All studies show the US to be one of the top, least-corrupt, counties in the world.
a fractional reserve system which has been fractured by bankster gambling,
The US Dollar remains very nearly the largest currency in the world, and by any rational measure, the strongest and most reliable. eg. While the Euro is slightly larger (yet requiring 170% of the population to reach that goal) its fate is questionable should it ever fall substantially. There is no central authority capable of forcing all parties involved to remain tied to it for better or worse, while there is with the US Dollar.
corporate media,
The reporting from the "corporate media" is far and away better than supposedly unbiased sources, eg. BBC. You can complain about Fox News all you want, but there are plenty of tabloids all over the world...
electronic vote tabulation devices which firewall out public oversight,
Restrictions on voting machines are getting continually more strict. The state of CA threw out every one of their voting machine one year, and bought new ones that leave a paper trail the next... More and more are requiring source code, and independent certification of the machines. They actually hold the possibility of providing much MORE accuracy to elections, and making it much more difficult to commit voter fraud.
and the wrong approach to health.
All systems have their pros and cons. In the US, you don't have the endless wait times for procedures, and have substantial choice about what procedures will be covered, versus not. It doesn't take forever for new and better procedures to be accepted and covered. And it all works sustainably... ie. Doctors aren't making so little money that it's proving impossible to entice others to take up the profession.
By the most pessimistic estimates, the benefits of the US system come with 25% overhead due to not being single-payer. That could certainly be improved substantially with additional regulation on health insurance companies, and simplifying rules and regulations, without taking the disadvantages of all other systems that nobody likes to talk about while they're busy criticizing the US...
That'll change as soon as they have a real medical problem.
Nope. All three have full-time jobs, which include medical insurance for ~$100/mo. out of their paycheck, plus perhaps $1,000 or so in deductibles/co-pays.
It's those who can't (or whose family members can't) manage to hold down a full-time job (or are self-employed and foolishly choose to forgo health insurance) but yet also aren't quite poor enough to get government assistance.
All the above points are good ones, but others may be more important.
The US is HUGE and extremely diverse. Pick your climate, scenery, culture, government, etc., and you'll find it somewhere in the US.
Few countries allow such a large number of immigrants as the US, though there certainly are hoops to jump through.
With the exchange rate what it is, you'll find yourself pretty well off after converting your savings.
While jobs may not pay what you'd expect, with the considerably lower cost of living in most areas, less expensive products, and much lower taxes, I expect you'll find yourself better off.
I just happen to know 3 British Ex-pats here in Southern California, all of them all seemingly content with their near minimum-wage jobs.
But there are inherent dangers. The current Lithium-Ion batteries are pretty dangerous when they are mistreated.
Lithium-Ion batteries are dangerous because of very low internal resistance. ie. They can dump a large amount of current in a very short time. This is completely independent of energy density, and future designs could well have higher energy density with less danger of thermal runaway.
Pirates get all the best deals. It's the honest people that get screwed over...
Visited Windows update on a damaged XP system... It recognized it as pirated, gave me a link to follow, where I was then offered the option of buying either XP Home or Pro at half-price.
I guess Microsoft figures they've got a better chance of getting half the money from a pirate, rather than no money at all. Meanwhile, I figure I got screwed, because I wasn't dishonest enough the get the big discount...
No ADDITIONAL power plants is considered the least destructive option, yes.
The state of CA has been very aggressive in energy conservation, and ever increasing energy efficiency, which can potentially stave off the power crunch for several more years.
The state has also been heavily subsidizing renewables, like solar and wind, so there has been new capacity, but it hasn't been rolled out on a large scale just yet.
OMG NUCLEAR! You want to build a BOMB in my state! How dare you.
Yeah, as opposed to the other 49 states, which are building nukes left and right? Pure red herring.
California is not sustainable, because they look only to the short term, and have short memories.
...and haven't been sustainable for over a century now... Strange that.
and then when they're done turn on a huge magnet just to make sure. And stop wasting all that hardware
Erasing the the whole drive with a giant magnet (ie. not JUST the data area, but also the tracking informatiion encoded ny the manufacturer) is every bit as bad as physically destroying the drive. You certainly won't be using it ever again, unless the manufacturer is specifically involved in refurbishing it (which probably is probably too expensive to be worthwhile).
They should have drilled in Montana, the Dakotas, anywhere where people are semi-reasonable about things.
"Semi-reasonable"? Do you have any idea just how many gigantic hellish toxic waste pits there are in Montana? Say it with me: "Superfund Site"
the area where they refused to build powerplants for about 10 years and not only caused themselves rolling blackouts
What's this... The area with the most polluted air in the US has some slightly tough regulations, making it hard to build more coal power plants? The devil you say! Clearly, they should just bend over, and start sucking up whatever amount of soot the multinational corporations feel like putting out...
California as a political entity is non-viable, it's just taking a while to totally collapse...
You know, you only serve to make yourself look like a nutjob completely detached from reality when you spout off nonsense.
Would any right-wing nutjobs care to explain why it is that the most environmentally stringent cities and states just HAPPEN to be the most prosperous? Crazy, isn't it? Clearly proof that any environmental regulation is untenable. All these areas with pollution controls are clearly going to collapse, just a few thousand years from now. Just you wait! I'll be proven right! Now if you'll excuse me, I think my left lung just collapsed again...
No incentive for the retailer to sell counterfeit batteries there. No siree Bob!
Any decent sized company isn't going to risk a lawsuit for an extra $40 in profits.
There's PLENTY of places to get knock-offs, as well as counterfeit products, but everyone knows precisely what those places look like: Dollar stores, swap meets, no-name corner shops, street vendors, etc.
You're not going to find counterfeit products in your nearest Target, Wal-Mart, Best Buy, etc.
And all this is entirely besides the point. Companies still have yet to prove their case. They're MUCH too happy with their own baseless assertions and love their favorite scapegoat and boogieman to avoid taking any responsibility in the public eye.
But what's really interesting about this flute is that the harmonics are very close to a modern-day flute - 35,000 years later!
Brass and wood-wind musical instruments are substantially influenced by the player. A person with no pitch can't play a flute well, for example, though they could still be a good violinist.
It's likely any tonal similarities are due to the modern musician's training, rather than the instrument itself.
If you don't believe that can happen, then I suggest you review all the stories of exploding laptop batteries. It can and does happen.
You, or Panasonic, are MOST WELCOME to PROVE that the rate at which 3rd party batteries fail dangerously, is notably higher than the rate at which Panasonic's own batteries fail dangerously...
Whenever there's a story about a cell phone, or a laptop, exploding, the first thing the PR people do is complain about unlicensed 3rd party batteries. When it's pointed out that it has the company logo on it, they complain of 3rd parties selling bad batteries with a forged logo. Doesn't matter if it's a brand new item you were just walking out of the store with, they will INSIST it was a 3rd party battery that blew up, and absolutely refuse to admit that their own batteries aren't perfect in every way... After all, for 4X the price, they MUST BE!
If you look at the h264 YouTube encoder, which has been designed for speed rather than 'work as long as you like to optimize the output', suddenly Theora is exactly on-par.
Maybe, but you're accounting for performance in on breath, and ignoring it in another.
Theora (and VP3.2 before it) remains a worse performing encoder, AND decoder, than the slowest H.264 codecs I've used, so it's actually an UNFAIR comparison for x264, let alone something even faster.
My god, audio was one of the reasons why I ditched Linux for a mac four years ago
There's a little thing called BSD. They're all Unixy, and each includes one method of audio output.
Admittedly, the BSD family is divided between sun and oss methods, but neither is remotely as buggy or as over complicated of a mess as ALSA. And if you want to see REALLY SIMPLE stuff that works, take a look at the development of aucat in OpenBSD and be surprised.
All too often, Linux development goes the "copy what Windows has"-way rather than the Unix/KISS way.
There is nothing in the idea or structure of a corporation that makes them innately evil. I doubt your incorporation papers have a hidden sub-clause demanding you be "evil", and I really doubt that many existent corporations set out to do evil.
Corporations are obligated to generate as much money as possible.
If you knew a person who behaved that way, you'd probably call them evil. If you knew of a whole class of people who, to the man, acted that way, you'd DEFINITELY call them evil.
At best, corporations are endlessly greedy and amoral sociopaths.
Has it occurred to anyone else that treating "utilities" like utilities is what's caused water shortages and rolling brown-outs in CA?
No, it hadn't occured to me... Perhaps because it sounds patently idiotic on the face of it.
Water shortages in CA are simply because CA is the most populous state in the county, and half the state happens to be desert. Add-in the fact that California doesn't get any higher priority over interstate rivers than other, vastly less-populous states, and the recent restictions on water usage because of endangered species, and it's pretty amazing CA doesn't run out of water after a decade-long drought. Other southwestern states have managed to avoid the same fate just because of their minuscule populations. OTOH, I hear Atlanta has been having even more serious water shortages than Los Angeles.
The infamous rolling blackouts had everything to do with deregulation. Before then, when SoCal Edison/PG&E were in charge of everything, there were no rolling blackouts. Once Enron went bust, things got back under control.
Of course, power issues in CA are also related to that same issue of massive population, in the desert (innumerable tons of air conditioning dragging the grid down) also combined with stringent state regulations on air pollution.
Why do you want to over engineer things? A balloon is easy to make, cheap to make and can stay up for days.
Perhaps because: "The balloons come down every 24 hours due to the limitations of battery life -- and to keep them from floating into territories that don't subscribe to the service. "You're looking at a wide geographic area -- there's a wide jet stream at near space"
BTW, you'll NEVER GUESS where that quote came from... NEVER!
Did you actually do any wiring during that period? Did you work with a pre-IBM PC ever? I did.
Indeed. I've got boxes full of 3-pin DB-25 to DB-25 cables that once wired dozens of terminals to a couple different mainframes. A few old modems. Lots of old documentation. etc.
If by "standard wiring" you mean a cable that will connect a PC's 9-pin serial port to a terminal's 25-pin port, you're referring to something that did not exist in 70s
No. I'm referring to the fact that terminals, modems, etc, only use 3 pins for signaling. There's no magic to it. It simply sounds like you might well have been out of your depth.
because each of these had their own pinouts.
Yes, the earliest serial-port pin-outs varied, so you needed to find the right pins. That's it... Hardly rocket science. The other pins were, for all practical purposes, nearly unused. That's why it was possible to reduce to a DB-9 connector, with minimal hassle.
Trust me, it was non-trivial.
You've very well shown you love nothing more than to spout-off like an expert on subjects where you know next to nothing, so I don't think I'll be doing that, in any case.
Radio waves (with very few exceptions) don't go "through objects" like a "hill" or a "big building" AT ALL.
Would you like to tell me what magic happens at the 300MHz mark that makes VHF "work" and UHF "fail" even though the distinction is an arbitrary frequency boundary?
Or would you like to admit that you're arguing nonsense out of pure ignorance?
People, this is 1983. All connectors were "non-standard".
What? I've got terminals from the 70s with 25-pin RS-232 connectors that work fine with modern PCs with standard wiring. So you're off by about a decade and a half there...
So making cables that would connect some random computer to some random modem or serial printer was a serious black art.
Not really. The usual 3 pins did 99% of everything. Of course there will always edge cases, even with "standards".
I'm fairly young and therefore am automatically assumed to lack experience. Yet somehow I am continually amazed at the sheer ignorance that many people I meet display about absolutely everything.
What's this, now? An angsty teenager who thinks he knows everything?!?!
Slashdot Mirror
All studies show the US to be one of the top, least-corrupt, counties in the world.
The US Dollar remains very nearly the largest currency in the world, and by any rational measure, the strongest and most reliable. eg. While the Euro is slightly larger (yet requiring 170% of the population to reach that goal) its fate is questionable should it ever fall substantially. There is no central authority capable of forcing all parties involved to remain tied to it for better or worse, while there is with the US Dollar.
The reporting from the "corporate media" is far and away better than supposedly unbiased sources, eg. BBC. You can complain about Fox News all you want, but there are plenty of tabloids all over the world...
Restrictions on voting machines are getting continually more strict. The state of CA threw out every one of their voting machine one year, and bought new ones that leave a paper trail the next... More and more are requiring source code, and independent certification of the machines. They actually hold the possibility of providing much MORE accuracy to elections, and making it much more difficult to commit voter fraud.
All systems have their pros and cons. In the US, you don't have the endless wait times for procedures, and have substantial choice about what procedures will be covered, versus not. It doesn't take forever for new and better procedures to be accepted and covered. And it all works sustainably... ie. Doctors aren't making so little money that it's proving impossible to entice others to take up the profession.
By the most pessimistic estimates, the benefits of the US system come with 25% overhead due to not being single-payer. That could certainly be improved substantially with additional regulation on health insurance companies, and simplifying rules and regulations, without taking the disadvantages of all other systems that nobody likes to talk about while they're busy criticizing the US...
Nope. All three have full-time jobs, which include medical insurance for ~$100/mo. out of their paycheck, plus perhaps $1,000 or so in deductibles/co-pays.
It's those who can't (or whose family members can't) manage to hold down a full-time job (or are self-employed and foolishly choose to forgo health insurance) but yet also aren't quite poor enough to get government assistance.
All the above points are good ones, but others may be more important.
The US is HUGE and extremely diverse. Pick your climate, scenery, culture, government, etc., and you'll find it somewhere in the US.
Few countries allow such a large number of immigrants as the US, though there certainly are hoops to jump through.
With the exchange rate what it is, you'll find yourself pretty well off after converting your savings.
While jobs may not pay what you'd expect, with the considerably lower cost of living in most areas, less expensive products, and much lower taxes, I expect you'll find yourself better off.
I just happen to know 3 British Ex-pats here in Southern California, all of them all seemingly content with their near minimum-wage jobs.
No, it isn't.
Lithium-Ion batteries are dangerous because of very low internal resistance. ie. They can dump a large amount of current in a very short time. This is completely independent of energy density, and future designs could well have higher energy density with less danger of thermal runaway.
Completely unlike the Lithium Air battery on /. a month ago: http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/21/1237231
Pirates get all the best deals. It's the honest people that get screwed over...
Visited Windows update on a damaged XP system... It recognized it as pirated, gave me a link to follow, where I was then offered the option of buying either XP Home or Pro at half-price.
I guess Microsoft figures they've got a better chance of getting half the money from a pirate, rather than no money at all. Meanwhile, I figure I got screwed, because I wasn't dishonest enough the get the big discount...
No ADDITIONAL power plants is considered the least destructive option, yes.
The state of CA has been very aggressive in energy conservation, and ever increasing energy efficiency, which can potentially stave off the power crunch for several more years.
The state has also been heavily subsidizing renewables, like solar and wind, so there has been new capacity, but it hasn't been rolled out on a large scale just yet.
Yeah, as opposed to the other 49 states, which are building nukes left and right? Pure red herring.
Erasing the the whole drive with a giant magnet (ie. not JUST the data area, but also the tracking informatiion encoded ny the manufacturer) is every bit as bad as physically destroying the drive. You certainly won't be using it ever again, unless the manufacturer is specifically involved in refurbishing it (which probably is probably too expensive to be worthwhile).
"Semi-reasonable"? Do you have any idea just how many gigantic hellish toxic waste pits there are in Montana? Say it with me: "Superfund Site"
What's this... The area with the most polluted air in the US has some slightly tough regulations, making it hard to build more coal power plants? The devil you say! Clearly, they should just bend over, and start sucking up whatever amount of soot the multinational corporations feel like putting out...
You know, you only serve to make yourself look like a nutjob completely detached from reality when you spout off nonsense.
Would any right-wing nutjobs care to explain why it is that the most environmentally stringent cities and states just HAPPEN to be the most prosperous? Crazy, isn't it? Clearly proof that any environmental regulation is untenable. All these areas with pollution controls are clearly going to collapse, just a few thousand years from now. Just you wait! I'll be proven right! Now if you'll excuse me, I think my left lung just collapsed again...
Any decent sized company isn't going to risk a lawsuit for an extra $40 in profits.
There's PLENTY of places to get knock-offs, as well as counterfeit products, but everyone knows precisely what those places look like: Dollar stores, swap meets, no-name corner shops, street vendors, etc.
You're not going to find counterfeit products in your nearest Target, Wal-Mart, Best Buy, etc.
And all this is entirely besides the point. Companies still have yet to prove their case. They're MUCH too happy with their own baseless assertions and love their favorite scapegoat and boogieman to avoid taking any responsibility in the public eye.
Brass and wood-wind musical instruments are substantially influenced by the player. A person with no pitch can't play a flute well, for example, though they could still be a good violinist.
It's likely any tonal similarities are due to the modern musician's training, rather than the instrument itself.
You, or Panasonic, are MOST WELCOME to PROVE that the rate at which 3rd party batteries fail dangerously, is notably higher than the rate at which Panasonic's own batteries fail dangerously...
Whenever there's a story about a cell phone, or a laptop, exploding, the first thing the PR people do is complain about unlicensed 3rd party batteries. When it's pointed out that it has the company logo on it, they complain of 3rd parties selling bad batteries with a forged logo. Doesn't matter if it's a brand new item you were just walking out of the store with, they will INSIST it was a 3rd party battery that blew up, and absolutely refuse to admit that their own batteries aren't perfect in every way... After all, for 4X the price, they MUST BE!
Maybe, but you're accounting for performance in on breath, and ignoring it in another.
Theora (and VP3.2 before it) remains a worse performing encoder, AND decoder, than the slowest H.264 codecs I've used, so it's actually an UNFAIR comparison for x264, let alone something even faster.
Ditto. And yet the RIAA stubbornly refuses to cease to exist...
There's a little thing called BSD. They're all Unixy, and each includes one method of audio output.
Admittedly, the BSD family is divided between sun and oss methods, but neither is remotely as buggy or as over complicated of a mess as ALSA. And if you want to see REALLY SIMPLE stuff that works, take a look at the development of aucat in OpenBSD and be surprised.
All too often, Linux development goes the "copy what Windows has"-way rather than the Unix/KISS way.
Corporations are obligated to generate as much money as possible.
If you knew a person who behaved that way, you'd probably call them evil. If you knew of a whole class of people who, to the man, acted that way, you'd DEFINITELY call them evil.
At best, corporations are endlessly greedy and amoral sociopaths.
No, it hadn't occured to me... Perhaps because it sounds patently idiotic on the face of it.
Water shortages in CA are simply because CA is the most populous state in the county, and half the state happens to be desert. Add-in the fact that California doesn't get any higher priority over interstate rivers than other, vastly less-populous states, and the recent restictions on water usage because of endangered species, and it's pretty amazing CA doesn't run out of water after a decade-long drought. Other southwestern states have managed to avoid the same fate just because of their minuscule populations. OTOH, I hear Atlanta has been having even more serious water shortages than Los Angeles.
The infamous rolling blackouts had everything to do with deregulation. Before then, when SoCal Edison/PG&E were in charge of everything, there were no rolling blackouts. Once Enron went bust, things got back under control.
Of course, power issues in CA are also related to that same issue of massive population, in the desert (innumerable tons of air conditioning dragging the grid down) also combined with stringent state regulations on air pollution.
Just enough time to fix global warming...
BTW, that must be a HUGE groundhog.
Perhaps because: "The balloons come down every 24 hours due to the limitations of battery life -- and to keep them from floating into territories that don't subscribe to the service. "You're looking at a wide geographic area -- there's a wide jet stream at near space"
BTW, you'll NEVER GUESS where that quote came from... NEVER!
Indeed. I've got boxes full of 3-pin DB-25 to DB-25 cables that once wired dozens of terminals to a couple different mainframes. A few old modems. Lots of old documentation. etc.
No. I'm referring to the fact that terminals, modems, etc, only use 3 pins for signaling. There's no magic to it. It simply sounds like you might well have been out of your depth.
Yes, the earliest serial-port pin-outs varied, so you needed to find the right pins. That's it... Hardly rocket science. The other pins were, for all practical purposes, nearly unused. That's why it was possible to reduce to a DB-9 connector, with minimal hassle.
You've very well shown you love nothing more than to spout-off like an expert on subjects where you know next to nothing, so I don't think I'll be doing that, in any case.
Pure straw-man. I made no such sweeping statement, that's the invention of your own delusional mind.
Here, the legal experts agree: "even if Calixte had sent the forged e-mail, that did not constitute a crime"
Radio waves (with very few exceptions) don't go "through objects" like a "hill" or a "big building" AT ALL.
Would you like to tell me what magic happens at the 300MHz mark that makes VHF "work" and UHF "fail" even though the distinction is an arbitrary frequency boundary?
Or would you like to admit that you're arguing nonsense out of pure ignorance?
What? I've got terminals from the 70s with 25-pin RS-232 connectors that work fine with modern PCs with standard wiring. So you're off by about a decade and a half there...
Not really. The usual 3 pins did 99% of everything. Of course there will always edge cases, even with "standards".
What's this, now? An angsty teenager who thinks he knows everything?!?!
I'm SHOCKED! Shocked I say!
Most broadcasters on VHF 7 - 13 are going to continue to broadcast on their old VHF channels, so you're just making a fool of yourself.
Also "can't receive (frequency)" is completely baseless nonsense. You COULD SAY that your antenna doesn't work well for them, but that's about it.