I'll be signing out of my workstation, laughing at the poor saps who have to stay at work through it all, and enjoying the fact that there'll be no traffic on my commute home because of the rapture.:)
As Ghandi said... I like your Christ. I don't like your Christians. Your Christians are nothing like your Christ.:)
There's a distinction to be made between not believing in a god, and believing that there is no god. Both can be called atheism, but the people who claim atheism is a religion are observing the behaviour of the people who believe the latter, not necessarily the former. Those who actively believe there is no god, and can't possibly be one, can be just as evangelical about their belief as the worst of the fundamentalists out there, and just as blind to the fact that their beliefs are based on an idea that's inherently unprovable. Worse still, they can be just as dirisive of people who disagree with them. Heaven forbid you should choose to have some kind of faith, be it in the Judeo-Christian pantheon or not, you're obviously some kind of idiot for not seeing the truth that there can't possibly be any kind of force out there beyond our comprehension. And like many fundamentalists, they're just as ignorant of how other religions define gods/goddesses, and completely oblivious to the fact that some traditions define them in terms that are wholly incompatible with the Judeo-Christian description.
Not legal in many jurisdictions, and not enforceable. Check into your local laws, but most countries are sane about that kind of thing: specifically you cannot preemptively sign away your copyright on things you haven't even created yet.
That said, I wouldn't buy the handheld anyway. My cell phone is good enough for casual gaming on the bus, and I have better things to do with my time than sit around playing video games... if I'm not at home, I'm either travelling or doing something. If I am at home, and the mood to play a video game strikes me, I have much better systems available to me than a handheld.
HDMI cables are not twisted pairs like Ethernet, meaning that they rely on shielding in the cable for signal integrity. If you have really poor quality or non-existant shielding in the cable, then your cable becomes a radio antenna. The longer that radio antenna is, the more likely it'll pick up interference from other sources.
That said, and the point of the article, the distances most of us use HDMI cables are short enough that the difference between top end super high quality shielding and "meh, this'll work" shielding is negligible, and the cheap cables are good enough. If you're doing a 100' run for some reason, the quality of the cabling will make a difference, but for most of us 6' cable from the local chinese market is good enough.
But it is worth mentionning... a digital signal is either there or not, but if part of a digital signal is missing (say due to signal noise or dropped packets), you may experience loss of audio/video synch, stuttering audio, pixellization, or an image freeze (depending on what information is dropped).
Over the distances that most consumers use HDMI, cable quality won't really make a big difference. But if you're using an unshielded or a shittily shielded 15' HDMI cable, it's a radio antenna and is *much* more likely to experience the above. The point of TFA was that most of us use shorter HDMI cables... the longest one I have for my own setup was a 6' cable. I do own 10' HDMI cable, but I have only ever used it to hook up my laptop to a spare HDMI port on the TV, which is an exceedingly rare ocurrance (I have an XBMC system bolted to the back of the TV which serves up a network hard drive... if I want to watch a video on the TV I just copy it in to the Videos folder on the media center and poof, it's there).
Actually, what ruins Cat5, Cat5e, Cat6, Cat6e, etc., is cutting the cable to the wrong length. There is no "shielding" wire, or a ground line or anything. It's a set of twisted pairs, and the "shielding" comes from having the twisted pair at the right length, just as a twisted pair is what provides the "shielding" for telephone line.
If it's cut to the wrong length, then the twisted pair ends up acting like an antenna, rather than offering a degree of protection, and it will seriously degrade the performance characteristics of the cable. That's why when you buy the cable on a spool to make your own cables, there're usually marks to indicate where you should cut... the correct length (and harmonic lengths) to cut is dependent on how tightly the pair is twisted.
There isn't a huge ecosystem of music players that take memory cards as the primary medium
My last 5 cell phones all had a microSD slot, which was used for storing pics from the camera, and for storing media for the phone's built-in mp3 player.
In Canada, it's been used to justify downloading/copying, but distribution is still verboten.
If the Conservative government tries to introduce a Canadian DMCA like they have in the past, I expect the levy to be used as grounds to challenge it in court.
Either workers, or the unsecured part of the airport. Nefarious persons could do just as much financial damage and cause just as much panic by setting off a bomb in the wait line to go through the security checkpoint, and they wouldn't have to go through any security at all to reach that point.
The reason that kind of thing hasn't happened is because of the increased inter-departmental communication happening, which is greatly improving the intelligence-gathering capabilities of the government (though most of the plots uncovered are due to either a member of the plot having a change of heart, or somebody bragging about it to the wrong person... loose lips sink ships and all).
Not true. Most drugs that're approved in Canada are also approved in the US, but there's several drugs that are approved in the US that are not available in Canada (including a few that've been pulled from the shelves for being dangerous in the US, which were never approved in Canada specifically because of those dangers), and similarly some drugs are available years earlier in Canada than the US. One of the drugs I'm taking right now is on that list... it's been available in Canada for almost a decade but still can't be had in the US.
And, then of course there's the constant commercials for a drug you should "ask your doctor about" -- sometimes they don't say what it treats
That would be the commercials intended for the Canadian or international markets.... in Canada, it's not legal to advertise for drugs, and the way around that is to avoid mentionning both the drug name and what it treats in the same advert. On the other hand, that legal loophole has led to some of the more amusing Viagra and Cialis commercials out there...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escitalopram would be a perfect example. Citalopram's patent expired, so they found a new way to encapsulate the drug so that they could continue to sell the patented version. The new drug works exactly the same way that the old drug worked, has exactly the same mechanism, and a nearly identical success rate in clinical trials, but because it's encapsulated, it's technically a different drug, so they were able to renew the patent. I would lay odds that they have already developped the replacement for when Escitalopram's patent expires.
It's also a perfect example of a case where medical professionals are lobbied to continue selling the expensive proprietary drug... because the patent has expired, you can get a generic off-label version of Citalopram for a fraction of the cost of Escitalopram, but doctors continue to prescribe the newer version because the company that makes it lobbies physicians against prescribing the cheaper drug. (and all of the references you seek are cited in the Wikipedia article above)
TSA doesn't increase security at all... if they were *really* interested in improving security, they'd go back to metal detectors, and make everybody get the once-over from sniffer dogs before getting into the secure area. Dogs, I said. Plural. One that's trained to sniff for drugs (though I personally believe the war on drugs to be a complete waste of money), and one that's been trained to sniff for explosives and gunpowder. Between that, not allowing any bottles/containers into the secure area (except what you buy in the secure area), and the fortified cockpits on the airplanes, that would be all the security they would need.
I can't comment on ATT, but I do know that Bell Canada, which uses the same technology for their FibeTV service, will put you on a 27/1.7 VDSL connection by default, and you can pay them extra for a 27/8 connection. Bell will also let you pay extra for faster download speeds.. usually it's throttled to 6mbit with the other 21mbit set aside for the up to 4 TV streams, but you can pay for a higher throttle speed, up to the full 27mbit when the tvs are off.
Your connection is probably doing what Rogers does here in Canada. They're actually adveretising it as such, too... when they see "extra" bandwidth available, you get a quick burst of speed before it drops down... the result is that when you do a speed test, poof, you get 25meg, but as soon as you try to download something that's more than a couple of megs, you lose the speed boost and get a more realistic measure of your line speed. Works great for watching Youtube/Vimeo, but sucks balls for anything larger than that.
I probably get better throughput on my 5meg DSL connection than you do on your cable connection, because my DSL provider doesn't play shenanigans like that.
I suspect he's complaining about the socio-economic pressures that lead to lower class/poor people having a much higher representation rate in the armed forces.
Of course, the military still does have standards. Even the US military won't take *everyone*, and if you're going to do anything that actually requires clearance, there's a skills and IQ test you need to pass before they'll even consider you for it.
Depends on the laptop and what it's being used for. My father is using one of my old laptops, and is quite happy with it. It's being used for surfing, word processing, e-mailing, web development, and has a linux virtual machine with apache/mysql/php to test the webpages he develops. Said laptop has an Athlon 64 3500+ in it and 1GB of RAM and a 40GB hard drive, which should give you an idea of how old it is.
I rather like Sanctuary, but I get that on Space, in Canada, which is from all the reports I've seen a *much* better channel than SyFy is in the US.
And the commercials are much more tolerable when you have a PVR.:) I don't grok why I should have to watch commercials when I am already paying extra on my Satellite bill just to get the channel in the first place. I understand commercials on the free-to-air channels (stuff like NBC, CBS, or ABC in the US), but not on something I can't get without paying.
The courts wouldn't see 23,000 cases. The usual procedure here is settlement. The copyright holder just has to make an offer that cannot be refused: Either settle for $7,000 or so, or go to court and face tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees even if you win.
You can actually file a motion to have the prosecution pay your legal fees if you win. You shouldn't have to look very far to find a lawyer who's willing to take on the case without charging you directly, considering some of the precedent that's been set recently... they can extract their payment from the opposing litigants.
If you actually take them to court and challenge it, this will stop being a profitable venture for them.
They aren't paid per rental. Video stores (if they still exist) buy videos licensed for rental use. They're a bit more expensive, but the individual payments go to the store, not to the studio.
Yes, they do. But I'm not about to pay to see a movie that I'll walk out of halfway through, like 90% of the content they're producing. I download movies. I have over 500 DVD's in my library that were bought at retail. I use the downloads to decide whether it's worth buying the DVD or if I should simply walk away from the movie, and most of what I download gets deleted. The last movie I bought at retail was yesterday. (and it's 7am as of this writing)
What you're saying is that I should go out and rent it instead? Given that it takes about 15 minutes to rip a DVD to an MKV with all of the soundtracks and subtitle tracks intact, I think that would actually be worse for the studios, because once I find something I like, I'll just rip it rather than going out and paying for it again. If I'm downloading/renting a movie in the first place, it's because I have liked its reviews or it's been recommended, and there's a non-zero chance that I intend to buy it, but there's no fucking way that I'm going to pay for it twice.
Besides, they can't trace it if I rent a movie and then rip it, as long as I don't put it on the web. Storage is cheap, and it's super-easy to set up an XMBC system that will have no problem playing those MKV's....
Actually, rail's main advantage in terms of efficiency is being able to travel at a mostly constant speed with fewer slowdowns and stops. Overland freight trucks could be significantly more efficient if they had a dedicated road system with centralized traffic management and they could travel at pretty much the same speed throughout. They still wouldn't approach the efficiency of a train for reasons you've touched on, but the efficiency could be improved greatly.
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Certainly not 21 May if they expect to sell anything in the Commonwealth....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victoria_Day
I'll be signing out of my workstation, laughing at the poor saps who have to stay at work through it all, and enjoying the fact that there'll be no traffic on my commute home because of the rapture. :)
As Ghandi said... I like your Christ. I don't like your Christians. Your Christians are nothing like your Christ. :)
There's a distinction to be made between not believing in a god, and believing that there is no god. Both can be called atheism, but the people who claim atheism is a religion are observing the behaviour of the people who believe the latter, not necessarily the former. Those who actively believe there is no god, and can't possibly be one, can be just as evangelical about their belief as the worst of the fundamentalists out there, and just as blind to the fact that their beliefs are based on an idea that's inherently unprovable. Worse still, they can be just as dirisive of people who disagree with them. Heaven forbid you should choose to have some kind of faith, be it in the Judeo-Christian pantheon or not, you're obviously some kind of idiot for not seeing the truth that there can't possibly be any kind of force out there beyond our comprehension. And like many fundamentalists, they're just as ignorant of how other religions define gods/goddesses, and completely oblivious to the fact that some traditions define them in terms that are wholly incompatible with the Judeo-Christian description.
Not legal in many jurisdictions, and not enforceable. Check into your local laws, but most countries are sane about that kind of thing: specifically you cannot preemptively sign away your copyright on things you haven't even created yet.
That said, I wouldn't buy the handheld anyway. My cell phone is good enough for casual gaming on the bus, and I have better things to do with my time than sit around playing video games... if I'm not at home, I'm either travelling or doing something. If I am at home, and the mood to play a video game strikes me, I have much better systems available to me than a handheld.
HDMI cables are not twisted pairs like Ethernet, meaning that they rely on shielding in the cable for signal integrity. If you have really poor quality or non-existant shielding in the cable, then your cable becomes a radio antenna. The longer that radio antenna is, the more likely it'll pick up interference from other sources.
That said, and the point of the article, the distances most of us use HDMI cables are short enough that the difference between top end super high quality shielding and "meh, this'll work" shielding is negligible, and the cheap cables are good enough. If you're doing a 100' run for some reason, the quality of the cabling will make a difference, but for most of us 6' cable from the local chinese market is good enough.
Pretty sure he was joking... :P
But it is worth mentionning... a digital signal is either there or not, but if part of a digital signal is missing (say due to signal noise or dropped packets), you may experience loss of audio/video synch, stuttering audio, pixellization, or an image freeze (depending on what information is dropped).
Over the distances that most consumers use HDMI, cable quality won't really make a big difference. But if you're using an unshielded or a shittily shielded 15' HDMI cable, it's a radio antenna and is *much* more likely to experience the above. The point of TFA was that most of us use shorter HDMI cables... the longest one I have for my own setup was a 6' cable. I do own 10' HDMI cable, but I have only ever used it to hook up my laptop to a spare HDMI port on the TV, which is an exceedingly rare ocurrance (I have an XBMC system bolted to the back of the TV which serves up a network hard drive... if I want to watch a video on the TV I just copy it in to the Videos folder on the media center and poof, it's there).
Actually, what ruins Cat5, Cat5e, Cat6, Cat6e, etc., is cutting the cable to the wrong length. There is no "shielding" wire, or a ground line or anything. It's a set of twisted pairs, and the "shielding" comes from having the twisted pair at the right length, just as a twisted pair is what provides the "shielding" for telephone line.
If it's cut to the wrong length, then the twisted pair ends up acting like an antenna, rather than offering a degree of protection, and it will seriously degrade the performance characteristics of the cable. That's why when you buy the cable on a spool to make your own cables, there're usually marks to indicate where you should cut... the correct length (and harmonic lengths) to cut is dependent on how tightly the pair is twisted.
*gasp* no! thieves are not stupid at all! they're the smartest on the planet!
(and I weep for the planet)....
There isn't a huge ecosystem of music players that take memory cards as the primary medium
My last 5 cell phones all had a microSD slot, which was used for storing pics from the camera, and for storing media for the phone's built-in mp3 player.
In Canada, it's been used to justify downloading/copying, but distribution is still verboten.
If the Conservative government tries to introduce a Canadian DMCA like they have in the past, I expect the levy to be used as grounds to challenge it in court.
Either workers, or the unsecured part of the airport. Nefarious persons could do just as much financial damage and cause just as much panic by setting off a bomb in the wait line to go through the security checkpoint, and they wouldn't have to go through any security at all to reach that point.
The reason that kind of thing hasn't happened is because of the increased inter-departmental communication happening, which is greatly improving the intelligence-gathering capabilities of the government (though most of the plots uncovered are due to either a member of the plot having a change of heart, or somebody bragging about it to the wrong person... loose lips sink ships and all).
Not true. Most drugs that're approved in Canada are also approved in the US, but there's several drugs that are approved in the US that are not available in Canada (including a few that've been pulled from the shelves for being dangerous in the US, which were never approved in Canada specifically because of those dangers), and similarly some drugs are available years earlier in Canada than the US. One of the drugs I'm taking right now is on that list... it's been available in Canada for almost a decade but still can't be had in the US.
And, then of course there's the constant commercials for a drug you should "ask your doctor about" -- sometimes they don't say what it treats
That would be the commercials intended for the Canadian or international markets.... in Canada, it's not legal to advertise for drugs, and the way around that is to avoid mentionning both the drug name and what it treats in the same advert. On the other hand, that legal loophole has led to some of the more amusing Viagra and Cialis commercials out there...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escitalopram would be a perfect example. Citalopram's patent expired, so they found a new way to encapsulate the drug so that they could continue to sell the patented version. The new drug works exactly the same way that the old drug worked, has exactly the same mechanism, and a nearly identical success rate in clinical trials, but because it's encapsulated, it's technically a different drug, so they were able to renew the patent. I would lay odds that they have already developped the replacement for when Escitalopram's patent expires.
It's also a perfect example of a case where medical professionals are lobbied to continue selling the expensive proprietary drug... because the patent has expired, you can get a generic off-label version of Citalopram for a fraction of the cost of Escitalopram, but doctors continue to prescribe the newer version because the company that makes it lobbies physicians against prescribing the cheaper drug. (and all of the references you seek are cited in the Wikipedia article above)
TSA doesn't increase security at all... if they were *really* interested in improving security, they'd go back to metal detectors, and make everybody get the once-over from sniffer dogs before getting into the secure area. Dogs, I said. Plural. One that's trained to sniff for drugs (though I personally believe the war on drugs to be a complete waste of money), and one that's been trained to sniff for explosives and gunpowder. Between that, not allowing any bottles/containers into the secure area (except what you buy in the secure area), and the fortified cockpits on the airplanes, that would be all the security they would need.
I can't comment on ATT, but I do know that Bell Canada, which uses the same technology for their FibeTV service, will put you on a 27/1.7 VDSL connection by default, and you can pay them extra for a 27/8 connection. Bell will also let you pay extra for faster download speeds.. usually it's throttled to 6mbit with the other 21mbit set aside for the up to 4 TV streams, but you can pay for a higher throttle speed, up to the full 27mbit when the tvs are off.
Your connection is probably doing what Rogers does here in Canada. They're actually adveretising it as such, too... when they see "extra" bandwidth available, you get a quick burst of speed before it drops down... the result is that when you do a speed test, poof, you get 25meg, but as soon as you try to download something that's more than a couple of megs, you lose the speed boost and get a more realistic measure of your line speed. Works great for watching Youtube/Vimeo, but sucks balls for anything larger than that.
I probably get better throughput on my 5meg DSL connection than you do on your cable connection, because my DSL provider doesn't play shenanigans like that.
Leaking classified information *is* aiding the enemy. Depending on what information is leaked, and when, it can also be Treason.
I suspect he's complaining about the socio-economic pressures that lead to lower class/poor people having a much higher representation rate in the armed forces.
Of course, the military still does have standards. Even the US military won't take *everyone*, and if you're going to do anything that actually requires clearance, there's a skills and IQ test you need to pass before they'll even consider you for it.
Depends on the laptop and what it's being used for. My father is using one of my old laptops, and is quite happy with it. It's being used for surfing, word processing, e-mailing, web development, and has a linux virtual machine with apache/mysql/php to test the webpages he develops. Said laptop has an Athlon 64 3500+ in it and 1GB of RAM and a 40GB hard drive, which should give you an idea of how old it is.
Orwell, perhaps.... but my first thought on reading that was "thank heavens I have an unlocked phone from Canada". :)
I rather like Sanctuary, but I get that on Space, in Canada, which is from all the reports I've seen a *much* better channel than SyFy is in the US.
And the commercials are much more tolerable when you have a PVR. :) I don't grok why I should have to watch commercials when I am already paying extra on my Satellite bill just to get the channel in the first place. I understand commercials on the free-to-air channels (stuff like NBC, CBS, or ABC in the US), but not on something I can't get without paying.
You can actually file a motion to have the prosecution pay your legal fees if you win. You shouldn't have to look very far to find a lawyer who's willing to take on the case without charging you directly, considering some of the precedent that's been set recently... they can extract their payment from the opposing litigants.
If you actually take them to court and challenge it, this will stop being a profitable venture for them.
Yes, they do. But I'm not about to pay to see a movie that I'll walk out of halfway through, like 90% of the content they're producing. I download movies. I have over 500 DVD's in my library that were bought at retail. I use the downloads to decide whether it's worth buying the DVD or if I should simply walk away from the movie, and most of what I download gets deleted. The last movie I bought at retail was yesterday. (and it's 7am as of this writing)
What you're saying is that I should go out and rent it instead? Given that it takes about 15 minutes to rip a DVD to an MKV with all of the soundtracks and subtitle tracks intact, I think that would actually be worse for the studios, because once I find something I like, I'll just rip it rather than going out and paying for it again. If I'm downloading/renting a movie in the first place, it's because I have liked its reviews or it's been recommended, and there's a non-zero chance that I intend to buy it, but there's no fucking way that I'm going to pay for it twice.
Besides, they can't trace it if I rent a movie and then rip it, as long as I don't put it on the web. Storage is cheap, and it's super-easy to set up an XMBC system that will have no problem playing those MKV's....
Actually, rail's main advantage in terms of efficiency is being able to travel at a mostly constant speed with fewer slowdowns and stops. Overland freight trucks could be significantly more efficient if they had a dedicated road system with centralized traffic management and they could travel at pretty much the same speed throughout. They still wouldn't approach the efficiency of a train for reasons you've touched on, but the efficiency could be improved greatly.