I've had this very idea before and think it would be great. Instead of a sphere, though, I'd think of being on the inside of a many-sided polygon.
I'm not sure which would be more valuable, a multi desktop or a multi monitor paradigm, perhaps both, or all three -- multiple desktops within a polygon, some desktops spanning multiple polygon faces, and perhaps a multiple polygon paradigm as well. It gets kind of trippy if you start thinking of how you would implement this with multiple physical monitors.
Anyway, they all require that you be able to see and interact with all visble sphere faces simultaneously, as well as being able to change your virtual camera's pan/zoom/angle and field of view. Navigating the polygon might be the hardest part, although it could be made easier with commands to make your camera centered and perpendicular to a polygon face or faces.
I think this is a really great idea. There's limits to how many physical monitors you can have, and windows are unfortunately fixed resolution, so tiling them doesn't accomplish the same goal as zooming out on many of them. The inside-of-a-polygon also gives you a geometic advantage by allowing more screens than a simple 2-D rectangular layout.
Re:They forgot about "TV Recording"
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TiVo to Offer SDK
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· Score: 1
$50 after rebate is too much for a 40G TiVo? C'mon, that's just silly.
Sure, but it's another $300 for lifetime service. Not worth it, at least _another_ standalone standard-def one isn't to me. A cablecard standard def one would be, though. Still a bad bet for basic TV watchers vs. cable provided boxes, they can be had for $10 per month, making the Tivo box a 3+ year investment to pay back.
A mistep on standards at this point could be monstrously expensive for any company, be they makers of DVRs or disc burners.
So freakin' innovate. Partner with nVidia or ATI to come up with programmable decoders that can adapt to new codecs; since we're talking MPEG4 variants and MPEG2, none of this should be too hard. It won't be a $1.50 IC, but part of the idea is to make the devices worthwhile to buy.
Even if HD goes nutty for MPEG4 (I'm not convinced they will) and the box becomes obsolete for HD content, it's just an incentive to buy another box. The boxes can be sold for a profit, not just as loss leaders on increasingly too-expensive monthly service fees, and hardware churn sells boxes.
There are ways to do DVD burning. However, think about the data rate required. The TiVos weren't designed for that, they're basically drivers for some dedicated MPEG2 chips, not wide buses.
See above. Tivo needs to stop viewing itself as a razors & blades business where the razors (hardware) are given away and the blades are sold for a big margin. Look at the hardware as a profit center and quit figuring out a way to build the boxes so darned cheaply; build them so that they can be smarter and more flexible.
Most of these Tivo could and should have been added years ago, but they have instead wasted resources on stuff like HMO and PC2Go. Not that those things aren't somehow valuable, but they're much better as farmed out SDK items than as Tivo-produced.
Tivo has also failed to see their hardware line as a source of profitability. It's kind of pathetic that as a geek I can't justify buying a new standalone 3 years after buying my first. At a bare minimum, where's digital audio recording? Why isn't a cablecard (despite the limitations of 1.0) Tivo that does HD and digital audio out *now*? Why not Tivos with 1394/USB2 interfaces for HDD expansion or adding DVD recorders? Even if the boxes need to be Tivo branded, *I* would buy them.
I love my Tivo and won't trade it, but not having HD recording and digital audio is increasingly frustrating. I'm increasingly tempted to trade up my SA3250 for the HD DVR Time Warner offers to AT LEAST get HD recording ability.
(DirecTV zealots: I can't have DirecTV, so don't start in on DirecTivo.)
You're right, although until I did some simple math it didn't seem like that.
Maybe having the buffer size be 4G or something up front makes more sense; this way you could write it all to the buffer. You could have the camera either auto-copy to flash or not copy to flash. The camera could store more video than a single flash card and for some situations, you'd just transfer the video directly from buffer to PC.
RAM is cheap enough these days that it might make sense.
It's a far fetched dream, but I'd like to see an ultrabasic meta-os that would basically be for managing hardware resources and VMs, with actual desktop OS environment(s) booted within VMs.
Kind of like booting an OS, and then running VMWare and actually having your everyday environments in VMWare. Except the "OS" in my dream isn't a full-fledged OS and hardware resources can be exclusively reserved for specific VMs, and the VMs run faster.
Which still seems dubious considering it wouldn't have been terribly expensive to add nnn MB of RAM to buffer writes, thus eliminating the need to use MemoryShaft.
The 3CCD consumer camera from Panny one up from mine will do MPEG4/WMV to SD memory. Since it's not my model, I forget if its crippled to 15FPS or not. But with a big enough card it would be meaningful.
Muslim unity is grossly oversold. Bin Laden is able to maintain safe haven in Pashtun tribal areas with money, not with his reputation as a Muslim hero. Remember in 2000 when Iran massed troops on their Afghan border (and probably performed some cross-border raids/recon that never got in the Western press); what does THAT tell you about "muslim unity"?
Muslim unity supposes a functional hierarchy; leaders and followers. Except Islam doesn't have a formal structure like Catholicism or Protestant denominations, furthermore "leadership" gets confused with statecraft; when I take marching orders from an Ayatollah in, say, Iran, am I taking the best religious advice for my sect, or am I actually furthering the goals of Iran? Of the Persians?
With the competing political demands of ethnicity, religion and nation-states all mixed together in Islamic countries, it's easy to see how Muslim unity gets really tough to rely on.
These people are family members, clan members, tribal members, ethnic group members, and religious members in that order and in that order of loyalty.
The Pashtun had a good thing going before Bin Laden in the tribal areas. The last thing they want is the Pakistani army snooping around, and ESPECIALLY not a bunch of US special forces guys who have the scary habit of seeing in the dark and being able to squawk into a radio and rain down hell from the sky. It's a choice between Bin Laden or having AC-130s tear up your villages; for now the Bin Laden's money has equalized the equation. On day it might not.
We talked to our phone system vendor a couple of days ago and suprisingly (to me, anyway) she didn't make a case for forklift upgrades to VoIP and actually acknowledged that interoperability didn't exist right now. Given that we have a 61c running 21.xx with 2000 series handsets, I expected a full-blown VoIP sales pitch.
One thing I found interesting was that she said that SIP interoperability was coming and that Nortel wanted it to come as they wanted to be out of the handset business. It seemed odd given the prices that even 2008s command these days, but I guess unless you churn your handset designs frequently it doesn't take very long for the secondary market to deeply undercut a vendor's pricing.
Hate to break it to you, dumbass, but its unlikely any of the people the U.S. arrested on visa violations after 9/11 had anything to do with 9/11 or hijacking planes, or crashing them into buildings. They were mostly guilty of being Muslim and being in the U.S. after 9/11 and at worst violating their visas.
Sorry, but I'll take denying illegal immigrants associated with suspect behavior a measure of "their" (they're not citizens) civil rights versus just assuming that all the Muslims in the US are shiny happy people who love America, American culture and American values and aren't contributing support in person, materially or otherwise to Islamofascists bent on killing people.
I'll grant you that Iraq was/is a clusterfuck, but you dramatically overstate the "success" Bin Laden's been experiencing.
Bin Laden personally: Kicked out of Afghanistan, lost his host government and is living life as a hunted man. Not a cheap proposition for an Arab in Pashtun regions.
Al Quaeda generally: Lost their host country. Experiencing small succcesses against the US military, but all are pyhrric victories given that we've been stacking dead terrorists there like cordwood. One unstated virtue of the Iraqi occupation is that it's far better for them to take out their aggression with only slight success against the US military than it is against the US civilian population. Further, Al Quaeda cells across Europe are under extreme scrutiny and Europe is currently re-evaluating the entire premise of multiculturism given the Islamic killings in Holland and elsewhere.
Depsite America's apparent loss of diplomatic prestige, post-9/11 we have the largest military presence we've ever had in the middle east, not to mention new military bases in Afghanistan and several central Asian republics.
They are very unlikely to do this to a foreign citizen unless what you are doing is or can be construed to be espionage or subversion.
Am I expected to rely on my extensive rights within the independent Chinese judicial system as the protection against the Interior Ministry arbitrarily construing my behavior as espionage/subversion related?
Hundreds if not thousands of foreigners have been locked up in the U.S. in the aftermath of 9/11 without due process, without lawyers, without trials, without access to their families, and often under varying degrees of stress, sleep deprivation for example, if not rising to the level of torture. About the only thing many of them were guilty of are various visa infractions, which should at most have resulted in deportation, not indefinite detention without due process.
Maybe we should have just driven tanks over them like they did in Tiananmen Square. Sure, peaceful protest in the name of democracy is a lot more dangerous and kills more people than terrorist plots to fly hijacked planes into buildings, but just to keep on equal footing with the Chinese perhaps a mass killing was called for.
Shit, I wish I did, other than PR/Press release crap I read on nVidia's web site.
As with anything promising, it's not worth a damn unless someone comes up with codecs written to make it work. Of course it's typical for a hardware company to add some features that nobody ever exploits.
I have long been looking for/wondering why there's not some $129 board I can plug into my system and get at least 2x real time MPEG2 encoding, given the fact that $229 will buy you a settop DVD recorder that will do at least 1x real time MPEG2 encoding. Put two MPEG2 encoders from that box on a board and you should be able to get 2x encoding.
The nVidia GPU solution sounds much, much more elegant as it ought to be much more flexible and possible to get higher multiples of real time, in addition to custom transcode codecs (MPEG2->Xvid, Xvid->WM9, etc) so that you didn't have to do multiple transcodes to get where you needed to be.
What further surprises me is that as popular as video is, the MPEG2 encode times are crushingly slow even on fast machines. This would be a killer app, IMHO, and I'm surprised there's not further development of this.
IIRC the newest series of nVidia cards support that plus more, enabling (according to the PR, anyway) stuff like faster-than-real-time video transcoding.
I bought an MD player and deck in 97 or 98. At the time it was fabulous, at least as a direct replacement of cassette tape. If Sony would have paid attention and done the right thing, MD players could have easily been ubiquitous and maybe even have stopped the iPod (sorry, a little hyperbole to keep you reading).
Their optical disc format held 230MB way back then, even the first MP3 players had 64 and sometimes only 32MB of fixed flash. Getting nearly 4x storage on a single MD for MP3s, $5 media and -- the part Sony never did get right -- MP3 playback and computer connectivity would have been huge back then. There was a Palm/MD player someone put together as a concept on the MD user web site even back then that suggested what they could have done.
Sure, you can get 1GB flash cards now, but back then you couldn't, and Sony would have had such a huge market that all they would to have done was just add flash sockets (and not MemoryStick, another mistake).
As it was they refused MP3 and are now just a dusty relic on my shelf I don't know what to do with.
IIRC, cablecard is a FCC mandated standard, not an optional one. While lobbying and foot dragging might make the standard implentation deadlines extended, the actual implementation is a requirement. I'd also imagine that 2.0 would be backwards compatible with 1.0 headends and vice-versa.
I can see where Tivo wouldn't want to waste a lot of development effort with a 1.0 standard box if 2.0 was around the corner, however, this demonstrates to me two problems: 1) Tivo isn't doing enough ongoing hardware development to modularize the Tivo guts to make a 2.0 upgrade simpler, and 2) that Tivo is ignoring the "tech churn" phenomena of coming out with newer/better hardware on a regular basis, denying themselves revenue by preventing upgrade opportunities.
Around our house, dual tuner is actually less of an issue than direct-stream HD recording capabilities, which even 1.0 should have given (unless I'm grossly misunderstanding the capabilities of CableCard).
Failure to provide HD recording (and digital audio recording/integration) is a real missing feature for Tivo right now.
I think a lot of people in the income group capable of buying Tivo are also Digital Cable subscribers, too. SA Tivos work fine with Digital Cable and the IR extenders, but it makes changing channels slow, its overly complicated and about once every month or so my cable box freezes/reboots, which puts it out of sync with the Tivo (power-cycling not being a function Tivo can do via IR).
Furthermore, this same group probably has HD TV, and CableCard would give Tivo the ability to do direct-to-disc recording of the stream ala DirecTivo, which would enable HD recording.
Plus it would give them a reason to rev the boxen in other ways (digital audio, etc) and sell more boxes.
I'd say that the deferred compensation/savings thing could best be taught with a passbook savings account as soon as the child understands what money is at a basic level.
Give the kid $2 per week allowance and tell them they have to save $1 in the bank. Tell them that for every 10 dollars they put in the bank, the bank will give them $1 [you will actually do this yourself]. Tell them that when they get to a certain high amount ($30 or something) they can use HALF the money saved to buy something.
Here's where the lesson comes -- when they see the amount of money coming and are within 6 weeks of being able to buy something, get them interested in something 2x or 3x as expensive (this isn't hard, actually) and tell them they if they KEEP SAVING, they'll be able to buy this. This is aided by making a big deal out of checking the bank balance every so often.
If you do this right, you eventually convince the kid that there's nothing that they can't buy provided they save/invest enough. If they get set on actually buying something, hopefully they'll value their long-term dream and their savings enough to not spend it all.
But even wealthy men have told me that you can't take it with you.
If you had started investing heavily in high school and college and your first n years of work, what are the chances that you could have a big enough nest egg to not do wage slavery in a corporation and work on something you like (for money, but only enough to buy food or other basic necessities -- a vanity job, if you will)?
Even if its not enough for early retirement (and it probably would be by age 40 or 45), it might be a nice nest egg useful for starting a business, buying a home (outright, or nearly so) or even some other luxury-type purchase (presumably with an investment value, like a summer home or ski condo).
The problem with investing in an IRA is the money's locked in until your're old. Yes, there's tax deferrals, but that's primarily of value to wage slaves with medium/high incomes who will (a) invest over a long time and (b) don't need the money for a long time and (c) want/need a tax deduction.
If you started investing early enough you might have enough money built up that waiting until traditional retirement age to get at it was a big disadvantage.
Well, didn't phishing initally get its start as a small-time deal to snag AOL accounts?
After that it's largely a semantic debate as to what makes something an organized crime (2 guys working together?) and how many thousands you have to steal to not be petty.
Asking why we don't monitor whites because of the IRA/ETA or any of the other half-dozen regional seperatist/self-government terroist movements in Europe is disingenious, and you know it. None of those organizations has targeted Americans specifically or America generally, and they certainly haven't turned to "anti-Western" International terrorist tactics.
Sophistic arguments about "terrorists" working together doesn't hold water, either. I don't see a group of Irish Catholic revolutionaries having much to say/do with middle eastern Islamic radicals, particularly given radical Islam's intolerance.
There is no internal white US terrorist movement, either. McVeigh's act wasn't part of a movement or broader organization. We may have green card or other middle eastern citizens with terrorist aspirations, though.
That the large majority of middle eastern men aren't terrorists is a red herring as well, since it only takes *one* to blow up an airplane, and they have repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to do so.
Given their willingness to continue this behavior, watching for terrorist activity is a good idea. Giving into terror is failing to acknowledge who the terrorists are and treating the entire population as terrorists.
I wondered if the people who put the region concept together didn't figure on not only protecting regional price differentials, but gaining better entry to markets sensitive to content for ideological reasons by "ensuring" that content they didn't like wasn't playable on the recorders commonly available within that region.
This would explain why the region code map has some significant geographical incongruities and why China is its own region.
From what I can tell, the people blowing themselves and others up (c.f. "9/11") all tend to fit a common ethnic profile -- men of Middle Eastern origin. So why *not* perform ethnic profiling, at least on this group?
IIRC, the airlines have stopped doing random carry on checks for domestic flights at the gate, but almost universally the people I saw checked most often were elderly caucasian women, the ethnic group least associated with any kind of terrorism.
What baffles me is that we know good and well who the terrorist threat is, and yet we continue to deny this and act like a general security crackdown is both necessary and relevant. This is bad because it shows our willingness to subvert the truth in the name of political correctness, it dilutes the resources necessary to actually focus on the real threat and it dilutes freedom and liberty for the entire population.
But some of that assumes you would have the money and wherewithal to get 10 doctorates, which is another of the challenges of a 1000 lifespan. It's not like you work until 65 and then retire for the next 935 years. You might have to smiply get a *job* and work like a schlub just to pay the bills. The ability to play 20-something grad student for 100 years might not exist.
And then there's the question as to whether you *could* switch careers, or at least be competitive if you did. What if most interesting careers were dominated by people who didn't leave them? PhD or not, how do you compete with someone who has 300 years of hands-on experience? How do you join a team of 10 that has a collective 2500 years of experience? It'd be like watching one episode of Judge Judy and then trying to join the Supreme Court!
And assuming you have to switch careers (eg, yours becomes obsolete) and its for an income related purpose, do you end up doing the shit work for 10 years, 50 years, 100 years before you can move up?
The more I think about it, the more it strikes me that 1K year lifespans would be just like 80 year lifespans, just with everything we experience now multiplied by 10.
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I've been tempted to block portions of APNIC space, do this but have been stymied by the lack of a decent reference.
Is there one?
I've had this very idea before and think it would be great. Instead of a sphere, though, I'd think of being on the inside of a many-sided polygon.
I'm not sure which would be more valuable, a multi desktop or a multi monitor paradigm, perhaps both, or all three -- multiple desktops within a polygon, some desktops spanning multiple polygon faces, and perhaps a multiple polygon paradigm as well. It gets kind of trippy if you start thinking of how you would implement this with multiple physical monitors.
Anyway, they all require that you be able to see and interact with all visble sphere faces simultaneously, as well as being able to change your virtual camera's pan/zoom/angle and field of view. Navigating the polygon might be the hardest part, although it could be made easier with commands to make your camera centered and perpendicular to a polygon face or faces.
I think this is a really great idea. There's limits to how many physical monitors you can have, and windows are unfortunately fixed resolution, so tiling them doesn't accomplish the same goal as zooming out on many of them. The inside-of-a-polygon also gives you a geometic advantage by allowing more screens than a simple 2-D rectangular layout.
$50 after rebate is too much for a 40G TiVo? C'mon, that's just silly.
Sure, but it's another $300 for lifetime service. Not worth it, at least _another_ standalone standard-def one isn't to me. A cablecard standard def one would be, though. Still a bad bet for basic TV watchers vs. cable provided boxes, they can be had for $10 per month, making the Tivo box a 3+ year investment to pay back.
A mistep on standards at this point could be monstrously expensive for any company, be they makers of DVRs or disc burners.
So freakin' innovate. Partner with nVidia or ATI to come up with programmable decoders that can adapt to new codecs; since we're talking MPEG4 variants and MPEG2, none of this should be too hard. It won't be a $1.50 IC, but part of the idea is to make the devices worthwhile to buy.
Even if HD goes nutty for MPEG4 (I'm not convinced they will) and the box becomes obsolete for HD content, it's just an incentive to buy another box. The boxes can be sold for a profit, not just as loss leaders on increasingly too-expensive monthly service fees, and hardware churn sells boxes.
There are ways to do DVD burning. However, think about the data rate required. The TiVos weren't designed for that, they're basically drivers for some dedicated MPEG2 chips, not wide buses.
See above. Tivo needs to stop viewing itself as a razors & blades business where the razors (hardware) are given away and the blades are sold for a big margin. Look at the hardware as a profit center and quit figuring out a way to build the boxes so darned cheaply; build them so that they can be smarter and more flexible.
Check this list of missing features:
Megazone's Tivo Feature Wishlist
Most of these Tivo could and should have been added years ago, but they have instead wasted resources on stuff like HMO and PC2Go. Not that those things aren't somehow valuable, but they're much better as farmed out SDK items than as Tivo-produced.
Tivo has also failed to see their hardware line as a source of profitability. It's kind of pathetic that as a geek I can't justify buying a new standalone 3 years after buying my first. At a bare minimum, where's digital audio recording? Why isn't a cablecard (despite the limitations of 1.0) Tivo that does HD and digital audio out *now*? Why not Tivos with 1394/USB2 interfaces for HDD expansion or adding DVD recorders? Even if the boxes need to be Tivo branded, *I* would buy them.
I love my Tivo and won't trade it, but not having HD recording and digital audio is increasingly frustrating. I'm increasingly tempted to trade up my SA3250 for the HD DVR Time Warner offers to AT LEAST get HD recording ability.
(DirecTV zealots: I can't have DirecTV, so don't start in on DirecTivo.)
You're right, although until I did some simple math it didn't seem like that.
Maybe having the buffer size be 4G or something up front makes more sense; this way you could write it all to the buffer. You could have the camera either auto-copy to flash or not copy to flash. The camera could store more video than a single flash card and for some situations, you'd just transfer the video directly from buffer to PC.
RAM is cheap enough these days that it might make sense.
It's a far fetched dream, but I'd like to see an ultrabasic meta-os that would basically be for managing hardware resources and VMs, with actual desktop OS environment(s) booted within VMs.
Kind of like booting an OS, and then running VMWare and actually having your everyday environments in VMWare. Except the "OS" in my dream isn't a full-fledged OS and hardware resources can be exclusively reserved for specific VMs, and the VMs run faster.
Which still seems dubious considering it wouldn't have been terribly expensive to add nnn MB of RAM to buffer writes, thus eliminating the need to use MemoryShaft.
The 3CCD consumer camera from Panny one up from mine will do MPEG4/WMV to SD memory. Since it's not my model, I forget if its crippled to 15FPS or not. But with a big enough card it would be meaningful.
Muslim unity is grossly oversold. Bin Laden is able to maintain safe haven in Pashtun tribal areas with money, not with his reputation as a Muslim hero. Remember in 2000 when Iran massed troops on their Afghan border (and probably performed some cross-border raids/recon that never got in the Western press); what does THAT tell you about "muslim unity"?
Muslim unity supposes a functional hierarchy; leaders and followers. Except Islam doesn't have a formal structure like Catholicism or Protestant denominations, furthermore "leadership" gets confused with statecraft; when I take marching orders from an Ayatollah in, say, Iran, am I taking the best religious advice for my sect, or am I actually furthering the goals of Iran? Of the Persians?
With the competing political demands of ethnicity, religion and nation-states all mixed together in Islamic countries, it's easy to see how Muslim unity gets really tough to rely on.
These people are family members, clan members, tribal members, ethnic group members, and religious members in that order and in that order of loyalty.
The Pashtun had a good thing going before Bin Laden in the tribal areas. The last thing they want is the Pakistani army snooping around, and ESPECIALLY not a bunch of US special forces guys who have the scary habit of seeing in the dark and being able to squawk into a radio and rain down hell from the sky. It's a choice between Bin Laden or having AC-130s tear up your villages; for now the Bin Laden's money has equalized the equation. On day it might not.
We talked to our phone system vendor a couple of days ago and suprisingly (to me, anyway) she didn't make a case for forklift upgrades to VoIP and actually acknowledged that interoperability didn't exist right now. Given that we have a 61c running 21.xx with 2000 series handsets, I expected a full-blown VoIP sales pitch.
One thing I found interesting was that she said that SIP interoperability was coming and that Nortel wanted it to come as they wanted to be out of the handset business. It seemed odd given the prices that even 2008s command these days, but I guess unless you churn your handset designs frequently it doesn't take very long for the secondary market to deeply undercut a vendor's pricing.
Hate to break it to you, dumbass, but its unlikely any of the people the U.S. arrested on visa violations after 9/11 had anything to do with 9/11 or hijacking planes, or crashing them into buildings. They were mostly guilty of being Muslim and being in the U.S. after 9/11 and at worst violating their visas.
Sorry, but I'll take denying illegal immigrants associated with suspect behavior a measure of "their" (they're not citizens) civil rights versus just assuming that all the Muslims in the US are shiny happy people who love America, American culture and American values and aren't contributing support in person, materially or otherwise to Islamofascists bent on killing people.
I'll grant you that Iraq was/is a clusterfuck, but you dramatically overstate the "success" Bin Laden's been experiencing.
Bin Laden personally: Kicked out of Afghanistan, lost his host government and is living life as a hunted man. Not a cheap proposition for an Arab in Pashtun regions.
Al Quaeda generally: Lost their host country. Experiencing small succcesses against the US military, but all are pyhrric victories given that we've been stacking dead terrorists there like cordwood. One unstated virtue of the Iraqi occupation is that it's far better for them to take out their aggression with only slight success against the US military than it is against the US civilian population. Further, Al Quaeda cells across Europe are under extreme scrutiny and Europe is currently re-evaluating the entire premise of multiculturism given the Islamic killings in Holland and elsewhere.
Depsite America's apparent loss of diplomatic prestige, post-9/11 we have the largest military presence we've ever had in the middle east, not to mention new military bases in Afghanistan and several central Asian republics.
They are very unlikely to do this to a foreign citizen unless what you are doing is or can be construed to be espionage or subversion.
Am I expected to rely on my extensive rights within the independent Chinese judicial system as the protection against the Interior Ministry arbitrarily construing my behavior as espionage/subversion related?
Hundreds if not thousands of foreigners have been locked up in the U.S. in the aftermath of 9/11 without due process, without lawyers, without trials, without access to their families, and often under varying degrees of stress, sleep deprivation for example, if not rising to the level of torture. About the only thing many of them were guilty of are various visa infractions, which should at most have resulted in deportation, not indefinite detention without due process.
Maybe we should have just driven tanks over them like they did in Tiananmen Square. Sure, peaceful protest in the name of democracy is a lot more dangerous and kills more people than terrorist plots to fly hijacked planes into buildings, but just to keep on equal footing with the Chinese perhaps a mass killing was called for.
Asshat.
Shit, I wish I did, other than PR/Press release crap I read on nVidia's web site.
As with anything promising, it's not worth a damn unless someone comes up with codecs written to make it work. Of course it's typical for a hardware company to add some features that nobody ever exploits.
I have long been looking for/wondering why there's not some $129 board I can plug into my system and get at least 2x real time MPEG2 encoding, given the fact that $229 will buy you a settop DVD recorder that will do at least 1x real time MPEG2 encoding. Put two MPEG2 encoders from that box on a board and you should be able to get 2x encoding.
The nVidia GPU solution sounds much, much more elegant as it ought to be much more flexible and possible to get higher multiples of real time, in addition to custom transcode codecs (MPEG2->Xvid, Xvid->WM9, etc) so that you didn't have to do multiple transcodes to get where you needed to be.
What further surprises me is that as popular as video is, the MPEG2 encode times are crushingly slow even on fast machines. This would be a killer app, IMHO, and I'm surprised there's not further development of this.
IIRC the newest series of nVidia cards support that plus more, enabling (according to the PR, anyway) stuff like faster-than-real-time video transcoding.
I bought an MD player and deck in 97 or 98. At the time it was fabulous, at least as a direct replacement of cassette tape. If Sony would have paid attention and done the right thing, MD players could have easily been ubiquitous and maybe even have stopped the iPod (sorry, a little hyperbole to keep you reading).
Their optical disc format held 230MB way back then, even the first MP3 players had 64 and sometimes only 32MB of fixed flash. Getting nearly 4x storage on a single MD for MP3s, $5 media and -- the part Sony never did get right -- MP3 playback and computer connectivity would have been huge back then. There was a Palm/MD player someone put together as a concept on the MD user web site even back then that suggested what they could have done.
Sure, you can get 1GB flash cards now, but back then you couldn't, and Sony would have had such a huge market that all they would to have done was just add flash sockets (and not MemoryStick, another mistake).
As it was they refused MP3 and are now just a dusty relic on my shelf I don't know what to do with.
IIRC, cablecard is a FCC mandated standard, not an optional one. While lobbying and foot dragging might make the standard implentation deadlines extended, the actual implementation is a requirement. I'd also imagine that 2.0 would be backwards compatible with 1.0 headends and vice-versa.
I can see where Tivo wouldn't want to waste a lot of development effort with a 1.0 standard box if 2.0 was around the corner, however, this demonstrates to me two problems: 1) Tivo isn't doing enough ongoing hardware development to modularize the Tivo guts to make a 2.0 upgrade simpler, and 2) that Tivo is ignoring the "tech churn" phenomena of coming out with newer/better hardware on a regular basis, denying themselves revenue by preventing upgrade opportunities.
Around our house, dual tuner is actually less of an issue than direct-stream HD recording capabilities, which even 1.0 should have given (unless I'm grossly misunderstanding the capabilities of CableCard).
Failure to provide HD recording (and digital audio recording/integration) is a real missing feature for Tivo right now.
Tivo could really use CableCard support now.
I think a lot of people in the income group capable of buying Tivo are also Digital Cable subscribers, too. SA Tivos work fine with Digital Cable and the IR extenders, but it makes changing channels slow, its overly complicated and about once every month or so my cable box freezes/reboots, which puts it out of sync with the Tivo (power-cycling not being a function Tivo can do via IR).
Furthermore, this same group probably has HD TV, and CableCard would give Tivo the ability to do direct-to-disc recording of the stream ala DirecTivo, which would enable HD recording.
Plus it would give them a reason to rev the boxen in other ways (digital audio, etc) and sell more boxes.
Waiting for this is a huge mistake.
I call bullshit.
The same way that sodomy laws, the war on drugs, and all the other conservative morality laws are "less government."
The chocolate ration has been increased to 20 grams.
I'd say that the deferred compensation/savings thing could best be taught with a passbook savings account as soon as the child understands what money is at a basic level.
Give the kid $2 per week allowance and tell them they have to save $1 in the bank. Tell them that for every 10 dollars they put in the bank, the bank will give them $1 [you will actually do this yourself]. Tell them that when they get to a certain high amount ($30 or something) they can use HALF the money saved to buy something.
Here's where the lesson comes -- when they see the amount of money coming and are within 6 weeks of being able to buy something, get them interested in something 2x or 3x as expensive (this isn't hard, actually) and tell them they if they KEEP SAVING, they'll be able to buy this. This is aided by making a big deal out of checking the bank balance every so often.
If you do this right, you eventually convince the kid that there's nothing that they can't buy provided they save/invest enough. If they get set on actually buying something, hopefully they'll value their long-term dream and their savings enough to not spend it all.
But even wealthy men have told me that you can't take it with you.
If you had started investing heavily in high school and college and your first n years of work, what are the chances that you could have a big enough nest egg to not do wage slavery in a corporation and work on something you like (for money, but only enough to buy food or other basic necessities -- a vanity job, if you will)?
Even if its not enough for early retirement (and it probably would be by age 40 or 45), it might be a nice nest egg useful for starting a business, buying a home (outright, or nearly so) or even some other luxury-type purchase (presumably with an investment value, like a summer home or ski condo).
The problem with investing in an IRA is the money's locked in until your're old. Yes, there's tax deferrals, but that's primarily of value to wage slaves with medium/high incomes who will (a) invest over a long time and (b) don't need the money for a long time and (c) want/need a tax deduction.
If you started investing early enough you might have enough money built up that waiting until traditional retirement age to get at it was a big disadvantage.
Well, didn't phishing initally get its start as a small-time deal to snag AOL accounts?
After that it's largely a semantic debate as to what makes something an organized crime (2 guys working together?) and how many thousands you have to steal to not be petty.
Asking why we don't monitor whites because of the IRA/ETA or any of the other half-dozen regional seperatist/self-government terroist movements in Europe is disingenious, and you know it. None of those organizations has targeted Americans specifically or America generally, and they certainly haven't turned to "anti-Western" International terrorist tactics.
Sophistic arguments about "terrorists" working together doesn't hold water, either. I don't see a group of Irish Catholic revolutionaries having much to say/do with middle eastern Islamic radicals, particularly given radical Islam's intolerance.
There is no internal white US terrorist movement, either. McVeigh's act wasn't part of a movement or broader organization. We may have green card or other middle eastern citizens with terrorist aspirations, though.
That the large majority of middle eastern men aren't terrorists is a red herring as well, since it only takes *one* to blow up an airplane, and they have repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to do so.
Given their willingness to continue this behavior, watching for terrorist activity is a good idea. Giving into terror is failing to acknowledge who the terrorists are and treating the entire population as terrorists.
I wondered if the people who put the region concept together didn't figure on not only protecting regional price differentials, but gaining better entry to markets sensitive to content for ideological reasons by "ensuring" that content they didn't like wasn't playable on the recorders commonly available within that region.
This would explain why the region code map has some significant geographical incongruities and why China is its own region.
From what I can tell, the people blowing themselves and others up (c.f. "9/11") all tend to fit a common ethnic profile -- men of Middle Eastern origin. So why *not* perform ethnic profiling, at least on this group?
IIRC, the airlines have stopped doing random carry on checks for domestic flights at the gate, but almost universally the people I saw checked most often were elderly caucasian women, the ethnic group least associated with any kind of terrorism.
What baffles me is that we know good and well who the terrorist threat is, and yet we continue to deny this and act like a general security crackdown is both necessary and relevant. This is bad because it shows our willingness to subvert the truth in the name of political correctness, it dilutes the resources necessary to actually focus on the real threat and it dilutes freedom and liberty for the entire population.
But some of that assumes you would have the money and wherewithal to get 10 doctorates, which is another of the challenges of a 1000 lifespan. It's not like you work until 65 and then retire for the next 935 years. You might have to smiply get a *job* and work like a schlub just to pay the bills. The ability to play 20-something grad student for 100 years might not exist.
And then there's the question as to whether you *could* switch careers, or at least be competitive if you did. What if most interesting careers were dominated by people who didn't leave them? PhD or not, how do you compete with someone who has 300 years of hands-on experience? How do you join a team of 10 that has a collective 2500 years of experience? It'd be like watching one episode of Judge Judy and then trying to join the Supreme Court!
And assuming you have to switch careers (eg, yours becomes obsolete) and its for an income related purpose, do you end up doing the shit work for 10 years, 50 years, 100 years before you can move up?
The more I think about it, the more it strikes me that 1K year lifespans would be just like 80 year lifespans, just with everything we experience now multiplied by 10.