Paying isn't hugely convenient (or, it *wasn't* - they've sorted their payment gateway now) because it required a credit card.
What prompted me to go for the paid service was the 30-day free trial. The adverts were deeply annoying and spoilt my enjoyment of the service to the extent that I just couldn't put up with it for more than a couple of songs. Having it for a month for free demonstrated that it actually works extremely well (modulo a few bugs in the Linux client) and it's well worth the money.
Another issue is that most people don't "see" adverts, and will skip over these.
Video and audio adverts are the worst - one of the things that annoys me about Spotify is the adverts, which are so annoying they make me less likely to even pay for the service and just stick to playing my own music. Every three songs I get some guy quack-quack-quacking away in a foreign language, which surely makes no commercial sense.
It's going to be very short range, or *ridiculously* high power. If you go for the latter, then all you need to do is look for the thing emitting collossal blasts of RF pink noise every so often.
You can't frequency hop very far, though. If you do, you'll run out of the passband of your aerial and the efficiency will suck. If you use a suitably wide front-end on your receiver then you can tell that *something* is there, well enough to triangulate it.
Yes, and all the DSL routers, a bunch of the DSLAMs, probably not the core routers so much (they're more likely to be Cisco, or Juniper - but Juniper uses FreeBSD), any wifi bridges. Maybe someone is reading this on a modernish digital TV rather than a monitor - oh look, Linux, right there in the TV!
Year of Linux on the desktop? Don't make me laugh. It's been the *decade* of Linux in devices though.
Canonical can have a good poke about in/home/gordonjcp if they think it'll help. Why?
Because I'm getting bombarded with advertising *anyway*.
If the adverts are going to be there then they may as well be for stuff I actually want, rather than constantly advertising pharmacies that will discreetly ship to the US without requiring a prescription (why would you want to buy drugs over the internet, never mind without a prescription?). If advertising stuff that I want to buy helps a company that I'd like to support but can't be bothered actually handing over cash to, then that's fine by me.
Many places in the USA if you dig a hole in the ground capable of capturing a measurable quantity of rainwater you will be taxed on its surface area to account for evaporation. If you do not have water rights, it is actually illegal to take surface water from your property for your own use. The federal government is currently attempting a land grab in the Klamath-Siskiyous, one of the last major watersheds still vital and active in the USA.
Good job I don't live in the USA, then. I can't imagine living in such a repressive hell-hole.
Some, yes, but compared to the UK and EU you don't.
How's that Data Protection Act coming along? Are companies still allowed to sell all your personal information to anyone who wants it?
Have you figured out how to fix your libel laws yet? Basing the decisions on who can show up with the most money for lawyers, instead of the actual facts seems a bit wonky from here.
I could go on, but I won't. Oh, but before you mention CCTV, American cities have just as many CCTV cameras as anywhere else - but you've got armed police ready and willing to shoot you thrown into the mix too. Last I heard, no-one had ever been shot and killed by a CCTV camera.
You've got the whole culture of prison rape thing, and you have the highest prison population of any country because your increasingly insane "War on Drugs" means that people get long prison sentences for possessing the kind of amounts of cannabis that the police in other countries (the UK included) wouldn't even bother confiscating (although here depending on how arsey the police officers involved are, they might make you throw it in a bin, and pretend not to notice if you fish it out once they've gone up the street a bit).
You may not have "communal stoning" in the sense that you actually throw rocks at people, but you do have a strong mob mentality and the drive to ruin people's lives over minor infractions. For example, there are people right now in America who are on the sex offender register because they were naked in their own back garden. These people are denied the right to vote, and denied most jobs, simply because *someone* decided to call the police because of something they were doing in private. I think that's pretty close.
Honour killings you *probably* don't have, but you do have a culture where people subscribe to this Roy Rogers fantasy where if they carry a gun and someone tries to mug them, they can just shoot the bad guy's gun right out of his hand and everything will be okay. Police officers who carry guns have to spend a hell of a lot of time on the range practicing, and they probably can't do that. What's the bets that these "guns make us safer" nutcases couldn't even hit their assailant, and end up injuring someone else - or worse?
If you're getting a hangover, you can't handle your drink.
You shouldn't drink so much, then come home and pass out. Drink a bit less, then when you get home have a wee something to eat and a cup of tea, a glass or two of water as you listen to some quiet and calm music, maybe troll slashdot a little, then go to bed once you've wound down a bit.
Of course, if you could handle your drink, you'd be doing that already.
... and that's why those of us in civilised countries consider the US to have a similar legal system to the brutal Sharia law of countries like Afghanistan, Somalia and Mali, among others.
You lost me there. When has Ubuntu ever been targeted at the "more technically literate"?
Ubuntu has always been the best distro for the more technically literate.
"Minimal" distros like Gentoo and Arch are great for newbs who want to watch pages and pages of compiler output so they can pretend they're learning about Linux. Those of us that actually have to Get Stuff Done use Ubuntu, and are up and running in ten minutes.
I think you'll find that in the US they have very similar regulations.
Trucks use a bloody great big spring to hold the brake on, and have a complicated system of reservoirs and check valves to ensure that a burst pipe doesn't just instantly lock all the wheels. Buses have an even more complicated system with a sort of a latch thing that holds off the parking brake mechanism.
Road Vehicles (Construction and Use) 1986, Schedule 3, chapter 18:
"(c) in either case, its braking force, when the vehicle is not being driven or is left unattended (and in the case of a trailer, whether the braking force is applied by the driver using the service brakes of the drawing vehicle or by a person standing on the ground in the manner indicated in sub-paragraph (b)) can at all times be maintained in operation by direct mechanical action without the intervention of any hydraulic, electric or pneumatic device and, when so maintained, can hold the vehicle stationary on a gradient of at least 16% without the assistance of stored energy."
The brake isn't held on or off by electric power, because that would be illegal.
What happens is that a surprisingly small electric motor (about the size of an electric window motor) tensions up the perfectly ordinary mechanical handbrake mechanism through a screw jack. The friction of the screw is sufficient to stop the tension in the brake cables slackening it off.
This is pretty common on cars now, for some reason. I think they're fairly horrible to use and make hill starts difficult.
Wish you'd posted that logged in so you could get the karma.
Aircraft scatter on the microwave bands is good fun, with paths from Scotland into Norway and even as far south as Denmark. For those who haven't come across it, this is pretty much what the name suggests - point your aerial up and out over the sea when there are aircraft in roughly the right place, and listen for other stations doing the same and being reflected back off the aircraft fuselage. Because the signal is so tiny (a plane isn't that big, really) you need to use Morse code or one of the small-signal digital modes.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, because no-one ever gets injured. My point is more that there have never been any terrorist attacks by Muslims here, only by Christians.
Most terrorists are Christians. I've never been blown up by a Muslim.
Paying isn't hugely convenient (or, it *wasn't* - they've sorted their payment gateway now) because it required a credit card.
What prompted me to go for the paid service was the 30-day free trial. The adverts were deeply annoying and spoilt my enjoyment of the service to the extent that I just couldn't put up with it for more than a couple of songs. Having it for a month for free demonstrated that it actually works extremely well (modulo a few bugs in the Linux client) and it's well worth the money.
Another issue is that most people don't "see" adverts, and will skip over these.
Video and audio adverts are the worst - one of the things that annoys me about Spotify is the adverts, which are so annoying they make me less likely to even pay for the service and just stick to playing my own music. Every three songs I get some guy quack-quack-quacking away in a foreign language, which surely makes no commercial sense.
It's going to be very short range, or *ridiculously* high power. If you go for the latter, then all you need to do is look for the thing emitting collossal blasts of RF pink noise every so often.
You can't frequency hop very far, though. If you do, you'll run out of the passband of your aerial and the efficiency will suck. If you use a suitably wide front-end on your receiver then you can tell that *something* is there, well enough to triangulate it.
Yes, and all the DSL routers, a bunch of the DSLAMs, probably not the core routers so much (they're more likely to be Cisco, or Juniper - but Juniper uses FreeBSD), any wifi bridges. Maybe someone is reading this on a modernish digital TV rather than a monitor - oh look, Linux, right there in the TV!
Year of Linux on the desktop? Don't make me laugh. It's been the *decade* of Linux in devices though.
Everyone uses Linux. You're using it right now. Even Microsoft uses Linux extensively.
The simple fact of the matter is that Linux became *the* mainstream OS a decade ago, and you never even noticed.
If my head was in the sand, I'd drown. If there's one thing we're not short of here - and not likely to be short of - it's water.
Sucks to live in a country with third-world healthcare then, doesn't it? I don't really want to hear about their problems.
Canonical can have a good poke about in /home/gordonjcp if they think it'll help. Why?
Because I'm getting bombarded with advertising *anyway*.
If the adverts are going to be there then they may as well be for stuff I actually want, rather than constantly advertising pharmacies that will discreetly ship to the US without requiring a prescription (why would you want to buy drugs over the internet, never mind without a prescription?). If advertising stuff that I want to buy helps a company that I'd like to support but can't be bothered actually handing over cash to, then that's fine by me.
Many places in the USA if you dig a hole in the ground capable of capturing a measurable quantity of rainwater you will be taxed on its surface area to account for evaporation. If you do not have water rights, it is actually illegal to take surface water from your property for your own use. The federal government is currently attempting a land grab in the Klamath-Siskiyous, one of the last major watersheds still vital and active in the USA.
Good job I don't live in the USA, then. I can't imagine living in such a repressive hell-hole.
I don't have a basement, not with this sort of soil conditions.
You are taking your water for granted. This is not a sustainable stance.
Right, because it's not like it just falls from the sky, or anything.
Do you want some water? Come round here and haul away as much as you can carry, for free.
at this rate they'll own all of the water
Oooooh-kaaay, and how do you think that's going to work?
Some, yes, but compared to the UK and EU you don't.
How's that Data Protection Act coming along? Are companies still allowed to sell all your personal information to anyone who wants it?
Have you figured out how to fix your libel laws yet? Basing the decisions on who can show up with the most money for lawyers, instead of the actual facts seems a bit wonky from here.
I could go on, but I won't. Oh, but before you mention CCTV, American cities have just as many CCTV cameras as anywhere else - but you've got armed police ready and willing to shoot you thrown into the mix too. Last I heard, no-one had ever been shot and killed by a CCTV camera.
You've got the whole culture of prison rape thing, and you have the highest prison population of any country because your increasingly insane "War on Drugs" means that people get long prison sentences for possessing the kind of amounts of cannabis that the police in other countries (the UK included) wouldn't even bother confiscating (although here depending on how arsey the police officers involved are, they might make you throw it in a bin, and pretend not to notice if you fish it out once they've gone up the street a bit).
You may not have "communal stoning" in the sense that you actually throw rocks at people, but you do have a strong mob mentality and the drive to ruin people's lives over minor infractions. For example, there are people right now in America who are on the sex offender register because they were naked in their own back garden. These people are denied the right to vote, and denied most jobs, simply because *someone* decided to call the police because of something they were doing in private. I think that's pretty close.
Honour killings you *probably* don't have, but you do have a culture where people subscribe to this Roy Rogers fantasy where if they carry a gun and someone tries to mug them, they can just shoot the bad guy's gun right out of his hand and everything will be okay. Police officers who carry guns have to spend a hell of a lot of time on the range practicing, and they probably can't do that. What's the bets that these "guns make us safer" nutcases couldn't even hit their assailant, and end up injuring someone else - or worse?
If you're getting a hangover, you can't handle your drink.
You shouldn't drink so much, then come home and pass out. Drink a bit less, then when you get home have a wee something to eat and a cup of tea, a glass or two of water as you listen to some quiet and calm music, maybe troll slashdot a little, then go to bed once you've wound down a bit.
Of course, if you could handle your drink, you'd be doing that already.
... and that's why those of us in civilised countries consider the US to have a similar legal system to the brutal Sharia law of countries like Afghanistan, Somalia and Mali, among others.
You lost me there. When has Ubuntu ever been targeted at the "more technically literate"?
Ubuntu has always been the best distro for the more technically literate.
"Minimal" distros like Gentoo and Arch are great for newbs who want to watch pages and pages of compiler output so they can pretend they're learning about Linux. Those of us that actually have to Get Stuff Done use Ubuntu, and are up and running in ten minutes.
I think you'll find that in the US they have very similar regulations.
Trucks use a bloody great big spring to hold the brake on, and have a complicated system of reservoirs and check valves to ensure that a burst pipe doesn't just instantly lock all the wheels. Buses have an even more complicated system with a sort of a latch thing that holds off the parking brake mechanism.
Road Vehicles (Construction and Use) 1986, Schedule 3, chapter 18:
"(c) in either case, its braking force, when the vehicle is not being driven or is left unattended (and in the case of a trailer, whether the braking force is applied by the driver using the service brakes of the drawing vehicle or by a person standing on the ground in the manner indicated in sub-paragraph (b)) can at all times be maintained in operation by direct mechanical action without the intervention of any hydraulic, electric or pneumatic device and, when so maintained, can hold the vehicle stationary on a gradient of at least 16% without the assistance of stored energy."
There's your citation.
The brake isn't held on or off by electric power, because that would be illegal.
What happens is that a surprisingly small electric motor (about the size of an electric window motor) tensions up the perfectly ordinary mechanical handbrake mechanism through a screw jack. The friction of the screw is sufficient to stop the tension in the brake cables slackening it off.
This is pretty common on cars now, for some reason. I think they're fairly horrible to use and make hill starts difficult.
No, you can't. Software is explicitly excluded from EU patent legislation.
Wish you'd posted that logged in so you could get the karma.
Aircraft scatter on the microwave bands is good fun, with paths from Scotland into Norway and even as far south as Denmark. For those who haven't come across it, this is pretty much what the name suggests - point your aerial up and out over the sea when there are aircraft in roughly the right place, and listen for other stations doing the same and being reflected back off the aircraft fuselage. Because the signal is so tiny (a plane isn't that big, really) you need to use Morse code or one of the small-signal digital modes.
FB QSO YR 599 OM
73s de MM0YEQ
This is all Motorola TETRA kit I'm talking about here. It's pretty fragile stuff.