Perhaps laser relays with high-speed servos to keep a couple of beams always going out and reaching the plane and always coming back in, over a frequency difficult to create (so as not to be blinded by a flash) and scrambled by something insanely complex, like full 4096-bit encryption, which would be essentially impossible to crack over years, let alone the few minutes a dogfight would take, or the few hours a UCAV would be over hostile territory. Relays could also be placed in a constellation of LEO satellites, so as to allow extremely long distance missions. Pilots could be aboard an AWACS-style aircraft with an uplink to a satellite or three a few hundred miles up, then a few hundred miles down, and (assuming a total distance of 800 miles), you would have a lag of only about 9ms, well within what would be required to keep control of the aircraft, especially considering the full-3D view of the surroundings that could be available through the link.
Hmmmmm.... Anybody know of anyone building terabit aerial lasers?:-)
The "secrets" were well-known; hundreds of lab animals died as a result of radiation exposure during tests leading up to the first detonation, and investigations into the plants and animals that survived the initial test blast led us to a fairly detailed knowledge of the effects. Read up a little on the history of the drops; Truman really struggled with this decision, and the only reason a second was dropped was because the Japanese began to redouble their efforts to build a defense for an invasion. It wasn't until an official communication to the Japanese government that we had more (whether we actually did or not seems to be a matter of debate), and the will to use them, that the Japanese realized how futile it was to continue the war effort.
China may be more likely than most to use the bombs, but that does not mean that they will sleep easily. Whoever gives the order knows that tens of thousands of innocents will die, too, and while it's possible to assert that "the enemy" has no ethical block to using such weapons, I'd invite you to examine the suicide rate of anyone responsible for the launch anywhere in the chain of command that survives the inevitable response.
Perhaps an analogy of ballistic gelatin and a bullet would work better. A very small, high-speed bullet will often penetrate much deeper into the gelatin than a larger round, simply due to friction. The same thing happens in the Higgs' boson field, where the more massive an object, the greater the drag, and the more it is slowed.
OK, so that's not a perfect version, either, and my gun-toting friends will probably get on my case for it, but that is the best way *I* know how to explain it.
I've seen similar information when running tracerts on various systems I've connected to for one reason or other. It's not nearly as detailed as what @Home provides, but it does give some basic form of regional information. The AOL info isn't enough to be able to market Billy Joe Bob Ray's Barbershop, but it could suggest that the person have a look at the regional newspaper.
Your reasoning implies that nothing is a dead issue until the Supreme Court hears it. From an absolute point of view, this may be correct, since a similar lawsuit could always pop up and continue up the hierarchy. However, that the 9th Circuit declined to hear an appeal signals that they agreed that the lower court judge ruled fairly and properly, and thus his decision is precedent for future cases. The 9th Circuit's refusal to hear an appeal can also be cited, giving it nearly the same weight in court as an actual opinion from the Appeals Court.
Do the companies want UCITA? Yes, they do. Do they want to test it? I suspect not, although I can think of a few hundred thousand regular people who would love to see a test case go before a judge. Why do the companies not want it tested? Because a court could rule against the law, striking it down, and although such a decision would almost certainly be appealed, future enforcement of the law would likely be blocked as the case made its way to a Circuit Court panel, then possibly back down to the original trial judge, then back to the panel, then on to the full court, then to the Supreme Court.
What is the danger? By passing these individual laws, states are in danger of violating the Constitution's provision of power to Congress to regulate interstate trade. Consumer protection laws are one thing; they usually apply solely to residents of the state which passed them. However, granting additional power to companies that do not reside within a state could leave a US Supreme Court very unimpressed, and a decision knocking down, say, Virginia or Maryland's UCITA laws would allow that decision to be used to very quickly knock down every other UCITA law in the country. The companies and lobbying groups have already spent a lot of money on this; they don't want it tested so soon as to make the money a complete waste.
Actually, @Home does allow static residential IPs in some cases. For example, in Orange County, CA, Comcast and Cox operate @Home segments. Cox is all DHCP, but Comcast allows static IP if requested. I also know some people who went with DHCP, and their address hasn't changed in about a year. When I moved to Windows 2000 Server in January (let me duck behind this wall for a moment), I had to go with DHCP, as the DNS wouldn't accept requests for some reason. Works now, but then it was a big question mark.
As for servers, I've not had any problems from Comcast. Aside from picking up the NNTP server checks every few hours (UDPs really work), they don't check for anything else. I've been quietly running an FTP server and a web server, not to mention Napster, et al, with nary a peep from @Home, even when I've used the FTP to transfer my entire MP3 collection to work over the course of a couple of days. (I need a CD-R....)
Incidentally, the rate cap doesn't seem to apply so much to Comcast's @Home in OC, either. I routinely download at rates as high as 5Mb, although the norm is 1.5Mb, and the upload cap seems to be at 480Kb, although recently I rarely see that, and usually see about a 256Kb rate or so.
DSL in SoCal, OTOH, is a nightmare. Pacific Bell DSL switches their DHCP addresses every few months, and I have friends who are knocked offline for as long as SIXTEEN HOURS as they bring things back up. This doesn't even include the 8-10 weeks some people have to wait for their installation, although self-install kits are supposedly easing the pain. I don't know who's running their network, but I'm willing to bet they're from SBC. You Texans can have your SBC people back so they can stop messing up our nice PacBell stuff (more than DSL has gone downhill since the buyout).
Ummm.... It wasn't National Semiconductor that they bought. They may have bought or licensed patents, but NSC is a seperate company with a market cap of $6.5 billion. Check it out at http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=nsm&d=t. NSC still has a sizable business manufacturing smaller specialized chips (as they have for many years now).
Huh? This parent got modded down? It was a first post (a real first post) essentially making a comment about the current system and whether it needs to be changed, attached to a story about an alternative system, and it gets tagged Off-topic?
Maybe I really don't understand the current moderation system....
There are a number of states also involved, and I expect that with all of the evidence that is out there, the states (most of them, anyway) will continue the prosecution even if Bush does get into office and wants to drop the case. What I would also like to see is the hiring by the states of Joel Klein to oversee the appeals process.
I rather expected this to happen, actually. The Supreme Court tends to avoid cases of extreme complexity, preferring to rule instead on those where there are only a few (significant) issues left to resolve. While I do expect that portions of the results of this case will make it to the final round of appeals, I'm not altogether sure that it will actually take the case, and may just leave it where it is, unless some *really* sticky issues come up, and for now, I don't see how they could.
I, like many of you, am of mixed feelings about this. I don't like to see government intervention into business, but at the same time, I think that there is a viable reason in some cases. As a historical example, before AT&T was broken up, a former co-worker used to call family back home in India for as much as $8 per minute. Within a couple of years, that price had dropped to $3 per minute, and is even lower now.
As I understand it, treason can be committed by any citizen who undertakes an act of aiding an enemy or acting as an agent of an enemy of the United States in an act of warfare. It may be easier to prove when you're an employee or soldier (depending on what oaths were required), but it's still possible.
I dunno about having to be rich... I got a WinFast GF2MX for $140, and I'm quite happy with the 40-70fps I get in Counterstrike. Great performance for low cost is what is propelling nVidia into the territories formerly covered by 3dfx, and nVidia may soon be invading 3DLabs' and the chipset manufacturers territories.
Personally, I was hoping for a buyout of the Aureal assets by nVidia, but that's not happening. Although.... Word has it that nVidia "aquired" Aureal's techs. Whether it was sneaky and underhanded, I don't know, but it could bode well for the future.
Actually, Nader is included in most polls, as is Buchanan. They usually score about 3% and 2%, respectively.
I have been contacted for a political poll once. It was reasonably well balanced, asking questions like, "Of the following candidates, for whom are you most likely to vote?" Then they mention the candidates' names in a random order. The question was brought up about three times (phrased differently) total in the poll, mixing up the names each time. The whole thing lasted about ten minutes or so.
I believe that they mix up the names to weed out the people who will automatically answer with the first name, and get real results.
While working at Disneyland in tech support, I got called out on an old system back behind the Thunder Mountain BBQ because the keyboard wasn't working. When I got there and started popping keys off, there was this reddish build-up. Curious, I lifted it to have a closer look and smelled BBQ sauce. Apparently, this system had been back there since the TM BBQ opened, and over the preceding 7 or 8 years, BBQ sauce that had evaporated (or something) had built up in the keyboard, and eventually shorted part of it out. A new keyboard fixed it, but I'm still amazed by what one can find in these things.
According to the Time Almanac 2000, United States copyright protection lengths are life of the author (or last surviving author, in the case of multiple authors) plus 70 years in most cases. In cases of work for hire, or for anonymous or pseudonymous work (unless the author's true identity is revealed in Copyright Office records), it is 95 years from the date of publication, or 120 years from creation, whichever is shorter.
The above applies specifically to all works created on or after Jan 1, 1978. Most other work from before that date was brought under the same statute of life plus 70 years or 95/120, as well, although it also specifies that no work from this category will have its copyright expire before Dec 31, 2002, and for works published on or before Dec 31, 2002, the copyright will not expire before Dec 31, 2047. Works created before Jan 1, 1978 usually get a 75 year copyright protection.
Apparently, there may be some other exceptions. The United States Copyright Office (http://lcweb.loc.gov/copyright/) has full information.
Before you throw all of that stuff out there, you need to make sure that you know a bit about all of those ideas and how they would work, and also maybe learn a few things about the terms you choose to use.
its almost routine for billions of gallons of oil to be "accidently" spilled into the ocean
You think the companies intentionally send that stuff into the water? Do you have any idea how much it costs to clean up oil? It's a lot more than the value of the oil that gets spilled, and something everybody involved tries their best to avoid, because of both the environmental and the financial costs. Gasoline is even worse, because it can filter into groundwater even faster. Unfortunately, we have a few people who make bad decisions (like heading up the Exxon Valdez while drunk), and we have disasters. Oil isn't the worst, just the one on which the media can pounce easiest.
good carborators that were invented and outlawed back in the early 60's
Good God, haven't we done away with these conspiracy rumors yet? If this stuff was already discovered, then why is it that all of the college teams haven't rediscovered the same principles? They get hundreds of miles to the gallon by building very low-weight, low-powered cars with ideas that do not scale well. If they did scale well, then one of them would have at least come up with a Geo that hits 300mpg. Mileage isn't just a function of the engine; it's every single component in the drive train, from the engine to the tires. Try improving the efficiency of the power transfer from the engine to the tires (instead of reactively blaming the billion dollar oil companies, which is oh-so-easy to do), and you'll have a better chance to see a real mileage change.
in an internal combustion engine the carborator injects gas into the piston in the form of a fine mist or vapor, its still liquid, there are ways of making them that inject it a a gas, not a mist or vapor
Aside from the fact that a vapor is a gas, there are almost no production cars anymore that use carbeurators. Why? Because they are inefficient at handling the mixtures when compared to other technologies. Modern fuel-injected vehicles are capable of balancing the mixtures on a per-cylinder basis, which is what keeps your car running when one of the plugs is going, or when you change your driving habits and it needs to maintain a proper balance of fuel economy and power. Anyway, the mixture that is injected is a very fine mist, not all that far from a vapor in the first place, with a total droplet surface area high enough to allow rapid vaporization of the fuel, which, when mixed with the surrounding air, creates a flammable mixture. Does all of the fuel vaporize? Ideally, yes. In reality, the amount that fails to vaporize during the mixing and combustion stages is so small as to be negligible.
this causes it to burn less at much higher temptures, which have litle or no exhaugst besides carbon, something that dosent heur much and might even be usefull as a lubricant
Burning at higher temperatures also allows other things to combust, like the nitrogen in the air. This isn't a fail-safe solution; try as you might, it's a bitch to get all of the pollutants out of the exhaust gasses, and companies have been trying for decades to get it reduced, whether due to regulations or trying to outdo the other companies in terms of fuel efficiency, or power, or both.
capitalisim hasent anything to do with it, oil is just what happened to be convienient and at the moment still seems to be, that however is going to and has to change, and being a tree hugger has nothing to do with it.
Capitalism has everything to do with it, even in your own argument. Capitalism is why companies that cannot adapt go away, whether bought up or shut down. One of the reasons that oil is still convenient is because everything else (tidal generation, nuclear reactors, hydroelectric, and even large solar plants) is subject to very costly environmental studies and regulations and litigation. If the same people who claim to be wanting to save the environment would allow new nuclear plants to go up, or would cooperate with new hydroelectric or solar plants, then maybe we could move along a little faster towards reducing our reliance on fossil fuels. Microsoft isn't the king of FUD; the environmentalists are, and when they learn to calm down and talk instead of sue, then maybe we can all get somewhere together.
It depends entirely on the area you're in. For example, as I understand it, @Home in New England blows bald goats. However, in my neck of the woods (Comcast@Home in SoCal), I have an uplink of 480Kb, and a downlink that I can routinely test at 1.5Mb, and which has on several occasions touched 5Mb, and on one occasion, even reached the 6Mb mark. (Mmmmmm..... 760K/sec... ) (This was early morning and I can only ascribe it to lucking my way in during a performance test or something like that.) I don't use the proxy, which would have been useless in these cases, anyway, since they were from private FTP sites.
Most people I know of are rather locked in at lower speeds, rarely seeing 1Mb down and never seeing higher than 128Kb up. I count myself as very, very lucky.
They do, in fact, enforce the ban on NNTP services, to which my firewall logs will attest. After the Usenet Death Threat a year or so ago, they take this one, at least, pretty seriously.
I just block everyone from accessing my services unless they are from a specific IP or set of IPs, which include no @Home computers save for two of my friends. Simple enough.
Network ICE's BlackICE Defender works wonders for this in terms of simplicity and ease of tracking. It's amazing how often my box (W2K Server) gets hit from them. I've recorded as many as about 200 hits in one day from their systems checking for NNTP services on my system. They're more common than all of the ping, Trojan, OS fingerprint, and modified packet touches put together.
BTW, I was one of those who was supposed to get an IP address, only to find that it had been hijacked by someone else. They gave me another one, but started tracking the hijacker at that point. Doesn't take long to figure out just about where he is. The traceability of a cable company's copper is amazing sometimes.
The exercise isn't totally pointless. Imagine picking out a significant number of major metroplexes (call them Class I connections) in the continental United States, and then running 128Tb connections between them with no intervening branching. Reducing the number of hops from Los Angeles to New York, for example, to two (or maybe even one) would reduce a lot of side traffic, freeing up bandwidth and improving the efficiency of connections. From each of these primary hubs could extend a few 16Tb or 32Tb connections (call these Class II connections) to other significant population/data centers, providing robust, high speed connections at a lower cost.
As a rather extreme example, I was playing a game of Q2:CTF once, and wanted to see why the connection seemed flaky. Running a tracert, I found that I was going through 23 hops, roughly from Los Angeles to San Jose to Chicago to New York to Washington to Florida to Dallas, where the server was located. With a better backbone architecture, that could have been reduced to maybe six hops -- rouhgly from my ISP to LA to Dallas to server. (Excess hops in the same location were left out of both of those examples.)
A few ideas of locations that could be interconnected with 128Tb connections:
Seattle San Francisco Bay Los Angeles Denver Los Alamos Chicago Dallas New York Boston Washington, D.C. Atlanta Miami
Boston is kind of questionable for that one, and it may be better suited for a Class II connection. Other cities, such as San Diego or Houston, could get Class II connections from their closest Class I connection point.
This architecture would provide for alternate routing (each Class I would link with three or more Class I locations, as each Class II would link with two or more Class II locations in addition to the Class I source) in case of disaster or other disruption. The only barrier to this is the costs associated with building and running a dozen or so Class I connection sites, plus the dozens of Class II sites, plus all of the F-O that would have to be run.
There are a couple of possibilities on this one. One of the major problems that keeps LCDs so expensive is errors in the manufacturing process. Every manufacturer allows a certain number of pixels per specified size to be bad to keep the rejection rate down, but the process still leaves a lot of bad screens, and so a lot of work and materials are wasted.
The question that needs to be answered to determine if costs go up or down is the accuracy of the joining process. If it is very accurate, can be done by machine, and has a low failure rate, the costs could well go down significantly, as each rejection would be of a smaller part, meaning less work and fewer materials wasted. If it is a painstaking process, the materials question remains about the same, but the work costs can go up, meaning no reduction or possibly an increase in size.
One interesting possibility with this technology is a sort of "Lego" function, where you could snap in more and more of them (this would require some very tight manufacturing tolerances) to create larger screens on your own. This would allow not only individual consumers to build to the size they need (gamers go for larger traditional screens, graphic artists and webmasters go for wider screens, etc.), but companies could create screens that fit into their decor. Another upside with this is that if you have a panel that starts to have an unnacceptably high number of bad pixels, you swap it out for a new one.
:: sigh:: Technology never does move fast enough for me.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps laser relays with high-speed servos to keep a couple of beams always going out and reaching the plane and always coming back in, over a frequency difficult to create (so as not to be blinded by a flash) and scrambled by something insanely complex, like full 4096-bit encryption, which would be essentially impossible to crack over years, let alone the few minutes a dogfight would take, or the few hours a UCAV would be over hostile territory. Relays could also be placed in a constellation of LEO satellites, so as to allow extremely long distance missions. Pilots could be aboard an AWACS-style aircraft with an uplink to a satellite or three a few hundred miles up, then a few hundred miles down, and (assuming a total distance of 800 miles), you would have a lag of only about 9ms, well within what would be required to keep control of the aircraft, especially considering the full-3D view of the surroundings that could be available through the link.
:-)
Hmmmmm.... Anybody know of anyone building terabit aerial lasers?
The "secrets" were well-known; hundreds of lab animals died as a result of radiation exposure during tests leading up to the first detonation, and investigations into the plants and animals that survived the initial test blast led us to a fairly detailed knowledge of the effects. Read up a little on the history of the drops; Truman really struggled with this decision, and the only reason a second was dropped was because the Japanese began to redouble their efforts to build a defense for an invasion. It wasn't until an official communication to the Japanese government that we had more (whether we actually did or not seems to be a matter of debate), and the will to use them, that the Japanese realized how futile it was to continue the war effort.
China may be more likely than most to use the bombs, but that does not mean that they will sleep easily. Whoever gives the order knows that tens of thousands of innocents will die, too, and while it's possible to assert that "the enemy" has no ethical block to using such weapons, I'd invite you to examine the suicide rate of anyone responsible for the launch anywhere in the chain of command that survives the inevitable response.
Perhaps an analogy of ballistic gelatin and a bullet would work better. A very small, high-speed bullet will often penetrate much deeper into the gelatin than a larger round, simply due to friction. The same thing happens in the Higgs' boson field, where the more massive an object, the greater the drag, and the more it is slowed.
OK, so that's not a perfect version, either, and my gun-toting friends will probably get on my case for it, but that is the best way *I* know how to explain it.
Well, a tracert to login.oscar.aol.com (AIM's login server) gathers, among others, the following:
p0-0.aoldulles.bbnplanet.com (AOL's backbone connection?)
ow4-dtc-P0-0.atdn.net
oscar-dc3-P0-1.aol.com
I've seen similar information when running tracerts on various systems I've connected to for one reason or other. It's not nearly as detailed as what @Home provides, but it does give some basic form of regional information. The AOL info isn't enough to be able to market Billy Joe Bob Ray's Barbershop, but it could suggest that the person have a look at the regional newspaper.
Your reasoning implies that nothing is a dead issue until the Supreme Court hears it. From an absolute point of view, this may be correct, since a similar lawsuit could always pop up and continue up the hierarchy. However, that the 9th Circuit declined to hear an appeal signals that they agreed that the lower court judge ruled fairly and properly, and thus his decision is precedent for future cases. The 9th Circuit's refusal to hear an appeal can also be cited, giving it nearly the same weight in court as an actual opinion from the Appeals Court.
Do the companies want UCITA? Yes, they do. Do they want to test it? I suspect not, although I can think of a few hundred thousand regular people who would love to see a test case go before a judge. Why do the companies not want it tested? Because a court could rule against the law, striking it down, and although such a decision would almost certainly be appealed, future enforcement of the law would likely be blocked as the case made its way to a Circuit Court panel, then possibly back down to the original trial judge, then back to the panel, then on to the full court, then to the Supreme Court.
What is the danger? By passing these individual laws, states are in danger of violating the Constitution's provision of power to Congress to regulate interstate trade. Consumer protection laws are one thing; they usually apply solely to residents of the state which passed them. However, granting additional power to companies that do not reside within a state could leave a US Supreme Court very unimpressed, and a decision knocking down, say, Virginia or Maryland's UCITA laws would allow that decision to be used to very quickly knock down every other UCITA law in the country. The companies and lobbying groups have already spent a lot of money on this; they don't want it tested so soon as to make the money a complete waste.
Actually, @Home does allow static residential IPs in some cases. For example, in Orange County, CA, Comcast and Cox operate @Home segments. Cox is all DHCP, but Comcast allows static IP if requested. I also know some people who went with DHCP, and their address hasn't changed in about a year. When I moved to Windows 2000 Server in January (let me duck behind this wall for a moment), I had to go with DHCP, as the DNS wouldn't accept requests for some reason. Works now, but then it was a big question mark.
As for servers, I've not had any problems from Comcast. Aside from picking up the NNTP server checks every few hours (UDPs really work), they don't check for anything else. I've been quietly running an FTP server and a web server, not to mention Napster, et al, with nary a peep from @Home, even when I've used the FTP to transfer my entire MP3 collection to work over the course of a couple of days. (I need a CD-R....)
Incidentally, the rate cap doesn't seem to apply so much to Comcast's @Home in OC, either. I routinely download at rates as high as 5Mb, although the norm is 1.5Mb, and the upload cap seems to be at 480Kb, although recently I rarely see that, and usually see about a 256Kb rate or so.
DSL in SoCal, OTOH, is a nightmare. Pacific Bell DSL switches their DHCP addresses every few months, and I have friends who are knocked offline for as long as SIXTEEN HOURS as they bring things back up. This doesn't even include the 8-10 weeks some people have to wait for their installation, although self-install kits are supposedly easing the pain. I don't know who's running their network, but I'm willing to bet they're from SBC. You Texans can have your SBC people back so they can stop messing up our nice PacBell stuff (more than DSL has gone downhill since the buyout).
Ummm.... It wasn't National Semiconductor that they bought. They may have bought or licensed patents, but NSC is a seperate company with a market cap of $6.5 billion. Check it out at http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=nsm&d=t. NSC still has a sizable business manufacturing smaller specialized chips (as they have for many years now).
Huh? This parent got modded down? It was a first post (a real first post) essentially making a comment about the current system and whether it needs to be changed, attached to a story about an alternative system, and it gets tagged Off-topic?
Maybe I really don't understand the current moderation system....
There are a number of states also involved, and I expect that with all of the evidence that is out there, the states (most of them, anyway) will continue the prosecution even if Bush does get into office and wants to drop the case. What I would also like to see is the hiring by the states of Joel Klein to oversee the appeals process.
I rather expected this to happen, actually. The Supreme Court tends to avoid cases of extreme complexity, preferring to rule instead on those where there are only a few (significant) issues left to resolve. While I do expect that portions of the results of this case will make it to the final round of appeals, I'm not altogether sure that it will actually take the case, and may just leave it where it is, unless some *really* sticky issues come up, and for now, I don't see how they could.
I, like many of you, am of mixed feelings about this. I don't like to see government intervention into business, but at the same time, I think that there is a viable reason in some cases. As a historical example, before AT&T was broken up, a former co-worker used to call family back home in India for as much as $8 per minute. Within a couple of years, that price had dropped to $3 per minute, and is even lower now.
As I understand it, treason can be committed by any citizen who undertakes an act of aiding an enemy or acting as an agent of an enemy of the United States in an act of warfare. It may be easier to prove when you're an employee or soldier (depending on what oaths were required), but it's still possible.
I dunno about having to be rich... I got a WinFast GF2MX for $140, and I'm quite happy with the 40-70fps I get in Counterstrike. Great performance for low cost is what is propelling nVidia into the territories formerly covered by 3dfx, and nVidia may soon be invading 3DLabs' and the chipset manufacturers territories.
Personally, I was hoping for a buyout of the Aureal assets by nVidia, but that's not happening. Although.... Word has it that nVidia "aquired" Aureal's techs. Whether it was sneaky and underhanded, I don't know, but it could bode well for the future.
Actually, Nader is included in most polls, as is Buchanan. They usually score about 3% and 2%, respectively.
I have been contacted for a political poll once. It was reasonably well balanced, asking questions like, "Of the following candidates, for whom are you most likely to vote?" Then they mention the candidates' names in a random order. The question was brought up about three times (phrased differently) total in the poll, mixing up the names each time. The whole thing lasted about ten minutes or so.
I believe that they mix up the names to weed out the people who will automatically answer with the first name, and get real results.
While working at Disneyland in tech support, I got called out on an old system back behind the Thunder Mountain BBQ because the keyboard wasn't working. When I got there and started popping keys off, there was this reddish build-up. Curious, I lifted it to have a closer look and smelled BBQ sauce. Apparently, this system had been back there since the TM BBQ opened, and over the preceding 7 or 8 years, BBQ sauce that had evaporated (or something) had built up in the keyboard, and eventually shorted part of it out. A new keyboard fixed it, but I'm still amazed by what one can find in these things.
The above applies specifically to all works created on or after Jan 1, 1978. Most other work from before that date was brought under the same statute of life plus 70 years or 95/120, as well, although it also specifies that no work from this category will have its copyright expire before Dec 31, 2002, and for works published on or before Dec 31, 2002, the copyright will not expire before Dec 31, 2047. Works created before Jan 1, 1978 usually get a 75 year copyright protection.
Apparently, there may be some other exceptions. The United States Copyright Office (http://lcweb.loc.gov/copyright/) has full information.
its almost routine for billions of gallons of oil to be "accidently" spilled into the ocean
You think the companies intentionally send that stuff into the water? Do you have any idea how much it costs to clean up oil? It's a lot more than the value of the oil that gets spilled, and something everybody involved tries their best to avoid, because of both the environmental and the financial costs. Gasoline is even worse, because it can filter into groundwater even faster. Unfortunately, we have a few people who make bad decisions (like heading up the Exxon Valdez while drunk), and we have disasters. Oil isn't the worst, just the one on which the media can pounce easiest.
good carborators that were invented and outlawed back in the early 60's
Good God, haven't we done away with these conspiracy rumors yet? If this stuff was already discovered, then why is it that all of the college teams haven't rediscovered the same principles? They get hundreds of miles to the gallon by building very low-weight, low-powered cars with ideas that do not scale well. If they did scale well, then one of them would have at least come up with a Geo that hits 300mpg. Mileage isn't just a function of the engine; it's every single component in the drive train, from the engine to the tires. Try improving the efficiency of the power transfer from the engine to the tires (instead of reactively blaming the billion dollar oil companies, which is oh-so-easy to do), and you'll have a better chance to see a real mileage change.
in an internal combustion engine the carborator injects gas into the piston in the form of a fine mist or vapor, its still liquid, there are ways of making them that inject it a a gas, not a mist or vapor
Aside from the fact that a vapor is a gas, there are almost no production cars anymore that use carbeurators. Why? Because they are inefficient at handling the mixtures when compared to other technologies. Modern fuel-injected vehicles are capable of balancing the mixtures on a per-cylinder basis, which is what keeps your car running when one of the plugs is going, or when you change your driving habits and it needs to maintain a proper balance of fuel economy and power. Anyway, the mixture that is injected is a very fine mist, not all that far from a vapor in the first place, with a total droplet surface area high enough to allow rapid vaporization of the fuel, which, when mixed with the surrounding air, creates a flammable mixture. Does all of the fuel vaporize? Ideally, yes. In reality, the amount that fails to vaporize during the mixing and combustion stages is so small as to be negligible.
this causes it to burn less at much higher temptures, which have litle or no exhaugst besides carbon, something that dosent heur much and might even be usefull as a lubricant
Burning at higher temperatures also allows other things to combust, like the nitrogen in the air. This isn't a fail-safe solution; try as you might, it's a bitch to get all of the pollutants out of the exhaust gasses, and companies have been trying for decades to get it reduced, whether due to regulations or trying to outdo the other companies in terms of fuel efficiency, or power, or both.
capitalisim hasent anything to do with it, oil is just what happened to be convienient and at the moment still seems to be, that however is going to and has to change, and being a tree hugger has nothing to do with it.
Capitalism has everything to do with it, even in your own argument. Capitalism is why companies that cannot adapt go away, whether bought up or shut down. One of the reasons that oil is still convenient is because everything else (tidal generation, nuclear reactors, hydroelectric, and even large solar plants) is subject to very costly environmental studies and regulations and litigation. If the same people who claim to be wanting to save the environment would allow new nuclear plants to go up, or would cooperate with new hydroelectric or solar plants, then maybe we could move along a little faster towards reducing our reliance on fossil fuels. Microsoft isn't the king of FUD; the environmentalists are, and when they learn to calm down and talk instead of sue, then maybe we can all get somewhere together.
It depends entirely on the area you're in. For example, as I understand it, @Home in New England blows bald goats. However, in my neck of the woods (Comcast@Home in SoCal), I have an uplink of 480Kb, and a downlink that I can routinely test at 1.5Mb, and which has on several occasions touched 5Mb, and on one occasion, even reached the 6Mb mark. (Mmmmmm..... 760K/sec... ) (This was early morning and I can only ascribe it to lucking my way in during a performance test or something like that.) I don't use the proxy, which would have been useless in these cases, anyway, since they were from private FTP sites.
Most people I know of are rather locked in at lower speeds, rarely seeing 1Mb down and never seeing higher than 128Kb up. I count myself as very, very lucky.
They do, in fact, enforce the ban on NNTP services, to which my firewall logs will attest. After the Usenet Death Threat a year or so ago, they take this one, at least, pretty seriously.
I just block everyone from accessing my services unless they are from a specific IP or set of IPs, which include no @Home computers save for two of my friends. Simple enough.
Network ICE's BlackICE Defender works wonders for this in terms of simplicity and ease of tracking. It's amazing how often my box (W2K Server) gets hit from them. I've recorded as many as about 200 hits in one day from their systems checking for NNTP services on my system. They're more common than all of the ping, Trojan, OS fingerprint, and modified packet touches put together. BTW, I was one of those who was supposed to get an IP address, only to find that it had been hijacked by someone else. They gave me another one, but started tracking the hijacker at that point. Doesn't take long to figure out just about where he is. The traceability of a cable company's copper is amazing sometimes.
I thought it was a "This Way Up" sign for the Russian launch engineers....
The exercise isn't totally pointless. Imagine picking out a significant number of major metroplexes (call them Class I connections) in the continental United States, and then running 128Tb connections between them with no intervening branching. Reducing the number of hops from Los Angeles to New York, for example, to two (or maybe even one) would reduce a lot of side traffic, freeing up bandwidth and improving the efficiency of connections. From each of these primary hubs could extend a few 16Tb or 32Tb connections (call these Class II connections) to other significant population/data centers, providing robust, high speed connections at a lower cost.
As a rather extreme example, I was playing a game of Q2:CTF once, and wanted to see why the connection seemed flaky. Running a tracert, I found that I was going through 23 hops, roughly from Los Angeles to San Jose to Chicago to New York to Washington to Florida to Dallas, where the server was located. With a better backbone architecture, that could have been reduced to maybe six hops -- rouhgly from my ISP to LA to Dallas to server. (Excess hops in the same location were left out of both of those examples.)
A few ideas of locations that could be interconnected with 128Tb connections:
Seattle
San Francisco Bay
Los Angeles
Denver
Los Alamos
Chicago
Dallas
New York
Boston
Washington, D.C.
Atlanta
Miami
Boston is kind of questionable for that one, and it may be better suited for a Class II connection. Other cities, such as San Diego or Houston, could get Class II connections from their closest Class I connection point.
This architecture would provide for alternate routing (each Class I would link with three or more Class I locations, as each Class II would link with two or more Class II locations in addition to the Class I source) in case of disaster or other disruption. The only barrier to this is the costs associated with building and running a dozen or so Class I connection sites, plus the dozens of Class II sites, plus all of the F-O that would have to be run.
There are a couple of possibilities on this one. One of the major problems that keeps LCDs so expensive is errors in the manufacturing process. Every manufacturer allows a certain number of pixels per specified size to be bad to keep the rejection rate down, but the process still leaves a lot of bad screens, and so a lot of work and materials are wasted.
:: Technology never does move fast enough for me.
The question that needs to be answered to determine if costs go up or down is the accuracy of the joining process. If it is very accurate, can be done by machine, and has a low failure rate, the costs could well go down significantly, as each rejection would be of a smaller part, meaning less work and fewer materials wasted. If it is a painstaking process, the materials question remains about the same, but the work costs can go up, meaning no reduction or possibly an increase in size.
One interesting possibility with this technology is a sort of "Lego" function, where you could snap in more and more of them (this would require some very tight manufacturing tolerances) to create larger screens on your own. This would allow not only individual consumers to build to the size they need (gamers go for larger traditional screens, graphic artists and webmasters go for wider screens, etc.), but companies could create screens that fit into their decor. Another upside with this is that if you have a panel that starts to have an unnacceptably high number of bad pixels, you swap it out for a new one.
:: sigh