there are thousands of audio recordings that were recoreded...
This, unintentionally, gets to the heart of the matter. The durability of a format depends on the popularity of the format. The history of wire recorders tells us nothing about whether or not we will be able to read CD-ROMs 50 years from now, because compared to CD-ROMs, CD-Rs, etc., wire recorders were never very popular. How many millions (tens of millions? hundreds of millions?) of CD-Rs have been burned? That alone will guarantee a market for CD-ROM drives for a very long time. If 50 million wire recordings had been made, you'd be able to buy a wire recorder/player for $39 at Circuit City today .
The real danger, of course, is that the CD-R media in use today won't last, physically. But then photographic negatives don't last either, if they're not taken care of.
If we want our country to be safe, perhaps we should start practicing some of the philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth, whom a majority of theistic Americans claim for a saviour.
"Give to Caesar what is Caesar's and give to God what is God's" - Matthew 22:21
Designing flexible wires to every pixel, and flexible transistors to control every pixel, if needed, is the bulk of the complexity.
True, but that problem is going to exist whether or not you "throw out the Digital to Analog converter."
Re:Every pixel must be separately addressable.
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But SVDave, if you throw out the Digital to Analog converter, you must provide some way of hooking every row and every column with a separate wire. Every pixel must be separately addressable.
And every bit of the main memory of your computer must be separately addressable by the CPU. That doesn't meant that you need to have a wire from the CPU to every bit of memory, nor does it mean that the CPU needs a D-to-A converter to communicate with memory.
Right now, the preferred way for an external LCD to talk to a video board is through a digital interface. If an LCD doesn't need to see an analog signal, why would e-paper need to?
Also, the hardware driver could not use a fan, as does the Matrox G-450.
So what? The reason video boards need fans these days (remember, they didn't always need them), is because of the hardware devoted to 3-D. Take that out, and the display circuitry will run a lot cooler. Take out color support, and things get simpler and cooler still.
Re:Very, very difficult problem: Designing cheap..
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E-Paper Moves Closer
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The speaker is quickly skipping over a very, very difficult problem: Designing cheap, flexible, fast, digital electronics that can address every one of those pixels so that they can be turned off and on.
Just getting the speed and resolution necessary costs $110 for a Matrox G-450 video card, which is not flexible and doesn't include digital output. The final signal to a monitor is analog.
The Matrox does a lot more than a video driver for an e-book would need to. 8.5"x11" at 300dpi for e-paper would be a 3300x2550 monochrome display. The G-450 already does 2048x1536 @ 32bpp, so I think Matrox could put together something that did about 2x the resolution with 1/32 fewer bits per pixel without difficulty. Throw out the d-to-a converter, the analog port connectors, most of the memory, the AGP interface, and the 3-D hardware and you'll get something that costs a lot less than $110.
Would Congressmen listen to teenagers who aren't registered to vote yet? Or do they listen to adults? If they do in fact listen it'll go a long way. At this moment I'm preparing to write a letter to my senators, but unsure if they'll actually listen to me, a 16 year old male from CA.
There's no need to include your age in your letter. All you need to tell them is that you're against the bill. If the bill has been officially submitted by the time you write your letter (it hasn't as of now), include the docket number (the HR-XXXX or SB-XXXX number that identifies the bill).
If the cost of an IPv6 block dwindles to about ten bucks a year per thousand (pulling numbers out of the air) then I suspect each ISP account would come with 16 or so addresses.
At 2^128 addresses, $10 per trillion would be too expensive. At that price, the entire address space would be worth $3 billion billion billion, which would probably make the IPV6 address space worth more than all the real estate on the planet:-). Does anyone think that the IPV6 address space is worth that much? If so, then we should all switch from IPV4 to IPV6 for no other reason than to cause the single greatest creation of wealth in the history of the human race.
IP addresses will be dynamically assigned, be transitory, and be mobile.
Dynamically assigned? Transitory? Why? IPV6 has 2^128 possible addresses. According to the IPV6 FAQ, that's 3.4*10^27 addresses per person (assuming a worldwide population of 10 billion). You could give every person 256, or 4096, or 65536 IPV6 addresses and barely scratch the surface of the address space. Why make address assignments anything other than permanent?
What about the audio?
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So we're going to have HDTV video from NASA. But the important question is: what about the audio? The video I see on NASA TV (I get it on my cable system) looks pretty good, about what I'd expect from modern video equipment. But whenever they broadcast audio as well (an interview from the shuttle, for example), it sounds the same as audio from an Apollo mission. Why can't they use TV-quality audio when broadcasting TV-quality video from orbit?
if you were to paint your car with an *invisible* paint. You then offered a service whereby you would let people look at your invisible car through goggles that can see invisible cars. You'd be pretty pissed if people started hacking together their own goggles and came and looked at your car.
Perhaps, but it still wouldn't be theft. Pissing someone off isn't against the law.
Ah yes, the good old "if it's in plain sight you should expect it to be stolen" defense. I guess I'll just help myself to your car (parked on a public street no less!) and the contents of your mailbox. And it was your fault for not keeping these items inside your house.
The DirecTV signal is not something that can be "taken" (unlike a car or mail). Someone who "pirates" DirecTV inflicts no harm on anyone, including DirecTV.
A more apt analogy would be that you park your car on your lawn in plain view and announce that anyone who wants to look at it from the street must pay $30. Do you think that someone who looked at the car without paying would be stealing?
.... Miller, who had worked for NASA in the early 1980s, studying the effects of zero gravity on circadian rhythms in squirrel monkeys...
NASA's true goal is to discover the most strange and useless facts in the universe.
Yeah, studying the effects of zero-gravity on primates is probably the least useful thing NASA can do. What does that have to do with putting humans in space, anyway?
So, why don't we let them have their bullshit patent and design DNS 2.0, which uses unicode throughout. Just throw it on a different port, and supercede RFC 1035. Since the whole patent hinges on this particular RFC, a new system that's not backwards compatible with the old one would not violate the patent.
Good idea! I'm glad I thought of it. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to make a quick trip to the Patent Office...
(and while I'm there, maybe I'll trademark "DNS 2.0")
Actually, in the U.S. they are. The Federal tax code assumes that all waiters in a restaurant receive a certain amount of tips (computed according to the restaurant's income). Any given waiter is required to pay taxes on the "correct" amount of tips they (should have) received.
In other words, your waiter has to pay taxes on your tip, even if you don't give it to him.
USENET postings have expiration dates, which state to recipients how long the authors intends for them to be retained on public servers.
Really? I've been reading and posting to Usenet for years and have never heard about this. I just checked a random selection of about a dozen articles on various newsgroups (alt.usage.english, comp.os.linux.misc, sci.lang, etc.) and couldn't find a single article with a header line specifying an expiration date.
I know that the reason cellular phones aren't allowed to be used in planes is that the radio signal emitted by the phone can interfere with the plane's navigation equipment.
That may be one reason, but the reason I've always heard was that, on the ground, cell phones can only "see" a few cell towers at a time. At 35,000 feet, it can see hundreds, and will switch cells every few seconds (given how fast the airplane is moving). This tends to play havoc with cellular systems as a whole. The ban on cell phone use in airplanes originated from the FCC, not the FAA.
A better example would be AM/FM radios. We've been told that years that radios shouldn't be used on airplanes, because they can cause problems with navigation equipment. I find it hard to believe that a passive receiver can cause more problems than an active 802.11b transmitter.
What Novus Telecom is offering is a fiber-optic connection that provides cable TV, telephone and Internet services. The technology being deployed in Hartwell, Georgia does the same thing, but with existing copper phone wires.
Slashdot Mirror
This, unintentionally, gets to the heart of the matter. The durability of a format depends on the popularity of the format. The history of wire recorders tells us nothing about whether or not we will be able to read CD-ROMs 50 years from now, because compared to CD-ROMs, CD-Rs, etc., wire recorders were never very popular. How many millions (tens of millions? hundreds of millions?) of CD-Rs have been burned? That alone will guarantee a market for CD-ROM drives for a very long time. If 50 million wire recordings had been made, you'd be able to buy a wire recorder/player for $39 at Circuit City today .
The real danger, of course, is that the CD-R media in use today won't last, physically. But then photographic negatives don't last either, if they're not taken care of.
What's an "SOE"?
It would be nice if story submitters would define acronyms and initialisms before using them.
"Give to Caesar what is Caesar's and give to God what is God's" - Matthew 22:21
(i.e. pay your taxes)
665.9999999781
The number of the beast (on a Pentium).
A unit of measure used on the Mars Climate Orbiter.
True, but that problem is going to exist whether or not you "throw out the Digital to Analog converter."
And every bit of the main memory of your computer must be separately addressable by the CPU. That doesn't meant that you need to have a wire from the CPU to every bit of memory, nor does it mean that the CPU needs a D-to-A converter to communicate with memory.
Right now, the preferred way for an external LCD to talk to a video board is through a digital interface. If an LCD doesn't need to see an analog signal, why would e-paper need to?
So what? The reason video boards need fans these days (remember, they didn't always need them), is because of the hardware devoted to 3-D. Take that out, and the display circuitry will run a lot cooler. Take out color support, and things get simpler and cooler still.
The Matrox does a lot more than a video driver for an e-book would need to. 8.5"x11" at 300dpi for e-paper would be a 3300x2550 monochrome display. The G-450 already does 2048x1536 @ 32bpp, so I think Matrox could put together something that did about 2x the resolution with 1/32 fewer bits per pixel without difficulty. Throw out the d-to-a converter, the analog port connectors, most of the memory, the AGP interface, and the 3-D hardware and you'll get something that costs a lot less than $110.
There's no need to include your age in your letter. All you need to tell them is that you're against the bill. If the bill has been officially submitted by the time you write your letter (it hasn't as of now), include the docket number (the HR-XXXX or SB-XXXX number that identifies the bill).
I guess the Borg must have gotten lots of grey LEGOs when they were kids.
At 2^128 addresses, $10 per trillion would be too expensive. At that price, the entire address space would be worth $3 billion billion billion, which would probably make the IPV6 address space worth more than all the real estate on the planet
Dynamically assigned? Transitory? Why? IPV6 has 2^128 possible addresses. According to the IPV6 FAQ, that's 3.4*10^27 addresses per person (assuming a worldwide population of 10 billion). You could give every person 256, or 4096, or 65536 IPV6 addresses and barely scratch the surface of the address space. Why make address assignments anything other than permanent?
So we're going to have HDTV video from NASA. But the important question is: what about the audio? The video I see on NASA TV (I get it on my cable system) looks pretty good, about what I'd expect from modern video equipment. But whenever they broadcast audio as well (an interview from the shuttle, for example), it sounds the same as audio from an Apollo mission. Why can't they use TV-quality audio when broadcasting TV-quality video from orbit?
The DirecTV signal is not something that can be "taken" (unlike a car or mail). Someone who "pirates" DirecTV inflicts no harm on anyone, including DirecTV.
A more apt analogy would be that you park your car on your lawn in plain view and announce that anyone who wants to look at it from the street must pay $30. Do you think that someone who looked at the car without paying would be stealing?
Good idea! I'm glad I thought of it. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to make a quick trip to the Patent Office...
(and while I'm there, maybe I'll trademark "DNS 2.0")Actually, in the U.S. they are. The Federal tax code assumes that all waiters in a restaurant receive a certain amount of tips (computed according to the restaurant's income). Any given waiter is required to pay taxes on the "correct" amount of tips they (should have) received.
In other words, your waiter has to pay taxes on your tip, even if you don't give it to him.
Commander Williams
Admiral Leonard
Admiral Forrest
Anyone else see a pattern here?That may be one reason, but the reason I've always heard was that, on the ground, cell phones can only "see" a few cell towers at a time. At 35,000 feet, it can see hundreds, and will switch cells every few seconds (given how fast the airplane is moving). This tends to play havoc with cellular systems as a whole. The ban on cell phone use in airplanes originated from the FCC, not the FAA.
A better example would be AM/FM radios. We've been told that years that radios shouldn't be used on airplanes, because they can cause problems with navigation equipment. I find it hard to believe that a passive receiver can cause more problems than an active 802.11b transmitter.
What Novus Telecom is offering is a fiber-optic connection that provides cable TV, telephone and Internet services. The technology being deployed in Hartwell, Georgia does the same thing, but with existing copper phone wires.