional church at one time, and the pastor there, in his 70s, was preaching from his phone. It's still the Bible, no matter what form it takes. The electronic form makes it easier to make notes, cross reference, post to Facebook and Twitter, look up stuff online, and easier to carry. I actually find myself reading it more as I can easily carry it with me in my phone. It is probably the greatest advancement to the Bible since the Guttenberg press, with the NIV and other translations being the second greatest advancement (which you can also get in the Bible apps)
Same here. I want to know how they are going to "print" my videos! I probably have 5k - 10k photos myself, and over 100 videos, and I have been on FB since 2004. I just downloaded my profile a couple of months ago, and it was about 4 gig
Of course, that is easily taken care of by using VPN through one of the many resources out there - iPredator is one that comes to mind
https://www.ipredator.se/
And if you simply want to block out ads, that is easy to do as well, with AdBlocking extensions that is available for all the major browsers (yes, I have even used some for IE).
I am actually surprised at how many people are surprised at this. ISPs will redirect mistyped domains to their own search engines (if some squatter hasn't already bought the mistyped domain), they will often redirect search engines (my ISP has a bad habbit of this, but there is an option to switch back to your default search engine - its just annoying), and, shoot, NetZero and Juno practically back in the 90s came up with the whole idea that you get cheap internet by them pushing ads on you. As for the self-signed certs, yeah, you see that too, although not as often as other tricks.
So, yeah, if you are really concerned about security, use VPN through a trusted host. And certainly never trust that a website, even if it starts with https, is secure on an open hotspot.
There are some great discussions going on here, but too many people are saying stuff like XBMC or building PCs or some crap. Doesn't sound like what you are looking for.
I am no expert, but I could tell you what some of these devices that you talked about actually are.
First, you would probably need a customized motherboard which has HDMI output for both audio and video. As building your own motherboard would be costly, it sounds like you are going to need something like a microATX motherboard to start with. You probably don't need a ton of features on it - you are not going to be plugging in any cards, just mainly it needs to support HDMI, SATA harddrives, and USB. Also make sure that it has a good onboard video-card that has great video-hardware support for whatever OS you are going to throw on it
You may or may not need an x64 processor - if you want to do just 720p video, you could probably get away with an ARM processor, as my tablet is able to handle 720p mp4s just fine. If you are looking to do 1080p or higher, or Full3D (either Full SBS or whatever), you are probably going to have to go with a multi-core x64 processor. I will let you decide which one you are going to use.
The amount of ram is probably going to be dependant on how much you customize your kernel (on a Linux based system), or which OS you decide to use. I mean, you could easily throw Windows 7 on the thing and use Media Center, or some plugin for it, and end up having to do zero programming, you just have to setup the software. So, depending on what you want to do, you could go anywhere from, say, 512 meg of ram up to 4 gig (should be plenty).
If you do go windows 7, you could get Media Center to launch on startup, then get a Windows Media Center remote from amazon for like $20. You could either mount USB ports inside the case or try to do some custom wiring and see if you can get your USB device to connect to a USB port on the PC. You are going to need to do a bit of cutting to the front of the case to mount your IR sensor, then maybe put a piece of tinted glass in front of it to make it look cool.
Don't forget to mount your Harddrive.
You may need to use the DVI connection on the motherboard for the initial installation of software and setting up of the OS, but you should then be able to have it default to HDMI once its setup.
Setup networking on it to easily put files onto the device.
There are a few UIs out there that you can put on top of MediaCenter to customize the look and feel. This would require zero programming.
Now, if you want to use Linux or Android, it would require a bit more work, and would mean that you may have issues playing something like Blu-Ray content, but I don't think most of the media players you mentioned support that, either. Usually, you are throwing MKVs, AVIs, or movies at it, and many of the codecs you can get for Linux. I have been away from Linux for a while, though, and not sure how well hardware acceleration works now. The downside to using Linux or Android is that it WILL mean that you will have to do a bit more customization, but you could do more as well. You could add an LCD pannel, and a few other things.
In either Windows, Android, or Linux, you can change your splash screen when it powers up, so you don't HAVE to use the Windows Logo (not sure where to change it in Windows 7, but it was easy enough to do in XP) or the Android logo or whatever, and if you decide to write your own software, you could do whatever you want. In fact, you could probably even write your own UI for MediaCenter and have it use that cool front LCD panel if you want to.
Point is, you can get one up and running with zero programming skill, and even get it with a customized startup logo and a UI that you can download off the net with basic tinkering skills, and not really even have to worry about codecs because there is software out there already that takes care of it. Or you can spend the next 2-3 years of your life writing your own video-software and embedding
This really seems useless to me, and a waste of resources. The only thing this may be useful for is people who have their profiles set to be viewed by friends only. I guess it could be useful if you are trying to track someone who is on the run by monitoring IP addresses, and for the really dumb criminal, their check-ins, but a savory criminal would just need to use some VPN service or something else to mask their IP address. I mean, seriously, that seems to be the only bit of useful information in here at all is the IP address. It may also be useful for private messages (which now should include chat conversations), but, seriously, they asked for his pictures and videos? The average Facebook user has their profile set to be wide open where anyone can view it, and many who have set their privacy levels up higher still approve every single friend request they get.
Seems like it would be a lot easier to just subpeona Facebook for the IP address and private messages, as its really the only info of any use.
Thanks, exactly what I was looking for. I understand now.
Trying to figure this out. It looks like maybe the title and the summery is badly written - it sounds like they do pay taxes - they are just trying to avoid paying a certain tax. Not too familer with how Taxes work in the UK - I just know that, living in the US, I get a huge discount when ordering from the UK because they take OFF the VAT. When I first read the article, it sounded like Amazon needed to refund hundreds of millions, if not billions, of VAT to customers, or give it to the government, but it sounds like the article is talking about some other tax.
I know one of the big issues in the United States is that many states are trying to sue Amazon for not paying sales taxes. Amazon seems to get away from charging sales taxes in the US by simply shipping an item you order from a warehouse in a state other than the one you live in, and its some type of federal law (sorry, been a long time since I took business law in college, so can't tell you exactly where its written) that you are not allowed to tax on interstate commerce. Some states like Texas say that items can still be taxed if the company has a physical presence inside of the state, which caused Amazon to close their Texas warehouse.
This exact same story was posted Wednesday, almost word for word:
http://slashdot.org/submission/2008151/bogus-takedown-notice-lands-150k-settlement-in-australian-court
I am not trying to troll here, but seriously, what? I read the headline several times, and then read the article summery, and all I can say is that I don't have a clue what this is talking about. I clicked on the first link, and it left me even more confused. This was the entire body of the first link:
We examine the history of cake cutting mechanisms and discuss the efficiency of their allocations. In the case of piecewise uniform preferences, we define a game that in the presence of strategic agents has equilibria that are not dominated by the allocations of any mechanism. We identify that the equilibria of this game coincide with the allocations of an existing cake cutting mechanism.
Cutting a cake is a game? I mean, at first I thought it was some sort of distributed computing post, but that doesn't really make sense either - why would distributed computing over the internet have this sort of problem.
Once again, I am seriously not trying to be a troll, but can someone PLEASE explain wth this article is about, in layman's terms?
And this is really old news. It has been believed that fracking and seismic activity were related for a while now. I could have told you that anyways. Hadn't had earthquakes in my area for decades (probably close to the century mark, but I am too lazy to look it up for sure, and then it was only like one every few decades), but since they started drilling here a couple of years ago, we seem to get one every few months - or rather, one that is measurable. I think the number of really small quakes is actually considerably higher, just too small to register. We have a suspended projector at the chruch. Have for years. Never had any issues at all until they started pumping gas out of our area. Now, about once every couple of weeks, you will see the image on the screen just start shaking very slightly. First I thought it may be because we had the speakers too loud, but this sometimes happens before and after service, or in times of silence during the service. With a projected image 10 feet tall from a projector suspended from an arm attached to the roof of the building, this is probably the only reason I notice them at all - I mean, you really don't see lights shake or anything like that. Figured out that the shaking seems to coincide with the times that they are actually fracking in the area. So, yeah, I think that it actually causes probably more seismic activity than is actually being reported, its just that its on scales too small for most people to even notice.
Totally agree. Its not like CBS is shutting down production of Phase 2. They are just saying they can't use a script that has already been copyrighted. Its a perfectly valid argument. It may suck, but its valid.
I really do this. One arm at 12. Sometimes it will drift to 1 or 2. If I am on the highway, I keep it at about 5 or 6.
I am no great programmer, but I am usually good pretty good at following logic in code. I can usually tweak a little code here and there to get the desired result. Many times, bugs in code comes from typos and / or poor documentation in the code. Pretty much, anyone with a year or two of programming in school can do some simple debugging.
Back in my Linux days, I helped with some of the early DVD software code. This was the days before DeCSS, so we were working on getting drivers and software working for a hardware decoder (for the life of me, I can't remember what it was called, but I think it was made by Creative Labs). Anyways, other people had gotten most of the functionality working, but there were bugs in things such as Subtitle colors and positioning, being able to read multi-angle discs, and being able to read chapters on a disc. The code was there, but some was commented out because it had bugs in it, some had the code but was improperly implementing it, etc. I just played around with the code for a couple of days, fixed the issue, and submitted my patch back to the community. And I learned a lot about how DVD actually worked.
Granted, I couldn't write a GUI to save my life, databases scare me, and I don't know many of the newer languages. But tackling a bug here and there is usually not as hard as one might think. You don't have to go through ten million lines of code, just work on a couple of hundred lines for a menu or an event or something. Play with it and see what happens. Once you learn how it works, then you can start working on bugs. And put comments left and right in the code, so that others can easily code as well.