Can't we get back on track for fighting crime and terrorism or something? Right now, this is a waste of time and money. Tell the MPAA to keep trying, and when they can actually identify shipments of what might actually have a chance of being bootleg dvds, come back and we'll take a look at it.
The funny thing is, they are spending money training dogs to combat crime, the crime of commercial bootleging... or at least that's my guess. I see alot of anti MPAA and RIAA posts here but like it or not... it's the job of Customs to protect a given country from harm, whether it be biological as in the case of food and animals, or ecconimical as is the case of counterfeit Beanie Babies. The fact of the matter is there are a ton of overseas companies who's business it is to make bootleg DVDs and ship them anywhere.
Like it or not, checking for bootleg dvds is pretty much within their mandate. You may think it's nutty... and you may think their money would be better spent on other things, but the truth of the matter is unlike piracy we are talking about a physical product, one which not only infringes on someone's copyright, but the existance of which causes tangible ecconomic harm esp in cases where the bootleg is sold as the "real deal".
oh yeah, that really worked for drug dealers. Of course, the fact that drugs are either shipped in humans, dogs, or packed with other high odor eminating items would indicate that the idea will not work.
Of the things I know... this is one subject I know nothing about. I "imagine" it's really a bad idea to ship such things via mail, and even more stupid to ship them cross boarders. But I honestly don't know what the hit to miss ratio is to smuggling drugs or anything with a distinctive odor. This is one of those things that you tend to not try.
The funny thing is, I don't think anyone on/. knows anything about it either... and those who do won't talk.
This is not "solely for the benefit of a third party" (I assume you mean the MPAA). This program is testing the feasibility of catching DVD counterfeiters. Do you think those guys pay the appropriate Customs Duties?
Gift... 20 bucks. I'm sure they do pay the approperate duty... which is well zero.
"Lets say you connect to a web server - how are you to know if that's a public web site or a private company's intranet site that they didn't bother to password protect?"
Because the website's terms of use would say that you may use their service
Do you think any site where they didn't bother to password protect, that wasn't intended to be public, would have their terms of service listed anywhere? This is an issue not really related to this case as this person was activly looking to access propriority information (regarding UFOs), but average joe using goggle who's looking for "macrame coat hangers" happens upon a page of a private company who's business is "macrame coat hangers". Or even worse, let's say this site wasn't in a language the person could understand, but had some spiffy paterns, and no obvious or working way to contact the staff and ask what is ok and what isn't ok.
SMS is only used for SMS. When you are GPRS attatched and logged into AIM, Yahoo, ICQ, etc you are connected to whatever services server, not to an SMS box. You make it sound like they are doing some kind of relay.
SMS is meant for one way communication and has a limited text length not to mention it isn't always instant.
If you are logged into any IM on your TMO phone your GPRS attatched and it will swap over if you get a phone call and then swap back.
Trust me, I work on the network.
You "could" be right... though to me it looks like a relay. For yahoo, outbound text messages are sent to "4700", and from my perspective it acts the very same way as if I told my IM provider to relay messages to my cell phone. It further acts like a relay as my phone has no specific MSN or Yahoo software, only a GPRS address and a number. I thought the GPRS part was just to login to the relay and wait for a responce, and perhaps update the user list. The actuall messaging, to me, acts just like SMS. Also, messages get billed as if they were SMS.
I "could" be misunderstanding how the system works, my observations are as a user and not as someone who works on the network.
The $6.99 plan is quite useful. It gives you unlimited access to all data services on your phone, and lets you tether to your phone to use GPRS. The "catch" is that you can "only check e-mail" while tethered. Of course, with a SOCKS proxy running on port 110 in my office, it's basically unlimited Internet. Very helpful when you're at a coffee shop and want to surf, but don't want to pay $100/hr or whatever hotspots charge these days:)
That's handy to know, though I don't know if for example it would let me run msn messanger on my phone over GPRS, or other Nokia 6820 net apps. I "imagine" it's limited but I honestly have no clue.
Yeah thanks. It was a joke. Believe it or not most people always knew the difference.;-)
I'm not sure it was a joke. I don't know all of Irwin Allen's work, nor have I watched much Lost in Space, The Time Tunnel, Land of the Giants, or whatever else he's done. But it woudln't shock me if there was a Lost in Space episode where they landed on some planet and met some evil alien East Indians or another with evil Cowboys. It wouldn't shock me at all if if there was an episode with East Indians and Cowboys flying away on Persian carpets showing "you don't need a carpet, you need a r-r-r-r-r-r-ug".
The way it works in the states with T-Mo is that you have SMS which allows you to use SMS or AIM only, at least on my phone. Then there's T-Zones, which comes in two flavors. There's one where you pay an exorbitant amount per megabyte, and only get up to a few megs. Then for $30, you get GPRS (woo hoo, max of ~41kbps) plus access to any T-Mo wifi hotspot, which includes starbucks and kinko's. Unlimited text is $10 on a family plan for everyone on the plan, don't know if that offer has been disco'd or not yet, but I just got it. However I'm on my ex's phone plan right now, so I probably won't have it soon... she's giving me a hard time again. Pretty sure it's $10 on an individual plan, too. 200 messages costs $3 or $4, something like that.
T-Mo used to offer unlimited GPRS for $20, or a data-only plan for $25, but I guess they decided they needed to sell hotspot access, in which I am not particularly interested. If I need to make a high speed download I'm not going to use my phone to locate a T-Mo hotspot and drive there, unless I know I'm close to one anyway. I'm going to fire up netstumbler and find the nearest open AP with parking next, and sit in my car for a bit.
Looks like my info on T-zones is out of date, though i'll double check the site. My phone is telling me $5.99 for some unlimited access "T-MobileWeb" plan, but it's too vague to know exactly what it is. In fact, that's one reason I've not bothered to switch plans... they have clear titles but the descriptions are too vague and what I presently enjoy works.
Regarding AIM only though... I lost my cheepo Nokia and replaced it with another which wasn't pre-set for MSN/ICQ/Yahoo, but lucky for me I can plop in the GPRS address and the text bearer ID number and poof, feature enabled.
MSN settings don't seem to work for me, but yahoo and icq on the other hand work just fine.
A ban on IM alone will ensure that no one uses their product. I think that I am currently the only person in the US who isn't on AIM/MSN/Yahoo/IRC. I would love to be able to listen to their customer support calls: "C: AIM isn't working. S: We don't support AIM. C: We seem to have a bad connection, you don't what?!" Do they have their own private IM service they are planning on offering?
The way it works in the states is... you have a choice between SMS and I believe "T-zones" is what it's called..... internet service basicly. SMS gives you access to Aim-ICQ/MSN/Yahoo for a fee per message, or you can get it at a flat rate for a tad more. You can pay extra to get unlimited text messages, or you can go with a data plan and, if you have a phone that supports it, run a true blue IM client on your phone. T-Zones costs a little more than unlimited SMS, not all phones support it, but you can login to multiable services at any given time. The SMS version basicly relays your messages though their standard text message service.
The artical isn't clear on this subject, but I imagine you can still have your IM, just so long as you use it through their SMS network, a fee per message deal or additional subscription. Just a true blue IM client is banned... which I suspect it's because it simply can NOT be metered.
The Scientific Atlanta (now Cisco) box that Cox uses is pretty amazing imho. Tivo might be slightly better in somethings, but I would not pay a pennie more for it. It could be worst, you could be stack with Comcast and their awful Motorola box. Boy, do those suck or what! Comcast inhereted AT&T's obsession with Motorola boxes for some reason. Every Motorola (formally known as General Instument I believe) digital box I have ever encountered was a miserable failure. Motorola should do all of us a favor and close their cable box division down.
Keep in mind that there are many boxes offered by Motorola... and you might just be thinking of the 68000 based ones which were the first to be released to support Digital Cable. The newer ones sport cable modems, support hard drives, and of corse firewire... though not having HDTV I can't say I have met one with firewire onboard. Here is an advert for the Motorola DVR box service.
While I appricate the opinion that Sci-Atlanta boxes are better than their Motorola counterparts... it would be nice to know how they are better. Those like me who have never met a Sci-Atlanta box would be most interested.
Besides, in theory you can buy your own damn cablebox and jack it into your cable network.
I doubt they would be a good replacement for a standard monitor unless you can either touch type. Also it might be messy groping for your cup of coffee. Also it is healthy to see some daylight during working hours. So great for personal multimedia or gaming, probably not entirely practical as a replacement for a monitor in a work situation.
I can touch type just fine, I can even touch drink coffee. I should have probally said I could replace my 20 incher with a smaller model... anything graphics I can pop on the glasses, and wait time I can take them off. While I would agree it's healthy for the eyes to get some daylight... it's also unhealthy to sit in one place for any period of time... hince the large monitor.
3) They are suppressing free energy? Why? Free energy would launch an incredible boom for economy, help greatly in pollution reduction, provide an excellent way of getting rid of oil dependency, provide instant cheap space exploration (and thus access to the vast resources on the moon and in the asteroid belt, for example), erase any poverty and/or hunger etc. So WHY should anyone suppress that? Can anyone tell me why?
Because according to one theory the impact the industrial age has had on the Earth's climate. You have the surplus of greenhouse gasses creating a global warming effect... and according to some scienets the increase of particulate matter in the atmosphere has also resulted in global dimming effect. Assuming cheap efficent clean engery existed, and also assuming that particulate matter does decrease the amount of solar engery that actually reaches the earth, it would be a good idea to supress it till such time as we can get our atmosphere back under control.
This however is a wacky conspiricy theory and would imply that people involved in goverment knew jack shit about their earth, which generally speaking they don't. They seem to be more worried about the effect it would have on the ecconomy which in all fairness a sudden switch from oil which is basicily a form of currency to anything else such as breader reactors would result in chaos.
Try to keep in mind that there's almost certainly never going to be another 'Dark Ages'. The world's population is a damned sight higher, and the idea that every last person who understands English is just going to disappear off the face of the planet is ludicrous, at best.
The problem is living 5000 years into the future my only reference to pre 25th century english is on a damn DRM disc and the small Redmond who made it company doesn't know how to unlock it anymore.
Besides, it doesn't take a fall of a civilization for a language to become irrevicably altered. Look what happened to English when the French had control over England. With a strong enough cultural influence... let's say I don't know... living in an age where the furthest distance between any given person on planet earth is is a few hundrad milliseconds... it wouldn't be too far fetched in 1000 years for 21st century English to look like Beowulf.
No she couldnt, and any upper management to suggest that would have been liable for a lawsuit if she HAD been fired.
regardless of the fact had she done that here she would have been arrested for missuse of 911 and likely given 24 hours of public service and a $2000 fine, 911 is for emergancys only, you use the normal police phone number for stuff like this.
This is where I get confused. I agree 911 should be used for emergencies only... but exactly what qualifies as an emergency? If you actually talk to the police about whether it's approperate to call 911 if you are activly witnessing a crime taking place, odds are they would say yes. Heck, many cites reccomend dialing 911 when there is a powerline down that presents a hazzard.... I would call the power company but hey their city their rules. http://www.cityoflewiston.org/police/How%20To%20Us e%209-1-1.htm
When seeing someone breaking into a car i've used 911. Shoplifting is a crime... and while we could say the manager was overreacting... if you think about it, there is a risk of shoplifting when you have 80 people dressed like employees in a store. If this was the complaint then I would have to say use of 911 could be argued as being approperate. I'm not so sure on "violating civil rights".
I don't personally have any experience with any of these companies except Gizmo, which suits my needs perfectly. I have one of their UK local call-in numbers and it all works with no problems at all.
I was unaware of these options, and I thank you for sharing them. I might even take the time to sign up for one as a UK number "may" be handy for dealing with people in the UK. However, I presume what AOL is offering is a US based number. That would be "so" ultra handy for someone like my self in North America... esp among the residence of Mexico who deal with the US/Canadian residence. Heck, kinda handy for Canadians as well, though decent phone rates are easier to find between US and Canada. Mexico is another ball of wax in this regard.
http://www.sipgate.co.uk/ offers a free local number in the UK (and other countries i believe) when you sign up.
http://www.gizmoproject.com/ has a nice softphone application which, from looking at the Mac OS X 2.0 test version, will soon allow you to set it up for 3rd party SIP services. There are other softphone apps out there, but Gizmo's is the nicest cross-platform one IMO.
Looks like gizmo is $3.00/month for inbound calls. Not a bad deal. The "sipgate" is saying "Customers who sign up with sipgate for geographic phone numbers in the UK, must reside within the UK." Looks like I could get a number in Germany, which could be handy.
> And once again AOL offers us another paid service any person can spend 15 minutes learning > to get absolutely free and legal! Pity time and warner.
According to TFA you get an inbound phone number with this sucker, for free. That's kind-of spiffy, that's almost worth running AIM. Think about it, your stuck at an airport abroad but you have your laptop and WiFI. You need to contact your non-technical person so you hit the website and msg their mobile, and boom "you've got a phone call".
Now color me ignorant, but show me another service that would permit free incomming calls without a monthly fee.
Uh huh. And what would you say is the target demographic -- and the average age -- of today's comic book reader?
Why don't you tell us? I for one have no clue. I sort of understand the 80s were a silver age of comics, which would sugest that anyone who liked them then and still buys them would be in their mid 30s. But I don't have a clue... to me a comic book was something one bought as a kid as light reading on a long road trip... while certainly entertaining in order to get a full story one had to buy them monthly at 75cent to 1.50 a pop... when it was generally easier to wait until the TV show and hear others complain about how the comic book was better.
Perhaps i'm one of the few people on Slashdot who wasn't into comics, so please, enlighten us.
(how many times have you observed someone smashing in a car window while spectators did nothing and just watched? No one's going to smash in a window with you looking)
10 or 12... and I wouldn't say did nothing.... I at least looked for a phone, but none to be found. It unfortunatly is rather common. A good rule of thumb... if you part in the inner city... park where the drug dealers peddle their wares. They are the last people who want the police around and tend to do a better job than neighborhood watch.
Even if you get into the car and no one cares that the alarms going off, and no one cares that you just smashed in a car window you still have to start the car which is going to be impossible without using the laptop (although I think in a luxury car smashing in the window will set off some kind of alarm that'll stop you from turning the car on anyway.) You can't just hot wire a luxury car, they have all kinds of lock outs for all the systems if the key isn't present. The laptop acts as a key if you use it properly (as in don't smash the window with it.)
I don't honestly know about modern cards, as in cars made past like 2000, I was more commenting on the window smashing thing. Happens often enough and even if there are witnesses, it tends not to matter. I can however speak about experences with pre-2000 toyotas... where the cars do have a default mechanical mode even if the car's computer is kapaut. It'll run poorly, and often limited to 25 or 35mph, but the car will run.
I'm not up on modern fuel injection systems, so I can't say whether the vacuum is enough to permit fuel delivery without external assistance.
Assuming that is the case... there are three things you need to get an engine running...
1. Crank (Starter or a push) 2. Fuel (Fuel injection) 3. Spark (Timming and spark)
The starter motor is rather accidemic, it's just a dc motor. Fuel typicaly not an issue, but as I have no experence with trully new cars it might be. Spark would only be an issue if they decided to go with a trully distributorless system and lumped off the cam lobe. If the cam lobe still exists all you need do is connect it to a coil and your engery supply and poof, a running engine. Even without any sort of electronic advance it'll work well enough to move the car. If talking DIS, I know less about those, but the cue is probally done though magnetic induction, which would require some form of relay... something that is actually academic and might actually be easier as, near as i'm aware, there is a coil for every two cylinders in this event. Actually... come to think about it, a DIS would likely be easier.
Fuel injection i'm fuzzy on... but needless to say I find it hard to believe that it's impossible to steal a largly electronic car without a laptop. The technology to make an engine run is really very basic. Making it run "well" is more advanced.
This is not their responsibility to make sure predatory activity is prevented. Is it ANY places' responsilbility (online or in the physical world) to do that?
I had an experence in the late 1980s going to a roller skating rink. I wore a tweed hat which I was asked to remove because "gang members wear hats". It's a mystery to me as what what gang would be wearing a tweed jacket and a hat... but clearly as this was a place with many kids they experenced pressure to make sure it was a safe enviroment... or at the very least look like it's a safe enviroment, a hatless one.
Chucky Cheeses I remember had a policy that you had to be a certain age in order to play in some large plastic jungle gym thing... 8 was ok but 9 was not or something along those lines. I thought it was odd at the time but I imagine they were doing something to make it look like they were protecting kids from sexual predators. As it turns out they had crappy pizza and were so mega anal it wasn't even funny.
If you are going to market your service tward kids, you are expected to do the very minimum possible to help make sure that it's a safe enviroment, which would include listing to jackasses that believe that gangs wear hats, which for all I know they do.
When does MySpace's accountability end and an individual's accountability begins?
And MSN had a their bout with their online chat system, where shockingly enough were were issues with kids running off to meet older people where the only resolution they had was to permit only registered users to use their service. Pretty much killed their service, which is likely exactly what they wanted to do. I doubt they wanted the responciblity, and who could blame them.
But we're going to have to deal with jackasses that expect others to do their job for them until we as a people relaise that perhaps it's a GOOD idea to actually educate kids on these dangers. Don't take candy from strangers, and don't go off to meet 40 year old men at hotels. What is really sad is this is an old problem... just with new technology.
But smashing the window will make a lot of noise, set off any car alarms, and you won't be able to start the car. Plus it's obvious it's not your car if you're smashing the window. Someone just sitting against their car using a laptop isn't that suspicious at all, if anyone asks you're just waiting for your friend.
While yes, smashing a window would make much noise... and looks rather suspicious... what are bystanders going to do about it? You would "think" they would phone the police but if you actually observe parkinglots where this tends to happen most people don't do jack. And heck even calling 911 the responce time can be anywhere from 5min to an hour by that time said theif could run away on foot or run away with the car.
Alarms are even more of a joke... they are so common place people tend not to even look anymore. It's better than nothing, but might scare away your average petty thief, but at this point people don't care unless it goes off all the time... like that jackass down the street who has a viper 3000... you know the one.
It (BSplayer) has easy aspect ratio correction, low CPU usage, and key re-mapping, among it's many useful features. The key controls is what converted me from the other players I tried.
While mplayer does have the ability for key remaping, one thing it lacks over winamp is that nice 3rd mouse scroll feature. Default scroll wheel is volume, 3rd button and scroll is jump forward and back. Mplayer is nice but i've not managed to figure out how to define anything beyond mouse buttons. While I do have a wireless keyboard, I find the wireless trackball infaninatly more handy. I "could" buy a wireless numeric keypad, but i'm cheap and prefer to use what I got.
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Can't we get back on track for fighting crime and terrorism or something? Right now, this is a waste of time and money. Tell the MPAA to keep trying, and when they can actually identify shipments of what might actually have a chance of being bootleg dvds, come back and we'll take a look at it.
The funny thing is, they are spending money training dogs to combat crime, the crime of commercial bootleging... or at least that's my guess. I see alot of anti MPAA and RIAA posts here but like it or not... it's the job of Customs to protect a given country from harm, whether it be biological as in the case of food and animals, or ecconimical as is the case of counterfeit Beanie Babies. The fact of the matter is there are a ton of overseas companies who's business it is to make bootleg DVDs and ship them anywhere.
Like it or not, checking for bootleg dvds is pretty much within their mandate. You may think it's nutty... and you may think their money would be better spent on other things, but the truth of the matter is unlike piracy we are talking about a physical product, one which not only infringes on someone's copyright, but the existance of which causes tangible ecconomic harm esp in cases where the bootleg is sold as the "real deal".
oh yeah, that really worked for drug dealers. Of course, the fact that drugs are either shipped in humans, dogs, or packed with other high odor eminating items would indicate that the idea will not work.
/. knows anything about it either... and those who do won't talk.
Of the things I know... this is one subject I know nothing about. I "imagine" it's really a bad idea to ship such things via mail, and even more stupid to ship them cross boarders. But I honestly don't know what the hit to miss ratio is to smuggling drugs or anything with a distinctive odor. This is one of those things that you tend to not try.
The funny thing is, I don't think anyone on
This is not "solely for the benefit of a third party" (I assume you mean the MPAA). This program is testing the feasibility of catching DVD counterfeiters. Do you think those guys pay the appropriate Customs Duties?
Gift... 20 bucks. I'm sure they do pay the approperate duty... which is well zero.
"Lets say you connect to a web server - how are you to know if that's a public web site or a private company's intranet site that they didn't bother to password protect?"
Because the website's terms of use would say that you may use their service
Do you think any site where they didn't bother to password protect, that wasn't intended to be public, would have their terms of service listed anywhere? This is an issue not really related to this case as this person was activly looking to access propriority information (regarding UFOs), but average joe using goggle who's looking for "macrame coat hangers" happens upon a page of a private company who's business is "macrame coat hangers". Or even worse, let's say this site wasn't in a language the person could understand, but had some spiffy paterns, and no obvious or working way to contact the staff and ask what is ok and what isn't ok.
SMS is only used for SMS. When you are GPRS attatched and logged into AIM, Yahoo, ICQ, etc you are connected to whatever services server, not to an SMS box. You make it sound like they are doing some kind of relay.
SMS is meant for one way communication and has a limited text length not to mention it isn't always instant.
If you are logged into any IM on your TMO phone your GPRS attatched and it will swap over if you get a phone call and then swap back.
Trust me, I work on the network.
You "could" be right... though to me it looks like a relay. For yahoo, outbound text messages are sent to "4700", and from my perspective it acts the very same way as if I told my IM provider to relay messages to my cell phone. It further acts like a relay as my phone has no specific MSN or Yahoo software, only a GPRS address and a number. I thought the GPRS part was just to login to the relay and wait for a responce, and perhaps update the user list. The actuall messaging, to me, acts just like SMS. Also, messages get billed as if they were SMS.
I "could" be misunderstanding how the system works, my observations are as a user and not as someone who works on the network.
The $6.99 plan is quite useful. It gives you unlimited access to all data services on your phone, and lets you tether to your phone to use GPRS. The "catch" is that you can "only check e-mail" while tethered. Of course, with a SOCKS proxy running on port 110 in my office, it's basically unlimited Internet. Very helpful when you're at a coffee shop and want to surf, but don't want to pay $100/hr or whatever hotspots charge these days :)
That's handy to know, though I don't know if for example it would let me run msn messanger on my phone over GPRS, or other Nokia 6820 net apps. I "imagine" it's limited but I honestly have no clue.
Yeah thanks. It was a joke. Believe it or not most people always knew the difference. ;-)
I'm not sure it was a joke. I don't know all of Irwin Allen's work, nor have I watched much Lost in Space, The Time Tunnel, Land of the Giants, or whatever else he's done. But it woudln't shock me if there was a Lost in Space episode where they landed on some planet and met some evil alien East Indians or another with evil Cowboys. It wouldn't shock me at all if if there was an episode with East Indians and Cowboys flying away on Persian carpets showing "you don't need a carpet, you need a r-r-r-r-r-r-ug".
The way it works in the states with T-Mo is that you have SMS which allows you to use SMS or AIM only, at least on my phone. Then there's T-Zones, which comes in two flavors. There's one where you pay an exorbitant amount per megabyte, and only get up to a few megs. Then for $30, you get GPRS (woo hoo, max of ~41kbps) plus access to any T-Mo wifi hotspot, which includes starbucks and kinko's. Unlimited text is $10 on a family plan for everyone on the plan, don't know if that offer has been disco'd or not yet, but I just got it. However I'm on my ex's phone plan right now, so I probably won't have it soon... she's giving me a hard time again. Pretty sure it's $10 on an individual plan, too. 200 messages costs $3 or $4, something like that.
T-Mo used to offer unlimited GPRS for $20, or a data-only plan for $25, but I guess they decided they needed to sell hotspot access, in which I am not particularly interested. If I need to make a high speed download I'm not going to use my phone to locate a T-Mo hotspot and drive there, unless I know I'm close to one anyway. I'm going to fire up netstumbler and find the nearest open AP with parking next, and sit in my car for a bit.
Looks like my info on T-zones is out of date, though i'll double check the site. My phone is telling me $5.99 for some unlimited access "T-MobileWeb" plan, but it's too vague to know exactly what it is. In fact, that's one reason I've not bothered to switch plans... they have clear titles but the descriptions are too vague and what I presently enjoy works.
Regarding AIM only though... I lost my cheepo Nokia and replaced it with another which wasn't pre-set for MSN/ICQ/Yahoo, but lucky for me I can plop in the GPRS address and the text bearer ID number and poof, feature enabled.
MSN settings don't seem to work for me, but yahoo and icq on the other hand work just fine.
A ban on IM alone will ensure that no one uses their product. I think that I am currently the only person in the US who isn't on AIM/MSN/Yahoo/IRC. I would love to be able to listen to their customer support calls: "C: AIM isn't working. S: We don't support AIM. C: We seem to have a bad connection, you don't what?!" Do they have their own private IM service they are planning on offering?
The way it works in the states is... you have a choice between SMS and I believe "T-zones" is what it's called..... internet service basicly. SMS gives you access to Aim-ICQ/MSN/Yahoo for a fee per message, or you can get it at a flat rate for a tad more. You can pay extra to get unlimited text messages, or you can go with a data plan and, if you have a phone that supports it, run a true blue IM client on your phone. T-Zones costs a little more than unlimited SMS, not all phones support it, but you can login to multiable services at any given time. The SMS version basicly relays your messages though their standard text message service.
The artical isn't clear on this subject, but I imagine you can still have your IM, just so long as you use it through their SMS network, a fee per message deal or additional subscription. Just a true blue IM client is banned... which I suspect it's because it simply can NOT be metered.
The Scientific Atlanta (now Cisco) box that Cox uses is pretty amazing imho. Tivo might be slightly better in somethings, but I would not pay a pennie more for it. It could be worst, you could be stack with Comcast and their awful Motorola box. Boy, do those suck or what! Comcast inhereted AT&T's obsession with Motorola boxes for some reason. Every Motorola (formally known as General Instument I believe) digital box I have ever encountered was a miserable failure. Motorola should do all of us a favor and close their cable box division down.
Keep in mind that there are many boxes offered by Motorola... and you might just be thinking of the 68000 based ones which were the first to be released to support Digital Cable. The newer ones sport cable modems, support hard drives, and of corse firewire... though not having HDTV I can't say I have met one with firewire onboard. Here is an advert for the Motorola DVR box service.
While I appricate the opinion that Sci-Atlanta boxes are better than their Motorola counterparts... it would be nice to know how they are better. Those like me who have never met a Sci-Atlanta box would be most interested.
Besides, in theory you can buy your own damn cablebox and jack it into your cable network.
I doubt they would be a good replacement for a standard monitor unless you can either touch type. Also it might be messy groping for your cup of coffee. Also it is healthy to see some daylight during working hours. So great for personal multimedia or gaming, probably not entirely practical as a replacement for a monitor in a work situation.
I can touch type just fine, I can even touch drink coffee. I should have probally said I could replace my 20 incher with a smaller model... anything graphics I can pop on the glasses, and wait time I can take them off. While I would agree it's healthy for the eyes to get some daylight... it's also unhealthy to sit in one place for any period of time... hince the large monitor.
Hmmm.. 20 inch tube monitor or glasses that fit in a drawer when i'm done... hmmmmmm
More desktop space or a 20 inch tube monitor that takes up so much space I glued a shelf ontop of it.
The ability to wear glasses... lean back with my wireless keyboard and trackball, and get something done.
I gotta say... while I like my old sony 20se, it won't last forever... and LCD is pretty attractive, glasses are even more so.
3) They are suppressing free energy? Why? Free energy would launch an incredible boom for economy, help greatly in pollution reduction, provide an excellent way of getting rid of oil dependency, provide instant cheap space exploration (and thus access to the vast resources on the moon and in the asteroid belt, for example), erase any poverty and/or hunger etc. So WHY should anyone suppress that? Can anyone tell me why?
Because according to one theory the impact the industrial age has had on the Earth's climate. You have the surplus of greenhouse gasses creating a global warming effect... and according to some scienets the increase of particulate matter in the atmosphere has also resulted in global dimming effect. Assuming cheap efficent clean engery existed, and also assuming that particulate matter does decrease the amount of solar engery that actually reaches the earth, it would be a good idea to supress it till such time as we can get our atmosphere back under control.
This however is a wacky conspiricy theory and would imply that people involved in goverment knew jack shit about their earth, which generally speaking they don't. They seem to be more worried about the effect it would have on the ecconomy which in all fairness a sudden switch from oil which is basicily a form of currency to anything else such as breader reactors would result in chaos.
Try to keep in mind that there's almost certainly never going to be another 'Dark Ages'. The world's population is a damned sight higher, and the idea that every last person who understands English is just going to disappear off the face of the planet is ludicrous, at best.
The problem is living 5000 years into the future my only reference to pre 25th century english is on a damn DRM disc and the small Redmond who made it company doesn't know how to unlock it anymore.
Besides, it doesn't take a fall of a civilization for a language to become irrevicably altered. Look what happened to English when the French had control over England. With a strong enough cultural influence... let's say I don't know... living in an age where the furthest distance between any given person on planet earth is is a few hundrad milliseconds... it wouldn't be too far fetched in 1000 years for 21st century English to look like Beowulf.
what's latin for "radioactive"?
Plutonium strenuus - toxicum radiare?
No she couldnt, and any upper management to suggest that would have been liable for a lawsuit if she HAD been fired.
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regardless of the fact had she done that here she would have been arrested for missuse of 911 and likely given 24 hours of public service and a $2000 fine, 911 is for emergancys only, you use the normal police phone number for stuff like this.
This is where I get confused. I agree 911 should be used for emergencies only... but exactly what qualifies as an emergency? If you actually talk to the police about whether it's approperate to call 911 if you are activly witnessing a crime taking place, odds are they would say yes. Heck, many cites reccomend dialing 911 when there is a powerline down that presents a hazzard.... I would call the power company but hey their city their rules.
http://www.cityoflewiston.org/police/How%20To%20U
When seeing someone breaking into a car i've used 911. Shoplifting is a crime... and while we could say the manager was overreacting... if you think about it, there is a risk of shoplifting when you have 80 people dressed like employees in a store. If this was the complaint then I would have to say use of 911 could be argued as being approperate. I'm not so sure on "violating civil rights".
I don't personally have any experience with any of these companies except Gizmo, which suits my needs perfectly. I have one of their UK local call-in numbers and it all works with no problems at all.
I was unaware of these options, and I thank you for sharing them. I might even take the time to sign up for one as a UK number "may" be handy for dealing with people in the UK. However, I presume what AOL is offering is a US based number. That would be "so" ultra handy for someone like my self in North America... esp among the residence of Mexico who deal with the US/Canadian residence. Heck, kinda handy for Canadians as well, though decent phone rates are easier to find between US and Canada. Mexico is another ball of wax in this regard.
Its called a cell phone... which most people seem to have these days...
I said "airport abroad". Cellphones are ultra handy, when they work. Mine did not in Monterey. But WiFi did.
http://www.sipgate.co.uk/ offers a free local number in the UK (and other countries i believe) when you sign up.
http://www.gizmoproject.com/ has a nice softphone application which, from looking at the Mac OS X 2.0 test version, will soon allow you to set it up for 3rd party SIP services. There are other softphone apps out there, but Gizmo's is the nicest cross-platform one IMO.
Looks like gizmo is $3.00/month for inbound calls. Not a bad deal.
The "sipgate" is saying "Customers who sign up with sipgate for geographic phone numbers in the UK, must reside within the UK." Looks like I could get a number in Germany, which could be handy.
But this aim deal sounds like it's free...
> And once again AOL offers us another paid service any person can spend 15 minutes learning
> to get absolutely free and legal! Pity time and warner.
According to TFA you get an inbound phone number with this sucker, for free. That's kind-of spiffy, that's almost worth running AIM. Think about it, your stuck at an airport abroad but you have your laptop and WiFI. You need to contact your non-technical person so you hit the website and msg their mobile, and boom "you've got a phone call".
Now color me ignorant, but show me another service that would permit free incomming calls without a monthly fee.
Uh huh. And what would you say is the target demographic -- and the average age -- of today's comic book reader?
Why don't you tell us? I for one have no clue. I sort of understand the 80s were a silver age of comics, which would sugest that anyone who liked them then and still buys them would be in their mid 30s. But I don't have a clue... to me a comic book was something one bought as a kid as light reading on a long road trip... while certainly entertaining in order to get a full story one had to buy them monthly at 75cent to 1.50 a pop... when it was generally easier to wait until the TV show and hear others complain about how the comic book was better.
Perhaps i'm one of the few people on Slashdot who wasn't into comics, so please, enlighten us.
(how many times have you observed someone smashing in a car window while spectators did nothing and just watched? No one's going to smash in a window with you looking)
10 or 12... and I wouldn't say did nothing.... I at least looked for a phone, but none to be found. It unfortunatly is rather common. A good rule of thumb... if you part in the inner city... park where the drug dealers peddle their wares. They are the last people who want the police around and tend to do a better job than neighborhood watch.
Even if you get into the car and no one cares that the alarms going off, and no one cares that you just smashed in a car window you still have to start the car which is going to be impossible without using the laptop (although I think in a luxury car smashing in the window will set off some kind of alarm that'll stop you from turning the car on anyway.) You can't just hot wire a luxury car, they have all kinds of lock outs for all the systems if the key isn't present. The laptop acts as a key if you use it properly (as in don't smash the window with it.)
I don't honestly know about modern cards, as in cars made past like 2000, I was more commenting on the window smashing thing. Happens often enough and even if there are witnesses, it tends not to matter. I can however speak about experences with pre-2000 toyotas... where the cars do have a default mechanical mode even if the car's computer is kapaut. It'll run poorly, and often limited to 25 or 35mph, but the car will run.
I'm not up on modern fuel injection systems, so I can't say whether the vacuum is enough to permit fuel delivery without external assistance.
Assuming that is the case... there are three things you need to get an engine running...
1. Crank (Starter or a push)
2. Fuel (Fuel injection)
3. Spark (Timming and spark)
The starter motor is rather accidemic, it's just a dc motor. Fuel typicaly not an issue, but as I have no experence with trully new cars it might be. Spark would only be an issue if they decided to go with a trully distributorless system and lumped off the cam lobe. If the cam lobe still exists all you need do is connect it to a coil and your engery supply and poof, a running engine. Even without any sort of electronic advance it'll work well enough to move the car. If talking DIS, I know less about those, but the cue is probally done though magnetic induction, which would require some form of relay... something that is actually academic and might actually be easier as, near as i'm aware, there is a coil for every two cylinders in this event. Actually... come to think about it, a DIS would likely be easier.
Fuel injection i'm fuzzy on... but needless to say I find it hard to believe that it's impossible to steal a largly electronic car without a laptop. The technology to make an engine run is really very basic. Making it run "well" is more advanced.
This is not their responsibility to make sure predatory activity is prevented.
Is it ANY places' responsilbility (online or in the physical world) to do that?
I had an experence in the late 1980s going to a roller skating rink. I wore a tweed hat which I was asked to remove because "gang members wear hats". It's a mystery to me as what what gang would be wearing a tweed jacket and a hat... but clearly as this was a place with many kids they experenced pressure to make sure it was a safe enviroment... or at the very least look like it's a safe enviroment, a hatless one.
Chucky Cheeses I remember had a policy that you had to be a certain age in order to play in some large plastic jungle gym thing... 8 was ok but 9 was not or something along those lines. I thought it was odd at the time but I imagine they were doing something to make it look like they were protecting kids from sexual predators. As it turns out they had crappy pizza and were so mega anal it wasn't even funny.
If you are going to market your service tward kids, you are expected to do the very minimum possible to help make sure that it's a safe enviroment, which would include listing to jackasses that believe that gangs wear hats, which for all I know they do.
When does MySpace's accountability end and an individual's accountability begins?
And MSN had a their bout with their online chat system, where shockingly enough were were issues with kids running off to meet older people where the only resolution they had was to permit only registered users to use their service. Pretty much killed their service, which is likely exactly what they wanted to do. I doubt they wanted the responciblity, and who could blame them.
But we're going to have to deal with jackasses that expect others to do their job for them until we as a people relaise that perhaps it's a GOOD idea to actually educate kids on these dangers. Don't take candy from strangers, and don't go off to meet 40 year old men at hotels. What is really sad is this is an old problem... just with new technology.
But smashing the window will make a lot of noise, set off any car alarms, and you won't be able to start the car. Plus it's obvious it's not your car if you're smashing the window. Someone just sitting against their car using a laptop isn't that suspicious at all, if anyone asks you're just waiting for your friend.
While yes, smashing a window would make much noise... and looks rather suspicious... what are bystanders going to do about it? You would "think" they would phone the police but if you actually observe parkinglots where this tends to happen most people don't do jack. And heck even calling 911 the responce time can be anywhere from 5min to an hour by that time said theif could run away on foot or run away with the car.
Alarms are even more of a joke... they are so common place people tend not to even look anymore. It's better than nothing, but might scare away your average petty thief, but at this point people don't care unless it goes off all the time... like that jackass down the street who has a viper 3000... you know the one.
It (BSplayer) has easy aspect ratio correction, low CPU usage, and key re-mapping, among it's many useful features. The key controls is what converted me from the other players I tried.
While mplayer does have the ability for key remaping, one thing it lacks over winamp is that nice 3rd mouse scroll feature. Default scroll wheel is volume, 3rd button and scroll is jump forward and back. Mplayer is nice but i've not managed to figure out how to define anything beyond mouse buttons. While I do have a wireless keyboard, I find the wireless trackball infaninatly more handy. I "could" buy a wireless numeric keypad, but i'm cheap and prefer to use what I got.