I have lots of control. I can choose to buy it, or not. Since I don't have kids and don't mind adult content in my movies, I choose not to buy it. If somebody else want auto-censored DVDs, RCA is answering their demand. Good for them. Everybody wins. Why are so many people getting their panties in a twist over this?
It would be too easy to make a generic charger without violating patents. Chargers are just AC - DC step-down transformers. All you need is two leads, the correct voltage, and enough amps. Radio Shack will probably end up stocking them for $30 each.
If the battery will be cheap, it's because it will be cheap to make, not because it's a loss-leader to sell chargers.
A lot of speaker companies sell test-tone CD's which go well below 20 Hz.
A lot of amplifiers and speakers can't push much out below 20 (which is why output specs are usually evaluated on a basis of how it performs between 20 and 20,000 Hz... 20 Hz is a popular roll-off point, especially with speaker makers), but the problem is not the CD player. Whoever told you that consumer DAC hardware can't go below 20 is simply wrong.
The visible shaking of long-throw subwoofers is a fairly common artifact. It's probably not harming your speaker drivers.
However, if you are worried, I would say you should go to your nearest analog audio boutique for advice. (There's at least one in every metro area... A small audio store which is staffed almost entirely by friendly, low-pressure, well-informed vinyl bigots who only sell speakers which are guaranteed to give any audio fanatic a chubby. They know everything there is to know about the state of the art in all things analog, and usually know more about digital sources than your local Sony dealer. For the Twin Cities, it's Hi-Fi Sounds in downtown Minneapolis. You'll have to ask around to discover the one in your town.)
Actually, I would count Trigun among those that could have been even shorter. The 13-episode anime shows like "Serial Experiments Lain", "Haibane Renmei", and "Kino's Journey" seem to have found the sweet-spot between the rushed feel of 6-hour "OVA" shows, and 26-episode sagas which almost always have at least a few filler "monster of the week" type episodes. The one possible exception being Cowboy Bebop.
Well, the secret's out now... I'm a big ol' anime nerd.
That's the ammount of oil which is practical to get at with today's methods. When people say "oil reserves", instead of just "oil", they mean "oil can easilly get an right now."
There's a genuinely stunning quantity of oil under the Gulf of Mexico... it's just too difficult and expensive to drill for it with current technology, so it doens't really count as "oil reserves."
The reason for China's increased oil demands is their growing economic success. They were, until recently, a fantastically poor country for the amount of resources they had. Now, thanks in large part to free-market reforms (and the absorbtion of Hong Kong, one of the most libertarian capitalist cities in the world), they are becoming bigger consumers.
A major part of this prosperity depends on trade with the West.
Also, it's silly to suggest that Middle East oil will ever be "practically all that is left." If anything, that's the oil which will run out first. South and Central America are practically floating on the stuff.
Re:The bad side of course...
on
Weapons in Space
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Actually, Kerry is part French.
I don't buy the negative portrayals of either Kerry or Bush, though. Too many people get their information from the attack ads of opposing candidates, rather than actually bothering to learn about their real records.
As far as I'm concerned, either one would do a fairly good job as President for the upcoming term, and neither would be perfect.
Just for the record, I consider the Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger guest appearance to be the beginning of the end... and Marge & Homer's public nudity fettish episode to be the one where the show finally strapped on the water skis and gave a thumbs-up to the camera on the way to its death-defying-stunt-cliffhanger.
Blasphemy! The Frank Grimes episode was probably the funniest episode they managed to cobble together in years, and certainly the only funny one of its season.
I agree it has not been as good. But all the lousy episodes were worth putting up with for the single "Frank Grimes" episode. That one was a masterpiece. I still laugh thinking of some of the lines.
I'm sick of this Friends comparison! It's not valid!
Like it or not, Friends has been a top-10 show from its opening seasons, and a #1 show which has anchored NBC's Must-See TV Thursday nights for a significant portion of its run. It's arguably the most consistently successful sit-com since The Cosby Show and has been the most important show of the #1 netowork for years.
When the Simpsons began, it seldom got a higher ranking that 50 in the Nielsons, and only got to continue because they were on a new network which didn't have anything better to offer. Stop saying The Simpsons made FOX a successful network, because that dubious honor mostly belongs to Married, With Children and The X-Files.
Even during it's seasons of peak popularity, it was barely a top-20 show, and the popularity of the show has been waning for the last couple of years, due to the quality of writing going downhill. Many of the best writers from its heyday have moved on to work for Late Night With Conan O'Brien and Saturday Night Live.
It was once my favorite show, and the favorite of many geeks like me. It also made a huge impact on popular culture... but it was never the monolith of TV success that Friends was and continues to be.
Also, as has been said everywhere, the charisma of the cast, not the quality of the writing, is what makes Friends successful. Put the cast of The Simpsons in front of the camera with a Friends script and nobody will watch it. Likewise, send the writers of Friends to do a Simpsons episode, and it will suck.
How is this any different than if they were an enourmously succesful rock band?
The difference is that most of the top rock acts are the actual creators of the work. In the case of the Simpsons cast, we are talking about people who stand in a sound-proof room and read scripts. The real creators are the writers. I say, get the best writers you can find, and give the millions to them.
Old Alfred was right, actors are cattle.
I don't watch "The Simpsons" for the magnificent voice acting of Nancy Cartwright. She's just some chick who could sound like a young boy who was available cheap when "The Tracy Ullman Show" was looking for somebody cheap to voice their interstitial cartoons.
After all, the best voice actor on the whole show has been dead for several years now. (Rest in peace, Phil. Rest in peace.)
They can bargain all they like, just don't try to draw any sympathy from me for their miserable plight of only drawing a few million dollars off the fortune the show they have the privilege of acting on has collected.
Yes, but that stupid Michael Jordan & Bugs movie made millions, proving that voice actors, even the great ones like Mel Blanc, can be replaced without losing any hope of keeping an audience.
Would another Lisa sound exactly like Yardley Smith? No. Could the new actress be as good, or... dare I suggest it... even better!? It's possible.
The strength of the Simpsons has never been the voice cast. It's always been the writing. The seasons when the writing has been week, it has been barely worth watching.
The seasons when the writing was strong, you could replace the entire voice cast with the regulars from Guy Richie's movies, and it would still be entertaining.
How much did the writers, the real geniuses behind all 15 years of laughs, get paid over that same 15 years. Apart from Matt Groening himself, I bet it was a hell of a lot less than $20 Million dollars each.
The core cast of the Simpsons are just homely-looking actors who were capable of doing funny voices. They are a remarkably talented voice cast, but that's all they are. They don't even ever appear on camera.
Did you know that, for large chucks of The Muppet Show and the associated movies, Kermit was actually being voiced by Jim Henson's understudy? If nobody could tell the difference then, what makes you think these people are so damned impossible to replace? Watch season 1 again and then watch a new episode. The Simpsons already sound different from how they originally sounded, especially Marge and Homer, even without changing cast members.
They signed the contracts they signed. Work at the rate you signed for, or leave. It pisses me off when millionaire entertainers and athletes say they are going on "strike." News flash guys: You are not exploited steel workers. You are pampered millionaires. Get over yourselves.
Currency exchange is not a magical machine that turns dollars into rupis. It just means that somebody else ends up with those US dollars, and has to spend them in the US. Either way, they get spent here.
I disagree with both your points about free trade.
1. Free trade is still good, even if it's only between two countries. The more, the better, obviously, but we should trade freely with anybody willing to trade freely with us.
2. Planned economies, superior in theory, end up doing more harm than good. I've never seen a government capable of running an economy better than the market can.
This is all very general, but as a U.S. Citizen looking at it from a Constitutional/'U.S. Government serves the best interests of the U.S. citizens' perspective, I believe outsourcing all ( or the majority of ) industries that deal with information and knowledge management, is a bad thing.
That's a straw man argument. It does not make economic sense for "the majority of" our "information and knowledge management" to be outsourced, therefore it's not going to happen. It does sometimes make economic sense to use outsourcing for some of your IT needs. For example, the company I work at had a project which required thousands of man-hours to code and needed to be delivered in six months. We all stood to make money from supporting this project, and would even get to expand our staff. To get this done, we had three options:
1. Hire a bunch of new people who we would need to lay off in six months. 2. Hire contractors at $50-$200 per hour, resulting in a net loss on the project. 3. Farm out to a team in Bangalore that will slap together a working (if slightly buggy) product for us in six months and then disappear.
How can a country afford to privde items for their citizens if all of the money flows out and not back into the country?
Okay, clearly something about international trade needs to be explained to you: Money never flows out and not back into a country, unless they are your colony.
When nation $FOOnia sells a product or service to nation $BARistan, they get $BARistan money in exchange. Since the only place you can spend $BARistan money is $BARistan, the people of $FOOnia really have no choice but to turn around and buy something from $BARistan.
This is why the Japanese were buying so much US real estate in the 80s and 90s. The "trade deficit" between us had grown to the point that the Japanese found themselves sitting on more US money than they really knew what to do with, so they invested in chunks of downtown New York.
Employing people in other countries is simply an element of free trade between nations, and is a Good Thing, in the macro-economic sense, even if it means that you can no longer get a crappy consumer tech support job in the US.
I gotta agree that the moderation is strange. I was clearly whoring for a "Funny" mod, but at the moment the score is "0, Insightful." (20% Interesting, 60% Overrated, 20% Interesting).
Slashdot Mirror
I have lots of control. I can choose to buy it, or not. Since I don't have kids and don't mind adult content in my movies, I choose not to buy it. If somebody else want auto-censored DVDs, RCA is answering their demand. Good for them. Everybody wins. Why are so many people getting their panties in a twist over this?
Matrix Revolutions took the crown from Alien^3
"I dunno, I can imagine quite a lot."
In other words, it's essentially an empty vessel which you drop a non-rechargable (liquid) battery into?
That would be far less impressive.
If the battery will be cheap, it's because it will be cheap to make, not because it's a loss-leader to sell chargers.
A lot of amplifiers and speakers can't push much out below 20 (which is why output specs are usually evaluated on a basis of how it performs between 20 and 20,000 Hz... 20 Hz is a popular roll-off point, especially with speaker makers), but the problem is not the CD player. Whoever told you that consumer DAC hardware can't go below 20 is simply wrong.
However, if you are worried, I would say you should go to your nearest analog audio boutique for advice. (There's at least one in every metro area... A small audio store which is staffed almost entirely by friendly, low-pressure, well-informed vinyl bigots who only sell speakers which are guaranteed to give any audio fanatic a chubby. They know everything there is to know about the state of the art in all things analog, and usually know more about digital sources than your local Sony dealer. For the Twin Cities, it's Hi-Fi Sounds in downtown Minneapolis. You'll have to ask around to discover the one in your town.)
Oh no you didn't just dis Usagi!
(Speaking of "monster of the week" shows...)
Well, the secret's out now... I'm a big ol' anime nerd.
There's a genuinely stunning quantity of oil under the Gulf of Mexico... it's just too difficult and expensive to drill for it with current technology, so it doens't really count as "oil reserves."
A major part of this prosperity depends on trade with the West.
Also, it's silly to suggest that Middle East oil will ever be "practically all that is left." If anything, that's the oil which will run out first. South and Central America are practically floating on the stuff.
I don't buy the negative portrayals of either Kerry or Bush, though. Too many people get their information from the attack ads of opposing candidates, rather than actually bothering to learn about their real records.
As far as I'm concerned, either one would do a fairly good job as President for the upcoming term, and neither would be perfect.
Good Lord! Have you forgotten the unholy abomination against nature which was The Lone Gunmen?
Quirky supporting characters should never get their own show.
Just for the record, I consider the Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger guest appearance to be the beginning of the end... and Marge & Homer's public nudity fettish episode to be the one where the show finally strapped on the water skis and gave a thumbs-up to the camera on the way to its death-defying-stunt-cliffhanger.
Blasphemy! The Frank Grimes episode was probably the funniest episode they managed to cobble together in years, and certainly the only funny one of its season.
I agree it has not been as good. But all the lousy episodes were worth putting up with for the single "Frank Grimes" episode. That one was a masterpiece. I still laugh thinking of some of the lines.
Like it or not, Friends has been a top-10 show from its opening seasons, and a #1 show which has anchored NBC's Must-See TV Thursday nights for a significant portion of its run. It's arguably the most consistently successful sit-com since The Cosby Show and has been the most important show of the #1 netowork for years.
When the Simpsons began, it seldom got a higher ranking that 50 in the Nielsons, and only got to continue because they were on a new network which didn't have anything better to offer. Stop saying The Simpsons made FOX a successful network, because that dubious honor mostly belongs to Married, With Children and The X-Files.
Even during it's seasons of peak popularity, it was barely a top-20 show, and the popularity of the show has been waning for the last couple of years, due to the quality of writing going downhill. Many of the best writers from its heyday have moved on to work for Late Night With Conan O'Brien and Saturday Night Live.
It was once my favorite show, and the favorite of many geeks like me. It also made a huge impact on popular culture... but it was never the monolith of TV success that Friends was and continues to be.
Also, as has been said everywhere, the charisma of the cast, not the quality of the writing, is what makes Friends successful. Put the cast of The Simpsons in front of the camera with a Friends script and nobody will watch it. Likewise, send the writers of Friends to do a Simpsons episode, and it will suck.
The difference is that most of the top rock acts are the actual creators of the work. In the case of the Simpsons cast, we are talking about people who stand in a sound-proof room and read scripts. The real creators are the writers. I say, get the best writers you can find, and give the millions to them.
Old Alfred was right, actors are cattle.
I don't watch "The Simpsons" for the magnificent voice acting of Nancy Cartwright. She's just some chick who could sound like a young boy who was available cheap when "The Tracy Ullman Show" was looking for somebody cheap to voice their interstitial cartoons.
After all, the best voice actor on the whole show has been dead for several years now. (Rest in peace, Phil. Rest in peace.)
They can bargain all they like, just don't try to draw any sympathy from me for their miserable plight of only drawing a few million dollars off the fortune the show they have the privilege of acting on has collected.
Would another Lisa sound exactly like Yardley Smith? No. Could the new actress be as good, or... dare I suggest it... even better!? It's possible.
The strength of the Simpsons has never been the voice cast. It's always been the writing. The seasons when the writing has been week, it has been barely worth watching.
The seasons when the writing was strong, you could replace the entire voice cast with the regulars from Guy Richie's movies, and it would still be entertaining.
How much did the writers, the real geniuses behind all 15 years of laughs, get paid over that same 15 years. Apart from Matt Groening himself, I bet it was a hell of a lot less than $20 Million dollars each.
The core cast of the Simpsons are just homely-looking actors who were capable of doing funny voices. They are a remarkably talented voice cast, but that's all they are. They don't even ever appear on camera.
Did you know that, for large chucks of The Muppet Show and the associated movies, Kermit was actually being voiced by Jim Henson's understudy? If nobody could tell the difference then, what makes you think these people are so damned impossible to replace? Watch season 1 again and then watch a new episode. The Simpsons already sound different from how they originally sounded, especially Marge and Homer, even without changing cast members.
They signed the contracts they signed. Work at the rate you signed for, or leave. It pisses me off when millionaire entertainers and athletes say they are going on "strike." News flash guys: You are not exploited steel workers. You are pampered millionaires. Get over yourselves.
Currency exchange is not a magical machine that turns dollars into rupis. It just means that somebody else ends up with those US dollars, and has to spend them in the US. Either way, they get spent here.
I disagree with both your points about free trade.
1. Free trade is still good, even if it's only between two countries. The more, the better, obviously, but we should trade freely with anybody willing to trade freely with us.
2. Planned economies, superior in theory, end up doing more harm than good. I've never seen a government capable of running an economy better than the market can.
This is all very general, but as a U.S. Citizen looking at it from a Constitutional/'U.S. Government serves the best interests of the U.S. citizens' perspective, I believe outsourcing all ( or the majority of ) industries that deal with information and knowledge management, is a bad thing.
That's a straw man argument. It does not make economic sense for "the majority of" our "information and knowledge management" to be outsourced, therefore it's not going to happen. It does sometimes make economic sense to use outsourcing for some of your IT needs. For example, the company I work at had a project which required thousands of man-hours to code and needed to be delivered in six months. We all stood to make money from supporting this project, and would even get to expand our staff. To get this done, we had three options:
1. Hire a bunch of new people who we would need to lay off in six months.
2. Hire contractors at $50-$200 per hour, resulting in a net loss on the project.
3. Farm out to a team in Bangalore that will slap together a working (if slightly buggy) product for us in six months and then disappear.
Take a guess which one we opted for?
Okay, clearly something about international trade needs to be explained to you: Money never flows out and not back into a country, unless they are your colony.
When nation $FOOnia sells a product or service to nation $BARistan, they get $BARistan money in exchange. Since the only place you can spend $BARistan money is $BARistan, the people of $FOOnia really have no choice but to turn around and buy something from $BARistan.
This is why the Japanese were buying so much US real estate in the 80s and 90s. The "trade deficit" between us had grown to the point that the Japanese found themselves sitting on more US money than they really knew what to do with, so they invested in chunks of downtown New York.
Employing people in other countries is simply an element of free trade between nations, and is a Good Thing, in the macro-economic sense, even if it means that you can no longer get a crappy consumer tech support job in the US.
I think we are looking at April Fools moderation.