The official records would also show, if they bothered to measure such things, that a significant portion of that hungry 10% has a very large and expensive rent-to-own HDTV in their living room. Further, it should also show that they're feeding that television a rotation of cable and satellite providers under names of different household members: As one service disconnects due to nonpayment, another is subscribed to by a different person.
There may not be a Lexus in the drive, but there sure as fuck is an awesome set for watching wrestling on.
We're only there to find WMD. No, wait, I mean, we're only there to find Saddam. Rather, we're only there to instill a democratic government. In fact, we're only there to stop the insurgence of people trying to keep us from fucking up their side of the world.
Yeah, that's really fucking committed. Not to mention the amount of world-wide respect his commitment and tact have garnered.
You can want anything at all, but that doesn't mean you'll get it.
With Check 21 being law for years now, it is possible and perfectly legal for Comcast to simply scan your check into a computer and then destroy it, with the actual document never being seen by a bank.
In order for this to work, they're authorized (see link, above) to go mucking with your checking account every time you give them a paper check.
You only think you're safer. In reality, you're just killing extra trees.
What do I expect? I thought I detailed fairly well what I expect. If you're still confused, head over to the library and pick up a few back issues of Byte, or even Computer Shopper, from 80's or early 90's.
But whatever the case, I'd be satisfied with quality reviews of specialized products, too. But those don't exist anywhere anymore, either.
No, wait -- that's not what I mean at all. In fact, I mourn the loss of proper technical journalism in the world. Nobody bothers actually reviewing a product, or rendering an original opinion anymore.
Instead, we get twelve pages of ads, with only sixteen paragraphs of whitewash, er, ahem, content spread amongst them.
I miss seeing reviews produced by competent and well-qualified people about things other than the latest 7800GTX repack. Just try to find useful comparison information on printers, monitors, keyboards, or even simple mice. These products are the human interface for the machine and are therefore among the most important facets of it, but unless it's twice as expensive as it should be and is intended for a child's gaming rig then there will be no reviews of it in the blogs.
There's a thousand disparate e-commerce reviews to wade through, sure, but at least they're typically honest. Blog entries (if you can find one related) all lack any semblance of depth or integrity.
The dead-tree derivatives like C|Net and the remains of Ziff-Davis aren't any better these days, as they flail about trying to copy their blog competitor's attention-deficit formatting and lack of editorial oversight, managing only to add more misery to their already inevitable death.
Absolutely nobody ever bothers setting up repeatable tests for comparative measurement of anything in this century unless it can be done in the form of a Quake benchmark. And even then, products offering 1-2% gain for the low-low price of $200 more than everything else in the review are proclaimed to be the "clear winner" by some spineless high-school kid who is afraid to write a bad review for fear that XFX or MSI or whoever will turn off the free hardware spigot in retaliation.
The fact that I find Amazon and Newegg customer reviews by the clueless masses to be some of the most meaningful and useful information available makes me feel like we've lost something important. It's probably gone forever.
A cat and a dog will get along together generally as well as that same cat or dog would with anything else, including members of its own species, or humans.
I've produced the arched-back hissing demonstration by trying to handle kittens of a few days old, which hadn't had any prior human contact. This is, of course, somewhat different from the typical household kitten that is gently handled by humans as often as possible from moments after its birth onward.
The disgruntled farm kitten, therefore, simply hadn't yet learned to trust humans. The household kitten learned early on, likely before it could even see, that people were generally OK.
It may still be related to an innate fear, but it's a fear of anything that moves, not some specific phobia related specifically to dogs or other stereotypically-incompatible creatures that it has never encountered.
To further break the stereotype of such specific innate fears: I have a pet rat who has not ever displayed any fear of a very large house cat. The rat is so not-bloody-fearful that it will walk right up to the cat to curiously examine it. The cat, of course, just sees this as an invitation to be treated to a warm, fur-covered meal and stages occasional attacks, but none of them are successful due to consistently quick intervention by a human.
Because the attacks are always stopped before any cat-rat contact can occur, the rat will not learn that cats are dangerous, and will simply not learn to fear them in this environment.
But more important than their exact composition is the question of how well they fare over the long term.
I've thrown away at least a dozen motherboards with nothing at all wrong with them, except for a few bad capacitors, all within the last 5 or so years.
I recently fixed a not-too-old series 2 tivo which had a few bulging capacitors in its power supply. This was mostly interesting because all of the obviously broken caps were of the same brand, while the other 4 or 5 brands of caps on that board appeared to be OK.
So: Does this solid conductive polymer capacitor improve reliability? If not, are there any advantages to the technology other than being newly marketable?
ACPI has been around for almost eleven fucking years. In-depth information about it can be had in all of the usual sources, from LKML to Wikipedia to decade-fucking-old back issues of Byte and PC Magazine.
Everything you say is true, but you're missing a further bit of irony:
Businesses are also expected to pay more for television service than residential customers. It's another form of licensing fee, similar to what ASCAP/BMI does to music in public places.
See, for example, commercial.dishnetwork.com -- it's a whole different animal than their residential pricing, policies, and packages.
Arguments about this hurting station owners is based on the flawed assumption that gasoline has a fixed markup, but that's generally not true: Most states allow market economics (including, of course, wind direction, phase of moon, rumors, lies, and perhaps now ambient temperature) to dictate the price of gasoline at the pump.
So, in a hypothetical dream-world where all gas stations are required to adjust the meaning of the US Gallon based on temperature, all gas stations in a given climatic area will be about equally affected by temperature shifts.
Of course, their margins are already quite slim, and successful gas stations are not operated by fools. Therefore, if the cost of dispensing "One Temperature-Compensated US Gallon" rises above that of "One Old-School Volumetric US Gallon," then they'll just unilaterally increase prices to compensate, by whatever amount the market will bear.
There will be some variable and inconsistent pricing while they learn to compensate for the change, but it the adjustment period will be short-lived. We consumers wouldn't even notice it given the frequent swings in gasoline prices as of late.
Are all of you folks completely unable to see that I mirrored, as closely as possible, all of the original poster's mistakes, bad habits, formatting, and punctuation? Same number of sentences. Same number of parenthetical remarks. I even used the same exact words, wherever I found it possible to do so.
proof reading there words: Misuse of "there" instead of "their," just like the original poster.
site Op's: I don't even know where to begin describing the wrongness of these letters being juxtaposed just like this, but it's simply copied verbatim (as legally protected parody) from the text provided by the original poster.
Punctuation and Letter's: I used a little liberty with these particular sins, but felt that was necessary to complete the body of work.
Maybe the next time you feel the urge to troll yourself, look a little a bit more closely at the context before hitting the "submit" button. Otherwise, you may just make yourself look like a foolish and careless slacker.
But you're right, I suppose. It is funnier your way. I just can't stop laughing about the way you sling about your grammatical corrections and editorial remarks.
It reeks of genuine hilarity, and I thank you for that. Your veraciousness is to be applauded.
What I don't understand, why aren't people reading their own comments (proof-reading there words, it's common in written speech)? I understand the logic behind poor grammar, but why support an author that cannot produce comprehensible English?!? (I understand they also don't produce comprehensible German, but I don't care about that) Is writing proper English that difficult for many people?!? Perhaps I should write another article which explains to the user how to do this? I had a previous article published on englishnewswire.net, but that was written in or around 2000, and since I can't contact the englishnewswire site Op's, I can't update the article (using Punctuation and capital Letter's creatively). Or perhaps people are just too lazy to bother trying to communicate clearly?!?
1. Doctors have had for eons a very functional on-call system which allows them to truly take time off of work, dispite their obvious importance to society. They don't need to be in contact 24/7, but only when they're on-call. So, they needn't be watching a movie and awaiting a phone call at the same time. These folks probably shouldn't be doing anything which is too terribly consuming while on-call, but while off-call they have other qualified doctors who are able to handle any emergencies which may pop up. Watch a movie? Take a trip to the lake/mountains/edge of the Earth? As long as they're not on-call at the time, they're covered.
2. "Similar professionals" risking "heaping piles of cash"? Uh, yeah. If they're that fucking important, they need to get away from being a single point of failure in their company immediately. Forget the relatively benign concept of them missing an important deal because the person is watching a movie -- they just might get hit by a bus on their way back to the office one day, and their coworkers and family members will be glad that Daddy Moneytree had his shit together beforehand.
If they're unable or unwilling to do this, I see them having four choices:
1. Accept that a couple of hours away from work means a couple of hours away from work, and that this may have business consequences. 2. Stay the fuck out of the movie theater, being qualitively too important for such detached entertainment. 3. Hire a lackey to take and screen their calls, fetching them from the theater in the event that something important happens that needs their attention. Being responsible for "heaping piles of cash," tickets+lackey should be at least as affordable to them as the tickets alone are to my broke ass. 4. Download the telesync and watch it at home, where they can yammer into the phone as much as they want.
Being a professional and important businessperson does not entitle them to conduct business wherever they choose, at the expense of others. Else, we might as well invite in all the dog groomers, day care providers, computer professionals, and professional skateboarders and musicians in as well. If Daddy Moneytree gets to conduct business while out at a movie, then I want to be able to do the same thing as a meat cutter.
I've ranted at length about it here in the past, but the point is simple: There is no law requiring anyone to stop, just for setting off a door alarm on the way out of the store. There is also no law permitting them to force anyone to stop.
It's not so much that nobody wants to be bothered with doing anything about it, but rather that all but the dumbest of them realize that they're already defeated and powerless, long before the alarm actually goes off.
It's amazing to me that a group so technical as that here on Slashdot is typically completely confounded when it comes to anything technical when it comes to dealing with a telephone. Caller ID is a convenience service, meant to be convenient for both the calling and called parties, and able to be completely disabled and/or manipulated -- by design.
There's good reasons for this.
Suppose that a small company, WidgetCo, has 100 desks, all of which have a phone on them with its own extension on the phone system, and Direct Inward Dialing set up so that each desk has its own globally-accessible PSTN telephone number, and they're all prefixed 212-222-21xx.
Suppose also they have only a single PRI to the outside world, which only gives them 23 "phone lines".
In order to get more than 23 different "outgoing numbers," their switch is programmed to set up caller ID according to the DID number of the person's extension. So that Bob, at extension 168 a.k.a. PSTN DID 212-222-2168, can have 212-222-2168 show up on caller ID instead of the number for the receptionist or IVR. And so can Fred, over at x193, along with anyone else at any (or all) of the other desks as long as the local phone system is configured accordingly.
It's -good- that your fax machine show up on caller ID as being from from it's own, unique, number, instead of that of the receptionist.
It's not a lie -- it's just a more efficient way of doing things. This is all just part of how telephone trunking works, at almost all levels, all the way through the PSTN between the two parties. It is not magic.:)
It is also worth noting that this Caller ID information being sent over the PRI by WidgetCo contains only the desired originating number, but never any name information. So while the system makes it easy for Bob and Fred to have their DID numbers displayed on calls that they make, they won't be able to put their own name there without coordinated cooperation with the telephone company (which is, of course, impossible). The name is drawn out of a database by the called party's CO, in a fashion not completely unlike reverse DNS [1]. In this case, the name displayed by Caller ID would likely be "WidgetCo" for all 100 DID extensions.
[1]: And, like reverse DNS, screwdrivers, knives, hammers, and other useful tools, it can be abused. But just because some of the people who use them are broken doesn't mean the tools themselves need fixed/criminalized/fucked with.
I believe that the attitude would apply equally to blues, jazz, classical, and classic soul/funk as it would to the modern pop tripe that you seem to think it implies.
Quit being a snob! Look again at what the poster said, and then apply it to your scenario without immediately disqualifying yourself on the basis that you posess Superior Culture.
In other words:
Listen to better [blues|jazz|classical|classic soul/funk|pop tripe], and a greater percentage of what actually gets put onto a CD will actually be good.
AFAICT, all of the E36 OBD-II (post-1996) 6-cylinder model descriptions are wrong.
For whatever reason, stated power output for a given displacement went down somewhat with the change in engine management systems, and the model numbers changed accordingly although displacement actually stayed the same.
For example, a 1995 325i has a 2.5l M50 engine, as expected. But in 1996, that model was dropped, and became the 323i, which was equipped with a 2.5 liter S50. 3-liter engines also suffered from lies in their naming: a 1996 328i actually has a motor with 3 liter displacement.
(Of course, as a consequence to all of this nonsense there's a not-small number of people driving around in modified ODB-I-equipped 1996+ BMWs, all of which were originally equipped for ODB-II. While probably illegal to drive on the street in the States due to braindead emissions laws, it allows them to regain the few horsepower that they allegedly lost.)
The problem with your argument is that your distinguishing point is invalid:
"Promoting copyright infringement" is not a crime.
I mean, dig this:
Hey, fuckers! I want each and every one of you to personally try the burn-and-return game, today. Just download DVD Shrink and a trial of AnyDVD, install them both, and then rent some movies from Blockbuster, dupe them, and return them. It's easy! Anyone can do it! Keep the copy forever!
So there it is - shameless promotion of copyright infringement, courtesy of me. Funny how I don't feel like a criminal for saying it.
Automotive air conditioner compressors are not powered by vacuum[1].
Instead, they are driven by a belt which is connected to the crank shaft by means of two or more pulleys and an electric clutch (which is used to disengage the compressor when not needed, or conditions dictate[2]).
The reason the air conditioner seems so overbuilt in a car is because it -is- overbuilt, because the demands upon it are huge. Peope don't treat them the same as they do in their homes. You don't leave your glass house to sit in an unshaded parking lot for 8 hours and then expect its AC to cool it off from 100+ degrees to something tolerable in just a few minutes, do you?
But you do expect the car's AC to do just that, and cool the air as instantaneously as possible. And remember, it doesn't just have to keep up with the sunlight streaming through the windows, but it also has to remove heat from a few hundred pounds of plastic and sheet metal in the interrior, plus offset the heat generated by its warm-blooded occupants. A pre-heated car with 5 people in it on a hot, sunny day requires a lot of cooling capacity to catch up, let alone keep up, and I'm sure that a lot of folks in such a situation might feel that it's nowhere near overbuilt enough. (The profound lack of meaningful thermal insulation doesn't help much, either.)
So, yeah. It's inefficient and wasteful. But then, so is anything else that involves a piston engine.
[1]: Yeah, sure. The controls in the passenger compartment may be vacuum-operated, but they're just setting the position of various flaps and valves inside the maze of ducts inside the dashboard. There have been various vacuum-operated accessories in cars in the past (things like convertable tops, windshield wipers) as well as in the present (power-assisted brakes), but they're all pretty small things. To suggest that the vacuum of a small gasoline engine is adequate to run a multi-kilowatt compressor load is laughable, at best: Even if you did get it to work, the engine would be uncontrollable at low-to-idle throttle due to presense of copious amounts of air in the cylinders where there would normally be a partial vacuum. Fuel input would have to be increased to match, or else there would be detonation due to the lean mixture (which is every bit as bad as it sounds). This combination of increased air and increased fuel will result in, you guessed it, increased engine speed. Which is not exactly something you want happening just because you switch on the AC, and reeks of "lawsuit waiting to happen." And never mind the efficiency of this hypothetical clusterfuck.
[2]: The compressor may turn off and on depending on pressures (too high, or too low), engine load, throttle position, temperature inside or outside or both, or whatever else the car's designers had in mind.
I don't know of a digital cellular phone existing -- ever -- which does not have a "dock connector." Even a bloody Startac can talk RS-232 just fine. All new(ish) phones have USB ports on them.
But good luck getting GPS data out of any of them. The most you can expect, for any particular phone, is basic modem emulation functionality, and an undocumented interface for accessing contacts/photos/music/whatver.
If history is any indicator at all, then the iPhone will not be different in this regard.
The police should not be videotaped in their interaction with the public because there exists huge potential to exploit such video as defaming of random (or not so random) people who may in fact be doing nothing wrong.
"In tonight's exclusive, we have shocking footage of heavyweight champ John Smith being placed in the back of a patrol car. Police aren't saying what it is that Smith did wrong, but our confidential sources say that he is involved in a [sophisticated money laundering scheme/cocaine binge/nasty divorce/child custody case/other unproven or private nastiness]."
Don't get me wrong. I'm generally all for all sorts of liberties and rights, whether it be of the press or the general public, but especially the much more vague right to avoid being fucked with -- in any form.
What right does a guy with a camera have to start the wheels of the rumor mill churning?
Anecdotally, I've been in the back of a patrol car for questioning. I didn't do anything wrong, and I'm not ashamed of the event. But I do not wish for it to be spun into the public eye, where I would either be forced to defend myself against the spin or admit (by silence) being guilty of something that never happened.
OK, I'm imagining it: A world where software implementations of RSA were never covered by a patent.
And what I see is a world, circa 1996, in which early adoption of SSL was not hindered a patent on RSA. In this world, telnet became deprecated much earlier on, free browsers included strong authentication and encryption, and it wasn't illegal to run Apache with mod-ssl in the US.
It doesn't sound like such a bad place.
Now, of course, what really happened is that RSA was only successfully patented in the US. The rest of the world was free to do whatever they felt like, as outlined above.
Slashdot Mirror
The official records would also show, if they bothered to measure such things, that a significant portion of that hungry 10% has a very large and expensive rent-to-own HDTV in their living room. Further, it should also show that they're feeding that television a rotation of cable and satellite providers under names of different household members: As one service disconnects due to nonpayment, another is subscribed to by a different person.
There may not be a Lexus in the drive, but there sure as fuck is an awesome set for watching wrestling on.
Uh, yeah.
We're only there to find WMD. No, wait, I mean, we're only there to find Saddam. Rather, we're only there to instill a democratic government. In fact, we're only there to stop the insurgence of people trying to keep us from fucking up their side of the world.
Yeah, that's really fucking committed. Not to mention the amount of world-wide respect his commitment and tact have garnered.
Thanks for the laughs, though.
You can want anything at all, but that doesn't mean you'll get it.
With Check 21 being law for years now, it is possible and perfectly legal for Comcast to simply scan your check into a computer and then destroy it, with the actual document never being seen by a bank.
In order for this to work, they're authorized (see link, above) to go mucking with your checking account every time you give them a paper check.
You only think you're safer. In reality, you're just killing extra trees.
What do I expect? I thought I detailed fairly well what I expect. If you're still confused, head over to the library and pick up a few back issues of Byte, or even Computer Shopper, from 80's or early 90's.
But whatever the case, I'd be satisfied with quality reviews of specialized products, too. But those don't exist anywhere anymore, either.
I, for one, welcome our blog-spewing overlords!
No, wait -- that's not what I mean at all. In fact, I mourn the loss of proper technical journalism in the world. Nobody bothers actually reviewing a product, or rendering an original opinion anymore.
Instead, we get twelve pages of ads, with only sixteen paragraphs of whitewash, er, ahem, content spread amongst them.
I miss seeing reviews produced by competent and well-qualified people about things other than the latest 7800GTX repack. Just try to find useful comparison information on printers, monitors, keyboards, or even simple mice. These products are the human interface for the machine and are therefore among the most important facets of it, but unless it's twice as expensive as it should be and is intended for a child's gaming rig then there will be no reviews of it in the blogs.
There's a thousand disparate e-commerce reviews to wade through, sure, but at least they're typically honest. Blog entries (if you can find one related) all lack any semblance of depth or integrity.
The dead-tree derivatives like C|Net and the remains of Ziff-Davis aren't any better these days, as they flail about trying to copy their blog competitor's attention-deficit formatting and lack of editorial oversight, managing only to add more misery to their already inevitable death.
Absolutely nobody ever bothers setting up repeatable tests for comparative measurement of anything in this century unless it can be done in the form of a Quake benchmark. And even then, products offering 1-2% gain for the low-low price of $200 more than everything else in the review are proclaimed to be the "clear winner" by some spineless high-school kid who is afraid to write a bad review for fear that XFX or MSI or whoever will turn off the free hardware spigot in retaliation.
The fact that I find Amazon and Newegg customer reviews by the clueless masses to be some of the most meaningful and useful information available makes me feel like we've lost something important. It's probably gone forever.
I, for one, am not very happy about it.
No.
A cat and a dog will get along together generally as well as that same cat or dog would with anything else, including members of its own species, or humans.
I've produced the arched-back hissing demonstration by trying to handle kittens of a few days old, which hadn't had any prior human contact. This is, of course, somewhat different from the typical household kitten that is gently handled by humans as often as possible from moments after its birth onward.
The disgruntled farm kitten, therefore, simply hadn't yet learned to trust humans. The household kitten learned early on, likely before it could even see, that people were generally OK.
It may still be related to an innate fear, but it's a fear of anything that moves, not some specific phobia related specifically to dogs or other stereotypically-incompatible creatures that it has never encountered.
To further break the stereotype of such specific innate fears: I have a pet rat who has not ever displayed any fear of a very large house cat. The rat is so not-bloody-fearful that it will walk right up to the cat to curiously examine it. The cat, of course, just sees this as an invitation to be treated to a warm, fur-covered meal and stages occasional attacks, but none of them are successful due to consistently quick intervention by a human.
Because the attacks are always stopped before any cat-rat contact can occur, the rat will not learn that cats are dangerous, and will simply not learn to fear them in this environment.
But more important than their exact composition is the question of how well they fare over the long term.
I've thrown away at least a dozen motherboards with nothing at all wrong with them, except for a few bad capacitors, all within the last 5 or so years.
I recently fixed a not-too-old series 2 tivo which had a few bulging capacitors in its power supply. This was mostly interesting because all of the obviously broken caps were of the same brand, while the other 4 or 5 brands of caps on that board appeared to be OK.
So: Does this solid conductive polymer capacitor improve reliability? If not, are there any advantages to the technology other than being newly marketable?
ACPI has been around for almost eleven fucking years. In-depth information about it can be had in all of the usual sources, from LKML to Wikipedia to decade-fucking-old back issues of Byte and PC Magazine.
News? Where?
Everything you say is true, but you're missing a further bit of irony:
Businesses are also expected to pay more for television service than residential customers. It's another form of licensing fee, similar to what ASCAP/BMI does to music in public places.
See, for example, commercial.dishnetwork.com -- it's a whole different animal than their residential pricing, policies, and packages.
Here in Ohio, we don't let our grain rot in silos.
No, sir - that would be inefficient, and wasteful.
We just let it rot in huge fucking piles on the ground in front of the silos, like this.
Hope this helps!
Arguments about this hurting station owners is based on the flawed assumption that gasoline has a fixed markup, but that's generally not true: Most states allow market economics (including, of course, wind direction, phase of moon, rumors, lies, and perhaps now ambient temperature) to dictate the price of gasoline at the pump.
So, in a hypothetical dream-world where all gas stations are required to adjust the meaning of the US Gallon based on temperature, all gas stations in a given climatic area will be about equally affected by temperature shifts.
Of course, their margins are already quite slim, and successful gas stations are not operated by fools. Therefore, if the cost of dispensing "One Temperature-Compensated US Gallon" rises above that of "One Old-School Volumetric US Gallon," then they'll just unilaterally increase prices to compensate, by whatever amount the market will bear.
There will be some variable and inconsistent pricing while they learn to compensate for the change, but it the adjustment period will be short-lived. We consumers wouldn't even notice it given the frequent swings in gasoline prices as of late.
Geez. You, too?
Are all of you folks completely unable to see that I mirrored, as closely as possible, all of the original poster's mistakes, bad habits, formatting, and punctuation? Same number of sentences. Same number of parenthetical remarks. I even used the same exact words, wherever I found it possible to do so.
proof reading there words: Misuse of "there" instead of "their," just like the original poster.
site Op's: I don't even know where to begin describing the wrongness of these letters being juxtaposed just like this, but it's simply copied verbatim (as legally protected parody) from the text provided by the original poster.
Punctuation and Letter's: I used a little liberty with these particular sins, but felt that was necessary to complete the body of work.
Maybe the next time you feel the urge to troll yourself, look a little a bit more closely at the context before hitting the "submit" button. Otherwise, you may just make yourself look like a foolish and careless slacker.
My, how dense you are, AC.
But you're right, I suppose. It is funnier your way. I just can't stop laughing about the way you sling about your grammatical corrections and editorial remarks.
It reeks of genuine hilarity, and I thank you for that. Your veraciousness is to be applauded.
What I don't understand, why aren't people reading their own comments (proof-reading there words, it's common in written speech)? I understand the logic behind poor grammar, but why support an author that cannot produce comprehensible English?!? (I understand they also don't produce comprehensible German, but I don't care about that) Is writing proper English that difficult for many people?!? Perhaps I should write another article which explains to the user how to do this? I had a previous article published on englishnewswire.net, but that was written in or around 2000, and since I can't contact the englishnewswire site Op's, I can't update the article (using Punctuation and capital Letter's creatively). Or perhaps people are just too lazy to bother trying to communicate clearly?!?
Ah, yes. -Those- people.
1. Doctors have had for eons a very functional on-call system which allows them to truly take time off of work, dispite their obvious importance to society. They don't need to be in contact 24/7, but only when they're on-call. So, they needn't be watching a movie and awaiting a phone call at the same time. These folks probably shouldn't be doing anything which is too terribly consuming while on-call, but while off-call they have other qualified doctors who are able to handle any emergencies which may pop up. Watch a movie? Take a trip to the lake/mountains/edge of the Earth? As long as they're not on-call at the time, they're covered.
2. "Similar professionals" risking "heaping piles of cash"? Uh, yeah. If they're that fucking important, they need to get away from being a single point of failure in their company immediately. Forget the relatively benign concept of them missing an important deal because the person is watching a movie -- they just might get hit by a bus on their way back to the office one day, and their coworkers and family members will be glad that Daddy Moneytree had his shit together beforehand.
If they're unable or unwilling to do this, I see them having four choices:
1. Accept that a couple of hours away from work means a couple of hours away from work, and that this may have business consequences.
2. Stay the fuck out of the movie theater, being qualitively too important for such detached entertainment.
3. Hire a lackey to take and screen their calls, fetching them from the theater in the event that something important happens that needs their attention. Being responsible for "heaping piles of cash," tickets+lackey should be at least as affordable to them as the tickets alone are to my broke ass.
4. Download the telesync and watch it at home, where they can yammer into the phone as much as they want.
Being a professional and important businessperson does not entitle them to conduct business wherever they choose, at the expense of others. Else, we might as well invite in all the dog groomers, day care providers, computer professionals, and professional skateboarders and musicians in as well. If Daddy Moneytree gets to conduct business while out at a movie, then I want to be able to do the same thing as a meat cutter.
I never understood that, either.
I've ranted at length about it here in the past, but the point is simple: There is no law requiring anyone to stop, just for setting off a door alarm on the way out of the store. There is also no law permitting them to force anyone to stop.
It's not so much that nobody wants to be bothered with doing anything about it, but rather that all but the dumbest of them realize that they're already defeated and powerless, long before the alarm actually goes off.
It's amazing to me that a group so technical as that here on Slashdot is typically completely confounded when it comes to anything technical when it comes to dealing with a telephone. Caller ID is a convenience service, meant to be convenient for both the calling and called parties, and able to be completely disabled and/or manipulated -- by design.
:)
There's good reasons for this.
Suppose that a small company, WidgetCo, has 100 desks, all of which have a phone on them with its own extension on the phone system, and Direct Inward Dialing set up so that each desk has its own globally-accessible PSTN telephone number, and they're all prefixed 212-222-21xx.
Suppose also they have only a single PRI to the outside world, which only gives them 23 "phone lines".
In order to get more than 23 different "outgoing numbers," their switch is programmed to set up caller ID according to the DID number of the person's extension. So that Bob, at extension 168 a.k.a. PSTN DID 212-222-2168, can have 212-222-2168 show up on caller ID instead of the number for the receptionist or IVR. And so can Fred, over at x193, along with anyone else at any (or all) of the other desks as long as the local phone system is configured accordingly.
It's -good- that your fax machine show up on caller ID as being from from it's own, unique, number, instead of that of the receptionist.
It's not a lie -- it's just a more efficient way of doing things. This is all just part of how telephone trunking works, at almost all levels, all the way through the PSTN between the two parties. It is not magic.
It is also worth noting that this Caller ID information being sent over the PRI by WidgetCo contains only the desired originating number, but never any name information. So while the system makes it easy for Bob and Fred to have their DID numbers displayed on calls that they make, they won't be able to put their own name there without coordinated cooperation with the telephone company (which is, of course, impossible). The name is drawn out of a database by the called party's CO, in a fashion not completely unlike reverse DNS [1]. In this case, the name displayed by Caller ID would likely be "WidgetCo" for all 100 DID extensions.
[1]: And, like reverse DNS, screwdrivers, knives, hammers, and other useful tools, it can be abused. But just because some of the people who use them are broken doesn't mean the tools themselves need fixed/criminalized/fucked with.
I believe that the attitude would apply equally to blues, jazz, classical, and classic soul/funk as it would to the modern pop tripe that you seem to think it implies.
Quit being a snob! Look again at what the poster said, and then apply it to your scenario without immediately disqualifying yourself on the basis that you posess Superior Culture.
In other words:
Listen to better [blues|jazz|classical|classic soul/funk|pop tripe], and a greater percentage of what actually gets put onto a CD will actually be good.
More exceptions:
AFAICT, all of the E36 OBD-II (post-1996) 6-cylinder model descriptions are wrong.
For whatever reason, stated power output for a given displacement went down somewhat with the change in engine management systems, and the model numbers changed accordingly although displacement actually stayed the same.
For example, a 1995 325i has a 2.5l M50 engine, as expected. But in 1996, that model was dropped, and became the 323i, which was equipped with a 2.5 liter S50. 3-liter engines also suffered from lies in their naming: a 1996 328i actually has a motor with 3 liter displacement.
(Of course, as a consequence to all of this nonsense there's a not-small number of people driving around in modified ODB-I-equipped 1996+ BMWs, all of which were originally equipped for ODB-II. While probably illegal to drive on the street in the States due to braindead emissions laws, it allows them to regain the few horsepower that they allegedly lost.)
The problem with your argument is that your distinguishing point is invalid:
"Promoting copyright infringement" is not a crime.
I mean, dig this:
Hey, fuckers! I want each and every one of you to personally try the burn-and-return game, today. Just download DVD Shrink and a trial of AnyDVD, install them both, and then rent some movies from Blockbuster, dupe them, and return them. It's easy! Anyone can do it! Keep the copy forever!
So there it is - shameless promotion of copyright infringement, courtesy of me. Funny how I don't feel like a criminal for saying it.
Er. Uh. WTF?
Automotive air conditioner compressors are not powered by vacuum[1].
Instead, they are driven by a belt which is connected to the crank shaft by means of two or more pulleys and an electric clutch (which is used to disengage the compressor when not needed, or conditions dictate[2]).
The reason the air conditioner seems so overbuilt in a car is because it -is- overbuilt, because the demands upon it are huge. Peope don't treat them the same as they do in their homes. You don't leave your glass house to sit in an unshaded parking lot for 8 hours and then expect its AC to cool it off from 100+ degrees to something tolerable in just a few minutes, do you?
But you do expect the car's AC to do just that, and cool the air as instantaneously as possible. And remember, it doesn't just have to keep up with the sunlight streaming through the windows, but it also has to remove heat from a few hundred pounds of plastic and sheet metal in the interrior, plus offset the heat generated by its warm-blooded occupants. A pre-heated car with 5 people in it on a hot, sunny day requires a lot of cooling capacity to catch up, let alone keep up, and I'm sure that a lot of folks in such a situation might feel that it's nowhere near overbuilt enough. (The profound lack of meaningful thermal insulation doesn't help much, either.)
So, yeah. It's inefficient and wasteful. But then, so is anything else that involves a piston engine.
[1]: Yeah, sure. The controls in the passenger compartment may be vacuum-operated, but they're just setting the position of various flaps and valves inside the maze of ducts inside the dashboard. There have been various vacuum-operated accessories in cars in the past (things like convertable tops, windshield wipers) as well as in the present (power-assisted brakes), but they're all pretty small things. To suggest that the vacuum of a small gasoline engine is adequate to run a multi-kilowatt compressor load is laughable, at best: Even if you did get it to work, the engine would be uncontrollable at low-to-idle throttle due to presense of copious amounts of air in the cylinders where there would normally be a partial vacuum. Fuel input would have to be increased to match, or else there would be detonation due to the lean mixture (which is every bit as bad as it sounds). This combination of increased air and increased fuel will result in, you guessed it, increased engine speed. Which is not exactly something you want happening just because you switch on the AC, and reeks of "lawsuit waiting to happen." And never mind the efficiency of this hypothetical clusterfuck.
[2]: The compressor may turn off and on depending on pressures (too high, or too low), engine load, throttle position, temperature inside or outside or both, or whatever else the car's designers had in mind.
So what?
I don't know of a digital cellular phone existing -- ever -- which does not have a "dock connector." Even a bloody Startac can talk RS-232 just fine. All new(ish) phones have USB ports on them.
But good luck getting GPS data out of any of them. The most you can expect, for any particular phone, is basic modem emulation functionality, and an undocumented interface for accessing contacts/photos/music/whatver.
If history is any indicator at all, then the iPhone will not be different in this regard.
Perhaps:
The police should not be videotaped in their interaction with the public because there exists huge potential to exploit such video as defaming of random (or not so random) people who may in fact be doing nothing wrong.
"In tonight's exclusive, we have shocking footage of heavyweight champ John Smith being placed in the back of a patrol car. Police aren't saying what it is that Smith did wrong, but our confidential sources say that he is involved in a [sophisticated money laundering scheme/cocaine binge/nasty divorce/child custody case/other unproven or private nastiness]."
Don't get me wrong. I'm generally all for all sorts of liberties and rights, whether it be of the press or the general public, but especially the much more vague right to avoid being fucked with -- in any form.
What right does a guy with a camera have to start the wheels of the rumor mill churning?
Anecdotally, I've been in the back of a patrol car for questioning. I didn't do anything wrong, and I'm not ashamed of the event. But I do not wish for it to be spun into the public eye, where I would either be forced to defend myself against the spin or admit (by silence) being guilty of something that never happened.
Just a thought.
OK, I'm imagining it: A world where software implementations of RSA were never covered by a patent.
And what I see is a world, circa 1996, in which early adoption of SSL was not hindered a patent on RSA. In this world, telnet became deprecated much earlier on, free browsers included strong authentication and encryption, and it wasn't illegal to run Apache with mod-ssl in the US.
It doesn't sound like such a bad place.
Now, of course, what really happened is that RSA was only successfully patented in the US. The rest of the world was free to do whatever they felt like, as outlined above.
Yay us!
Yes. On purpose.
"But this one goes to eleven." It's just like Spinal Tap, but spread across the entire popular music industry.