Calling 911 when someone is having a heart attack - commendable.
Calling 911 when someone just stole your car - questionable, but I can understand it I guess since you want to get in touch ASAP since time is of the essence, and you may not know the local police number.
Calling 911 because someone is annoying you by using your WAP???? How in any way is this an emergency? Why couldn't the store take 30 seconds to look up the local number for the police?
The rules are different from city to city what approperate 911 use is. The general rule of thumb is to report a serious crime, life threating emergency, or a *crime in progress*. Threat to property also is typicaly accepted use. Neighborhood watch programs are often a good resource to learn what the police want you to use, whether to use 911 to report suspicious behavior or whether to use the non-emergency number. They can't for example record all calls on their non-emergancy number but 911 it's all on tape, legal, and may be admissible in court. A downed powerline for example I would contact the power company, but some cities list this as something you should phone 911 for, or when reporting it to the power company say, "Hang up now and call 911". If you move to a new town you should always check the local phonebook for information on this subject.
My point is there is no firm rule of thumb what 911 should be used for. In this case we are talking Vancouver, Washingon which is part of the Clarks county Emergency agency (cresa) They say
When To Call 9-1-1
Call 9-1-1 anytime you have an EMERGENCY when police, fire or medical response is required immediately. Examples of 9-1-1 emergencies include fire, crimes in progress or that just occurred, or a medical crisis. A good rule of thumb is - when life or property is threatened or at immediate risk, or if there is a good chance that a criminal can be apprehended, call 9-1-1. If you are unsure how serious an incident is, do not hesitate to call 9-1-1. Assistance will be dispatched to the most critical calls first.
Call precedence from highest to lowest:
* Threat to life
* Threat to property/property damage
* General Assistance
If in doubt, call 9-1-1. Better to be safe than sorry
In this case, you or I might use the non-emergency number, but clearly Clark County accepts general assistance calls on 9-1-1 lines. This is very normal for smaller towns. They shouldn't because it just encourages bad behavier when these people visit other cities. But it's also bad to make an assumption what a regions 911 is used for. Always check with the phone book, local law enforcement and emergency service, as well as the neighborhood watch.
We're talking Bakersfield California. It's 120 miles or so from LA, about 300 miles from San Fran. It's along that strech of I-5 which is a straight road of a whole lotta nothing. People tend to speed there for a very good reason, because if you don't you're on this boring road for much longer... and the risk of being hypnotized is much greater. That lane line moving past you, blink, blink, blink, blink. Speeds of 100+ are not unusual, though in my experence the typical speed is about 85mph, where the speed limit is 75mph unless you're near a major city like near Bakersfield then it drops to 65mph. You'd have to be nuts to drive more slowly than 80mph as you run a serious risk of getting rear ended by a road hypotized person.
In all fairness, I forgot to renew my license till I needed to travel to Mexico, and as it turns out my state now mails out photo IDs and give you a temporary laser printed copy. The "only" issue I had with this was the security checkpoint at SFO.
Guard - "How did you copy this" the secuirty check station guard asked Me- "It's not a copy" Guard - "I can't let you through, this is expired" Me - "No, it's not expired, I just renewed it" Guard - "This looks like a photo copy" Me - "If you take the time to read it it says temporary. California does the same thing if you renew out of state. You staple the paper renewal to the expired plastic. If you have questions, call this number below".
Now, to be fair, I do understand how a laser printed license does look suspicious. But spending time in cali I also know your average liquor store has on hand a book of respective licenses, what they should look like, and even pictures of ones that fall apart easily (Washington). This leads me to believe at least in California liquor is more secure than airports.
* Will last much less time than a standard DVD before failing
It would depend on the cost.
* Not play in all of my DVD players
New players cost as low as $50. There is Divx certified player at costco I saw recently for $50.00.
* Mean I have to wait around for it to finish burning
If it was connected to an online warehouse it could be worth the wait. If it just dispences the usual hollywood crap then it probally wouldn't be. I can imagine it would be handy to those who wanted for example to buy a copy of the DVD in the theater directly after the film. This at least would help combat camcorder piracy.
* Probably cost as much, or more than, a regular DVD
Could cost more, could cost less, it's hard to say. At least with the physical product you might find what you are looking for in the bargin/closeout bin. Without the issue of too much stock I imagine we'd be stuck with the $20/pop fee.
What "would" be nice is a kiosk that offered DVD-RW, where you could for example return with your handy dandy little disc and get the next episode of 24.
Maybe I'm just old fashioned, but I don't know of anyone that buys music videos, and I'm only 21. Classically, music videos are the free things on MTV and VH1 used to promote the music.
I've bought music videos... not many but a few. Not all videos make their way to MTV/VH1, but I would agree for the most part most videos are taped off the air, or copied from some other source, and traded.
This being said... there are videos I would buy.... for example THE GO BETWEENS "Right Here" off their Tallulah album, which just so happens to be on youtube. I would also be most pleased to buy any tape that has Red Box's Chenko and "For America" (later not on youtube). But I can't, they don't sell it. To me it's a piece of history that would otherwise be lost if it wasn't for the pirates, and likely the pirates who make some of this stuff popular enough to find it's way on compilation albums.
The meat of the article is on page 26 for those who are actually interested. Ignore the last 2 pages, they're basically ads for "input devices that light up".
I was gonna get a display-model PB for my first PC at Best Buy, lucky for me the employees there knew enough to run a scandisk on it. They found a bunch of bad sectors and said they couldn't sell it to me... (wound up getting a low-end IBM Aptiva which was probably for the best).
Well, given the choice between a packard bell with a hard disc with bad sectors on it and a tri-gem, i'd go packard bell with the bad sectors. Those you can at least map out so long as the HD isn't creating new ones, and often hard discs are covered by the OEM warranty for years, though some in recent years have dropped their default warranty to 1 year. But at least a HD you can replace with moderate ease in most cases. The Tri-Gem was odd even for LPX standards, so swaping out the board was likely out of the question.
I am surprised that Packard Bell didn't make the list. They made some pretty crappy computers in the late 80s.
Packard Bell had their faults... but the price was right and most still continue to work today. They always had drivers on the website and good documentation. If all you needed was MS Word, Packard Bell did the job perfectly well. Upgrading was the pits even the time period. Now if you were to say Tri-Gem they were the pits. These suckers were sold at places like "GoodGuys" and other misc general electronics retailers. They were the lowest cost PC they had and salesmen got a $100 bonus for selling one. Something always failed from keyboard controler (no not just the fuse), floppy controler, you name it. Packard bell may have used some cheap obscure parts but tri-gem was just cheap crap. They later formed a joint project with KDS (Korean Data Systems) known as Emachine. You might see a packard bell still in service today putting away on windows 3.1 or 95/98. Trigems stopped putting faster than yugos.
whats so wrong with advertising embedded in TV shows. Why can't Tony Soprano be driving a coke, or eating at a Wendys and commenting how good the sandwich is.
Ad placement / embedded advertising can be tastefuly done. Archie Bunker drank Royal Crown cola. I don't know if RC paid for that, but an entire episode centered around whether they could taste the difference between the various colas on the market, which as far as a sit-com goes is totally approperate. In other cases, it can be quite tacky... The Flintstones offered 30 second spots during their show plugging Winston cigarettes. Some of the japanese anime are basicly shameless 30min adverts for toys, some even worse than Pokemon.
Don't let the networks win this one, or the battle is going to go on for years. Once it has left their antenna, they lose their control over it.
My memory is vague on this subject, thankfully this is./ and there will always be some bugger to popup and fill in the gaps.
Back in the 80s it wasn't a problem for cable companies to rebroadcast the local channels over the cable. Why should it, they were doing local stations a favor. The cable company would invest in the approperate antenna, subscribers could get a spiffy signal, and they were doing the TV stations a favor. Some subscribers might have noticed a short period of time were stations they specificly got cable for were dropped from the lineup. But came the 90s... and for some reason the laws changed and TV stations were demanding money for the right to rebroadcast their signal.
Again with DVR service, they are doing broadcasters a favor as DVRs don't filter out commercials... which is the bread and butter of the business. So we have this company selling a service which permits recording of broadcasts, something ruled as being legal, permiting people to archive content and adverts, and for some reason they want money to do this?
Guess they were wanting a piece of the pie that scalpers normally would get.
At least with scalpers, while illigit, are working hard to make that buck. They stand in line, they shell out money for tickets, and resell them. They peform a useful service for those of us who can't stand in line... and that service is worth a few bucks to say the least. Better yet often times for overpriced over hyped shows they sell them at a huge discount. For example the Who's tour for their album Next seemed to have more scalpers than attendees... as also was the case for the U2 ZooTV tour.
Ticketmaster on the other hand is working with venues to artificaly infact the cost of tickets that normally would be flat rate. Call me silly, but I prefer the scalpers. It's income for the otherwise unemployed, and it sure beats selling things that are outright illegal and very much harmful like *crack*.
why a DVD+R? DVD+R holds ~4.7GBs of data while a commercially produced movie DVD holds almost double. anyone who's made a movie back-up using dvd shrink or other transcoders degrade the video quality. comparing the original DVD with the transcoded version shows a significant difference if you have a quality display.
Let's say you wanted to demo two videos side by side, but only had 15min to do it in? Would you...
a. buy a copy of each video, manualy jump to selected scenes to show the difference b. take selected scenes and paste them together in a sequence
This being said I know jack squat about the demo, but I see lots of conspiricy theorists here. I'm not saying they took a HQ video and dumbed it down to SP. For all I know they could have, but you asked "why" and this is a very good reason.
why is it I should spend $80 for a crippled "budget" card that will need to be replaced in a year, or a $300 card that will need to be replaced in two when I could go buy a xbox for $200, and enjoy it for a while yet?
I only upgrade video cards when
1. There happens to be a game which needs it. "sid meyer's pirates" was an example of this 2. If my existing video card flips out. The Diamond v770 (TNT 2) was a good example of this. 3. Someone "happens" to need a video card and I give up mine and upgrade.
That being said, the last card I bought was an ATI 9600 by rosewill. Come to think about it, it was last year. I think I spent close to $80 for it, and it's still more than adquate for my needs. I tend not to play the latest games so this is pretty much a non-issue for me. "sid meyer's pirates" was an exception, for whatever reason the town sequence required something better than I had. Silly me.
But hey... if you absolutly need that $200 for your needs, go for it.
The Christian religion is mighty big on ignoring that no killig bit.
People are mighty big on ignoring facts. Religions are just a set of ideals one subscribes to that have no more power to ignore anything than lump of clay.
Because of the six degrees of seperation rule. Odds are someone you know is a communist. If you don't know anyone who is a communist odds are you know someone who knows someone who is a communist... etc etc etc. If you are unwilling to divulge the name of any communists, and since obviously by the rule of six degrees of seperation you at least know someone who knows someone who knows someone ect... who is a communist, you must be a communist. QED.
Just replace communist with terrorist and ask your self again why the right to privacy is important. Granted six degrees of seperation is just to illistrate a point, and it may be possible that there is somoene other there who doesn't know anyone who has ever commited a crime, disagreed with the current political climate, or commited a copyright violation. All of which including the sale of counterfeit t-shirts (oklahoma city bombing according to us customs was funded by the sale of counterfeit t-shirts) are signs of being a terrorist apparently.
Hahaha! That made m laugh, because it's true. I'd expect at least a "thou shalt not screw thy fellow man" type of thing.
We are talking Adrian Lamo here, the guy who spent his time hacking into networks and exposing the exploits. Illegal... sure... but such actions are often taken by people with a strong moral conscience and deep religious convections. For example, if someone picks a lock to steal something that's tresspass and burglary... something a common criminal would do. But someone who picks a lock and leaves a note that the lock sucks, that's tresspass and hardly common. I would describe the person as a pain in the ass... and rather stupid since the world needs locksmiths, and security consultants.
I wonder what his religion has to say about breaking the law.
If we are talking God's law in conflict with man's law... you might become a martyr, get a spiffy statue. The Christian bible is mighty clear on the no killig bit, it's rather vague about thy neighbors server.
How does a plane flying around the world or a boat floating around the world affect my commute?
This would depend. In the past airships travled in excess of 120kph. This isn't exactly what one would call super steller in terms of speed, in fact it's about the speed of your average car. But imagine how handy this would be if you combined old airship technology with solar power. You would have the ability to create links between two points without mucking around with making highways, laying rail, or doing much of anything other than installing ports at each end. *This* could affect your commute, and could be reasonably green to boot.
I loved customizing my computers 10-15 years ago. It was fun and the end product was a cool computer. That was the end product.
Well, I won't say I hated it... if I trully hated it I wouldn't have done it. I remember at one point I had a Pro Audio Spectrium 8bit which offered semi-decent audio but for some reason I needed to upgrade to 16bit. Righto... onwards and upwards to the PAS 3D which was not fully supported in win95 though having a really nice digitizer. Same deal with some obscure 14.4 Mwave non IBM modem which was in theory upgradable to 28.8 or 33.6... not really supported in win95 and the upgrade was well only supported if you happned to set your IRQ to one setting, the setting I didn't want for it conflicted with something else. And not to speak of odd ball tape drives or scanners.
So while I had lots of fun in those days, i'm happy they are for the most part gone.
1) I know a LOT of morons 2) At least where I live, it's still cheaper. The only gotcha is the monitor.
And software. Let's face it, it would be hard to piece together something with a monitor and windows for $400. I'm not saying you can't do it, and i'm not saying you'll end up with a better product, but given that a motherboard worth it's salt costs about $100, a cpu worth it's salt is about $50, and windows it self is about $100, plus case, monitor, side of ram, and drives. And lets not forget trivial items like mouse, keyboard, speakers.
I "could" shop compgeeks, pickup a mb/cpu combo for $120.. a semptron 2800+, but even then we would be talking about $400+ vs $356 shipped from dell ready to go. Even going linux the Dell is a pretty good deal, very tough to beat.
You could go parts, but odds are it'll cost you more. The only way it wouldn't is if you happened to have all the extra trivial hardware laying about, bought things on closeout, or got crap handed to you. But assuming new parts, with full warranties... Dell tends to cost less.
I don't know much about the IP internet side of TMO, it's outside my area. But I can tell you SMS only handles SMS. It's a dedicated node on the SS7 side of the network. That isn't to say that TMO doesn't have something on the IP side that acts as a relay. It would make sense to do it that way since many of the phones that they offer AIM service with don't have dedicated clients.
I presume the GPRS address is used for authentication, and the text msg number is the relay. All of this would seem to be billed under the SMS plans, not their t-zones or data plans. This is not to say that you can't run a softclient that doesn't use the relay provided your phone supported it. There is also a text msg number for ICQ, MSN, and Yahoo, though for some reason the MSN one doesn't work on my 6820 but did work on my other crappy phone.
I do wish the T-mobile relays were better documented. The SMS e-mail one has come in handy many times, and I imagine of one had the syntax would could shuttle out a message to their SMS system without being sent a message in the first place.
First, coffee beans. Supposedly, if your cannabis, hard drugs or DVDs are wrapped in coffee, dogs can't distinguish it.
I've heard of this, but I don't have a dog nor cannabis. I have coffee and DVDs, and though coffee does have this rep. I have not yet had an issue crossing the boarder with Coffee, even bulk ground coffee.
The only issue I have had was ordering a hammick from Mexico where it seemed FedEx asked me if my package had anything to do with chemical or nuclear weapons.
I can tell you 100% that the SMS device is not relaying AIM or Yahoo. If your phone has limited functionality then TMO's internet backbone might be relaying the messages, but their internet and Tzones based servers are completely seperate from any callP side devices like the MSC/HLR/SGSN etc.
I have a T809 and have experience as a TMO user as well and I have to sign in to my phone, it contains the AIM pocket and Yahoo pocket software etc and actually logs into the AIM/Yahoo server. I know this because it kicks me out from my desktop because it won't let you log in twice. They keep a continuous GPRS/EDGE connection up as long as I am logged in.
SMS is handled by a completely different box on the callP network that has nothing to do with any GPRS or internet functionality. It's a periphrial of the MSC and deals in the SS7 world of telephony, not the IP world of internet.
Well... while I'm sure I "could" install some form of pocket AIM or some msn client on my Nokia 6820, but the default IM clients act in the exact same way as SMS does. While if I login to my phone it would kick me off the desktop... the reverse is not always true. I can turn off my phone or go out of range and not get messages then a whole slew of them apear when I re-enter range.
Now I can't "honesty" tell if my phone keeps a GPRS connection open durint the period of time i'm logged into a particular client, but everything about my phone sugests that IM is handled though SMS, sent to the number 4700 and processed. And from a billing perspective they are billed at the same rate as SMS, though I have an unlimited plan so I tend to not pay "too" much attention. And the simple fact that I don't have any sort of GPRS, no T-Zones nothing along those lines... all of this leads me to believe that IM service... unless you are running a client like pocketAIM, is handled though a relay.
It sounds like you know from which you speak... and I can't say I know the network on an intimate level... but I have to say on phones that support it IM is a SMS based service which does use GRPS for "something"... which I presume is for authentication, after which it seems like the relay handles everything. If it was trully a GRPS service, I would "think" that when my connection timed out it would boot me off the messaging server rather than buffering the messages. And most important, to function properly I have to plug in a number in my phone for IM service, which I presume is the IM relay, just like they have an e-mail relay number. Further I don't think I would get a bill with all my text messages on it under the SMS catagory.
But I could be wrong. T-mobile is none too clear as far as the technical aspect of their service.
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Calling 911 when someone just stole your car - questionable, but I can understand it I guess since you want to get in touch ASAP since time is of the essence, and you may not know the local police number.
Calling 911 because someone is annoying you by using your WAP???? How in any way is this an emergency? Why couldn't the store take 30 seconds to look up the local number for the police?
The rules are different from city to city what approperate 911 use is. The general rule of thumb is to report a serious crime, life threating emergency, or a *crime in progress*. Threat to property also is typicaly accepted use. Neighborhood watch programs are often a good resource to learn what the police want you to use, whether to use 911 to report suspicious behavior or whether to use the non-emergency number. They can't for example record all calls on their non-emergancy number but 911 it's all on tape, legal, and may be admissible in court. A downed powerline for example I would contact the power company, but some cities list this as something you should phone 911 for, or when reporting it to the power company say, "Hang up now and call 911". If you move to a new town you should always check the local phonebook for information on this subject.
My point is there is no firm rule of thumb what 911 should be used for. In this case we are talking Vancouver, Washingon which is part of the Clarks county Emergency agency (cresa)
They say
http://www.cresa911.org/911when.htm
In this case, you or I might use the non-emergency number, but clearly Clark County accepts general assistance calls on 9-1-1 lines. This is very normal for smaller towns. They shouldn't because it just encourages bad behavier when these people visit other cities. But it's also bad to make an assumption what a regions 911 is used for. Always check with the phone book, local law enforcement and emergency service, as well as the neighborhood watch.
ever consider slowing down? thats really fast.
We're talking Bakersfield California. It's 120 miles or so from LA, about 300 miles from San Fran. It's along that strech of I-5 which is a straight road of a whole lotta nothing. People tend to speed there for a very good reason, because if you don't you're on this boring road for much longer... and the risk of being hypnotized is much greater.
That lane line moving past you, blink, blink, blink, blink. Speeds of 100+ are not unusual, though in my experence the typical speed is about 85mph, where the speed limit is 75mph unless you're near a major city like near Bakersfield then it drops to 65mph. You'd have to be nuts to drive more slowly than 80mph as you run a serious risk of getting rear ended by a road hypotized person.
In all fairness, I forgot to renew my license till I needed to travel to Mexico, and as it turns out my state now mails out photo IDs and give you a temporary laser printed copy. The "only" issue I had with this was the security checkpoint at SFO.
Guard - "How did you copy this" the secuirty check station guard asked
Me- "It's not a copy"
Guard - "I can't let you through, this is expired"
Me - "No, it's not expired, I just renewed it"
Guard - "This looks like a photo copy"
Me - "If you take the time to read it it says temporary. California does the same thing if you renew out of state. You staple the paper renewal to the expired plastic. If you have questions, call this number below".
Now, to be fair, I do understand how a laser printed license does look suspicious. But spending time in cali I also know your average liquor store has on hand a book of respective licenses, what they should look like, and even pictures of ones that fall apart easily (Washington). This leads me to believe at least in California liquor is more secure than airports.
...something that:
* Will last much less time than a standard DVD before failing
It would depend on the cost.
* Not play in all of my DVD players
New players cost as low as $50. There is Divx certified player at costco I saw recently for $50.00.
* Mean I have to wait around for it to finish burning
If it was connected to an online warehouse it could be worth the wait. If it just dispences the usual hollywood crap then it probally wouldn't be. I can imagine it would be handy to those who wanted for example to buy a copy of the DVD in the theater directly after the film. This at least would help combat camcorder piracy.
* Probably cost as much, or more than, a regular DVD
Could cost more, could cost less, it's hard to say. At least with the physical product you might find what you are looking for in the bargin/closeout bin. Without the issue of too much stock I imagine we'd be stuck with the $20/pop fee.
What "would" be nice is a kiosk that offered DVD-RW, where you could for example return with your handy dandy little disc and get the next episode of 24.
Maybe I'm just old fashioned, but I don't know of anyone that buys music videos, and I'm only 21. Classically, music videos are the free things on MTV and VH1 used to promote the music.
I've bought music videos... not many but a few. Not all videos make their way to MTV/VH1, but I would agree for the most part most videos are taped off the air, or copied from some other source, and traded.
This being said... there are videos I would buy.... for example THE GO BETWEENS "Right Here" off their Tallulah album, which just so happens to be on youtube. I would also be most pleased to buy any tape that has Red Box's Chenko and "For America" (later not on youtube). But I can't, they don't sell it. To me it's a piece of history that would otherwise be lost if it wasn't for the pirates, and likely the pirates who make some of this stuff popular enough to find it's way on compilation albums.
That Hello Kitty keyboard definitely spells "hardcore."
A "My Melody" keyboard would be "hardcore" if one existed.
The meat of the article is on page 26 for those who are actually interested. Ignore the last 2 pages, they're basically ads for "input devices that light up".
Oh come now, everyone on slashdot needs a Hello Kitty keyboard.
I was gonna get a display-model PB for my first PC at Best Buy, lucky for me the employees there knew enough to run a scandisk on it. They found a bunch of bad sectors and said they couldn't sell it to me... (wound up getting a low-end IBM Aptiva which was probably for the best).
Well, given the choice between a packard bell with a hard disc with bad sectors on it and a tri-gem, i'd go packard bell with the bad sectors. Those you can at least map out so long as the HD isn't creating new ones, and often hard discs are covered by the OEM warranty for years, though some in recent years have dropped their default warranty to 1 year. But at least a HD you can replace with moderate ease in most cases. The Tri-Gem was odd even for LPX standards, so swaping out the board was likely out of the question.
I am surprised that Packard Bell didn't make the list. They made some pretty crappy computers in the late 80s.
Packard Bell had their faults... but the price was right and most still continue to work today. They always had drivers on the website and good documentation. If all you needed was MS Word, Packard Bell did the job perfectly well. Upgrading was the pits even the time period. Now if you were to say Tri-Gem they were the pits. These suckers were sold at places like "GoodGuys" and other misc general electronics retailers. They were the lowest cost PC they had and salesmen got a $100 bonus for selling one. Something always failed from keyboard controler (no not just the fuse), floppy controler, you name it. Packard bell may have used some cheap obscure parts but tri-gem was just cheap crap. They later formed a joint project with KDS (Korean Data Systems) known as Emachine. You might see a packard bell still in service today putting away on windows 3.1 or 95/98. Trigems stopped putting faster than yugos.
whats so wrong with advertising embedded in TV shows. Why can't Tony Soprano be driving a coke, or eating at a Wendys and commenting how good the sandwich is.
Ad placement / embedded advertising can be tastefuly done. Archie Bunker drank Royal Crown cola. I don't know if RC paid for that, but an entire episode centered around whether they could taste the difference between the various colas on the market, which as far as a sit-com goes is totally approperate. In other cases, it can be quite tacky... The Flintstones offered 30 second spots during their show plugging Winston cigarettes. Some of the japanese anime are basicly shameless 30min adverts for toys, some even worse than Pokemon.
Don't let the networks win this one, or the battle is going to go on for years. Once it has left their antenna, they lose their control over it.
./ and there will always be some bugger to popup and fill in the gaps.
My memory is vague on this subject, thankfully this is
Back in the 80s it wasn't a problem for cable companies to rebroadcast the local channels over the cable. Why should it, they were doing local stations a favor. The cable company would invest in the approperate antenna, subscribers could get a spiffy signal, and they were doing the TV stations a favor. Some subscribers might have noticed a short period of time were stations they specificly got cable for were dropped from the lineup. But came the 90s... and for some reason the laws changed and TV stations were demanding money for the right to rebroadcast their signal.
Again with DVR service, they are doing broadcasters a favor as DVRs don't filter out commercials... which is the bread and butter of the business. So we have this company selling a service which permits recording of broadcasts, something ruled as being legal, permiting people to archive content and adverts, and for some reason they want money to do this?
Guess they were wanting a piece of the pie that scalpers normally would get.
At least with scalpers, while illigit, are working hard to make that buck. They stand in line, they shell out money for tickets, and resell them. They peform a useful service for those of us who can't stand in line... and that service is worth a few bucks to say the least. Better yet often times for overpriced over hyped shows they sell them at a huge discount. For example the Who's tour for their album Next seemed to have more scalpers than attendees... as also was the case for the U2 ZooTV tour.
Ticketmaster on the other hand is working with venues to artificaly infact the cost of tickets that normally would be flat rate. Call me silly, but I prefer the scalpers. It's income for the otherwise unemployed, and it sure beats selling things that are outright illegal and very much harmful like *crack*.
why a DVD+R? DVD+R holds ~4.7GBs of data while a commercially produced movie DVD holds almost double. anyone who's made a movie back-up using dvd shrink or other transcoders degrade the video quality. comparing the original DVD with the transcoded version shows a significant difference if you have a quality display.
Let's say you wanted to demo two videos side by side, but only had 15min to do it in? Would you...
a. buy a copy of each video, manualy jump to selected scenes to show the difference
b. take selected scenes and paste them together in a sequence
This being said I know jack squat about the demo, but I see lots of conspiricy theorists here. I'm not saying they took a HQ video and dumbed it down to SP. For all I know they could have, but you asked "why" and this is a very good reason.
why is it I should spend $80 for a crippled "budget" card that will need to be replaced in a year, or a $300 card that will need to be replaced in two when I could go buy a xbox for $200, and enjoy it for a while yet?
I only upgrade video cards when
1. There happens to be a game which needs it. "sid meyer's pirates" was an example of this
2. If my existing video card flips out. The Diamond v770 (TNT 2) was a good example of this.
3. Someone "happens" to need a video card and I give up mine and upgrade.
That being said, the last card I bought was an ATI 9600 by rosewill. Come to think about it, it was last year. I think I spent close to $80 for it, and it's still more than adquate for my needs. I tend not to play the latest games so this is pretty much a non-issue for me. "sid meyer's pirates" was an exception, for whatever reason the town sequence required something better than I had. Silly me.
But hey... if you absolutly need that $200 for your needs, go for it.
The Christian religion is mighty big on ignoring that no killig bit.
People are mighty big on ignoring facts. Religions are just a set of ideals one subscribes to that have no more power to ignore anything than lump of clay.
Because of the six degrees of seperation rule. Odds are someone you know is a communist. If you don't know anyone who is a communist odds are you know someone who knows someone who is a communist... etc etc etc. If you are unwilling to divulge the name of any communists, and since obviously by the rule of six degrees of seperation you at least know someone who knows someone who knows someone ect... who is a communist, you must be a communist. QED.
Just replace communist with terrorist and ask your self again why the right to privacy is important. Granted six degrees of seperation is just to illistrate a point, and it may be possible that there is somoene other there who doesn't know anyone who has ever commited a crime, disagreed with the current political climate, or commited a copyright violation. All of which including the sale of counterfeit t-shirts (oklahoma city bombing according to us customs was funded by the sale of counterfeit t-shirts) are signs of being a terrorist apparently.
Hahaha! That made m laugh, because it's true. I'd expect at least a "thou shalt not screw thy fellow man" type of thing.
We are talking Adrian Lamo here, the guy who spent his time hacking into networks and exposing the exploits. Illegal... sure... but such actions are often taken by people with a strong moral conscience and deep religious convections. For example, if someone picks a lock to steal something that's tresspass and burglary... something a common criminal would do. But someone who picks a lock and leaves a note that the lock sucks, that's tresspass and hardly common. I would describe the person as a pain in the ass... and rather stupid since the world needs locksmiths, and security consultants.
I wonder what his religion has to say about breaking the law.
If we are talking God's law in conflict with man's law... you might become a martyr, get a spiffy statue. The Christian bible is mighty clear on the no killig bit, it's rather vague about thy neighbors server.
How does a plane flying around the world or a boat floating around the world affect my commute?
This would depend. In the past airships travled in excess of 120kph. This isn't exactly what one would call super steller in terms of speed, in fact it's about the speed of your average car. But imagine how handy this would be if you combined old airship technology with solar power. You would have the ability to create links between two points without mucking around with making highways, laying rail, or doing much of anything other than installing ports at each end. *This* could affect your commute, and could be reasonably green to boot.
I think we all know that the real question here is, in a straight, clean fight, who wins, Airwolf or Bluethunder?.
Remember kids
Red Dawn + Bluethunder = Purple Rain
I loved customizing my computers 10-15 years ago. It was fun and the end product was a cool computer. That was the end product.
Well, I won't say I hated it... if I trully hated it I wouldn't have done it. I remember at one point I had a Pro Audio Spectrium 8bit which offered semi-decent audio but for some reason I needed to upgrade to 16bit. Righto... onwards and upwards to the PAS 3D which was not fully supported in win95 though having a really nice digitizer. Same deal with some obscure 14.4 Mwave non IBM modem which was in theory upgradable to 28.8 or 33.6... not really supported in win95 and the upgrade was well only supported if you happned to set your IRQ to one setting, the setting I didn't want for it conflicted with something else. And not to speak of odd ball tape drives or scanners.
So while I had lots of fun in those days, i'm happy they are for the most part gone.
1) I know a LOT of morons 2) At least where I live, it's still cheaper. The only gotcha is the monitor.
And software. Let's face it, it would be hard to piece together something with a monitor and windows for $400. I'm not saying you can't do it, and i'm not saying you'll end up with a better product, but given that a motherboard worth it's salt costs about $100, a cpu worth it's salt is about $50, and windows it self is about $100, plus case, monitor, side of ram, and drives. And lets not forget trivial items like mouse, keyboard, speakers.
I "could" shop compgeeks, pickup a mb/cpu combo for $120.. a semptron 2800+, but even then we would be talking about $400+ vs $356 shipped from dell ready to go. Even going linux the Dell is a pretty good deal, very tough to beat.
You could go parts, but odds are it'll cost you more. The only way it wouldn't is if you happened to have all the extra trivial hardware laying about, bought things on closeout, or got crap handed to you. But assuming new parts, with full warranties... Dell tends to cost less.
I don't know much about the IP internet side of TMO, it's outside my area. But I can tell you SMS only handles SMS. It's a dedicated node on the SS7 side of the network. That isn't to say that TMO doesn't have something on the IP side that acts as a relay. It would make sense to do it that way since many of the phones that they offer AIM service with don't have dedicated clients.
Exactly... here is the data in such a device
---
Screen Name: (AOL Screen Name)
Password: (AOL Password)
GPRS Address: http://wirelessvillage.t-mobile.com/
Text msg. number: 4670
Bearer: Automatic
Service Name: AOL
----
I presume the GPRS address is used for authentication, and the text msg number is the relay. All of this would seem to be billed under the SMS plans, not their t-zones or data plans. This is not to say that you can't run a softclient that doesn't use the relay provided your phone supported it. There is also a text msg number for ICQ, MSN, and Yahoo, though for some reason the MSN one doesn't work on my 6820 but did work on my other crappy phone.
I do wish the T-mobile relays were better documented. The SMS e-mail one has come in handy many times, and I imagine of one had the syntax would could shuttle out a message to their SMS system without being sent a message in the first place.
First, coffee beans. Supposedly, if your cannabis, hard drugs or DVDs are wrapped in coffee, dogs can't distinguish it.
I've heard of this, but I don't have a dog nor cannabis. I have coffee and DVDs, and though coffee does have this rep. I have not yet had an issue crossing the boarder with Coffee, even bulk ground coffee.
The only issue I have had was ordering a hammick from Mexico where it seemed FedEx asked me if my package had anything to do with chemical or nuclear weapons.
I can tell you 100% that the SMS device is not relaying AIM or Yahoo. If your phone has limited functionality then TMO's internet backbone might be relaying the messages, but their internet and Tzones based servers are completely seperate from any callP side devices like the MSC/HLR/SGSN etc.
I have a T809 and have experience as a TMO user as well and I have to sign in to my phone, it contains the AIM pocket and Yahoo pocket software etc and actually logs into the AIM/Yahoo server. I know this because it kicks me out from my desktop because it won't let you log in twice. They keep a continuous GPRS/EDGE connection up as long as I am logged in.
SMS is handled by a completely different box on the callP network that has nothing to do with any GPRS or internet functionality. It's a periphrial of the MSC and deals in the SS7 world of telephony, not the IP world of internet.
Well... while I'm sure I "could" install some form of pocket AIM or some msn client on my Nokia 6820, but the default IM clients act in the exact same way as SMS does. While if I login to my phone it would kick me off the desktop... the reverse is not always true. I can turn off my phone or go out of range and not get messages then a whole slew of them apear when I re-enter range.
Now I can't "honesty" tell if my phone keeps a GPRS connection open durint the period of time i'm logged into a particular client, but everything about my phone sugests that IM is handled though SMS, sent to the number 4700 and processed. And from a billing perspective they are billed at the same rate as SMS, though I have an unlimited plan so I tend to not pay "too" much attention. And the simple fact that I don't have any sort of GPRS, no T-Zones nothing along those lines... all of this leads me to believe that IM service... unless you are running a client like pocketAIM, is handled though a relay.
It sounds like you know from which you speak... and I can't say I know the network on an intimate level... but I have to say on phones that support it IM is a SMS based service which does use GRPS for "something"... which I presume is for authentication, after which it seems like the relay handles everything. If it was trully a GRPS service, I would "think" that when my connection timed out it would boot me off the messaging server rather than buffering the messages. And most important, to function properly I have to plug in a number in my phone for IM service, which I presume is the IM relay, just like they have an e-mail relay number. Further I don't think I would get a bill with all my text messages on it under the SMS catagory.
But I could be wrong. T-mobile is none too clear as far as the technical aspect of their service.