Yeah, I know about jitter. I'm right in the middle of the design of a Gbps+ transmission system. Keep in mind, though, that we're not talking about Gbps here, we're talking about Mbps. It's digital audio. The data stream simply isn't that fast (6 MHz, or 163 ns clock rate), and any home audio D/A that doesn't reclock the input data to get rid of jitter can be considered poorly-designed.
I like your rule of thumb. It can be supported well with some calculations, if needed. Works fine. I submit that my coathanger statement is an extension of that rule of thumb - the roundtrip time of a 1 meter interconnect is less than the risetime of a S/DIF signal, and less than the jitter allowed by the AES/EBU spec. At lengths like that, the terminations don't really matter. Sure, you can get analog distortion of the digital signal, but it won't be enough to prevent accurate decoding.
The point of controlled-impedance coax is that it acts as a transmission line, and the signal won't be rolled off via capacitive filtering; it'll get smeared due to the varying propagation speeds at differing frequencies. (All Hail Fourier!) This takes considerably more than 1 meter, or even 10 meters for a reasonably well-matched system. There will be some loss of signal level - Belden 8212, e.g., will lose ~1.5 dB from a 10 MHz signal over 50 meters. No big deal.
At any rate, you and I are agreed - nothing more than a $3 Radio Shack coax is needed for home digital transmission.
If I were a real bastard, I'd start selling Teflon-coated coathangers with BNC's on 'em to audiophools, telling them that this eliminates capacitive rolloff and reduces inductance. Bet I could make a mint.
Inductive charging systems are considerably more than 3% efficient. It's nothing but a transformer with no magnetic core and somewhat less coupling than usual. Depending on the physical layout of the charging and receiving coils, energy transfer efficiency can easily be greater than 90%, and the least little tiny bit of intelligence on the part of the charger will have it shut down the charging coil when not needed...
If systems that used magnetic induction between two coils for energy transfer were so inefficient, we wouldn't use these things called transformers EVERYWHERE. In fact, that was the whole point of Tesla's preference for AC power...
I'm sorry; did you just say that "$1,200.00 is not that much for a high quality digital cable"?
Did you mean that to imply that there is some set of conditions, liable to be encountered in a home audiophile environment, under which there is ANY justification at all for a $1200 digital interconnect? That there is any way in which that cable will actually outperform a $2.99 Radio Shack coax cable?
Because, being the great exposer of snake oil that you are, I'm sure you're aware that the only way a DIGITAL interconnect will negatively affect the signal transmission is if it is seriously fucked-up BROKEN. No competently-designed piece of audio gear will have any trouble accurately and errorlessly decoding a digital signal passed over, say, a straightened-out wire coathanger, much less a decent piece of coax. The most you will need to spend on a piece of coaxial digital interconnect, for audio usage, is about $5. Anything more than that is marketing. Gold-plated connectors, oxygen-free copper, pure silver litz wire - none of that is necessary.
You must have meant that that particular purveyor of patent nostrums isn't asking more than other such fleecers of the unwary ask for such things. You couldn't possibly have meant that $1200 for a digital interconnect was justified.
I started trying to use OpenDX, and immediately found that it wouldn't import 16-bit grayscale images. If you know of a way to get around that, I'd be interested in hearing about it. Otherwise, it's useless to me.
I can do raw LaTeX, have done so. However, I find that most of what I need to do is easier in LyX. If I need to do raw LaTeX, I simply open an ERT (Evil Red Text) box with CTRL-I and put in whatever I want. Subfigures, e.g., are more easily formatted with ERT than using the built-in routines. However, inserting a citation is as easy as hitting Alt-I,C and selecting it from a list. I don't have to remember the tag I gave that citation, which I really appreciate when I'm writing a 187-page thesis and citing different 6 papers from the same guys (Was it Wang1999c or Wang1999d?). And, since LyX will happily output pure TeX, it's as portable as you want it.
There are times when using a GUI is faster and easier, and my experience has been that LyX is one of them. You may operate better command-line only - that's cool. I suspect that if you spent an hour with LyX, you find yourself wondering why you ever thought it was more efficient to run LaTeX three times and then run a DVI viewer, all from the command line, than it is to simply press CTRL-D once. Another advantage that I find is that you can see the formatting in LyX as you type it - not WYSIWYG, no, byt WYSIWYMeant - which is insanely useful for things like equations, tables, etc. I don't have to worry about whether I got a typo in \uespackage{babel_touched_my_junk_liberally} or not. Oops - I did. Now I have to find it and recompile. Damn.
The reason to have a GUI to insulate me from what I'm really doing is that the GUI accelerates what I'm doing. I don't have to know assembler to program in C, and I don't have to know the current equation for a MOSFET in saturation in order to use a 7404 hex inverter. More to the point, I don't have to find the W/L ratios of the P and N transistors in order to figure out the number of gates I can drive with it - even though that's what I'm really doing.
For that matter, why learn LaTeX when I've already got a perfectly good typewriter? Oh, yeah - because it's easier and more flexible, making me more productive. And LyX is easier still, but just as flexible. That makes it more powerful for me. YMMV.
However, I just pointed out that hydrogen is hard to store and transport.
Personally, I think that improved battery technology and a serious commitment to fusion is the best way to improve our personal transport energy issues.
Until then, though, gasoline and diesel have the unfortunate advantages of being cheap*, energy-rich, and relatively stable at room temp.
*At least around here, a gallon of gasoline is about 2/3 the cost of a gallon of milk. And there are some idiots paying more for a point of water (Penta? Please!) than for a gallon of gas. Even in Europe, gasoline is cheap *considering what it does*.
Engineers need spreadsheets to draw graphs? Custodial engineers, maybe. REAL engineers use things like MATLAB, MathCAD, etc. to draw graphs. If Excel lets you graph on log-log and semi-log scales, I haven't been able to find it - and, for that reason, I haven't tried to find it in a while. Got better things to do with my time than twist a spreadsheet into being an engineering application. REAL engineers don't predict the demise of any competitors, that's what marketing pricks do.
Besides which, NOTHING about OpenOffice or MS Orifice requires ECC or a workstation.
When it comes to engineering documents, a combination of LyX, XCircuit or XFig, and MATLAB beats the shit out of Excel and Word any day of the week. I think I'd quit my job before I tried to write a real, equation-heavy engineering document in Word. LyX just has a better EQ editor hands down. And there's a native OSX version of LyX.
What's needed to establish Macintosh as "the premiere engineering workstation" platform is ENGINEERING APPLICATIONS. PSpice, MathCAD, a decent version of MATLAB, various FEA packages, etc. Vendor support in the form of OSX-native tools (Altera, Microchip, are you listening?). Obviously I'm EE-biased here (being an EE), but I'm sure that the ME, ChE, and CE guys can provide a similar wishlist. How about an OSX version of Autocad? THAT would sell some Dual G5 boxen.
Processor architecture is really irrelevant here. It's the OS that matters. Autodesk, say, can easily recompile a Unix version of Autocad to run on SPARC, AMD64, Xeon, P4, MIPS, or PowerPC once they develop the Unix version . Now, it may not be completely straightforward to turn that into a native Aqua version, but it's gotta be easier than converting the Windows version to Aqua.
Actually, I think I recall that containing H2 IS a lot harder than containing natural gas. Something about the fact that a pair of H's is a lot smaller than a few H's hanging off of some C's, and thus the H2's tend to migrate through the container walls. H2 also has to be pretty cold to get liquified, IIRC.
However, I'm an EE not a ChemE. I could be mistaken.
I understand what a GPS is - don't be an asshole. Nonetheless, this IS surveillance without a warrant or court order.
Knowing the location of someone's house at all times is a trivial comparison - houses don't move. However, monitoring my car with a surveillance device in order to determine the location of the car is a thinly-veiled way of using a surveillance device to monitor MY location at all times, and without a court order this is not acceptable - at least, I would say that it's not in keeping with the spirit of the Amendment quoted by grandparent or with other court decisions in this area (besides the one under discussion).
There has to be a line drawn somewhere. If the police feel strongly enough about needing to know my location that they assign an officer to follow me, that's fine as long as they don't trespass in order to do it. This decision, though, leaves the door open to performing GPS location monitoring on everyone, and knowing my position at all times is NOT needed for either state or local governments. If they need to know, they can damned well ask a judge to let them monitor.
Regardless of whether it's in public or not, it's still MY car, and the police have no moral right to tamper with it. Then again, the correspondence between "moral" and "legal" is often random...
"Whereabouts of vehicles, wherein the vehicles are registered to the government, the privilege of driving said vehicles is granted by government, and in a country in which the vehicles are driven on roads built by the government and maintained by the government. "
So?
My house is registered with the government. The privilege of living in and owning said house is subject to governmental permission (try refusing to pay your property tax). The roads to my house are paid for by the government (with my taxes, I'd like to add) - I can't get to my house without using government roads or trespassing on someone else's private property. Apparently, by your logic, the government has the right to plant surveillance devices in my home without a court order or warrant.
I believe that your logic misses a few connections. It's not enough to say that there are differences between a car and a house. You must establish how those differences matter. You need to establish that surveillance of me, in my automobile, is somehow NOT "unreasonable searches and seizures" of my person. Noting that cars are licensed by the government (state gov't, not federal) does not ineluctable lead to the conclusion that no warrant is needed for surveillance devices attached to cars.
Stating that the GPS isn't IN the car is irrelevant; neither a contact microphone on the outside of a window nor a wiretap on my telephone (done at the junction box, e.g.) are inside my house as such; nonetheless, those are surveillance methods which require warrants. In or Out of the car, doesn't matter. But if you get a court order, that's a different story.
"One of these things is not like the other. One of these things does not belong." I'd like to see you use that sort of argument before, say, the SCOTUS. Oh, and might I point out that neither GPS nor automobiles were part of 18th-century American culture? It's hard to imagine that the authors of said Amendments left out GPS surveillance of cars intentionally, you know? I think, frankly, that the word "unreasonable" is important here, not the fact that the words "Mercedes-Benz" are absent.
Look who's talking, Mr. AC. At least I have the balls to post under my own own name.
And, yet again, you miss the point. Doesn't matter whether a 60" RP unit uses CRTs, DLPs, LCDs, FEDs, or a bunch of really fucking fast gnomes with flashlights. When the topic of discussion is the fact that no one makes a 60" CRT, talking about the fact that a RP TV can and often does use three 7" CRTs is as relevant as my pointing out that a standalone BARCO 1101 projector uses 9" CRTs. A 60" RP TV doesn't have a 60" CRT. That's the point. The whole point.
You might want to check some wiki or similar reference - they used to make these things in book form called dictionaries - and look up "sarcasm". When I said, "And here I thought that the 60" models were always some sort of projection thing," that was sarcasm. The feigned ignorance was a subtle (apparently too subtle) way of mocking the parent poster's clear ignorance. Admittedly, sarcasm is harder to pull off in print than in spoken conversation, but you might want to try it yourself. It'll come in handy when you get out of mommy's basement.
1. I haven't seen anyone deny that RP used CRTs. I did, however, myself point out that a 60" RP TV doesn't use a 60" CRT. Since the entire discussion centers around some dipshit three levels or so up who, when asked to point to a 60" CRT, replied:
"Here you go: big-screen television."
then the fact that a 60" RP TV might have three 7" CRTs is totally irrelevant, whether factually correct or not. We're looking for 60" CRTs here, not 60" TVs that might have a CRT involved somewhere. Try to keep up.
2. I myself stated that some current RPs use CRTs. This is not a secret. It's not some piece of arcana that only AC's on Slashdot know. You're not going to get "+5, Informative" from that.
3. People who disagree with you are not necessarily assholes. AC's are more likely to be, though.
4. The BARCOs I used to work with (and on), before DLP and LCD made standalone CRT projectors obsolete, most certainly did have CRTs bigger than 7" - however, they were designed to produce 1100 lumens and to be bright when viewed on a 14'x10' screen. Not necessary for a 4'x3' screen.
Yes. *Some* RP TV's are CRT-based. The majority of current models are DLP- or LCD-based. Are those three CRTs 60"? Any of them?
No. They use optics to project the image from a 10" or so CRT onto a 60" screen. This is not the same as a 60" CRT. Therefore, discussion of a RP TV is totally irrelevant to the discussion of the size and weight of a 60" CRT.
Huh. And here I thought that the 60" models were always some sort of projection thing. I didn't think anybody made a Cathode Ray Tube television as large as 40".
Nice thing about those projection-style TV's is the lack of a heavy Cathode Ray Tube which is typically made of glass and really fscking heavy. I wonder how much that 60" Cathode Ray Tube television you're talking about weighs?
You know, oddly enough, I couldn't find a single Cathode Ray Tube television larger than 36" or 37" ? Your link doesn't seem to have a web address associated with it, 'cause my cursor don't turn into a little finger when I'm over it. Who'd you say makes that thing, again?
Huh. So, grandparent sets a dollar value on human life and suffering, says that rape is no big deal, gets modded "insightful" - but *I* get modded "troll"?
Let's try an experiment - why don't you write a remarkably successful game, sell several hundred thousand copies, have twice that many more pirated - and then get raped. Physically raped - in the ass, preferably. Bonus points for STDs or for permanent injury. Post back here and tell us which one deserves more punishment. Specific dollar amounts, please.
Allow me to point out that there ARE some lasers capable of emitting a red, a green, and a blue beam simultaneously. That is more properly termed an RGB laser, but I can see where the distinction might be irrelevant under certain circumstances.
If its output is white, it's not a laser. Lasers are monochromatic (or very nearly) and coherent. White light is by definition not monochromatic.
White LEDs, FYI, use a monochromatic (or nearly so) LED die and a phosphor similar to those in fluourescent lights to produce white light - the light from the LED itself isn't white.
Ack. Wrote one thing, typed another. That should be 1.25x10^7 kW-hr, not 4.5x10^7 kW-hr of electricity. That's only about 1.38 metric fuckloads of power.
Fusion. Nuclear Fusion. Conversion of matter to energy. It's even in the headline. Yes, he's talking about the potential nuclear energy.
He's talking about converting some small fraction of a collection of matter into energy, and then that energy helps convert MORE of that same matter into energy, thus making it a self-sustaining reaction.
In other words, instead of using a bunch of huge-assed lasers to initiate fusion in a glass pellet infused with deuterium and then collecting the resultant energy, you spank (in some unspecified manner, probably lasers) the hell out of a conglomeration of some isotope of hydrogen (suspended in a toroidal magnetic field) so that some of the hydrogen fuses into REALLY FUCKING HOT helium, which then helps to heat up more of the hydrogen, which then fuses into more REALLY FUCKING HOT helium, and so on until you run out of hydrogen. Along the way, you convert a small amount of that hot helium into cooler helium, and the heat is used to generate electricity in a steam turbine.
The ultimate net cost of this electricity is (as is referenced elsewhere; see my recent posting history) the electrolysis of a small amount of water into a small amount of hydrogen, which process requires a smaller amount of electricity than is being produced by the fusion. More energy out than in; no laws are broken. Why? Because we're converting "matter" into "energy".
We do lose some matter, though. By my back-of-the-envelope (literally!) calculations, completely converting the hydrogen in 1/2 gram of water will release energy equivalent to 4.5x10^7 kW-hr of electricity (which is the units we buy it in around here). How much of that we can actually capture and convert is another story, but grandparent poster suggests 40% - that's approximately 5 metric fuckloads of power. And we have a lot more water where that gram came from.
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Yeah, I know about jitter. I'm right in the middle of the design of a Gbps+ transmission system. Keep in mind, though, that we're not talking about Gbps here, we're talking about Mbps. It's digital audio. The data stream simply isn't that fast (6 MHz, or 163 ns clock rate), and any home audio D/A that doesn't reclock the input data to get rid of jitter can be considered poorly-designed.
I like your rule of thumb. It can be supported well with some calculations, if needed. Works fine. I submit that my coathanger statement is an extension of that rule of thumb - the roundtrip time of a 1 meter interconnect is less than the risetime of a S/DIF signal, and less than the jitter allowed by the AES/EBU spec. At lengths like that, the terminations don't really matter. Sure, you can get analog distortion of the digital signal, but it won't be enough to prevent accurate decoding.
The point of controlled-impedance coax is that it acts as a transmission line, and the signal won't be rolled off via capacitive filtering; it'll get smeared due to the varying propagation speeds at differing frequencies. (All Hail Fourier!) This takes considerably more than 1 meter, or even 10 meters for a reasonably well-matched system. There will be some loss of signal level - Belden 8212, e.g., will lose ~1.5 dB from a 10 MHz signal over 50 meters. No big deal.
At any rate, you and I are agreed - nothing more than a $3 Radio Shack coax is needed for home digital transmission.
If I were a real bastard, I'd start selling Teflon-coated coathangers with BNC's on 'em to audiophools, telling them that this eliminates capacitive rolloff and reduces inductance. Bet I could make a mint.
Inductive charging systems are considerably more than 3% efficient. It's nothing but a transformer with no magnetic core and somewhat less coupling than usual. Depending on the physical layout of the charging and receiving coils, energy transfer efficiency can easily be greater than 90%, and the least little tiny bit of intelligence on the part of the charger will have it shut down the charging coil when not needed...
If systems that used magnetic induction between two coils for energy transfer were so inefficient, we wouldn't use these things called transformers EVERYWHERE. In fact, that was the whole point of Tesla's preference for AC power...
I'm sorry; did you just say that "$1,200.00 is not that much for a high quality digital cable"?
Did you mean that to imply that there is some set of conditions, liable to be encountered in a home audiophile environment, under which there is ANY justification at all for a $1200 digital interconnect? That there is any way in which that cable will actually outperform a $2.99 Radio Shack coax cable?
Because, being the great exposer of snake oil that you are, I'm sure you're aware that the only way a DIGITAL interconnect will negatively affect the signal transmission is if it is seriously fucked-up BROKEN. No competently-designed piece of audio gear will have any trouble accurately and errorlessly decoding a digital signal passed over, say, a straightened-out wire coathanger, much less a decent piece of coax. The most you will need to spend on a piece of coaxial digital interconnect, for audio usage, is about $5. Anything more than that is marketing. Gold-plated connectors, oxygen-free copper, pure silver litz wire - none of that is necessary.
You must have meant that that particular purveyor of patent nostrums isn't asking more than other such fleecers of the unwary ask for such things. You couldn't possibly have meant that $1200 for a digital interconnect was justified.
Right?
Of course, for the same reasons, the Gimp is also useless to me. [shrug]
I started trying to use OpenDX, and immediately found that it wouldn't import 16-bit grayscale images. If you know of a way to get around that, I'd be interested in hearing about it. Otherwise, it's useless to me.
Well, no, but Yoda doesn't need a proofreader.
Methinks you might be remembering some other website.
I can do raw LaTeX, have done so. However, I find that most of what I need to do is easier in LyX. If I need to do raw LaTeX, I simply open an ERT (Evil Red Text) box with CTRL-I and put in whatever I want. Subfigures, e.g., are more easily formatted with ERT than using the built-in routines. However, inserting a citation is as easy as hitting Alt-I,C and selecting it from a list. I don't have to remember the tag I gave that citation, which I really appreciate when I'm writing a 187-page thesis and citing different 6 papers from the same guys (Was it Wang1999c or Wang1999d?). And, since LyX will happily output pure TeX, it's as portable as you want it.
There are times when using a GUI is faster and easier, and my experience has been that LyX is one of them. You may operate better command-line only - that's cool. I suspect that if you spent an hour with LyX, you find yourself wondering why you ever thought it was more efficient to run LaTeX three times and then run a DVI viewer, all from the command line, than it is to simply press CTRL-D once. Another advantage that I find is that you can see the formatting in LyX as you type it - not WYSIWYG, no, byt WYSIWYMeant - which is insanely useful for things like equations, tables, etc. I don't have to worry about whether I got a typo in \uespackage{babel_touched_my_junk_liberally} or not. Oops - I did. Now I have to find it and recompile. Damn.
The reason to have a GUI to insulate me from what I'm really doing is that the GUI accelerates what I'm doing. I don't have to know assembler to program in C, and I don't have to know the current equation for a MOSFET in saturation in order to use a 7404 hex inverter. More to the point, I don't have to find the W/L ratios of the P and N transistors in order to figure out the number of gates I can drive with it - even though that's what I'm really doing.
For that matter, why learn LaTeX when I've already got a perfectly good typewriter? Oh, yeah - because it's easier and more flexible, making me more productive. And LyX is easier still, but just as flexible. That makes it more powerful for me. YMMV.
Are you asking ME if it's worth it?
Hell, no. I don't think so.
However, I just pointed out that hydrogen is hard to store and transport.
Personally, I think that improved battery technology and a serious commitment to fusion is the best way to improve our personal transport energy issues.
Until then, though, gasoline and diesel have the unfortunate advantages of being cheap*, energy-rich, and relatively stable at room temp.
*At least around here, a gallon of gasoline is about 2/3 the cost of a gallon of milk. And there are some idiots paying more for a point of water (Penta? Please!) than for a gallon of gas. Even in Europe, gasoline is cheap *considering what it does*.
Engineers need spreadsheets to draw graphs? Custodial engineers, maybe. REAL engineers use things like MATLAB, MathCAD, etc. to draw graphs. If Excel lets you graph on log-log and semi-log scales, I haven't been able to find it - and, for that reason, I haven't tried to find it in a while. Got better things to do with my time than twist a spreadsheet into being an engineering application. REAL engineers don't predict the demise of any competitors, that's what marketing pricks do.
Besides which, NOTHING about OpenOffice or MS Orifice requires ECC or a workstation.
When it comes to engineering documents, a combination of LyX, XCircuit or XFig, and MATLAB beats the shit out of Excel and Word any day of the week. I think I'd quit my job before I tried to write a real, equation-heavy engineering document in Word. LyX just has a better EQ editor hands down. And there's a native OSX version of LyX.
What's needed to establish Macintosh as "the premiere engineering workstation" platform is ENGINEERING APPLICATIONS. PSpice, MathCAD, a decent version of MATLAB, various FEA packages, etc. Vendor support in the form of OSX-native tools (Altera, Microchip, are you listening?). Obviously I'm EE-biased here (being an EE), but I'm sure that the ME, ChE, and CE guys can provide a similar wishlist. How about an OSX version of Autocad? THAT would sell some Dual G5 boxen.
Processor architecture is really irrelevant here. It's the OS that matters. Autodesk, say, can easily recompile a Unix version of Autocad to run on SPARC, AMD64, Xeon, P4, MIPS, or PowerPC once they develop the Unix version . Now, it may not be completely straightforward to turn that into a native Aqua version, but it's gotta be easier than converting the Windows version to Aqua.
Actually, I think I recall that containing H2 IS a lot harder than containing natural gas. Something about the fact that a pair of H's is a lot smaller than a few H's hanging off of some C's, and thus the H2's tend to migrate through the container walls. H2 also has to be pretty cold to get liquified, IIRC.
However, I'm an EE not a ChemE. I could be mistaken.
I understand what a GPS is - don't be an asshole. Nonetheless, this IS surveillance without a warrant or court order.
Knowing the location of someone's house at all times is a trivial comparison - houses don't move. However, monitoring my car with a surveillance device in order to determine the location of the car is a thinly-veiled way of using a surveillance device to monitor MY location at all times, and without a court order this is not acceptable - at least, I would say that it's not in keeping with the spirit of the Amendment quoted by grandparent or with other court decisions in this area (besides the one under discussion).
There has to be a line drawn somewhere. If the police feel strongly enough about needing to know my location that they assign an officer to follow me, that's fine as long as they don't trespass in order to do it. This decision, though, leaves the door open to performing GPS location monitoring on everyone, and knowing my position at all times is NOT needed for either state or local governments. If they need to know, they can damned well ask a judge to let them monitor.
Regardless of whether it's in public or not, it's still MY car, and the police have no moral right to tamper with it. Then again, the correspondence between "moral" and "legal" is often random...
"Whereabouts of vehicles, wherein the vehicles are registered to the government, the privilege of driving said vehicles is granted by government, and in a country in which the vehicles are driven on roads built by the government and maintained by the government. "
So?
My house is registered with the government. The privilege of living in and owning said house is subject to governmental permission (try refusing to pay your property tax). The roads to my house are paid for by the government (with my taxes, I'd like to add) - I can't get to my house without using government roads or trespassing on someone else's private property. Apparently, by your logic, the government has the right to plant surveillance devices in my home without a court order or warrant.
I believe that your logic misses a few connections. It's not enough to say that there are differences between a car and a house. You must establish how those differences matter. You need to establish that surveillance of me, in my automobile, is somehow NOT "unreasonable searches and seizures" of my person. Noting that cars are licensed by the government (state gov't, not federal) does not ineluctable lead to the conclusion that no warrant is needed for surveillance devices attached to cars.
Stating that the GPS isn't IN the car is irrelevant; neither a contact microphone on the outside of a window nor a wiretap on my telephone (done at the junction box, e.g.) are inside my house as such; nonetheless, those are surveillance methods which require warrants. In or Out of the car, doesn't matter.
But if you get a court order, that's a different story.
"One of these things is not like the other. One of these things does not belong." I'd like to see you use that sort of argument before, say, the SCOTUS. Oh, and might I point out that neither GPS nor automobiles were part of 18th-century American culture? It's hard to imagine that the authors of said Amendments left out GPS surveillance of cars intentionally, you know? I think, frankly, that the word "unreasonable" is important here, not the fact that the words "Mercedes-Benz" are absent.
I'm a troll?
Look who's talking, Mr. AC. At least I have the balls to post under my own own name.
And, yet again, you miss the point. Doesn't matter whether a 60" RP unit uses CRTs, DLPs, LCDs, FEDs, or a bunch of really fucking fast gnomes with flashlights. When the topic of discussion is the fact that no one makes a 60" CRT, talking about the fact that a RP TV can and often does use three 7" CRTs is as relevant as my pointing out that a standalone BARCO 1101 projector uses 9" CRTs. A 60" RP TV doesn't have a 60" CRT. That's the point. The whole point.
You might want to check some wiki or similar reference - they used to make these things in book form called dictionaries - and look up "sarcasm". When I said, "And here I thought that the 60" models were always some sort of projection thing," that was sarcasm. The feigned ignorance was a subtle (apparently too subtle) way of mocking the parent poster's clear ignorance. Admittedly, sarcasm is harder to pull off in print than in spoken conversation, but you might want to try it yourself. It'll come in handy when you get out of mommy's basement.
HAND.
1. I haven't seen anyone deny that RP used CRTs. I did, however, myself point out that a 60" RP TV doesn't use a 60" CRT. Since the entire discussion centers around some dipshit three levels or so up who, when asked to point to a 60" CRT, replied:
"Here you go: big-screen television."
then the fact that a 60" RP TV might have three 7" CRTs is totally irrelevant, whether factually correct or not. We're looking for 60" CRTs here, not 60" TVs that might have a CRT involved somewhere. Try to keep up.
2. I myself stated that some current RPs use CRTs. This is not a secret. It's not some piece of arcana that only AC's on Slashdot know. You're not going to get "+5, Informative" from that.
3. People who disagree with you are not necessarily assholes. AC's are more likely to be, though.
4. The BARCOs I used to work with (and on), before DLP and LCD made standalone CRT projectors obsolete, most certainly did have CRTs bigger than 7" - however, they were designed to produce 1100 lumens and to be bright when viewed on a 14'x10' screen. Not necessary for a 4'x3' screen.
I just checked - 9" CRTs in the BarcoData 1101.
Going out on a limb, here - you're Catholic, right?
Yes. *Some* RP TV's are CRT-based. The majority of current models are DLP- or LCD-based. Are those three CRTs 60"? Any of them?
No. They use optics to project the image from a 10" or so CRT onto a 60" screen. This is not the same as a 60" CRT. Therefore, discussion of a RP TV is totally irrelevant to the discussion of the size and weight of a 60" CRT.
Can we move on now, please?
Huh. And here I thought that the 60" models were always some sort of projection thing. I didn't think anybody made a Cathode Ray Tube television as large as 40".
Nice thing about those projection-style TV's is the lack of a heavy Cathode Ray Tube which is typically made of glass and really fscking heavy. I wonder how much that 60" Cathode Ray Tube television you're talking about weighs?
You know, oddly enough, I couldn't find a single Cathode Ray Tube television larger than 36" or 37" ? Your link doesn't seem to have a web address associated with it, 'cause my cursor don't turn into a little finger when I'm over it. Who'd you say makes that thing, again?
Huh. So, grandparent sets a dollar value on human life and suffering, says that rape is no big deal, gets modded "insightful" - but *I* get modded "troll"?
Whatever. This mod system is seriously fscked.
Clearly, you've never been raped.
Let's try an experiment - why don't you write a remarkably successful game, sell several hundred thousand copies, have twice that many more pirated - and then get raped. Physically raped - in the ass, preferably. Bonus points for STDs or for permanent injury. Post back here and tell us which one deserves more punishment. Specific dollar amounts, please.
Allow me to point out that there ARE some lasers capable of emitting a red, a green, and a blue beam simultaneously. That is more properly termed an RGB laser, but I can see where the distinction might be irrelevant under certain circumstances.
Apologies.
A white laser? What the hell is that?
If its output is white, it's not a laser. Lasers are monochromatic (or very nearly) and coherent. White light is by definition not monochromatic.
White LEDs, FYI, use a monochromatic (or nearly so) LED die and a phosphor similar to those in fluourescent lights to produce white light - the light from the LED itself isn't white.
"Feral cats? BRILLIANT!"
You, sir - funny.
Ack. Wrote one thing, typed another. That should be 1.25x10^7 kW-hr, not 4.5x10^7 kW-hr of electricity. That's only about 1.38 metric fuckloads of power.
Sorry for the confusion.
Fusion. Nuclear Fusion. Conversion of matter to energy. It's even in the headline. Yes, he's talking about the potential nuclear energy.
He's talking about converting some small fraction of a collection of matter into energy, and then that energy helps convert MORE of that same matter into energy, thus making it a self-sustaining reaction.
In other words, instead of using a bunch of huge-assed lasers to initiate fusion in a glass pellet infused with deuterium and then collecting the resultant energy, you spank (in some unspecified manner, probably lasers) the hell out of a conglomeration of some isotope of hydrogen (suspended in a toroidal magnetic field) so that some of the hydrogen fuses into REALLY FUCKING HOT helium, which then helps to heat up more of the hydrogen, which then fuses into more REALLY FUCKING HOT helium, and so on until you run out of hydrogen. Along the way, you convert a small amount of that hot helium into cooler helium, and the heat is used to generate electricity in a steam turbine.
The ultimate net cost of this electricity is (as is referenced elsewhere; see my recent posting history) the electrolysis of a small amount of water into a small amount of hydrogen, which process requires a smaller amount of electricity than is being produced by the fusion. More energy out than in; no laws are broken. Why? Because we're converting "matter" into "energy".
We do lose some matter, though. By my back-of-the-envelope (literally!) calculations, completely converting the hydrogen in 1/2 gram of water will release energy equivalent to 4.5x10^7 kW-hr of electricity (which is the units we buy it in around here). How much of that we can actually capture and convert is another story, but grandparent poster suggests 40% - that's approximately 5 metric fuckloads of power. And we have a lot more water where that gram came from.
By the way, you misspelled "arrakis".