TV stations always used Beta because VHS wasn't good enough for their needs.
And they still do. Of course, it's the broadcast version, not the consumer version, and I think there's a digital variant these days. But it's still Beta-something.
I do not understand why the MD format is still around and Sony releases a new player if there are mp3 players for the same price which can carry much more music for less weight...
That might be an argument against minidisc players, but minidisc recorders are used for all kinds of field recording. Radio reporters, for instance, will plug a good microphone (hacked to provide unbalanced input) into a minidisc recorder for interviews and such.
The current batch of commercial minidisc recorders appear to be slightly crippled in the digital-out department, unfortunately, but there's an advantage to be had there over analog recording -- you can edit your recorded sound without losing a generation in analogue dubbing between the capture medium (the minidisc) and the editing medium (a WAV file on a PC hard disk, these days).
In the same breath I fail to understand how the birds which are riding the same air that's helping the turbines move getting hit by the turbines.
The turbine blades and the birds would be moving in different directions, for one thing. The turbine faces into the wind.
And of course birds aren't necessarily being blown along by the wind; they fly of their own accord.
Only if the energy gained by the turbines is more than that imparted by the air can the turbines rotate so fast that they strike the bird!!
It seems to me that the bird would be flying along when (unexpectedly to the bird) the turbine blade would rotate into its path. The blade certainly wouldn't have to speed up and swat the bird out of the air from behind, which is what your statement seems to assume.
They would be arguing that computer code is a special case that cannot be copyrighted but must be either held as a trade secret or released as public domain.
One wonders what grounds they'd make that argument upon, beyond the fact that they wish things worked that way. It might sound convincing enough to keep the stock price inflated a little while longer, in any case.
Is there any evidence to support the (unlikely) theory that someone at SCO actually believes the hooey that their PR is spouting? Perhaps they're so monumentally misled as to think that they own a magic, money-making spell that only works if it's kept secret, and that IBM has somehow spoiled it and led to the imminent ruin of the company.
Or perhaps not. I just felt compelled to say something other than "what a bunch of crooks!" by way of comment.
Download the power of government to everyone, so that fairness becomes the new standard. Inform the public based on true logic, not stupid logic, like "if you vote for this, you will be good looking."
This doesn't necessarily follow. Why would fairness become the new standard if the majority has no reason to consider the minority? Why wouldn't those in power continue to use advertising and sloganeering ("stupid logic") to influence people?
I mean... if you BANK online, what's so bad about voting online? Seriously.
If online banking fouls up your accounts, you lose. If online voting fouls up an election, everybody loses.
If the corruption is there to the point where you can't post a ballot online, then the same must be true with any form of electoral process.
In Canada, we use hand-marked paper ballots for provincial and federal elections. They are counted by a committee of sorts, composed of representatives of various parties and the (theoretically neutral) elections staff. It would take widespread, systematic shenanigans to alter the outcome of a typical election.
Electronic votes are stored in a database that any one person with the right password can fiddle.
No, that would be just as wrong as using "homonym"...
...as I pointed out myself. However, it would have been the more appropriate word to use in the context of the joke, because the principal feature of homophones is that they sound alike.
A "homograph" is a word that has the same spelling as another word but which differs in meaning.
Indeed, just as the COD entry I quoted states.
Clearly you've read my post, as you've just written it back to me. But, since you're such a stickler, I should point out a hint that you didn't take: it's "sound-alike," not "sound-a-like."
There may be a new rule, here, analogous with the one that states that all spelling flames will contain at least one spelling error. "Any correction to diction will contain at least one word for which a better alternative exists," perhaps.
"soundalike words", is that Bush-speak for homonym?
No, because "homonym" means a word that has the same sound, and often the same spelling too, as another word whereas "sound-a-like" or "soundalike" means a word that sounds like another word without necessarily being homonymous to it.
Homophone isn't exactly the right word, of course, because "tenet" and "tenant" don't sound the same (or oughtn't to). But it would have been better than "homonym" in the initial joke.
By the way, I'd always assumed that words had to be spelled identically to count as homonyms; the definitions to which you refer conflate what are in my opinion two separate categories (which is why I happen to know what a homophone is).
I wonder what the OED has to say about these sound-alike words. My ancient COD (4th ed.) lacks homophone, requires homonyms to be "of the same form," and offers the apparently synonymous "homograph... [w]ord spelt like another, but with different meaning."
[...]would you have supported military and police action because "it appeared, within the intelligence commite, that the taliban was going to fly an airplane into the world trade centers"? Probably not.
And rightly so, because it wasn't the Taliban, now, was it?
but the communists in the 50's weren't blowing up too many buildings or killing people.
What about Stalin and the millions that were killed under his rule of the USSR?
Perhaps kannibal_klown should've written "...weren't blowing up... buildings or killing people in the United States".
But I think that the klown may be a bit hasty in distinguishing between witches and terrorists solely on the ground that terrorists seem to be a more realistic threat.
Witches used to be a realistic threat, back when people believed that it was possible to gain supernatural powers through an unholy pact with the devil.
And just because real terrorists exist, it doesn't follow that people won't fear/accuse non-terrorists just because "they hated that particular person anyway, were trying to gain monetray/political ground, or were just bored".
Let's not forget the 1980s, when we were informed (if not reliably then repeatedly) that Satanists were running day-cares and drinking babies' blood in secret underground chambers, and that anyone who said "hogwash" was In On It.
What is more, it is would not slow down as more and more people use the service...
Infinite capacity?
For people interested in uploading as well as downloading, it will provide the same speeds in both directions.
Twice as infinite!
Problems such as bad weather conditions can be countered by an antenna stabilisation system which would make sure the antenna stays in place regardless of wind, rain or other conditions.
The antenna is hanging from a tethered balloon. Unsurprisingly, the magic means of keeping it from bobbing about is not discussed in detail.
Going completely unaddressed is the question of what the user's ground station would look like. Presumably you'd need a small dish with line-of-sight to the balloon to receive; I don't know what kind of transmitter you'd be looking at.
Re: I've used genetic algorithms
on
Digital Darwin
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· Score: 1
Oh, and what good has religion brought to mankind? Well, you could ask survivors of the holocaust, who witnessed firsthand what a society without religion is like.
Myself, I thought that the Nazis' biggest problem was that they were a pack of bigoted, racist murderers. So, while we're at it, why don't we use them as an example of the perils of poor taste in art?
By which I mean to say, your example is beyond poor.
Anyway, it's not as though the Germany from which the Nazis arose was a society without religion.
...explain to me why the anti-hate-speech laws that are in the criminal code of Canada can exist when they are clearly in contradiction of section 2...
The anti-hate-speech stuff is presumably justified by the principle mentioned by the previous poster: "the rights are stated as not absolute, but subject to such limits as are necessary in a free and democratic society".
...that's not even a provincial decision...
Wouldn't matter. The Federal government is theoretically as able to use the "Notwithstanding Clause" as a provincial government is.
...there's a lot more laws that don't get renewed that are in contradiction to that section as well.
Plenty of laws which seem to violate one part of the Charter have been found by the courts to be constitutional. You can't conspire to commit murder, for instance, despite freedom of expression.
Canon seems to be the least obnoxious with the ink issues...
I'm late replying to this, but I should mention my experience with the (recently discontinued) Canon S520. It has individually replaceable ink tanks, which attracted me to the printer, and they don't contain any tricky chips.
Alas, as I discovered when doing some heavy-coverage monochrome work, the printer likes to dump colour ink in with the black. Even when printing in monochrome mode. I've actually replaced more colour tanks than black tanks while printing nothing but black.
It's not just the cleaning cycle getting me, either -- I've printed plenty of full colour pages and not gone through the colour ink as fast as I'm now going through it printing in black only.
Now, this is heavy coverage, I admit, but I'm not complaining that it's consuming the black ink. I'm complaining that in the middle of a black page, with the "monochrome" box checked, the driver pops up an "out of magenta" message.
Indeed, I began using cheaper refills than Canon's, and the difference between the black on the last page printed with all Canon ink and the black on the first page printed with cheaper refill cyan was visible.
This "feature" is not mentioned in the documentation.
No, I accused you of trolling for suckers. I did accuse the suckers of jingoism.
...demonstrating that the US is a better country...
If one country is better than another, it doesn't mean that the better country's actions against the worse one will always be good and for the best.
...change our policy.
I think that many people view the current war as a continuation of a bad history of international meddling.
And of course the only alternative to this is to bomb them until they love you.
The may not love us but they will respect us.
And now it's my turn to ask when in history something has ever worked. How much respect did the IRA gain by blowing stuff up? How about the FLQ? Did Londoners respect the Luftwaffe? Does anyone respect the PLO?
Dropping dynamite on cities from a great height is a guaranteed method of becoming feared and despised, but respect is not guaranteed.
I'm not sure how you can pervert my statement that the US does not throw people into plastic shredders...
Bonus points for misdirection, since I was of course quoting your line: "An American would never stand by while another human being was tortured in the ways the Iraqis are everyday!"
I suspect that people who'd eagerly agree with your "An American would never stand by..." assertion would be shocked and appalled even by the level of repression in Saudi Arabia, which is peanuts (seeing as people aren't actually disappearing left and right) compared to the conditions in some countries whose governments have been either propped up or practically installed by ever-so-clever U.S. foreign policy.
...we should crawl to these third rate countries with our hat in our hand and beg forgiveness and allow them to fly planes into buildings...?
And of course the only alternative to this is to bomb them until they love you. Amazing, isn't it?
An American would never stand by while another human being was tortured in the ways the Iraqis are everyday!
I wonder how many suckers you'll catch, trolling this on the end of your line. There are probably quite a few people who're willing to "forget," for the purposes of jingoism, at least, all of the very bad men that Americans have helped to keep in power.
All in the name of stability, of course. Difficult decisions, et cetera, and as we have now seen, it's always possible to take it back later and fix everything by offering peace and freedom from the end of a gun.
Proves that he's got missiles with longer ranges than he's supposed to, and that he didn't declare everything that he had. It's hardly a surprise -- there was coverage of other missiles of his a few weeks ago.
But al-Hussein-variant Scuds aren't "weapons of mass destruction". They aren't even very good missiles, in the grand scheme of things. And they're certainly not a threat to the United States.
Proof of what, then? That Saddam's a creep? You're confused if you think that anyone needs more evidence of that.
Slashdot Mirror
And they still do. Of course, it's the broadcast version, not the consumer version, and I think there's a digital variant these days. But it's still Beta-something.
That might be an argument against minidisc players, but minidisc recorders are used for all kinds of field recording. Radio reporters, for instance, will plug a good microphone (hacked to provide unbalanced input) into a minidisc recorder for interviews and such.
The current batch of commercial minidisc recorders appear to be slightly crippled in the digital-out department, unfortunately, but there's an advantage to be had there over analog recording -- you can edit your recorded sound without losing a generation in analogue dubbing between the capture medium (the minidisc) and the editing medium (a WAV file on a PC hard disk, these days).
The turbine blades and the birds would be moving in different directions, for one thing. The turbine faces into the wind.
And of course birds aren't necessarily being blown along by the wind; they fly of their own accord.
It seems to me that the bird would be flying along when (unexpectedly to the bird) the turbine blade would rotate into its path. The blade certainly wouldn't have to speed up and swat the bird out of the air from behind, which is what your statement seems to assume.
One wonders what grounds they'd make that argument upon, beyond the fact that they wish things worked that way. It might sound convincing enough to keep the stock price inflated a little while longer, in any case.
Is there any evidence to support the (unlikely) theory that someone at SCO actually believes the hooey that their PR is spouting? Perhaps they're so monumentally misled as to think that they own a magic, money-making spell that only works if it's kept secret, and that IBM has somehow spoiled it and led to the imminent ruin of the company.
Or perhaps not. I just felt compelled to say something other than "what a bunch of crooks!" by way of comment.
Both sides with nukes, angrily contesting territory?
This doesn't necessarily follow. Why would fairness become the new standard if the majority has no reason to consider the minority? Why wouldn't those in power continue to use advertising and sloganeering ("stupid logic") to influence people?
If online banking fouls up your accounts, you lose. If online voting fouls up an election, everybody loses.
In Canada, we use hand-marked paper ballots for provincial and federal elections. They are counted by a committee of sorts, composed of representatives of various parties and the (theoretically neutral) elections staff. It would take widespread, systematic shenanigans to alter the outcome of a typical election.
Electronic votes are stored in a database that any one person with the right password can fiddle.
...as I pointed out myself. However, it would have been the more appropriate word to use in the context of the joke, because the principal feature of homophones is that they sound alike.
Indeed, just as the COD entry I quoted states.
Clearly you've read my post, as you've just written it back to me. But, since you're such a stickler, I should point out a hint that you didn't take: it's "sound-alike," not "sound-a-like."
There may be a new rule, here, analogous with the one that states that all spelling flames will contain at least one spelling error. "Any correction to diction will contain at least one word for which a better alternative exists," perhaps.
You mean like a homophone?
Homophone isn't exactly the right word, of course, because "tenet" and "tenant" don't sound the same (or oughtn't to). But it would have been better than "homonym" in the initial joke.
By the way, I'd always assumed that words had to be spelled identically to count as homonyms; the definitions to which you refer conflate what are in my opinion two separate categories (which is why I happen to know what a homophone is).
I wonder what the OED has to say about these sound-alike words. My ancient COD (4th ed.) lacks homophone, requires homonyms to be "of the same form," and offers the apparently synonymous "homograph ... [w]ord spelt like another, but with different meaning."
Hamburger:
Or so you hope.
No, but what he's talking about is the root name-servers for the Internet. That's a little more important.
It's true. Some of those dancers have decades of experience. It'd take some doing to put one over on them.
That would be tricky, given that the bodies in question orbit the sun.
And rightly so, because it wasn't the Taliban, now, was it?
Perhaps kannibal_klown should've written "...weren't blowing up ... buildings or killing people in the United States".
But I think that the klown may be a bit hasty in distinguishing between witches and terrorists solely on the ground that terrorists seem to be a more realistic threat.
Witches used to be a realistic threat, back when people believed that it was possible to gain supernatural powers through an unholy pact with the devil. And just because real terrorists exist, it doesn't follow that people won't fear/accuse non-terrorists just because "they hated that particular person anyway, were trying to gain monetray/political ground, or were just bored".
Let's not forget the 1980s, when we were informed (if not reliably then repeatedly) that Satanists were running day-cares and drinking babies' blood in secret underground chambers, and that anyone who said "hogwash" was In On It.
A kind of idiot similar to the kind who'd use an electronic voting machine with no voter-verifiable paper backup?
Well, for one thing, God would be unlikely to mis-spell "creator" on his own driver's license application.
A few optimistic points do stick out:
Infinite capacity?
Twice as infinite!
The antenna is hanging from a tethered balloon. Unsurprisingly, the magic means of keeping it from bobbing about is not discussed in detail.
Going completely unaddressed is the question of what the user's ground station would look like. Presumably you'd need a small dish with line-of-sight to the balloon to receive; I don't know what kind of transmitter you'd be looking at.
Myself, I thought that the Nazis' biggest problem was that they were a pack of bigoted, racist murderers. So, while we're at it, why don't we use them as an example of the perils of poor taste in art?
By which I mean to say, your example is beyond poor.
Anyway, it's not as though the Germany from which the Nazis arose was a society without religion.
The anti-hate-speech stuff is presumably justified by the principle mentioned by the previous poster: "the rights are stated as not absolute, but subject to such limits as are necessary in a free and democratic society".
Wouldn't matter. The Federal government is theoretically as able to use the "Notwithstanding Clause" as a provincial government is.
Plenty of laws which seem to violate one part of the Charter have been found by the courts to be constitutional. You can't conspire to commit murder, for instance, despite freedom of expression.
I'm late replying to this, but I should mention my experience with the (recently discontinued) Canon S520. It has individually replaceable ink tanks, which attracted me to the printer, and they don't contain any tricky chips.
Alas, as I discovered when doing some heavy-coverage monochrome work, the printer likes to dump colour ink in with the black. Even when printing in monochrome mode. I've actually replaced more colour tanks than black tanks while printing nothing but black.
It's not just the cleaning cycle getting me, either -- I've printed plenty of full colour pages and not gone through the colour ink as fast as I'm now going through it printing in black only.
Now, this is heavy coverage, I admit, but I'm not complaining that it's consuming the black ink. I'm complaining that in the middle of a black page, with the "monochrome" box checked, the driver pops up an "out of magenta" message.
Indeed, I began using cheaper refills than Canon's, and the difference between the black on the last page printed with all Canon ink and the black on the first page printed with cheaper refill cyan was visible.
This "feature" is not mentioned in the documentation.
No, I accused you of trolling for suckers. I did accuse the suckers of jingoism.
If one country is better than another, it doesn't mean that the better country's actions against the worse one will always be good and for the best.
I think that many people view the current war as a continuation of a bad history of international meddling.
And now it's my turn to ask when in history something has ever worked. How much respect did the IRA gain by blowing stuff up? How about the FLQ? Did Londoners respect the Luftwaffe? Does anyone respect the PLO?
Dropping dynamite on cities from a great height is a guaranteed method of becoming feared and despised, but respect is not guaranteed.
Bonus points for misdirection, since I was of course quoting your line: "An American would never stand by while another human being was tortured in the ways the Iraqis are everyday!"
I suspect that people who'd eagerly agree with your "An American would never stand by..." assertion would be shocked and appalled even by the level of repression in Saudi Arabia, which is peanuts (seeing as people aren't actually disappearing left and right) compared to the conditions in some countries whose governments have been either propped up or practically installed by ever-so-clever U.S. foreign policy.
And of course the only alternative to this is to bomb them until they love you. Amazing, isn't it?
I wonder how many suckers you'll catch, trolling this on the end of your line. There are probably quite a few people who're willing to "forget," for the purposes of jingoism, at least, all of the very bad men that Americans have helped to keep in power.
All in the name of stability, of course. Difficult decisions, et cetera, and as we have now seen, it's always possible to take it back later and fix everything by offering peace and freedom from the end of a gun.
Proves that he's got missiles with longer ranges than he's supposed to, and that he didn't declare everything that he had. It's hardly a surprise -- there was coverage of other missiles of his a few weeks ago.
But al-Hussein-variant Scuds aren't "weapons of mass destruction". They aren't even very good missiles, in the grand scheme of things. And they're certainly not a threat to the United States.
Proof of what, then? That Saddam's a creep? You're confused if you think that anyone needs more evidence of that.