actually, from my (admittedly fuzzy) memory, accepted standard s that planes always bank to the right to avoid other planes. this is to avoid the goofy looking dance that people inevitably do when they see somebody walking down the hallway towards them. so in the case you mention there would be absolutely no problem whatsoever. right?
What happens when they need to make an emergency landing and there's a "soft wall" around the best landing spot?
well, considering the explicit purpose of the soft wall is to keep planes away from places we dont want them to be, i cant imagine why there would be a soft wall around any good landing place, particularly the "best" one.
i dont want to sound callous, but for the sake of the rest of us, if this system were implemented, and there came a time where the only place a plane could land was behind a soft wall, well, then screw 'em- save the people on the ground.
while i dont know enough about debian or kde to comment on the rest of this post (i dont use kde more than i have to, and have only used debian on servers), why is png such an absurd format for icons? i personally can't think of a better one...
ricochet failed because the company built too much, too fast. they spent cose to $100 billion building their networks in 20-something cities, and then couldn't get their follow-on funding to actually run the networks. some cities were only live for about a week or two before the plug got pulled.
ricochet is back in some cities, although i'm not sure which. the company that bought oup all of ricochet's assets lit up the denver network a little while ago, and is licensing out the networks in other cities to other companies. from what i understand, their service in denver has been wildly popular, and the 2nd generation hardware that they are using now connect at near-dsl speed (still over a cellular-like network). i knew a guy who was looking to light up the ricochet network in chicago last year, but i guess the deal fell through because he thought the company in denver (i forget their name) was asking too high of a licensing fee.
at any rate, the point of this post is that although the idea has been tried in the past, it did not fail because of shortcomings in technology or consumer interest. ricochet, both from what i remember when it was first introduced, and what i know of the reactivation of the denver network, has been very popular. ricochet's failing was due to the fact that they spent all of their money building their networks, and never even considered the fact that there might not be a second round of funding to actually run the networks after that money was gone. had they been a little wiser with their money, maybe they would still be around today, and now we'd all be talking about ricochet instead of wi-fi.
i would imagine it's because boeing or the airlines can choose which airplanes they install wireless antennae on. As other people have mentioned, cellphone and other electronic emissions aer not really an issue for new airplanes which can be easily shielded. however, most commercial airliners have been built or contain parts that have been built over the last thirty years, and for a significant part of that time frame transmissions at the frequencies where cell phones operate were uncommon, and little thought was given to proper shielding against them.
but while it might be really hard to make a lot of clueless users understand why cellphones are ok on some planes and not on others, 802.11 is short enough range that it would be much easier: if you are on a plane with networking gear installed it will work, and if you are not it wont work. and the airlines, who know the equipment on all of their planes, would know whether the plane contained modern, properly shielded equipment before they installed the wireless antennae, and would probably be required to do some testing afterwards as well.
in the first sentence he mentions Cal Poly Pomona. but i would imagine this is not that uncommon. we did something similar in one of my CS classes (i attended Illinois Institute of Technology). we didn't have to do any soldering- the entire thing was drawn out in schematics and downloaded onto a FPGA. Ours used an 8 bit RISC instruction set and (IIRC) ran at a blistering 8MHz. (the FPGA had a built in 25 MHZ clock, but our design required three cycles of the internal clock for each CPU clock cycle. it also had a manual clock mode for viewing the output on the built in 7 segment led. we also received bonus points on the project for writing our own assembler. this was in a required sophomore level cs class.
later, in one of my senior electives, we designed a 32 bit cpu entirely in VHDL, which was pretty cool, but we ended up having to cut it down to actually load it onto hardware since the FPGA's we were using couldn't fit 32 (or even 16 iirc) 32 bit registers on the board properly.
both were projects i enjoyed a great deal, and those were probably two of the classes i learned to most from.
except it was probably developed on nullsoft's computers, not aol's. as i understand, nullsoft is still a company, it's just a company that is owned by another company (aol). if he is an officer of nullsoft, justin has the authority to enter into a binding agreement on nullsoft's behalf, so even if he doesn't "own" the software, he may still have the right to give it away on bahalf of the company he founded, and i would presume still has a stake in.
This is the problem with the USA. Corporations can say any damn thing they want to, and hold no accountability...
well, not entirely. an officer of a corporation can obligate a corporation legally without the consent of the corporation as a whole and possibly (in some cases) against such consent. if this guy frankel is an officer of nullsoft (which i suspect he is, as the article mentions him as a founder) then he does have the authority to enter into contractual obligations (in this case software licenses) without the consent of nullsoft as a whole. aol can force them to pull the software if they want, but the license that people originally downloaded it under does still have legal clout.
ianal, but we did get into a situation not terribly unlike this at a company i was an officer of, so i have some basis for my ramblings.
In the first quarter, 55.8 percent of worldwide shipments came from PC makers not among the top five, according to research firm Gartner. Under Thursday's deal, these builders will get AOL discs when they order Windows.
wait, so they still think there are people left in this country that haven't already thrown away enough aol cd's to wallpaper a room? do they really think that anyone out there who isn't using aol at this point isn't using it because they dont have access to an aol cd? It might have helped if they went back to the old deal they had with ms (circa win95r2 and win98) where they had a "sign up for aol" icon on the desktop when you installed windows. but this is just going to be an extra cd no one will ever look at. if aol really wants to gain marketshare, they should really be going after dell, gateway, etc. to include aol memberships with their pre installed software bundles.
i must apologize (a little). my initial impression was that it just didnt work, however, upon closer inspection, it seems document.createElement() does work in opera 7, however, something doesnt work when using it to create <iframe> or <img> objects.
opera doesnt give me any errors at all- it just doesnt work. it might be possible that this is something that i am doing incorrectly, but i dont know what. for that i blame the fact that i have yet to find a good dom reference other than this one as msdn.
at the time it made sense- up until about version 6.1, mandrake version x.y was not much more than redhat x.y + precompiled kde packages and a slightly different installer. they used the same version number as redhat to indicate package compatibility. it wasnt until around mandrake 7 that they truly distinguished themselves from redhat. at that point it wouldn't have made much sense to jump backwards to mandrake 1.0, would it?
i've been hearing opera's standards support being praised for like a year or two now, and i've always wondered on what basis. while opera's css implementation seems solid from what i've seen, the dom implementation in even the newest version of opera seems to me to be significantly lacking in comparison even to browsers as old as ie 5.5 and mozilla since around the time of netscape 6.
i may be wrong about the overall level of standards compliance, but to this day, opera does not work correctly with document.createElement() and document.body.appendChild(), which (for my uses at least) has made any further testing impossible and irrelevant.
you may lose the turnaround, but i think you would gain an impulse buy factor- if people see two or three movies they like and can't decide which one to rent, with this new system they could just get all of them and not worry about having time to watch them all within the next two days.
i have a list right now of around a dozen movies i've been intending to watch for a while, but never got around to. if something like this were around now, i'd probably be willing to go grab all twelve of them for $3 a piece or so and just leave them sitting on my shelf until i felt like watching them. of course, whether i would get them at my neighborhood blockbuster or just pick them up the next time i go to best buy is another question...
also, as somebody mentioned before, these would considerably lower the breakeven point, at least on new releases. given the price a rental place has to pay for it's movies (hint: it's not the same $15 movie you grab off the shelf at best buy) they have to rent them out about 30 times or so before they break even. for new releases i'm sure they would much prefer to take $.5 of every sale and be able to return the unsold ones back to the distributor than to try and figure exactly where the balance is in terms of getting enough movies to cover demand without getting so many they'll never break even. then they could just keep two or three of the "real" dvds around to rent out after the initial demand dies down.
i've been playing a lot of alpha centauri lately, and every time one of the faction leaders wants to speak to me, i can't help but read "Switch to main viewscreen" as "Main screen turn on"
If everyone had a shot at a scholarship, then I would be agreeing with you right now. Sure, get good test scores, and good grades, be in a lot of clubs, do a lot of activities, be from a poor family. All these things aren't going to land you any good scholarships to an out of state school. They are going to get you maybe a choice between a couple in state schools, and possibly a regional private school.
all those things can get you a great scholarship at an out of state school. they did at my school. there were quite a few people at my school from a background like that who qualified for what my school was calling "the largest engineering scholarship in the country"- between 3/4 tuition and full tuition & board for 5 years. for quite a few of the more motivated people that was enough to have a masters degree by the time your scholarship ran out.
besides that, there are quite a number of state schools all over the coutry that will waive the out-of-state fees for people with good test scores.
And a choice btween a couple to few different schools isn't going to get you into a school without these ID Card systems(assuming it is correct that they are in widespread use around the country)
on this point i agree with you. i know they have a system like this at the school i went to, although i'm not sure if its the same company. at my school, though, they were mostly used for access to the dorms and your meal plan, which means if you dont live in the dorms (and therefore aren't on the campus meal plan) the cards are worthless anyway.
3. A NV20 (GeForce 3) will be able to run Doom3 at 30FPS with max detail at 1024x768. It's a single-player game as well, so 60FPS+ isn't that big of a concern.
not to mention, if you're playing Doom3 on an XBox, you're probably only playing at around 500x350 resolution at 60Hz, seeing as that is your standard TV resolution. you get a HUGE performance increase in games like that by cutting the resolution in half...
so when somebody sends me a file (or i download one) i'm stuck with all the previous users (or creator's) metadata and icon choices? NO THANKS!!
it already drives me nuts to have to delete the id3 tags on any mp3's i download because they're often wrong and almost always not in my desired format. i can only imagine how infuriating it would be if icon preferences and who knows what else was also stored along with the file. and burning it all onto a cd where this information is read only? it would make me want to scream.
in short, as soon as you want to exchange a file with somebody else, all of your precious metadata becomes a curse rather than a blessing. but hey, as long as you live in an isolated world where you're the only person who uses or sees your files, go nuts! but when you decide to join the rest of the internet, please store your metadata somewhere else....
i did a great deal of research into this many years ago for a school project. i dont recall when exactly, but it was around the time bill clinton was first elected, and the brady bill was a big deal.
i was able to find a great deal of material at the time- some of it unbiased, much of it not. it didn't matter really. if you read the opinions with a mind toward the authors bias, you can usually pick out the relevent facts and ignore the opinions.
the problem is that it's impossible to do a controlled study of the issue. there are too many implicit variables. there's no way to find two locations that are exactly the same except for their gun policies. prevailing social attitudes, demograpics, and a whole host of other factors all play into the situation.
the result is that there are reams and reams of studies and statistics out there that support both sides of the argument.
for example (this is all off the top of my head, and i may have mixed up some of the countries- my research was >6 years ago):
- switzerland has one of the most armed populaces in the worls. swiss citizens can buy and own military artillery. swiss violent crime levels are much lower than the us.
- canada has much stricter gun control than the us. gun crime is lower than the us, but overall violent crime is about the same- the decrease in gun related crime is roughly offset by an increase in beatings, knifings, etc.
- japan has very strict gun control and also very low violent crime rates compared to most other countries.
- another country i studied (australia or great britain possibly) had much stricter gun control laws than the us, but also a much higher rate of gun-related crimes.
i also remember a variety of comparisons of areas within the us. but in the end, none of the comparisons i found meant very much. they all deal with areas that are different in so many ways that it's hard to come to any sort of hard conclusion.
in the end, everyone out there does the same thing i did. they pick a bunch of statistics from a region that matches the view of the world that they'd like to portray, and ignore the rest. the great thing is that they dont even have to lie or make the statistics up. there's so many valid statistics out there that portray any possible view on this issue, why risk getting caught with invalid ones?
Maybe I'm a bigot, but I hadn't expected an actor's commentary to be so perceptive and nuanced.
well, besides being a really good actor, you might be surprized to know that he's also an artist and a writer, and has conducted a symphony playing music he wrote.
i remember reading about this some time ago, and i think the key is that they may happen every 250,000 years.
if memory serves me correctly, every 250,000 years or so, the earth's magnetic field begins to break down and the poles begin to wander a bit. when the field begins to strengthen again, it may or may not reverse polarity.
the magnetic field breakdowns tend to be much worse when the poles actually flip. however, there doesnt appear to be any pattern as to whether or not the flip will occur - which means that the field could change every 250,000 years, or it could stay the same for several million. evidence of both cases has been found at different points in the fossil record.
anyway, this is all from memory of something that i read a very long time ago, so take with the appropriate dosage of salt.
just out ouf curiosity, did you bother to calculate just how much raw copper you'd need to make ten thousand one-meter cables each long enough to circle the earth's equator?
and if you did, how does that compare to the amount of copper mined in the world every year? or even the entire amount of available copper in the world?
oh, and by the way, given the amount of force that woukd be required to cut or break a hundred meter copper cable in the first place, i dont think the 10-gigaton or so discharge that results would be all that much more destructive....
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true enough. there might also be a problem if the soft wall was to the pilots right instead of his left.....
it was mostly an attempt at subtle humor.
Pull the breaker, bye-bye soft wall.
not to mention, bye-bye throttle, ailerons, elevators, rudder, flaps, landing gear.....
you know, all of the other things that are controlled by the fly-by-wire avionics system of which the soft-wall software would be a part of.
actually, from my (admittedly fuzzy) memory, accepted standard s that planes always bank to the right to avoid other planes. this is to avoid the goofy looking dance that people inevitably do when they see somebody walking down the hallway towards them. so in the case you mention there would be absolutely no problem whatsoever. right?
What happens when they need to make an emergency landing and there's a "soft wall" around the best landing spot?
well, considering the explicit purpose of the soft wall is to keep planes away from places we dont want them to be, i cant imagine why there would be a soft wall around any good landing place, particularly the "best" one.
i dont want to sound callous, but for the sake of the rest of us, if this system were implemented, and there came a time where the only place a plane could land was behind a soft wall, well, then screw 'em- save the people on the ground.
And the proposed format for icons is png. absurd.
while i dont know enough about debian or kde to comment on the rest of this post (i dont use kde more than i have to, and have only used debian on servers), why is png such an absurd format for icons? i personally can't think of a better one...
aparently the new ricochet is still only available in san diego and denver.
ricochet failed because the company built too much, too fast. they spent cose to $100 billion building their networks in 20-something cities, and then couldn't get their follow-on funding to actually run the networks. some cities were only live for about a week or two before the plug got pulled.
ricochet is back in some cities, although i'm not sure which. the company that bought oup all of ricochet's assets lit up the denver network a little while ago, and is licensing out the networks in other cities to other companies. from what i understand, their service in denver has been wildly popular, and the 2nd generation hardware that they are using now connect at near-dsl speed (still over a cellular-like network). i knew a guy who was looking to light up the ricochet network in chicago last year, but i guess the deal fell through because he thought the company in denver (i forget their name) was asking too high of a licensing fee.
at any rate, the point of this post is that although the idea has been tried in the past, it did not fail because of shortcomings in technology or consumer interest. ricochet, both from what i remember when it was first introduced, and what i know of the reactivation of the denver network, has been very popular. ricochet's failing was due to the fact that they spent all of their money building their networks, and never even considered the fact that there might not be a second round of funding to actually run the networks after that money was gone. had they been a little wiser with their money, maybe they would still be around today, and now we'd all be talking about ricochet instead of wi-fi.
i would imagine it's because boeing or the airlines can choose which airplanes they install wireless antennae on. As other people have mentioned, cellphone and other electronic emissions aer not really an issue for new airplanes which can be easily shielded. however, most commercial airliners have been built or contain parts that have been built over the last thirty years, and for a significant part of that time frame transmissions at the frequencies where cell phones operate were uncommon, and little thought was given to proper shielding against them.
but while it might be really hard to make a lot of clueless users understand why cellphones are ok on some planes and not on others, 802.11 is short enough range that it would be much easier: if you are on a plane with networking gear installed it will work, and if you are not it wont work. and the airlines, who know the equipment on all of their planes, would know whether the plane contained modern, properly shielded equipment before they installed the wireless antennae, and would probably be required to do some testing afterwards as well.
in the first sentence he mentions Cal Poly Pomona.
but i would imagine this is not that uncommon. we did something similar in one of my CS classes (i attended Illinois Institute of Technology). we didn't have to do any soldering- the entire thing was drawn out in schematics and downloaded onto a FPGA. Ours used an 8 bit RISC instruction set and (IIRC) ran at a blistering 8MHz. (the FPGA had a built in 25 MHZ clock, but our design required three cycles of the internal clock for each CPU clock cycle. it also had a manual clock mode for viewing the output on the built in 7 segment led. we also received bonus points on the project for writing our own assembler. this was in a required sophomore level cs class.
later, in one of my senior electives, we designed a 32 bit cpu entirely in VHDL, which was pretty cool, but we ended up having to cut it down to actually load it onto hardware since the FPGA's we were using couldn't fit 32 (or even 16 iirc) 32 bit registers on the board properly.
both were projects i enjoyed a great deal, and those were probably two of the classes i learned to most from.
except it was probably developed on nullsoft's computers, not aol's. as i understand, nullsoft is still a company, it's just a company that is owned by another company (aol). if he is an officer of nullsoft, justin has the authority to enter into a binding agreement on nullsoft's behalf, so even if he doesn't "own" the software, he may still have the right to give it away on bahalf of the company he founded, and i would presume still has a stake in.
This is the problem with the USA. Corporations can say any damn thing they want to, and hold no accountability...
well, not entirely. an officer of a corporation can obligate a corporation legally without the consent of the corporation as a whole and possibly (in some cases) against such consent. if this guy frankel is an officer of nullsoft (which i suspect he is, as the article mentions him as a founder) then he does have the authority to enter into contractual obligations (in this case software licenses) without the consent of nullsoft as a whole. aol can force them to pull the software if they want, but the license that people originally downloaded it under does still have legal clout.
ianal, but we did get into a situation not terribly unlike this at a company i was an officer of, so i have some basis for my ramblings.
In the first quarter, 55.8 percent of worldwide shipments came from PC makers not among the top five, according to research firm Gartner. Under Thursday's deal, these builders will get AOL discs when they order Windows.
wait, so they still think there are people left in this country that haven't already thrown away enough aol cd's to wallpaper a room? do they really think that anyone out there who isn't using aol at this point isn't using it because they dont have access to an aol cd? It might have helped if they went back to the old deal they had with ms (circa win95r2 and win98) where they had a "sign up for aol" icon on the desktop when you installed windows. but this is just going to be an extra cd no one will ever look at. if aol really wants to gain marketshare, they should really be going after dell, gateway, etc. to include aol memberships with their pre installed software bundles.
actually i have used opera 7, but only briefly.
i must apologize (a little). my initial impression was that it just didnt work, however, upon closer inspection, it seems document.createElement() does work in opera 7, however, something doesnt work when using it to create <iframe> or <img> objects.
opera doesnt give me any errors at all- it just doesnt work. it might be possible that this is something that i am doing incorrectly, but i dont know what. for that i blame the fact that i have yet to find a good dom reference other than this one as msdn.
mandrake started out around version 5.1 or 5.2.
at the time it made sense- up until about version 6.1, mandrake version x.y was not much more than redhat x.y + precompiled kde packages and a slightly different installer. they used the same version number as redhat to indicate package compatibility. it wasnt until around mandrake 7 that they truly distinguished themselves from redhat. at that point it wouldn't have made much sense to jump backwards to mandrake 1.0, would it?
i've been hearing opera's standards support being praised for like a year or two now, and i've always wondered on what basis. while opera's css implementation seems solid from what i've seen, the dom implementation in even the newest version of opera seems to me to be significantly lacking in comparison even to browsers as old as ie 5.5 and mozilla since around the time of netscape 6.
i may be wrong about the overall level of standards compliance, but to this day, opera does not work correctly with document.createElement() and document.body.appendChild(), which (for my uses at least) has made any further testing impossible and irrelevant.
you may lose the turnaround, but i think you would gain an impulse buy factor- if people see two or three movies they like and can't decide which one to rent, with this new system they could just get all of them and not worry about having time to watch them all within the next two days.
i have a list right now of around a dozen movies i've been intending to watch for a while, but never got around to. if something like this were around now, i'd probably be willing to go grab all twelve of them for $3 a piece or so and just leave them sitting on my shelf until i felt like watching them. of course, whether i would get them at my neighborhood blockbuster or just pick them up the next time i go to best buy is another question...
also, as somebody mentioned before, these would considerably lower the breakeven point, at least on new releases. given the price a rental place has to pay for it's movies (hint: it's not the same $15 movie you grab off the shelf at best buy) they have to rent them out about 30 times or so before they break even. for new releases i'm sure they would much prefer to take $.5 of every sale and be able to return the unsold ones back to the distributor than to try and figure exactly where the balance is in terms of getting enough movies to cover demand without getting so many they'll never break even. then they could just keep two or three of the "real" dvds around to rent out after the initial demand dies down.
i've been playing a lot of alpha centauri lately, and every time one of the faction leaders wants to speak to me, i can't help but read "Switch to main viewscreen" as "Main screen turn on"
If everyone had a shot at a scholarship, then I would be agreeing with you right now. Sure, get good test scores, and good grades, be in a lot of clubs, do a lot of activities, be from a poor family. All these things aren't going to land you any good scholarships to an out of state school. They are going to get you maybe a choice between a couple in state schools, and possibly a regional private school.
all those things can get you a great scholarship at an out of state school. they did at my school. there were quite a few people at my school from a background like that who qualified for what my school was calling "the largest engineering scholarship in the country"- between 3/4 tuition and full tuition & board for 5 years. for quite a few of the more motivated people that was enough to have a masters degree by the time your scholarship ran out.
besides that, there are quite a number of state schools all over the coutry that will waive the out-of-state fees for people with good test scores.
And a choice btween a couple to few different schools isn't going to get you into a school without these ID Card systems(assuming it is correct that they are in widespread use around the country)
on this point i agree with you. i know they have a system like this at the school i went to, although i'm not sure if its the same company. at my school, though, they were mostly used for access to the dorms and your meal plan, which means if you dont live in the dorms (and therefore aren't on the campus meal plan) the cards are worthless anyway.
3. A NV20 (GeForce 3) will be able to run Doom3 at 30FPS with max detail at 1024x768. It's a single-player game as well, so 60FPS+ isn't that big of a concern.
not to mention, if you're playing Doom3 on an XBox, you're probably only playing at around 500x350 resolution at 60Hz, seeing as that is your standard TV resolution. you get a HUGE performance increase in games like that by cutting the resolution in half...
so when somebody sends me a file (or i download one) i'm stuck with all the previous users (or creator's) metadata and icon choices? NO THANKS!!
it already drives me nuts to have to delete the id3 tags on any mp3's i download because they're often wrong and almost always not in my desired format. i can only imagine how infuriating it would be if icon preferences and who knows what else was also stored along with the file. and burning it all onto a cd where this information is read only? it would make me want to scream.
in short, as soon as you want to exchange a file with somebody else, all of your precious metadata becomes a curse rather than a blessing. but hey, as long as you live in an isolated world where you're the only person who uses or sees your files, go nuts! but when you decide to join the rest of the internet, please store your metadata somewhere else....
funny. i've always thought fight club was entirely too overrated.
i did a great deal of research into this many years ago for a school project. i dont recall when exactly, but it was around the time bill clinton was first elected, and the brady bill was a big deal.
i was able to find a great deal of material at the time- some of it unbiased, much of it not. it didn't matter really. if you read the opinions with a mind toward the authors bias, you can usually pick out the relevent facts and ignore the opinions.
the problem is that it's impossible to do a controlled study of the issue. there are too many implicit variables. there's no way to find two locations that are exactly the same except for their gun policies. prevailing social attitudes, demograpics, and a whole host of other factors all play into the situation.
the result is that there are reams and reams of studies and statistics out there that support both sides of the argument.
for example (this is all off the top of my head, and i may have mixed up some of the countries- my research was >6 years ago):
- switzerland has one of the most armed populaces in the worls. swiss citizens can buy and own military artillery. swiss violent crime levels are much lower than the us.
- canada has much stricter gun control than the us. gun crime is lower than the us, but overall violent crime is about the same- the decrease in gun related crime is roughly offset by an increase in beatings, knifings, etc.
- japan has very strict gun control and also very low violent crime rates compared to most other countries.
- another country i studied (australia or great britain possibly) had much stricter gun control laws than the us, but also a much higher rate of gun-related crimes.
i also remember a variety of comparisons of areas within the us. but in the end, none of the comparisons i found meant very much. they all deal with areas that are different in so many ways that it's hard to come to any sort of hard conclusion.
in the end, everyone out there does the same thing i did. they pick a bunch of statistics from a region that matches the view of the world that they'd like to portray, and ignore the rest. the great thing is that they dont even have to lie or make the statistics up. there's so many valid statistics out there that portray any possible view on this issue, why risk getting caught with invalid ones?
Maybe I'm a bigot, but I hadn't expected an actor's commentary to be so perceptive and nuanced.
well, besides being a really good actor, you might be surprized to know that he's also an artist and a writer, and has conducted a symphony playing music he wrote.
i remember reading about this some time ago, and i think the key is that they may happen every 250,000 years.
if memory serves me correctly, every 250,000 years or so, the earth's magnetic field begins to break down and the poles begin to wander a bit. when the field begins to strengthen again, it may or may not reverse polarity.
the magnetic field breakdowns tend to be much worse when the poles actually flip. however, there doesnt appear to be any pattern as to whether or not the flip will occur - which means that the field could change every 250,000 years, or it could stay the same for several million. evidence of both cases has been found at different points in the fossil record.
anyway, this is all from memory of something that i read a very long time ago, so take with the appropriate dosage of salt.
just out ouf curiosity, did you bother to calculate just how much raw copper you'd need to make ten thousand one-meter cables each long enough to circle the earth's equator?
and if you did, how does that compare to the amount of copper mined in the world every year? or even the entire amount of available copper in the world?
oh, and by the way, given the amount of force that woukd be required to cut or break a hundred meter copper cable in the first place, i dont think the 10-gigaton or so discharge that results would be all that much more destructive....