Um, no. The Duke Nukem shape is not physiologically possible for any human being.
The strange thing is that while the ultra-hunky heroes are seen as a "wish-fulfillment" figure for guys ("gee, I wish I had muscles like him and knew how to kick ass"), the ultra-feminine heroines are seen as a "jealousy/envy" figure by women ("they've no right to have a heroine looking like that - she makes me feel inferior"). Me, I reckon that speaks volumes about the way most men and women think. Men are much more "pack animals" who collect in mutually-supportive groups, and status rubs off from who you're with. Whilst women are more likely to hang out in larger groups, they're classically a group of mutual competitors. I know this doesn't always hold true, but it's a good approximation.
This is precisely my problem with RMS's theory of freeness. The original reason he developed his whole GNU ideology was due to not being able to get hardware interfaces to work correctly. In other words, he wanted to get some work done and was prevented from doing so by the software he needed not being available. RMS being RMS, he decided he would solve the problem himself, and found that the info he needed to hack the drivers wasn't available. Now there are two possible AND EQUALLY VALID solutions here: either the suppliers make information freely available so that RMS can hack his drivers; OR the suppliers ship decent software in the first place.
Now granted, if all the docs and source for everything was available to everyone then the world certainly would be a better place - but ultimately what counts is having the tools you need to do your job. RMS (and hence clearly the Hurd developers) have confused this "freeness" with being an objective in itself, when really it is just a tool to let other people achieve their objectives.
This is as true in the physical domain as in software. If I want to do some woodwork, I buy a chisel, or borrow one off a friend. I don't give a shit if the specs for the chisel and the process by which it's made are posted on a website somewhere - I want to dig a hole in a bit of wood! If the chisel with its own website is a blunt piece of crap, I'll get one that's sharp and does the job properly.
Frankly, the only reason RMS (and others) can sustain their GNU agenda is that they don't have (and in some cases have never had) real jobs. You know, jobs with deadlines, where you can be made redundant or fired if you're not pulling your weight on a project, and where you don't get a load of time that you can arbitrarily spend on any scheme that takes your fancy. Checking RMS's resume, his background is all Bell Labs and similar "think-tanks". In Ivory Tower Land, such principles are fine - but in the real world, we just want to do stuff, thanks all the same. If your ideologically-perfect OS doesn't work as well as Windows, or if your ideologically-perfect application doesn't work as well as the MS equivalent, I'll ditch it without a moment's hesitation.
And this is where the Hurd people have fallen down. In their pursuit of the ultimate in gold-plating, they've utterly missed the point of delivering something that people can use. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that Hurd will never succeed - I don't see how it can, because they've proven time after time that serving their user base is much less important to them than their ideology. And if you screw over your user base, man, you're dead.
More ways? I guess you mean the ABS or power steering failing, or something like that? OK, there are many more systems like that on new cars, so I guess there are more ways for stuff to fail. But the way higher reliability of this stuff means they *don't* fail often.
Re generic parts: Really? My memory is that most of these were manufacturer-specific (particularly coils, pumps, starters, lamps, keys, manifolds, pulleys, belts, gaskets) and frequently vehicle-specific. In many cases you've got *more* standardisation now that OEMs contract someone like Bosch or Marelli to make stuff, and you've also got the option of buying "pattern parts" which you never had back in the old days. Batteries and cables are as generic now as they ever were.
The worst case for variety of components on a car is when the company gets bought out and new variants of the car are subsequently produced. My current car (a Seat) is a classic example of this - parts could be original Seat, Audi or VW spec and you practically need to know the month of manufacture to know which part you need! But this is the result of bad management, not an inherent feature of new cars - Austin, British Leyland and Rover went through the same thing back in the 70s. Fords OTOH are generally pretty consistent.
There's certainly more variety of fluids now, but that's mainly due to increases in performance and expected lifespan requiring advances in lubricant technology (a gearbox that previously would require replacing at 80K miles is now expected to run for twice that or more), so just sticking 10W/40 oil in everything is no longer an option. Modern vehicles are fairly consistent in the standards of fluids they need - the variety on sale is often more to allow older vehicles to keep running with the same obsolete fluids they originally used. You could go back to putting 10W/40 in everything if you wanted, but you'd be back to the life expectancy that older cars had (which is much less).
You're right, putting the fuel pump inside the tank is a dumb move. Not really related to the electronics issue though.
And you're right too - there were a larger number of old-car problems that could be fixed on the side of the road. Reason? Not only were there more problems available with old cars, they happened more often! So there needed to be the facility to fix them more easily.
With contact-breaker ignition, the distributor had to be somewhere you could get to. The points needed adjusting every 6 months, and the points, rotor arm and distributor cap needed replacing at regular intervals. Plus you needed to be able to accurately turn the distributor to adjust the spark timing. All that meant the distributor had to be somewhere easily accessible. Today there's no points, and electronic ignition controls the spark so the rotor arm and distributor cap may only need changing once or twice in the life of the car. There's so much less to go wrong that putting the distributor cap somewhere hard-to-reach is not a big deal. And newer cars have even done away with the distributor cap by using coil-over sparks, with the result that even if one lead is dodgy, there's three more cylinders to get you home.
I don't agree with you on the "specialised parts" though. All cars have always needed special parts (points, for instance - every car would have different ones). I can't think of many "non-specialised" parts on old cars. The most I can come up with is that you could replace the carbs or air filters with different ones for higher performance.
If you're a sucker for things that look cool, you've got deep pockets, and you don't care if it doesn't perform, then by all means go for it.
Alternatively, if you have any kind of budget, or if you want a computer that actually *does* stuff instead of just sitting there like an artist's doorstop, you might want to stick with PC-based stuff. Without exception, anything PC-based is faster and cheaper. If you really need something that looks cool, shop around for a nice-looking laptop or a fancy desktop case.
Carbs and contact-breaker (points) ignition systems are *incredibly* unreliable in damp conditions, and are not great in the cold either. If you've never had your car fail to start on a winter's day, you are one lucky individual! The only time I've had an electronic fuel/injection car fail to start in the cold or damp, it was because the HT leads had broken down. I couldn't count the number of times my first (carb & standard ignition) car failed to start, and the same with my friends' cars of the same vintage.
Another prominent carb issue that EFI doesn't have is the float chamber problem. If the float gets a leak, you're screwed - fuel goes everywhere. Or if the float gets stuck, you're screwed again - the car runs for a minute or so and then dies. A good solid thump generally unsticks it, but we're talking reliability, right? Something that needs a regular kick to run is not what I'd call reliable.
And then we get to the spark plugs. It doesn't take much wear on a carb for it to get the air/fuel ratio wrong, and then your plugs get killed one way or another. Plus contact-breaker ignition systems don't give a consistent voltage for the spark, and excessive voltage causes wear on the spark plugs. An EFI car can easily go 2 years or more with the same spark plugs - contact-breaker ignition systems need plugs to be replaced every 6 months, and often needed re-gapping more often.
I've never bought a new car yet - my current car is the newest I've ever had, at 30K miles on the clock. All the ones previously have been 60-80K on the clock, and whilst they've all been absolute dogs mechanically and bodywork-wise, I've never had a single failure of the electronics. The only time anything went wrong on any of them, it was a broken connector tab to the electronic ignition, and that could just as easily have happened on any type of ignition.
But suppose something had gone wrong? Sorting it is easy - new module and it all works. Try fixing your carbs in the same length of time!
Note that I've not even touched on fuel economy or emissions, both of which carbs fail miserably at. For a given volume of engine, an EFI car will always get better on both than a car with carbs. And a larger volume of engine will always require more fuel for the same acceleration, because engine volume impacts directly on vehicle construction and hence vehicle mass.
Now granted, there could be something peculiar in the software. I work in automotive software, so I know some of it ain't so hot. But it goes through pretty rigorous testing, so by the time it hits the road it's in decent shape. And even then, it's very rare to get a quit-on-road - more often it's noise or vibration caused by an oscillation somewhere, which can be majorly annoying but rarely damaging.
Simple. You need the ".A" to indicate it's the first of its type. Since this dumbass has released the virus code to the world, you can bet there's going to be a ".B", ".C", etc.. In fact I doubt one alphabet will be enough to count them all.
As for using this guy's name, why would we want a virus writer and distributor to become famous?
Sure, you can watch that documentary. But since it's controversial, you must also show the "conventional" view that a person's sexuality cannot be altered and is not an "issue".
Alcoholism is an addiction, is harmful to the person affected and harmful to the addict's family and friends. Homosexuality is none of these, so to say "being gay is like being an alcoholic" amounts to insulting gay people. And flames generally don't get you modded +1 insightful...
What if you're attacked in your home, and your atttacker gets to the gun before you do? Or what if someone breaks in, gets the gun, and waits for you to come home?
I would be happier knowing that the fate of the world still lies at least partially in the hands of humans, not in the circuitry of a processor.
That's a bizarre statement. Hoes this affect the fate of the world? And why do you believe this electronics is bad? "We've already put computers into every household appliance" and made them easier to use and given them more functionality "and most forms of transportation" and made them safer and more environmentally friendly.
"Humans" will rob, steal and murder. The majority of these involve stolen weapons. Young people will kill (friends or themselves) by accident. The majority of these involve weapons the young person doesn't own. So it's bad that we stop this happening, is it?
Bcos JPG is out in the world, and everyone uses it. Until you can get every digital camera manufacturer to support JPG, you're screwed. Since they don't even support GIF or PNG for lossless compression of raw files, or JPEG2K for lossy compression - all of which are major mainstream formats and have been around for years - I can predict how successful your compression algorithm won't be!;-/
Check the website. You'll see ACT has its list of "best" compression programs, none of which are Winzip or the version of ZIP that comes with Windows. But 99.vanishing-9 percent of users will only ever use ZIP format. Why? Because everything supports it. The point of these algorithms generally *isn't* to make life easier for Joe Average running Windows. Rather, it's to make life easier for people writing installers and stuff like that, who can apply any arbitrary compression system they like.
Yes, all those factors have a dramatic effect on weight gain, so that what's a stable diet for one person could be a cause of morbid obesity in others.
But for a given person, weight gain is simply a case of balancing calories in (diet) and calories out (exercise). If you're putting on fat, you either need to reduce the calories in or increase the calories out. And eating less food is one way of achieving the former.
The guy didn't just "point out someone else's mistake" - he produced and published exploits to allow access into the system./. analogies are always dodgy, but what he's done is like duplicating someone's front door key a thousand times and standing on a street corner in the local Cracktown handing keys out to everyone who walks past.
You want to point out a mistake, there's plenty of legitimate channels for doing so which don't involve hackers (or crackers, if you prefer the outdated early-80s terminology) ass-raping the system in question.
Maybe that's the case for the independents - but the independents are only selling 50% porn and 50% arthouse because the big chains are selling the top Hollywood hits. And it's the top Hollywood hits that made video work.
Also FWIW, your "typical video shop" sadly became a Blockbuster (or similar) very quickly. The independent video store is unfortunately very atypical.
You're obviously ignoring the reason that all the *movies* were available on VHS.
Certainly porn was available as well. But I doubt your typical video shop was ever renting more than a few porn films a week compared to dozens of copies of Rocky, Terminator, Tron, The Breakfast Club, Wierd Science, Top Gun, etc, etc. And Betamax screwed up by not getting films from the major studios, so they cut themselves out of the top-blockbusters-on-video market, which was where most people agree the VHS-versus-Betamax battle was won/lost.
For (1), check out this very recent/. article. 40.6uW gets you 546.8 miles. Admittedly that's only a beacon station and not going for anything complicated like FM, but even so your signal could be going a lot further than you expect.
Which kind of ties in to point (2). "If you build it, they will come." The point isn't that no-one else happens to be using the frequencies, the point is that you're using a regulated resource (EM bandwidth) and if one person gets away with it then everyone will have a go. I know that's all screwed up, but I'm not the one running the country.:-/
But for point (3), the fact that there's no-one else on that frequency will likely mitigate the penalty (which will probably just be a letter saying "don't do it again"). Especially if you're not trying to do a "real" pirate radio station. Claiming ignorance will probably get you out of the worst of it if you haven't done any damage.
I've not read the book, but if you're an electronics newbie then stripboard is the only way to go. Cheap, easy to use, easy to rework, and you get a nice resilient circuit board. The only problem is space, bcos it ends up bigger than a regular PCB would, but most beginners aren't too worried about that. It's cheaper to get a bigger box than to buy a full-on PCB system.;-)
For proper PCBs, Press-and-peel (or is it PressNPeel - can never remember) is a reasonable way of getting started. The main problem is designing the layout, bcos there doesn't seem to be a decent FOSS layout program for Windows (several for Linux though), and other ones cost money. GEDA and Eagle are OK for small boards though so you might get away with that. Otherwise I guess you're limited to ExpressPCB's program, although that does then make it easy to get your PCBs made. Me, I've got a ten-year-old el-dodgy version of Protel.
FWIW, the only really expensive part of a PCB-making system is the UV light box, and you don't necessarily need one of those. A few years ago, I made a PCB by exposing the photoresist board in the sun for a couple of hours, and it worked fine. Your tracks and spacings need to be a little wider, but otherwise no worries.
Got my Squier in 2001 (Fat Strat version). Nice sound, but I just don't rate the hardware - tuners and bridge are just crap. I agree with you on the tremelo - no cheap guitar has a tremelo worth using. I'd rather Fender made their low-end guitars as hard-tail versions, bcos it'd save some money by deleting something that doesn't bloody work anyway!:-/
Personally, I think riffs are a really bad way of learning guitar. Learn chords and work from there, because the basis of all guitar work is chords. And that's where a classical helps. On an electric you can turn the distortion up and you can't hear whether the chord went down properly or not. On an acoustic guitar you can't fool yourself. And a classical is better than a steel-string acoustic for starting because (a) the strings are easier on the fingers and (b) classicals are cheap. My argument is that on an electric you *don't* learn basic finger dexterity, because cranking up the distortion hides the fact that your technique is usually for shit when you start.
Once you can play some basic chords consistently, then moving to an electric is a reasonable choice. You've got far enough that you can learn from listening to songs and downloading chords off Olga or wherever. But until you can do those first few chords (I'd say A, Am, E, Em, D, G and C as the essentials) then the electric is going to be covering up your mistakes, so unless you're already a competent musician with another instrument and you know what mistakes sound like and how to practise, you're not going to get any better. Or at least you're not going to get better as fast as someone playing acoustically. So starting with an electric is pretty much wasting a beginner's time. (Besides the obvious money factor as well.)
I will say that once you've learnt the basic chords, playing electric *is* a good idea. Whilst high gain can cover up bad tone on some things, it does very much show up noise when you brush other strings during chord changes, which just isn't audible on an acoustic. And the strings are closer together. Those two combine to require more precision from your fretting hand, so it's good to go through that. And of course, electric is *lots* of fun!:-)
I *didn't* say to learn classical style. My main complaint with classical players (and I know, because I learnt violin and piano before I touched a guitar) is that although they've generally done theory and written down notes on a sheet of paper, none of them know how they sound. They just don't have a concept of chord progressions, which means they don't have a concept of musical structure, so they can only blindly reproduce notes on a page and can't add much of their own creativity. I don't see why any musician should limit themselves this way - start off learning chords and stuff, then get onto riffs, then try your own riffs (pentatonic scale and so on), and *then* start doing classical stuff when you know your own mind, otherwise you'll just get stifled by it.
Serious, hit Harmony Central and you'll find more than you could ever imagine on guitar stuff, complete with reviews by any number of musicians.
For myself, I learnt off the Russ Shipton books, downloaded chords off the web (a href=http://www.tab-robot.com>Tab Robot is a good place to start these days), and put in lots of practise.
After 8 years of playing, I went to a teacher to refine some technique. Man, that's well worth doing, and I wish I'd done it earlier. But don't go until you *can* actually play stuff - learning basic chords is muscle memory, and you can do that just as well yourself without spending big money on a teacher. Practise, is all.
As for getting a guitar, for god's sake learn on a small classical guitar first, and don't buy any of those "learn rock guitar" books - I've not seen a good one. They might have you playing the "Smoke On The Water" riff quickly, but ultimately it's like using "Chopsticks" to teach piano playing. What you'll learn is a few basic tricks instead of proper technique, and it's very easy to fake stuff on an electric.
And don't get a cheapy Fender Squier - spring for a proper one. I got a Squier and whilst it sounds OK, the hardware is poor quality so it tends not to stay in tune properly. Spring for a proper Strat - it's not much more expensive. And if you've started with a cheap little classical, you'll then be in a position to hit the shops and actually play them yourself and make a decent choice, instead of watching like a sucker while the assistant prepares to fleece you.
Oh yes, another rule - beware of trusting a guitar shop salesman.
Depends. I play *rarely* (maybe 3-5 hours a month, if that) so I can't justify $40 on the game and another $15/mo. I could maybe justify $40 on the game if I knew whatever else was proportional to time spent. If their billing system is anywhere near sensible (ie. relying on email and computer billing, not sending paper copies) then they should make a profit on the deal. Given a choice between making a smaller profit off me or no profit at all, they'd be better going for the former. And that means a charge structure designed for casual players.
If you're in a war and you're captured, there's this thing called the Geneva Convention that says in real detail what you can and can't do with captured enemy fighters. This is international law. The US is claiming that somehow these people were "combatants" but not "soldiers", and using this form of words to avoid the treatment that is mandated by international law for captured enemies.
Torture does not always sum up to a negative value -- sometimes it's necessary.
And here you disagree with US law, international law and the Geneva Convention, which all say that torture is not permitted under any circumstances. Also you disagree with many intelligence-gathering experts (including the FBI) who say that information obtained from torture is almost universally incorrect, simply because the victim will tell the torturer anything to make them stop.
Your "what-if" scenario (which bears no resemblance to the cases of the people imprisoned at Guantanamo) also makes the explicit assumption that you know the person is guilty before you start, which is an invalid assumption.
they are outside of criminal law, you don't have to conduct trials with lawyers, etc.
If you're accusing them of war crimes then in fact you do. International law again, I'm afraid.
Regarding civilian casualties in Iraq
Denied? Fine. That's the LOWEST estimate of Iraqi civilian casualties. You want to take the Lancet's version, fine. The Lancet's approach is somewhat inaccurate, granted, but it's a valid statistical method so you can't dismiss it out of hand as "unscientific".
Regarding Abu Ghraib
I think you fail to realise that it was more than a "few grunts" in that jail. Also see the following.
OK, gov documents leaked by the ACLU (the hated "liberals") but gov documents nonetheless.
And it's pretty damn clear that nothing would have happened if the pictures hadn't hit the papers. The FBI knew about this *way* before, but nothing happened until the press found out about it. In addition, the official report makes it clear that Abu Ghraib was tacitly permitted by the Army - they didn't set out explicitly for it to happen, but once the torture was known to be happening, the Army did absolutely nothing about it. In regular law, the word is "accessory" to the crime.
Of course the insurgents gave no fair trials to the people they murdered. The reason we're different to them is that we believe it's wrong to do that. Or *I* believe it's wrong. You can keep defending it on the "it's OK if we do it" reasoning if you like.
being the liberal that you are
I am proud to call myself a liberal. That means I believe in things that are worth defending. Little things like human rights, the rule of law and the US Constitution. The founders of the USA were liberals too - they believed in the value of these concepts. Piss on them if you like.
But when the US government trys to prevent Saddam's dictatorship from killing more people
As it happens, I believe invading Iraq was the right thing to do, and it should have happened long before. (I won't mention who brought Saddam to power in the first place... *cough* US *cough*) But I don't believe it should have been done through false pretences (the farces of the claims about WMDs and al-Qaeda links which were proven false) - the US and UK governments should have had the guts to say "we're doing this because it's right". And I also don't believe the US and UK governments had any plans to do more than conquer Iraq - they were fundamentally unprepared for peacekeeping and setting up any civil or paramilitary structure to the country. The reason things are so bad now is that the invasion sma
With pleasure. I'll use the BBC News site as my source. I'm deliberately not using a source such as Amnesty, because they're an easy target as a "liberal" organisation. Instead, I'll stick to the BBC as a well-known independent news source.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/3592186. stm First trials of any captives at Guantanamo (before a military court, and note that suitability of a military court for trying these people is itself controversial): 2004, and note that trials have yet to complete. Date of capture: 2001 or 2002 Time imprisoned without trial: 2-3 years
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4079059.stm Absolute MINIMUM civilian deaths in Iraq: 14,000 (requiring 2 independent sources for every death) British government estimate: 40,000 "The Lancet" estimate: 100,000
And for torture in Iraq, let's say Abu Ghraib, shall we?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/35960 90.stm Quote: "The events of October through December 2003 on the night shift of Tier 1 at Abu Ghraib prison were acts of brutality and purposeless sadism. We know these abuses occurred at the hands of both military police and military intelligence personnel." I don't see the need to link anywhere else for specific cases of torture in Abu Ghraib - they're so numerous and so widely available from any news source.
If you really haven't heard anything about all these facts over the last three years, you need to inform yourself from some proper news sources. If you don't take the trouble to inform yourself, you're not in a situation to just shrug it off as "liberal brainwashing", because you don't know shit about what's going on.
When you've got hundreds of people imprisoned without trial and tortured over a period of years, when you invade another country and kill tens of thousands of civilians and torture a whole bunch of them, and when you justify all that as "stopping terrorism", you might want to rethink your definition of "terrorism"...
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Um, no. The Duke Nukem shape is not physiologically possible for any human being.
The strange thing is that while the ultra-hunky heroes are seen as a "wish-fulfillment" figure for guys ("gee, I wish I had muscles like him and knew how to kick ass"), the ultra-feminine heroines are seen as a "jealousy/envy" figure by women ("they've no right to have a heroine looking like that - she makes me feel inferior"). Me, I reckon that speaks volumes about the way most men and women think. Men are much more "pack animals" who collect in mutually-supportive groups, and status rubs off from who you're with. Whilst women are more likely to hang out in larger groups, they're classically a group of mutual competitors. I know this doesn't always hold true, but it's a good approximation.
Grab.
Too true.
This is precisely my problem with RMS's theory of freeness. The original reason he developed his whole GNU ideology was due to not being able to get hardware interfaces to work correctly. In other words, he wanted to get some work done and was prevented from doing so by the software he needed not being available. RMS being RMS, he decided he would solve the problem himself, and found that the info he needed to hack the drivers wasn't available. Now there are two possible AND EQUALLY VALID solutions here: either the suppliers make information freely available so that RMS can hack his drivers; OR the suppliers ship decent software in the first place.
Now granted, if all the docs and source for everything was available to everyone then the world certainly would be a better place - but ultimately what counts is having the tools you need to do your job. RMS (and hence clearly the Hurd developers) have confused this "freeness" with being an objective in itself, when really it is just a tool to let other people achieve their objectives.
This is as true in the physical domain as in software. If I want to do some woodwork, I buy a chisel, or borrow one off a friend. I don't give a shit if the specs for the chisel and the process by which it's made are posted on a website somewhere - I want to dig a hole in a bit of wood! If the chisel with its own website is a blunt piece of crap, I'll get one that's sharp and does the job properly.
Frankly, the only reason RMS (and others) can sustain their GNU agenda is that they don't have (and in some cases have never had) real jobs. You know, jobs with deadlines, where you can be made redundant or fired if you're not pulling your weight on a project, and where you don't get a load of time that you can arbitrarily spend on any scheme that takes your fancy. Checking RMS's resume, his background is all Bell Labs and similar "think-tanks". In Ivory Tower Land, such principles are fine - but in the real world, we just want to do stuff, thanks all the same. If your ideologically-perfect OS doesn't work as well as Windows, or if your ideologically-perfect application doesn't work as well as the MS equivalent, I'll ditch it without a moment's hesitation.
And this is where the Hurd people have fallen down. In their pursuit of the ultimate in gold-plating, they've utterly missed the point of delivering something that people can use. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that Hurd will never succeed - I don't see how it can, because they've proven time after time that serving their user base is much less important to them than their ideology. And if you screw over your user base, man, you're dead.
Grab.
More ways? I guess you mean the ABS or power steering failing, or something like that? OK, there are many more systems like that on new cars, so I guess there are more ways for stuff to fail. But the way higher reliability of this stuff means they *don't* fail often.
Re generic parts: Really? My memory is that most of these were manufacturer-specific (particularly coils, pumps, starters, lamps, keys, manifolds, pulleys, belts, gaskets) and frequently vehicle-specific. In many cases you've got *more* standardisation now that OEMs contract someone like Bosch or Marelli to make stuff, and you've also got the option of buying "pattern parts" which you never had back in the old days. Batteries and cables are as generic now as they ever were.
The worst case for variety of components on a car is when the company gets bought out and new variants of the car are subsequently produced. My current car (a Seat) is a classic example of this - parts could be original Seat, Audi or VW spec and you practically need to know the month of manufacture to know which part you need! But this is the result of bad management, not an inherent feature of new cars - Austin, British Leyland and Rover went through the same thing back in the 70s. Fords OTOH are generally pretty consistent.
There's certainly more variety of fluids now, but that's mainly due to increases in performance and expected lifespan requiring advances in lubricant technology (a gearbox that previously would require replacing at 80K miles is now expected to run for twice that or more), so just sticking 10W/40 oil in everything is no longer an option. Modern vehicles are fairly consistent in the standards of fluids they need - the variety on sale is often more to allow older vehicles to keep running with the same obsolete fluids they originally used. You could go back to putting 10W/40 in everything if you wanted, but you'd be back to the life expectancy that older cars had (which is much less).
And cables and batteries
You're right, putting the fuel pump inside the tank is a dumb move. Not really related to the electronics issue though.
And you're right too - there were a larger number of old-car problems that could be fixed on the side of the road. Reason? Not only were there more problems available with old cars, they happened more often! So there needed to be the facility to fix them more easily.
With contact-breaker ignition, the distributor had to be somewhere you could get to. The points needed adjusting every 6 months, and the points, rotor arm and distributor cap needed replacing at regular intervals. Plus you needed to be able to accurately turn the distributor to adjust the spark timing. All that meant the distributor had to be somewhere easily accessible. Today there's no points, and electronic ignition controls the spark so the rotor arm and distributor cap may only need changing once or twice in the life of the car. There's so much less to go wrong that putting the distributor cap somewhere hard-to-reach is not a big deal. And newer cars have even done away with the distributor cap by using coil-over sparks, with the result that even if one lead is dodgy, there's three more cylinders to get you home.
I don't agree with you on the "specialised parts" though. All cars have always needed special parts (points, for instance - every car would have different ones). I can't think of many "non-specialised" parts on old cars. The most I can come up with is that you could replace the carbs or air filters with different ones for higher performance.
Grab.
If you're a sucker for things that look cool, you've got deep pockets, and you don't care if it doesn't perform, then by all means go for it.
Alternatively, if you have any kind of budget, or if you want a computer that actually *does* stuff instead of just sitting there like an artist's doorstop, you might want to stick with PC-based stuff. Without exception, anything PC-based is faster and cheaper. If you really need something that looks cool, shop around for a nice-looking laptop or a fancy desktop case.
Grab.
Reliability?
Carbs and contact-breaker (points) ignition systems are *incredibly* unreliable in damp conditions, and are not great in the cold either. If you've never had your car fail to start on a winter's day, you are one lucky individual! The only time I've had an electronic fuel/injection car fail to start in the cold or damp, it was because the HT leads had broken down. I couldn't count the number of times my first (carb & standard ignition) car failed to start, and the same with my friends' cars of the same vintage.
Another prominent carb issue that EFI doesn't have is the float chamber problem. If the float gets a leak, you're screwed - fuel goes everywhere. Or if the float gets stuck, you're screwed again - the car runs for a minute or so and then dies. A good solid thump generally unsticks it, but we're talking reliability, right? Something that needs a regular kick to run is not what I'd call reliable.
And then we get to the spark plugs. It doesn't take much wear on a carb for it to get the air/fuel ratio wrong, and then your plugs get killed one way or another. Plus contact-breaker ignition systems don't give a consistent voltage for the spark, and excessive voltage causes wear on the spark plugs. An EFI car can easily go 2 years or more with the same spark plugs - contact-breaker ignition systems need plugs to be replaced every 6 months, and often needed re-gapping more often.
I've never bought a new car yet - my current car is the newest I've ever had, at 30K miles on the clock. All the ones previously have been 60-80K on the clock, and whilst they've all been absolute dogs mechanically and bodywork-wise, I've never had a single failure of the electronics. The only time anything went wrong on any of them, it was a broken connector tab to the electronic ignition, and that could just as easily have happened on any type of ignition.
But suppose something had gone wrong? Sorting it is easy - new module and it all works. Try fixing your carbs in the same length of time!
Note that I've not even touched on fuel economy or emissions, both of which carbs fail miserably at. For a given volume of engine, an EFI car will always get better on both than a car with carbs. And a larger volume of engine will always require more fuel for the same acceleration, because engine volume impacts directly on vehicle construction and hence vehicle mass.
Now granted, there could be something peculiar in the software. I work in automotive software, so I know some of it ain't so hot. But it goes through pretty rigorous testing, so by the time it hits the road it's in decent shape. And even then, it's very rare to get a quit-on-road - more often it's noise or vibration caused by an oscillation somewhere, which can be majorly annoying but rarely damaging.
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Wow, is that some twisted logic or what! Dude, I'm not going to lie - you're not OK and you need help...
Simple. You need the ".A" to indicate it's the first of its type. Since this dumbass has released the virus code to the world, you can bet there's going to be a ".B", ".C", etc.. In fact I doubt one alphabet will be enough to count them all.
As for using this guy's name, why would we want a virus writer and distributor to become famous?
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Sure, you can watch that documentary. But since it's controversial, you must also show the "conventional" view that a person's sexuality cannot be altered and is not an "issue".
Alcoholism is an addiction, is harmful to the person affected and harmful to the addict's family and friends. Homosexuality is none of these, so to say "being gay is like being an alcoholic" amounts to insulting gay people. And flames generally don't get you modded +1 insightful...
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What if you're attacked in your home, and your atttacker gets to the gun before you do? Or what if someone breaks in, gets the gun, and waits for you to come home?
I would be happier knowing that the fate of the world still lies at least partially in the hands of humans, not in the circuitry of a processor.
That's a bizarre statement. Hoes this affect the fate of the world? And why do you believe this electronics is bad? "We've already put computers into every household appliance" and made them easier to use and given them more functionality "and most forms of transportation" and made them safer and more environmentally friendly.
"Humans" will rob, steal and murder. The majority of these involve stolen weapons. Young people will kill (friends or themselves) by accident. The majority of these involve weapons the young person doesn't own. So it's bad that we stop this happening, is it?
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The overloading of the bit-shift operators > for streams in C++. Kludge city! And C++'s templates don't exactly come out smelling of roses either.
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Bcos JPG is out in the world, and everyone uses it. Until you can get every digital camera manufacturer to support JPG, you're screwed. Since they don't even support GIF or PNG for lossless compression of raw files, or JPEG2K for lossy compression - all of which are major mainstream formats and have been around for years - I can predict how successful your compression algorithm won't be! ;-/
Check the website. You'll see ACT has its list of "best" compression programs, none of which are Winzip or the version of ZIP that comes with Windows. But 99.vanishing-9 percent of users will only ever use ZIP format. Why? Because everything supports it. The point of these algorithms generally *isn't* to make life easier for Joe Average running Windows. Rather, it's to make life easier for people writing installers and stuff like that, who can apply any arbitrary compression system they like.
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Yes, all those factors have a dramatic effect on weight gain, so that what's a stable diet for one person could be a cause of morbid obesity in others.
But for a given person, weight gain is simply a case of balancing calories in (diet) and calories out (exercise). If you're putting on fat, you either need to reduce the calories in or increase the calories out. And eating less food is one way of achieving the former.
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Here we go indeed.
/. analogies are always dodgy, but what he's done is like duplicating someone's front door key a thousand times and standing on a street corner in the local Cracktown handing keys out to everyone who walks past.
The guy didn't just "point out someone else's mistake" - he produced and published exploits to allow access into the system.
You want to point out a mistake, there's plenty of legitimate channels for doing so which don't involve hackers (or crackers, if you prefer the outdated early-80s terminology) ass-raping the system in question.
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Maybe that's the case for the independents - but the independents are only selling 50% porn and 50% arthouse because the big chains are selling the top Hollywood hits. And it's the top Hollywood hits that made video work.
Also FWIW, your "typical video shop" sadly became a Blockbuster (or similar) very quickly. The independent video store is unfortunately very atypical.
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You're obviously ignoring the reason that all the *movies* were available on VHS.
Certainly porn was available as well. But I doubt your typical video shop was ever renting more than a few porn films a week compared to dozens of copies of Rocky, Terminator, Tron, The Breakfast Club, Wierd Science, Top Gun, etc, etc. And Betamax screwed up by not getting films from the major studios, so they cut themselves out of the top-blockbusters-on-video market, which was where most people agree the VHS-versus-Betamax battle was won/lost.
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(1) Get large fan.
(2) Attach large fan to PC case.
And presumably also
(3) Put filters on air intake for large fan.
(4) Block up unwanted airholes in PC case.
For (1), check out this very recent /. article. 40.6uW gets you 546.8 miles. Admittedly that's only a beacon station and not going for anything complicated like FM, but even so your signal could be going a lot further than you expect.
:-/
Which kind of ties in to point (2). "If you build it, they will come." The point isn't that no-one else happens to be using the frequencies, the point is that you're using a regulated resource (EM bandwidth) and if one person gets away with it then everyone will have a go. I know that's all screwed up, but I'm not the one running the country.
But for point (3), the fact that there's no-one else on that frequency will likely mitigate the penalty (which will probably just be a letter saying "don't do it again"). Especially if you're not trying to do a "real" pirate radio station. Claiming ignorance will probably get you out of the worst of it if you haven't done any damage.
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I've not read the book, but if you're an electronics newbie then stripboard is the only way to go. Cheap, easy to use, easy to rework, and you get a nice resilient circuit board. The only problem is space, bcos it ends up bigger than a regular PCB would, but most beginners aren't too worried about that. It's cheaper to get a bigger box than to buy a full-on PCB system. ;-)
For proper PCBs, Press-and-peel (or is it PressNPeel - can never remember) is a reasonable way of getting started. The main problem is designing the layout, bcos there doesn't seem to be a decent FOSS layout program for Windows (several for Linux though), and other ones cost money. GEDA and Eagle are OK for small boards though so you might get away with that. Otherwise I guess you're limited to ExpressPCB's program, although that does then make it easy to get your PCBs made. Me, I've got a ten-year-old el-dodgy version of Protel.
FWIW, the only really expensive part of a PCB-making system is the UV light box, and you don't necessarily need one of those. A few years ago, I made a PCB by exposing the photoresist board in the sun for a couple of hours, and it worked fine. Your tracks and spacings need to be a little wider, but otherwise no worries.
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Got my Squier in 2001 (Fat Strat version). Nice sound, but I just don't rate the hardware - tuners and bridge are just crap. I agree with you on the tremelo - no cheap guitar has a tremelo worth using. I'd rather Fender made their low-end guitars as hard-tail versions, bcos it'd save some money by deleting something that doesn't bloody work anyway! :-/
:-)
Personally, I think riffs are a really bad way of learning guitar. Learn chords and work from there, because the basis of all guitar work is chords. And that's where a classical helps. On an electric you can turn the distortion up and you can't hear whether the chord went down properly or not. On an acoustic guitar you can't fool yourself. And a classical is better than a steel-string acoustic for starting because (a) the strings are easier on the fingers and (b) classicals are cheap. My argument is that on an electric you *don't* learn basic finger dexterity, because cranking up the distortion hides the fact that your technique is usually for shit when you start.
Once you can play some basic chords consistently, then moving to an electric is a reasonable choice. You've got far enough that you can learn from listening to songs and downloading chords off Olga or wherever. But until you can do those first few chords (I'd say A, Am, E, Em, D, G and C as the essentials) then the electric is going to be covering up your mistakes, so unless you're already a competent musician with another instrument and you know what mistakes sound like and how to practise, you're not going to get any better. Or at least you're not going to get better as fast as someone playing acoustically. So starting with an electric is pretty much wasting a beginner's time. (Besides the obvious money factor as well.)
I will say that once you've learnt the basic chords, playing electric *is* a good idea. Whilst high gain can cover up bad tone on some things, it does very much show up noise when you brush other strings during chord changes, which just isn't audible on an acoustic. And the strings are closer together. Those two combine to require more precision from your fretting hand, so it's good to go through that. And of course, electric is *lots* of fun!
I *didn't* say to learn classical style. My main complaint with classical players (and I know, because I learnt violin and piano before I touched a guitar) is that although they've generally done theory and written down notes on a sheet of paper, none of them know how they sound. They just don't have a concept of chord progressions, which means they don't have a concept of musical structure, so they can only blindly reproduce notes on a page and can't add much of their own creativity. I don't see why any musician should limit themselves this way - start off learning chords and stuff, then get onto riffs, then try your own riffs (pentatonic scale and so on), and *then* start doing classical stuff when you know your own mind, otherwise you'll just get stifled by it.
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Serious, hit Harmony Central and you'll find more than you could ever imagine on guitar stuff, complete with reviews by any number of musicians.
For myself, I learnt off the Russ Shipton books, downloaded chords off the web (a href=http://www.tab-robot.com>Tab Robot is a good place to start these days), and put in lots of practise.
After 8 years of playing, I went to a teacher to refine some technique. Man, that's well worth doing, and I wish I'd done it earlier. But don't go until you *can* actually play stuff - learning basic chords is muscle memory, and you can do that just as well yourself without spending big money on a teacher. Practise, is all.
As for getting a guitar, for god's sake learn on a small classical guitar first, and don't buy any of those "learn rock guitar" books - I've not seen a good one. They might have you playing the "Smoke On The Water" riff quickly, but ultimately it's like using "Chopsticks" to teach piano playing. What you'll learn is a few basic tricks instead of proper technique, and it's very easy to fake stuff on an electric.
And don't get a cheapy Fender Squier - spring for a proper one. I got a Squier and whilst it sounds OK, the hardware is poor quality so it tends not to stay in tune properly. Spring for a proper Strat - it's not much more expensive. And if you've started with a cheap little classical, you'll then be in a position to hit the shops and actually play them yourself and make a decent choice, instead of watching like a sucker while the assistant prepares to fleece you.
Oh yes, another rule - beware of trusting a guitar shop salesman.
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Depends. I play *rarely* (maybe 3-5 hours a month, if that) so I can't justify $40 on the game and another $15/mo. I could maybe justify $40 on the game if I knew whatever else was proportional to time spent. If their billing system is anywhere near sensible (ie. relying on email and computer billing, not sending paper copies) then they should make a profit on the deal. Given a choice between making a smaller profit off me or no profit at all, they'd be better going for the former. And that means a charge structure designed for casual players.
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Regarding Guantanamo Bay
... *cough* US *cough*) But I don't believe it should have been done through false pretences (the farces of the claims about WMDs and al-Qaeda links which were proven false) - the US and UK governments should have had the guts to say "we're doing this because it's right". And I also don't believe the US and UK governments had any plans to do more than conquer Iraq - they were fundamentally unprepared for peacekeeping and setting up any civil or paramilitary structure to the country. The reason things are so bad now is that the invasion sma
If you're in a war and you're captured, there's this thing called the Geneva Convention that says in real detail what you can and can't do with captured enemy fighters. This is international law. The US is claiming that somehow these people were "combatants" but not "soldiers", and using this form of words to avoid the treatment that is mandated by international law for captured enemies.
Torture does not always sum up to a negative value -- sometimes it's necessary.
And here you disagree with US law, international law and the Geneva Convention, which all say that torture is not permitted under any circumstances. Also you disagree with many intelligence-gathering experts (including the FBI) who say that information obtained from torture is almost universally incorrect, simply because the victim will tell the torturer anything to make them stop.
Your "what-if" scenario (which bears no resemblance to the cases of the people imprisoned at Guantanamo) also makes the explicit assumption that you know the person is guilty before you start, which is an invalid assumption.
they are outside of criminal law, you don't have to conduct trials with lawyers, etc.
If you're accusing them of war crimes then in fact you do. International law again, I'm afraid.
Regarding civilian casualties in Iraq
Denied? Fine. That's the LOWEST estimate of Iraqi civilian casualties. You want to take the Lancet's version, fine. The Lancet's approach is somewhat inaccurate, granted, but it's a valid statistical method so you can't dismiss it out of hand as "unscientific".
Regarding Abu Ghraib
I think you fail to realise that it was more than a "few grunts" in that jail. Also see the following.
http://edition.cnn.com/2004/US/12/07/prisoner.abus e.ap/index.html
OK, gov documents leaked by the ACLU (the hated "liberals") but gov documents nonetheless.
And it's pretty damn clear that nothing would have happened if the pictures hadn't hit the papers. The FBI knew about this *way* before, but nothing happened until the press found out about it. In addition, the official report makes it clear that Abu Ghraib was tacitly permitted by the Army - they didn't set out explicitly for it to happen, but once the torture was known to be happening, the Army did absolutely nothing about it. In regular law, the word is "accessory" to the crime.
Of course the insurgents gave no fair trials to the people they murdered. The reason we're different to them is that we believe it's wrong to do that. Or *I* believe it's wrong. You can keep defending it on the "it's OK if we do it" reasoning if you like.
being the liberal that you are
I am proud to call myself a liberal. That means I believe in things that are worth defending. Little things like human rights, the rule of law and the US Constitution. The founders of the USA were liberals too - they believed in the value of these concepts. Piss on them if you like.
But when the US government trys to prevent Saddam's dictatorship from killing more people
As it happens, I believe invading Iraq was the right thing to do, and it should have happened long before. (I won't mention who brought Saddam to power in the first place
With pleasure. I'll use the BBC News site as my source. I'm deliberately not using a source such as Amnesty, because they're an easy target as a "liberal" organisation. Instead, I'll stick to the BBC as a well-known independent news source.
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For the former, I cite Guantanamo Bay.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/3754238
Number of prisoners as of mid-October: 549
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/3592186
First trials of any captives at Guantanamo (before a military court, and note that suitability of a military court for trying these people is itself controversial): 2004, and note that trials have yet to complete.
Date of capture: 2001 or 2002
Time imprisoned without trial: 2-3 years
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/408
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/3533804
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/manchester/350
They all claim use of some physical violence and extensive non-physical torture such as sleep deprivation. You think non-physical torture is "easy", check this link.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3708902.stm
For the latter, how's about Iraq?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4079059.st
Absolute MINIMUM civilian deaths in Iraq: 14,000 (requiring 2 independent sources for every death)
British government estimate: 40,000
"The Lancet" estimate: 100,000
And for torture in Iraq, let's say Abu Ghraib, shall we?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/3596
Quote: "The events of October through December 2003 on the night shift of Tier 1 at Abu Ghraib prison were acts of brutality and purposeless sadism. We know these abuses occurred at the hands of both military police and military intelligence personnel."
I don't see the need to link anywhere else for specific cases of torture in Abu Ghraib - they're so numerous and so widely available from any news source.
If you really haven't heard anything about all these facts over the last three years, you need to inform yourself from some proper news sources. If you don't take the trouble to inform yourself, you're not in a situation to just shrug it off as "liberal brainwashing", because you don't know shit about what's going on.
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When you've got hundreds of people imprisoned without trial and tortured over a period of years, when you invade another country and kill tens of thousands of civilians and torture a whole bunch of them, and when you justify all that as "stopping terrorism", you might want to rethink your definition of "terrorism"...
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