I don't think the police should be allowed to use illicitly gained information or that they should be allowed to encourage private citizens to commit felonies.
Good, because they aren't. This is completely illegal.
I've looked at all the purpose-built CD racks around, and they are HORRIBLY designed. In earthquake country, you don't put CDs on a flat shelf, and expect them to stay there.
The solution was a cheap, fairly small clothes dresser I found. They're perfectly protected from light, dust, etc., and quite easily accessible still. Plus, you get much more storage on each wall, compared to solutions that are only one CD deep.
The one modification I made was to make it angle backwards by maybe 4 degrees, so even heavy shaking wouldn't possibly cause the drawers to slide all the way out (which could cause it to topple). Large filing cabinets already have such safety interlocks in place.
So, all you need to do is find something with a large number of drawers, which are all only slightly (vertically) deeper than CDs/jewel-cases. Put the discs in paper sleves to save space and money.
And what makes you think you actually PAY for that hypothetical power?
You've heard of conservation of energy, I'm sure (I hope). Here's a new one: Conservation of Money.
Anything that requires power companies to spend more money is going to be reflected by higher (flat) power-rates for YOU. The money for massive power factor correction facilities isn't going to come from the sky, and commercial power companies aren't going to take that money out of their own profits.
Besides, even though home users don't pay for their overall Power Factor, commercial power users (companies) certainly do.
The benefit of using an increased desktop resolution is that everything on the screen is smaller, and you have more "empty space".
No, you can adjust the SIZE of everything, entirely independently of the resolution. With X11 you just have to set a "display size".
The primary benefits of upgrading to DVD from VHS are: [...] smaller storage medium (stores love this),
Well then, the studios sure screwed the pooch on that one, by making DVD cases more than 50% the size of VHS cases, when they could be nearly as small as CD cases.
On top of this, as the article points out, more complicated and restrictive DRM schemes are going to cause consumers significant difficulties in actually playing HD content, if they're convinced to buy it.
On computers, yes. On HDTVs, they'll plug-in the HDMI cable, and not know anything about DRM.
Of course, people used the DRM argument about DVD vs VHS for a long time, too. That didn't even DVDs down. The "DVD boycott" was nothing more than a long-running joke here on/.
You might notice there's been no hue and cry about the cost of running DNS servers to date.
Few if any cry about it, but I know a great many simply don't get a domain name for themselves, because $10/year or so isn't worth it for their vanity sites. Look at the popularity of something like dyndns sites for some evidence of that.
Don't fix what aint broken.
If everyone followed that advice, nothing would ever be improved.
Try to ignore other peoples cash-grabs.
Yes, the prices listed are beyond ridicuous. However, I was just trying bring some rationality to the discussion, and refute the idea that the popularity of a domain doesn't add to the cost of the service.
yesterday I watched my average MPG for that trip drop 1.5MPG just from the 2minute idle. This on a 15mile trip.
Well, you're being just a bit vague, here. Was this AFTER a 15 mile trip, or near the beginning of the trip?
If you're using the A/C (as you mention later) that could account for the difference as well. Otherwise, I can't account for that, more than to say you've got an unusually ineffecient engine at idling.
even [accelerating] slowly it's not unusual to see single digit MPG until you're up to at least 15-25MPH.
Sounds like the lowest gear in your transmission isn't nearly low enough. Most diesels (in fact most cars I believe) don't get a 10x performance penalty when accelerating.
Of course, both of these issues could be easilly dismissed if your MPG computer is simply buggy or incorrect in certain specific senarios.
so argue against them all you want but there are gains to be had despite the added weight.
...and initial expense, and added maintenance costs, and added repair costs, etc. Hybrids like the Prius already take a long time before they come out cheaper than their conventional counterparts.
Hrm, 20%+ more effecient than a comparable diesel in OEM testing, still think there are *no* gains to be had??
See above. I never said there were no gains.
Besides, car companies claim nonsense in their "tests" all the time. It is all hype, to be taken with a grain of salt.
Even if they get that in the real world, that would (apparently) mean only half the improvements you see with gasoline hybrids, according to the numbers in the beginning of that same story.
As for plugging in, sure why not?
That is an entirely seperate discussion on it's own, which is the only reason I mentioned it. I'd like to see plug-ins myself, but (current) hybrids aren't very effective plug-ins, so it should be kept a wholly seperate issue.
Registrants would be charged based on content or popularity, rather than by the actual level of resources provided by the registrar that are consumed by the registrant.
Actually, here, you could make the case that the more popular a domain is, the more load it causes on the TLD servers. How many hits a day do you think the servers get for fredspersonalwebsite.com, and how many hits does the server take, serving up the address for google.com? Should fred's rates be raised, when google is causing more load on the servers?
Of course, the problem with this is that only one entity is getting all the money for the load, while anyone running a major DNS server will face the same disproportionate network loads, but certainly won't be seeing any of this money.
The underlying issue here is the ongoing struggle of between regulations and commercial interests. Everyone is making it up as they go along.
Fingerprint scanners were pretty much busted, including one really high tech fingerprint scanner that the company said had never been broken into, EVER,. ..
The moral of that story is that companies lie... A LOT... STRAIGHT FACED... Even when faced with irrefutable evidence to the contrary.
Any fingerprint scanner which can be defeated by a paper print-out of a fingerprint, is clearly trivial to break-in to. If it's "never been broken into", that's only possibly because they've NEVER given anyone a chance to try at all.
The same can't be said for HD, which only really shines are enormous TVs that are out of reach for your typical consumer.
Nonsense. HDTV is a big improvement even on the 27" ~$400 CRT HDTVs available in stores.
It's a big improvement on 20"+ computer monitors as well. Just try using your computer with the display set at 640x480 for a few weeks, then switch it to 1920x1024, and tell me you don't notice a huge improvement.
Really? Where, exactly, is the wasted energy going?
Up the power distribution system, actually. That requires power companies to maintain HUGE banks of capacitors.
If you're interested, do a bit of research on Power Factor.
While a fully-resistive load like an traditional lightbulb and an electric heater will have a PF of 1.0 (~100%), cheap switching power supplies are as low as PF 0.4 (~40%).
Switching PSUs in computers are usually closer to 0.6, though the very effecient with active Power-Factor-Correction (PFC) like Seasonic, get as high as 0.9+.
Even a small amount of additional help could yield gains - yes at the expense of drawing down the batteries.
You still haven't explained where the batteries are going to be charged from. Unless you're going to plug-in your diesel hybrid, I can only see this thing wasting more fuel than it saves, all the while costing more, weighing more, and requiring more maintenance than a straight diesel.
For instance look at the steam generation system Mercedes or BMW ios\was looking at to gain small amounts of power from the heat of the exhaust.
Again, that's practically-free energy, due to ineffeciencies.
And to make use of that, you don't even need a hybrid. Use that steam to power your headlights and car battery, and you'll more than exhaust it.
Now please remember also MS isn't a consumer rights group. They aren't interested in changing the world, they are interested in making money, and they'll do what makes the most business sense.
MS isn't a rights group, but the idea they were FORCED to do this is clearly nonsense.
Also, it would make quite a lot of business sense for them to enable x86-32 computers to playback DRMed HiDef material.
If you're going to run it anyhow, yes, do it in the winter instead of the summer, otherwise you'll be using twice the electricity, thanks to air conditioning.
However, don't think you're not paying anything for it in the winter. Electric heating is much more expensive, and much less effecient than burning gas/oil/wood/etc. And, running something with a switching power supply is much less effecient than using a fully-resistive electric heater of the same power.
AND if you are using electric to heat your home, you should really switch to ground/water-source (geothermal) heat pumps, and use a fraction as much energy.
They could, if they wished, ship Windows without any DRM at all. However what would happen is the media companies would simply refuse them the licenses necessary to be able to play any of their HD content at all.
Right... The same way the media companies shut-down iTunes, because Apple refused to adopt stricter DRM schemes... Oh, wait, that didn't happen.
The media companies, for all their hot-air, won't dare cut off Windows playback. No matter what the losses from casual "copyright infringement", losses from people being unable to play your movies on their computers at all is infinitely worse, and they couldn't be stupid enough to try and do it.
The media companies don't have any choice. All they can do is bluff.
So, if it's a Media Player decision, does that mean that this only matters if you use WMP? If that's the case, I'll continue using my vastly superior ZoomPlayer, thankyouverymuch.
ZoomPlayer is just a front-end to the Windows Media Framework, doing practically nothing on it's own (somewhat unlike MPC, and completely unlike VLC, MPlayer, etc.).
So, no. Switching players won't get you away from WMP restrictions. What's more, even if it did, that would just mean you couldn't play DRM'd files, period, which is probably the case with WMP on x86 anyhow.
Vista keeps looking more and more worthless.
I said that same thing about XP. Better late than never, though.
Hybrids are currently no better at highway speeds because they use the gasoline engine at those speeds.
Yes, but they don't use electric at highway speeds BECAUSE it couldn't do any better. The electricity has to come from somewhere. Siphoning power off the ICE to the generator, to turn the electric motor, would be completely wasteful.
For the most part, hybrids only work because gasoline ICEs are terribly ineffecient at lower RPMs (where diesels are not), and running the engine at a higher RPM to charge the battery at the same time, results in nearly-free electricity.
Now augment that with a little electric at speed and see where you end up.
Hybrids aren't MAGIC. You need to get the energy from somewhere. You can't just make anything hybrid, and automatically get more power out of it. There has to be some major ineffeciency in the engine that you can use electric to overcome or avoid.
Diesel engines also aren't any harder to start than a gas powered model - I know because I am DRIVING one now.
First of all, you really shouldn't be driving your car while reading and posting on/.
I didn't mean hard for YOU to start, as computers can be made to easily handle issues that bother people. I mean "harder" as in requiring much more electrical power from the battery. Since electricity isn't free, that prospect may make it counter-productive to shut it down at most stop lights.
Lastly, why would a diesel hybrid be significantly heavier?
Diesel engines are much higher compression (pressure) and higher tempuratures. As such they need stronger, heavier materials.
Did you even bother to READ my original post. I explained exactly how ATI and NVidia support OSS.
"NVidia is supporting the development of the open-source NV driver, and ATI has been providing documentation to the gatos project for a long time now."
If you're just going to ignore facts you don't like, you'll continue to look like a fool.
Prove it. I already addressed why you can't expect much improvement, and certainly not near the improvement you see with gas hybrids.
http://www.motherearthnews.com/library/1980_Sept em ber_October/Mother_s_Own_Hybrid_Car_
That's a SERIAL hybrid, not the (infinitely) more common PARALLEL hybrids. If someone doesn't say, it's safe to assume they mean the latter... You, however, meant the former, and didn't bother to specify either.
why do you think these hybrids aren't being produced and sold at your local car dealer by now
The car described had a TOP speed of 45MPH, which NOBODY would accept.
They only got 60MPH in their (honest) test, which isn't any better than a conventional diesel.
I'm a big supporter of serial hybrids myself, but it certainly wasn't practical in the 1980s, and that article isn't proof of much of anything.
Unfortunately it's also the hardest layer to debug.
Not at all. Like any other flaky component, you swap it out with a known-good one for testing, and if you determine the original was defective, you dispose of it.
Slashdot Mirror
Good, because they aren't. This is completely illegal.
Nonsense.
If the climate change is minor and tolerable, we don't need to do much of anything, even if it's man-made.
If the climate change is going to be catastrophic, we should do something serious about it, even if it is natural.
Whether it's natural or not, has little bearing on whether humans (society) will be able to survive it.
Like urinating on a bald eagle...
It's perfectly natural, guys.
I've looked at all the purpose-built CD racks around, and they are HORRIBLY designed. In earthquake country, you don't put CDs on a flat shelf, and expect them to stay there.
The solution was a cheap, fairly small clothes dresser I found. They're perfectly protected from light, dust, etc., and quite easily accessible still. Plus, you get much more storage on each wall, compared to solutions that are only one CD deep.
The one modification I made was to make it angle backwards by maybe 4 degrees, so even heavy shaking wouldn't possibly cause the drawers to slide all the way out (which could cause it to topple). Large filing cabinets already have such safety interlocks in place.
So, all you need to do is find something with a large number of drawers, which are all only slightly (vertically) deeper than CDs/jewel-cases. Put the discs in paper sleves to save space and money.
You've heard of conservation of energy, I'm sure (I hope). Here's a new one: Conservation of Money.
Anything that requires power companies to spend more money is going to be reflected by higher (flat) power-rates for YOU. The money for massive power factor correction facilities isn't going to come from the sky, and commercial power companies aren't going to take that money out of their own profits.
Besides, even though home users don't pay for their overall Power Factor, commercial power users (companies) certainly do.
No, you can adjust the SIZE of everything, entirely independently of the resolution. With X11 you just have to set a "display size".
Well then, the studios sure screwed the pooch on that one, by making DVD cases more than 50% the size of VHS cases, when they could be nearly as small as CD cases.
On computers, yes. On HDTVs, they'll plug-in the HDMI cable, and not know anything about DRM.
Of course, people used the DRM argument about DVD vs VHS for a long time, too. That didn't even DVDs down. The "DVD boycott" was nothing more than a long-running joke here on
Few if any cry about it, but I know a great many simply don't get a domain name for themselves, because $10/year or so isn't worth it for their vanity sites. Look at the popularity of something like dyndns sites for some evidence of that.
If everyone followed that advice, nothing would ever be improved.
Yes, the prices listed are beyond ridicuous. However, I was just trying bring some rationality to the discussion, and refute the idea that the popularity of a domain doesn't add to the cost of the service.
Well, you're being just a bit vague, here. Was this AFTER a 15 mile trip, or near the beginning of the trip?
If you're using the A/C (as you mention later) that could account for the difference as well. Otherwise, I can't account for that, more than to say you've got an unusually ineffecient engine at idling.
Sounds like the lowest gear in your transmission isn't nearly low enough. Most diesels (in fact most cars I believe) don't get a 10x performance penalty when accelerating.
Of course, both of these issues could be easilly dismissed if your MPG computer is simply buggy or incorrect in certain specific senarios.
See above. I never said there were no gains.
Besides, car companies claim nonsense in their "tests" all the time. It is all hype, to be taken with a grain of salt.
Even if they get that in the real world, that would (apparently) mean only half the improvements you see with gasoline hybrids, according to the numbers in the beginning of that same story.
That is an entirely seperate discussion on it's own, which is the only reason I mentioned it. I'd like to see plug-ins myself, but (current) hybrids aren't very effective plug-ins, so it should be kept a wholly seperate issue.
Actually, here, you could make the case that the more popular a domain is, the more load it causes on the TLD servers. How many hits a day do you think the servers get for fredspersonalwebsite.com, and how many hits does the server take, serving up the address for google.com? Should fred's rates be raised, when google is causing more load on the servers?
Of course, the problem with this is that only one entity is getting all the money for the load, while anyone running a major DNS server will face the same disproportionate network loads, but certainly won't be seeing any of this money.
The underlying issue here is the ongoing struggle of between regulations and commercial interests. Everyone is making it up as they go along.
The moral of that story is that companies lie... A LOT... STRAIGHT FACED... Even when faced with irrefutable evidence to the contrary.
Any fingerprint scanner which can be defeated by a paper print-out of a fingerprint, is clearly trivial to break-in to. If it's "never been broken into", that's only possibly because they've NEVER given anyone a chance to try at all.
Nonsense. HDTV is a big improvement even on the 27" ~$400 CRT HDTVs available in stores.
It's a big improvement on 20"+ computer monitors as well. Just try using your computer with the display set at 640x480 for a few weeks, then switch it to 1920x1024, and tell me you don't notice a huge improvement.
Up the power distribution system, actually. That requires power companies to maintain HUGE banks of capacitors.
If you're interested, do a bit of research on Power Factor.
While a fully-resistive load like an traditional lightbulb and an electric heater will have a PF of 1.0 (~100%), cheap switching power supplies are as low as PF 0.4 (~40%).
Switching PSUs in computers are usually closer to 0.6, though the very effecient with active Power-Factor-Correction (PFC) like Seasonic, get as high as 0.9+.
You still haven't explained where the batteries are going to be charged from. Unless you're going to plug-in your diesel hybrid, I can only see this thing wasting more fuel than it saves, all the while costing more, weighing more, and requiring more maintenance than a straight diesel.
Again, that's practically-free energy, due to ineffeciencies.
And to make use of that, you don't even need a hybrid. Use that steam to power your headlights and car battery, and you'll more than exhaust it.
MS isn't a rights group, but the idea they were FORCED to do this is clearly nonsense.
Also, it would make quite a lot of business sense for them to enable x86-32 computers to playback DRMed HiDef material.
If you're going to run it anyhow, yes, do it in the winter instead of the summer, otherwise you'll be using twice the electricity, thanks to air conditioning.
However, don't think you're not paying anything for it in the winter. Electric heating is much more expensive, and much less effecient than burning gas/oil/wood/etc. And, running something with a switching power supply is much less effecient than using a fully-resistive electric heater of the same power.
AND if you are using electric to heat your home, you should really switch to ground/water-source (geothermal) heat pumps, and use a fraction as much energy.
Right... The same way the media companies shut-down iTunes, because Apple refused to adopt stricter DRM schemes... Oh, wait, that didn't happen.
The media companies, for all their hot-air, won't dare cut off Windows playback. No matter what the losses from casual "copyright infringement", losses from people being unable to play your movies on their computers at all is infinitely worse, and they couldn't be stupid enough to try and do it.
The media companies don't have any choice. All they can do is bluff.
You could have said the same thing about VHS tapes, or VCDs, I'm sure. It didn't stop everyone from jumping on to DVDs.
ZoomPlayer is just a front-end to the Windows Media Framework, doing practically nothing on it's own (somewhat unlike MPC, and completely unlike VLC, MPlayer, etc.).
So, no. Switching players won't get you away from WMP restrictions. What's more, even if it did, that would just mean you couldn't play DRM'd files, period, which is probably the case with WMP on x86 anyhow.
I said that same thing about XP. Better late than never, though.
Err, that was supposed to be 60MPG.
Yes, but they don't use electric at highway speeds BECAUSE it couldn't do any better. The electricity has to come from somewhere. Siphoning power off the ICE to the generator, to turn the electric motor, would be completely wasteful.
For the most part, hybrids only work because gasoline ICEs are terribly ineffecient at lower RPMs (where diesels are not), and running the engine at a higher RPM to charge the battery at the same time, results in nearly-free electricity.
Hybrids aren't MAGIC. You need to get the energy from somewhere. You can't just make anything hybrid, and automatically get more power out of it. There has to be some major ineffeciency in the engine that you can use electric to overcome or avoid.
First of all, you really shouldn't be driving your car while reading and posting on
I didn't mean hard for YOU to start, as computers can be made to easily handle issues that bother people. I mean "harder" as in requiring much more electrical power from the battery. Since electricity isn't free, that prospect may make it counter-productive to shut it down at most stop lights.
Diesel engines are much higher compression (pressure) and higher tempuratures. As such they need stronger, heavier materials.
Did you even bother to READ my original post. I explained exactly how ATI and NVidia support OSS.
"NVidia is supporting the development of the open-source NV driver, and ATI has been providing documentation to the gatos project for a long time now."
If you're just going to ignore facts you don't like, you'll continue to look like a fool.
Prove it. I already addressed why you can't expect much improvement, and certainly not near the improvement you see with gas hybrids.
That's a SERIAL hybrid, not the (infinitely) more common PARALLEL hybrids. If someone doesn't say, it's safe to assume they mean the latter... You, however, meant the former, and didn't bother to specify either.
The car described had a TOP speed of 45MPH, which NOBODY would accept.
They only got 60MPH in their (honest) test, which isn't any better than a conventional diesel.
I'm a big supporter of serial hybrids myself, but it certainly wasn't practical in the 1980s, and that article isn't proof of much of anything.
I never did like that Guns 'n Roses soundtrack NASA put in the moon landing footage... Seemed out of place somehow.
Not at all. Like any other flaky component, you swap it out with a known-good one for testing, and if you determine the original was defective, you dispose of it.
Note to self: Buy more heavy-duty trash bags.
You mean those AOL disks? They're the internet, right?
**shudder**
Not here, I only have the kind of latency that doesn't affect lag. You know, "Good Latency(tm)".