Devil's advocate on that point, but... growing up in Ontario, I was forced to learn French as a second language. I'm actually grateful that they did, because it has made it much easier to find a job, being bilingual. Perhaps the application is limited, but it does open a lot of doors that would otherwise be closed.
Of course, that same reasoning can be applied to teaching programming at school. You may or may not use the skills later in life, but they do open doors that would otherwise be closed. As with any language, it's easier for a child to learn, because the child hasn't yet learned that it's difficult to learn languages.
It's ridiculous like that in many parts of the world. In the US, it's legal to back up your media, however you're not allowed to break the DRM in order to do it. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out how one can back up something that they're not allowed to make spare copies of.
Well, in short... there is no DRM on certain types of media. In fact, the only portable media that you own which has DRM on it is probably on DVD or BD... unless you buy mp3's from iTunes or similar service. If you buy a CD, however, there's no copy protection on it at all, because such copy protection doesn't exist in the CDDA standard, and would break the ability to play the CD on some players.
Circumventing the copy protection on a DVD or BluRay is a different ballgame. There's copy protection built right into the standard for both media types. In that respect, the US is insane... in the country where I live, it's perfectly legal to back up that media to another format, as long as you're not distributing it. Copyright here doesn't really exist in the sense it does elsewhere... distribution right does, however. You can copy something for personal use, but you can't distribute it for others to use. Due to some quirks in the way the law is written, you can legally download a copy from somebody else... you're not breaking the law, but he is by distributing it to you.
If you want to support game developers or the industry, buy new products, whether it's games or licensed T-shirts. There's precious little to be found in emulation that could possibly help their bottom line.
I presume you've never owned a Nintendo Wii then?
In response to the originally asked question, the only way to have a legal ROM without buying it directly from the publisher (which isn't going to happen) is to make your own ROM. Get something like this: http://hackaday.com/2009/06/19/usb-reader-for-snes-game-carts/ and make your own. And don't distribute them.
yes, though a truce was declared almost 60 years ago, and aside from a couple of incidents, that truce has been respected. The truth is, nobody really wants to get into a shooting war with NK, because they're too heavily entrenched, and because they could inflict a lot of pain and suffering on SK if they wanted to. There isn't really a lot we can do against conventional artillery pointed at civilians unless we strike first, and there's so much artillery entrenched on the NK side that we can't really guarantee we'd get it all. We're basically waiting until Kim Jong Il shuffles off his mortal coil and hopefully some newer, saner blood can take over and a proper peace can be brokered.
And when I say "we", I mean those nations who fought against NK during the Korean war. It was a UN thing, not a US + Korea + Japan thing. The other nations that participated in the engagement (Canada, Australia, the UK, France, Belgium, Italy, etc.) haven't all made an official peace, nor opened diplomatic relations with NK either.
Interesting aside: Canada's actually officially "at war" with a half dozen countries... NK is one of them, there's also a couple of countries in Africa that we never bothered to make an official peace with after the Boer war....
They've been advertising them on US TV for more than 15 years, now. I find it hard to believe that your parents had never heard of the hearing aids that fit into the ear canal.
That said, I don't find it difficult to believe that the charger they had wasn't designed to handle international voltages... sometimes it seems that many folks in the US are completely oblivious to the fact that other parts of the world do things differently (they get confused by those multiples of 10 in the metric system or something)... while universal input power supplies are common and cheap everywhere else in the world (even my $4 AA battery charger has universal input and charges each cell individually), they seem to be uncommon on stuff that's bought in the states, even smaller/portable stuff that people actually would take with them on a vacation.
Except when you have a captive market. When you have a product that people need, and a virtual monopoly on the supply chain, you can effectively set the prices at whatever you want, and people have no choice but to pay.
As the adage goes, everything is worth what its purchaser will pay. But that does depend on the purchaser having the choice of paying somebody else for the product if he doesn't like the price you're charging.
That said, $3000 isn't unreasonable for a hearing aid, when you consider the technology and miniaturization that goes into the current generation of them. If you were charging that for a 1960's era over-the-ear hearing aid that ran on a cr2025 and lasted about 6 hours on a full charge, and produced a staticky hissy mess of the sound that was louder, but was crap, then I'd tell you that you were nuts. But even over-the-ear hearing aids are much improved in technology, and considering the patents and regulation involved, that cost is reasonable.
Government regulations are the primary reason why the number of suppliers is so limited. The regulations governing the manufacture and sale of medical devices are subject to interpretation and the FDA will not necessarily give you the definitive word on what the correct interpretation is.
Patents, specifically. For generics whose patents have expired, or which have been opened to the public, it's actually really cheap to get drugs/equipment. Equipment not as much as drugs, but to an extent it holds true as well. Removing patent enforcement would be a very bad idea, however, because the government doesn't exactly have a history of spending gobs and gobs of cash on medical research lately... those patents and limited supply chains exist to make it profitable for companies to develop new drugs/treatments.
What should be going away is the ability to change the encapsulation of a drug without changing the drug itself (Citalopram - Escitalopram, for example, have exactly the same active drug, just a different way of encapsulating the drug). When you can make a minor change to the chemical formula of a drug without changing its mechanism of action, nor the chemical composition of the active elements, you shouldn't be able to renew the patent and continue selling it under a new name.
How odd... you think it's fashionable to wear bluetooth earpieces, I think it just makes people look like idiots.... diff'rent strokes, I guess.
There are, however, hearing "aid" devices available that are designed to look like a bluetooth earpiece. I've seen them advertised on TV on the rare occasion that I watch a US station. They are fairly cheap, too... yours for 5 easy payments of only $19.95, if you order within the next 5 minutes for this special TV offer. No clue what the quality of the devices is, but seeing as they aren't fighting space considerations the way the in-ear hearing aids do, I imagine it's actually fairly decent, if a bit hissy.
Screw the table saw... I wear a set of ear defenders at work. I'm surrounded by people who have never heard of using their "inside voice" in the office.
Noise levels may not be high enough to hurt my hearing (haven't thought of bringing in a meter), but it is certainly high enough to affect my productivity.
The system in question is a Mini ITX system, and the processor is a P8400, mobile penryn-based Core2 Duo. When I turn the system on, the fan spins up to about 5000-7000 RPM, and sounds a bit like a jet engine taking off, but once the system is booted it spins down to about 200-300rpm, is still slow enough under load that I can't hear it when I'm watching full-screen video. You can hear it when it's idle, but not from more than 2-3 feet away. Since that system is on 24/7 and rarely rebooted (it's an HTPC, but it's also my network fileserver), and is bolted to the back of a 42" TV, that really isn't a problem.
Having a small fan doesn't need to be a hinderance.... I have a mini ITX-based HTPC system with a 1.5" fan on the CPU, and it's still damned near silent, even when watching h.264 full screen 1080p video. If you have sufficient air flow around the CPU, then you don't need the CPU fan to move much air specifically over the CPU. Put it in a case like this one, and minimize the number of moving parts (in my case, no moving parts aside from the CPU fan), and you can do quite nicely with a small fan keeping the CPU cool and still being quiet.
Second the above. You don't even need passively cooled, though they do have a large selection of C7 and Atom-based options that are passively cooled. I have an HTPC, most of whose components were bought from LogicSupply... the only moving part in that system is the stock cooling fan for the P8400 CPU, and it is damned near silent.
It shouldn't be too hard to put together a silent or nearly silent system that's got plenty of horsepower for what the submitter suggests. It will, however cost. Probably more than getting a Wii and installing homebrew, which will do most, if not all, of what the submitter is asking for. As others before me have suggested, perhaps getting the Nintendo would be a better idea....
The speed of high capacity drives can matter a great deal depending on what the system is used for, and read/write speed is not just important for applications and the OS. Ask anyone who does realtime uncompressed video or multi-track audio recording.
Yes, but.... as the capacity of a platter increases without increasing the size, the rpm needed to obtain a set transfer rate goes down. It's basic math... when the bit density increases, the read head has to cover less area to pick up the same number of bits. That's not to say that a 7200rpm 3TB drive will not be faster than a 5400rpm 3TB drive, but it does mean that the difference between the two won't be as significant as a 7200rpm 80GB drive versus a 5400rpm 80GB drive, as the transfer will run into other bottlenecks first.
Just check out the reviews for similar cases... the 1TB WD Scorpio Blue laptop hard drive runs at 5200rpm, but because the data is so densely packed, that drive is faster than most 7200rpm 500GB laptop hard drives, and in sustained read it's faster than some SSD's.
More to the point: for most computer users, you will never really notice the difference in speed between a 7200rpm drive and a 5400rpm drive. You will, however, notice the difference in noise. For specific applications, it'll make a difference, but for most of us, it won't at all.
My first thought was more along the lines of "what kind of idiot thought a laser would make a good flood lamp?"
You don't need a point of light in your car headlights, you need a flood lamp that illuminates a large area. Either they're putting the mother of all lasers on their car, or they're running it through a light diffuser which would rather defeat the purpose of it being a laser. Or maybe it's not actually a laser, and this is just marketing drivel.
Not sure if you're trolling or what, but... the star is 21 million light years away. That means that the light which just reached us recently (actually about a week ago, but it was detected about 4h after it was possible to detect the supernova) was actually generated 21 million years ago.
From the star's POV, 21 million LY away, the explosion happened 21 million years ago. From our point of view, however, the light is only just recently observable, and as such it only just happened, for us.
To put it in more perspective... if you had a telescope that was capable of such a feat, you could travel to Procyon (11.4LY away) and watch Shrub take the oath of office on the White House lawn. For us, it happened 11 years ago. For Procyon, it's about to happen.
GP is probably just trying to demonstrate their superior grasp of the English language by attempting to speak the Queen's English, but is unaware that the extra U between O and R only appears where the Queen deems fit, and not everywhere in the colourful language that is English.
(semi-facetious... it's not so much where the Queen sees fit, but rather where the myriad grammatical and spelling rules that form the completely messed up jumble that is our language... Most languages borrow from other languages, English follows them down dark alleys, clubs them over the head, and rifles through their pockets looking for loose grammar)
Celebrating May Day (May 5) dates back about 3000 years before the existence of the US. It's an ancient pagan festival called Beltaine, that marks the halfway point between the vernal equinox and the summer solstice, and the start of the summer planting season. Most of the symbols and rituals surrounding Beltaine are about fertility and celebrating life.
As with most pagan festivals, it's been claimed and modified by modern folks, but you can still find the roots of the ancient festival in the modern practice... the most visible for May Day would be dancing around the may pole, but there's other elements of the ancient festival that have made it into the modern version. For further enlightenment, look up Ostara, Samhain, and Yule, all of which show up in the xian calendar in different forms.
Ever had a machine that was just unstable? Even with the penguin? Swapping the clunker pack in 500W power supply that came free with the case for a quality (a pimped out gamer product may or may not be quality) power supply, even one rated at only 320W if the box isn't stuffed, cures about half of those cases. If the power supply doesn't it fix swap motherboards. Assuming you already ran memcheck for a day before swapping anything of course.
Actually, no. I haven't. I have never had a system that was just unstable like that. Even when I was running Windows 9X on all of my systems, my systems were generally stable and solid, except when I ran into a badly written driver. Bad power supplies do happen, no doubt, but most of those woes can be solved by simply having something with an actual brand name on it, and by building your system to the rated sustained power rating on a PSU, not the rated maximum power rating. If you have a 135W CPU, a 55W GPU, memory/hdd/optical that's rated at another 20W, then you need 210W minimum sustained, and will be better off with a 230W or 250W sustained output power supply. If you're buying a 300W power supply thinking it'll be enough, you could be sorely mistaken, because the sustained output may only be 200W. If your power supply in this theoretical machine is only capable of 200W sustained, then you're going to have problems once all of your hardware starts spinning up at the same time. The sustained output is supposed to be printed on the label of your power supply, and if you don't see it, then perhaps you should buy a new PSU.
It's funny that you mention Antec, actually, because in 25 years of working with PC's, the only power supply I ever had fail was a 550W Antec that claimed to be 80% efficient.
And as far as the cases go... most people who build their own are enthusiasts, and most of the cases people like that buy are Thermaltake, Antec, Cooler Master, or the like. You're unlikely to find a shitty power supply in any of the above, because all of the above make high end power supplies for enthusiasts.
When you are really building a computer, NEVER skimp on the power supply. You lose every time when you do that.
Depends on what the computer is being used for. I have an HTPC that fills in a double role as a network fileserver... its specs are as follows: Mobo: MSI MS-9818 Mini ITX CPU: P8400 dual core RAM: 4GB DDR2 HDD: 500GB 2.5" (currently waiting on a 1TB drive that I've ordered as an upgrade) Video: onboard Intel GMA4500 LAN: onboard dual gigE WLAN: Intel 5100 A/B/G/N, installed to the mini-pcie on the mobo
It's powered by a 60W DC brick, and according to the kill-a-watt, there's about 25W to spare under load. I had the option of buying an 80W brick when I built the system, but I really didn't need it, and I won't need it... the 1TB drive I've ordered uses less power than the 2-year old 500GB drive that's in there right now.
Power consumption is going way down in hardware these days. Yes, the above system is using a laptop CPU, but it's also 2 years old. You can, if you look, find a desktop CPU that draws less than the 25W TDP that my P8400 claims, but even if you're not trying, you're unlikely to build a system that'll tax any semi-decent 300W power supply. Don't buy a $20 korean market special, but you don't need to buy that $400 PSU either. For most cases that cost more than $40 or so, the PSU that comes with it will be adequate, for most users.:)
DVD is MPEG2 video. If you're ripping it, you can convert it to MPEG4, dropping the extra audio channels you don't want, and the subtitles, and cut it to about half that size without any loss at all. Other codecs will allow even more compression... I have found that I can safely rip my DVD movies to about a 1GB MKV (using h.264) without noticing significant loss of quality on my 42" 1080p tv.
If you're a hardcore gamer, then buying an optical drive in your computer is a no-brainer. There are games you can only get on optical media, and there are old games that you'll never find online. Plus there's a degree of nostalgia that you can't really get through services like Steam.
If you're not a gamer, the decision is tougher. I have one computer that still has an optical drive in it, which gets used for backing up audio cd's and dvd's to the network hard drive so I can play them on other systems (including the HTPC). I will never go to itms to buy music, and I prefer not to pirate stuff I'm actually going to use, so I still need an optical drive for those backup purposes. Said optical drive is in my gaming machine, which these days only gets turned on to do such a backup, or for the occasional game of Civ. 99% of my computer use is on an ultraportable Linux-based laptop that doesn't have an optical drive, and I find I don't miss it. I would never be able to do without one entirely, but there's really no reason I couldn't use an external drive that's off/in a drawer most of the time.
Considering the precedent that TFA is describing, I doubt that the law would last very long... basically, as soon as somebody challenged the law in court, the parts allowing them to subpoena information without a warrant would be struck down, as this sets the legal precedent of a reasonable expectation of anonymity online, and the requirement that for that anonymity to be broken, they need to prove you actually committed a crime.
Slashdot Mirror
Devil's advocate on that point, but... growing up in Ontario, I was forced to learn French as a second language. I'm actually grateful that they did, because it has made it much easier to find a job, being bilingual. Perhaps the application is limited, but it does open a lot of doors that would otherwise be closed.
Of course, that same reasoning can be applied to teaching programming at school. You may or may not use the skills later in life, but they do open doors that would otherwise be closed. As with any language, it's easier for a child to learn, because the child hasn't yet learned that it's difficult to learn languages.
It's ridiculous like that in many parts of the world. In the US, it's legal to back up your media, however you're not allowed to break the DRM in order to do it. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out how one can back up something that they're not allowed to make spare copies of.
Well, in short... there is no DRM on certain types of media. In fact, the only portable media that you own which has DRM on it is probably on DVD or BD... unless you buy mp3's from iTunes or similar service. If you buy a CD, however, there's no copy protection on it at all, because such copy protection doesn't exist in the CDDA standard, and would break the ability to play the CD on some players.
Circumventing the copy protection on a DVD or BluRay is a different ballgame. There's copy protection built right into the standard for both media types. In that respect, the US is insane... in the country where I live, it's perfectly legal to back up that media to another format, as long as you're not distributing it. Copyright here doesn't really exist in the sense it does elsewhere... distribution right does, however. You can copy something for personal use, but you can't distribute it for others to use. Due to some quirks in the way the law is written, you can legally download a copy from somebody else... you're not breaking the law, but he is by distributing it to you.
If you want to support game developers or the industry, buy new products, whether it's games or licensed T-shirts. There's precious little to be found in emulation that could possibly help their bottom line.
I presume you've never owned a Nintendo Wii then?
In response to the originally asked question, the only way to have a legal ROM without buying it directly from the publisher (which isn't going to happen) is to make your own ROM. Get something like this: http://hackaday.com/2009/06/19/usb-reader-for-snes-game-carts/ and make your own. And don't distribute them.
yes, though a truce was declared almost 60 years ago, and aside from a couple of incidents, that truce has been respected. The truth is, nobody really wants to get into a shooting war with NK, because they're too heavily entrenched, and because they could inflict a lot of pain and suffering on SK if they wanted to. There isn't really a lot we can do against conventional artillery pointed at civilians unless we strike first, and there's so much artillery entrenched on the NK side that we can't really guarantee we'd get it all. We're basically waiting until Kim Jong Il shuffles off his mortal coil and hopefully some newer, saner blood can take over and a proper peace can be brokered.
And when I say "we", I mean those nations who fought against NK during the Korean war. It was a UN thing, not a US + Korea + Japan thing. The other nations that participated in the engagement (Canada, Australia, the UK, France, Belgium, Italy, etc.) haven't all made an official peace, nor opened diplomatic relations with NK either.
Interesting aside: Canada's actually officially "at war" with a half dozen countries... NK is one of them, there's also a couple of countries in Africa that we never bothered to make an official peace with after the Boer war....
take solace... he'll probably trip and do it to himself the first time he tries going up/down stairs with more than 6" height between steps.
http://www.miracle-ear.com/
They've been advertising them on US TV for more than 15 years, now. I find it hard to believe that your parents had never heard of the hearing aids that fit into the ear canal.
That said, I don't find it difficult to believe that the charger they had wasn't designed to handle international voltages... sometimes it seems that many folks in the US are completely oblivious to the fact that other parts of the world do things differently (they get confused by those multiples of 10 in the metric system or something)... while universal input power supplies are common and cheap everywhere else in the world (even my $4 AA battery charger has universal input and charges each cell individually), they seem to be uncommon on stuff that's bought in the states, even smaller/portable stuff that people actually would take with them on a vacation.
Except when you have a captive market. When you have a product that people need, and a virtual monopoly on the supply chain, you can effectively set the prices at whatever you want, and people have no choice but to pay.
As the adage goes, everything is worth what its purchaser will pay. But that does depend on the purchaser having the choice of paying somebody else for the product if he doesn't like the price you're charging.
That said, $3000 isn't unreasonable for a hearing aid, when you consider the technology and miniaturization that goes into the current generation of them. If you were charging that for a 1960's era over-the-ear hearing aid that ran on a cr2025 and lasted about 6 hours on a full charge, and produced a staticky hissy mess of the sound that was louder, but was crap, then I'd tell you that you were nuts. But even over-the-ear hearing aids are much improved in technology, and considering the patents and regulation involved, that cost is reasonable.
Government regulations are the primary reason why the number of suppliers is so limited. The regulations governing the manufacture and sale of medical devices are subject to interpretation and the FDA will not necessarily give you the definitive word on what the correct interpretation is.
Patents, specifically. For generics whose patents have expired, or which have been opened to the public, it's actually really cheap to get drugs/equipment. Equipment not as much as drugs, but to an extent it holds true as well. Removing patent enforcement would be a very bad idea, however, because the government doesn't exactly have a history of spending gobs and gobs of cash on medical research lately... those patents and limited supply chains exist to make it profitable for companies to develop new drugs/treatments.
What should be going away is the ability to change the encapsulation of a drug without changing the drug itself (Citalopram - Escitalopram, for example, have exactly the same active drug, just a different way of encapsulating the drug). When you can make a minor change to the chemical formula of a drug without changing its mechanism of action, nor the chemical composition of the active elements, you shouldn't be able to renew the patent and continue selling it under a new name.
How odd... you think it's fashionable to wear bluetooth earpieces, I think it just makes people look like idiots.... diff'rent strokes, I guess.
There are, however, hearing "aid" devices available that are designed to look like a bluetooth earpiece. I've seen them advertised on TV on the rare occasion that I watch a US station. They are fairly cheap, too... yours for 5 easy payments of only $19.95, if you order within the next 5 minutes for this special TV offer. No clue what the quality of the devices is, but seeing as they aren't fighting space considerations the way the in-ear hearing aids do, I imagine it's actually fairly decent, if a bit hissy.
Screw the table saw... I wear a set of ear defenders at work. I'm surrounded by people who have never heard of using their "inside voice" in the office.
Noise levels may not be high enough to hurt my hearing (haven't thought of bringing in a meter), but it is certainly high enough to affect my productivity.
It's one of these:
http://www.logicsupply.com/products/epn_41els_02
The system in question is a Mini ITX system, and the processor is a P8400, mobile penryn-based Core2 Duo. When I turn the system on, the fan spins up to about 5000-7000 RPM, and sounds a bit like a jet engine taking off, but once the system is booted it spins down to about 200-300rpm, is still slow enough under load that I can't hear it when I'm watching full-screen video. You can hear it when it's idle, but not from more than 2-3 feet away. Since that system is on 24/7 and rarely rebooted (it's an HTPC, but it's also my network fileserver), and is bolted to the back of a 42" TV, that really isn't a problem.
Having a small fan doesn't need to be a hinderance.... I have a mini ITX-based HTPC system with a 1.5" fan on the CPU, and it's still damned near silent, even when watching h.264 full screen 1080p video. If you have sufficient air flow around the CPU, then you don't need the CPU fan to move much air specifically over the CPU. Put it in a case like this one, and minimize the number of moving parts (in my case, no moving parts aside from the CPU fan), and you can do quite nicely with a small fan keeping the CPU cool and still being quiet.
Second the above. You don't even need passively cooled, though they do have a large selection of C7 and Atom-based options that are passively cooled. I have an HTPC, most of whose components were bought from LogicSupply... the only moving part in that system is the stock cooling fan for the P8400 CPU, and it is damned near silent.
It shouldn't be too hard to put together a silent or nearly silent system that's got plenty of horsepower for what the submitter suggests. It will, however cost. Probably more than getting a Wii and installing homebrew, which will do most, if not all, of what the submitter is asking for. As others before me have suggested, perhaps getting the Nintendo would be a better idea....
The speed of high capacity drives can matter a great deal depending on what the system is used for, and read/write speed is not just important for applications and the OS. Ask anyone who does realtime uncompressed video or multi-track audio recording.
Yes, but.... as the capacity of a platter increases without increasing the size, the rpm needed to obtain a set transfer rate goes down. It's basic math... when the bit density increases, the read head has to cover less area to pick up the same number of bits. That's not to say that a 7200rpm 3TB drive will not be faster than a 5400rpm 3TB drive, but it does mean that the difference between the two won't be as significant as a 7200rpm 80GB drive versus a 5400rpm 80GB drive, as the transfer will run into other bottlenecks first.
Just check out the reviews for similar cases... the 1TB WD Scorpio Blue laptop hard drive runs at 5200rpm, but because the data is so densely packed, that drive is faster than most 7200rpm 500GB laptop hard drives, and in sustained read it's faster than some SSD's.
More to the point: for most computer users, you will never really notice the difference in speed between a 7200rpm drive and a 5400rpm drive. You will, however, notice the difference in noise. For specific applications, it'll make a difference, but for most of us, it won't at all.
A laser that doesn't produce a coherent beam of light is called a light-emitting diode....
My first thought was more along the lines of "what kind of idiot thought a laser would make a good flood lamp?"
You don't need a point of light in your car headlights, you need a flood lamp that illuminates a large area. Either they're putting the mother of all lasers on their car, or they're running it through a light diffuser which would rather defeat the purpose of it being a laser. Or maybe it's not actually a laser, and this is just marketing drivel.
Not sure if you're trolling or what, but... the star is 21 million light years away. That means that the light which just reached us recently (actually about a week ago, but it was detected about 4h after it was possible to detect the supernova) was actually generated 21 million years ago.
From the star's POV, 21 million LY away, the explosion happened 21 million years ago. From our point of view, however, the light is only just recently observable, and as such it only just happened, for us.
To put it in more perspective... if you had a telescope that was capable of such a feat, you could travel to Procyon (11.4LY away) and watch Shrub take the oath of office on the White House lawn. For us, it happened 11 years ago. For Procyon, it's about to happen.
GP is probably just trying to demonstrate their superior grasp of the English language by attempting to speak the Queen's English, but is unaware that the extra U between O and R only appears where the Queen deems fit, and not everywhere in the colourful language that is English.
(semi-facetious... it's not so much where the Queen sees fit, but rather where the myriad grammatical and spelling rules that form the completely messed up jumble that is our language... Most languages borrow from other languages, English follows them down dark alleys, clubs them over the head, and rifles through their pockets looking for loose grammar)
Celebrating May Day (May 5) dates back about 3000 years before the existence of the US. It's an ancient pagan festival called Beltaine, that marks the halfway point between the vernal equinox and the summer solstice, and the start of the summer planting season. Most of the symbols and rituals surrounding Beltaine are about fertility and celebrating life.
As with most pagan festivals, it's been claimed and modified by modern folks, but you can still find the roots of the ancient festival in the modern practice... the most visible for May Day would be dancing around the may pole, but there's other elements of the ancient festival that have made it into the modern version. For further enlightenment, look up Ostara, Samhain, and Yule, all of which show up in the xian calendar in different forms.
Send it to them in the form of V14gkra!11! vouchers.
Ever had a machine that was just unstable? Even with the penguin? Swapping the clunker pack in 500W power supply that came free with the case for a quality (a pimped out gamer product may or may not be quality) power supply, even one rated at only 320W if the box isn't stuffed, cures about half of those cases. If the power supply doesn't it fix swap motherboards. Assuming you already ran memcheck for a day before swapping anything of course.
Actually, no. I haven't. I have never had a system that was just unstable like that. Even when I was running Windows 9X on all of my systems, my systems were generally stable and solid, except when I ran into a badly written driver. Bad power supplies do happen, no doubt, but most of those woes can be solved by simply having something with an actual brand name on it, and by building your system to the rated sustained power rating on a PSU, not the rated maximum power rating. If you have a 135W CPU, a 55W GPU, memory/hdd/optical that's rated at another 20W, then you need 210W minimum sustained, and will be better off with a 230W or 250W sustained output power supply. If you're buying a 300W power supply thinking it'll be enough, you could be sorely mistaken, because the sustained output may only be 200W. If your power supply in this theoretical machine is only capable of 200W sustained, then you're going to have problems once all of your hardware starts spinning up at the same time. The sustained output is supposed to be printed on the label of your power supply, and if you don't see it, then perhaps you should buy a new PSU.
It's funny that you mention Antec, actually, because in 25 years of working with PC's, the only power supply I ever had fail was a 550W Antec that claimed to be 80% efficient.
And as far as the cases go... most people who build their own are enthusiasts, and most of the cases people like that buy are Thermaltake, Antec, Cooler Master, or the like. You're unlikely to find a shitty power supply in any of the above, because all of the above make high end power supplies for enthusiasts.
When you are really building a computer, NEVER skimp on the power supply. You lose every time when you do that.
Depends on what the computer is being used for. I have an HTPC that fills in a double role as a network fileserver... its specs are as follows:
Mobo: MSI MS-9818 Mini ITX
CPU: P8400 dual core
RAM: 4GB DDR2
HDD: 500GB 2.5" (currently waiting on a 1TB drive that I've ordered as an upgrade)
Video: onboard Intel GMA4500
LAN: onboard dual gigE
WLAN: Intel 5100 A/B/G/N, installed to the mini-pcie on the mobo
It's powered by a 60W DC brick, and according to the kill-a-watt, there's about 25W to spare under load. I had the option of buying an 80W brick when I built the system, but I really didn't need it, and I won't need it... the 1TB drive I've ordered uses less power than the 2-year old 500GB drive that's in there right now.
Power consumption is going way down in hardware these days. Yes, the above system is using a laptop CPU, but it's also 2 years old. You can, if you look, find a desktop CPU that draws less than the 25W TDP that my P8400 claims, but even if you're not trying, you're unlikely to build a system that'll tax any semi-decent 300W power supply. Don't buy a $20 korean market special, but you don't need to buy that $400 PSU either. For most cases that cost more than $40 or so, the PSU that comes with it will be adequate, for most users. :)
DVD is MPEG2 video. If you're ripping it, you can convert it to MPEG4, dropping the extra audio channels you don't want, and the subtitles, and cut it to about half that size without any loss at all. Other codecs will allow even more compression... I have found that I can safely rip my DVD movies to about a 1GB MKV (using h.264) without noticing significant loss of quality on my 42" 1080p tv.
If you're a hardcore gamer, then buying an optical drive in your computer is a no-brainer. There are games you can only get on optical media, and there are old games that you'll never find online. Plus there's a degree of nostalgia that you can't really get through services like Steam.
If you're not a gamer, the decision is tougher. I have one computer that still has an optical drive in it, which gets used for backing up audio cd's and dvd's to the network hard drive so I can play them on other systems (including the HTPC). I will never go to itms to buy music, and I prefer not to pirate stuff I'm actually going to use, so I still need an optical drive for those backup purposes. Said optical drive is in my gaming machine, which these days only gets turned on to do such a backup, or for the occasional game of Civ. 99% of my computer use is on an ultraportable Linux-based laptop that doesn't have an optical drive, and I find I don't miss it. I would never be able to do without one entirely, but there's really no reason I couldn't use an external drive that's off/in a drawer most of the time.
Considering the precedent that TFA is describing, I doubt that the law would last very long... basically, as soon as somebody challenged the law in court, the parts allowing them to subpoena information without a warrant would be struck down, as this sets the legal precedent of a reasonable expectation of anonymity online, and the requirement that for that anonymity to be broken, they need to prove you actually committed a crime.