I think you will find it a sad experience when you find half the disks won't read. I went away overseas for 10 years, leaving behind an old 386 and about 50 5.25" disks that had ancient games, all the stuff I did at uni, and other pet programming projects on them. When I finally returned about 3 years ago, I decided I'd try to ressurect some of my old code - mostly for laughs. Although the drive worked OK in a P4, unfortunately, many of the disks were unreadable - and some of the old games that did actually start to run had major issues - presumably because of lack of support foe CGA/EGA etc.
Still, it was fun laughing at ancient code that I once though so L33t! I even got an old copy of turbo pascal running but unfortunately the video driver modules didn't want to know about my video card either. The drive still sits in my new computer for no other reason than to fill up the otherwise gaping 5.25 bay (I have lost the cover long ago). Good for laughs at LUG meetups. The question is - why do they still make full tower cases with so many 5.25" bays, when you need at most 1 or 2 for a CDROM/DVD? It'd be a lot more useful to have fewer 5.25" bays and more 3.5" internal bays.
Korea is already lightyears ahead of the US in terms of high speed broadband rollout. Adding such a speed based tax would actually hold back connection speeds, as consumers would be less reluctant to pay for relatively more expensive high speed broadband, and widen the gap between Korea and the rest of us
What would make more sense is to make the tax inversely proportional, or flat as this means the slow speed connections are getting taxed relatively more per bit - thus encouraging people to move to higher speeds. Many of the costs of upgrading network infrastructure are fixed anyway. eg The cost of ripping up the road to lay copper vs fibre is still about the same - horrily expensive.
What would make even more sense is no seperate tax at all - as the very administration of the tax will generate more wasted hours, paper and gnashing of teeth for everyone. Road users are alreasy paying taxes (ie. fuel and registration) for a lot of other things besides roads, so why not divert some of those taxes to broadband infrastructure, since its roads that will mostly be getting dug up anyway? They can mabey have a better chance of synchronising hole diggind to lay multiple services in the one pipe at the same time too, instead of doing them one after the other.
Whatever happens, I sincerely hope that a seperate internet tax is not introduced because I can guarantee that within a year of the US adopting such a tax, us poor buggers down under will get it too. The Australian. government loves to follow the US and the UK's tax ideas. Eg. the city center congestion tax that they have become very interested in just after London started one - even though we have nothing like the traffic problems or population of London, not to mention completely inadequate public transport networks to give people a viable alternative of switching to commuting. Strangely enough, these issues never seem to come up before hand at elections, se we never actually get an option to vote for them.
So lobby like hell to stop this one, because I dont want to see yet another stupid tax introduced here, just because the US or UK has a similar one.
Well NASA of course would normally be concerned about the 13th being an unluck day, but they figured there was a 30 fold damping factor due to the other 30 days of the "lucky month" cancelling the effect.
Either that, or the guys and girls at NASA just don't believe in all that superstitious stuff.
Being full of astronomers and mathematicians instead of astrologists and numerologists, I would guess that the latter is the case.
hold a crowbar from one end, singe handed. That fierce twisting force you feel on your wrist is torque. It doesn't have to be moving to be applying a rotational force to your wrist.
I drive a car everyday, and I have little idea how it works. Sure I could find out, but I really don't care enough to. Apply that to the computer situation.
Looking at your car analogy - you don't need to know how to fix a car, just like you don't have to know how to write a program.
Here's where you you have failed to use the analogy correctly: When you were taught how to drive a car, it was in terms general enough so that you could get behind the wheel of ANY car and drive it, even if it was a small car or large car, and presumably automatic or manual. Some cars even have indicators on the opposite side - in Australia, the European imports nearly always have the wipers/indicators around the other way, annoyingly enough) - but because you were taught the general principles of driving a car, instead of a specific model, you can get into any car and zoom off. Kids should be taught how to use software in the same way.
Programmers write software with this in mind - every word processor program out there will have a way to cut, paste, delete, save files etc. They may be in slightly different places, but the functions will be there, and anyonw that has been taught what sort of functions that programs can do will be able to find and use them.
I bet that if you were put behind the wheel of just about any normal street car sold in the last 40 years, you could figure out how to open the door, get in, and drive it, even if you didn't know how to repair it.
I have always wondered why it is in the US, that when you turn 18, you are old enough to be put on a front line and shoot someone, or get killed trying, yet you are not considered responsible enough to drink a beer. It always seemed grossly unjust to me.
If you have a theory,...then no matter how many times the experiments go along with the theory, it's still a theory and there is a possibility that eventually they won't. But that first time that the experiments conflict with the theory, then the theory is bunk.
Actually, the first time the experiment conflicts with the theory, the experiment is bunk. It is only after the experiment has been repeated numerous times by peers that everyone finally starts agreeing that the theory is bunk. Before that time, you are just another crackpot.
wha people forget is, that such a setup could actually reduce powerplant capacity. Ask yourself this: Where is your car now? Where is it 90% of the time? Answer: Parked somewhere. If we all drove hybrid cars like you describe, and left them pluggged in when parked, with two-way power metering to credit your account, your car could help smooth out the daily peak power demand. During the day when electricity demand is at the maximum, cars that have excess capacity could be used to pump power back into the grid, essentially acting to flatten out the high and low points in the daily electricity demand.
When you are in the middle of nowhere and it's been raining for the last week and everyting in your kit is soaked, it's a wonderful thing to have a can of spam and a hexamine stove to fry it up on. Spam's a lot tastier than the mystery stew you get in the other cans in the ration packs. Best of all you can convince the other younger guys it tastes horrible and get them to leave it all for you.
I wonder if Linux can be forked into a more restrictive License, which doesnt go against the GPL. That way Solaris source blocks can be moved to Linux if its even worth that much.
In a word: No. Anything that imposed additional conditions to the GPL (which any forked version is still covered by) would violate the licence. In order to be able to mix GNU/Linux code with Solaris code, according to the Solaris licence the code has to be non-redistributable, but according to the GPL, GNU/Linux must be freely distributable. Hence the two can never be mixed.
If the GPL wasn't like this, Microsoft (or anyone else) could just "fork" Linux, put a windows sticker on it and call it their own, without returning anything to the community or making any of their changes redistributable.
I can't speak to that in detail, but I do know that in Japan, my 4'11" ex can reach the overhead handholds on the subway, so I would be willing to bet that ceilings are considerably lower.
Those trains often have posters hanging down from the ceiling, which, being 6"4, I'd brush through as I walked down the carriage. Unfortunately in some trains they'd have a steel rail going accross the carriage between the hand rails running the length of the car. These were usually located just behind hanging posters that neatly hid them, and I have sent a carriage ringing like a bell on more than one occasion because of this.
Standard door height in Japan seems to be about 6 ft. I have the scars to prove it. In either environment, I don't think the walker bot's going to fit.
Come to think of it, Japan is probably one of the safest places on earth for women after dark, yet they have all that weird tentacle schoolgirl porn that I have actually seen business guys in suits reading on the train!
So mabey theres some kind of inverse relationship between society's attitude to porn and the level of sex crime caused by frustrated sickos on the loose.
Thankyou for highighting the real cause of world hunger. I thought I was going to have to write a post myself. Well I will expand on what you said anyway.
it has been shown time and time again that the cause of world hunger isnt the lack of production, but in fact the lack of distribution due to corruption, civil unrest and war, and high levels of subsidies in both the US and Europe that make it impossible for countries out side these areas to compete and hence develop their own agriculture.
Being forced to open their markets to subsidied produce from Europe and the US via pressure from the world bank, local farmers are thus unable to sell their own cash crops at a fair price. This has happened with nut growers, coffee, corn and many others. You thought the war on terror is expensive? The US will spend $180 Billion over 10 years from 2002.
Infact, GM products increase the likelyhood of starvation in the third world, because now the farmers are forced to buy expensive seed stocks and breeding animals from the owners of the GM patents (usually Monsanto) instead of being able to resow part of last year's crop, or if they try to continue in the traditional manner, they face competition in a heavily subsidies market. Farming only becomes ecconomically viable for "big agriculture". More here
Give the government full control over my internet access?
Two words come to mind buddy first one starts with an F and the second starts with a T.
They have full control over the road to your front door, don't they? At any rate, they can tap your telephone when they want, and subphoena your ISP too, for that matter.
I am not saying they should neccesarily be your ISP - that could still be in the hands of private companies.
Eg. In Australia, Telstra owns the phone network - the physical lines etc. Telstra is also the largest Broadband provider. There are many other broadband providers who compete with Telstra, but they have to buy their last mole connection from Telstra.
The problem is, Telstra used to be government owned, but is now half privatised. Because Telstra are also competing in the broadbnand market, and are being forced to allow other ISPs to use their network, they still have a tendancy to screw over the other ISPs where possible. (See this site for many discussions)
My argument is that the actual physical network - particularly the last mile, should be in public hands, so all the private ISPs can compete fairly.
The problem with privately owned networks is that it is often impractical at best, or very wasteful at worst to roll out two networks. This means that if the network is privatised, there exists either small pockets of monopolies, with one company having exclusive control over a section of network, or wasteful duplication in profitable areas, at the expense of less profitable areas, such as has happened in many cities with broadband available from both cable and adsl, yet poorer/more distant areas remain out of range for either service.
Physical infrastructure for networks should always be publicly owned. This isn't to say that the services running on them should be publicly owned.
Eg. Roads. It is much more efficient for roads to be in the hands of a public entity that maintains them for the use of all services that run on them. In the case of roads, you can have both privately owned and publicly owned "services" running on them - for example, busses and cars can be privately owned for both personal use and to provide services such as fedex, public transport and emergency services. In the case of roads, if they were privatised, it would be extremly impractical for a competitor to start up a new road network that serviced the same area as an existing road network - apart from the cost, it would be very wasteful of resources.
Ideally, I think that TCP/IP networks should be the same as roads. The fundamental infrastructure, ie. the wires/airwaves should be in the hands of public non-profit entities, with private companies running their services on top of that, and paying a fee for usage in much the same way that you pay registration fees/fuel tax to pay for roads. Note that it is the actual transport medium I am refering to that should be in public hands - not those other neccesary components to complete the system. The roads and stoplights if you will, not the vehicles and petrol stations.
This would mean that the basic infrastructure is not monopolised by any one company, and in the case of wireless technologies, there is no wasteful competition for the limited spectrum. The public body that maintains the network should also have a mandate to provide the network to all areas according to need, rather than profitablility, in much the same way roads are.
This is the most efficient way to get good broadband to all, and keep a healthy level of competition in the market. If the physical network is privatised, competition effectively comes to a halt.
You could also brush your teeth with a clean tootbrush dipped in neat 5% hydrogen peroxide (H202). You can buy 5% concentration from the chemist/drug store. Don't use pure peroxide, which you probably can't get anyway unless you work at Armadillo Aerospace.
After brushing your teeth normally and rinsing, give them the peroxide treatment.
Put the peroxide in a small cup ( like say, a shot glass) so you don't contaminate the whole bottle.
That will nuke any anaerobic bacteria in your mouth and also bubble off any food particles etc. that are stuck in hard to get to places.
The peroxide will break down on contact with debri and plaque to H20 and O2, making lots of foamy oxygen bubbles.
Rinse your brush before dunking it back in the peroxide again.
Don't swallow the peroxide.
Re:Hard Drive in the Freezer
on
Creative Data Loss
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
We used to solve this problem with a sharp wrist flick of the hard drive. Basically you hild the drive vertically in your hand, with the edge facing you. then do a sharp wrist rotation in the same plane as the drive platter would normally rotate. Better than subjecting all the drive to such a hard shock like youd get clubbing it.
Getting on MTV, "music" magazines (think Rolling Stone), the radio etc. isn't cheap.
You know, last time I asked about licencing etc. at a community radio station that I occasionally help out with, they told me they have to keep track of each song they play, and pay a licencing fee, on top of the cost of the CD which they hae already bought in a shop. So actually radio play is earning the record labels money, not costing them, plus being a pain in the arse for the station because they have to record all those numbers. I have no idea about the setup with MTV. Got any figures or links?
To make this the perfect geek tool in my eyes, they need to add a Hhillips screw driver that will lock in the open position, and mabey a flat blade - even if they have to drop the nail file and/or blade. The knife would be handy for stripping cat 5 cable, and if they could somehow attach a miniature crimper it would be the uber geek tool.
actually there's no reason you couldn't have a mini web server in it's memory so you could run a server on whatever computer you plugged it in to, serving up your favourite pages or streaming audio etc. to your office:)
I wrote off a CBR400 T-boning a car that pulled a U-turn right in front of me. I was probably doing about 25mph at impact (because I was able to break some before hitting), and flew over the back of the car. I was wearing full Dainese racing leathers, helmet gloves & boots. The gloves took a lot of damage, I slid into the gutter & hit my shin very hard on the curb and the bike ended up on my foot. my only injuries were a bit of bruising on my foot - the shin armor in the leathers spread the curb impact over my whole shin, so I didn't get hurt at all by that - but it would have broken my leg without the armor. The arm, shoulder area and & hip also took a bit of abrasion, and I was also a bit bruised on my hip, but again the padding there helped absorb a lot of the impact, so I reckon the $1000 investment in the leathers was definitely worth the money.
Here's some info on abrasion resistance of different materials: Reprint from a Sept 88 "Cycle" magazine article "Abrasion Testing: Torn in the USA".
Drag Test
"For the Drag Test, samples were stitched to a bag that held a 75-pound sandbag inside a milk crate, then dragged behind a pickup truck..."
"For the Taber Test, the specimen was mounted on a rotating platform and scuffed by two rubber-emery grinding wheels." The numbers represent the number of revolutions until the fabric totally fails. A vacuum clears debris.
"Finally, protection from road abrasion cannot be guaranteed by a materials abrasion resistance alone. A jacket may have panels of highly abrasion-resistant materials, yet if low-quality stitching joins those panels and the seams come apart upon impact or during a slide, then the abrasion resistance of the panels could count for nothing. Furthermore, an ill-fitting garment may ride up in a slide, contorting the body and exposing the skin. And the best jacket in the world, left unzipped and/or unsnapped, won't give riders the protection they pay for. When it comes to safety, the issues are more complex than just the abrasion resistance of materials."
The article also states "WinFS uses a direct acyclic graph of items (DAG)."
Here in Australia (and NZ, I think), DAG is the um.... technical term for the lup of flyblown crap that hangs off the end of a sheep's arse. The Acronym seems appropriate, somehow.
I would have thought that with a son in the IT industry, Jonnie Howard would have been at least mildly concerned about the software patent/IP issues in the unpopular "free trade" agreement we recently got shoved down out throats.
Too much to expect, I suppose.
We don't even have an alternative come the next election because the Labor party has accepted them too. So much for democracy & having a choice.
So what can the average joe citizen do to fight crap like this, when all the parties seem to have identical policies on issues like this?
Slashdot Mirror
I think you will find it a sad experience when you find half the disks won't read. I went away overseas for 10 years, leaving behind an old 386 and about 50 5.25" disks that had ancient games, all the stuff I did at uni, and other pet programming projects on them. When I finally returned about 3 years ago, I decided I'd try to ressurect some of my old code - mostly for laughs. Although the drive worked OK in a P4, unfortunately, many of the disks were unreadable - and some of the old games that did actually start to run had major issues - presumably because of lack of support foe CGA/EGA etc.
Still, it was fun laughing at ancient code that I once though so L33t! I even got an old copy of turbo pascal running but unfortunately the video driver modules didn't want to know about my video card either. The drive still sits in my new computer for no other reason than to fill up the otherwise gaping 5.25 bay (I have lost the cover long ago). Good for laughs at LUG meetups.
The question is - why do they still make full tower cases with so many 5.25" bays, when you need at most 1 or 2 for a CDROM/DVD? It'd be a lot more useful to have fewer 5.25" bays and more 3.5" internal bays.
Korea is already lightyears ahead of the US in terms of high speed broadband rollout.
Adding such a speed based tax would actually hold back connection speeds, as consumers would be less reluctant to pay for relatively more expensive high speed broadband, and widen the gap between Korea and the rest of us
What would make more sense is to make the tax inversely proportional, or flat as this means the slow speed connections are getting taxed relatively more per bit - thus encouraging people to move to higher speeds. Many of the costs of upgrading network infrastructure are fixed anyway. eg The cost of ripping up the road to lay copper vs fibre is still about the same - horrily expensive.
What would make even more sense is no seperate tax at all - as the very administration of the tax will generate more wasted hours, paper and gnashing of teeth for everyone. Road users are alreasy paying taxes (ie. fuel and registration) for a lot of other things besides roads, so why not divert some of those taxes to broadband infrastructure, since its roads that will mostly be getting dug up anyway?
They can mabey have a better chance of synchronising hole diggind to lay multiple services in the one pipe at the same time too, instead of doing them one after the other.
Whatever happens, I sincerely hope that a seperate internet tax is not introduced because I can guarantee that within a year of the US adopting such a tax, us poor buggers down under will get it too. The Australian. government loves to follow the US and the UK's tax ideas.
Eg. the city center congestion tax that they have become very interested in just after London started one - even though we have nothing like the traffic problems or population of London, not to mention completely inadequate public transport networks to give people a viable alternative of switching to commuting. Strangely enough, these issues never seem to come up before hand at elections, se we never actually get an option to vote for them.
So lobby like hell to stop this one, because I dont want to see yet another stupid tax introduced here, just because the US or UK has a similar one.
Well NASA of course would normally be concerned about the 13th being an unluck day, but they figured there was a 30 fold damping factor due to the other 30 days of the "lucky month" cancelling the effect.
Either that, or the guys and girls at NASA just don't believe in all that superstitious stuff.
Being full of astronomers and mathematicians instead of astrologists and numerologists, I would guess that the latter is the case.
hold a crowbar from one end, singe handed. That fierce twisting force you feel on your wrist is torque. It doesn't have to be moving to be applying a rotational force to your wrist.
I drive a car everyday, and I have little idea how it works. Sure I could find out, but I really don't care enough to. Apply that to the computer situation.
Looking at your car analogy - you don't need to know how to fix a car, just like you don't have to know how to write a program.
Here's where you you have failed to use the analogy correctly: When you were taught how to drive a car, it was in terms general enough so that you could get behind the wheel of ANY car and drive it, even if it was a small car or large car, and presumably automatic or manual. Some cars even have indicators on the opposite side - in Australia, the European imports nearly always have the wipers/indicators around the other way, annoyingly enough) - but because you were taught the general principles of driving a car, instead of a specific model, you can get into any car and zoom off. Kids should be taught how to use software in the same way.
Programmers write software with this in mind - every word processor program out there will have a way to cut, paste, delete, save files etc. They may be in slightly different places, but the functions will be there, and anyonw that has been taught what sort of functions that programs can do will be able to find and use them.
I bet that if you were put behind the wheel of just about any normal street car sold in the last 40 years, you could figure out how to open the door, get in, and drive it, even if you didn't know how to repair it.
I have always wondered why it is in the US, that when you turn 18, you are old enough to be put on a front line and shoot someone, or get killed trying, yet you are not considered responsible enough to drink a beer. It always seemed grossly unjust to me.
Thanks for clearing this up.
If you have a theory, ...then no matter how many times the experiments go along with the theory, it's still a theory and there is a possibility that eventually they won't. But that first time that the experiments conflict with the theory, then the theory is bunk.
Actually, the first time the experiment conflicts with the theory, the experiment is bunk.
It is only after the experiment has been repeated numerous times by peers that everyone finally starts agreeing that the theory is bunk. Before that time, you are just another crackpot.
wha people forget is, that such a setup could actually reduce powerplant capacity.
Ask yourself this: Where is your car now?
Where is it 90% of the time?
Answer: Parked somewhere.
If we all drove hybrid cars like you describe, and left them pluggged in when parked, with two-way power metering to credit your account, your car could help smooth out the daily peak power demand. During the day when electricity demand is at the maximum, cars that have excess capacity could be used to pump power back into the grid, essentially acting to flatten out the high and low points in the daily electricity demand.
What about 4 space tabs? That's IMHO the best compromise between readability & vertical space use, and what I have been using for the last 12 years.
When you are in the middle of nowhere and it's been raining for the last week and everyting in your kit is soaked, it's a wonderful thing to have a can of spam and a hexamine stove to fry it up on. Spam's a lot tastier than the mystery stew you get in the other cans in the ration packs. Best of all you can convince the other younger guys it tastes horrible and get them to leave it all for you.
I wonder if Linux can be forked into a more restrictive License, which doesnt go against the GPL. That way Solaris source blocks can be moved to Linux if its even worth that much.
In a word: No.
Anything that imposed additional conditions to the GPL (which any forked version is still covered by) would violate the licence. In order to be able to mix GNU/Linux code with Solaris code, according to the Solaris licence the code has to be non-redistributable, but according to the GPL, GNU/Linux must be freely distributable.
Hence the two can never be mixed.
If the GPL wasn't like this, Microsoft (or anyone else) could just "fork" Linux, put a windows sticker on it and call it their own, without returning anything to the community or making any of their changes redistributable.
I can't speak to that in detail, but I do know that in Japan, my 4'11" ex can reach the overhead handholds on the subway, so I would be willing to bet that ceilings are considerably lower.
Those trains often have posters hanging down from the ceiling, which, being 6"4, I'd brush through as I walked down the carriage. Unfortunately in some trains they'd have a steel rail going accross the carriage between the hand rails running the length of the car. These were usually located just behind hanging posters that neatly hid them, and I have sent a carriage ringing like a bell on more than one occasion because of this.
Standard door height in Japan seems to be about 6 ft. I have the scars to prove it.
In either environment, I don't think the walker bot's going to fit.
Come to think of it, Japan is probably one of the safest places on earth for women after dark, yet they have all that weird tentacle schoolgirl porn that I have actually seen business guys in suits reading on the train!
So mabey theres some kind of inverse relationship between society's attitude to porn and the level of sex crime caused by frustrated sickos on the loose.
Thankyou for highighting the real cause of world hunger. I thought I was going to have to write a post myself. Well I will expand on what you said anyway.
it has been shown time and time again that the cause of world hunger isnt the lack of production, but in fact the lack of distribution due to corruption, civil unrest and war, and high levels of subsidies in both the US and Europe that make it impossible for countries out side these areas to compete and hence develop their own agriculture.
Being forced to open their markets to subsidied produce from Europe and the US via pressure from the world bank, local farmers are thus unable to sell their own cash crops at a fair price. This has happened with nut growers, coffee, corn and many others. You thought the war on terror is expensive? The US will spend $180 Billion over 10 years from 2002.
Infact, GM products increase the likelyhood of starvation in the third world, because now the farmers are forced to buy expensive seed stocks and breeding animals from the owners of the GM patents (usually Monsanto) instead of being able to resow part of last year's crop, or if they try to continue in the traditional manner, they face competition in a heavily subsidies market. Farming only becomes ecconomically viable for "big agriculture".
More here
they have to buy their last mole connection from Telstra.
:)
*sigh* of course that should be last MILE.
Proof that spell checking doesn't save you from all evil
Give the government full control over my internet access?
Two words come to mind buddy first one starts with an F and the second starts with a T.
They have full control over the road to your front door, don't they? At any rate, they can tap your telephone when they want, and subphoena your ISP too, for that matter.
I am not saying they should neccesarily be your ISP - that could still be in the hands of private companies.
Eg. In Australia, Telstra owns the phone network - the physical lines etc. Telstra is also the largest Broadband provider. There are many other broadband providers who compete with Telstra, but they have to buy their last mole connection from Telstra.
The problem is, Telstra used to be government owned, but is now half privatised. Because Telstra are also competing in the broadbnand market, and are being forced to allow other ISPs to use their network, they still have a tendancy to screw over the other ISPs where possible. (See this site for many discussions)
My argument is that the actual physical network - particularly the last mile, should be in public hands, so all the private ISPs can compete fairly.
The problem with privately owned networks is that it is often impractical at best, or very wasteful at worst to roll out two networks. This means that if the network is privatised, there exists either small pockets of monopolies, with one company having exclusive control over a section of network, or wasteful duplication in profitable areas, at the expense of less profitable areas, such as has happened in many cities with broadband available from both cable and adsl, yet poorer/more distant areas remain out of range for either service.
Physical infrastructure for networks should always be publicly owned. This isn't to say that the services running on them should be publicly owned.
Eg. Roads. It is much more efficient for roads to be in the hands of a public entity that maintains them for the use of all services that run on them. In the case of roads, you can have both privately owned and publicly owned "services" running on them - for example, busses and cars can be privately owned for both personal use and to provide services such as fedex, public transport and emergency services. In the case of roads, if they were privatised, it would be extremly impractical for a competitor to start up a new road network that serviced the same area as an existing road network - apart from the cost, it would be very wasteful of resources.
Ideally, I think that TCP/IP networks should be the same as roads. The fundamental infrastructure, ie. the wires/airwaves should be in the hands of public non-profit entities, with private companies running their services on top of that, and paying a fee for usage in much the same way that you pay registration fees/fuel tax to pay for roads. Note that it is the actual transport medium I am refering to that should be in public hands - not those other neccesary components to complete the system. The roads and stoplights if you will, not the vehicles and petrol stations.
This would mean that the basic infrastructure is not monopolised by any one company, and in the case of wireless technologies, there is no wasteful competition for the limited spectrum.
The public body that maintains the network should also have a mandate to provide the network to all areas according to need, rather than profitablility, in much the same way roads are.
This is the most efficient way to get good broadband to all, and keep a healthy level of competition in the market. If the physical network is privatised, competition effectively comes to a halt.
You could also brush your teeth with a clean tootbrush dipped in neat 5% hydrogen peroxide (H202). You can buy 5% concentration from the chemist/drug store. Don't use pure peroxide, which you probably can't get anyway unless you work at Armadillo Aerospace.
After brushing your teeth normally and rinsing, give them the peroxide treatment.
Put the peroxide in a small cup ( like say, a shot glass) so you don't contaminate the whole bottle.
That will nuke any anaerobic bacteria in your mouth and also bubble off any food particles etc. that are stuck in hard to get to places.
The peroxide will break down on contact with debri and plaque to H20 and O2, making lots of foamy oxygen bubbles.
Rinse your brush before dunking it back in the peroxide again.
Don't swallow the peroxide.
We used to solve this problem with a sharp wrist flick of the hard drive.
Basically you hild the drive vertically in your hand, with the edge facing you.
then do a sharp wrist rotation in the same plane as the drive platter would normally rotate. Better than subjecting all the drive to such a hard shock like youd get clubbing it.
Getting on MTV, "music" magazines (think Rolling Stone), the radio etc. isn't cheap.
You know, last time I asked about licencing etc. at a community radio station that I occasionally help out with, they told me they have to keep track of each song they play, and pay a licencing fee, on top of the cost of the CD which they hae already bought in a shop.
So actually radio play is earning the record labels money, not costing them, plus being a pain in the arse for the station because they have to record all those numbers.
I have no idea about the setup with MTV. Got any figures or links?
To make this the perfect geek tool in my eyes, they need to add a Hhillips screw driver that will lock in the open position, and mabey a flat blade - even if they have to drop the nail file and/or blade. The knife would be handy for stripping cat 5 cable, and if they could somehow attach a miniature crimper it would be the uber geek tool.
actually there's no reason you couldn't have a mini web server in it's memory so you could run a server on whatever computer you plugged it in to, serving up your favourite pages or streaming audio etc. to your office :)
I wrote off a CBR400 T-boning a car that pulled a U-turn right in front of me. I was probably doing about 25mph at impact (because I was able to break some before hitting), and flew over the back of the car. I was wearing full Dainese racing leathers, helmet gloves & boots.
The gloves took a lot of damage, I slid into the gutter & hit my shin very hard on the curb and the bike ended up on my foot. my only injuries were a bit of bruising on my foot - the shin armor in the leathers spread the curb impact over my whole shin, so I didn't get hurt at all by that - but it would have broken my leg without the armor. The arm, shoulder area and & hip also took a bit of abrasion, and I was also a bit bruised on my hip, but again the padding there helped absorb a lot of the impact, so I reckon the $1000 investment in the leathers was definitely worth the money.
Here's some info on abrasion resistance of different materials:
Reprint from a
Sept 88 "Cycle" magazine article "Abrasion Testing: Torn in the USA".
Drag Test
"For the Drag Test, samples were stitched to a bag that held a 75-pound
sandbag inside a milk crate, then dragged behind a pickup truck..."
New, 100% Cotton Denim Jeans 3' 10"
Senior Balistic Nylon 3' 10"
Leather, Lightweight, Nude Finish, 2.25 oz/sq. ft. 4' 3"
Leather, Fashion Weight, 1.75 oz/sq ft. 4' 4"
Two-year-old 100% Cotton Denim Jeans 4' 5"
Cordura Nylon Type 440 18' 3"
Kevlar 29 Aramid Fiber, Style 713 22' 1"
Leather, Competition Weight, 3 oz/sq. ft. 86' 0"
Taber Test
"For the Taber Test, the specimen was mounted on a rotating platform and
scuffed by two rubber-emery grinding wheels." The numbers represent the
number of revolutions until the fabric totally fails. A vacuum clears
debris.
Two-year-old 100% Cotton Denim Jeans: 168
New 100% Cotton Denim Jeans: 225
Kevlar 29 Aramid Fiber, Style 713: 506
Cordura Nylon, Type 440: 559
Leather, Lightweight, Nude Finish, 2.25 oz./sq. ft.: 564
Leather, Fashion Weight, 1.75 oz./sq. ft. 750
Senior Ballistic Nylon: 817
Leather, Competition Weight, 3 oz./sq. ft.: 2600
More to consider...
"Finally, protection from road abrasion cannot be guaranteed by a
materials abrasion resistance alone. A jacket may have panels of
highly abrasion-resistant materials, yet if low-quality stitching joins
those panels and the seams come apart upon impact or during a slide, then
the abrasion resistance of the panels could count for nothing.
Furthermore, an ill-fitting garment may ride up in a slide, contorting
the body and exposing the skin. And the best jacket in the world, left
unzipped and/or unsnapped, won't give riders the protection they pay
for. When it comes to safety, the issues are more complex than just the
abrasion resistance of materials."
The article also states "WinFS uses a direct acyclic graph of items (DAG)."
Here in Australia (and NZ, I think), DAG is the um.... technical term for the lup of flyblown crap that hangs off the end of a sheep's arse.
The Acronym seems appropriate, somehow.
I would have thought that with a son in the IT industry, Jonnie Howard would have been at least mildly concerned about the software patent/IP issues in the unpopular "free trade" agreement we recently got shoved down out throats.
Too much to expect, I suppose.
We don't even have an alternative come the next election because the Labor party has accepted them too. So much for democracy & having a choice.
So what can the average joe citizen do to fight crap like this, when all the parties seem to have identical policies on issues like this?