I'm in NW Ohio, which isn't -all that- far from Canada, and it's far less expensive to use a 90%+ efficiency gas furnace for heat than it is to use resistive heaters or electronics.
Been there, tried it both ways for entire seasons in the same structure (not by choice), and really: Electric heat is expensive here.
[I did have a couple of crappy apartments at different points which only had electric heat, and when the weather turned cold the first thing I'd do was crank up a few distributed.net clients to do useful work with the energy instead of just create heat, but again: Gas is better, at least here.]
No. The law has never (before now) limited loudness on television.
There has (for eons and eons), and continues to be limits maximum modulation (which is indirectly related to amplitude), but that's not at all the same thing as loudness, and has nothing to do with human perception but instead everything to do with minimizing interference.
In other words: The only person confused about what the term "loudness" means is you. So stop doing that.
If you want less dynamic range from a DVD, just crack open the manual for your player and learn how to adjust it. This is a function that is part of Dolby Digital and it is adjustable on every player I've ever had my hands on.
Some of us like loud car crashes and explosions while watching 2D images and sitting on the couch.
Actually knowing could be very useful, depending on the size of the object and the impact site. You might be able to get to high ground to avoid a tsunami. You might be able to hang out in a cavern to avoid debris fall. You could even renting a plane or catching a quick flight if any were still available. This all presumes an impact significantly smaller than an ELE.
Or, you know: Just use the opportunity to finally call up Dude to buy some smack, bang it with whatever filthy apparatus is available, and then go drive downtown and pay however-much cash the ATM will dish out to facefuck a crackwhore as the fireballs rain down.
In an end-of-your-world scenario, nothing is sacred.
Rather, this just validates a simple truth: My penis thinks for me, and I'm OK with that,
(Disclaimer: I'm married, and have been for darn near a decade, and we understand that her penis is larger than mine -- even if hers cannot be seen. Furthermore, she doesn't care where my penis goes, while also encouraging it to go places it has not yet been. YMM unfortunately V...)
If your email address is important to you, long-term, then it behooves you to ensure that it withstands the failure of all of the different providers that make it happen.
My important email address (not listed above) is on a domain that I own through an independent registrar. So if Google (or whoever) want to treat me badly, I can just go somewhere else.
This "privilege" costs me about $10 per year for the domain, and I can point the MX entries wherever I feel like.
(Meanwhile, it's not as hard to change an email address w.r.t. the rest of the world. I've done it a few times, and the drama was very limited.)
Make it the driver's responsibility to keep the black box in working order, in the same manner as headlights and blinkers.
How in the world would that promote safety?
It's my responsibility to make sure my lights are all working, and that my tires have tread on them...but these have obvious and immediate safety implications.
But a black box does nothing to promote safety. All it does (at best!) is provide additional data for folks to argue about once things have already gone all wrong.
Around the turn of the century I scored a weird 8088 with one 360k floppy drive, no hard drive, and integrated 10base2.
The local computer shop gave me a 5.25" drive and a floppy cable with card-edge connectors on it, and I found a box of NOS floppy disks on clearance at Wal-Mart.
Running MS-DOS from a floppy (or two), I was able to do some fun stuff. It had a browser, an FTP server running as a TSR, and of course telnet. It was kind of neat, and seemed to be ridiculously reliable, but I got rid of it when I moved...
Nowadays, I get more joy from the teletype that I have tied to my Linux box over RS-232.
You've already done a fine job of convincing yourself to believe that you do not need a desk phone.
So unplug the phone and put it in a desk drawer. If anyone (including you) complains about it, then there must be a reason to keep it around. Plug it back in for a few months and try again.
But if nobody notices, just rotate it over to the circular file at the same rate as any other disused desktop annoyance. You still get to keep your extension, and you can (presumably) get to your corporate voicemail if you need to by other means.
(And if you just don't like to do conference calls on a cell phone for some reason or other, then the entire Ask Slashdot is for naught. You still need a desk phone anyway, like an addict needs [or does not need] drugs. So either keep using for conference calls, with pride, or stop using it cold turkey, or nobody will care.)
I consider myself in that group, you insensitive clod. (Although if you want to suggest that folks with autism have a hard time communicating amongst eachother, just as they do with the rest of the world, then I'm right there with you.)
FFS, if anyone read TFS, they'd have seen that it is a question about Verizon LTE, which only operates in one band.
LTE doesn't really mean anything for an antenna designer.
It does if the antenna designer isn't a douchebag who can't read, since (again) the words "Verizon LTE" are very specific about what, exactly, is wanted and required.
(Sometimes I think the problem with engineers is that they expect everyone to speak their language and then spoon-feed them specific, concise instructions, all while anyone capable of doing so would be ahead to just engineer the fucking thing themselves and avoid the needless confusion.)
Verizon's LTE (which is the context here) is, always, 700MHz-ish, which is well within the grasp of a tinkerer. And I don't see anyone asking for perfect; all anyone really needs here is functional.
To use a computer analogy: No home user cares how well a Cat6 cable performs on a Pentascanner or a Fluke network analyzer. They care that they can plug it in and have reliable data transfer betwixt whatever real gear happens to be at either end.
Similarly, nobody cares how the antenna performs on a multi-kilobuck Anritsu monitor, as long as their 4G Internet goes from "meh" to "works reliably."
With regard to reflections and transmitter damage: Unplug the antennas on your WiFi router.
Go ahead. I'll wait while you do this.
With the antennas unplugged, witness nearly 100% reflected power causing no obvious damage.
Plug them back in.
Witness everything working fine, just as before: No smoke, no fire, no drama.
(I know it sounds irrational, but it's almost as if some smart person somewhere had considered the possibility that they might have 100% reflected power on the output and designed things to survive anyway!)
DIY antennas typically have a very high VSSR and while they are great when you need a little bit of gain, if you're aiming for something directional with lots of gain, the use of a bit of wire and a screw driver may cost you 3-10dB over many properly made products.
If the existing antenna is almost adequate, then perfection is not all that important. Any meaningful amount of gain, combined with improved placement, is entirely likely to be sufficient to make a marginal connection reliable.
Indeed, depending on the construction of the house, just getting an antenna (almost any antenna) outside could be a boon for reception: A hunk of coax with a quarter-wavelength of shielding stripped off of one end and then simply draped out of a window on the correct face of the house may make a massive improvement. (Bonus points for making the length of intact coax a multiple of one-half wavelength.)
Not so long ago I built a simple UHF TV antenna with some coat hangers, a scrap 2x4, some washers and screws, tinfoil, cardboard, and a balun. It worked very well* at ~600MHz, which is not dramatically far from Verizon's LTE spectrum.
Cost? About half an hour, plus a handful of washers at the hardware store. The rest of the kit was already laying around, and the rough plans were a random discovery on the Internet.
*: "Very well" meaning that I went from receiving one ATSC station some of the time, to four stations all of the time. Perfect? No. But it was better than the bunny ears and tunable UHF loops I also had laying around by a practical factor of 4, at least**.
I don't know if this is useful for how you want to do things, but here's what I do:
I rip/buy/borrow/download music. It goes into a directory that exists for this purpose, with mostly random sorting (due to the variety of sources). I do not trust the metadata from provided by any of these methods, at all.
I fire up my favorite MP3 tagging machine (mediamonkey, which happens to be a Windows beast). One by one, I edit/verify the metadata, throw some artwork in, and then my favorite tagging machine automatically moves them to another temporary (but this time well-sorted) directory structure. (I like artist/year-album/tracks, YMMV.)
After that comes some automated postprocessing (convert to MP3 if flac, run mp3gain to normalize levels in an album-centric way on mp3s), the results of which get moved their final destination.
I don't worry about the text on the back of the CD case, because chances are I can Google it later, faster than I can manage a bunch of physical disks.
Now then, I've also got my own assortment of odd and special CDs that nobody else seems to have and that confuse the hell out of musicbrainz/cddb/freedb, and these get handled differently -- one at a time, as you say you want to do.
Things I do to make it faster or better:
Normal CDs (which is most of them) just get dumped into the miscellaneous directory, period. As I said, I don't trust metadata produced by someone else, but it's trivial to verify a mass-market CD using Google and Amazon and discogs (who has pictures of the front and back, typically, which I also include) and others if it seems particularly iffy.
Special CDs (the rares, limiteds, odd imports, and other stuff that confuses CDDB/freedb/musicbrainz) are physically sorted into a different pile for special handling. You've already got a good method for this, so use it.
The different temp directories are on physically different drives. This makes copying (WITH changes) a breeze compared to doing it on a single drive.
I put my first FTP site together (WTF? FTP today is insecure as all hell these days for other than anon!) many, many moons ago, along with a commercial port 25 mail server before spam became a real problem
I also had a small hand in actually making spam a problem as well (my hat is not always white).
So, I used to use FTP servers to publish or transfer things. And, well, I don't do that anymore.
These days, I send attachments (sometimes of [OMFG!] 25 or more megabytes), and things work fine.
But filtering attachments? Seriously. It's asking visitors to jump through a hop-scotch before they're permitted to see you: It proves nothing, protects you from nothing, and (at best!) annoys or amuses the person trying to talk to you.
But whatever the case, rejecting attachments never does a single thing to protect you, the company, the sender, or the Security of the World. It proves nothing of any value, while making it difficult for folks (including you!) to make money*.
*Because if you wanted that money, you'd be downloading that data..one way or the other, whether it be a MIME attachment or a file on an FTP server.
I think you meant to say "They were lucky to be able to position themselves in a job that allows an awkward, obsessive, clumsy person with a narrow focus of intellectual ability to prosper, and they are very good at doing what they do."
In a perfect world with a CD in pristine condition, you will still have mastering errors.
Actually, in a perfect world, mastering errors wouldn't exist to begin with -- it's perfect, remember? And over here in the real world, I normally get perfect rips from clean and undamaged CDs, even at rather high speeds.
Start moving the head around to re-read a block and you will see what that does to your read times. Throw in a heavier head for an RW or especially for a lightscribe, and you get poor ripping performance.
Moving the head to re-read a single block? Just how physically wide do you think these blocks are that the weight of the head assembly would be a significant factor on either wear or speed, given the microscopic level of movement this entails?
Now then, I'm open to the suggestion that some readers may be better at ripping an audio CD than some recorders. But reasoning that excess mass must be the root of this perceived disparity seems more like blind faith than sound logic.
To wit, every cheap-shit DVD-RW that I have here, from Lite-on to LG, works both faster and better than the 32x Plextor SCSI CD-ROM reader that I bought exactly for this purpose ever did.
Perhaps you meant to reply to OP. I'm discussing copyright and actual habits of people who are in the business of copying and printing things; you're discussing polymers for firearms.
So while I find your commentary passingly interesting, I really could not give a shit less about it.
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Does Canada not have natural gas?
I'm in NW Ohio, which isn't -all that- far from Canada, and it's far less expensive to use a 90%+ efficiency gas furnace for heat than it is to use resistive heaters or electronics.
Been there, tried it both ways for entire seasons in the same structure (not by choice), and really: Electric heat is expensive here.
[I did have a couple of crappy apartments at different points which only had electric heat, and when the weather turned cold the first thing I'd do was crank up a few distributed.net clients to do useful work with the energy instead of just create heat, but again: Gas is better, at least here.]
My point remains: Every DVD player I've had my hands on has had this function, including licensed software players.
No. The law has never (before now) limited loudness on television.
There has (for eons and eons), and continues to be limits maximum modulation (which is indirectly related to amplitude), but that's not at all the same thing as loudness, and has nothing to do with human perception but instead everything to do with minimizing interference.
In other words: The only person confused about what the term "loudness" means is you. So stop doing that.
If you want less dynamic range from a DVD, just crack open the manual for your player and learn how to adjust it. This is a function that is part of Dolby Digital and it is adjustable on every player I've ever had my hands on.
Some of us like loud car crashes and explosions while watching 2D images and sitting on the couch.
We can have it both ways.
Not to me, nor anyone else who listens with their ears instead of watching a meter. It is a concept based on human perception.
Loudness, defined.
I suppose you'd think I'd be better to get off by going to church, eh?
Or, you know: Just use the opportunity to finally call up Dude to buy some smack, bang it with whatever filthy apparatus is available, and then go drive downtown and pay however-much cash the ATM will dish out to facefuck a crackwhore as the fireballs rain down.
In an end-of-your-world scenario, nothing is sacred.
Rather, this just validates a simple truth: My penis thinks for me, and I'm OK with that,
(Disclaimer: I'm married, and have been for darn near a decade, and we understand that her penis is larger than mine -- even if hers cannot be seen. Furthermore, she doesn't care where my penis goes, while also encouraging it to go places it has not yet been. YMM unfortunately V...)
If your email address is important to you, long-term, then it behooves you to ensure that it withstands the failure of all of the different providers that make it happen.
My important email address (not listed above) is on a domain that I own through an independent registrar. So if Google (or whoever) want to treat me badly, I can just go somewhere else.
This "privilege" costs me about $10 per year for the domain, and I can point the MX entries wherever I feel like.
(Meanwhile, it's not as hard to change an email address w.r.t. the rest of the world. I've done it a few times, and the drama was very limited.)
How in the world would that promote safety?
It's my responsibility to make sure my lights are all working, and that my tires have tread on them...but these have obvious and immediate safety implications.
But a black box does nothing to promote safety. All it does (at best!) is provide additional data for folks to argue about once things have already gone all wrong.
Around the turn of the century I scored a weird 8088 with one 360k floppy drive, no hard drive, and integrated 10base2.
The local computer shop gave me a 5.25" drive and a floppy cable with card-edge connectors on it, and I found a box of NOS floppy disks on clearance at Wal-Mart.
Running MS-DOS from a floppy (or two), I was able to do some fun stuff. It had a browser, an FTP server running as a TSR, and of course telnet. It was kind of neat, and seemed to be ridiculously reliable, but I got rid of it when I moved...
Nowadays, I get more joy from the teletype that I have tied to my Linux box over RS-232.
I still use mine. Lots of fun stuff can still be done with RG58 or LMR195.
You've already done a fine job of convincing yourself to believe that you do not need a desk phone.
So unplug the phone and put it in a desk drawer. If anyone (including you) complains about it, then there must be a reason to keep it around. Plug it back in for a few months and try again.
But if nobody notices, just rotate it over to the circular file at the same rate as any other disused desktop annoyance. You still get to keep your extension, and you can (presumably) get to your corporate voicemail if you need to by other means.
(And if you just don't like to do conference calls on a cell phone for some reason or other, then the entire Ask Slashdot is for naught. You still need a desk phone anyway, like an addict needs [or does not need] drugs. So either keep using for conference calls, with pride, or stop using it cold turkey, or nobody will care.)
Meh.
I consider myself in that group, you insensitive clod. (Although if you want to suggest that folks with autism have a hard time communicating amongst eachother, just as they do with the rest of the world, then I'm right there with you.)
What band?
FFS, if anyone read TFS, they'd have seen that it is a question about Verizon LTE, which only operates in one band.
It does if the antenna designer isn't a douchebag who can't read, since (again) the words "Verizon LTE" are very specific about what, exactly, is wanted and required.
(Sometimes I think the problem with engineers is that they expect everyone to speak their language and then spoon-feed them specific, concise instructions, all while anyone capable of doing so would be ahead to just engineer the fucking thing themselves and avoid the needless confusion.)
Verizon's LTE (which is the context here) is, always, 700MHz-ish, which is well within the grasp of a tinkerer. And I don't see anyone asking for perfect; all anyone really needs here is functional.
To use a computer analogy: No home user cares how well a Cat6 cable performs on a Pentascanner or a Fluke network analyzer. They care that they can plug it in and have reliable data transfer betwixt whatever real gear happens to be at either end.
Similarly, nobody cares how the antenna performs on a multi-kilobuck Anritsu monitor, as long as their 4G Internet goes from "meh" to "works reliably."
With regard to reflections and transmitter damage: Unplug the antennas on your WiFi router.
Go ahead. I'll wait while you do this.
With the antennas unplugged, witness nearly 100% reflected power causing no obvious damage.
Plug them back in.
Witness everything working fine, just as before: No smoke, no fire, no drama.
(I know it sounds irrational, but it's almost as if some smart person somewhere had considered the possibility that they might have 100% reflected power on the output and designed things to survive anyway!)
*shrug*
Chock Full O' Nuts didn't work as well as Bush's Baked Beans, in my early wardriving experience. YMMV (slow-clap pun intended).
If the existing antenna is almost adequate, then perfection is not all that important. Any meaningful amount of gain, combined with improved placement, is entirely likely to be sufficient to make a marginal connection reliable.
Indeed, depending on the construction of the house, just getting an antenna (almost any antenna) outside could be a boon for reception: A hunk of coax with a quarter-wavelength of shielding stripped off of one end and then simply draped out of a window on the correct face of the house may make a massive improvement. (Bonus points for making the length of intact coax a multiple of one-half wavelength.)
Not so long ago I built a simple UHF TV antenna with some coat hangers, a scrap 2x4, some washers and screws, tinfoil, cardboard, and a balun. It worked very well* at ~600MHz, which is not dramatically far from Verizon's LTE spectrum.
Cost? About half an hour, plus a handful of washers at the hardware store. The rest of the kit was already laying around, and the rough plans were a random discovery on the Internet.
*: "Very well" meaning that I went from receiving one ATSC station some of the time, to four stations all of the time. Perfect? No. But it was better than the bunny ears and tunable UHF loops I also had laying around by a practical factor of 4, at least**.
**: Put that in your SWR meter and smoke it.
Banker!
I don't know if this is useful for how you want to do things, but here's what I do:
I rip/buy/borrow/download music. It goes into a directory that exists for this purpose, with mostly random sorting (due to the variety of sources). I do not trust the metadata from provided by any of these methods, at all.
I fire up my favorite MP3 tagging machine (mediamonkey, which happens to be a Windows beast). One by one, I edit/verify the metadata, throw some artwork in, and then my favorite tagging machine automatically moves them to another temporary (but this time well-sorted) directory structure. (I like artist/year-album/tracks, YMMV.)
After that comes some automated postprocessing (convert to MP3 if flac, run mp3gain to normalize levels in an album-centric way on mp3s), the results of which get moved their final destination.
I don't worry about the text on the back of the CD case, because chances are I can Google it later, faster than I can manage a bunch of physical disks.
Now then, I've also got my own assortment of odd and special CDs that nobody else seems to have and that confuse the hell out of musicbrainz/cddb/freedb, and these get handled differently -- one at a time, as you say you want to do.
Things I do to make it faster or better:
Normal CDs (which is most of them) just get dumped into the miscellaneous directory, period. As I said, I don't trust metadata produced by someone else, but it's trivial to verify a mass-market CD using Google and Amazon and discogs (who has pictures of the front and back, typically, which I also include) and others if it seems particularly iffy.
Special CDs (the rares, limiteds, odd imports, and other stuff that confuses CDDB/freedb/musicbrainz) are physically sorted into a different pile for special handling. You've already got a good method for this, so use it.
The different temp directories are on physically different drives. This makes copying (WITH changes) a breeze compared to doing it on a single drive.
FWIW.
But I'm not technically illiterate.
I put my first FTP site together (WTF? FTP today is insecure as all hell these days for other than anon!) many, many moons ago, along with a commercial port 25 mail server before spam became a real problem
I also had a small hand in actually making spam a problem as well (my hat is not always white).
So, I used to use FTP servers to publish or transfer things. And, well, I don't do that anymore.
These days, I send attachments (sometimes of [OMFG!] 25 or more megabytes), and things work fine.
But filtering attachments? Seriously. It's asking visitors to jump through a hop-scotch before they're permitted to see you: It proves nothing, protects you from nothing, and (at best!) annoys or amuses the person trying to talk to you.
But whatever the case, rejecting attachments never does a single thing to protect you, the company, the sender, or the Security of the World. It proves nothing of any value, while making it difficult for folks (including you!) to make money*.
*Because if you wanted that money, you'd be downloading that data..one way or the other, whether it be a MIME attachment or a file on an FTP server.
Fuck off, Luddite.
I think you meant to say "They were lucky to be able to position themselves in a job that allows an awkward, obsessive, clumsy person with a narrow focus of intellectual ability to prosper, and they are very good at doing what they do."
They blew their EPROM budget on booze, and needed to make it work anyway.
Actually, in a perfect world, mastering errors wouldn't exist to begin with -- it's perfect, remember? And over here in the real world, I normally get perfect rips from clean and undamaged CDs, even at rather high speeds.
Moving the head to re-read a single block? Just how physically wide do you think these blocks are that the weight of the head assembly would be a significant factor on either wear or speed, given the microscopic level of movement this entails?
Now then, I'm open to the suggestion that some readers may be better at ripping an audio CD than some recorders. But reasoning that excess mass must be the root of this perceived disparity seems more like blind faith than sound logic.
To wit, every cheap-shit DVD-RW that I have here, from Lite-on to LG, works both faster and better than the 32x Plextor SCSI CD-ROM reader that I bought exactly for this purpose ever did.
Perhaps you meant to reply to OP. I'm discussing copyright and actual habits of people who are in the business of copying and printing things; you're discussing polymers for firearms.
So while I find your commentary passingly interesting, I really could not give a shit less about it.