After five years of making thoughtful and informed posts, I have some karma to burn. I'll regret having posted this when I see that "-5 Troll" beside it later today -- but I figure, a guy's got a right to let off some steam.
I'll let you in on a little secret of mine. Liberal as I am, I enjoy tuning into Fox. I like reading the RNC's website. I have fun watching the masters of hypocrisy and intolerance. They say some mighty funny, outrageous things! I wouldn't want these crackpots in charge of my country, my legal system or even the corporations in which I own stock -- but that doesn't stop me from laughing at 'em. For every three logical things they say, they just have to throw in a zinger -- a racist slur, a completely inappropriate personal attack, a tremendous fallacy, a made-up statistic, or what have you. And I find that funny as all hell!
(I apologize that all of those links are to biased sources; I tried to find more impartial sources for my quotes, but "unbiased" news sources tend to shy away from reporting on the more outrageous things our politicians and public figures say, because they would quickly gain a reputation for being biased for having done so.)
Yes, now we progressives have our own crackpot figures who make completely unfounded statements with fallacies you could drive a truck through. They twist words, edit footage and tinker until the truth looks juuuuuuust right. Like their regressive counterparts, they're darned good at it. I honestly enjoy them as entertainment, I do.
Aside from giving me great insight into Bush's and Cheney's motivations (money) and Bush's personality (insecure, attention-seeking jock who aims to please his parent figures), Fahrenheit 9/11 was funny, tragic, moving, a reminder of all we lost that day and all we've lost since: collective innocence, blissful ignorance of the effects of our actions abroad, good men in uniform, personal freedoms. Looking through the bull puckey about Saudi air travel privileges, tuning out the anti-war propaganda, I sat in the theater and saw a decent movie.
But this movie did not sway my political position any more than watching The O'Reilly Factor would. This is because Michael Moore, like all the rest of the pundits, makes entertainment. He tries to deliver a political message, but the message is almost always choked by his own hyperbole and willingness to sacrifice the truth in order to inspire outrage in his viewers.
If the intent of releasing Fahrenheit 9/11 ahead of time is to sway the minds of voters, I am afraid the stunt will backfire horribly. Most of the nation is already set in stone as to who they will vote for. The only votes left up for grabs are the precious, the few, the "swing votes." By definition, these people are independent, and like to think about their decisions before making them. They like to check their facts, and they are not easily swayed by appeals to sentimentality. If these people are forced to approach Fahrenheit 9/11 as a run-on political advertisement, they will rebel. They will scoff at the inaccuracies and ignore the redeeming social and political message of the movie. And that just might sway them enough to vote for the other side . ..
Point taken. Canada is doing a great job providing broadband in spite of their low population density and large area. Of course, they have some advantages over the US:
* Slightly more modern (and, I believe, more homogenous and highly regulated) telecomms infrastructure
* Higher per capita demand for broadband (more "haves" and fewer "have nots," as defined with respect to the need for Internet access).
But the main reason they're doing better, is simply because they've made it a priority to provide broadband. I'm curious to know who "they" are. Is there some sort of government mandate to deploy broadband even to individual farms, as previous posters have indicated? Or are Canadian telecomms companies simply doing so out of the goodness of their hearts?
You've got a good point. I had been working under the assumption that CATV copper is inherently much higher capacity than telco copper. At first this seems like a reasonable assumption, given that CATV lines were designed for literal high bandwidth (enough of the RF spectrum to multiplex ~100 NTSC signals over the same wire) whereas telephone lines were designed to carry a 20 kHz signal.
Of course, I forgot that not all telephone lines are equivalent. The wires going from my house to the neighborhood trunk are only designed to carry two unmultiplexed narrowband signals... but the trunk surely has a much higher-capacity line connecting it to the central office, or whatever.
The telcos can leverage their high bandwidth copper by replacing neighborhood switching equipment and the last couple hundred feet of cable running to each household's telephone network interface (and not to mention the TNI itself).
So there is a future for the telcos, if they hurry up.
Yes, our telecomms companies are mired in the past, and don't understand that there is more money to be made from content than content delivery.
Yes, we have a ridiculous regulatory structure that virtually guarantees the eventual extinction of DSL -- I know I, for one, won't shed a tear about this. The telephone companies of this nation have a decades-long legacy of sloth and profiteering; trying to starve and harass third-party DSL providers out of existence is just a continuation of their legacy. The sweet irony of it is: their aging copper is virtually useless in the face of newer broadband technologies, and while they were busy crushing their "partners," they missed the narrow window of opportunity for any profit whatsoever. Now, they are forced to sit on the sidelines and provide POTS to Grandma while licking their chops and gazing dolefully at the cash cows of the broadband revolution. </rant>
Yes, the use of the Internet in the US has been almost solely reserved for the technological and educational "haves" in this country, leaving the "have nots" by the wayside -- though this is changing.
The single biggest reason we lag behind other nations in broadband deployment, however, is sheer scale.
The United States has 93 TIMES (9300%) the surface area of South Korea, and 22 times the surface area of Sweden. As the third most populous nation on earth, we have almost 300,000,000 people living within our borders. Our national POTS telecomms infrastructure is the oldest and most complex on Earth.
Broadband penetration to US households in 2001 was around 7%. I am frankly amazed at the progress we've made in the past three years. The nation's major population centers -- the west and east coasts, and the Great Lakes region -- are entirely wired for both DSL and cable modem, and we're working on deploying those technologies (and more exciting, newer alternatives) to the less populous interior of our nation.
All things considered, I'd say we're doing a good job.
That's because the submitter succumbed to laziness, and simply cut and pasted headline verbatim from some SFGate's website.
New Devices Help Track Winners, Losers at Games
...said the headline. Our winsome hero added a word here and there, tacked one or two choice sentences from the article onto the headline, and voila... instant Slashdot article.
Back in my day, we had to come up with something original to say when we submitted an article. And we had to walk five miles uphill through the snow using only NCSA Mosaic and a 33.6k modem. Broadband was a term you used in reference to wedding rings, and GUI described the way you liked your cinnamon buns in the morning.
Kids these days... they've got it entirely too easy.
This reminds me of an x86 virus I was looking at the other day... it finds the address of a certain kernel data structure by finding the user32 module in physical memory, locating a certain API that uses the data structure and disassembling the first hundred or so instructions. Devious!
Wow, that's pretty hardcore...every program has to build its own import table every time it runs. It's the ultimate speed-for-size tradeoff!
I'm going to look into this more... curious to see how the initial search algorithm works. Iterating thru the entire address space looking for a module sounds like a really bad idea, especially if the architecture supports VM... you never know when you'll hit an invalid page.
OK, my fault for not RTFA. I agree that any malware written in assembly requires some skill.
On x86, it's relatively easy to call Windows API from asm... you can declare the symbols using some special asm syntax and link against a.lib file. The linker will produce a map of all the symbols you want to import, and at runtime, the PE loader will resolve the Import Address Table for your process. If you're super-leet, you can also raise an interrupt during execution to call an API.
Do you have a pointer to more specific info on how the process works on ARM? I'm curious how it differs... I find it hard to believe that processes running on ARM don't get the benefit of an IAT, but if so, that's pretty barbaric.
It's not exactly difficult to make a trojan for Windows CE... just write a simplistic Win32 trojan, taking care to only use API calls supported by CE and avoiding use of the standard C library (always good advice when writing virii/worms/trojans, anyhow!)
If someone had released this trojan for the Win32 platform it would be almost laughable, not newsworthy except for its silliness. But compile it against a different set of DLLs and target a different architecture, and suddenly it's news? What gives?!?
Not to mention the fact that the heterogeneity of Windows CE instruction set architectures makes it hard for a virus or worm to spread. Even if you write a genuine virus, if you target ARM (the most popular chip for CE devices), at best you'll be able to infect 60% of the devices your virus encounters.
No, it's quite true. They *have* managed their company differently! Whereas most companies report their options issued and shares sold, Google's management didn't. How radical and different-thinking of them! How daring they are, to break the law!
Electrovaya has concentrated on battery life as one of their core strengths since the beginning. Their latest model sports a whopping 75WH battery with a claimed run time of 9 hours. Even with a DVD player sucking away the juice, you should be able to get 4-5 hours out of it.
I haven't owned one of these beasties yet, but I've played with a friends and they're pretty nice. A bit on the expensive side, but that's what you have to expect from Tablet PCs. For some reason, manufacturers don't seem to realize that a Tablet PC is just like a normal laptop, only LESS CAPABLE. They prefer to treat tablets as some exotic new technology that people will pay a huge premium for. *Sigh*
Because these particular disposables are made of some bizarre plastic (probably will give me cancer) that is wonderfully thin; they sit on my eyeball just so -- and this is a rare thing for contacts to do, since I've got an astigmatism (slightly irregularly contoured cornea) in one eye.
I wore them for 16 hours today, using eye drops once, and my eyes are only slightly sore. Given that my eyes are very sensitive, this is unprecedented. I don't wear these contacts because they're disposable -- I wear 'em because they're comfortable.
Fully customizable -- import color mages to personalize each screen and create "skins"
Alas, the seething racial tension running through world of sorcery and magic leaves no corporation untouched... I can't believe that Sony has stooped so low that they are now importing underpaid, immigrant mages to run our miracle gadgets.
And the sheer gall of these people, calling their employees color mages! That kind of language may have been appropriate in the 1950s, but this is 21st century America where we believe a mage's color is a secondary characteristic and has nothing to do with his/her personality, skill, intelligence or hireability.
I feel deeply for those poor color mages, forced to create skins. What's wrong with the skins they've already got? This kind of intolerance, from a major electronics manufacturer, makes me seething mad.
Extended-wear contacts do exist; I've had roommates who wear their contacts for a week at a time or more.
Anyone with even slightly sensitive eyes should stay away from extended-wear. Or you can do what I do: buy the extended-wear disposables, and then wear them 8-12 hours a day. They're a bit tough to put in, but your eyes are happy throughout the day.
My doctor claims that wearing contacts for days at a time can, over several years, cause damage to the cornea. The operative word here is "can." It depends on your luck, how moist your eyes are, etc... you pays your money and you takes your chances.
Let's not forget people who actually appreciate decent audio quality. While I would prefer Ogg support in my portable media player, AAC is a close second in terms of the tradeoff between compression and quality.
Even with VBR and the MP3PRO extension, I can discern the difference between an MP3 and an AAC encoded at the same bit rate. And I'm no audiophile, just your average dumb schmuck with a pair of ears.
Notice the halfway sarcastic comment about garage doors opening and closing. I understand that RFI from BPL equipment affects more than just hams. That's why my suggestion is more valid than ever.
Rather than destroying BPL equipment, I would pour my energy into giving locals an alternative to BPL, for free, and thereby cost the power company money in the long run due to lost business. But that's just me. You go ahead and destroy whatever you feel like.
Correct, I am no ham. As I stated in my post, I am a licensed amateur radio enthusiast. I don't have an HF rig and can't hear CW for shit (I learned just enough Morse code to pass my Technician test). I devote my energy mostly to experiments with data transmission in the VHF, UHF and microwave bands: amateur packet radio, amateur TV, and so forth. I don't have enough experience, or enough contacts with the local ham community, to consider myself a well-rounded ham.
However: just because I'm no timer, doesn't mean that my opinion doesn't matter.
Geeze... try and offer an original suggestion, get modded down to flamebait.
I understand the problem quite clearly: BPL radiates in all of the HF ham bands (and if what you say is true, the entire HF spectrum) and keeps hams from having our lovely DX chats.
If there is indeed a BPL transmission technology that throws off less RFI, or puts out RFI in a more tractable part of the spectrum, then the ARRLshould by all means pursue regulations guaranteeing the use of that transmission technology, as opposed to the current disruptive one.
But my point is still valid: rather than exchanging heated words with FCC, they'd do well to stop the problem at its source. If nobody wants to buy broadband over power lines because they've all grown accustomed to low-cost community-operated wireless networking, the power companies will have no market for BPL in the areas where BPL would have previously been the only choice for broadband!
Ok, I entirely understand why these folks are mad about the interference caused by BPL. I have an amateur radio license myself.
It seems to me, however, that if these hams are going to protest the deployment of last-mile(s) broadband technology, they'll be better off promoting a creative, alternative solution. They may lobby all they please, but the population of hams will continue to shrink, and networking will become so ubiquitous, that within 50 years we'll need every broadband delivery mechanism we can get. Delivering power and data over the same link is efficient. Perhaps, by then, we'll be better able to control the interference.
So, instead of fighting the inevitable, why don't they deploy wireless mesh networks to the BPL trial areas? They need to show the locals that broadband can be had for cheap, and without causing their garage doors to open and close at random, TVs to be fuzzy, etc.
Perhaps we can get him drunk and let him wander around, encoding the direction of every step as a two-bit integer. That should be an adequate source of randomness, provided he's drunk enough.
Re:Not an implementation, but a binding
on
OpenGL in PHP
·
· Score: 1
Since PHP executes server side, you (the webmaster) wouldn't need to worry so much about your users' security, because no OpenGL or other executable code would be running on their systems. We're all familiar with PHP scripts that use ImageMagick or imlib to render 2d graphics at the user's request. I can easily see this OpenGL PHP binding being used for the same purpose, only with 3D graphics. With some slight modification, we could use a software driver in combination OpenGL's render-to-texture features to support realtime rendering into an image. Run the image through imlib to get a GIF file, and stream it to the user...voila, you have dynamically generated 3D graphics on your web page, without any work on the part of the user's browser!
Correction
on
OpenGL in PHP
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Oops! I meant to say: That would imply that all of the 3D math, texture mapping, shading, rasterization, etc was written in PHP. This is what happens when we post to Slashdot before having our afternoon triple espresso!
Not an implementation, but a binding
on
OpenGL in PHP
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Alert and knowledgeable readers will note that this isn't an implementation of OpenGL, but a binding of the OpenGL API into the PHP language.
A PHP *implementation* of OpenGL would be very impressive, indeed! That would imply that all of the 3D math, texture mapping, shading, rasterization, etc was written in OpenGL. Unfortunately, such an implementation would probably be extremely slow and therefore fairly useless. And it would of course still require an dynamically linked C library for framebuffer access.
So -- this is a cute trick, to be sure, but nothing to write home about. The author of the software has already said as much in an earlier comment.
You might still run into trouble by mimicking the leader's (or the average car's) actions. Let's say the leader swerved right hard, and the next five cars in the train also swerved right, though progressively less hard. Now let's say I'm the unlucky seventh car in the lane, and just as I decide to swerve right, someone pulls up beside me...big trouble, unless my car's autopilot is also capable of collision avoidance with arbitrary obstacles.
I think we might have more success in this run-on thought experiment if we simplified the rules. If the follower's behavior were dictated by a few simple rules:
1) Maintain constant distance from the cars ahead of and behind me (in the train or not)
2) Strive to match the leader's forward/backward speed at all times (when not preempted by rule #1)
3) Never follow the leader in lateral movement, only front-back
Then the power of a road train would be greatly reduced -- it would behave essentially the same as a train of luxury cars using radar cruise control -- but its behavior would be much more predictable. If the leader swerved left or right, the cars would stop following. If he came to a sudden stop, the cars would do the same. If one car in the middle of the train departed, none would follow it, and the cars on either end of him would close the gap.
Slashdot Mirror
Side effect of all the techies living on the left coast, I'm afraid.
Don't you worry; we'll get ours come November 3, when the nation rams their chosen president up our puckered liberal bungholes.
After five years of making thoughtful and informed posts, I have some karma to burn. I'll regret having posted this when I see that "-5 Troll" beside it later today -- but I figure, a guy's got a right to let off some steam.
.
I'll let you in on a little secret of mine. Liberal as I am, I enjoy tuning into Fox. I like reading the RNC's website. I have fun watching the masters of hypocrisy and intolerance. They say some mighty funny, outrageous things! I wouldn't want these crackpots in charge of my country, my legal system or even the corporations in which I own stock -- but that doesn't stop me from laughing at 'em. For every three logical things they say, they just have to throw in a zinger -- a racist slur, a completely inappropriate personal attack, a tremendous fallacy, a made-up statistic, or what have you. And I find that funny as all hell!
To all of the Bill O'Reillys of the world, for the Rush Limbaughs, the Ed Gillespies and the Zell Millers, I would like to say: nyeah nyeah nyeah, we have our own pundits now!
(I apologize that all of those links are to biased sources; I tried to find more impartial sources for my quotes, but "unbiased" news sources tend to shy away from reporting on the more outrageous things our politicians and public figures say, because they would quickly gain a reputation for being biased for having done so.)
Yes, now we progressives have our own crackpot figures who make completely unfounded statements with fallacies you could drive a truck through. They twist words, edit footage and tinker until the truth looks juuuuuuust right. Like their regressive counterparts, they're darned good at it. I honestly enjoy them as entertainment, I do.
Aside from giving me great insight into Bush's and Cheney's motivations (money) and Bush's personality (insecure, attention-seeking jock who aims to please his parent figures), Fahrenheit 9/11 was funny, tragic, moving, a reminder of all we lost that day and all we've lost since: collective innocence, blissful ignorance of the effects of our actions abroad, good men in uniform, personal freedoms. Looking through the bull puckey about Saudi air travel privileges, tuning out the anti-war propaganda, I sat in the theater and saw a decent movie.
But this movie did not sway my political position any more than watching The O'Reilly Factor would. This is because Michael Moore, like all the rest of the pundits, makes entertainment. He tries to deliver a political message, but the message is almost always choked by his own hyperbole and willingness to sacrifice the truth in order to inspire outrage in his viewers.
If the intent of releasing Fahrenheit 9/11 ahead of time is to sway the minds of voters, I am afraid the stunt will backfire horribly. Most of the nation is already set in stone as to who they will vote for. The only votes left up for grabs are the precious, the few, the "swing votes." By definition, these people are independent, and like to think about their decisions before making them. They like to check their facts, and they are not easily swayed by appeals to sentimentality. If these people are forced to approach Fahrenheit 9/11 as a run-on political advertisement, they will rebel. They will scoff at the inaccuracies and ignore the redeeming social and political message of the movie. And that just might sway them enough to vote for the other side . .
Just a thought.
Point taken. Canada is doing a great job providing broadband in spite of their low population density and large area. Of course, they have some advantages over the US:
* Slightly more modern (and, I believe, more homogenous and highly regulated) telecomms infrastructure
* Higher per capita demand for broadband (more "haves" and fewer "have nots," as defined with respect to the need for Internet access).
But the main reason they're doing better, is simply because they've made it a priority to provide broadband. I'm curious to know who "they" are. Is there some sort of government mandate to deploy broadband even to individual farms, as previous posters have indicated? Or are Canadian telecomms companies simply doing so out of the goodness of their hearts?
You've got a good point. I had been working under the assumption that CATV copper is inherently much higher capacity than telco copper. At first this seems like a reasonable assumption, given that CATV lines were designed for literal high bandwidth (enough of the RF spectrum to multiplex ~100 NTSC signals over the same wire) whereas telephone lines were designed to carry a 20 kHz signal.
... but the trunk surely has a much higher-capacity line connecting it to the central office, or whatever.
Of course, I forgot that not all telephone lines are equivalent. The wires going from my house to the neighborhood trunk are only designed to carry two unmultiplexed narrowband signals
The telcos can leverage their high bandwidth copper by replacing neighborhood switching equipment and the last couple hundred feet of cable running to each household's telephone network interface (and not to mention the TNI itself).
So there is a future for the telcos, if they hurry up.
Yes, our telecomms companies are mired in the past, and don't understand that there is more money to be made from content than content delivery.
Yes, we have a ridiculous regulatory structure that virtually guarantees the eventual extinction of DSL -- I know I, for one, won't shed a tear about this. The telephone companies of this nation have a decades-long legacy of sloth and profiteering; trying to starve and harass third-party DSL providers out of existence is just a continuation of their legacy. The sweet irony of it is: their aging copper is virtually useless in the face of newer broadband technologies, and while they were busy crushing their "partners," they missed the narrow window of opportunity for any profit whatsoever. Now, they are forced to sit on the sidelines and provide POTS to Grandma while licking their chops and gazing dolefully at the cash cows of the broadband revolution. </rant>
Yes, the use of the Internet in the US has been almost solely reserved for the technological and educational "haves" in this country, leaving the "have nots" by the wayside -- though this is changing.
The single biggest reason we lag behind other nations in broadband deployment, however, is sheer scale.
The United States has 93 TIMES (9300%) the surface area of South Korea, and 22 times the surface area of Sweden. As the third most populous nation on earth, we have almost 300,000,000 people living within our borders. Our national POTS telecomms infrastructure is the oldest and most complex on Earth.
Broadband penetration to US households in 2001 was around 7%. I am frankly amazed at the progress we've made in the past three years. The nation's major population centers -- the west and east coasts, and the Great Lakes region -- are entirely wired for both DSL and cable modem, and we're working on deploying those technologies (and more exciting, newer alternatives) to the less populous interior of our nation.
All things considered, I'd say we're doing a good job.
That's because the submitter succumbed to laziness, and simply cut and pasted headline verbatim from some SFGate's website.
New Devices Help Track Winners, Losers at Games
Back in my day, we had to come up with something original to say when we submitted an article. And we had to walk five miles uphill through the snow using only NCSA Mosaic and a 33.6k modem. Broadband was a term you used in reference to wedding rings, and GUI described the way you liked your cinnamon buns in the morning.
Kids these days ... they've got it entirely too easy.
This reminds me of an x86 virus I was looking at the other day ... it finds the address of a certain kernel data structure by finding the user32 module in physical memory, locating a certain API that uses the data structure and disassembling the first hundred or so instructions. Devious!
Wow, that's pretty hardcore...every program has to build its own import table every time it runs. It's the ultimate speed-for-size tradeoff!
... curious to see how the initial search algorithm works. Iterating thru the entire address space looking for a module sounds like a really bad idea, especially if the architecture supports VM ... you never know when you'll hit an invalid page.
I'm going to look into this more
OK, my fault for not RTFA. I agree that any malware written in assembly requires some skill.
... you can declare the symbols using some special asm syntax and link against a .lib file. The linker will produce a map of all the symbols you want to import, and at runtime, the PE loader will resolve the Import Address Table for your process. If you're super-leet, you can also raise an interrupt during execution to call an API.
On x86, it's relatively easy to call Windows API from asm
Do you have a pointer to more specific info on how the process works on ARM? I'm curious how it differs... I find it hard to believe that processes running on ARM don't get the benefit of an IAT, but if so, that's pretty barbaric.
It's not exactly difficult to make a trojan for Windows CE... just write a simplistic Win32 trojan, taking care to only use API calls supported by CE and avoiding use of the standard C library (always good advice when writing virii/worms/trojans, anyhow!)
If someone had released this trojan for the Win32 platform it would be almost laughable, not newsworthy except for its silliness. But compile it against a different set of DLLs and target a different architecture, and suddenly it's news? What gives?!?
Not to mention the fact that the heterogeneity of Windows CE instruction set architectures makes it hard for a virus or worm to spread. Even if you write a genuine virus, if you target ARM (the most popular chip for CE devices), at best you'll be able to infect 60% of the devices your virus encounters.
No, it's quite true. They *have* managed their company differently! Whereas most companies report their options issued and shares sold, Google's management didn't. How radical and different-thinking of them! How daring they are, to break the law!
Electrovaya has concentrated on battery life as one of their core strengths since the beginning. Their latest model sports a whopping 75WH battery with a claimed run time of 9 hours. Even with a DVD player sucking away the juice, you should be able to get 4-5 hours out of it.
I haven't owned one of these beasties yet, but I've played with a friends and they're pretty nice. A bit on the expensive side, but that's what you have to expect from Tablet PCs. For some reason, manufacturers don't seem to realize that a Tablet PC is just like a normal laptop, only LESS CAPABLE. They prefer to treat tablets as some exotic new technology that people will pay a huge premium for. *Sigh*
http://www.electrovaya.com/product/sc2100.html
Because these particular disposables are made of some bizarre plastic (probably will give me cancer) that is wonderfully thin; they sit on my eyeball just so -- and this is a rare thing for contacts to do, since I've got an astigmatism (slightly irregularly contoured cornea) in one eye.
I wore them for 16 hours today, using eye drops once, and my eyes are only slightly sore. Given that my eyes are very sensitive, this is unprecedented. I don't wear these contacts because they're disposable -- I wear 'em because they're comfortable.
From the linked page:
Alas, the seething racial tension running through world of sorcery and magic leaves no corporation untouched ... I can't believe that Sony has stooped so low that they are now importing underpaid, immigrant mages to run our miracle gadgets.
And the sheer gall of these people, calling their employees color mages! That kind of language may have been appropriate in the 1950s, but this is 21st century America where we believe a mage's color is a secondary characteristic and has nothing to do with his/her personality, skill, intelligence or hireability.
I feel deeply for those poor color mages, forced to create skins. What's wrong with the skins they've already got? This kind of intolerance, from a major electronics manufacturer, makes me seething mad.
FREE THE COLOR MAGES! BOYCOTT SONY!
Extended-wear contacts do exist; I've had roommates who wear their contacts for a week at a time or more.
... you pays your money and you takes your chances.
Anyone with even slightly sensitive eyes should stay away from extended-wear. Or you can do what I do: buy the extended-wear disposables, and then wear them 8-12 hours a day. They're a bit tough to put in, but your eyes are happy throughout the day.
My doctor claims that wearing contacts for days at a time can, over several years, cause damage to the cornea. The operative word here is "can." It depends on your luck, how moist your eyes are, etc
Let's not forget people who actually appreciate decent audio quality. While I would prefer Ogg support in my portable media player, AAC is a close second in terms of the tradeoff between compression and quality.
Even with VBR and the MP3PRO extension, I can discern the difference between an MP3 and an AAC encoded at the same bit rate. And I'm no audiophile, just your average dumb schmuck with a pair of ears.
Notice the halfway sarcastic comment about garage doors opening and closing. I understand that RFI from BPL equipment affects more than just hams. That's why my suggestion is more valid than ever.
Rather than destroying BPL equipment, I would pour my energy into giving locals an alternative to BPL, for free, and thereby cost the power company money in the long run due to lost business. But that's just me. You go ahead and destroy whatever you feel like.
Correct, I am no ham. As I stated in my post, I am a licensed amateur radio enthusiast. I don't have an HF rig and can't hear CW for shit (I learned just enough Morse code to pass my Technician test). I devote my energy mostly to experiments with data transmission in the VHF, UHF and microwave bands: amateur packet radio, amateur TV, and so forth. I don't have enough experience, or enough contacts with the local ham community, to consider myself a well-rounded ham.
However: just because I'm no timer, doesn't mean that my opinion doesn't matter.
Geeze ... try and offer an original suggestion, get modded down to flamebait.
I understand the problem quite clearly: BPL radiates in all of the HF ham bands (and if what you say is true, the entire HF spectrum) and keeps hams from having our lovely DX chats.
If there is indeed a BPL transmission technology that throws off less RFI, or puts out RFI in a more tractable part of the spectrum, then the ARRLshould by all means pursue regulations guaranteeing the use of that transmission technology, as opposed to the current disruptive one.
But my point is still valid: rather than exchanging heated words with FCC, they'd do well to stop the problem at its source. If nobody wants to buy broadband over power lines because they've all grown accustomed to low-cost community-operated wireless networking, the power companies will have no market for BPL in the areas where BPL would have previously been the only choice for broadband!
Ok, I entirely understand why these folks are mad about the interference caused by BPL. I have an amateur radio license myself.
It seems to me, however, that if these hams are going to protest the deployment of last-mile(s) broadband technology, they'll be better off promoting a creative, alternative solution. They may lobby all they please, but the population of hams will continue to shrink, and networking will become so ubiquitous, that within 50 years we'll need every broadband delivery mechanism we can get. Delivering power and data over the same link is efficient. Perhaps, by then, we'll be better able to control the interference.
So, instead of fighting the inevitable, why don't they deploy wireless mesh networks to the BPL trial areas? They need to show the locals that broadband can be had for cheap, and without causing their garage doors to open and close at random, TVs to be fuzzy, etc.
Chaitin's a pretty random guy, then, is he?
Perhaps we can get him drunk and let him wander around, encoding the direction of every step as a two-bit integer. That should be an adequate source of randomness, provided he's drunk enough.
Since PHP executes server side, you (the webmaster) wouldn't need to worry so much about your users' security, because no OpenGL or other executable code would be running on their systems. We're all familiar with PHP scripts that use ImageMagick or imlib to render 2d graphics at the user's request. I can easily see this OpenGL PHP binding being used for the same purpose, only with 3D graphics. With some slight modification, we could use a software driver in combination OpenGL's render-to-texture features to support realtime rendering into an image. Run the image through imlib to get a GIF file, and stream it to the user...voila, you have dynamically generated 3D graphics on your web page, without any work on the part of the user's browser!
Oops! I meant to say: That would imply that all of the 3D math, texture mapping, shading, rasterization, etc was written in PHP. This is what happens when we post to Slashdot before having our afternoon triple espresso!
Alert and knowledgeable readers will note that this isn't an implementation of OpenGL, but a binding of the OpenGL API into the PHP language.
A PHP *implementation* of OpenGL would be very impressive, indeed! That would imply that all of the 3D math, texture mapping, shading, rasterization, etc was written in OpenGL. Unfortunately, such an implementation would probably be extremely slow and therefore fairly useless. And it would of course still require an dynamically linked C library for framebuffer access.
So -- this is a cute trick, to be sure, but nothing to write home about. The author of the software has already said as much in an earlier comment.
You might still run into trouble by mimicking the leader's (or the average car's) actions. Let's say the leader swerved right hard, and the next five cars in the train also swerved right, though progressively less hard. Now let's say I'm the unlucky seventh car in the lane, and just as I decide to swerve right, someone pulls up beside me...big trouble, unless my car's autopilot is also capable of collision avoidance with arbitrary obstacles.
I think we might have more success in this run-on thought experiment if we simplified the rules. If the follower's behavior were dictated by a few simple rules:
1) Maintain constant distance from the cars ahead of and behind me (in the train or not)
2) Strive to match the leader's forward/backward speed at all times (when not preempted by rule #1)
3) Never follow the leader in lateral movement, only front-back
Then the power of a road train would be greatly reduced -- it would behave essentially the same as a train of luxury cars using radar cruise control -- but its behavior would be much more predictable. If the leader swerved left or right, the cars would stop following. If he came to a sudden stop, the cars would do the same. If one car in the middle of the train departed, none would follow it, and the cars on either end of him would close the gap.