It's trespass on the bot computers. As soon as they're used to send email claiming to be from elsewhere, that's fraud. Stealing a checkbook is simple theft, writing checks with it is fraud.
Actually it's those representatives you're suggesting everyone write to who are the ones making non-CARB approved mods illegal. They're the ones writing the legislation.
If ARB operates more efficiently, surely they'll be able to put mods through the approval process faster?
No, IBM handed it to them, by your own admission. They leveraged it from there. (The backstab to IBM they did with the OS/2 bait'n'switch helped establish the Office monopoly.)
There's no need for a central speaker if the imaging is sufficient on the speakers you have.
That's just not the case, unless your amp can somehow compensate for the lack of a center speaker. Most movies/TV etc concentrate the dialog in the center channel, so that it sounds like it's coming from the screen and so that you can focus on it despite high sound level from the other channels (music track, effects, etc).
If your system expects 5 (.1) speakers and you disconnect or turn off the center speaker, dialog will sound muddy or almost inaudible in many cases. The quality of the speakers has nothing to do with it, it's the fact that the sound engineers concentrated the dialog in that center speaker channel.
(I know -- I route the center speaker through my old NEC NTSC monitor's speakers, with the L and R channels throught the high quality speakers from my old stereo system. With the volume on the monitor down, dialog is frequently almost incomprehensible on 5.1 source material.)
You're right about the.1 being redundant -- the stereo speakers have enough bass response to shake the furniture themselves.
We don't actually use echoes for sound localization.
Yeah we do. It's called the shoulder cue. More for up/down localization as the ear compares the direct signal with the one that bounced off the nearby shoulder. (There's also filtering because of the shoulder, but echo is certainly part of it.)
There are also pinna cues, but these are more filtering effects rather than echoing. This is for front/back localization (sounds from the rear have the higher frequencies filtered more as they pass through the external ear flap (pinna), and filtered differently depending on direction.
This stuff has been known for about 30 years.
The two processes you mention are used for left/right localization, but that's only one dimension -- we live in three.
Hmm. Just out of curiosity, anyone happen to know if the massive rewrite of Traveller happened because of a (threatened) lawsuit? Many of the original concepts, technology, etc was pretty blatantly borrowed from E.C. Tubb's "Earl Dumarest" series. (A point in its favor, was my opinion at the time.) Plenty of other obvious SF influences in there too, but a lot of the stuff I'd only seen in Tubb's work.
Not many widescreen computer monitors out there, so I was comparing vertical resolution. 1200 > 1080.
However, the widescreen equivalent of UXGA, WUXGA, is the full 1920 wide (by 1200 high, so a 1920x1080 HDTV image will be letterboxed).
If you're only displaying at 24fps you don't have the bandwidth concern that you do at a higher framerate, so again, analog is tolerable. (Computer monitors are hardly ever used in interlace mode, so a 60 or 75 Hz refresh rate is uninterlaced frames, not fields, per second. Convert everything to pixels-per-second for real comparison.)
In general TVs, even HDTVs, have lousier frequency response than monitors because they just don't need it.
Shrug. If you think analog cables aren't good enough for your video, that's fine. Some people think gold-plated monster cables using oxygen-free copper conductors make a difference to the audio, too. Whatever floats your boat.
Realistcally, when I'm streaming a 1080p signal to my HDTV coming from a digital source... it would be -crazy- to use anything other than the HDMI (high definition multimedia interface) cables that this article is referencing.
Realistically, that's nonsense. 1080p is lower resolution than many computer monitors (UXGA, 1600x1200) and about the same as most (SXGA, 1280x1024), and the analog interfaces work just fine for those.
It's not until you start getting into something like Apple's WQXGA (2560x1600) where you really need digital (Apple uses dual-DVI). Beyond that (eg HXGA, 4096x3072) the displays don't exist yet -- and commercial consumer media at that rez isn't even on the horizon.
The rules seem to suggest unmanned but don't prohibit manned. Of course if the person aboard is piloting the thing, then he counts as part of the weight of the control system and not the 25kg (minimum) payload.
It's a piece of cake (well, relatively) with rockets if you're not using solids.
The old Bell rocketpack (as seen in the opening sequence of "Thunderball", among many others) is one such, using a hydrogen peroxide monopropellant and two nozzles. All guidance and control provided by the pilot.
The more recent DC-X, using LH2/LOX in four modified RL-10 engines (modified mostly to operate at sea level by cutting back the engine bells) did this just fine. As of course did the Apollo LM descent module, using hypergolic propellants and a deeply throttlable engine.
The SDI project tested some interceptors (Brilliant Pebbles) not much bigger than a breadbox -- I've seen video footage of one such hovering (indoors!) on its attitude jets while pivoting to track a target.
It's not the bundling that's illegal, is the use of a monopoly in one market (the desktop) to create a new monopoly in another market (audio and video formats).
And just in case anyone wants to try to argue that audio/video formats aren't a different market because it's all on the desktop anyway, I would point you to a number of disc players (like DVD players but they play more than just DVD Video) that include Windows Media Player and support discs that include HD WMV video files (and the DRM that goes with it).
Microsoft is trying to get itself in the position where e.g. Macrovision is, where it's software is installed (and paid for) on all consumer disc players and where the movie studios pay a license fee to use WMV.
Imagine if IBM, rather than extending their PC line with new chips and architecture that was backward compatible, simply dumped everything they'd built and started over.
Oh, they'd never have done that. *cough* PS/2 *cough* Microchannel *cough*.
Because the first prototypes of nuclear power plants were in the mid 30's.
You misspelled "50's".
The first nuclear reactor (called a "pile" then) ever went critical in December of 1942 at the University of Chicago. The first practical use of nuclear electrical power was Arco, Idaho in 1955 in the US, and about 1961 in Canada. The mid-60s CANDU designs are pretty safe.
I imagine an ice age will cause a lot more, and faster, deaths than will a few increased cancers from plutonium.
Heck, plutonium is mostly harmless anyway, as long as you don't inhale a powdered form. (Botulism is far worse, and people voluntarily have that toxin (botox) injected for cosmetic reasons.) It's an alpha emitter, and the metal keeps itself mildly warm. Heck, I've often wanted a plutonium disk built into the base of my coffee cup to keep my coffee warm....
Or rather, what was left of the project -- two nuclear reactors (one designed to be airborne), an airfield, and a bunch of photographs and drawings. Near a decommissioned nuclear power plant/research facility out in the middle of nowhere, Idaho.
President Kennedy killed the project. It was basically a nuclear jet, heating intake air to high temperatures with the reactor and jetting it out the back. I suspect lack of crashworthiness might have been one of the factors in cancelling it, that an the perfection of air-to-air refueling (unlimited range was one of the attractions).
There are probably still a few nuclear bomb craters in New Mexico and, yes, Nevada where it could be dumped and covered up.
Or, as I mentioned earlier, down old uranium mines. Can't be much worse than what they took out of there in the first place, and the energy content has to be less.
For use in the most common reactors you need to have a 5:95 mix of uranium-235:uranium-238 , but uranium ore is only 1% U-235, and the rest is U-238.
True for plain water reactors (most common outside of Canada and a few other places). The Canadian Deuterium Uranium (CANDU) reactor uses a heavy water moderator that will let it burn unenriched uranium. The tradeoff is that the lower temperature of a CANDU means slightly less thermal efficiency, but you don't have to worry about enriching the uranium (energy intensive) in the first place. You can harvest plutonium from the "spent" fuel rods.
The rest of the uranium-238 is depleted uranium waste; it's not pleasant stuff
It's not that bad -- sure it's toxic like any heavy metal but it's only mildly radioactive. The stuff is used as counterweights for control surfaces of large aircraft (lead is used on small aircraft). It's also used in armor-piercing ammunition, where it is nasty, because the impact tends to break the bullet into small pieces which burn easily and leaves uranium oxide all over the place.
But yes, using various breeder reactor cycles the energy supply is pretty unlimited. The biggest argument against same hasn't been so much the waste issue, but the nuclear proliferation issue. Given the state of the world, I'm not sure that that's really a valid argument anymore. (Sure, it's a concern, but that genie is already out of the bottle -- and sending tons of money to unstable regimes because of their hydrocarbon reserves isn't helping either.)
Slashdot Mirror
"... you evolved from an ape," Buttars said ... "I didn't."
I don't the apes would want to claim Buttars as a descendant, either.
Well, taking Buttars at his word, I think he's claiming to be a sibling.
It's trespass on the bot computers. As soon as they're used to send email claiming to be from elsewhere, that's fraud. Stealing a checkbook is simple theft, writing checks with it is fraud.
Actually it's those representatives you're suggesting everyone write to who are the ones making non-CARB approved mods illegal. They're the ones writing the legislation.
If ARB operates more efficiently, surely they'll be able to put mods through the approval process faster?
Microsoft also earned their market share.
No, IBM handed it to them, by your own admission. They leveraged it from there. (The backstab to IBM they did with the OS/2 bait'n'switch helped establish the Office monopoly.)
No sane person would do that.
Be fair. He was talking about Steve Jobs.
There's no need for a central speaker if the imaging is sufficient on the speakers you have.
.1 being redundant -- the stereo speakers have enough bass response to shake the furniture themselves.
That's just not the case, unless your amp can somehow compensate for the lack of a center speaker. Most movies/TV etc concentrate the dialog in the center channel, so that it sounds like it's coming from the screen and so that you can focus on it despite high sound level from the other channels (music track, effects, etc).
If your system expects 5 (.1) speakers and you disconnect or turn off the center speaker, dialog will sound muddy or almost inaudible in many cases. The quality of the speakers has nothing to do with it, it's the fact that the sound engineers concentrated the dialog in that center speaker channel.
(I know -- I route the center speaker through my old NEC NTSC monitor's speakers, with the L and R channels throught the high quality speakers from my old stereo system. With the volume on the monitor down, dialog is frequently almost incomprehensible on 5.1 source material.)
You're right about the
We don't actually use echoes for sound localization.
Yeah we do. It's called the shoulder cue. More for up/down localization as the ear compares the direct signal with the one that bounced off the nearby shoulder. (There's also filtering because of the shoulder, but echo is certainly part of it.)
There are also pinna cues, but these are more filtering effects rather than echoing. This is for front/back localization (sounds from the rear have the higher frequencies filtered more as they pass through the external ear flap (pinna), and filtered differently depending on direction.
This stuff has been known for about 30 years.
The two processes you mention are used for left/right localization, but that's only one dimension -- we live in three.
Heck, that summary could about describe Mary Stewart's "The Crystal Cave" (about the young Merlin, of Arthurian legend), published circa 1970.
Among numerous others.
Hmm. Just out of curiosity, anyone happen to know if the massive rewrite of Traveller happened because of a (threatened) lawsuit? Many of the original concepts, technology, etc was pretty blatantly borrowed from E.C. Tubb's "Earl Dumarest" series. (A point in its favor, was my opinion at the time.) Plenty of other obvious SF influences in there too, but a lot of the stuff I'd only seen in Tubb's work.
Not many widescreen computer monitors out there, so I was comparing vertical resolution. 1200 > 1080.
However, the widescreen equivalent of UXGA, WUXGA, is the full 1920 wide (by 1200 high, so a 1920x1080 HDTV image will be letterboxed).
If you're only displaying at 24fps you don't have the bandwidth concern that you do at a higher framerate, so again, analog is tolerable. (Computer monitors are hardly ever used in interlace mode, so a 60 or 75 Hz refresh rate is uninterlaced frames, not fields, per second. Convert everything to pixels-per-second for real comparison.)
In general TVs, even HDTVs, have lousier frequency response than monitors because they just don't need it.
Shrug. If you think analog cables aren't good enough for your video, that's fine. Some people think gold-plated monster cables using oxygen-free copper conductors make a difference to the audio, too. Whatever floats your boat.
Realistcally, when I'm streaming a 1080p signal to my HDTV coming from a digital source ... it would be -crazy- to use anything other than the HDMI (high definition multimedia interface) cables that this article is referencing.
Realistically, that's nonsense. 1080p is lower resolution than many computer monitors (UXGA, 1600x1200) and about the same as most (SXGA, 1280x1024), and the analog interfaces work just fine for those.
It's not until you start getting into something like Apple's WQXGA (2560x1600) where you really need digital (Apple uses dual-DVI). Beyond that (eg HXGA, 4096x3072) the displays don't exist yet -- and commercial consumer media at that rez isn't even on the horizon.
The rules seem to suggest unmanned but don't prohibit manned. Of course if the person aboard is piloting the thing, then he counts as part of the weight of the control system and not the 25kg (minimum) payload.
Alas, the Bell rocket belt only had a flight duration time of about 20-25 seconds. It would need to extend that quite a bit.
(I had the fortune to see somebody fly one of these, live. At the noise level it operates, 20 seconds is plenty. Videos don't do it justice.)
It's a piece of cake (well, relatively) with rockets if you're not using solids.
The old Bell rocketpack (as seen in the opening sequence of "Thunderball", among many others) is one such, using a hydrogen peroxide monopropellant and two nozzles. All guidance and control provided by the pilot.
The more recent DC-X, using LH2/LOX in four modified RL-10 engines (modified mostly to operate at sea level by cutting back the engine bells) did this just fine. As of course did the Apollo LM descent module, using hypergolic propellants and a deeply throttlable engine.
The SDI project tested some interceptors (Brilliant Pebbles) not much bigger than a breadbox -- I've seen video footage of one such hovering (indoors!) on its attitude jets while pivoting to track a target.
But yeah, solids suck.
It's not the bundling that's illegal, is the use of a monopoly in one market (the desktop) to create a new monopoly in another market (audio and video formats).
And just in case anyone wants to try to argue that audio/video formats aren't a different market because it's all on the desktop anyway, I would point you to a number of disc players (like DVD players but they play more than just DVD Video) that include Windows Media Player and support discs that include HD WMV video files (and the DRM that goes with it).
Microsoft is trying to get itself in the position where e.g. Macrovision is, where it's software is installed (and paid for) on all consumer disc players and where the movie studios pay a license fee to use WMV.
Imagine if IBM, rather than extending their PC line with new chips and architecture that was backward compatible, simply dumped everything they'd built and started over.
Oh, they'd never have done that. *cough* PS/2 *cough* Microchannel *cough*.
One way or another, it wouldn't have worked.
Hmm...
Levenshtein? There's no distance at all, Levenshtein is right next to Austria, between it and Switzerland.
Oh, wait...
Fair point.
;-)
On the bright side, if/when we ever bring D-D (or D-T, or D-anything) fusion online, we'll have all that fuel already refined.
Because the first prototypes of nuclear power plants were in the mid 30's.
You misspelled "50's".
The first nuclear reactor (called a "pile" then) ever went critical in December of 1942 at the University of Chicago. The first practical use of nuclear electrical power was Arco, Idaho in 1955 in the US, and about 1961 in Canada. The mid-60s CANDU designs are pretty safe.
I imagine an ice age will cause a lot more, and faster, deaths than will a few increased cancers from plutonium.
Heck, plutonium is mostly harmless anyway, as long as you don't inhale a powdered form. (Botulism is far worse, and people voluntarily have that toxin (botox) injected for cosmetic reasons.) It's an alpha emitter, and the metal keeps itself mildly warm. Heck, I've often wanted a plutonium disk built into the base of my coffee cup to keep my coffee warm....
No problem. Micrococcus radiodurans (aka Deinococcus radiodurans ) has no problem with radition, it'll even live in reactor water.
I've seen a nuclear aircraft.
Or rather, what was left of the project -- two nuclear reactors (one designed to be airborne), an airfield, and a bunch of photographs and drawings. Near a decommissioned nuclear power plant/research facility out in the middle of nowhere, Idaho.
President Kennedy killed the project. It was basically a nuclear jet, heating intake air to high temperatures with the reactor and jetting it out the back. I suspect lack of crashworthiness might have been one of the factors in cancelling it, that an the perfection of air-to-air refueling (unlimited range was one of the attractions).
There are probably still a few nuclear bomb craters in New Mexico and, yes, Nevada where it could be dumped and covered up.
Or, as I mentioned earlier, down old uranium mines. Can't be much worse than what they took out of there in the first place, and the energy content has to be less.
For use in the most common reactors you need to have a 5:95 mix of uranium-235:uranium-238 , but uranium ore is only 1% U-235, and the rest is U-238.
True for plain water reactors (most common outside of Canada and a few other places). The Canadian Deuterium Uranium (CANDU) reactor uses a heavy water moderator that will let it burn unenriched uranium. The tradeoff is that the lower temperature of a CANDU means slightly less thermal efficiency, but you don't have to worry about enriching the uranium (energy intensive) in the first place. You can harvest plutonium from the "spent" fuel rods.
The rest of the uranium-238 is depleted uranium waste; it's not pleasant stuff
It's not that bad -- sure it's toxic like any heavy metal but it's only mildly radioactive. The stuff is used as counterweights for control surfaces of large aircraft (lead is used on small aircraft). It's also used in armor-piercing ammunition, where it is nasty, because the impact tends to break the bullet into small pieces which burn easily and leaves uranium oxide all over the place.
But yes, using various breeder reactor cycles the energy supply is pretty unlimited. The biggest argument against same hasn't been so much the waste issue, but the nuclear proliferation issue. Given the state of the world, I'm not sure that that's really a valid argument anymore. (Sure, it's a concern, but that genie is already out of the bottle -- and sending tons of money to unstable regimes because of their hydrocarbon reserves isn't helping either.)
So what do we plan to do with these things again?
How about we mix them with dirt, or say, mine tailings, and dump them down oh, say, an old uranium mine?