But my idea involved using a mix of sodium (!) and aluminum:
The sodium would crack the water at room temperature, yielding sodium hydroxide and hydrogen and heat. The sodium hydoxide solution would attack the aluminum, yielding a sodium aluminate and Alx(OH)y slurry and more hydrogen.
Basically, I was using hydroxide to attack the protective Al2O3 oxide coating on the aluminum, so it could react with water to produce hydrogen, instead of requiring operation at an elevated temperature, though in a car, heat is probably plentiful.
As for the high energy required to refine aluminum from oxide, as another poster noted, this is (a) a good thing, and (b) can be routinely done where there is cheap hydroelectric, or less desirably, nuclear power.
In Canada, aluminum smelters are often located near sources of hydroelectric power, for this reason. Imagine a hydroelectric dam producing electricity to refine aluminum from oxide at it's base, with the refined aluminum and water loaded into such cars. Eventually the cars return (directly or indirectly) their slurry back to the smelter for re-refining.
The car "burns" aluminum to release water to the atmosphere which eventually drives the dam that produces the electricity to refine the "burned" aluminum (while some of the water might be recycled in the car, this will not be perfect).
The whole thing is driven by the Sun, of course. The big question is how efficient can the process be made? It strikes me as having too many steps (with losses all along the way).
Everying to build an internet is out there, in the open. (Well, some of the protocols used over it might be patented, but still).
Build your own!
But, this is really mostly about the DNS name to address mapping though and, to a lesser degree, about traffic filtering.
That's rather like France complaining that the international dialing prefix for the U.S., Canada, and a few other North American countries is a convenient 1, or that they can't assign me a telephone number or even an area code because I live in Washington state.
Nothing stops any other country or consortium of countries from setting up their own root DNS servers and, if they want, mapping some TLD understood by their servers to he "U.S.-centric" name space, stripping thair funky TLD (though it ceases to be a distributed name service, then, as they'd have to proxy that mapping -- serves them right -- or not interoperate at all.
What's really scary is the degree to which the politicos "just don't get it".
If anything, base internet technology is the most free form of information out there: not kept secret, and not encumbered by patents.
Speech for commercial purposes or that represents an immediate threat to people's lives (shouting fire in a movie theater) are not protected.
Shouting "Fire!" in a movie theater is protected speech... unless there is no threat of fire.
What is not protected speech is that which is likely to cause a panic. If the imminnent danger of a rapidly spreading fire appears greater, to a "reasonable" person, than the ensuing panic caused by anouncing the fact, it is quite alright to shout "Fire!". ("Reasonable" is is ultimately defined by a judge or jury).
Adding../ to the end of a URL is not the same as "B&Eing into a biker hangout." It's peeking in the windows at worst.
Bullshit, not even that: it's "Here, service that sends me back stuff, when I send you stuff, have some stuff!".
If someone rings my phone, and I answer, I can hardly be upset if he utters (non-obscene )words I don't like. The parallel to this case is "unauthorized talking": i.e. telling me something that I didn't like to hear upon my invitation to you to speak.
I can empathize regarding the pain associated with the enclosure.
I'm looking to make a small Via nano-ITX MythTV silent client box in a Silverstone LC-08 case and have run into difficulties between the mobo and the case -- an earlier thread on the issue is here. Unlike other designs, this has HD MPEG2 decoding hardware with a low power budget.
Basically, Via changed the mobo layout at the last minute and it no longer fits in the LC-08 case. Silverstone supposedly will have new cases ready this month (October '05), but the new design will spec a fan, wheras the old design was completely fanless (using a heatblock to transfer heat to the top of the case).
Seriously, this really is the whole control issue that's at the heart of most proprietary/open source battles.
While there may be good reasons for there to be a set of root DNS servers (what's in a name anyway?) independent of a U.S. company, that does not mean that said company can not continue to do business: It's not like you can't invent your own names and numbers in your namespace.
Over time, this might lead to "well-known" top level codes being country codes, with interoperability between.ab and.cd via proxies (oh, how the walls go up), with.com,.net, and.org becomming anachronisms of a pre-balkanized 'net. Nations do tend to get protective of their interests (well, those of their governments if not their citizens, anyway).
Perhaps we should see a silver lining to this cloud: the creation of the first cyberspace nation, owning the non-national domains, with laws of it's own regarding what happens in it's corner of cyberspace. Peering 'd be a bit of a hassle, but I don't see it as insurmountable. I can certainly envision a black market in the tunnelling of the "free internet" traffic to and through certain countries, though.
A "fair use" is one that does not infringe on the copyright holder's ability to exploit their work for gain.
Whether a use is "fair" depends on a number of factors: 1) does the user profit from it at the expense of the copyright holder, 2) is the use educational, 3) is the use a criticism of the work, 4) does the use involve the whole work, or a small portion of it?
An example of a "fair use", is whistling a song you heard on the radio, or playing a purchased tape or CD of it in your car. While others may hear the tune, they are not likely to pay the copyright holder to have someone walk or drive by them just to hear the song.
Now, if you hold a public performance, it gets a bit more dicey: you're competing with authorized performances (since the performance is the production of a copy, however ephemeral or transient). Playing CDs at a party at your house to a small crowd of people is O.K.
In either case, charging admission makes it not O.K., particularly if the reproduction is what induces people to pay the admission price.
The areas that are grey are things like a barber playing a radio in his shop while tending to customers. That's likely O.K. (since people don't go into barber shops to listen to music), but playing the radio to relieve the boredom of customers waiting their turn is probably not O.K.: you're using the work to make your business more attractive than your competition who provides no distractions for waiting customers. Still, it's iffy enough to not be a good idea even in the former case: whether intentional or not, waiting customers have their boredom relieved by the radio they can hear.
In the case of downloading the CD equivalent of an old, scratched album, you have, clearly you're getting something you didn't have before: better quality, so its likely not O.K. Downloading the CD equivalent of the CD you paid for that got scratched beyond playability would seam O.K.: you're not getting anything you didn't already pay for. A poor MP3 dowloaded to replace the scratchy album could be argued to be fine on the basis of comparable quality as well. But, of course, the copyright holder would argue strongly against this position. Do you want to test it in the courts?
And we're happy at paying 50% income tax so we don't have to worry about being screwed by health insurance companies or robbed at gunpoint in the streets.
Tax yourselves, then. But, you won't tax me. I earn an honest wage, and support my spouse and children. (Funny how Quebec never reimbursed me against my taxes what it would cost to support them if they were on welfare.)
But, tell me, how are you not screwed by the government when there is no doctor to see your sick kid, or hospital bed for your organ transplant recovery, or you have to wait in debillitating pain for routine surgery? How are you not screwed when the rate of violent crime against women in Canada is double what it is in the U.S. (I guess you're not a woman)? How are you not screwed when the extra taxes you pay for universal healthcare leaves you with waiting lists when the difference compared to a U.S. tax burden would pay for the best health insurance in the country? (About US$14k a year for family coverage)?
Ah, fuck it: we each have what we deserve, and I'm happy with my lot.
In Québec, we have been so much shafted by "free" entreprise that we have given ourselves a strong State to take care of everyone and make sure that no big guy screws the little guy.
Except by the biggest guy of all: the government. The unemployment rate is what, again? The tax rate is what again? You wait how long for a tonsillectomy? Mon dieu! Vous etes fou: tres, tres fou.
Behold: Communism in all it's glory.
And, I'll start to learn French when les Quebecois realize it's "pommes du terre fritez", and not "patates frites"; "le weekend" and not "la fin du semmaine"; and "le parking" and not "la stationnement". Then again, I suppose you've never visited Paris, you know, that city in France, where they speak French?
They just need to move to Canada, where the Supreme Court decided that file sharing is legal. Voilà! Problem solved!
Er, in Canada, the federal and provincial governments can trump the Supreme Court, by applying the "Notwithstanding Clause" in the Canadian Constitution.
This is likely to happen (again) in Quebec, where the government has indicated its intent to pass legislation overruling the Supreme Court's decision that it is unconstitutional to prevent a patient from paying a doctor for service, where the patient would otherwise have to wait under the "free" universal healthcare system. The Court, has stayed its decision until the government decides whether to overrule it. (Foreigners, of course, can purchase all the health insurance, or direct medical services, they want, with no waiting, so this may not affect you. Only in Canada, do citizens come second.)
The logic behind this absurd "Notwithstanding Clause" in the Canadian constitution is this: Judges are appointed, not elected, and so can not be the final arbiters of justice in a democracy. Naturally, this gives enourmous power to the legislatures and effectively renders the courts impotent.
Contrast the U.S., where, though Supreme Court (and Federal District, IIRC) judges are nominated by the Executive branch (i.e. the President), and confirmed by the Legislative branch (i.e. the Senate) -- the People's elected representatives do get a kick at the can, so to speak, but only one.
Another mechanism to keep judicial review in the hands of the elected represenatatives might be via judicial recall or impeachment, though existing decisions prior to such recall or impeachment should stand.
I do, however, feel a bit guilty that the US keeps on dumping all our washouts on Canada while simultaneously stealing Canada's best and brightest.
Stealing?
I dunno. I came here quite of my own free will. No one "stole" me -- bribed me perhaps:-).
I don't particularly mind having to jump through all the INS hoops -- after all, one doesn't just waltz into a place and get to benefit from the infrastructure already there. But, I wish the process wouldn't take so long. I'm on my second LC (a prerequisite for a "green card" -- "proves" that there is no American that can do my job for the prevailing wage) application -- the first was granted, but the green card lost because I had to change jobs before it was granted.
I could almost see the benefits of a "mixed" economy -- many socialist countries with "two tier" healthcare actually seem to deliver a reasonable level of care to everyone (the same way that U.S. welfare provides a "reasonable" level of existence) with better care available to those that pay. But, Canada has to have "universal" healthcare, and here, communism reigns supreme. Service sucks, taxes are high, waiting lists are long -- no evidence of any single payor economies of scale that should arise. Even if one thinks that some wealth redistribution is a good idea (and I don't), in Canada it is horribly inefficient and ineffective.
What's most maddening is that people are so blind as to how bad it is.
After the telecom bust, I had to leave the U.S. and return to Canada, like the good little law-abiding foreigner I was, having been layed off. I did so, dutifully, not wanting to ruin any chances to return legally in the future. For 18 months we (myself, wife, daughter, and son) lived in a suburb of Toronto. It was pure hell. Not being able to file jointly (my wife does not work), or deduct mortage interest meant my taxes were about triple what they'd be in the U.S. Canadian law requres a husband to "maintain the standard of living to which a wife has become accustomed", and with the taxes this was impossible -- we traded a brick 3200 square foot in Texas for one half that size. My poor daughter, when innocently presenting her previous years' school yearbook for "show and tell" was berrated by her teacher for "showing off" something "no Canadian child could ever hope to have": an elementary school yearbook. Never mind the fact that the school didn't have a cafeteria that served hot lunches (see, that would be "unfair" to the kids that couldn't afford food).
Canada is an excellent example of the failure of socialism. It was all well and good in the late '60s and early '70s, but then it becake time to pay the piper. While the national debt has been brought in check (there was little choice when 30% of the tax revenue went to pay the interest on it), all the social programs (including healthcare) have gone to hell. Of course, the high taxes remain.
So, Canada suffers the "socialist hangover": the high taxes remain while the services they fund are effectively gone.
If there's anything you take from this rant, take this: when the state provides health care "to all" "for free", it chooses who lives or dies. I call that murder.
Nevertheless, I welcome the departure to Canada of all whiny leftist brats who think that the US is not free enough.
Would you welcome a 1:1 trade for people, like me, who value freedom (at least as expressed in principle in the U.S. Constutition)? Granted, if the lefty whiner was unemployed, I'd be "taking an American job", but I'd be helping you get rid of a welfare bum in the process. If it makes a difference, my 5 year old son is an American citizen.
You forgot to mention Canada's insideous "Notwithstanding Clause" in its constitution: The federal or a provincial government can overrule the Supreme Court of Canada in declaring a law unconstitutional. Recently, the court ruled that Quebec's law against citizens and landed immigrants paying for health care was unconsitutional, but granted a stay until Quebec decides whether to over-rule its decision (Quebec has indicated that it will).
Bunch o' f*cking communists.
I fought politically tooth and nail, but came to the conclusion that the best way I could fight the monster was to stop feeding it with my tax dollars and leave the country. I currently work on a valid visa in the U.S.
Both "Dragon's Egg" and "Starquake" are worth reading.
The physics used to keep a human-crewed spaceship in close orbit around a neutron star without tidal forces ripping the crew apart are interesting. The appendicies to "Dragon's Egg" have interesting "hard" (well, not really: high school physics should be enough to understand them) derivations.
Another really interesting option is the MythTV frontend port to the Roku Photobridge HD. It's a cheap HD media player, with a hardware MPEG2 decoder
Almost missed that at the end of your post!
I'd been wanting to use the Photobridge in this application for a while!! It uses the ATI Xilleon X225 (or is it the 220?) chip. I wonder if mythroku uses the MPEG2 decoding capabilities of the Xilleon, or relies on the MIPS processor to S/W decode MPEG (which would be a real waste).
(Y, Pb, Pr) = (R, G, B) x [3x3 invertible transformation matrix]
There is no quality difference[1] between RGB and YPbPr, at least not theoretically: consumer sets with YPbPr inputs may not have higher video non-linearity and distortion figures that professional monitors with RGB inputs, but that is not a limitation of the format. [1] If you want to get really pedantic, there may be rounding that takes place to keep the signals within their limits, so the transformation is not perfectly lossless, but this is rarely a practical consideration.
YPbPr (and it's digital equivalent, YCbCr) offer benefits over RGB because they remove correlation between individual signals, which, in turn, reduces bandwidth and storage requirements.
It is true that RGB over SCART was (and is) a superior interface to composite and svideo interfaces commonly used in the U.S. before the advent of YPbPr. RGB was almost always used in professional equipment, sometimes with "sync on green" and sometimes with separate horizontal and vertical sync signal lines (yup: FIVE coax cables: RGBHV).
YPbPr does matter as far as storage is concerned: bandwidth requirements translate into space requirements. The only issue is what piece of equipment transcodes back to RGB to drive the guns: each playback and reception device or the one display.
RGB is the older, and easier technology to deal with, but it is bandwidth heavy, if modulated directly on a carrier. NTSC used a colour phase system to encode colour, losing a lot of colour resolution in the process (of course, the eye tends to be more sensitive to intensity (Y) than colour anyway). YPbPr is just a compact. reversible, coding of RGB (it is, after all, just a 3x3 matrix multiply). I don't see any conspiracy here.
As for Macrovision® that can be carried wherever you have a sync signal, either sync on green, or via separate HV sync lines.
In this country we have bad external RGB (i.e. SVGA) to YPbPr encoders.
YPbPr is prevelent because the transcoding to that format takes less bandwidth (when multiplexed over an analog channel with amplitude (Y) and phase (Pb and Pr) modulation) than raw RGB because of the corelation between the components. RGB is, at best, a color space model that is mathematically elegant. So, the TVs here like to see YPbPr (though, sadly DVI/HDCP is becoming popular) via their component video inputs.
If you're really interested, I can plow through my old Visa statements from the summer to find out who I bought the nano-ITX board from. I remember that they specialized in computer systems for automobiles (DIN-sized motorized slide out and flip-up LCD displays were 'da bomb' for them), and when I expressed surprise that they actually had stock in the U.S. (they had two left when I ordered mine, but were ordering them from Via as fast as they were shipping them out), their sales rep explained that they had a "close, special" relationship with Via.
But, rest assured it isn't vapour.
I think they integrated two chips at the last minute into one package, and had to rework the board to accomodate the heatsink (it covers the C3, and two other chips). The effect was that they (a) had to rotate the power connector 90 degrees in the corner it was in, (b) change the power connector type, and (c) because of the rotated power connector, moved all the back panel connectors about 5 mm toward the right (when viewed from the back). Of course, that made it entirely incompatible with Silverstone's LC07 and LC08 cases. The Silverstone rep I corresponded with let it be known that Silverstone was not pleased claiming Via kept them in the dark.
Slashdot Mirror
The sodium would crack the water at room temperature, yielding sodium hydroxide and hydrogen and heat. The sodium hydoxide solution would attack the aluminum, yielding a sodium aluminate and Alx(OH)y slurry and more hydrogen.
Basically, I was using hydroxide to attack the protective Al2O3 oxide coating on the aluminum, so it could react with water to produce hydrogen, instead of requiring operation at an elevated temperature, though in a car, heat is probably plentiful.
As for the high energy required to refine aluminum from oxide, as another poster noted, this is (a) a good thing, and (b) can be routinely done where there is cheap hydroelectric, or less desirably, nuclear power.
In Canada, aluminum smelters are often located near sources of hydroelectric power, for this reason. Imagine a hydroelectric dam producing electricity to refine aluminum from oxide at it's base, with the refined aluminum and water loaded into such cars. Eventually the cars return (directly or indirectly) their slurry back to the smelter for re-refining.
The car "burns" aluminum to release water to the atmosphere which eventually drives the dam that produces the electricity to refine the "burned" aluminum (while some of the water might be recycled in the car, this will not be perfect).
The whole thing is driven by the Sun, of course. The big question is how efficient can the process be made? It strikes me as having too many steps (with losses all along the way).
Build your own!
But, this is really mostly about the DNS name to address mapping though and, to a lesser degree, about traffic filtering.
That's rather like France complaining that the international dialing prefix for the U.S., Canada, and a few other North American countries is a convenient 1, or that they can't assign me a telephone number or even an area code because I live in Washington state.
Nothing stops any other country or consortium of countries from setting up their own root DNS servers and, if they want, mapping some TLD understood by their servers to he "U.S.-centric" name space, stripping thair funky TLD (though it ceases to be a distributed name service, then, as they'd have to proxy that mapping -- serves them right -- or not interoperate at all.
What's really scary is the degree to which the politicos "just don't get it".
If anything, base internet technology is the most free form of information out there: not kept secret, and not encumbered by patents.
Shouting "Fire!" in a movie theater is protected speech... unless there is no threat of fire.
What is not protected speech is that which is likely to cause a panic. If the imminnent danger of a rapidly spreading fire appears greater, to a "reasonable" person, than the ensuing panic caused by anouncing the fact, it is quite alright to shout "Fire!". ("Reasonable" is is ultimately defined by a judge or jury).
Bullshit, not even that: it's "Here, service that sends me back stuff, when I send you stuff, have some stuff!".
If someone rings my phone, and I answer, I can hardly be upset if he utters (non-obscene )words I don't like. The parallel to this case is "unauthorized talking": i.e. telling me something that I didn't like to hear upon my invitation to you to speak.
No, killed by being shot several times despite being unarmed. Don't you read the news?
I'm looking to make a small Via nano-ITX MythTV silent client box in a Silverstone LC-08 case and have run into difficulties between the mobo and the case -- an earlier thread on the issue is here. Unlike other designs, this has HD MPEG2 decoding hardware with a low power budget.
Basically, Via changed the mobo layout at the last minute and it no longer fits in the LC-08 case. Silverstone supposedly will have new cases ready this month (October '05), but the new design will spec a fan, wheras the old design was completely fanless (using a heatblock to transfer heat to the top of the case).
Seriously, this really is the whole control issue that's at the heart of most proprietary/open source battles.
While there may be good reasons for there to be a set of root DNS servers (what's in a name anyway?) independent of a U.S. company, that does not mean that said company can not continue to do business: It's not like you can't invent your own names and numbers in your namespace.
Over time, this might lead to "well-known" top level codes being country codes, with interoperability between .ab and .cd via proxies (oh, how the walls go up), with .com, .net, and .org becomming anachronisms of a pre-balkanized 'net. Nations do tend to get protective of their interests (well, those of their governments if not their citizens, anyway).
Perhaps we should see a silver lining to this cloud: the creation of the first cyberspace nation, owning the non-national domains, with laws of it's own regarding what happens in it's corner of cyberspace. Peering 'd be a bit of a hassle, but I don't see it as insurmountable. I can certainly envision a black market in the tunnelling of the "free internet" traffic to and through certain countries, though.
A "fair use" is one that does not infringe on the copyright holder's ability to exploit their work for gain.
Whether a use is "fair" depends on a number of factors: 1) does the user profit from it at the expense of the copyright holder, 2) is the use educational, 3) is the use a criticism of the work, 4) does the use involve the whole work, or a small portion of it?
An example of a "fair use", is whistling a song you heard on the radio, or playing a purchased tape or CD of it in your car. While others may hear the tune, they are not likely to pay the copyright holder to have someone walk or drive by them just to hear the song.
Now, if you hold a public performance, it gets a bit more dicey: you're competing with authorized performances (since the performance is the production of a copy, however ephemeral or transient). Playing CDs at a party at your house to a small crowd of people is O.K.
In either case, charging admission makes it not O.K., particularly if the reproduction is what induces people to pay the admission price.
The areas that are grey are things like a barber playing a radio in his shop while tending to customers. That's likely O.K. (since people don't go into barber shops to listen to music), but playing the radio to relieve the boredom of customers waiting their turn is probably not O.K.: you're using the work to make your business more attractive than your competition who provides no distractions for waiting customers. Still, it's iffy enough to not be a good idea even in the former case: whether intentional or not, waiting customers have their boredom relieved by the radio they can hear.
In the case of downloading the CD equivalent of an old, scratched album, you have, clearly you're getting something you didn't have before: better quality, so its likely not O.K. Downloading the CD equivalent of the CD you paid for that got scratched beyond playability would seam O.K.: you're not getting anything you didn't already pay for. A poor MP3 dowloaded to replace the scratchy album could be argued to be fine on the basis of comparable quality as well. But, of course, the copyright holder would argue strongly against this position. Do you want to test it in the courts?
... is indistinguishable from art.
Tax yourselves, then. But, you won't tax me. I earn an honest wage, and support my spouse and children. (Funny how Quebec never reimbursed me against my taxes what it would cost to support them if they were on welfare.)
But, tell me, how are you not screwed by the government when there is no doctor to see your sick kid, or hospital bed for your organ transplant recovery, or you have to wait in debillitating pain for routine surgery? How are you not screwed when the rate of violent crime against women in Canada is double what it is in the U.S. (I guess you're not a woman)? How are you not screwed when the extra taxes you pay for universal healthcare leaves you with waiting lists when the difference compared to a U.S. tax burden would pay for the best health insurance in the country? (About US$14k a year for family coverage)?
Ah, fuck it: we each have what we deserve, and I'm happy with my lot.
Granted, fragmentation would be bad, but it strikes me as inevitable as long as there are physical borders.
Enforcement of the use of particular root servers would, of course, be interesting to see attempted.
Except by the biggest guy of all: the government. The unemployment rate is what, again? The tax rate is what again? You wait how long for a tonsillectomy? Mon dieu! Vous etes fou: tres, tres fou.
Behold: Communism in all it's glory.
And, I'll start to learn French when les Quebecois realize it's "pommes du terre fritez", and not "patates frites"; "le weekend" and not "la fin du semmaine"; and "le parking" and not "la stationnement". Then again, I suppose you've never visited Paris, you know, that city in France, where they speak French?
Er, in Canada, the federal and provincial governments can trump the Supreme Court, by applying the "Notwithstanding Clause" in the Canadian Constitution.
This is likely to happen (again) in Quebec, where the government has indicated its intent to pass legislation overruling the Supreme Court's decision that it is unconstitutional to prevent a patient from paying a doctor for service, where the patient would otherwise have to wait under the "free" universal healthcare system. The Court, has stayed its decision until the government decides whether to overrule it. (Foreigners, of course, can purchase all the health insurance, or direct medical services, they want, with no waiting, so this may not affect you. Only in Canada, do citizens come second.)
The logic behind this absurd "Notwithstanding Clause" in the Canadian constitution is this: Judges are appointed, not elected, and so can not be the final arbiters of justice in a democracy. Naturally, this gives enourmous power to the legislatures and effectively renders the courts impotent.
Contrast the U.S., where, though Supreme Court (and Federal District, IIRC) judges are nominated by the Executive branch (i.e. the President), and confirmed by the Legislative branch (i.e. the Senate) -- the People's elected representatives do get a kick at the can, so to speak, but only one.
Another mechanism to keep judicial review in the hands of the elected represenatatives might be via judicial recall or impeachment, though existing decisions prior to such recall or impeachment should stand.
Stealing?
I dunno. I came here quite of my own free will. No one "stole" me -- bribed me perhaps :-).
I don't particularly mind having to jump through all the INS hoops -- after all, one doesn't just waltz into a place and get to benefit from the infrastructure already there. But, I wish the process wouldn't take so long. I'm on my second LC (a prerequisite for a "green card" -- "proves" that there is no American that can do my job for the prevailing wage) application -- the first was granted, but the green card lost because I had to change jobs before it was granted.
I could almost see the benefits of a "mixed" economy -- many socialist countries with "two tier" healthcare actually seem to deliver a reasonable level of care to everyone (the same way that U.S. welfare provides a "reasonable" level of existence) with better care available to those that pay. But, Canada has to have "universal" healthcare, and here, communism reigns supreme. Service sucks, taxes are high, waiting lists are long -- no evidence of any single payor economies of scale that should arise. Even if one thinks that some wealth redistribution is a good idea (and I don't), in Canada it is horribly inefficient and ineffective.
What's most maddening is that people are so blind as to how bad it is.
After the telecom bust, I had to leave the U.S. and return to Canada, like the good little law-abiding foreigner I was, having been layed off. I did so, dutifully, not wanting to ruin any chances to return legally in the future. For 18 months we (myself, wife, daughter, and son) lived in a suburb of Toronto. It was pure hell. Not being able to file jointly (my wife does not work), or deduct mortage interest meant my taxes were about triple what they'd be in the U.S. Canadian law requres a husband to "maintain the standard of living to which a wife has become accustomed", and with the taxes this was impossible -- we traded a brick 3200 square foot in Texas for one half that size. My poor daughter, when innocently presenting her previous years' school yearbook for "show and tell" was berrated by her teacher for "showing off" something "no Canadian child could ever hope to have": an elementary school yearbook. Never mind the fact that the school didn't have a cafeteria that served hot lunches (see, that would be "unfair" to the kids that couldn't afford food).
Canada is an excellent example of the failure of socialism. It was all well and good in the late '60s and early '70s, but then it becake time to pay the piper. While the national debt has been brought in check (there was little choice when 30% of the tax revenue went to pay the interest on it), all the social programs (including healthcare) have gone to hell. Of course, the high taxes remain.
So, Canada suffers the "socialist hangover": the high taxes remain while the services they fund are effectively gone.
If there's anything you take from this rant, take this: when the state provides health care "to all" "for free", it chooses who lives or dies. I call that murder.
Would you welcome a 1:1 trade for people, like me, who value freedom (at least as expressed in principle in the U.S. Constutition)? Granted, if the lefty whiner was unemployed, I'd be "taking an American job", but I'd be helping you get rid of a welfare bum in the process. If it makes a difference, my 5 year old son is an American citizen.
You forgot to mention Canada's insideous "Notwithstanding Clause" in its constitution: The federal or a provincial government can overrule the Supreme Court of Canada in declaring a law unconstitutional. Recently, the court ruled that Quebec's law against citizens and landed immigrants paying for health care was unconsitutional, but granted a stay until Quebec decides whether to over-rule its decision (Quebec has indicated that it will).
Bunch o' f*cking communists.
I fought politically tooth and nail, but came to the conclusion that the best way I could fight the monster was to stop feeding it with my tax dollars and leave the country. I currently work on a valid visa in the U.S.
The physics used to keep a human-crewed spaceship in close orbit around a neutron star without tidal forces ripping the crew apart are interesting. The appendicies to "Dragon's Egg" have interesting "hard" (well, not really: high school physics should be enough to understand them) derivations.
Worked on that a bit while I was employed there.
Basically, we use synchronize routing table state across several hot-standby routers, so failover is instantaneous, limiting flapping in the network.
Rather cool, actually.
Almost missed that at the end of your post!
I'd been wanting to use the Photobridge in this application for a while!! It uses the ATI Xilleon X225 (or is it the 220?) chip. I wonder if mythroku uses the MPEG2 decoding capabilities of the Xilleon, or relies on the MIPS processor to S/W decode MPEG (which would be a real waste).
This is where I got my nano-ITX N10000 mobo.
Why anyone would want to use a VT1623 with a CN400 is anyone's guess, but it is common on mini-ITX boards (and frustrating).
There is no quality difference[1] between RGB and YPbPr, at least not theoretically: consumer sets with YPbPr inputs may not have higher video non-linearity and distortion figures that professional monitors with RGB inputs, but that is not a limitation of the format. [1] If you want to get really pedantic, there may be rounding that takes place to keep the signals within their limits, so the transformation is not perfectly lossless, but this is rarely a practical consideration.
YPbPr (and it's digital equivalent, YCbCr) offer benefits over RGB because they remove correlation between individual signals, which, in turn, reduces bandwidth and storage requirements.
It is true that RGB over SCART was (and is) a superior interface to composite and svideo interfaces commonly used in the U.S. before the advent of YPbPr. RGB was almost always used in professional equipment, sometimes with "sync on green" and sometimes with separate horizontal and vertical sync signal lines (yup: FIVE coax cables: RGBHV).
RGB is the older, and easier technology to deal with, but it is bandwidth heavy, if modulated directly on a carrier. NTSC used a colour phase system to encode colour, losing a lot of colour resolution in the process (of course, the eye tends to be more sensitive to intensity (Y) than colour anyway). YPbPr is just a compact. reversible, coding of RGB (it is, after all, just a 3x3 matrix multiply). I don't see any conspiracy here.
As for Macrovision® that can be carried wherever you have a sync signal, either sync on green, or via separate HV sync lines.
YPbPr is prevelent because the transcoding to that format takes less bandwidth (when multiplexed over an analog channel with amplitude (Y) and phase (Pb and Pr) modulation) than raw RGB because of the corelation between the components. RGB is, at best, a color space model that is mathematically elegant. So, the TVs here like to see YPbPr (though, sadly DVI/HDCP is becoming popular) via their component video inputs.
But, rest assured it isn't vapour.
I think they integrated two chips at the last minute into one package, and had to rework the board to accomodate the heatsink (it covers the C3, and two other chips). The effect was that they (a) had to rotate the power connector 90 degrees in the corner it was in, (b) change the power connector type, and (c) because of the rotated power connector, moved all the back panel connectors about 5 mm toward the right (when viewed from the back). Of course, that made it entirely incompatible with Silverstone's LC07 and LC08 cases. The Silverstone rep I corresponded with let it be known that Silverstone was not pleased claiming Via kept them in the dark.
They took forever to release them, but the nano-ITX boards are not vapour. I have one.