You're correct in that they're not "rechargeable", they're "refillable."
Fuel will probably be available in cartridges that are shaped to fit the manufacturer's equipment. Replacing them will need to be as easy and fast as changing batteries. Don't forget that current fuel cells are designed with on-board cracking of methanol, which allows for liquid fuel rather than having a pressure tank of pure hydrogen. It will make things much more convenient, although at the possible expense of some size/weight, as well as lower energy density of the fuel.
Probably the biggest drawback will be that each manufacturer will likely specify somewhat different shapes with patented, incompatible fittings in order to "maximize brand loyalty" (lock you in to their refills.) As far as I can see, making it inconvenient would be the quickest way to kill off adoption, but manufacturers usually see things differently than I do.
They already have prototypes small enough to power a cell phone, and they're approaching the marketplace. Cost is unknown, but you can expect them to be expensive at first. And if they take platinum as a catalyst, costs will of course stay high.
It will remain to be seen if people will accept carrying volatile fluids around with them, but I'm betting they'll come out with a "clean change" cartridge system that people will like. Just think: no recharging time. A small reservoir will probably allow for a hot-swap of the cartridge as well, meaning not even any down-time.
Microsoft wants trusted computing in the worst way. Not only does it mean a way to implement a revenue scheme, but they believe they'll be able to "remotely" prevent or disable viruses and put an end to their stellar reputation for security black holes.
The [MP|RI]AA is all for it, of course, because it means an end to piracy (in their minds.)
If Microsoft can pitch it right, they'll get the customers on board because it will mean "no more viruses" (yeah, right!) But once Joe Sixpack finds out it REALLY means "Sony told us to disable your old copies of Kazaa and Thompson told us to disable unlicensed MP3 encoders", he's going to balk. Loudly.
I thought the same thing, but after Reading TFA I realized it was Barry Meyers and AccuWeather continuing to whine about the Fair Weather Policy. They're whining so much they've gone running off to Rick Santorum to get Congress to put an end to this criminal publication of public data. That's the new news here.
The article is poorly written indeed -- the author apparently didn't realize that the Fair Weather Policy was written precisely to address the OMB's circular A-130, or that it had already been implemented last month. And I'm almost certain Mr. Meyers didn't go out of his way to inform the reporter of his public spanking in the solicited comments.
They were not contracts, they were "policies". It was a recognition that the private weather firms provided some specific services and that the NWS wouldn't "compete". And that made sense back in the day when it took serious effort to publish data and make it available. Commercial broadcasters had a built in mechanism for performing that task: the TV nightly news. The old policy pretty much meant that the NWS wouldn't produce their own TV weather show.
But now, a web server can publish their data for the price of electricity and a sysadmin. And the OMB Circular A-130 says that if they can make it available to the public that easily, they must. That was the basis for the NOAA's new policy, called the "Fair Weather Policy", implemented last December. AccuWeather's Barry Meyer has been an outspoken opponent of the new policy because it trashes his profit model -- for-profit forecasting. I sort-of feel bad that the guy's business model is being thrashed by a public agency, but the agency was here long before AccuWeather was. And it was his choice to create a business by competing with the government. Government policies change like the winds -- he should have seen it coming.
The NWS was originally established 200 years ago to provide weather information for the coasts -- fishermen and sailors relied on them for forecasts. That core mission is still there: they are to provide forecasts for public safety and commerce. To that end, the NWS has always been processing available data and making forecasts.
What's new here is the technology allows the NWS to provide forecast data for an exact location. It was simply a byproduct of producing an accurate forecast. The NWS simply stuck on a web front end to allow everyone access to it.
I still think the industry is not going to serve themselves well by pushing this into Congress. Right now, the vast majority of the public is blissfully unaware that if they type weather.gov instead of weather.com into their browsers, they get good local information with no advertising. Once the Commercial Weather Services Association starts raising a stink in the Senate, I think the NWS is going to make a lot of front pages around the country. I believe the NWS will get a lot more customers at the expense of The Weather Channel.
Because this article is kind of a rehash of old news.
The NWS adopted the Fair Weather Policy on December 1st, 2004, in direct response to OMB Circular A-130. It's done. Public comments came and went last summer, and the policy was enacted last year already, despite Barry Meyer's whining. Of course he won't give up, because now he believes his "industry association" is in jeopardy because NWS computers can produce what his can. And he has a senator in his pocket, so his whining gets heard.
But I don't think it will go anywhere. The public comments to the NWS were plentiful and loud, running about 10:1 against the commercial weather services. The free NWS advertising that would result from a popular outcry like that at a congressional level will not serve the commercial services well at all.
The gov't isn't doing enough making this data reliably available via NoaaPort satellite feeds and CRS and FTP, but now they should process all that data, plot it over base maps, and make it available to the public?
Yes.
If they are going to process it at all (which they already do) then the resultant data which we the taxpayers paid them to process should be freely available to us. That's what the original article said, it's what OMB Circular A-130 requires, and it's what the NWS acknowledged in their Fair Weather Policy of December, 2004.
My understanding was that the NWS simply collects raw data and feeds it to the companies. The companies do not actually collect weather data independently. Prior to the new rules, the NWS data was only available to said companies, which packaged it up with fancy graphics or some such nonsense. Now, anyone can download the data and set up their own service. Is this all true?
That used to be correct. You, Private Citizen, have always been free to collect the raw data from the NOAA. The policy the commercial weather firms arranged with the NOAA fourteen years ago was a statement that the NOAA wouldn't compete with the commercial firms, in terms of providing "finished" content.
I think the "competition" you were asking about occurred in 2003 when the NOAA started experimenting with making "point forecasts" available to the public: the weather firms cried foul. The NOAA decided to revisit their policy last year, and they requested public comment. The public outcry was loud and clear: if the NOAA was processing data at public expense, the NOAA was expected to make the processed data available to the public. And, surprisingly enough, it became their new policy despite complaints from the commercial firms. It's called the "Fair Weather Policy".
So, the point forecasts are now available on-line. How has that changed things? Not much. People still turn to the local TV station for weather in the morning, and they tune in to The Weather Channel if they're heading to the beach or the mountains.
I think where the main effect has been felt is in the industrial sector. For example, concrete companies typically rely on a very precise two hour forecast to ensure their new sidewalks won't get rained on. They used to pay lots of money to private meterologists who "insured" their forecasts (for $499.00 we'll guarantee you'll see no rain in the next two hours or we pay you $10,000.) But with NOAA point forecasts available, as a concrete company I'd be likely to take my own chances regarding rain.
I think the original article is wrong in its assumptions.
Something people seem to forget is that Microsoft is its own worst enemy. Microsoft isn't enhancing Office 2005 to compete with Open Office.org 2.0. Microsoft is enhancing Office 2005 to compete with Office 2003!
Consider: Microsoft has giant piles of cash, Bill Gates is closer to Scrooge McDuck than any person in history. But what he doesn't have is a steady revenue stream, constantly topping off his vault. He has to constantly create new reasons for people to send him money. Sure, Microsoft has OS sales for new PCs, but Office upgrades? Why would the users upgrade? Office 2003 still works fine. Office XP still works fine. Office 97 still works OK. Office 95 still works, sort of. The "features" that Office 2005 bring to the table are the only reasons people would have to upgrade, and Office 2003 is already a really complete product that most businesses love. Therefore Office 2005 would just be a waste, right?
In order to get you buying Office 2005, they have to make it attractive enough that you'll consider it worth $239 more than Office 2003. And most people won't. Therefore, Microsoft doesn't make as much money.
Microsoft has two choices here to get cash churning again: One, speed up the End-of-Life process -- ditch support for Office 95, 97, and XP soon, and ditch Office 2003 two years after Office 2005 comes out.
The scarier option (that they are busy pursuing) is to turn software into a "rental" or "lease" business. And the only way they can accomplish that is by locking down their users' computers so they can't keep using the same old software: Trusted Computing, here we come! With Trusted Computing, if you don't pay your $9.95 per month for Office, you won't get Office. Sure, that $9.95 per month keeps you in the "newest" Office, whenever they get around to releasing one, but basically it turns Office into a revenue stream. Is $120 per year cheaper than $259 every two years? Depends on if you would ordinarily upgrade the day Office 2007 comes out.
Back when DTMF was new (and before ESSs became prevalent) they charged plenty for Touch-Tone(TM) service. As I recall, the way they "blocked" DTMF was to reverse the polarity of the wires. Since the original DTMF dial pad was a one-transistor job (a really clever circuit) the transistor wouldn't conduct in the reverse direction. "You want tone dialing? Call us, we'll come out in a van so you know we're spending the money on your valuable service." Then the craftsman just reversed the wires. Pulse dialing, of course, was unaffected by polarity since it's just a switch.
So, a phreak could get touch tone anywhere simply by reversing the wires.
Hard to say though, because by 1993 ESS was pretty well rolled out just about everywhere; perhaps excepting some really rural areas. Might have been a party line, too, I seem to recall either technical or regulatory problems with using Touch-Tones on party lines.
Yup, I bought my T637 even though it included a camera. I really only bought it for the Bluetooth and GSM, but was unable to find a phone that didn't include the camera.
And so today, for the very first time, I actually used the camera like in the old TV commercial featuring Siegfried and Roy. We were walking in the skyways during lunch, and I spotted a giant red Elmo being led around by a cute handler. Apparently Sesame Street Live is in town and this was a publicity thing. I pulled out the camera and took Elmo's picture, and sent it to my wife.
I got no reaction. She thought I just downloaded a picture of Elmo and sent it to her.:-( So much for Truth in Advertising.
Those are all good points. I missed considering that your test was a minimal power diable-the-target test rather than a blow-it-up test (your initial posting didn't describe the outcome of your test, only that you "fired" on it and did not "blow it to bits." I didn't recognize that you actually succeeded in disabling it.)
I realize that laser power doesn't dissipate with the cube of the distance like an omnidirectional point source, but the beam still diverges somewhat over distance. And a geosynchronous orbit is a long, long way. (I'm guessing that you probably can't/won't/shouldn't divulge power, divergence, etc, that's fine.) But if your hit on the LEO bird was a 2 meter diamter spot, unless you started with a 2 meter diameter laser that was substantial divergence. (Oh, hell, this is the Air Force, you probably DID have a 2 meter diameter laser! That is soo cool!)
Of course, there's still one final problem with the "Chinese theory". If it was a ground based laser (as yours was,) Beijing, China is at 116 degrees East. Unless some James Bond villain is floating a giant diamond mirror somewhere over the Pacific, the western hemisphere's geosynchronous satellites are completely shaded from China.:-) Of course a space-based platform would still be able to travel to any target.
Anyway, I'm a fan of Occam's Razor, rather than conspiracy theories. I'm still guessing that it was probably nothing more exciting than a debris strike.
Well, they could have just downloaded "Altivore", an open-source version of Carnivore. Of course, Altivore didn't come out until after Carnivore was released (causing the big controversy) but it was written to answer the questions of "what is the FBI snooping" and "what kinds of privacy do the other ISP customers have"? It also provided people a chance to see that it was secure, that "evil hackers" couldn't take over the Altivore box and subvert it for their own nefarious purposes.
This will give up some quality, as the PVR-350's video out is allegedly much better than other graphics cards,
I'm just letting you know I can confirm this wholeheartedly. The PVR-USB2 delivers an image quality that I can say is "outstanding". I just replaced an ATI TV-Wonder PCI card that I never cared much for -- it always had odd artifacts, such as a repeating interference pattern (the pattern was present regardless of the image size I chose) and washed out color. The Hauppauge box just worked like magic, once I stuck it in the Hi-Speed USB hub instead of the USB 1.1 hub. Picture quality is superb, and the sound quality is equally good (and is properly sync'd with the video.)
Crap, I can preview all I want but it's only after I submit that I see I typed "the definition of an equatorial orbit" when I meant to type "the definition of an geosynchronous orbit."
If you targeted an old Air Force bird, it was probably an old surveillance satellite. Virtually all surveillance satellites are in low earth orbits, (around 90-100 minute orbits, or somewhere around 200km in altitude) where they can actually do valuable surveillance.
That's a far cry from the Intelsats, which are all geosynchronous. Here's Celestrak's elset from Intelsat 804, the bird they just lost:
What this says is: this observation was taken on January 17, 2005. Orbital inclination was 0.0319, (that's "tipping" relative to the equator; very close to 0 is expected for an equatorial orbit.) RAAN was 265.8 degrees, (RAAN is a number that helps define the orbit, I could explain it but it would probably take a page.) Eccentricity was.000322; that's very close to circular which is expected for an equatorial orbit. ARGP was 27.0257, (where in the orbit the bird is closest to earth, mostly meaningless for an orbit this circular.) Mean anomaly was 112.3545, (where in the orbit the satellite was when measured.) Finally, mean motion (revolutions per day) was 1.0027, which is very close to 1, meaning it orbits the earth at the same speed the earth is turning, which is the definition of an equatorial orbit.
So, what's all this mean? The bird was about 35,800 km away, or roughly 180 times further away than your Air Force target. Their laser's power would have dropped off significantly over that distance.
Depends on what kind of old hardware you have laying around, and that will determine what you should add to turn it into a MythTV.
IFF (If and Only If) you have hardware encoding on your video/TV tuner card, MythTV will run on a lower end older CPU. www.byopvr.com claims 233MHz if you have hardware MPEG-2 encoding, but that seems fantastically optimistic. Keep in mind that hardware encoding is fairly expensive -- I just bought the USB-2 Hauppauge PVR for $150 at MicroCenter yesterday. (I'm sure they're cheaper on line, but I can afford instant gratification.) A faster CPU (1.8 GHz is adequate according to some people) will allow you to do software encoding, meaning you can get a cheapo video encoder for $50 or less.
The larger the drives, the more content you can save. ReplayTV figures it in the neighborhood of 1GB per hour saved at crappy quality, maybe 3GB/hour for better. They don't need to be fast -- 5400 RPM IDE will do. If you have an old 20GB laying around, it's probably good enough.
RAM, well, you'll need some. A CD-ROM drive is pretty much a minimum, but a DVD drive will let you playback DVDs. An ethernet connection is probably going to be useful. Audio hardware, you may need that too. There are reports that some on-board nVidia nForce 2 chipsets won't work with MythTV, so if that's your audio choice you might need a cheapo SoundBlaster Live! card. On-board video will probably also be adequate.
And you may end up struggling with xmltv; trying to keep a TV listing grid current can be a challenge, depending on what country you live in.
Bottom line: it certainly doesn't require an Athlon64 or a dual Xeon monster to run one of these. Like anything else, if you pay more you'll get more. There are people who have incorporated MAME consoles into their MythTVs, others build monster gaming machines and only use them as TVs when they're not online. Others simply want a fire-and-forget box like a ReplayTV or TiVo.
All in all, your mileage will vary. You need to consider what assembling and maintaining all this will cost you personally in terms of time. Are you willing to put that much effort into a box you could have just picked up at Best Buy for $400 and never looked at again?
If this is funny, maybe I don't get the joke, but it seems to me that it would be informative more than anything else...
You're right, you just don't get the joke yet. ( It's certainly not informative. )
If you browse at -1, you'll see this is a clever rehash of some troll's constant attempts to claim '*BSD is dying.' ( Not that I recommend browsing at -1, there are some really offensive posts down there. If you're faint of heart, just trust me -- most of them deserve deletion rather than simple mod-1. )
The real mystery to me is why the trolls bother continuing to post this crap. Have they no jobs, no lives, no girlfriends, nothing to do but lurk on websites that don't want them but have no effective way to rid themselves of them? Personally, I can't imagine a more pathetic existance, but I suppose if you're allergic to humanity you gotta find something to do...
Hey, there's a great solution. Put the marketplace to work.
A movie chain that advertises "We jam cell phones!" might see a lot of business.
Think about it. If you're on call, or you're a cell phone addict, you'll say "what a stupid idea, I'm never going to that theatre. I'm going to the one across the street." Fine by me, I'll be in that first theatre.
Now, if we could just make them "stroller-hostile" while remaining "wheelchair-friendly"...
Umm, no. Faraday cages are bi-directional. They block EMF in either direction.
For proof, go stand in front of your microwave oven with the door closed, heat a glass of water for a minute, then go reproduce. If your children are born with n arms, where 1 < n < 3, the EMF was blocked.
Slashdot Mirror
And how is this different from the internet today?
Fuel will probably be available in cartridges that are shaped to fit the manufacturer's equipment. Replacing them will need to be as easy and fast as changing batteries. Don't forget that current fuel cells are designed with on-board cracking of methanol, which allows for liquid fuel rather than having a pressure tank of pure hydrogen. It will make things much more convenient, although at the possible expense of some size/weight, as well as lower energy density of the fuel.
Probably the biggest drawback will be that each manufacturer will likely specify somewhat different shapes with patented, incompatible fittings in order to "maximize brand loyalty" (lock you in to their refills.) As far as I can see, making it inconvenient would be the quickest way to kill off adoption, but manufacturers usually see things differently than I do.
They already have prototypes small enough to power a cell phone, and they're approaching the marketplace. Cost is unknown, but you can expect them to be expensive at first. And if they take platinum as a catalyst, costs will of course stay high.
It will remain to be seen if people will accept carrying volatile fluids around with them, but I'm betting they'll come out with a "clean change" cartridge system that people will like. Just think: no recharging time. A small reservoir will probably allow for a hot-swap of the cartridge as well, meaning not even any down-time.
Next problem?
What do you think Longhorn is going to be?
Microsoft wants trusted computing in the worst way. Not only does it mean a way to implement a revenue scheme, but they believe they'll be able to "remotely" prevent or disable viruses and put an end to their stellar reputation for security black holes.
The [MP|RI]AA is all for it, of course, because it means an end to piracy (in their minds.)
If Microsoft can pitch it right, they'll get the customers on board because it will mean "no more viruses" (yeah, right!) But once Joe Sixpack finds out it REALLY means "Sony told us to disable your old copies of Kazaa and Thompson told us to disable unlicensed MP3 encoders", he's going to balk. Loudly.
The article is poorly written indeed -- the author apparently didn't realize that the Fair Weather Policy was written precisely to address the OMB's circular A-130, or that it had already been implemented last month. And I'm almost certain Mr. Meyers didn't go out of his way to inform the reporter of his public spanking in the solicited comments.
But now, a web server can publish their data for the price of electricity and a sysadmin. And the OMB Circular A-130 says that if they can make it available to the public that easily, they must. That was the basis for the NOAA's new policy, called the "Fair Weather Policy", implemented last December. AccuWeather's Barry Meyer has been an outspoken opponent of the new policy because it trashes his profit model -- for-profit forecasting. I sort-of feel bad that the guy's business model is being thrashed by a public agency, but the agency was here long before AccuWeather was. And it was his choice to create a business by competing with the government. Government policies change like the winds -- he should have seen it coming.
What's new here is the technology allows the NWS to provide forecast data for an exact location. It was simply a byproduct of producing an accurate forecast. The NWS simply stuck on a web front end to allow everyone access to it.
I still think the industry is not going to serve themselves well by pushing this into Congress. Right now, the vast majority of the public is blissfully unaware that if they type weather.gov instead of weather.com into their browsers, they get good local information with no advertising. Once the Commercial Weather Services Association starts raising a stink in the Senate, I think the NWS is going to make a lot of front pages around the country. I believe the NWS will get a lot more customers at the expense of The Weather Channel.
The NWS adopted the Fair Weather Policy on December 1st, 2004, in direct response to OMB Circular A-130. It's done. Public comments came and went last summer, and the policy was enacted last year already, despite Barry Meyer's whining. Of course he won't give up, because now he believes his "industry association" is in jeopardy because NWS computers can produce what his can. And he has a senator in his pocket, so his whining gets heard.
But I don't think it will go anywhere. The public comments to the NWS were plentiful and loud, running about 10:1 against the commercial weather services. The free NWS advertising that would result from a popular outcry like that at a congressional level will not serve the commercial services well at all.
Yes.
If they are going to process it at all (which they already do) then the resultant data which we the taxpayers paid them to process should be freely available to us. That's what the original article said, it's what OMB Circular A-130 requires, and it's what the NWS acknowledged in their Fair Weather Policy of December, 2004.
That used to be correct. You, Private Citizen, have always been free to collect the raw data from the NOAA. The policy the commercial weather firms arranged with the NOAA fourteen years ago was a statement that the NOAA wouldn't compete with the commercial firms, in terms of providing "finished" content.
I think the "competition" you were asking about occurred in 2003 when the NOAA started experimenting with making "point forecasts" available to the public: the weather firms cried foul. The NOAA decided to revisit their policy last year, and they requested public comment. The public outcry was loud and clear: if the NOAA was processing data at public expense, the NOAA was expected to make the processed data available to the public. And, surprisingly enough, it became their new policy despite complaints from the commercial firms. It's called the "Fair Weather Policy".
So, the point forecasts are now available on-line. How has that changed things? Not much. People still turn to the local TV station for weather in the morning, and they tune in to The Weather Channel if they're heading to the beach or the mountains.
I think where the main effect has been felt is in the industrial sector. For example, concrete companies typically rely on a very precise two hour forecast to ensure their new sidewalks won't get rained on. They used to pay lots of money to private meterologists who "insured" their forecasts (for $499.00 we'll guarantee you'll see no rain in the next two hours or we pay you $10,000.) But with NOAA point forecasts available, as a concrete company I'd be likely to take my own chances regarding rain.
Something people seem to forget is that Microsoft is its own worst enemy. Microsoft isn't enhancing Office 2005 to compete with Open Office.org 2.0. Microsoft is enhancing Office 2005 to compete with Office 2003!
Consider: Microsoft has giant piles of cash, Bill Gates is closer to Scrooge McDuck than any person in history. But what he doesn't have is a steady revenue stream, constantly topping off his vault. He has to constantly create new reasons for people to send him money. Sure, Microsoft has OS sales for new PCs, but Office upgrades? Why would the users upgrade? Office 2003 still works fine. Office XP still works fine. Office 97 still works OK. Office 95 still works, sort of. The "features" that Office 2005 bring to the table are the only reasons people would have to upgrade, and Office 2003 is already a really complete product that most businesses love. Therefore Office 2005 would just be a waste, right?
In order to get you buying Office 2005, they have to make it attractive enough that you'll consider it worth $239 more than Office 2003. And most people won't. Therefore, Microsoft doesn't make as much money.
Microsoft has two choices here to get cash churning again: One, speed up the End-of-Life process -- ditch support for Office 95, 97, and XP soon, and ditch Office 2003 two years after Office 2005 comes out.
The scarier option (that they are busy pursuing) is to turn software into a "rental" or "lease" business. And the only way they can accomplish that is by locking down their users' computers so they can't keep using the same old software: Trusted Computing, here we come! With Trusted Computing, if you don't pay your $9.95 per month for Office, you won't get Office. Sure, that $9.95 per month keeps you in the "newest" Office, whenever they get around to releasing one, but basically it turns Office into a revenue stream. Is $120 per year cheaper than $259 every two years? Depends on if you would ordinarily upgrade the day Office 2007 comes out.
So, a phreak could get touch tone anywhere simply by reversing the wires.
Hard to say though, because by 1993 ESS was pretty well rolled out just about everywhere; perhaps excepting some really rural areas. Might have been a party line, too, I seem to recall either technical or regulatory problems with using Touch-Tones on party lines.
And so today, for the very first time, I actually used the camera like in the old TV commercial featuring Siegfried and Roy. We were walking in the skyways during lunch, and I spotted a giant red Elmo being led around by a cute handler. Apparently Sesame Street Live is in town and this was a publicity thing. I pulled out the camera and took Elmo's picture, and sent it to my wife.
I got no reaction. She thought I just downloaded a picture of Elmo and sent it to her. :-( So much for Truth in Advertising.
I realize that laser power doesn't dissipate with the cube of the distance like an omnidirectional point source, but the beam still diverges somewhat over distance. And a geosynchronous orbit is a long, long way. (I'm guessing that you probably can't/won't/shouldn't divulge power, divergence, etc, that's fine.) But if your hit on the LEO bird was a 2 meter diamter spot, unless you started with a 2 meter diameter laser that was substantial divergence. (Oh, hell, this is the Air Force, you probably DID have a 2 meter diameter laser! That is soo cool!)
Of course, there's still one final problem with the "Chinese theory". If it was a ground based laser (as yours was,) Beijing, China is at 116 degrees East. Unless some James Bond villain is floating a giant diamond mirror somewhere over the Pacific, the western hemisphere's geosynchronous satellites are completely shaded from China. :-) Of course a space-based platform would still be able to travel to any target.
Anyway, I'm a fan of Occam's Razor, rather than conspiracy theories. I'm still guessing that it was probably nothing more exciting than a debris strike.
Well, they could have just downloaded "Altivore", an open-source version of Carnivore. Of course, Altivore didn't come out until after Carnivore was released (causing the big controversy) but it was written to answer the questions of "what is the FBI snooping" and "what kinds of privacy do the other ISP customers have"? It also provided people a chance to see that it was secure, that "evil hackers" couldn't take over the Altivore box and subvert it for their own nefarious purposes.
I'm just letting you know I can confirm this wholeheartedly. The PVR-USB2 delivers an image quality that I can say is "outstanding". I just replaced an ATI TV-Wonder PCI card that I never cared much for -- it always had odd artifacts, such as a repeating interference pattern (the pattern was present regardless of the image size I chose) and washed out color. The Hauppauge box just worked like magic, once I stuck it in the Hi-Speed USB hub instead of the USB 1.1 hub. Picture quality is superb, and the sound quality is equally good (and is properly sync'd with the video.)
Sorry about that.
That's a far cry from the Intelsats, which are all geosynchronous. Here's Celestrak's elset from Intelsat 804, the bird they just lost:
What this says is: this observation was taken on January 17, 2005. Orbital inclination was 0.0319, (that's "tipping" relative to the equator; very close to 0 is expected for an equatorial orbit.) RAAN was 265.8 degrees, (RAAN is a number that helps define the orbit, I could explain it but it would probably take a page.) Eccentricity was .000322; that's very close to circular which is expected for an equatorial orbit. ARGP was 27.0257, (where in the orbit the bird is closest to earth, mostly meaningless for an orbit this circular.) Mean anomaly was 112.3545, (where in the orbit the satellite was when measured.) Finally, mean motion (revolutions per day) was 1.0027, which is very close to 1, meaning it orbits the earth at the same speed the earth is turning, which is the definition of an equatorial orbit.
So, what's all this mean? The bird was about 35,800 km away, or roughly 180 times further away than your Air Force target. Their laser's power would have dropped off significantly over that distance.
IFF (If and Only If) you have hardware encoding on your video/TV tuner card, MythTV will run on a lower end older CPU. www.byopvr.com claims 233MHz if you have hardware MPEG-2 encoding, but that seems fantastically optimistic. Keep in mind that hardware encoding is fairly expensive -- I just bought the USB-2 Hauppauge PVR for $150 at MicroCenter yesterday. (I'm sure they're cheaper on line, but I can afford instant gratification.) A faster CPU (1.8 GHz is adequate according to some people) will allow you to do software encoding, meaning you can get a cheapo video encoder for $50 or less.
The larger the drives, the more content you can save. ReplayTV figures it in the neighborhood of 1GB per hour saved at crappy quality, maybe 3GB/hour for better. They don't need to be fast -- 5400 RPM IDE will do. If you have an old 20GB laying around, it's probably good enough.
RAM, well, you'll need some. A CD-ROM drive is pretty much a minimum, but a DVD drive will let you playback DVDs. An ethernet connection is probably going to be useful. Audio hardware, you may need that too. There are reports that some on-board nVidia nForce 2 chipsets won't work with MythTV, so if that's your audio choice you might need a cheapo SoundBlaster Live! card. On-board video will probably also be adequate.
And you may end up struggling with xmltv; trying to keep a TV listing grid current can be a challenge, depending on what country you live in.
Bottom line: it certainly doesn't require an Athlon64 or a dual Xeon monster to run one of these. Like anything else, if you pay more you'll get more. There are people who have incorporated MAME consoles into their MythTVs, others build monster gaming machines and only use them as TVs when they're not online. Others simply want a fire-and-forget box like a ReplayTV or TiVo.
All in all, your mileage will vary. You need to consider what assembling and maintaining all this will cost you personally in terms of time. Are you willing to put that much effort into a box you could have just picked up at Best Buy for $400 and never looked at again?
You're right, you just don't get the joke yet. ( It's certainly not informative. )
If you browse at -1, you'll see this is a clever rehash of some troll's constant attempts to claim '*BSD is dying.' ( Not that I recommend browsing at -1, there are some really offensive posts down there. If you're faint of heart, just trust me -- most of them deserve deletion rather than simple mod-1. )
The real mystery to me is why the trolls bother continuing to post this crap. Have they no jobs, no lives, no girlfriends, nothing to do but lurk on websites that don't want them but have no effective way to rid themselves of them? Personally, I can't imagine a more pathetic existance, but I suppose if you're allergic to humanity you gotta find something to do...
Bugs the hell out of me when people mod me up "informative" when I'm clearly going just for the laughs. And smileys just seem too overt for me.
A movie chain that advertises "We jam cell phones!" might see a lot of business.
Think about it. If you're on call, or you're a cell phone addict, you'll say "what a stupid idea, I'm never going to that theatre. I'm going to the one across the street." Fine by me, I'll be in that first theatre.
Now, if we could just make them "stroller-hostile" while remaining "wheelchair-friendly" ...
I'm all in favor of jamming cell phones in theatres. Patrons are already far too noisy and rude, and cell phones have not helped.
For proof, go stand in front of your microwave oven with the door closed, heat a glass of water for a minute, then go reproduce. If your children are born with n arms, where 1 < n < 3, the EMF was blocked.