I thought they also delt with anti-monopolisation of media and basic standards etc..?
Spectrum management serves as monopoly regulation. It's pretty hard to buy another radio station if the FCC says you have enough already and won't grant the broadcast license transfer.
"Basic standards" regulation is premised upon the notion that the spectrum is public property and that while you may have an exclusive license to broadcast on a certain frequency, you can't say anything there that you can't say on a street corner without being "indecent". The FCC is about 60 years out of date, there.
What about walking into a retail establishment that subscribes to satellite radio (retail edition) unbeknownst to you?
Being that a retail establishment is PRIVATE PROPERTY, they could be playing a "Butt Slammers IV" DVD on multiple video screens at full volume and there's not a fucking thing you or the FCC can do about it. The FCC doesn't guarantee that you won't hear anything offensive, ever.
You probably could shut down many power stations if all CRTs were replaced by TFTs. Just something to think about in these times of high oil prices.
CRTs consume an infinitesimal amount of electricity compared to lighting and heating/cooling. You could shut down maybe a half dozen power plants if everyone switched to TFT. Not a significant savings.
Sounds very interesting. I've been through a period of intensive language school before, albeit for French. In my personal experience, especially for beginners, your money would be best spent on small class-sized personal instruction.
I was trained as a Russian liguist by the US Army, and I strongly agree with your asessment. We had periodic language labs where we listened to boring tapes or watched low quality video tapes, but most of the time we sat in the classroom conversing with instructors. Class size started at 10 people or so and reduced to 5 or 6 through attrition. Instructors rotated to different classes every couple hours. Computers might've possibly been a better tool than the horrid casette players in the language labs, but all the real learning was done in small classes talking with real people.
You're a telco monkey? Congratulations on screwing people out of $85 an hour - you should be proud.
Work costs money, and that's the prevailing rate for telecom work. You think that $85 goes straight into my pocket? After insurance, taxes, payroll, etc., I'm doing well if I see $20 of that.
And you've bassackwards what I said, and then just cocked it all up. There would be one wireless connection to a neighboring town. The antenna on the local end would feed into a switch and distribute telephone over normal means.
You clearly have no clue what is involved in wiring a town for phone service. The expense isn't in getting the bandwidth to handle calls into the town-- that can be a couple strands of fiber and takes maybe a week-- it's getting a fucking copper pair into each and every house from the central point where the fiber comes in. Your ingenious plan is the same as their plan, only with the unnecessary complexity of a wireless link instead of fiber.
Just replace a copper T1 that apparently would cost $700,000 with a wireless one instead.
So everyone just walks to the center of town where this T1 terminates and plugs their phone in there? I don't think so. Think it through. You have to string copper lines to each and every god damned customer. You think the town is pre-wired and just never could convince anyone to run a fiber line along the road to hook them up? Cripes, you're dense.
For crap's sake, you could move the entire town for $700,000.
Hyperbole and ignorance. What a wonderful debate technique!
'failed to launch due to an unknown anomaly'
What kind of engineering is this? With all of the possible metrology, the system 'shut down' due to an unknown anomaly? If the scientists and engineers can't grok what causes a 'shut down', then they need new jobs
The talking head who said "unknown anomaly" probably talked to the engineers first. They probably said something like:
"The primary system dumped core with error 0xEA09, which indicates the fizgig wasn't able to spin up to polarity. We need time to dump the logs and figure out if it was the metabalancer, the interflexor, or maybe even the sky modulator that miscued the fizgig."
To which he says, "I'll just tell 'em we don't know what happened yet"
It can't possibly cost more than a couple hundred grand. Less than 1/3 what the article quotes. BellSouth is just being assinine about it.
Why do you think it would be cheaper? You sound like the kind of jackass I sometimes have to work for who complains that "all you did was hook up some wires" when I bill him for 3 hours work at $85/hr. Have you ever strung cabling? Set up a CO? Installed any utilities through public rights-of-way? There's more to it than you think, and skilled labor isn't cheap.
I see other good options too - like VOIP and link via long range wireless signal. Put the antenna up on some tall structures. Surely you could construct the whole rig for under $50K.
Seeing how they don't even have phone service, I'd like to know how you're going to get the internet connectivity out to them to start up this wonderful VOIP solution. The whole rig for $50K? Yer nuts, man. The transmitter for your "long range wireless signal" will likely cost that much by itself. And each residence will require a transceiver. And all this will have to be installed, not by uninsured nerds working for free, but by actual skilled technicians covered by liability insurance. And this whole wireless system will need to be maintained. Are those free nerds going to hang around troubleshooting forever? I doubt it.
I am not trying to make a new design or add a lot of eye candy. I would like to think I making something that will actually be useful but takes advantage of 3D hardware acceleration while leveraging exiting applications.
So wait, instead of addressing some specific shortcoming in 2D interface design, your motivation is the under-utilization of 3D hardware by the UI? That's kind of a backwards way to approach things. Many cars have voice-synth components, but nobody is adding talking speedometers or singing heater controls. Sure, the tech is under utilized, but that's for good reason: it's not an improvement.
It doesn't help that both the input device (mouse) and output device (monitor) usually are 2D and inefficient at navigating in and visualizing a 3D environment well.
Absolutely. Not to mention the fact that we don't actually see in 3 dimensions; it's more like 2 dimensions with depth cues. I think we can all agree that closing one eye gives you a 2D view of the world, and since opening that second eye doesn't give you the power to see what's inside the refrigerator with the door closed, we really only see in about 2.5 dimensions. This being the case, any 3D interface will require additional overhead to allow use to move crap out of the way so we can see behind it (not to mention a way to find objects we've inadvertently left in the virtual refrigerator), plus a means of panning the synthetic 3D view around to look for that document "behind" us, and in the end we're throwing away more time on virtual hide and seek than we're gaining by being able to spread our work out on this 3rd dimension. Frankly, it's just not worth it.
The idea is to see how 3D can enhance the user interface. Not replace something that isn't broken. The 'text' part of reading should stay in 2D land, but think about the visual feedback of flipping a page, or seeing how thick the side of the book is. Also keep in mind that text is only a part of a user interface. 3D objects as icons could be usefull for example.
A benefit of 3D objects over 2D objects is that if you move them in that 3rd dimension they will visually shrink in a natural looking manner and take up less space on your screen.
The problem with 3D interfaces is that there aren't many problems for which a 3D interface is a better solution that a 2D interface. 3D interfaces have a certain amount of automatic "overhead" in that they require some form of unusual control device and (more important) the display must provide a way for our eyes to see it. We don't really see in 3 dimensions; it's more like 2 dimensions with depth cues. The retina, being essentially a flat plane, receives a 2D picture. With two eyes we can (through the magic of our brains) compare the differences between two 2D pictures and calculate depth, but we still essentially have only a 2D picture.
Really, unless there's a very compelling reason* to present the data in a 3D format, 2D presentation is more efficient and better suited to the design of our visual organs.
* CAD/CAM applications, for example, obviously need to present in a 3D format, as the objects they model will have 3 dimensions.
My dads invention is missing -
It is a hydraulic engine with which you can build motors of any size. Want to rotate the Pentagon? It is possible with the Hercules motor
Other than being a motor design that could move things that are so large they shouldn't be moved, what's the purpose of this? Like most such "ingenious" inventions, it has the distinct appearance of a solution in search of a problem.
A nuke within a "couple of miles" off its target would still vapourize the target.
Actually, a 1 megaton blast will only vaporize things out to about.6 miles, and the "completely flattened buildings" radius only goes to about 1.7 miles. A couple of miles is a MISS for a hardened target.
This is all moot, though, because ICBMs don't use GPS for guidance.
But did it seem to anyone else that the L.A. Times in the past year or two had gotten WAY too opinionated in their HARD NEWS stories? I mean, I read the LA times occationally, but it seemed somewhere around a year after 9/11 it became VIOLENTLY anti-Bush/anti-republican.
Nah, it's been a liberal democrat rag for decades. My dad complained about it every morning back in the 70's. Its chosen audience is smug urban democrats who like government programs. The righties hate the LA Times because it's too far left. Real Progressives(tm) hate it because it's a cheerleader for the status-quo. The LA Times has tried to be the NY Times for years, but they just can't break out of the shallowness of local culture.
Search rec.woodworking for Crapsman and you get an idea of what the pro's think of Craftsman's tools. A lifetime guarantee is worthless to me if the tool is going to let me down on a job; I don't earn money taking defective kit back to the store. Top tip: buy Makita tools and they'll work out cheaper than Craftsmen in the long run even though the inital outlay is much more.
Only a fool buys Craftsman power tools for anything more than casual use, because they aren't covered by the lifetime warranty. The only thing the Craftsman line is good for is the casual home user who can't afford the outlay for pro-grade tools, but doesn't want to be stuck buying new ones every time he breaks a 3/8 ratchet.
A lifetime guarantee is worthless to me if the tool is going to let me down on a job; I don't earn money taking defective kit back to the store.
What kind of idiot buys Craftsman expecting professional-grade tools? The craftsman line is clearly marketed to the weekend do-it-yourself crowd. Some people don't use them enough to justify the outlay for a Snap-On socket set, a Milwaukee sawzall, a Porter-Cable hammer drill, or a DeWalt cordless drill/driver. Complaining that Craftsman tools aren't good enough for hard daily use is like complaining that the Honda CRV is too light to handle hauling concrete blocks and bags of cement 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. It's clearly the wrong tool for the job.
Actually, they don't. We get a certain number of 2-way minutes, and this is independent of the normal plan minutes.
Actually, that was precisely the point I was making. 2-way minutes generally come out of a common pool, while regular calls come out of minutes assigned to each phone. People have a tendency to use the 2-way because 2-way time use isn't itemized on the bill, while cell calls are.
but my instinct says that 'scholar' is not a generic term for a product like this.
There's no requirement for the term to be descriptive of the function of the product for it to be in generic use. "Business Class" seating on airplanes describes larger-than-coach-but-smaller-than-1st-class seats and it draws its name from the specific customer it's aimed at: businessmen. Google Scholar likewise draws its name from its intended user: scholars.
I think the radio feature was unilimited with the basic fee. That might have something to do with it...;)
Actually, minutes for 2 way come from a pool shared by all phones on the plan, usually. People tend to use 2 way because their boss (who likely pays for their phone) doesn't see who's using 2 way on the bill, but if you call someone using the cell phone it shows up itemized on the bill and he'll say "who the hell were you talking to for 65 minutes during work that day?"
I don't know if Sears still has this policy, but it used to be that if a Craftsman tool was damaged under any circumstances whatsoever, they would replace it no questions asked. If you still have the Craftsman tools, it might be worthwhile to ask about it.
The Craftsman lifetime warranty generally only applies to non-powered hand tools below a certain level of complexity. Screwdrivers, hammers, sockets -- yes. Power drills, table saws, click-type torque wrenches -- no. The "no" things are generally covered by some sort of warranty (usually at least a year), just not the lifetime one.
We have Lanceair. Europe and Japan have jack shit compared to this . And you can build it yourself. Can't do that in Europe.
Although the interesting thing about that is that most of the small airplane manufacturers are gone due to absurd product liability claims. The old Piper company went feet up from that as I recall, and I think Beech was gobbled up by Raytheon, who decided they didn't want to deal with the liability of light civil aviation and cancelled the line. Since we allow homebuilt aircraft in this country it looks to me like the market shifted to kit planes, neatly sidestepping the issue of exorbitant manufacturer liability suits.
I think I'm slightly more worried about balancing a 2.4GHz microwave generator (802.11g) on my bollocks.
Microwave radiation is non-ionizing. If it's strong enough, the most it'll do is produce heat. Your wireless card isn't strong enough for that. Your worries are unfounded.
Lets use a sense of proportion. Kent state protesters = 3,000. Tiananmen square protests = >1 million. 4 * 1,000,000 / 3,000 = 1333.
I'd call that proportional overuse of force.
Comparing proportion is a bad metric. A few jackass yahoo National Guardsmen with itchy trigger fingers can kill 4 people in seconds without consent from their immediate superiors. Killing 3000 people takes planning and significant leadership coordination.
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Spectrum management serves as monopoly regulation. It's pretty hard to buy another radio station if the FCC says you have enough already and won't grant the broadcast license transfer.
"Basic standards" regulation is premised upon the notion that the spectrum is public property and that while you may have an exclusive license to broadcast on a certain frequency, you can't say anything there that you can't say on a street corner without being "indecent". The FCC is about 60 years out of date, there.
Being that a retail establishment is PRIVATE PROPERTY, they could be playing a "Butt Slammers IV" DVD on multiple video screens at full volume and there's not a fucking thing you or the FCC can do about it. The FCC doesn't guarantee that you won't hear anything offensive, ever.
CRTs consume an infinitesimal amount of electricity compared to lighting and heating/cooling. You could shut down maybe a half dozen power plants if everyone switched to TFT. Not a significant savings.
I was trained as a Russian liguist by the US Army, and I strongly agree with your asessment. We had periodic language labs where we listened to boring tapes or watched low quality video tapes, but most of the time we sat in the classroom conversing with instructors. Class size started at 10 people or so and reduced to 5 or 6 through attrition. Instructors rotated to different classes every couple hours. Computers might've possibly been a better tool than the horrid casette players in the language labs, but all the real learning was done in small classes talking with real people.
And how's your missile defense system going?
It works just as well as yours, but at a fraction of the the cost! Heh. Touche.
Work costs money, and that's the prevailing rate for telecom work. You think that $85 goes straight into my pocket? After insurance, taxes, payroll, etc., I'm doing well if I see $20 of that.
And you've bassackwards what I said, and then just cocked it all up. There would be one wireless connection to a neighboring town. The antenna on the local end would feed into a switch and distribute telephone over normal means.
You clearly have no clue what is involved in wiring a town for phone service. The expense isn't in getting the bandwidth to handle calls into the town-- that can be a couple strands of fiber and takes maybe a week-- it's getting a fucking copper pair into each and every house from the central point where the fiber comes in. Your ingenious plan is the same as their plan, only with the unnecessary complexity of a wireless link instead of fiber.
Just replace a copper T1 that apparently would cost $700,000 with a wireless one instead.
So everyone just walks to the center of town where this T1 terminates and plugs their phone in there? I don't think so. Think it through. You have to string copper lines to each and every god damned customer. You think the town is pre-wired and just never could convince anyone to run a fiber line along the road to hook them up? Cripes, you're dense.
For crap's sake, you could move the entire town for $700,000.
Hyperbole and ignorance. What a wonderful debate technique!
And how's your missile defense system going?
dang fer'ners...
The talking head who said "unknown anomaly" probably talked to the engineers first. They probably said something like:
To which he says, "I'll just tell 'em we don't know what happened yet"
Why do you think it would be cheaper? You sound like the kind of jackass I sometimes have to work for who complains that "all you did was hook up some wires" when I bill him for 3 hours work at $85/hr. Have you ever strung cabling? Set up a CO? Installed any utilities through public rights-of-way? There's more to it than you think, and skilled labor isn't cheap.
I see other good options too - like VOIP and link via long range wireless signal. Put the antenna up on some tall structures. Surely you could construct the whole rig for under $50K.
Seeing how they don't even have phone service, I'd like to know how you're going to get the internet connectivity out to them to start up this wonderful VOIP solution. The whole rig for $50K? Yer nuts, man. The transmitter for your "long range wireless signal" will likely cost that much by itself. And each residence will require a transceiver. And all this will have to be installed, not by uninsured nerds working for free, but by actual skilled technicians covered by liability insurance. And this whole wireless system will need to be maintained. Are those free nerds going to hang around troubleshooting forever? I doubt it.
So wait, instead of addressing some specific shortcoming in 2D interface design, your motivation is the under-utilization of 3D hardware by the UI? That's kind of a backwards way to approach things. Many cars have voice-synth components, but nobody is adding talking speedometers or singing heater controls. Sure, the tech is under utilized, but that's for good reason: it's not an improvement.
Absolutely. Not to mention the fact that we don't actually see in 3 dimensions; it's more like 2 dimensions with depth cues. I think we can all agree that closing one eye gives you a 2D view of the world, and since opening that second eye doesn't give you the power to see what's inside the refrigerator with the door closed, we really only see in about 2.5 dimensions. This being the case, any 3D interface will require additional overhead to allow use to move crap out of the way so we can see behind it (not to mention a way to find objects we've inadvertently left in the virtual refrigerator), plus a means of panning the synthetic 3D view around to look for that document "behind" us, and in the end we're throwing away more time on virtual hide and seek than we're gaining by being able to spread our work out on this 3rd dimension. Frankly, it's just not worth it.
The problem with 3D interfaces is that there aren't many problems for which a 3D interface is a better solution that a 2D interface. 3D interfaces have a certain amount of automatic "overhead" in that they require some form of unusual control device and (more important) the display must provide a way for our eyes to see it. We don't really see in 3 dimensions; it's more like 2 dimensions with depth cues. The retina, being essentially a flat plane, receives a 2D picture. With two eyes we can (through the magic of our brains) compare the differences between two 2D pictures and calculate depth, but we still essentially have only a 2D picture.
Really, unless there's a very compelling reason* to present the data in a 3D format, 2D presentation is more efficient and better suited to the design of our visual organs.
* CAD/CAM applications, for example, obviously need to present in a 3D format, as the objects they model will have 3 dimensions.
Other than being a motor design that could move things that are so large they shouldn't be moved, what's the purpose of this? Like most such "ingenious" inventions, it has the distinct appearance of a solution in search of a problem.
Actually, a 1 megaton blast will only vaporize things out to about .6 miles, and the "completely flattened buildings" radius only goes to about 1.7 miles. A couple of miles is a MISS for a hardened target.
This is all moot, though, because ICBMs don't use GPS for guidance.
I'm always suspicious of people who think they're too good for spellcheckers.
Nah, it's been a liberal democrat rag for decades. My dad complained about it every morning back in the 70's. Its chosen audience is smug urban democrats who like government programs. The righties hate the LA Times because it's too far left. Real Progressives(tm) hate it because it's a cheerleader for the status-quo. The LA Times has tried to be the NY Times for years, but they just can't break out of the shallowness of local culture.
Only a fool buys Craftsman power tools for anything more than casual use, because they aren't covered by the lifetime warranty. The only thing the Craftsman line is good for is the casual home user who can't afford the outlay for pro-grade tools, but doesn't want to be stuck buying new ones every time he breaks a 3/8 ratchet.
A lifetime guarantee is worthless to me if the tool is going to let me down on a job; I don't earn money taking defective kit back to the store.
What kind of idiot buys Craftsman expecting professional-grade tools? The craftsman line is clearly marketed to the weekend do-it-yourself crowd. Some people don't use them enough to justify the outlay for a Snap-On socket set, a Milwaukee sawzall, a Porter-Cable hammer drill, or a DeWalt cordless drill/driver. Complaining that Craftsman tools aren't good enough for hard daily use is like complaining that the Honda CRV is too light to handle hauling concrete blocks and bags of cement 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. It's clearly the wrong tool for the job.
Actually, that was precisely the point I was making. 2-way minutes generally come out of a common pool, while regular calls come out of minutes assigned to each phone. People have a tendency to use the 2-way because 2-way time use isn't itemized on the bill, while cell calls are.
There's no requirement for the term to be descriptive of the function of the product for it to be in generic use. "Business Class" seating on airplanes describes larger-than-coach-but-smaller-than-1st-class seats and it draws its name from the specific customer it's aimed at: businessmen. Google Scholar likewise draws its name from its intended user: scholars.
Actually, minutes for 2 way come from a pool shared by all phones on the plan, usually. People tend to use 2 way because their boss (who likely pays for their phone) doesn't see who's using 2 way on the bill, but if you call someone using the cell phone it shows up itemized on the bill and he'll say "who the hell were you talking to for 65 minutes during work that day?"
The Craftsman lifetime warranty generally only applies to non-powered hand tools below a certain level of complexity. Screwdrivers, hammers, sockets -- yes. Power drills, table saws, click-type torque wrenches -- no. The "no" things are generally covered by some sort of warranty (usually at least a year), just not the lifetime one.
Now that I look, you can buy a 2004 Beech Bonanza for $650,000 so I guess they're not out of the civil aviation business.
We have Lanceair. Europe and Japan have jack shit compared to this . And you can build it yourself. Can't do that in Europe.
Although the interesting thing about that is that most of the small airplane manufacturers are gone due to absurd product liability claims. The old Piper company went feet up from that as I recall, and I think Beech was gobbled up by Raytheon, who decided they didn't want to deal with the liability of light civil aviation and cancelled the line. Since we allow homebuilt aircraft in this country it looks to me like the market shifted to kit planes, neatly sidestepping the issue of exorbitant manufacturer liability suits.
Microwave radiation is non-ionizing. If it's strong enough, the most it'll do is produce heat. Your wireless card isn't strong enough for that. Your worries are unfounded.
I'd call that proportional overuse of force.
Comparing proportion is a bad metric. A few jackass yahoo National Guardsmen with itchy trigger fingers can kill 4 people in seconds without consent from their immediate superiors. Killing 3000 people takes planning and significant leadership coordination.