I grew up in a house with bad central heating (a giant coal furnace which was converted to natural gas). It got very cold upstairs at night, often with frost on both side of the window. It was a long, long time ago, and I have no idea how cold it actually was...but I sure appreciated it when the furnace got replaced with something modern.
I mean, holy shit: 5C is cold.
I spent two recent winters heating my own house with a gas range and some fans. Why? Because the furnaces (plural) had died in floods (plural again), and the electric service was incapable of providing sufficient oomph to heat the dwelling by itself.
We managed to keep it at, roughly, 5-8C at the coldest.
At that temperature:
A wet cloth on the floor of the kitchen would freeze in place. The clothes washer would have its lines freeze up, and twice had its pump seize because it was full of ice.
I spent many very enjoyable hours with a hair drier in the basement, trying to get the pipes thawed so I could take a shower.
I had to buy bigger heaters for the aquariums.
The cat turned into a lethargic, needy twit.
I could see my breath in the bedroom. And, accordingly, I didn't get any sex from my wife.
I'm not in Norway, but way over and down south in Ohio.
I've heard a lot of claims about CFLs and LEDs, but "changing them less often" has never been one of them.
Regular tungsten incandescent bulbs are so cheap that the cost of the item itself is tiny.
Fancier halogen bulbs tend to be a lot more expensive, but (in my experience) tend to also last a lot longer.
And both types seem to last almost forever when used with a dimmer switch.
And in either case, if I were doing resistive heating with electricity almost all of the time, I wouldn't care about it. I'd simply pick the lamp which would produce the most pleasing light for the environment that they're in. This might mean that I use tungsten incandescent for the bedroom, and halogen for the office.
But it doesn't mean that I'd ever switch to CFL or LED, neither of which are any where near as good at actually illuminating things as conventional lamps are. Simply because: Any heat not produced by a light bulb must be produced by something else.
Now, here in Ohio, it's rather a lot warmer some of the time. We see a range of around -28 to +46 Celsius.
So, since it's rather hot some of the year, many of my lamps are CFL. But since it's also rather cold much of the year, I don't care to replace the incandescent/halogens where color is important.
Sounds like it's more about getting better* spontaneous shots out of a small, portable device, than trying to replace a proper camera+lighting.
I don't carry a dedicated camera, unless I'm planning on doing some photography. I've always got my phone, though. Any improvement is welcome.
*"Better", as in, an improvement over what similar devices could do before, not "better" as in that which can be accomplished by less-convenient means.
First, he wrote the book. Then, things happen. After that, he's threatened by the Pentagon. He decides to play along. Sometime later, he's had more time to think and then decides doesn't like the game he's been forced into.
Presumably, the author is human, and is capable of changing his mind.
If you're talking about the old PalmOS. The original Palm company was sold to 3M with the provision that Handspring (composed of the people who originally built and ran Palm) would get a license to continue building products with it. Third parties were never allowed to produce PalmOS devices.
Palm was initially independent, then bought by US Robotics, and was sold to 3com (not 3M). Handspring wasn't founded until about a year after the 3com acquisition. Eventually, Palm was spun off on its own again, Handspring was recombined, then Palm split into separate hardware and software groups, and then reuinited. Most recently, the mess was bought by HP.
Meanwhile, even Fossil once made a wristwatch that ran PalmOS. They even, allegedly, sold some at some point. Others have provided additional references to other PalmOS devices produced by third parties.
In 1999, I bought a Blaupunkt car stereo that supported RDS. It worked fine in the US.
While I had that radio, RDS actually got better, not worse. It went from some stations having IDs, to most of them. And a lot of stations then started doing now-playing text, and such. It even had a function, which I found very useful in unfamiliar areas, where it would automagically locate radio stations based on the type of programming they had. It could even set its own clock, back when that was still a neat trick to be doing. All of this worked great.
The radio did also support frequency hopping, traffic/weather report switching, and all that, but nobody around here used those functions as far as I could tell. These functions seem geared more toward the needs of national simucast networks like BBC than anyone else, which is fine, but not something that folks do much of around here.
Who except those who live in rural areas even bother with an antenna anymore?
Me. I don't like paying for cable. A lot of content is online (either legally, or somewhat less so), if not available from Netflix. Except for two things: Local TV news, and PBS.
And I happen to like local TV news and PBS.
Between Time Warner and AT&T Uverse, or any of the usual sources for satellite, I've got plenty of ways to pay to watch freely-broadcast TV. But it's cheaper/easier/better/more reliable not to bother with any of that and just use an antenna.
It works for good for radio, too. Not so long ago, I used to be able to listen to both CBC and 89x out of Windsor (about 2 hours away by car), until the FCC granted some nearby licenses on those frequencies.
It may be impossible, but we should try to convey as much of our data to our posterity as we can.
That's a nice sentiment and all, but as someone who is completely bored with ancient history simply due to its veracity and unbelievable nature, I guess I don't really care.
I see ancient texts as ancient, unverifiable fiction. And fiction, while it often has a basis in reality and is sometimes a great, insight-filled pleasure to read, is still fiction. And I, myself, am mostly bored with fiction.
So, presume for a moment that we can, from this point onward, forever record all data (or damn near). Who will read it? Who will sort out the sordid fiction from the genuine truths? No one man can do so by himself, if his own lifespan is finite.
I mean, honestly: Is it important for this very comment to be preserved? Will the works of adolf, #21054 some millennia from now, actually be useful or thought-provoking? I've got a big enough ego to say that I'd certainly hope that folks will study my written banter forever, but I'm enough of a realist to recognize that this simply won't occur.
So, then: Who's banter will be preserved and studied, instead?
I propose that it's impossible to predict what information will be deemed important or truthful ages from now. And that preserving all data instead of just some portion thereof really does does help any. I further propose that whatever we think is important or factual, today, may well be fictitious in a few thousand years. And that some legitimate fictions, as presented today, will be regarded as facts later.
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" (George Santayana) is a lovely catchphrase, but it assumes accuracy in the remembrance.
I prefer the following:
"Give any one species too much rope, and they'll fuck it up." (Roger Waters), which makes no such assumption.
Deflate was brought to life about two decades ago by Phil Katz of pkzip fame. And because back then it was very computationally-expensive to compress data, a way to select the amount of compression (ie: time used) was very useful: You could select a little compression to make things a lot smaller in a big hurry, or more compression when space (or transmission time) was a bigger issue.
(I remember when pkzip 2 came out, along with deflate. I used to use it to recompress ZIP uploads on my BBS using the highest compression available. It saved a bit of space, and a bit of time when folks would download things. This added up pretty quickly to being a good idea.)
Applying the Razor:
libpng probably just includes it because the implementation of deflate that they borrowed included it. And GIMP probably just exposes the setting because libpng provides it.
She'll need more than two if she's thinking of the children.
Probably the best bet is to have your wife get more breasts added. One for her, one for each of the kids, one for you, and one for me*.
*: I've been sharing the first of your wife's tits with you for too long, and frankly, I'm getting tired of that. If everyone else gets their own tit, then I want one, too.
I bought a pipe to the internet, I should be able to do what I want with it. If it's limited to 2 GB of data or whatever, then so be it, but that's different than saying "If you connect a phone it's $25, but if you connect a laptop, it's $15 more for the same exact data." It's price gouging people who use laptops just for the convenience of using a full size keyboard and monitor.
Verizon doesn't have an "unlimited" (as in uncapped) data plan, at least not here in GA. You get to chose 250MB/month (!!!) or 5GB/month. I believe they do use the word "unlimited", but it's a lie -- the caps have been in place for at least the 30 months I've been with them.
Not true.
Been discussed before. Etc.
Blah, blah, blah.
Verizon is Verizon is Verizon is Verizon, whether in GA, MN, TN, VA, or FU.
Verizon currently does offer an unlimited data plan, but only for smartphones. There are no specified limits, at all, thus making their unlimited smartphone completely unlimited (on paper, at least).
A MiFi or a netbook or an aircard or a whatever other non-smartphone device is limited to, at most, 5GB/month.
So: I can, currently, absorb as much bandwidth as I want with my Droid. But if I had a MiFi tied to a laptop, the plan would cap out at 5GB.
It's been this way at least since I got the Droid not long after launch last year. Previous to that, I didn't care enough to pay any attention.
Their telephone data plans are toward the right side of this page. Their dedicated data plans are described separately, however, over here, with very clearly stated limits. And, in neither case do I see any particular mention about excluding Peaches.
I once tried to open an account at Movie Gallery. When they asked for my home phone number, I gladly gave it to them. They then, with me standing right there, called my house to verify the number. The conversation went something like this:
Them: Nobody answers the number you gave me. Me: Of course nobody answered. I'm here in your store, not at home. Them: We need someone to answer, so we can verify that it's your number, or we can't let you rent anything. Me: How am I supposed to do that? Them: ??? Me: !!!
Not surprisingly, that place also went out of business a couple of years after that.
I, for one, like having a choice of different services.
Ideally, a whitespace network should be capable of, eventually, replacing my 12Mbps VDSL...or at least supplementing it when it is more efficient to do so.
This way, I still get fast connections to far-away places, but don't need to bother with zig-zagging my data all over the country just to get it to Joe a few blocks over.
By posting this, I'm un-modding some other stuff. So be it.
With CB, you have to listen to everyone else's banter. Communications are broadcast, by definition, to anyone else whose particular squelch setting and receiver sensitivity will allow them to receive it. It is easy for one party in one conversation to step all over another party in a completely different conversation, while being completely unaware of it.
There are no PL tones on CB to limit unintentional interference and distractions, just different channels.
But I hasten to say that things have moved on:
We now live in a world where communications are neither so rude, nor so limited.
It is now trivial to determine the precise sender and recipient of a transmission (hello, IP). It is trivial to ratchet down output power, automatically, such as to very nearly speak only to those who you intend to speak to. And it's possible to share a band, due to things like CDMA, TDMA, and OFDM.
None of this exists on CB.
And when mesh networking enters the picture, things become even less like a CB.
The acceptance of a white-space provision by the FCC, no matter what modern technology it consists of, will be a boon for communications amongst a populace -- including the torrenters and the porn mavens, as well as the web browsers and the Facebookers.
To think otherwise is to disregard everything, so far, that the Internet has brought to us, as well as everything that has been learned about RF communication over the past few decades.
(Stating the obvious for those with sufficiently low UIDs and/or those who remember VAXen, or similar, or at least those with a proper beard...)
that is basically it. Speex is built (as I understand it) for lossless transmission methods with little/no error correction needed. Radio, by its very nature is a very lossy medium, so something with better error tolerance is needed. Hence, Codec2 provides a nice route.
that is basically it. Speex is built (as I understand it) for lossless transmission methods with little/no error correction needed. UDP , by its very nature is a very lossy medium, so something with better error tolerance is needed. Hence, Codec2 provides a nice route.
(There. Extrapolated that for you. Doubly-so, perhaps.)
Aha! Finally, someone writes about something that can be useful about this whole thing, instead of just pedantically tearing apart my generalizations.
Thanks!
(Incidentally, I have a very nice (and not so old) 1600x1200 LCD which doesn't do HDCP. If it could cheaply be made to, then that would be very nice indeed.)
it means that while bd discs still cannot be cracked, the digital data that is being transferred to the device can be tapped and perfect digital copies can be made.
Since HDMI can transfer up to 10.2 gigabits per second of data, I don't think these "perfect digital copies" are going to be made any time soon. 1920x1080x60 + 8 channels of uncompressed audio == lots of bandwidth. More than anyone, currently, wants to store -- it'd be cheaper to buy the movie than buy the storage for a copy of it it, in the case of a direct HDMI lossless rip. And nevermind actually achieving these datarates on any commonly-available storage medium.
Unless, of course, the copies get compressed with something. And then, plainly, they're not perfect anymore.
So you record the stream from the player to the display. No big difference.
It's the difference between copying an unmodified MPEG (or VC1) stream at whatever rate your machine can muster, or recording the uncompressed output of such a stream at no faster than real-time.
The former is lossless, smallish, and fast. The latter is lossless only if you can keep up with and store the intense datarate, or is lossy if you recompress it, and it always takes as long to record as the playing-length of the source.
Big differences. Huge, giant, overwhelming differences, in fact.
TFS talks about using the HDCP master key to decode Blu-Ray.
But, really, HDCP has nothing to do with Blu-Ray in particular -- it's protection for a transmission format, not a storage format. The availability of this key means nothing with regards to Blu-Ray.
So, I've been wondering for the past few days: What, exactly, can this HDCP master key do for folks? Does it automagically allow us to decode HDCP-protected content on a DVI or HDMI cable? Or does it allow us to merely sign our own HDCP devices given an appropriate amount of hackery?
Hear, hear. I run Folding@Home all winter. It keeps my (rather leaky) office nice and warm, despite it having no source of heat aside from electronics. I reckon if I'm going to pay for heat, I might as well do something useful with it first.
During the summer, of course, things are set up to use as little power as possible.
I once used a few computers and a circulation fan to heat a large 2-bedroom apartment almost all winter. Between having decent insulation and having heat leaking over from the hallway and the neighbors, I only had to use the heaters on a handful of particularly cold nights.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that perhaps that the applications for DivX are bigger than you think that they are.
I'm not allergic to the cold.
I grew up in a house with bad central heating (a giant coal furnace which was converted to natural gas). It got very cold upstairs at night, often with frost on both side of the window. It was a long, long time ago, and I have no idea how cold it actually was...but I sure appreciated it when the furnace got replaced with something modern.
I mean, holy shit: 5C is cold.
I spent two recent winters heating my own house with a gas range and some fans. Why? Because the furnaces (plural) had died in floods (plural again), and the electric service was incapable of providing sufficient oomph to heat the dwelling by itself.
We managed to keep it at, roughly, 5-8C at the coldest.
At that temperature:
A wet cloth on the floor of the kitchen would freeze in place. The clothes washer would have its lines freeze up, and twice had its pump seize because it was full of ice.
I spent many very enjoyable hours with a hair drier in the basement, trying to get the pipes thawed so I could take a shower.
I had to buy bigger heaters for the aquariums.
The cat turned into a lethargic, needy twit.
I could see my breath in the bedroom. And, accordingly, I didn't get any sex from my wife.
5C is too cold.
I'm not in Norway, but way over and down south in Ohio.
I've heard a lot of claims about CFLs and LEDs, but "changing them less often" has never been one of them.
Regular tungsten incandescent bulbs are so cheap that the cost of the item itself is tiny.
Fancier halogen bulbs tend to be a lot more expensive, but (in my experience) tend to also last a lot longer.
And both types seem to last almost forever when used with a dimmer switch.
And in either case, if I were doing resistive heating with electricity almost all of the time, I wouldn't care about it. I'd simply pick the lamp which would produce the most pleasing light for the environment that they're in. This might mean that I use tungsten incandescent for the bedroom, and halogen for the office.
But it doesn't mean that I'd ever switch to CFL or LED, neither of which are any where near as good at actually illuminating things as conventional lamps are. Simply because: Any heat not produced by a light bulb must be produced by something else.
Now, here in Ohio, it's rather a lot warmer some of the time. We see a range of around -28 to +46 Celsius.
So, since it's rather hot some of the year, many of my lamps are CFL. But since it's also rather cold much of the year, I don't care to replace the incandescent/halogens where color is important.
Sounds like it's more about getting better* spontaneous shots out of a small, portable device, than trying to replace a proper camera+lighting.
I don't carry a dedicated camera, unless I'm planning on doing some photography. I've always got my phone, though. Any improvement is welcome.
*"Better", as in, an improvement over what similar devices could do before, not "better" as in that which can be accomplished by less-convenient means.
Or, perhaps:
First, he wrote the book.
Then, things happen.
After that, he's threatened by the Pentagon.
He decides to play along.
Sometime later, he's had more time to think and then decides doesn't like the game he's been forced into.
Presumably, the author is human, and is capable of changing his mind.
Palm was initially independent, then bought by US Robotics, and was sold to 3com (not 3M). Handspring wasn't founded until about a year after the 3com acquisition. Eventually, Palm was spun off on its own again, Handspring was recombined, then Palm split into separate hardware and software groups, and then reuinited. Most recently, the mess was bought by HP.
Meanwhile, even Fossil once made a wristwatch that ran PalmOS. They even, allegedly, sold some at some point. Others have provided additional references to other PalmOS devices produced by third parties.
Other than that, your paragraph is spot-on!
In 1999, I bought a Blaupunkt car stereo that supported RDS. It worked fine in the US.
While I had that radio, RDS actually got better, not worse. It went from some stations having IDs, to most of them. And a lot of stations then started doing now-playing text, and such. It even had a function, which I found very useful in unfamiliar areas, where it would automagically locate radio stations based on the type of programming they had. It could even set its own clock, back when that was still a neat trick to be doing. All of this worked great.
The radio did also support frequency hopping, traffic/weather report switching, and all that, but nobody around here used those functions as far as I could tell. These functions seem geared more toward the needs of national simucast networks like BBC than anyone else, which is fine, but not something that folks do much of around here.
Who except those who live in rural areas even bother with an antenna anymore?
Me. I don't like paying for cable. A lot of content is online (either legally, or somewhat less so), if not available from Netflix. Except for two things: Local TV news, and PBS.
And I happen to like local TV news and PBS.
Between Time Warner and AT&T Uverse, or any of the usual sources for satellite, I've got plenty of ways to pay to watch freely-broadcast TV. But it's cheaper/easier/better/more reliable not to bother with any of that and just use an antenna.
It works for good for radio, too. Not so long ago, I used to be able to listen to both CBC and 89x out of Windsor (about 2 hours away by car), until the FCC granted some nearby licenses on those frequencies.
That's a nice sentiment and all, but as someone who is completely bored with ancient history simply due to its veracity and unbelievable nature, I guess I don't really care.
I see ancient texts as ancient, unverifiable fiction. And fiction, while it often has a basis in reality and is sometimes a great, insight-filled pleasure to read, is still fiction. And I, myself, am mostly bored with fiction.
So, presume for a moment that we can, from this point onward, forever record all data (or damn near). Who will read it? Who will sort out the sordid fiction from the genuine truths? No one man can do so by himself, if his own lifespan is finite.
I mean, honestly: Is it important for this very comment to be preserved? Will the works of adolf, #21054 some millennia from now, actually be useful or thought-provoking? I've got a big enough ego to say that I'd certainly hope that folks will study my written banter forever, but I'm enough of a realist to recognize that this simply won't occur.
So, then: Who's banter will be preserved and studied, instead?
I propose that it's impossible to predict what information will be deemed important or truthful ages from now. And that preserving all data instead of just some portion thereof really does does help any. I further propose that whatever we think is important or factual, today, may well be fictitious in a few thousand years. And that some legitimate fictions, as presented today, will be regarded as facts later.
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" (George Santayana) is a lovely catchphrase, but it assumes accuracy in the remembrance.
I prefer the following:
"Give any one species too much rope, and they'll fuck it up." (Roger Waters), which makes no such assumption.
It behaves like the compression setting in gzip.
Both PNG and gzip use deflate for compression.
Deflate was brought to life about two decades ago by Phil Katz of pkzip fame. And because back then it was very computationally-expensive to compress data, a way to select the amount of compression (ie: time used) was very useful: You could select a little compression to make things a lot smaller in a big hurry, or more compression when space (or transmission time) was a bigger issue.
(I remember when pkzip 2 came out, along with deflate. I used to use it to recompress ZIP uploads on my BBS using the highest compression available. It saved a bit of space, and a bit of time when folks would download things. This added up pretty quickly to being a good idea.)
Applying the Razor:
libpng probably just includes it because the implementation of deflate that they borrowed included it. And GIMP probably just exposes the setting because libpng provides it.
She'll need more than two if she's thinking of the children.
Probably the best bet is to have your wife get more breasts added. One for her, one for each of the kids, one for you, and one for me*.
*: I've been sharing the first of your wife's tits with you for too long, and frankly, I'm getting tired of that. If everyone else gets their own tit, then I want one, too.
Some of us don't pay extra for tethering, and have been avoiding this trap for awhile.
Not true.
Been discussed before. Etc.
Blah, blah, blah.
Verizon is Verizon is Verizon is Verizon, whether in GA, MN, TN, VA, or FU.
Verizon currently does offer an unlimited data plan, but only for smartphones. There are no specified limits, at all, thus making their unlimited smartphone completely unlimited (on paper, at least).
A MiFi or a netbook or an aircard or a whatever other non-smartphone device is limited to, at most, 5GB/month.
So: I can, currently, absorb as much bandwidth as I want with my Droid. But if I had a MiFi tied to a laptop, the plan would cap out at 5GB.
It's been this way at least since I got the Droid not long after launch last year. Previous to that, I didn't care enough to pay any attention.
Their telephone data plans are toward the right side of this page. Their dedicated data plans are described separately, however, over here, with very clearly stated limits. And, in neither case do I see any particular mention about excluding Peaches.
Stupid policies are not exclusive to Blockbuster.
I once tried to open an account at Movie Gallery. When they asked for my home phone number, I gladly gave it to them. They then, with me standing right there, called my house to verify the number. The conversation went something like this:
Them: Nobody answers the number you gave me.
Me: Of course nobody answered. I'm here in your store, not at home.
Them: We need someone to answer, so we can verify that it's your number, or we can't let you rent anything.
Me: How am I supposed to do that?
Them: ???
Me: !!!
Not surprisingly, that place also went out of business a couple of years after that.
I sure hope it doesn't replace the last mile.
I, for one, like having a choice of different services.
Ideally, a whitespace network should be capable of, eventually, replacing my 12Mbps VDSL...or at least supplementing it when it is more efficient to do so.
This way, I still get fast connections to far-away places, but don't need to bother with zig-zagging my data all over the country just to get it to Joe a few blocks over.
By posting this, I'm un-modding some other stuff. So be it.
With CB, you have to listen to everyone else's banter. Communications are broadcast, by definition, to anyone else whose particular squelch setting and receiver sensitivity will allow them to receive it. It is easy for one party in one conversation to step all over another party in a completely different conversation, while being completely unaware of it.
There are no PL tones on CB to limit unintentional interference and distractions, just different channels.
But I hasten to say that things have moved on:
We now live in a world where communications are neither so rude, nor so limited.
It is now trivial to determine the precise sender and recipient of a transmission (hello, IP). It is trivial to ratchet down output power, automatically, such as to very nearly speak only to those who you intend to speak to. And it's possible to share a band, due to things like CDMA, TDMA, and OFDM.
None of this exists on CB.
And when mesh networking enters the picture, things become even less like a CB.
The acceptance of a white-space provision by the FCC, no matter what modern technology it consists of, will be a boon for communications amongst a populace -- including the torrenters and the porn mavens, as well as the web browsers and the Facebookers.
To think otherwise is to disregard everything, so far, that the Internet has brought to us, as well as everything that has been learned about RF communication over the past few decades.
(Stating the obvious for those with sufficiently low UIDs and/or those who remember VAXen, or similar, or at least those with a proper beard...)
that is basically it. Speex is built (as I understand it) for lossless transmission methods with little/no error correction needed. UDP , by its very nature is a very lossy medium, so something with better error tolerance is needed. Hence, Codec2 provides a nice route.
(There. Extrapolated that for you. Doubly-so, perhaps.)
The way we do almost everything is still is still pretty archaic, well, in the sense that they often require further reading for us to do them right.
Wait.
So.
I can record a Blu-Ray movie from HDMI, encode it in real-time with x264, and end up with something better than the original Blu-Ray?
I'll take three. I'd also like to purchase any remaining stock you might have of perpetual motion machines, if you don't mind.
Aha! Finally, someone writes about something that can be useful about this whole thing, instead of just pedantically tearing apart my generalizations.
Thanks!
(Incidentally, I have a very nice (and not so old) 1600x1200 LCD which doesn't do HDCP. If it could cheaply be made to, then that would be very nice indeed.)
Lies, deceit.
Since HDMI can transfer up to 10.2 gigabits per second of data, I don't think these "perfect digital copies" are going to be made any time soon. 1920x1080x60 + 8 channels of uncompressed audio == lots of bandwidth. More than anyone, currently, wants to store -- it'd be cheaper to buy the movie than buy the storage for a copy of it it, in the case of a direct HDMI lossless rip. And nevermind actually achieving these datarates on any commonly-available storage medium.
Unless, of course, the copies get compressed with something. And then, plainly, they're not perfect anymore.
It's the difference between copying an unmodified MPEG (or VC1) stream at whatever rate your machine can muster, or recording the uncompressed output of such a stream at no faster than real-time.
The former is lossless, smallish, and fast. The latter is lossless only if you can keep up with and store the intense datarate, or is lossy if you recompress it, and it always takes as long to record as the playing-length of the source.
Big differences. Huge, giant, overwhelming differences, in fact.
TFS talks about using the HDCP master key to decode Blu-Ray.
But, really, HDCP has nothing to do with Blu-Ray in particular -- it's protection for a transmission format, not a storage format. The availability of this key means nothing with regards to Blu-Ray.
So, I've been wondering for the past few days: What, exactly, can this HDCP master key do for folks? Does it automagically allow us to decode HDCP-protected content on a DVI or HDMI cable? Or does it allow us to merely sign our own HDCP devices given an appropriate amount of hackery?
Hear, hear. I run Folding@Home all winter. It keeps my (rather leaky) office nice and warm, despite it having no source of heat aside from electronics. I reckon if I'm going to pay for heat, I might as well do something useful with it first.
During the summer, of course, things are set up to use as little power as possible.
I once used a few computers and a circulation fan to heat a large 2-bedroom apartment almost all winter. Between having decent insulation and having heat leaking over from the hallway and the neighbors, I only had to use the heaters on a handful of particularly cold nights.
I imagine that all of the things I listed came with contact information.