They will most likely be replaced with equipment provided by vendors who are on the U.S. military's "Trusted Foundry" schedule. It doesn't matter if half the chips in those "Trusted Foundry" switches are manufactured in China - as a result of careful research, you can be "reasonably" sure they don't contain backdoors or malicious code.
Someone go dig up history's last Five-Star general, Supreme Allied Commander / then US President Dwight Eisenhower, who banged his personal driver back and forth across the US & Europe during the entirety of World War II - and share this with him, so he can have a jolly good chuckle before going back to sleep. http://www.nytimes.com/1991/06/06/us/eisenhower-letters-hint-at-affair-with-aide.html
No one hired Petraeus to be a marriage counselor or church pastor; he was hired to conquer and pacify a sovereign country and its insurgency. Then he was hired to play the dirty pool of espionage & subterfuge.
Foreign Red Team has zero leverage against Petraeus with this information; all he had to do was own up to it, admit a mistake an move on. This affects his family and his marriage, not his ability to spy on and clandestinely kill people. In fact, the alphabet-soup spy agencies (NSA, CIA in particular) have come as far to allow openly LGBT employees for many years. As long as you're already fully out & fabulous, there is no leverage to be used against you. You are not a potential exploit vector for agressors.
I make no apology or excuse for Petraeus' actions - what he did is morally reprehensible. But it had absolutely zero impact on his ability to perform his duties.
.. Isn't VALVe Software (Half-Life, Portal, Team Fortress franchises) working on a heavily optimized Steam client and OpenGL improvements for Ubuntu?
What prevents users from simply loading Steam onto their Ubuntu PCs along with all the tweaked OpenGL drivers and just rocking that instead of the default drivers?
Microsoft is pricing Windows 8 cheaply as, for the first time ever they are positioned to give you the handles and sell the blades, to borrow the old razor addage.
Who cares what Windows 8 costs - Every copy sold creates a potential income stream as they will get a percentage of sale on every piece of software moved through their online store, not unlike the Apple app store. How long will it be until CDROM drives start disappearing from even desktop PCs, as virtually everything is updated and/or sold through the Internet? Oh, you need to burn a DVD of your kid's softball game? Buy the USB slim external drive off Newegg for $ 40. Every Windows 8 copy exposes more consumers to the Zune market for music, TV shows, movies - you're getting the idea.
Microsoft probably has an internal calculation somewhere showing that they will make up the price difference between cheap Windows 8 and old sky-high pricing on Windows 7, Windows Vista, etc. within a year as they slice off a 20-30% chunk of every single game, desktop app and TV show you purchase through their digital store. Everything past that is gravy.
I purchased an iPad 1, used it for less than two months and sold it to a friend for half what I paid for it. I wanted it to be so much more than it was - more than they still are. Steve gave his amazing presentation, I swooned - I drank the kool-aid. I was Captain Picard, carrying my StarFleet tablet around. Then I bought one.
They are just 10" iPod Touches.
I wanted to be able to prop it up and type papers on it. I purchased the sleek 3rd party bluetooth keyboard/case combo. They keys were a compromise, tiny, poor travel, poor to type on. So I bought the Apple wireless keyboard. Apple's Pages software was friendly, and easy to use, but failed utterly to have any true usefulness in a world where Microsoft Word so utterly dominates academia or corporate America. Printing was a nightmare. Moving documents to my PC required iTunes syncing... iTunes..?? The music store software? What kind of "computer" was this!? My dream of a sleek, cool Sci-Fi space man computer was dashed as I realize the iPad is little more than a toy for reading Facebook on the toilet and clumbsily tapping in replies to emails from your sofa at a blistering 15 words per minute.
A sleek tablet with integrated, nearly full-size keyboard/cover and full, actual Microsoft Office built in?? A solid, well-engineered stand that folds out of the tablet to support it without needing to buy a pile of 3rd party cases, folios, etc. ? Be still my heart.
Touch is awesome. Touch is great for web surfing and watching cat videos on YouTube. Touch, paired with NO keyboard or keyboard and a very lightweight word processing app was absolutely useless. The keyboard is an order of magnitude more efficient for actually doing WORK.
The Surface tablet brings us so much closer to the dream of the all-in-one small, lightweight portable computer. I have hated Micro$oft as much as any other linux-using, Android using Slashdot reader. But I am cheering for them on this one. I hope the Surface takes it to Apple, and takes it to them hard.
I'm sorry, but the devil lay in the details, which in this case can be summarized as "After controlling for poverty and urbanization."
I'll take my numbers straight up & tallied, thank you, without being seasoned and cooked "after controlling for poverty and urbanization."
The FBI's violent crime statistics are accumulated from police departments across the country and presented factually. They are NOT collected, with altered numbers displayed "after controlling for poverty and urbanization."
A death is a death, a rape is a rape, an assault is an assault, and I don't want numbers fed to me that had such incidents numerically added or subtracted to arrive at an arbitrary score "after controlling for poverty and urbanization."
Above all: I realize we are all participating in a thought exercise in the comments today. My thoughts are with the people harmed in this incident and their families.
Now... Can we please begin blaming the perpetrator and NOT the tool they used to commit their crimes?
Can we craft laws that give family members the ability to report troubling behavior to authorities, possibly forcing a doctors' consultation? How is it that in the U.S., you can be jailed and forced to take treatment for Tuberculosis, but persons who walk around month after month, year after year exhibiting a dozen classical red flags for behavioral illness are left to their own devices? - Maybe they'll never harm anyone. Maybe they'll shoot up a movie theater.
Please stop blaming guns. Where are all the guns in Western Europe, where Britain has a violent crime rate higher than the United States, or for that matter even South Africa?
10 killed - 63 seriously injured - CLEARLY we need a background check and 30 day waiting period to buy AUTOMOBILES. What happens when a tragedy like this is intentional and not an accident? What could a sick person do with a Chevy Suburban in a crowded parking lot?
According to a number of sources, gunshot wounds - with access to medical treatment - are survivable nearly 95% of the time. Fate is cruel; survivability has everything to do with where you are shot and what is damaged internally.
edit: revenue per month, not profit. However, this Jan. 5 2011 article suggests Facebooks' profits scale similarly to Google's. By which measure, Facebook is still a tenth or twelfth as valuable and 100% dependent on the success of their one property.
Facebook is - or soon will be - flailing at the wind. Fighting an opponent they can't hurt.
Facebook is now facing a competitor that can afford to earn $ 0 from social media. Facebook's survival depends on the popularity and eyeball count of Facebook to sell ads and revenue share (Zynga) agreements against.
Google, currently earning as much profit per month as Facebook earns per year, does not need Google+ to earn three cents in order to continue flourishing. While they would LIKE Google+ to be a runaway hit, it simply isn't necessary.
Once Google starts aggressively advertising Google+ on television, stealing 10, 20, maybe 30% of Facebooks' traffic, how will Zuckerburg feel then? Probably like the guys at Netscape after Microsoft purchased Mosaic, rebranded it as Internet Explorer and started giving it away for free.
Facebook's UI is a mess, it's privacy and security settings are not intuitive and the entire user experience feels stale and worn-out to many people I've talked with. The massive redesign that Facebook is preparing to launch, with Timeline and other UI tweaks.. while satisfying some, will probably feel like "work" to many - something new to learn, for what was supposed to be a simple, fun way to keep in touch with friends.
If Google has half a brain, they will ascertain the date of Facebooks' relaunch and start a massive national ad buy for Google+ starting two days prior and run a solid week after. Clean, simple, secure microblogging with video and photo photo sharing. They will steal millions of users.
Does this game have multiplayer cheats available for it?
I was excited when I installed Urban Terror for the first time a few weeks ago, and enjoyed it for a day or so.. before noticing that some guys were pulling off unbelievable sniper rifle kills, suspiciously high head-shot percentages and the like. Five minutes with Google confirmed the worst- There is a wallhack + aimbot available for both Windows & Linux, it's absurdly easy to find and operate, and works like nobody's business. It just sucked the enjoyment out of the game.
Part of the problem with all these multi-platform games built on the id software open-sourced engines is that.. bots have been available for those engines for years, and the bot coders have very little updating to do in order to make new bots for the latest X, Y and Z mods running on those id engines. The people making the new games or mods have limited time or resources to put into staying ahead of the bot coders. Sad panda.
ADT, cellular problems, brand awareness
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D.I.Y. Home Security
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· Score: 2, Insightful
What this article does not address is the actual cost of having an alarm system, crime prevention statistics and technical problems associated with different systems.
Truthfully, most professionally installed, professionally monitored alarm systems end up being almost free. Free, as in speech, or beer. Most insurance companies will give you discounts on your homeowners policy if you present a certificate from a national brand monitored alarm service. This discount can end up being as high as $30-40/mo., which essentially pays for the monitoring fees charged by your alarm company. Toss in free installation specials (or $99 installation, which ADT runs frequently) and the cost is tough to beat.
I've seen statistics that show that having the large yard signs from a recognizable, national brand monitored alarm service will roughly reduce the likelihood of a break in at your residence by 80%. Most robbers are poor & dumb. They want to cut a window screen at the back of your house, slip in, smash, grab & ransack through your house for 5 minutes looking for firearms, cash & jewelry and GTFO. That monitored alarm gives them a pretty good chance of egressing just as Johnny Law pulls up, they know it, and they'll pass by your house without trying.
There are drawbacks. We use Vonage for our primary phone service at our house. ADT will not install on Vonage, as they claim it's unreliable and incompatible with some of the signals they send to the monitoring service, so they like to put a module in the basement with a digital cell phone card in it + battery backup. The problem we have been having is, about once a week, usually around 1-3 AM Monday or Tuesday mornings, the alarm panel starts screaming as though it's about to go off. Repeated calls to ADT tech support produced this finding: The cell companies "reboot" their towers roughly once a week, and the alarm module in the basement is seeing the loss of signal to the tower, it is assuming that tampering is taking place and is causing an immediate alarm - without any way of actually reaching the monitoring service. Will ADT send someone to the house to investigate a possible workaround? Yes, for a $200 truck roll fee + $100/hour labor. And we are prepaid two years ahead.
Being a good American, I vigorously exercise my second amendment rights, and also own a bionically sensitive 3 year old lab-hound mix. My wife and I aren't concerned about evening break-ins. It's the daylight "house is empty, everyone at work" smash & grab that we worry about, particularly that they will hurt, kill or release our animals and generally just make a mess of things, leaving that charming sense of violation and insecurity behind. I'm sure most of the readers share this concern.
My problem with homebrew DIY security systems is.. the DIY part. Hours and hours of time spent installing an alarm system that may not get the same quality response from the police as a human being at ADT's monitoring center (we've had 1 false alarm at our house, and I can vouch for the response time being very satisfactory.) ADT has spent millions of dollars on a quality program designed to reduce false alarms, and have blitzed the police with publicity trumpeting this fact - the goal being to impress upon them that ADT customers rarely have false alarms, when we call you, you had better get there quick.
I'm not sure that user installed security systems are worth the installation time and lack of name recognition with the most important demographic - would be burglars.
Fortifying your server inside physical security is painfully 1960's thinking. Your defenses will be defeated by the power of the subpoena and heavy handed back room diplomacy between governments.
We're going to watch the Pirate Bay issue play itself out accordingly. It doesn't matter if they mirror/move the tracker servers out of Sweden; the U.S. State department, acting on the behest of government officials beholden to enormously wealthy and influential lobbyists and IP (intellectual property) owning media companies - will suddenly start reminding X, Y and Z governments (in countries now hosting illicit material) that the huge agricultural trade deal they want with the U.S. may suddenly stall out because "we don't do business with countries that sponsor or turn a blind eye to the theft of American property." Oh, you wanted us to vote FOR your membership to the WTO? Well, about that pirate MP3 website hosted in your country, getting 500,000 hits a day..
Quote: " I read this with a twinge of curiosity. Vista Home Ultimate came on the new Dell system I received a couple months ago. While the novelty of Vista's graphical enhancements wore off quickly, my irritation at a litany of Vista bugs did not. They include:
- Two year old Netgear 802.11g wireless card being virtually impossible to install
- Crackling, popping audio in World of Warcraft (and other games) from the built in audio that defied repeated attempts to fix via driver upgrades
--- Disabled said audio in BIOS, inserted Creative Sound Blaster 5.1 digital PCI card. Guess what? VISTA INCOMPATIBLE. Creative. THE standard. in.com.patible with Vista's DRM-heavy digital device list. Back to crackling, popping on board audio. So annoying I resorted to playing WoW with no sound.
- ATI HDTv Wonder PCI card installation - wasted time. Windows Media Center could not tune ANYTHING with any degree of quality when the same card + antenna did brilliantly on my old Win XP box. Furthermore, exhaustive forum searching reveals that Media Center actually cripples the driver for the HD tuner, making it so that you can tune OTA content, OR CATV content, but NOT BOTH. You have to install a hacked up driver from some shady 3rd party website to use the full functionality of your TV card. Again, the ATI product does not appear on Microsoft's DRM-heavy "approved digital device" list.
- On board gigabit ethernet adapter's network configuration would randomly disappear and have to be reconfigured when the computer was hard rebooted for any reason, including power outages, or video lockups, leading us to..
- NVidia GForce 7300 PCI Express card included with machine worked flawlessly as delivered, BUT after Microsofts last "patch Tuesday" a few weeks ago, the video would not 'wake up' after the machine had been put to sleep. The "sleep mode" suspend worked great until the last security patch.. It makes no sense to me either. After the patch, the video would not wake with the rest of the system, forcing a hard poweroff/restart, causing the network setting to disappear.. HALF the time.
-
So, two nights ago, after backing up, I took my freshly burned Ubuntu 7.04 cd, took a deep breath, and installed. I can get around in Linux, but I am by no means an expert. My installation was smooth. In less than 90 minutes, using Automatix, I had every plugin, driver, and application I could ever want to make my system perform properly. Nvidia OpenGL driver automatically configured, all video/flash plugins for Firefox, DVD playback, the whole 9 yards. Additionally, using the step-by step copy and paste instructions from the ubuntu website, I had Wine installed, and had configured it properly to run World of Warcraft.
So here I sit. World of Warcraft runs smoothly. Audio is CRYSTAL CLEAR, my Soundblaster Live 5.1 card is supported, no popping, clicking audio. I play the game at 1680x1050 with almost all detail settings turned on at a very smooth framerate. I visit CNN.com and view all embedded video seamlessly, no plugin errors or other irritants. When I need to type papers for college, I have OpenOffice. Ipod works flawlessly with podcast management program.
I've had much success with NASLight from serverelements.com - It allegedly uses hand-tuned Samba that in independent tests blows away Freenas. It's ridiculously easy to set up, can boot from USB key, CD, or hard drive and has very light system requirements. I picked up two 500gb USB 2.0 external hard drives after thanksgiving and plugged 'em in - With one click in the web control panel, NASLight automagically rsyncs Drive1 to Drive2 once per day at the hour of your chosing.
I should add, that if you've never witnessed a Grand Mal seizure in either a human (or animal) - be glad. Short of hollywood's best effort at demonic possession I can't begin to describe how horrible they are to watch. We had to have the dog I mentioned above put down after he cluster-seized for almost a full day (about a year after his seizures began.) It was of great consolation to find out later, talking with people that suffered from epilepsy, that they (usually) are in no pain during the event. They feel an 'aura' (like migraine sufferers) and regain their senses a minute later, exhausted and sweaty on the floor or sofa, or wherever a kind passerby guided them.
If you ever witness someone experiencing an epileptic seizure,
1. Catch them if they are falling, guide them gently to the floor and step away. If they have already fallen down, ask bystanders to step back, move furniture, tables, lamps away from them so they do not injure themselves or damage property while their limbs (may) flail uncontrollably.
2. Wait. Most seizures "ride out" after less than a minute. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO RESTRAIN THEM and do NOT attempt to put ANYTHING in their mouth. They very well may bite your fingers off. The "they will swallow their tongue" bit IS A VERY DANGEROUS MYTH.
If they do NOT stop seizing after 10-15 seconds, if they have injured themselves, if you have reason to believe there is a problem with their breathing or pulse, CALL 911. Not all seizures are epileptic in nature. They may be suffering a stroke, or have a non-epilepsy genetic disorder.
3. If they "ride out" the seizure, empathize. Help them sit up, hand them their purse, briefcase, smile. Tell them they had a seizure and they're OK, talk as though it happens to everyone every day. GIVE THEM A COLD BOTTLED WATER or buy them a soda, anything COLD. Ask if they feel they need medical assistance.
4. Be glad you don't live in ancient China or Rome, and the person you witnessed seizing was the Emperor. You would be executed. Thankfully we live in more civilized times.
If you know any (humans) with epilepsy, suggest they look into getting a seizure dog. What?! Yep! Trained dogs that follow you around, and tell you that you're about to have a seizure. Scientists think they can cue in on changes in body odor caused by chemical changes. They are remarkably accurate, many kids with epilepsy can lead fairly normal lives with seizure dogs, even go swimming and ride bicycles. Their furry little pals just start barking a few minutes before the seizure is going to occur, they get somewhere safe and notify friends or family. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seizure_response_dog
Years ago our family had a Brittany Spaniel that started Grand Mal epileptic seizures at around 1 year of age. Phenobarbitol only moderately increase the time period between seizure clusters by a week or so.
While comforting the dog immediately post-seizure one evening, I noticed that he felt warm - his entire body was overheated, as though he'd just come in from a long walk on a hot summer day. To me, the obvious thing to do was to crush 10-15 ice cubes, dump them in a ziploc bag and apply it to the crown of his head. The effect was immediate, and amazing. His anxiety and discomfort disappeared immediately, and the "brain chiller" icepack seemed to lessen the severity of any subsequent cluster seizures, and reduce the number of seizures in a cluster (to almost petit mal effect.)
To me, this feels like another forehead smacking "well, DUH" discovery.;]
I read this with a twinge of curiosity. Vista Home Ultimate came on the new Dell system I received a couple months ago. While the novelty of Vista's graphical enhancements wore off quickly, my irritation at a litany of Vista bugs did not. They include:
- Two year old Netgear 802.11g wireless card being virtually impossible to install
- Crackling, popping audio in World of Warcraft (and other games) from the built in audio that defied repeated attempts to fix via driver upgrades
--- Disabled said audio in BIOS, inserted Creative Sound Blaster 5.1 digital PCI card. Guess what? VISTA INCOMPATIBLE. Creative. THE standard. in.com.patible with Vista's DRM-heavy digital device list. Back to crackling, popping on board audio. So annoying I resorted to playing WoW with no sound.
- ATI HDTv Wonder PCI card installation - wasted time. Windows Media Center could not tune ANYTHING with any degree of quality when the same card + antenna did brilliantly on my old Win XP box. Furthermore, exhaustive forum searching reveals that Media Center actually cripples the driver for the HD tuner, making it so that you can tune OTA content, OR CATV content, but NOT BOTH. You have to install a hacked up driver from some shady 3rd party website to use the full functionality of your TV card. Again, the ATI product does not appear on Microsoft's DRM-heavy "approved digital device" list.
- On board gigabit ethernet adapter's network configuration would randomly disappear and have to be reconfigured when the computer was hard rebooted for any reason, including power outages, or video lockups, leading us to..
- NVidia GForce 7300 PCI Express card included with machine worked flawlessly as delivered, BUT after Microsofts last "patch Tuesday" a few weeks ago, the video would not 'wake up' after the machine had been put to sleep. The "sleep mode" suspend worked great until the last security patch.. It makes no sense to me either. After the patch, the video would not wake with the rest of the system, forcing a hard poweroff/restart, causing the network setting to disappear.. HALF the time.
-
So, two nights ago, after backing up, I took my freshly burned Ubuntu 7.04 cd, took a deep breath, and installed. I can get around in Linux, but I am by no means an expert. My installation was smooth. In less than 90 minutes, using Automatix, I had every plugin, driver, and application I could ever want to make my system perform properly. Nvidia OpenGL driver automatically configured, all video/flash plugins for Firefox, DVD playback, the whole 9 yards. Additionally, using the step-by step copy and paste instructions from the ubuntu website, I had Wine installed, and had configured it properly to run World of Warcraft.
So here I sit. World of Warcraft runs smoothly. Audio is CRYSTAL CLEAR, my Soundblaster Live 5.1 card is supported, no popping, clicking audio. I play the game at 1680x1050 with almost all detail settings turned on at a very smooth framerate. I visit CNN.com and view all embedded video seamlessly, no plugin errors or other irritants. When I need to type papers for college, I have OpenOffice. Ipod works flawlessly with podcast management program.
The users in the LumenLab member forum are the real reason to buy the plans. Their experience is invaluable and they are amazingly eager to help you.
Brain, the guy who operates LumenLab.com is highly accessible, both in forums and LL's IRC channel. He's an interesting character. He and his wife built a biodiesel car that runs on hemp oil, a DIY home CNC machine, among other things.
I highly recommend browsing the LumenLab free forum where users post pics of their finished projectors. Hundreds of success stories. Look for my friend PyrettaBlaze, his finished PJ is amazing.
The finished result with the LumenLab kit is siginificantly sharper and brighter than the overhead projector/LCD panel kludge - Approximately 1800-2000 ANSI lumens at 1024x768 with the ability to throw anything from your PC to the screen (or other sources through adapter box.) The LL guys are using quality optics and have a fanatical support community behind them.
It will be interesting to see if BSG survives as long as Stargate SG-1, which is tying the X-Files as televisions' longest running sci-fi show this year.
I'm not up on my SG-1 fandom, but I believe some of the large, more well-connected sites have reported contract negotiations for a tenth season. (gateworld.net)
When you buy a media player, you're buying the media format. The quality, design or features of the actual PLAYER are almost secondary. You would think consumers would understand this at some point, but I guess not.
A slightly reconfigured SpaceShip One could probably earn a handsome profit lugging small (~300 pound) satellites into orbit, opening all kinds of GPS & communications markets to small and medium sized companies presently locked out by exorbitant boost prices.
Although additional lift would be required from 100km to stationary orbit, it shouldn't be terribly difficult to engineer a (relatively) inexpensive modular "shell" around the satellite with 100-200 lbs of fuel and a small motor to propel it to it's desired parking place. After all, most of the energy required to launch satellites is wasted just fighting your way out of orbit, and that is what SpaceShip One has solved. A cheap ride to LEO. Significantly less energy required from there to your parking spot.
As more private space companies emerge, and the usual business expansion/contraction/merger phase cools down, we'll be left with a handful of competitors for various corporations and governments to shop around for cheapest boost prices. Everyone wins! Consumers get cool new gizmos & services.
Today's launch is but a sliver-sized glimpse of the future.:)
Finns take the defense of their tiny country quite seriously! For those of you who may not remember, a quick refresher on one of history's most forgotten wars- The Winter War, 1939-1940.
Soviet Russia sent 23 divisions (460,000 troops) and 2,000 tanks into Finland in an act of naked agression, seeking little more than land expansion. They were told not to stop until they reached Sweden. They were so sure of victory that one of their divisions had a military band complete with instruments for their victory performance in Helsinki, after which they would install a puppet government.
Finland, with a whopping population of 3.6 million, managed to field 160,000 troops.
The final result: -The Soviets suffered 400,000 casualties -Stalin suffered a humiliating defeat, and was forced to sign the "Peace Agreement" March 13 1940.
Finland lost 10% of it's land, but survived as a free independent country. The Soviet army was recalled in defeat, with Stalin nervous about developments elsewhere in Europe as Hitler's war machine spun up.
To this day, even with Perestroika, Glasnost, and the "collapse" of the Soviet Union, the citizens of the tightly culturally interconnected scandanavian countries (Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Iceland) maintain a deep mistrust of Russia and it's motives for -anything-.
Read Friday's Wall Street Journal. There's a major article on serious problems plaguing Union Pacific. The short of it:
Pro: This dual-purpose truck would eliminate many of the problems rail carriers face, eg. crippling inefficiency in forming long trains together at various rail yards, and "last 100 miles" solution to get to the loading dock.
Cons: -> ALL of Union Pacific's tracks converge into one track for much of the midwest. They have serious logistical problems because of it. The WSJ article pointed out that frequently trains have to pull onto a siding somewhere in the middle and idle for an hour to let three westbound trains pass them before they can get back on track to continue eastward. They can lay more track, but it would require astronomical expenditure in an era of fierce trucking competition. Said WSJ article also pointed out that Union Pacific's average coast to coast speed dropped to 21 MPH, down 3 MPH from a year ago.
Man. People always forget that technology is the tail. Economics is the dog.
By the way - the few remaining competitors to Union Pacific are in relatively the same poor shape. One gets the feeling that rail in the US is maintained solely to service manufacturing that requires massive tonnage of raw materials moved about and strategic military materiel movement in event of another WW II level conflict.
When does SBC Ameritech plan on upgrading their business practices?
I had Ameritech's 1.5/128 plan for 18 months. Moved to a new address 2 miles from my old one. Had DSL service moved.
Downloads dropped from 155k per second at old apartment to 38.x k per second at the house. Download speed only fluctuated to the RIGHT of the decimal point. Obviously throttled.
Five hours worth of telephone calls over 2 different days. Bottom line? Ameritech has a HIDDEN PLAN that is ALSO $26.95/month, but - Drumroll - It's 192-384 DOWN, 128 up. This plan is not on their literature, and NOT on ameritech.com. Without any prior notification they switched me to this plan for a full MONTH before finally admitting to it while billing me at my normal service rate the entire time. The reason? They THOUGHT I was 146 FEET too far from the CO. Two network techs told me during two separate phone calls that their line scan showed I was good to go for 1.5 megabit down.
You wouldn't BELIEVE how many people I had to yell at to finally get an admission that they had quietly switched me over to their HIDDEN slower-speed "plan". I cancelled on the spot. Billing someone full price for a service you are KNOWINGLY not providing is FRAUD.
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They will most likely be replaced with equipment provided by vendors who are on the U.S. military's "Trusted Foundry" schedule. It doesn't matter if half the chips in those "Trusted Foundry" switches are manufactured in China - as a result of careful research, you can be "reasonably" sure they don't contain backdoors or malicious code.
"Reasonably."
Someone go dig up history's last Five-Star general, Supreme Allied Commander / then US President Dwight Eisenhower, who banged his personal driver back and forth across the US & Europe during the entirety of World War II - and share this with him, so he can have a jolly good chuckle before going back to sleep.
http://www.nytimes.com/1991/06/06/us/eisenhower-letters-hint-at-affair-with-aide.html
No one hired Petraeus to be a marriage counselor or church pastor; he was hired to conquer and pacify a sovereign country and its insurgency. Then he was hired to play the dirty pool of espionage & subterfuge.
Foreign Red Team has zero leverage against Petraeus with this information; all he had to do was own up to it, admit a mistake an move on. This affects his family and his marriage, not his ability to spy on and clandestinely kill people. In fact, the alphabet-soup spy agencies (NSA, CIA in particular) have come as far to allow openly LGBT employees for many years. As long as you're already fully out & fabulous, there is no leverage to be used against you. You are not a potential exploit vector for agressors.
I make no apology or excuse for Petraeus' actions - what he did is morally reprehensible. But it had absolutely zero impact on his ability to perform his duties.
What prevents users from simply loading Steam onto their Ubuntu PCs along with all the tweaked OpenGL drivers and just rocking that instead of the default drivers?
HELP US GABEN, YOU'RE OUR ONLY HOPE!
Microsoft is pricing Windows 8 cheaply as, for the first time ever they are positioned to give you the handles and sell the blades, to borrow the old razor addage.
Who cares what Windows 8 costs - Every copy sold creates a potential income stream as they will get a percentage of sale on every piece of software moved through their online store, not unlike the Apple app store. How long will it be until CDROM drives start disappearing from even desktop PCs, as virtually everything is updated and/or sold through the Internet? Oh, you need to burn a DVD of your kid's softball game? Buy the USB slim external drive off Newegg for $ 40. Every Windows 8 copy exposes more consumers to the Zune market for music, TV shows, movies - you're getting the idea.
Microsoft probably has an internal calculation somewhere showing that they will make up the price difference between cheap Windows 8 and old sky-high pricing on Windows 7, Windows Vista, etc. within a year as they slice off a 20-30% chunk of every single game, desktop app and TV show you purchase through their digital store. Everything past that is gravy.
I'm cheering for Microsoft.
Competition is good.
I purchased an iPad 1, used it for less than two months and sold it to a friend for half what I paid for it. I wanted it to be so much more than it was - more than they still are. Steve gave his amazing presentation, I swooned - I drank the kool-aid. I was Captain Picard, carrying my StarFleet tablet around. Then I bought one.
They are just 10" iPod Touches.
I wanted to be able to prop it up and type papers on it. I purchased the sleek 3rd party bluetooth keyboard/case combo. They keys were a compromise, tiny, poor travel, poor to type on. So I bought the Apple wireless keyboard. Apple's Pages software was friendly, and easy to use, but failed utterly to have any true usefulness in a world where Microsoft Word so utterly dominates academia or corporate America. Printing was a nightmare. Moving documents to my PC required iTunes syncing. .. iTunes..?? The music store software? What kind of "computer" was this!? My dream of a sleek, cool Sci-Fi space man computer was dashed as I realize the iPad is little more than a toy for reading Facebook on the toilet and clumbsily tapping in replies to emails from your sofa at a blistering 15 words per minute.
A sleek tablet with integrated, nearly full-size keyboard/cover and full, actual Microsoft Office built in?? A solid, well-engineered stand that folds out of the tablet to support it without needing to buy a pile of 3rd party cases, folios, etc. ? Be still my heart.
Touch is awesome. Touch is great for web surfing and watching cat videos on YouTube. Touch, paired with NO keyboard or keyboard and a very lightweight word processing app was absolutely useless. The keyboard is an order of magnitude more efficient for actually doing WORK.
The Surface tablet brings us so much closer to the dream of the all-in-one small, lightweight portable computer. I have hated Micro$oft as much as any other linux-using, Android using Slashdot reader. But I am cheering for them on this one. I hope the Surface takes it to Apple, and takes it to them hard.
Competition is good.
I'm sorry, but the devil lay in the details, which in this case can be summarized as "After controlling for poverty and urbanization."
I'll take my numbers straight up & tallied, thank you, without being seasoned and cooked "after controlling for poverty and urbanization."
The FBI's violent crime statistics are accumulated from police departments across the country and presented factually. They are NOT collected, with altered numbers displayed "after controlling for poverty and urbanization."
A death is a death, a rape is a rape, an assault is an assault, and I don't want numbers fed to me that had such incidents numerically added or subtracted to arrive at an arbitrary score "after controlling for poverty and urbanization."
Above all: I realize we are all participating in a thought exercise in the comments today. My thoughts are with the people harmed in this incident and their families.
Now...
Can we please begin blaming the perpetrator and NOT the tool they used to commit their crimes?
Can we craft laws that give family members the ability to report troubling behavior to authorities, possibly forcing a doctors' consultation? How is it that in the U.S., you can be jailed and forced to take treatment for Tuberculosis, but persons who walk around month after month, year after year exhibiting a dozen classical red flags for behavioral illness are left to their own devices? - Maybe they'll never harm anyone. Maybe they'll shoot up a movie theater.
Please stop blaming guns. Where are all the guns in Western Europe, where Britain has a violent crime rate higher than the United States, or for that matter even South Africa?
SOURCE: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1196941/The-violent-country-Europe-Britain-worse-South-Africa-U-S.html
SOURCE: http://www.metro.co.uk/news/696036-britain-more-violent-than-us-and-europe
10 killed - 63 seriously injured - CLEARLY we need a background check and 30 day waiting period to buy AUTOMOBILES. What happens when a tragedy like this is intentional and not an accident? What could a sick person do with a Chevy Suburban in a crowded parking lot?
SOURCE: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,222924,00.html
SOURCE: http://articles.cnn.com/2004-01-05/justice/farmer.market.crash_1_movsha-hoffman-molok-ghoulian-brendon-esfahani?_s=PM:LAW
I'd rather gamble my life rushing a gunman to grapple their weapon away. The Tueller Drill / 21 Foot Rule says I'd probably win:
SOURCE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tueller_Drill
SOURCE: http://www.policeone.com/edged-weapons/articles/102828-Edged-Weapon-Defense-Is-or-was-the-21-foot-rule-valid-Part-1/
According to a number of sources, gunshot wounds - with access to medical treatment - are survivable nearly 95% of the time. Fate is cruel; survivability has everything to do with where you are shot and what is damaged internally.
SOURCE: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/03/nyregion/03shot.html?_r=1
This just in!
Another human being can pick a fight with you, or sucker punch you in the head, AND KILL YOU BARE HANDED.
SOURCE: http://www.trinidadexpress.com/news/Man__bleeding_in_brain__after_club_fracas-139265238.html
SOURCE: http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/2012/02/27/20120227california-girl-dies-after-fight.html
SOURCE: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9PoXH_-tUE
SOURCE: http://crimeblog.dallasnews.com/2011/04/teen-killed-in-fistfight-near.html/
SOURCE: http://abcnews.go.com/US/TheLaw/fist-fight-left-miami-tourist-dead-caught-video/story?id=11445914#.UAnc_oa-zUY
SOURCE:
edit: revenue per month, not profit. However, this Jan. 5 2011 article suggests Facebooks' profits scale similarly to Google's. By which measure, Facebook is still a tenth or twelfth as valuable and 100% dependent on the success of their one property.
http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-details-leaked-company-is-much-more-profitable-than-everyone-thought-2011-1
Facebook is - or soon will be - flailing at the wind. Fighting an opponent they can't hurt.
Facebook is now facing a competitor that can afford to earn $ 0 from social media.
Facebook's survival depends on the popularity and eyeball count of Facebook to sell ads and revenue share (Zynga) agreements against.
Google, currently earning as much profit per month as Facebook earns per year, does not need Google+ to earn three cents in order to continue flourishing. While they would LIKE Google+ to be a runaway hit, it simply isn't necessary.
Once Google starts aggressively advertising Google+ on television, stealing 10, 20, maybe 30% of Facebooks' traffic, how will Zuckerburg feel then? Probably like the guys at Netscape after Microsoft purchased Mosaic, rebranded it as Internet Explorer and started giving it away for free.
Facebook's UI is a mess, it's privacy and security settings are not intuitive and the entire user experience feels stale and worn-out to many people I've talked with. The massive redesign that Facebook is preparing to launch, with Timeline and other UI tweaks.. while satisfying some, will probably feel like "work" to many - something new to learn, for what was supposed to be a simple, fun way to keep in touch with friends.
If Google has half a brain, they will ascertain the date of Facebooks' relaunch and start a massive national ad buy for Google+ starting two days prior and run a solid week after. Clean, simple, secure microblogging with video and photo photo sharing. They will steal millions of users.
Does this game have multiplayer cheats available for it?
I was excited when I installed Urban Terror for the first time a few weeks ago, and enjoyed it for a day or so.. before noticing that some guys were pulling off unbelievable sniper rifle kills, suspiciously high head-shot percentages and the like. Five minutes with Google confirmed the worst- There is a wallhack + aimbot available for both Windows & Linux, it's absurdly easy to find and operate, and works like nobody's business. It just sucked the enjoyment out of the game.
Part of the problem with all these multi-platform games built on the id software open-sourced engines is that.. bots have been available for those engines for years, and the bot coders have very little updating to do in order to make new bots for the latest X, Y and Z mods running on those id engines. The people making the new games or mods have limited time or resources to put into staying ahead of the bot coders. Sad panda.
What this article does not address is the actual cost of having an alarm system, crime prevention statistics and technical problems associated with different systems.
Truthfully, most professionally installed, professionally monitored alarm systems end up being almost free. Free, as in speech, or beer. Most insurance companies will give you discounts on your homeowners policy if you present a certificate from a national brand monitored alarm service. This discount can end up being as high as $30-40/mo., which essentially pays for the monitoring fees charged by your alarm company. Toss in free installation specials (or $99 installation, which ADT runs frequently) and the cost is tough to beat.
I've seen statistics that show that having the large yard signs from a recognizable, national brand monitored alarm service will roughly reduce the likelihood of a break in at your residence by 80%. Most robbers are poor & dumb. They want to cut a window screen at the back of your house, slip in, smash, grab & ransack through your house for 5 minutes looking for firearms, cash & jewelry and GTFO. That monitored alarm gives them a pretty good chance of egressing just as Johnny Law pulls up, they know it, and they'll pass by your house without trying.
There are drawbacks. We use Vonage for our primary phone service at our house. ADT will not install on Vonage, as they claim it's unreliable and incompatible with some of the signals they send to the monitoring service, so they like to put a module in the basement with a digital cell phone card in it + battery backup. The problem we have been having is, about once a week, usually around 1-3 AM Monday or Tuesday mornings, the alarm panel starts screaming as though it's about to go off. Repeated calls to ADT tech support produced this finding: The cell companies "reboot" their towers roughly once a week, and the alarm module in the basement is seeing the loss of signal to the tower, it is assuming that tampering is taking place and is causing an immediate alarm - without any way of actually reaching the monitoring service. Will ADT send someone to the house to investigate a possible workaround? Yes, for a $200 truck roll fee + $100/hour labor. And we are prepaid two years ahead.
Being a good American, I vigorously exercise my second amendment rights, and also own a bionically sensitive 3 year old lab-hound mix. My wife and I aren't concerned about evening break-ins. It's the daylight "house is empty, everyone at work" smash & grab that we worry about, particularly that they will hurt, kill or release our animals and generally just make a mess of things, leaving that charming sense of violation and insecurity behind. I'm sure most of the readers share this concern.
My problem with homebrew DIY security systems is.. the DIY part. Hours and hours of time spent installing an alarm system that may not get the same quality response from the police as a human being at ADT's monitoring center (we've had 1 false alarm at our house, and I can vouch for the response time being very satisfactory.) ADT has spent millions of dollars on a quality program designed to reduce false alarms, and have blitzed the police with publicity trumpeting this fact - the goal being to impress upon them that ADT customers rarely have false alarms, when we call you, you had better get there quick.
I'm not sure that user installed security systems are worth the installation time and lack of name recognition with the most important demographic - would be burglars.
Nuclear bunker? That's really cute.
Fortifying your server inside physical security is painfully 1960's thinking. Your defenses will be defeated by the power of the subpoena and heavy handed back room diplomacy between governments.
We're going to watch the Pirate Bay issue play itself out accordingly. It doesn't matter if they mirror/move the tracker servers out of Sweden; the U.S. State department, acting on the behest of government officials beholden to enormously wealthy and influential lobbyists and IP (intellectual property) owning media companies - will suddenly start reminding X, Y and Z governments (in countries now hosting illicit material) that the huge agricultural trade deal they want with the U.S. may suddenly stall out because "we don't do business with countries that sponsor or turn a blind eye to the theft of American property." Oh, you wanted us to vote FOR your membership to the WTO? Well, about that pirate MP3 website hosted in your country, getting 500,000 hits a day..
http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=284281&cid=20416659
Quote:
"
I read this with a twinge of curiosity. Vista Home Ultimate came on the new Dell system I received a couple months ago. While the novelty of Vista's graphical enhancements wore off quickly, my irritation at a litany of Vista bugs did not. They include:
- Two year old Netgear 802.11g wireless card being virtually impossible to install
- Crackling, popping audio in World of Warcraft (and other games) from the built in audio that defied repeated attempts to fix via driver upgrades
--- Disabled said audio in BIOS, inserted Creative Sound Blaster 5.1 digital PCI card. Guess what? VISTA INCOMPATIBLE. Creative. THE standard. in.com.patible with Vista's DRM-heavy digital device list. Back to crackling, popping on board audio. So annoying I resorted to playing WoW with no sound.
- ATI HDTv Wonder PCI card installation - wasted time. Windows Media Center could not tune ANYTHING with any degree of quality when the same card + antenna did brilliantly on my old Win XP box. Furthermore, exhaustive forum searching reveals that Media Center actually cripples the driver for the HD tuner, making it so that you can tune OTA content, OR CATV content, but NOT BOTH. You have to install a hacked up driver from some shady 3rd party website to use the full functionality of your TV card. Again, the ATI product does not appear on Microsoft's DRM-heavy "approved digital device" list.
- On board gigabit ethernet adapter's network configuration would randomly disappear and have to be reconfigured when the computer was hard rebooted for any reason, including power outages, or video lockups, leading us to..
- NVidia GForce 7300 PCI Express card included with machine worked flawlessly as delivered, BUT after Microsofts last "patch Tuesday" a few weeks ago, the video would not 'wake up' after the machine had been put to sleep. The "sleep mode" suspend worked great until the last security patch.. It makes no sense to me either. After the patch, the video would not wake with the rest of the system, forcing a hard poweroff/restart, causing the network setting to disappear.. HALF the time.
-
So, two nights ago, after backing up, I took my freshly burned Ubuntu 7.04 cd, took a deep breath, and installed. I can get around in Linux, but I am by no means an expert. My installation was smooth. In less than 90 minutes, using Automatix, I had every plugin, driver, and application I could ever want to make my system perform properly. Nvidia OpenGL driver automatically configured, all video/flash plugins for Firefox, DVD playback, the whole 9 yards. Additionally, using the step-by step copy and paste instructions from the ubuntu website, I had Wine installed, and had configured it properly to run World of Warcraft.
So here I sit. World of Warcraft runs smoothly. Audio is CRYSTAL CLEAR, my Soundblaster Live 5.1 card is supported, no popping, clicking audio. I play the game at 1680x1050 with almost all detail settings turned on at a very smooth framerate. I visit CNN.com and view all embedded video seamlessly, no plugin errors or other irritants. When I need to type papers for college, I have OpenOffice. Ipod works flawlessly with podcast management program.
Why do I need Vista again?
"
I've had much success with NASLight from serverelements.com - It allegedly uses hand-tuned Samba that in independent tests blows away Freenas. It's ridiculously easy to set up, can boot from USB key, CD, or hard drive and has very light system requirements. I picked up two 500gb USB 2.0 external hard drives after thanksgiving and plugged 'em in - With one click in the web control panel, NASLight automagically rsyncs Drive1 to Drive2 once per day at the hour of your chosing.
Scot
I should add, that if you've never witnessed a Grand Mal seizure in either a human (or animal) - be glad. Short of hollywood's best effort at demonic possession I can't begin to describe how horrible they are to watch. We had to have the dog I mentioned above put down after he cluster-seized for almost a full day (about a year after his seizures began.) It was of great consolation to find out later, talking with people that suffered from epilepsy, that they (usually) are in no pain during the event. They feel an 'aura' (like migraine sufferers) and regain their senses a minute later, exhausted and sweaty on the floor or sofa, or wherever a kind passerby guided them.
If you ever witness someone experiencing an epileptic seizure,
1. Catch them if they are falling, guide them gently to the floor and step away. If they have already fallen down, ask bystanders to step back, move furniture, tables, lamps away from them so they do not injure themselves or damage property while their limbs (may) flail uncontrollably.
2. Wait. Most seizures "ride out" after less than a minute. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO RESTRAIN THEM and do NOT attempt to put ANYTHING in their mouth. They very well may bite your fingers off. The "they will swallow their tongue" bit IS A VERY DANGEROUS MYTH.
If they do NOT stop seizing after 10-15 seconds, if they have injured themselves, if you have reason to believe there is a problem with their breathing or pulse, CALL 911. Not all seizures are epileptic in nature. They may be suffering a stroke, or have a non-epilepsy genetic disorder.
3. If they "ride out" the seizure, empathize. Help them sit up, hand them their purse, briefcase, smile. Tell them they had a seizure and they're OK, talk as though it happens to everyone every day. GIVE THEM A COLD BOTTLED WATER or buy them a soda, anything COLD. Ask if they feel they need medical assistance.
4. Be glad you don't live in ancient China or Rome, and the person you witnessed seizing was the Emperor. You would be executed. Thankfully we live in more civilized times.
If you know any (humans) with epilepsy, suggest they look into getting a seizure dog. What?! Yep! Trained dogs that follow you around, and tell you that you're about to have a seizure. Scientists think they can cue in on changes in body odor caused by chemical changes. They are remarkably accurate, many kids with epilepsy can lead fairly normal lives with seizure dogs, even go swimming and ride bicycles. Their furry little pals just start barking a few minutes before the seizure is going to occur, they get somewhere safe and notify friends or family.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seizure_response_dog
Years ago our family had a Brittany Spaniel that started Grand Mal epileptic seizures at around 1 year of age. Phenobarbitol only moderately increase the time period between seizure clusters by a week or so.
;]
While comforting the dog immediately post-seizure one evening, I noticed that he felt warm - his entire body was overheated, as though he'd just come in from a long walk on a hot summer day. To me, the obvious thing to do was to crush 10-15 ice cubes, dump them in a ziploc bag and apply it to the crown of his head. The effect was immediate, and amazing. His anxiety and discomfort disappeared immediately, and the "brain chiller" icepack seemed to lessen the severity of any subsequent cluster seizures, and reduce the number of seizures in a cluster (to almost petit mal effect.)
To me, this feels like another forehead smacking "well, DUH" discovery.
I read this with a twinge of curiosity. Vista Home Ultimate came on the new Dell system I received a couple months ago. While the novelty of Vista's graphical enhancements wore off quickly, my irritation at a litany of Vista bugs did not. They include:
, linux/article.html
- Two year old Netgear 802.11g wireless card being virtually impossible to install
- Crackling, popping audio in World of Warcraft (and other games) from the built in audio that defied repeated attempts to fix via driver upgrades
--- Disabled said audio in BIOS, inserted Creative Sound Blaster 5.1 digital PCI card. Guess what? VISTA INCOMPATIBLE. Creative. THE standard. in.com.patible with Vista's DRM-heavy digital device list. Back to crackling, popping on board audio. So annoying I resorted to playing WoW with no sound.
- ATI HDTv Wonder PCI card installation - wasted time. Windows Media Center could not tune ANYTHING with any degree of quality when the same card + antenna did brilliantly on my old Win XP box. Furthermore, exhaustive forum searching reveals that Media Center actually cripples the driver for the HD tuner, making it so that you can tune OTA content, OR CATV content, but NOT BOTH. You have to install a hacked up driver from some shady 3rd party website to use the full functionality of your TV card. Again, the ATI product does not appear on Microsoft's DRM-heavy "approved digital device" list.
- On board gigabit ethernet adapter's network configuration would randomly disappear and have to be reconfigured when the computer was hard rebooted for any reason, including power outages, or video lockups, leading us to..
- NVidia GForce 7300 PCI Express card included with machine worked flawlessly as delivered, BUT after Microsofts last "patch Tuesday" a few weeks ago, the video would not 'wake up' after the machine had been put to sleep. The "sleep mode" suspend worked great until the last security patch.. It makes no sense to me either. After the patch, the video would not wake with the rest of the system, forcing a hard poweroff/restart, causing the network setting to disappear.. HALF the time.
-
So, two nights ago, after backing up, I took my freshly burned Ubuntu 7.04 cd, took a deep breath, and installed. I can get around in Linux, but I am by no means an expert. My installation was smooth. In less than 90 minutes, using Automatix, I had every plugin, driver, and application I could ever want to make my system perform properly. Nvidia OpenGL driver automatically configured, all video/flash plugins for Firefox, DVD playback, the whole 9 yards. Additionally, using the step-by step copy and paste instructions from the ubuntu website, I had Wine installed, and had configured it properly to run World of Warcraft.
So here I sit. World of Warcraft runs smoothly. Audio is CRYSTAL CLEAR, my Soundblaster Live 5.1 card is supported, no popping, clicking audio. I play the game at 1680x1050 with almost all detail settings turned on at a very smooth framerate. I visit CNN.com and view all embedded video seamlessly, no plugin errors or other irritants. When I need to type papers for college, I have OpenOffice. Ipod works flawlessly with podcast management program.
Why do I need Vista again?
------
Make World of Warcraft work flawlessy in Ubuntu with Wine:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WorldofWarcraft
PC World's noob-friendly "Seven Post-Install Tips for Unbuntu 7.04" :
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,130923-page,1-c
The users in the LumenLab member forum are the real reason to buy the plans. Their experience is invaluable and they are amazingly eager to help you.
Brain, the guy who operates LumenLab.com is highly accessible, both in forums and LL's IRC channel. He's an interesting character. He and his wife built a biodiesel car that runs on hemp oil, a DIY home CNC machine, among other things.
I highly recommend browsing the LumenLab free forum where users post pics of their finished projectors. Hundreds of success stories. Look for my friend PyrettaBlaze, his finished PJ is amazing.
The finished result with the LumenLab kit is siginificantly sharper and brighter than the overhead projector/LCD panel kludge - Approximately 1800-2000 ANSI lumens at 1024x768 with the ability to throw anything from your PC to the screen (or other sources through adapter box.) The LL guys are using quality optics and have a fanatical support community behind them.
Check it out.
It will be interesting to see if BSG survives as long as Stargate SG-1, which is tying the X-Files as televisions' longest running sci-fi show this year.
I'm not up on my SG-1 fandom, but I believe some of the large, more well-connected sites have reported contract negotiations for a tenth season. (gateworld.net)
Yeah, great.
Do they work with iTunes? No? Nice try fellas.
When you buy a media player, you're buying the media format. The quality, design or features of the actual PLAYER are almost secondary. You would think consumers would understand this at some point, but I guess not.
Laserdisc or Betamax, anyone?
ITMS > everything else.
Space tourists for $200k a head? Yawn.
A slightly reconfigured SpaceShip One could probably earn a handsome profit lugging small (~300 pound) satellites into orbit, opening all kinds of GPS & communications markets to small and medium sized companies presently locked out by exorbitant boost prices.
Although additional lift would be required from 100km to stationary orbit, it shouldn't be terribly difficult to engineer a (relatively) inexpensive modular "shell" around the satellite with 100-200 lbs of fuel and a small motor to propel it to it's desired parking place. After all, most of the energy required to launch satellites is wasted just fighting your way out of orbit, and that is what SpaceShip One has solved. A cheap ride to LEO. Significantly less energy required from there to your parking spot.
As more private space companies emerge, and the usual business expansion/contraction/merger phase cools down, we'll be left with a handful of competitors for various corporations and governments to shop around for cheapest boost prices. Everyone wins! Consumers get cool new gizmos & services.
Today's launch is but a sliver-sized glimpse of the future.
Required reading:
Diamond, Jared: "Guns, Germs & Steel"
Finns take the defense of their tiny country quite seriously! For those of you who may not remember, a quick refresher on one of history's most forgotten wars- The Winter War, 1939-1940.
;)
Soviet Russia sent 23 divisions (460,000 troops) and 2,000 tanks into Finland in an act of naked agression, seeking little more than land expansion. They were told not to stop until they reached Sweden. They were so sure of victory that one of their divisions had a military band complete with instruments for their victory performance in Helsinki, after which they would install a puppet government.
Finland, with a whopping population of 3.6 million, managed to field 160,000 troops.
The final result:
-The Soviets suffered 400,000 casualties
-Stalin suffered a humiliating defeat, and was forced to sign the "Peace Agreement" March 13 1940.
Finland lost 10% of it's land, but survived as a free independent country. The Soviet army was recalled in defeat, with Stalin nervous about developments elsewhere in Europe as Hitler's war machine spun up.
To this day, even with Perestroika, Glasnost, and the "collapse" of the Soviet Union, the citizens of the tightly culturally interconnected scandanavian countries (Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Iceland) maintain a deep mistrust of Russia and it's motives for -anything-.
Do NOT mock the Finish army!
Read Friday's Wall Street Journal. There's a major article on serious problems plaguing Union Pacific. The short of it:
Pro: This dual-purpose truck would eliminate many of the problems rail carriers face, eg. crippling inefficiency in forming long trains together at various rail yards, and "last 100 miles" solution to get to the loading dock.
Cons: -> ALL of Union Pacific's tracks converge into one track for much of the midwest. They have serious logistical problems because of it. The WSJ article pointed out that frequently trains have to pull onto a siding somewhere in the middle and idle for an hour to let three westbound trains pass them before they can get back on track to continue eastward. They can lay more track, but it would require astronomical expenditure in an era of fierce trucking competition. Said WSJ article also pointed out that Union Pacific's average coast to coast speed dropped to 21 MPH, down 3 MPH from a year ago.
Man. People always forget that technology is the tail. Economics is the dog.
By the way - the few remaining competitors to Union Pacific are in relatively the same poor shape. One gets the feeling that rail in the US is maintained solely to service manufacturing that requires massive tonnage of raw materials moved about and strategic military materiel movement in event of another WW II level conflict.
When does SBC Ameritech plan on upgrading their business practices?
I had Ameritech's 1.5/128 plan for 18 months. Moved to a new address 2 miles from my old one. Had DSL service moved.
Downloads dropped from 155k per second at old apartment to 38.x k per second at the house. Download speed only fluctuated to the RIGHT of the decimal point. Obviously throttled.
Five hours worth of telephone calls over 2 different days. Bottom line? Ameritech has a HIDDEN PLAN that is ALSO $26.95/month, but - Drumroll - It's 192-384 DOWN, 128 up. This plan is not on their literature, and NOT on ameritech.com. Without any prior notification they switched me to this plan for a full MONTH before finally admitting to it while billing me at my normal service rate the entire time. The reason? They THOUGHT I was 146 FEET too far from the CO. Two network techs told me during two separate phone calls that their line scan showed I was good to go for 1.5 megabit down.
You wouldn't BELIEVE how many people I had to yell at to finally get an admission that they had quietly switched me over to their HIDDEN slower-speed "plan". I cancelled on the spot. Billing someone full price for a service you are KNOWINGLY not providing is FRAUD.