Upon some reflection after typing that, the two are not equally equal.. one of them is a psycho nutter, and he's not getting my vote.
But my initial Jack Johnson / John Jackson thought remains. It's just that one of them has a fatal flaw that the other doesn't have - or at least has been carefully hidden.
2. Let them and the Arabs sort things out the way nature intended to. I'm sure it'll go nuclear about 20 minutes into it. If not, various nations can Profit by selling arms to both sides . The French and the Germans and the US love such deals. Win for the economy! War is Great! (Don't believe me? War lifted the world out of the 30's depression. Even the losers made off like bandits.)
3. Spend the next 30 years rebuilding the area, ensure good schooling for all, you know, all that jazz that happened after WWII. Maybe then the whole Middle East can make things other than war and hatred and intolerance. Things they can sell and service, and therefore have a somewhat-educated people that's not hell-bent on burning the world.
4. Profit! Buy the stuff they make (if it's worth a damn), and sell them stuff!
And in a perfect world,
5. The world finally wakes the fuck up and loses all its religions, now that the huge religiously-fuelled battle with hundreds of thousands or even millions of lives lost wasn't just filmed and televised, it was tweeted and facebooked realtime. The horror show to end all horror shows.
I'm not trying to be funny or cavalier. I'm sick and tired of all this religion-based bickering. It brings nothing but war and suffering, directly or indirectly.
Two things. First, you're over-exaggerating it a bit, it is unlikely that any drastic anti-freedom legislation will be passed in the west based on the wishes of Saudi Arabia in the next decade or two. Or more, if you freedom-lovers choose to lead instead of whine.
The more extremist muslims want exactly that, a muslim world. Try it. I will personally grab a rifle and oppose such an effort. It's no different than Germany, 1934. If only more people had opposed that. And as for us stopping whining and lead? That contradicts your following point!
Second, there is only one country in the world that has, throughout its history, used its military power and political influence consistently to try to export its ideas of morality and law to the world, and it ain't no abode of Muslin desperation, it is the U-S-of-A.
What a load of succotash. UK spread by arms. France spread by arms. Spain. Rome. Japan. China. Russia. Portugal. They all were empires and invaders at one time, some until very recently. Everywhere they went they left some of their morals and laws behind -- including the US. Our legal system is modeled on our past masters, the Brits. How do we spread? We buy our land, not take it at the tip of a sword. We spread by having motherfucking Kodak, Camel, Coke and McDonald's in Bumfuck, Egypt, and in the smallest of shops in the deep of Africa. (Ok, so Kodak's gone, but the point remains.)
Moreover, the US rationale for this was always the perception of the superior morality of the American way, not some logical, scientific argument. Why are you complaining when other countries notice what yours does, and try to do the same?
*sigh*. Just like the aforementioned Brits, Romans, Spaniards, Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese -- all were convinced that they were better than the peoples they were taking over.
Oh shit, did I just defend the USA? Oh well. It could be worse. I could be living in a Muslim-ran country where I'd be shot just for being. For expressing my thought, which is there is no God, neither Mohammed nor Jesus are his prophets, and no amount of institutional brainwashing nor intimidation at the tip of a sword or muzzle of gun will change my mind.
Sitting down and doing bong rips with a deity, that may convince me. "Hey, Jesus, you gonna hit that or just hold it and philosophize?"
A little too rich for my blood. Someone come up with a DIY version and put it on kickstarter. As long as you have put an Arduino in there it'll sell like hotcakes.
Just thought of this... sshhhhh, don't give DHS any more ideas -- model rocketeers into the really big stuff were being hounded by Ashcroft's Asshat Brigade out of fear that someone could.. build something like a Stinger. Or worse. Out of commonly-available parts.
A little too rich for my blood. Someone come up with a DIY version and put it on kickstarter. As long as you have put an Arduino in there it'll sell like hotcakes.
Weren't we giving these away not too long ago to certain people under the guise of helping them fight the Big Bad Bear? I doubt those people paid MSRP for them.
OK, so it was long ago.. man, time flies.
Didn't we get some of those back recently, pointy-end first?
When what you're talking about is things businesses and governments wish to keep secret, there is no such thing as free speech. You pay for it in blood.
Were I Assange, I'd be far more worried about a bullet in my head or a mickey in my drink than a legit arrest.
Am I insinuating that a government or business would kill over information they wish to keep secret for legitimate reasons, or otherwise?
Hell yes, I am.
I'm sure there are many secrets that should remain so -- but buried in that pile are atrocities and behind-the-scene dealings that impact people like you and I in the worst ways -- and those are the dirty bits of laundry that need to get out.
Frankly, I still think the Internet is nothing but television magnified by 1000, with all the lolcatz and pr0n and myface and spacebook and all that -- but the ability to shed light on nasty, shady dealings -- that's what I had hoped the Internet would be able to do.
We need more of this. We need to know more about what businesses and governments do in secret to line their pockets by picking ours. The mainstream media can't quite be trusted to do so, I feel they're in the payroll of government and business -- so the last resort is.. this.
But, who vets this kind of leaks? Who can assure the reader that it isn't misinformation? Wow, paranoids are right, I think!
Still, there's a little place in my heart that tells me.. we really don't want to know. I think it could be that revolting, that repulsive.
Or more properly, Phalanx CIWS does. R2D2 is just a nickname, owing to what the radar section looks like.
It was designed specifically to deal with supersonic hi-G maneuvering anti-ship missiles.
The future weapon to fear is the railgun. How are we (or anyone) going to defend against that? Forcefields? I can't think of any kind of armor that will stand up to a railgun.
our search history and social networking activity can be used against you by providing tell-tale clues for your propensity to pay jacked-up prices to 'reconsume' electronic content, such as 'watching a video recording, reading an electronic book, playing a game, or listening to an audio recording.'
Surely, RIAA / MPAA's wettest dream.
I hope against hope Google patents this and then makes it so it's impossible or impractical to license, while vigorously suing into oblivion anyone who dares try it without license. Otherwise, Google just became as evil as any other ordinary Evil Enterprise.
This whole "streaming" and "cloud" thing is just setting us up for robbery. Worse than we are now, I mean. I can see content one's already bought held hostage for further payment. That's what these assholes want, you know. They want it so every single time you read a book that you already bought you have to pay for it. Wait -- didn't someone already try this some time ago? DIVX. Failed, didn't it... it'll be easier to make it stick once all the content's in "the cloud."
Can you imagine? A Blu-Ray one already purchased requiring further payment every time one wishes to view it? That's why they want to do away with physical media, you know. They want this. It's that kind of thinking that makes me think physical media must remain the primary method of distribution. Files in a cloud are too easy to arbitrarily delete, too easy to control, too easy to hold for ransom. With physical, if you want my copy of Brave back, you're going to have to bust into my house, survive whatever punishment greets you when you do, and then make off with the movie.
Every time I read crap like this, I become more disillusioned with this modern world. I don't yearn for days gone by, what I want is for people to wake the fuck right up and say "enough with the gouging and pocket-picking, nickle-and-diming and outright robbery already!"
"And now you see why AT&T yanked all their payphones and for some reason simply refuses to compete in the landline business, even with billions and billions in sunk costs for all that wire going everywhere. Eliminate hardlines and everyone MUST buy a cell. It is already sorta odd to encounter someone who doesn't carry one, eventually it will be reasonable suspicion of criminal activity. Wouldn't suprise me if they become the preferred physical identifier, i.e. 'your papers.'"
Normally I'm very skeptical about business motives, but the apparent death of the landline, I think, has little to do with any nefariousness on AT&T's part.
An Illustration: In 1997 I visited Europe for an extended period of time. In that time I found that different countries treat wireless different. In France, I noticed almost no one had landlines in their homes. And this was 1997! When I asked, I was told "Wireless is simply cheaper than a land line, so we got rid of landlines." A story I heard at more than one dinner table. Italy still had lots of landlines that I saw in use by people in their homes.
I'm shocked, actually, that AT&T didn't see it coming (or chose to ignore it.) The landline will die in time, and it has nothing to do with conspiracies. Wasn't AT&T themselves, a couple of years ago, bemoaning the dramatic drop in landline revenue? I remember thinking at the time "Duh, didn't you see it happen in Europe 10 years ago? Your MBAs failed to see the impending death of POTS within the next 20 years?"
I still have a landline -- For DSL. I don't use the landline for voice. I mean, I have a phone, but it's in a drawer somewhere -- I use it for troubleshooting. Landlines were made unusable by telemarketers, surveytakers, etc. I've not made a landline call in over 10 years.
My days as an AT&T landline customer are soon to be at an end, I plan on switching to cable for internet sometime soon. Ma Bell, that old hag, will only get my $ for wireless -- where i"m at their DSL is horridly slow, and no hope for faster service.. so to hell with them.
'till then it's just a picture of someone's parts. Could be anyone's parts. Could be intentional misinformation. Could be a rejected Apple design. Could be Samsung, even!
At least TFA got lots of clicks and eyeballs. Well done, advertisers.
Yes...and that's the point. It's really nothing special. Just a standard semi-automatic rifle (not much different than any other varmint rifle).
Not quite. The 715 is chambered in 7.62 NATO, not the 5.56 NATO the normal AR rifle is chambered for.
A short history lesson:
The original AR-10 rifle was indeed 7.62. This is very similar and almost interchangeable with.308 Winchester. This isn't a plinking or varmint round. This is a blow-your-head-off-at-800-yards man killer. This is what the M14 chambered. This is what the M40 sniper rifle chambers.. and countless civilian rifles as well.
Somewhere down the line, the round was dropped to 5.56mm. Some desk jockey thought it was better to carry many more lighter, smaller bullets that don't hit nearly as hard as a heavier, larger bullet.
So no. This isn't your typical assault rifle. The 716 is more properly called a battle rifle. Like an M14 or FAL or M1 Garand, or a '03 Springfield, or a '98 Mauser.
Don't get me wrong, I live in the Now, and always have an eye down the road for Later but my heart relishes the comforts of Then. From what I observe around me, this is hard-wired into us.
I don't like the idea of books, film and music being only available as ethereal data. I double dislike the idea when one factors in "cloud" storage, and a vendor's ability to remove things from that cloud.
Can you imagine? "License" "Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt" now in 2012, watch it a bunch of times, then in 2022 try to go to it again only to find.. "Due to violation of Federal Decency Code #A113 paragraph 1313, this title has been removed for your own protection." I *can* see this happening. Good thing I have it in hardcopy here.. You want it? *come and get it*
How about availability? Can you get, 50 years from now, an e-book of some low-run title from some unheard of author? Cinemas are starting to find this out right now.. "Oh, you want "Everybody Sing" (1938, Judy Garland) in 4k DCI? So sorry, we don't have it.. but we do have the last 35mm print known to exist.. what's that you say? You sold your film projectors in the Great Physical Purge of 2012? So sorry to hear that! We can offer you the latest by Michael Ba"----*CLICK*
Speaking broadly, aren't we headed for a possible Digital Alexandria, or a Digital Book Burning Party? Didn't one of the major e-bookstores remove Tom Sawyer from reader's devices? What would prevent this on a much larger scale? What would prevent a government from declaring a title "verbotten" and having the e-vendors pull it from all readers' devices and zap it from the cloud?
I can't think of a world where all the world's books, music and film are sold and contained in "the cloud." I may be getting old, so I may have a skewed perspective on the physical world.. but there's little comfort to be found knowing that I have Mahoromatic on my hard drive, vs. just looking over my shoulder and seeing the 8 books sitting in my shelf, snugly surrounded by other obscure titles that no one in the mainstream cares about. A shelf full of books, film and music is a good sign. To me, anyway.
And yet, as I say all this, one of my back-burner projects is to build a home media server and stuff it with bit-for-bit copies of all my music and film. The physical media itself would remain, right where it is, lining the walls of my favorite room.
make a system that amplifies dialog to the same level as everyfucking thing else in the movie so I dont have to constantly fiddle with my remote. Why is it in music we have the loudness wars where all sound is mashed into mindless noise at the peak of volume, but in movies there HAS to be a 100db difference between scenes
So let me get this straight - you're cutting down music because of the loudness war, but you want THE SAME THING in movies? Shoot, you already have it! Just pick the mix with the most letters and acronyms in the name!
I'll give you one example, and I hope you have this dvd and a shit-hot hi-fi to go with it so you can duplicate it.
2007's Titanic release, the 3-disk set in the blue case. This one has a "5.1 dolby mix" that I wager most people use -- this is what I call the "muggle mix." For people who don't know any better. THe dialog and music are fairly close -- in fact, the dialog is too loud. This mix is compressed, just like pop music. I play this one with the volume at -52db. (95db 1w 1/m speakers.) It sounds "meh". Sure, you hear everything, and everything's fairly close, but it's "meh". Just like compressed pop.
THen there's the 2.0 Dolby Stereo mix. This is the one you want, if you want it to sound like it did in a theater. This one's uncompressed. To get a natural dialog level, I set the volume at -36 or -34, depends on my mood. At this level the sound is completely natural. WHich means when people whisper, they whisper. When people talk, they talk. When they yell, its getting loud. When Rose makes her trek down E-Deck to bust Jack free, the whole house shakes along with the boat -- and is one of the best demo bits I've ever heard for movie sound.
Same with classical music. I play most of it on the same rig as above at -36 or -34. It's soft when the orchestra's soft, and it's fucking LOUD when the conductor sticks the baton up the orchestra's collective ass.
But when I play compressed pop, it's down to -52 for moderately compressed stuff (squirrel nut zippers) and -62 for MECO's Star Wars disco thingy, which is probably the most compressed music I have.
Movies have huge dynamic range. You can either accept this, or play the muggle track.
Or, get into your receiver's or source's setup, pick DRC = ON compress the snot out of it yourself. Every DD / DTS receiver or prepro has it. It may be called different things, but it's Dynamic Range Compression.
And it's the Devils Work. It should be banned from all recordings.
In my opinion, loudness was the worst thing that ever happened to music.
Orchestras are loud.
Big grand pianos, the type used in concerts, not little polite "baby" grands, are loud.
Pipe organs are loud. Probably the single loudest instrument ever built.
Point is, Loud has been with us for a few hundred years now, if not more. All the electric guitar and its amps did was bring Loud to the guitar.
Perhaps you're thinking of dymamic range compression? IMO, that truly is the most evil thing ever foisted on musicians and listeners alike. It's sole purpose is to render music playable by the lowest common denominator. Truly an abominable, despicable creation. It sucks all the life, all the soul, out of the music.
Orbit the Earth, then walk on the moon, then take cars on the moon with you, then play golf on the moon, then -for some reason- abstain from going anywhere higher than low Earth orbit indefinetely?
The reason is the same reason so many things get cut short either at their prime, or before they've even exited the "idea" stage -- Money.
No bucks, no Buck Rogers.
And why isn't there any money to do this? Politics. Everyone wants things, but they want everyone else to pay for it. No one wants to pay for anything. Especially things they can't see immediate benefit from.. such as R&D, exploration (space, maritime and other) and pure research.
Don't be foolish, they would explode from all the weaving, diving, bobbing, feints, corrections, double-backs and plowing through verbal feces (the black boxes, not the politicians.
Back when the earth was still cooling, somewhere in Alabama, I was on a green light going through an intersection, when from the road perpendicular to mine came a huge Lincoln black sedan, a big one (but not a limo) doing about warp 3. All I saw was a huge black blur cross my bow a few feet from my little car's nose. As it passed, I saw the "STATE SENATE" license plate, or something like that -- an Alabama hi-level government plate. He'd ran his red light, and was going quite fast. I'd say a goodly 70-90 mph, on a street marked for 45.
Had that Lincoln plowed into my little '84 Rx-7 (first gen.. very light.. no door beams, no airbags, and it was at least 40% rust overall) he would've tore through me like a locomotive. It'd been a fatal t-bone. Good thing that little rustbucket actually had some brakes to go with the go. She stopped quick-like, among the smell of hot brake and burnt rubber (ok, so I locked 'em up a bit.. this is before ABS.)
I actually considered giving chase (things like that bring on the red haze.) Then I thought: "A car like that is likely to have MiBs with who knows what in their shoulder holsters.." so instead I went home and then the shakes began.
I think it's time we turn Big Brother loose on himself. Twit(ter) is kinda helping with that, so's Facebook and the almighty sms. I say we implant our politicos with chips that reveal to us when they go the local crackhouse, cathouse, or other houses of ill repute. It's only fair. They want into our daily life, we'd like to get into theirs. I bet it'd be far more entertaining and illuminating than watching whatever dreck is playing on the muggle box.
LONG LIVE BILL THE CAT! Ackthpt, you have got to have the best nick in this here place n.n Ye gods, how I miss Bloom Co.! Senator Bedfellow has nothing on the craptacular people we've put into office now. I wish Brethed would revive Bloom Co as a daily, with all the main characters. What fantastic fodder these past 10 years would've been!
They avoid idling for x minutes at a light. Good fuel savings.
The allow traffic to flow, flow, flow.
I've driven in England and in France, where rotaries are how it's done. I love 'em. The locals don't seem to mind them, they seem perfectly at ease zipping in and out of the many lanes on their way in our out of the roundabout.
They're only a problem in America, where no one wants to let the other guy in. Give it a generation, and people will wonder how come we used those pesky traffic signals for a century.
And that will be the end... when we stay home because we prefer a machine. We'll give up on loving our own kind not because it is superior, but just because it is less "work".
That's part of the setup of CLAMP's "Chobits" comic and anime. There was this side-story of Chi finding this series of children's books -- dealing with exactly that -- people had stopped hanging out with people, preferring the PersoCom bots.. droids.. whatever Chi and her kind are.
It's round, it has numbers, an hour hand, a minute hand, a second hand, an alarm hand, a great snooze button on top, and it doesn't give a rip about what "time zone" it is in. It's not radio controlled, it's not set by GPS, I set its time by hand. (It's a seiko QXE011ALH)
I have an iphone, and have used its alarm on a couple of occasions -- but never for a 'mission-critical' wakeup. I only use it as a safety net when I need an earlier-than-normal wakeup. The thing sleeps on the same table as my clock, yet I still use the clock as the primary.
This little episode just makes me grin. All that tech trumped by a humble little clock.
Slashdot Mirror
Upon some reflection after typing that, the two are not equally equal.. one of them is a psycho nutter, and he's not getting my vote.
But my initial Jack Johnson / John Jackson thought remains. It's just that one of them has a fatal flaw that the other doesn't have - or at least has been carefully hidden.
Seriously, that's how I feel about all this.
1. Take the leash off Israel.
2. Let them and the Arabs sort things out the way nature intended to. I'm sure it'll go nuclear about 20 minutes into it. If not, various nations can Profit by selling arms to both sides . The French and the Germans and the US love such deals. Win for the economy! War is Great! (Don't believe me? War lifted the world out of the 30's depression. Even the losers made off like bandits.)
3. Spend the next 30 years rebuilding the area, ensure good schooling for all, you know, all that jazz that happened after WWII. Maybe then the whole Middle East can make things other than war and hatred and intolerance. Things they can sell and service, and therefore have a somewhat-educated people that's not hell-bent on burning the world.
4. Profit! Buy the stuff they make (if it's worth a damn), and sell them stuff!
And in a perfect world,
5. The world finally wakes the fuck up and loses all its religions, now that the huge religiously-fuelled battle with hundreds of thousands or even millions of lives lost wasn't just filmed and televised, it was tweeted and facebooked realtime. The horror show to end all horror shows.
I'm not trying to be funny or cavalier. I'm sick and tired of all this religion-based bickering. It brings nothing but war and suffering, directly or indirectly.
Oh, Really?
The more extremist muslims want exactly that, a muslim world. Try it. I will personally grab a rifle and oppose such an effort. It's no different than Germany, 1934. If only more people had opposed that. And as for us stopping whining and lead? That contradicts your following point!
What a load of succotash. UK spread by arms. France spread by arms. Spain. Rome. Japan. China. Russia. Portugal. They all were empires and invaders at one time, some until very recently. Everywhere they went they left some of their morals and laws behind -- including the US. Our legal system is modeled on our past masters, the Brits. How do we spread? We buy our land, not take it at the tip of a sword. We spread by having motherfucking Kodak, Camel, Coke and McDonald's in Bumfuck, Egypt, and in the smallest of shops in the deep of Africa. (Ok, so Kodak's gone, but the point remains.)
*sigh*. Just like the aforementioned Brits, Romans, Spaniards, Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese -- all were convinced that they were better than the peoples they were taking over.
Oh shit, did I just defend the USA? Oh well. It could be worse. I could be living in a Muslim-ran country where I'd be shot just for being. For expressing my thought, which is there is no God, neither Mohammed nor Jesus are his prophets, and no amount of institutional brainwashing nor intimidation at the tip of a sword or muzzle of gun will change my mind.
Sitting down and doing bong rips with a deity, that may convince me. "Hey, Jesus, you gonna hit that or just hold it and philosophize?"
MANPADS brings forth images of combating... anal leakage.
*shrug* Whoever came up with that deusy of an acronym should have their head examined.. "MANPAD.. for when things get un-Dependable!"
Aw what the hell do I know about comedy, it's o' dark thirty and I'm still up... x.x
Just thought of this... sshhhhh, don't give DHS any more ideas -- model rocketeers into the really big stuff were being hounded by Ashcroft's Asshat Brigade out of fear that someone could.. build something like a Stinger. Or worse. Out of commonly-available parts.
Weren't we giving these away not too long ago to certain people under the guise of helping them fight the Big Bad Bear? I doubt those people paid MSRP for them.
OK, so it was long ago.. man, time flies.
Didn't we get some of those back recently, pointy-end first?
Stinger.
For when ye granpappy's olde side-by-side 12-gauge isn't enough.
When what you're talking about is things businesses and governments wish to keep secret, there is no such thing as free speech. You pay for it in blood.
Were I Assange, I'd be far more worried about a bullet in my head or a mickey in my drink than a legit arrest.
Am I insinuating that a government or business would kill over information they wish to keep secret for legitimate reasons, or otherwise?
Hell yes, I am.
I'm sure there are many secrets that should remain so -- but buried in that pile are atrocities and behind-the-scene dealings that impact people like you and I in the worst ways -- and those are the dirty bits of laundry that need to get out.
Frankly, I still think the Internet is nothing but television magnified by 1000, with all the lolcatz and pr0n and myface and spacebook and all that -- but the ability to shed light on nasty, shady dealings -- that's what I had hoped the Internet would be able to do.
We need more of this. We need to know more about what businesses and governments do in secret to line their pockets by picking ours. The mainstream media can't quite be trusted to do so, I feel they're in the payroll of government and business -- so the last resort is.. this.
But, who vets this kind of leaks? Who can assure the reader that it isn't misinformation? Wow, paranoids are right, I think!
Still, there's a little place in my heart that tells me.. we really don't want to know. I think it could be that revolting, that repulsive.
Been done.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_aircraft_carrier/
Or more properly, Phalanx CIWS does. R2D2 is just a nickname, owing to what the radar section looks like.
It was designed specifically to deal with supersonic hi-G maneuvering anti-ship missiles.
The future weapon to fear is the railgun. How are we (or anyone) going to defend against that? Forcefields? I can't think of any kind of armor that will stand up to a railgun.
Missiles.. how quaint.
Surely, RIAA / MPAA's wettest dream.
I hope against hope Google patents this and then makes it so it's impossible or impractical to license, while vigorously suing into oblivion anyone who dares try it without license. Otherwise, Google just became as evil as any other ordinary Evil Enterprise.
This whole "streaming" and "cloud" thing is just setting us up for robbery. Worse than we are now, I mean. I can see content one's already bought held hostage for further payment. That's what these assholes want, you know. They want it so every single time you read a book that you already bought you have to pay for it. Wait -- didn't someone already try this some time ago? DIVX. Failed, didn't it... it'll be easier to make it stick once all the content's in "the cloud."
Can you imagine? A Blu-Ray one already purchased requiring further payment every time one wishes to view it? That's why they want to do away with physical media, you know. They want this. It's that kind of thinking that makes me think physical media must remain the primary method of distribution. Files in a cloud are too easy to arbitrarily delete, too easy to control, too easy to hold for ransom. With physical, if you want my copy of Brave back, you're going to have to bust into my house, survive whatever punishment greets you when you do, and then make off with the movie.
Every time I read crap like this, I become more disillusioned with this modern world. I don't yearn for days gone by, what I want is for people to wake the fuck right up and say "enough with the gouging and pocket-picking, nickle-and-diming and outright robbery already!"
Heh. Fat chance. I know.
Normally I'm very skeptical about business motives, but the apparent death of the landline, I think, has little to do with any nefariousness on AT&T's part.
An Illustration: In 1997 I visited Europe for an extended period of time. In that time I found that different countries treat wireless different. In France, I noticed almost no one had landlines in their homes. And this was 1997! When I asked, I was told "Wireless is simply cheaper than a land line, so we got rid of landlines." A story I heard at more than one dinner table. Italy still had lots of landlines that I saw in use by people in their homes.
I'm shocked, actually, that AT&T didn't see it coming (or chose to ignore it.) The landline will die in time, and it has nothing to do with conspiracies. Wasn't AT&T themselves, a couple of years ago, bemoaning the dramatic drop in landline revenue? I remember thinking at the time "Duh, didn't you see it happen in Europe 10 years ago? Your MBAs failed to see the impending death of POTS within the next 20 years?"
I still have a landline -- For DSL. I don't use the landline for voice. I mean, I have a phone, but it's in a drawer somewhere -- I use it for troubleshooting. Landlines were made unusable by telemarketers, surveytakers, etc. I've not made a landline call in over 10 years.
My days as an AT&T landline customer are soon to be at an end, I plan on switching to cable for internet sometime soon. Ma Bell, that old hag, will only get my $ for wireless -- where i"m at their DSL is horridly slow, and no hope for faster service.. so to hell with them.
'till then it's just a picture of someone's parts. Could be anyone's parts. Could be intentional misinformation. Could be a rejected Apple design. Could be Samsung, even!
At least TFA got lots of clicks and eyeballs. Well done, advertisers.
Not quite. The 715 is chambered in 7.62 NATO, not the 5.56 NATO the normal AR rifle is chambered for.
A short history lesson:
The original AR-10 rifle was indeed 7.62. This is very similar and almost interchangeable with .308 Winchester. This isn't a plinking or varmint round. This is a blow-your-head-off-at-800-yards man killer. This is what the M14 chambered. This is what the M40 sniper rifle chambers.. and countless civilian rifles as well.
Somewhere down the line, the round was dropped to 5.56mm. Some desk jockey thought it was better to carry many more lighter, smaller bullets that don't hit nearly as hard as a heavier, larger bullet.
So no. This isn't your typical assault rifle. The 716 is more properly called a battle rifle. Like an M14 or FAL or M1 Garand, or a '03 Springfield, or a '98 Mauser.
Don't get me wrong, I live in the Now, and always have an eye down the road for Later but my heart relishes the comforts of Then. From what I observe around me, this is hard-wired into us.
I don't like the idea of books, film and music being only available as ethereal data. I double dislike the idea when one factors in "cloud" storage, and a vendor's ability to remove things from that cloud.
Can you imagine? "License" "Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt" now in 2012, watch it a bunch of times, then in 2022 try to go to it again only to find.. "Due to violation of Federal Decency Code #A113 paragraph 1313, this title has been removed for your own protection." I *can* see this happening. Good thing I have it in hardcopy here.. You want it? *come and get it*
How about availability? Can you get, 50 years from now, an e-book of some low-run title from some unheard of author? Cinemas are starting to find this out right now.. "Oh, you want "Everybody Sing" (1938, Judy Garland) in 4k DCI? So sorry, we don't have it.. but we do have the last 35mm print known to exist.. what's that you say? You sold your film projectors in the Great Physical Purge of 2012? So sorry to hear that! We can offer you the latest by Michael Ba"----*CLICK*
Speaking broadly, aren't we headed for a possible Digital Alexandria, or a Digital Book Burning Party? Didn't one of the major e-bookstores remove Tom Sawyer from reader's devices? What would prevent this on a much larger scale? What would prevent a government from declaring a title "verbotten" and having the e-vendors pull it from all readers' devices and zap it from the cloud?
I can't think of a world where all the world's books, music and film are sold and contained in "the cloud." I may be getting old, so I may have a skewed perspective on the physical world.. but there's little comfort to be found knowing that I have Mahoromatic on my hard drive, vs. just looking over my shoulder and seeing the 8 books sitting in my shelf, snugly surrounded by other obscure titles that no one in the mainstream cares about. A shelf full of books, film and music is a good sign. To me, anyway.
And yet, as I say all this, one of my back-burner projects is to build a home media server and stuff it with bit-for-bit copies of all my music and film. The physical media itself would remain, right where it is, lining the walls of my favorite room.
make a system that amplifies dialog to the same level as everyfucking thing else in the movie so I dont have to constantly fiddle with my remote. Why is it in music we have the loudness wars where all sound is mashed into mindless noise at the peak of volume, but in movies there HAS to be a 100db difference between scenes
So let me get this straight - you're cutting down music because of the loudness war, but you want THE SAME THING in movies? Shoot, you already have it! Just pick the mix with the most letters and acronyms in the name!
I'll give you one example, and I hope you have this dvd and a shit-hot hi-fi to go with it so you can duplicate it.
2007's Titanic release, the 3-disk set in the blue case. This one has a "5.1 dolby mix" that I wager most people use -- this is what I call the "muggle mix." For people who don't know any better. THe dialog and music are fairly close -- in fact, the dialog is too loud. This mix is compressed, just like pop music. I play this one with the volume at -52db. (95db 1w 1/m speakers.) It sounds "meh". Sure, you hear everything, and everything's fairly close, but it's "meh". Just like compressed pop.
THen there's the 2.0 Dolby Stereo mix. This is the one you want, if you want it to sound like it did in a theater. This one's uncompressed. To get a natural dialog level, I set the volume at -36 or -34, depends on my mood. At this level the sound is completely natural. WHich means when people whisper, they whisper. When people talk, they talk. When they yell, its getting loud. When Rose makes her trek down E-Deck to bust Jack free, the whole house shakes along with the boat -- and is one of the best demo bits I've ever heard for movie sound.
Same with classical music. I play most of it on the same rig as above at -36 or -34. It's soft when the orchestra's soft, and it's fucking LOUD when the conductor sticks the baton up the orchestra's collective ass.
But when I play compressed pop, it's down to -52 for moderately compressed stuff (squirrel nut zippers) and -62 for MECO's Star Wars disco thingy, which is probably the most compressed music I have.
Movies have huge dynamic range. You can either accept this, or play the muggle track.
Or, get into your receiver's or source's setup, pick DRC = ON compress the snot out of it yourself. Every DD / DTS receiver or prepro has it. It may be called different things, but it's Dynamic Range Compression.
And it's the Devils Work. It should be banned from all recordings.
In my opinion, loudness was the worst thing that ever happened to music.
Orchestras are loud.
Big grand pianos, the type used in concerts, not little polite "baby" grands, are loud.
Pipe organs are loud. Probably the single loudest instrument ever built.
Point is, Loud has been with us for a few hundred years now, if not more. All the electric guitar and its amps did was bring Loud to the guitar.
Perhaps you're thinking of dymamic range compression? IMO, that truly is the most evil thing ever foisted on musicians and listeners alike. It's sole purpose is to render music playable by the lowest common denominator. Truly an abominable, despicable creation. It sucks all the life, all the soul, out of the music.
The reason is the same reason so many things get cut short either at their prime, or before they've even exited the "idea" stage -- Money.
No bucks, no Buck Rogers.
And why isn't there any money to do this? Politics. Everyone wants things, but they want everyone else to pay for it. No one wants to pay for anything. Especially things they can't see immediate benefit from.. such as R&D, exploration (space, maritime and other) and pure research.
Don't be foolish, they would explode from all the weaving, diving, bobbing, feints, corrections, double-backs and plowing through verbal feces (the black boxes, not the politicians.
Back when the earth was still cooling, somewhere in Alabama, I was on a green light going through an intersection, when from the road perpendicular to mine came a huge Lincoln black sedan, a big one (but not a limo) doing about warp 3. All I saw was a huge black blur cross my bow a few feet from my little car's nose. As it passed, I saw the "STATE SENATE" license plate, or something like that -- an Alabama hi-level government plate. He'd ran his red light, and was going quite fast. I'd say a goodly 70-90 mph, on a street marked for 45.
Had that Lincoln plowed into my little '84 Rx-7 (first gen.. very light.. no door beams, no airbags, and it was at least 40% rust overall) he would've tore through me like a locomotive. It'd been a fatal t-bone. Good thing that little rustbucket actually had some brakes to go with the go. She stopped quick-like, among the smell of hot brake and burnt rubber (ok, so I locked 'em up a bit.. this is before ABS.)
I actually considered giving chase (things like that bring on the red haze.) Then I thought: "A car like that is likely to have MiBs with who knows what in their shoulder holsters.." so instead I went home and then the shakes began.
I think it's time we turn Big Brother loose on himself. Twit(ter) is kinda helping with that, so's Facebook and the almighty sms. I say we implant our politicos with chips that reveal to us when they go the local crackhouse, cathouse, or other houses of ill repute. It's only fair. They want into our daily life, we'd like to get into theirs. I bet it'd be far more entertaining and illuminating than watching whatever dreck is playing on the muggle box.
LONG LIVE BILL THE CAT! Ackthpt, you have got to have the best nick in this here place n.n Ye gods, how I miss Bloom Co.! Senator Bedfellow has nothing on the craptacular people we've put into office now. I wish Brethed would revive Bloom Co as a daily, with all the main characters. What fantastic fodder these past 10 years would've been!
...I still think this was nothing more than a cash grab by their corporate parent, EMC.
As if mugging you for all your lunch money at disk-adding time wasn't enough for EMC, right?
They avoid idling for x minutes at a light. Good fuel savings.
The allow traffic to flow, flow, flow.
I've driven in England and in France, where rotaries are how it's done. I love 'em. The locals don't seem to mind them, they seem perfectly at ease zipping in and out of the many lanes on their way in our out of the roundabout.
They're only a problem in America, where no one wants to let the other guy in. Give it a generation, and people will wonder how come we used those pesky traffic signals for a century.
And that will be the end... when we stay home because we prefer a machine. We'll give up on loving our own kind not because it is superior, but just because it is less "work".
That's part of the setup of CLAMP's "Chobits" comic and anime. There was this side-story of Chi finding this series of children's books -- dealing with exactly that -- people had stopped hanging out with people, preferring the PersoCom bots.. droids.. whatever Chi and her kind are.
Digital battlefield indeed.
It's round, it has numbers, an hour hand, a minute hand, a second hand, an alarm hand, a great snooze button on top, and it doesn't give a rip about what "time zone" it is in. It's not radio controlled, it's not set by GPS, I set its time by hand. (It's a seiko QXE011ALH)
I have an iphone, and have used its alarm on a couple of occasions -- but never for a 'mission-critical' wakeup. I only use it as a safety net when I need an earlier-than-normal wakeup. The thing sleeps on the same table as my clock, yet I still use the clock as the primary.
This little episode just makes me grin. All that tech trumped by a humble little clock.