Would applying a lighter flame to a Li-Ion battery, say one of those 16-cell monsters that power Alienware laptops, cause it to enter thermal runaway and release enough heat to start a huge fire / melt through a window?
And then he waved the bright shiny object for slashdot - how would YOU do it - how would you prevent the smuggling of liquid explosives onto an airplane given that you don't necessarily know the chemical signature(s) of the explosives...or their constituents?
By not going out of our way to piss off the suicidal-maniac portion of the world's population for no good reason, perhaps?
If you want to keep roaches out of your house, you can use as much insecticide as you want, but if you keep leaving old pizza lying around, it's a losing proposition.
The TSA is doing their job about as well as the airlines are doing THEIR jobs! The TSA is totally funded by the public, and if you don't like one of the low-buck airlines you were dissing, you are welcome to pay a little more you cheap bastard and get good service.
Oddly enough, it's cheapo airlines like JetBlue and Southwest that have the BEST service, and the big names like Delta that have completely craptastic service.
Gee, are we going to see Clinton bashing spin stories once Hillary wins the White House? Or are we going to be seeing stories squashed that are unflattering to Clinton that can't be blamed on Bush?
Maybe, maybe not. If she does anything worth bashing, then no doubt we will see the stories. All politicians aren't created equal: some are shittier than others, and Bush is one of the bad ones. I think you mistake "bias in favor of common sense" for "liberal bias"; anyone who consistently does stupid shit with my country will draw criticism, no matter their party.
I imagine the school IT department itself doesn't much care about filesharing, if they've got the bandwidth to soak it up; if they don't, they can go after students for excessive transfer no matter what they're doing.
Besides, is there a comprehensive list anywhere of the Tor entry points? Couldn't some students at a sympathetic university simply set up their own entry nodes and not publicize them except to the UK students?
Either way, Tor forces them to play a very expensive and difficult game of whack-a-mole. What's next, banning encrypted communications out of the dorms?
Kind of ironic seeing that while visiting family in Alabama. AL has a constitution that's 2.5 times longer than the federal one, with around 900 amendments...... and is corrupt as shit.
If the majority of the Republican Party is "Republicans in name only", then perhaps we should define them as "mainstream Republicans" and classify the few honest ones as "Republicans in name only"?
Panasonic makes a lot of cameras under their Lumix brand. All of them use conventional glass lenses. Panasonic cameras, especially the FZ series and the L-1, are known for having high-quality lenses, but they don't involve any magic.
What you may be thinking of is optical image stabilization, a movable element in the lens that shifts to compensate for jitter, reducing the need for a tripod. All Lumix cameras incorporate this.
Classical music public radio stations are supposed to be bastions of sanity and concern for quality, right?
Well, the choir I'm in collaborated with another choir and the local symphony orchestra to put on Carmina Burana. So we did -- great show and such. The recording was broadcast by the local public radio station the next day. I recorded it off the air (with decent equipment that isn't the culprit), since the symphony wasn't going to make their recording available to the singers (something about union rules).
Carmina starts (and ends) with the piece "O Fortuna" -- you've probably heard it. Theme song to Excalibur, used and spoofed in tons of advertisements, etc. There is a short (~15 second) ridiculously loud introduction, about a minute of very quiet music, thirty seconds of loud, and then forty seconds of extreme loud -- if you know the piece you know what I mean. All the dynamic changes are sudden. It's the poster child for dynamic range, and the effect is wonderful.
I get the recording, and the quiet bit is just as loud as the rest. WTF? I pull the waveform on Audacity -- flat.
Aargh!
Then I started listening, and you can hear it all over the place in much of their music. Peak limiters and such kick in to reduce the level whenever there is a high-amplitude sound... so you can actually hear the rest of the orchestra suddenly get softer when the bass drum goes off. The bass drum isn't that *loud*, thanks to the response curves of human ears and the frequency-power connection, but it is high-amplitude and triggers the peak limiter like nobody's business. (Orchestral bass drums have a very, very deep sound.)
I'm in the same boat. Fortunately the sorts of music I like to listen to most are all performed acoustically, so live concerts by definition aren't all screwed up.
But the amplified concerts I've been to? Terrible. Not only is there horrible harmonic distortion, but they seem to use a mustache EQ: -5dB or so at 50 Hz, +5dB at 120 Hz, -5 dB at 500 Hz, +15 dB or something insane at 2-5 kHz (grating as hell, and sounds the loudest -- look at response curves for ears), a boost in low treble, a cut in high treble... it's awful.
Worse are cell phones. You have to turn those bastards up to the point where they'll deafen you with the 2-3 kHz part of the signal in order to get enough of the higher part of the signal to understand consonant sounds. If anyone would stop putting cameras and shit I don't care about on phones and put in an EQ and possibly customizable DSP, I'd buy their phones in a heartbeat.
Keep in mind that the purpose of military R&D isn't to develop working products; it's to get funding to continue work. This is especially true for the pseudoprivate military contractors like Boeing and Raytheon, but also partly true for groups like Spawar... who tend to be less greedy but also less concerned with actually making something that works. Military R&D labs and contractors don't manufacture products; they manufacture grants.
Saying "They must be on to something, because they're still doing the research" isn't valid, because they're only still doing the research because they can get money for it.
I had an engineering professor who once worked on Reagan's Star Wars program. He admitted that everyone in his team knew for a fact, based on sound science, that what they were doing would never work... but they kept at it, because they were getting paid to do it by people unconcerned with whether or not it *would* work.
So, another DRM system devised with more complicated encryption, another DRM system cracked by even cleverer hardware hackers.
Yay.
I notice, however, that digital camcorder technology is quickly improving. How long will it be before a $1000 camcorder pointed at a television playing a HD-DVD will produce an image of decent quality? There will always be quality losses in analog transfer, but when those quality losses are no greater than those that you get from recompression to internet-friendly sizes, who cares?
Digital still cameras are also getting faster and more flexible with their timings. If a camera is capable of recording, say, 8-10fps at 1024 x whatever continuously, then all you have to do is sync the shutter trigger with every third frame retrace signal and you've pulled down every third frame of the movie. So, three trips through, and you've got a high-quality jpeg of every frame. Unfortunately all the timing data I can find is for dSLR's using ~10 megapixel images, but my three-year-old $200 camera using a slow card can do 4fps continuous at its 2000 x 1500 resolution... so a modern SLR set on the lowest resolution might be able to manage it.
This sounds like a pain, but so is soldering chips and whatnot. The point, as everyone knows, is that if one guy with $1000 of equipment can spend ten hours and pull a decent copy of the movie out of the analog hole, video DRM is dead.
The analog hole is sort of the death knell of audio DRM -- sound is easy to record. How long before video succumbs also?
Advertising, fundamentally, is an economic parasite. Advertisers produce nothing of value, and add no value to the products they advertise; any economic model that relies on excessive advertising (more than "I have this product for sale if you are interested", which *does* provide value) is essentially wasteful.
This leaves open the question of how Slashdot et al. will get compensated for their bandwidth, but having to find a way for Slashdot to get paid is a better outcome than having an entire section of the economy doing nothing productive.
Slashdot Mirror
Would applying a lighter flame to a Li-Ion battery, say one of those 16-cell monsters that power Alienware laptops, cause it to enter thermal runaway and release enough heat to start a huge fire / melt through a window?
Then someone should do that interview, and show everyone what a weasel he is.
By not going out of our way to piss off the suicidal-maniac portion of the world's population for no good reason, perhaps?
If you want to keep roaches out of your house, you can use as much insecticide as you want, but if you keep leaving old pizza lying around, it's a losing proposition.
Oddly enough, it's cheapo airlines like JetBlue and Southwest that have the BEST service, and the big names like Delta that have completely craptastic service.
Maybe, maybe not. If she does anything worth bashing, then no doubt we will see the stories. All politicians aren't created equal: some are shittier than others, and Bush is one of the bad ones. I think you mistake "bias in favor of common sense" for "liberal bias"; anyone who consistently does stupid shit with my country will draw criticism, no matter their party.
I imagine the school IT department itself doesn't much care about filesharing, if they've got the bandwidth to soak it up; if they don't, they can go after students for excessive transfer no matter what they're doing.
Besides, is there a comprehensive list anywhere of the Tor entry points? Couldn't some students at a sympathetic university simply set up their own entry nodes and not publicize them except to the UK students?
Either way, Tor forces them to play a very expensive and difficult game of whack-a-mole. What's next, banning encrypted communications out of the dorms?
I wouldn't be surprised if signs saying only "tor.eff.org" start appearing around campus...
Kind of ironic seeing that while visiting family in Alabama. AL has a constitution that's 2.5 times longer than the federal one, with around 900 amendments... ... and is corrupt as shit.
If the majority of the Republican Party is "Republicans in name only", then perhaps we should define them as "mainstream Republicans" and classify the few honest ones as "Republicans in name only"?
Y'know, despite your trolling, you've really summed up the political discourse of the American right better than anyone else could have.
"Your a liberal!!111oneone!11" is really all the Republicans are capable of saying.
There's also an inverse correlation between education and conservatism, though.
It's not supposed to work.
The goal of military R&D, remember, isn't to make shit that works. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't, but that's just a side effect.
The main goal is to generate highly profitable contracts for the contractors.
This site looks easier to use and more feature-rich than photobucket, picasaweb, etc.
So I'll use it.
Sharing a computer with pr0n won't make pictures of sunsets ashamed...
The US also has ten times the population available to count ballots.
*That* isn't right either.
"There is no cow level" was a cheat code in Starcraft.
The code to unlock the cow level in D2 was transmuting Wirt's Leg with a Tome of Town Portal.
Panasonic makes a lot of cameras under their Lumix brand. All of them use conventional glass lenses. Panasonic cameras, especially the FZ series and the L-1, are known for having high-quality lenses, but they don't involve any magic.
What you may be thinking of is optical image stabilization, a movable element in the lens that shifts to compensate for jitter, reducing the need for a tripod. All Lumix cameras incorporate this.
Huntsville, Alabama, 2004.
Classical music public radio stations are supposed to be bastions of sanity and concern for quality, right?
Well, the choir I'm in collaborated with another choir and the local symphony orchestra to put on Carmina Burana. So we did -- great show and such. The recording was broadcast by the local public radio station the next day. I recorded it off the air (with decent equipment that isn't the culprit), since the symphony wasn't going to make their recording available to the singers (something about union rules).
Carmina starts (and ends) with the piece "O Fortuna" -- you've probably heard it. Theme song to Excalibur, used and spoofed in tons of advertisements, etc. There is a short (~15 second) ridiculously loud introduction, about a minute of very quiet music, thirty seconds of loud, and then forty seconds of extreme loud -- if you know the piece you know what I mean. All the dynamic changes are sudden. It's the poster child for dynamic range, and the effect is wonderful.
I get the recording, and the quiet bit is just as loud as the rest. WTF? I pull the waveform on Audacity -- flat.
Aargh!
Then I started listening, and you can hear it all over the place in much of their music. Peak limiters and such kick in to reduce the level whenever there is a high-amplitude sound... so you can actually hear the rest of the orchestra suddenly get softer when the bass drum goes off. The bass drum isn't that *loud*, thanks to the response curves of human ears and the frequency-power connection, but it is high-amplitude and triggers the peak limiter like nobody's business. (Orchestral bass drums have a very, very deep sound.)
It's ridiculous.
I'm in the same boat. Fortunately the sorts of music I like to listen to most are all performed acoustically, so live concerts by definition aren't all screwed up.
... it's awful.
But the amplified concerts I've been to? Terrible. Not only is there horrible harmonic distortion, but they seem to use a mustache EQ: -5dB or so at 50 Hz, +5dB at 120 Hz, -5 dB at 500 Hz, +15 dB or something insane at 2-5 kHz (grating as hell, and sounds the loudest -- look at response curves for ears), a boost in low treble, a cut in high treble
Worse are cell phones. You have to turn those bastards up to the point where they'll deafen you with the 2-3 kHz part of the signal in order to get enough of the higher part of the signal to understand consonant sounds. If anyone would stop putting cameras and shit I don't care about on phones and put in an EQ and possibly customizable DSP, I'd buy their phones in a heartbeat.
Keep in mind that the purpose of military R&D isn't to develop working products; it's to get funding to continue work. This is especially true for the pseudoprivate military contractors like Boeing and Raytheon, but also partly true for groups like Spawar... who tend to be less greedy but also less concerned with actually making something that works. Military R&D labs and contractors don't manufacture products; they manufacture grants.
... but they kept at it, because they were getting paid to do it by people unconcerned with whether or not it *would* work.
Saying "They must be on to something, because they're still doing the research" isn't valid, because they're only still doing the research because they can get money for it.
I had an engineering professor who once worked on Reagan's Star Wars program. He admitted that everyone in his team knew for a fact, based on sound science, that what they were doing would never work
So, another DRM system devised with more complicated encryption, another DRM system cracked by even cleverer hardware hackers.
Yay.
I notice, however, that digital camcorder technology is quickly improving. How long will it be before a $1000 camcorder pointed at a television playing a HD-DVD will produce an image of decent quality? There will always be quality losses in analog transfer, but when those quality losses are no greater than those that you get from recompression to internet-friendly sizes, who cares?
Digital still cameras are also getting faster and more flexible with their timings. If a camera is capable of recording, say, 8-10fps at 1024 x whatever continuously, then all you have to do is sync the shutter trigger with every third frame retrace signal and you've pulled down every third frame of the movie. So, three trips through, and you've got a high-quality jpeg of every frame. Unfortunately all the timing data I can find is for dSLR's using ~10 megapixel images, but my three-year-old $200 camera using a slow card can do 4fps continuous at its 2000 x 1500 resolution... so a modern SLR set on the lowest resolution might be able to manage it.
This sounds like a pain, but so is soldering chips and whatnot. The point, as everyone knows, is that if one guy with $1000 of equipment can spend ten hours and pull a decent copy of the movie out of the analog hole, video DRM is dead.
The analog hole is sort of the death knell of audio DRM -- sound is easy to record. How long before video succumbs also?
I lost all respect for Greenpeace when they came out opposing nuclear power.
I specifically exempted that sort of advertising. Telling me that a product exists is useful; bombarding me with messages that I should buy it is not.
Advertising, fundamentally, is an economic parasite. Advertisers produce nothing of value, and add no value to the products they advertise; any economic model that relies on excessive advertising (more than "I have this product for sale if you are interested", which *does* provide value) is essentially wasteful.
This leaves open the question of how Slashdot et al. will get compensated for their bandwidth, but having to find a way for Slashdot to get paid is a better outcome than having an entire section of the economy doing nothing productive.
NYC: under 3000 dead on 9/11
Iraq: over 3000 Americans and 60000 (conservative estimate) Iraqis dead