The companies that handle the rebates for the store and/or product manufactor, has a vested interest in making it as hard as possible to actually get your rebate back. The less they send back, the more they and the company making the product make. Every bad experience someone has with rebates is because of that as the rebate concept is litered with corruption. At least 50% of the rebates I have sent in have been rejected by the processing company for one reason or another, incomplete data, some mysterious condition was not met like they recieved it late, they could not read my receipt, etc.. I had a rebate for some software rejected because the company claimed the rebate was only valid in the US and Hawaii was not in the US! When I called to complain, I was told there was nothing they can do because that rebate offer expired. Often times you call the number (if they have one), and you will hear some bogus reason and they need a copy of everything you sent to them faxed in. Suddenly you qualify this time now you just have to wait another 8-12 weeks for that check that is in an envelope that looks like junk mail (which you may throw away) and the check expires in like 14 days.
Rebate can work but the current system is abused too much that consumers are getting screwed.
You do not shop at stores with rebates or do not buy products with rebates? I think just about every computer and electronics retailer uses mail in rebates (which hopefully that changes). You must have a long list of places to avoid. I only buy products with rebates if I was going to buy that specific model anyway but I still look at the inital cost when comparing. Some examples would be my Sirius radio and service, my cell phone and a few others.
One of the many reasons that I really really can't stand Bestbuy and go out of my way to avoid buying something from them was the rebates, like I said though, that is only one of the reasons. I did notice in the last month or so, they seem to have scaled back on the amount of rebates. Typically, 90% of the weekly sales items were infested with rebates. That number has gone down. Maybe it was a test?
What you are suggesting is that one larger company with a controlling interest in a much larger area will increase competition. I am still confused. Maybe we are using different definitions of competition [1]. There are reasons those negotiations may take six months. The carriers and the municipalities do not have the same goals, that should be the flag that it is probably not in your best interest to eliminate that process. Of course moving it to the state level will still result in negotitions but you remove the powerful voice the local communities had in the negotiations. Probably leaving a watered down contract that will benefit less people overall. What would you think about a national franchise deal? Using your logic, that would be the best way to go, only one contract to negotiate and that will cover everyones needs in the country.
Okay, we move to your plan. Comcast now has the entire state of VA negotiated under one contract. Where is the increased competition from and how do I use that competition? Why and how would anyone else even attempt to get a presense in the state of VA? Verizon negotiated with my county for the FIOS roll out. One of the requirements my country set for Verizon was they can enter the country with this program if they have it available within a specific time period to every house in every area that meets a certain density requirement, something like 7-10 houses per square mile. I have NO confidence that requirement would have been included had Verizon been dealing with the entire state and not just my county. Those hearings and contract negotiations are public. I've heard and read quite a few from my county. Maybe other areas are different but my county has the residents best interests in mind and has the power to hold the providers accountable for thier actions in the county.
Again, anything short of pure open access and separation of last mile from service will not increase competition.
[1] Competition defined as: The act of competing, as for profit or a prize; rivalry. Rivalry between two or more businesses striving for the same customer or market.
If other companies can get a single franchise from a state, rather than each and every municipality, it becomes far easier to start providing alternative television services. This is what we call competition.
I do not understand how your arrived at that assumption. How is state level franchising going to increase competition? I would say one company having a franchise deal over an entire state is NOT competition. Of course one company having a franchise over individual single counties/municipalities is not either. The advantage of smaller individual franchises is the local areas get to negotiate thier own contracts which I think would be better service that area. If the franchises were at the state level, you would risk getting a one size fits all which would not be an advantage when servicing rural AND suburban areas. IMHO, the only thing that would increase competition would be open access but I believe that concept eventually died off under the same argument you bring here... the innovation and expansion card! That gets played way to often by the telco and cable companies. I view that claim the same way I view "it is for terrorism" or "think of the children". Last milers claim they will innovate and expand if condition 1 is met. We all buy into it and condition 1 is allowed. One year later, they claim they will innovate and expand if a new condition 2 is met. We all buy into it and condition 2 is allowed, rinse lather repeat. With true open access, any company can provide any service anywhere and you can pick and choose. Without seperating the last mile from the service, I feel that will NEVER happen.
I have another post in this article describing my speed issues as well. I've also tried the setting you suggested in the past and that had no noticable change at all. Maybe that is useful for short bursts with a few files. The bottleneck always seems to be how Windows treats or handles large amounts of files. It might not even be the amount of files but the latency or overhead involved with opening and closing a file multiplied by the number you have adds up to significant delays. Anything above 10k or more files becomes a problem regardless of the location, type of media, or connection and bandwidth that your medium has. It could by local between two hard drives, a portable drive and an internal, or over a network with TCP/IP or IPX. Your tip combined with other general tips and practices from others will help but I have not found a combination that even comes close to the typical everyday throughput you should expect of the hardware being used.
I've noticed this as well. At work we move hundreds of thousands of files from firwire/usb drives and other computers on a frequent basis. Windows takes a LOOONG time to handle large directories and large amounts of files. Even selecting a directory on a dual CPU/8GB ram server class hardware with RAID 0+1 10-15K ultra SCSI drives to get the properites of that directory (total size and file count)can take over 30 minutes if it contains over 50k files in the below sub directories. Try moving those directories and files to or from a firewire drive can literally take 24-48 hours even though the total bytes may only be 500-750GB. Doing the same transfer over to a network computer takes even longer. Hell, even moving them from one SAN to another SAN from the same physical server with 2 HBA's (one to each SAN) is terrible. We completely skip the gui and go command line with robocopy, still slow but prevents strange mid transfer lockups and eliminates the confusion from using the GUI because robocopy reports files as they are transfered and reports the final results when complete. Not just that inaccurate copy dialog box that the Windows gui provides.
A vet I work with did not receive the letter, the other three of us that are vets, did. I can not confirm this but I was told by another person that the VA has no detailed records on specific vets until that vet does business with the VA. Meaning, once you contact the VA for assitance (GI bill usage, VA home loan, transition assistance etc..), your "military records" are transfered and maintained from that point on by the VA. Again, I have no idea if that is true or not.
Damn, I hate to reply to myself so soon but the VA web site had my answer. I guess I was confused by the letter and I assumed every Vet was sent one.
To whom is VA sending letters?
VA is sending individual notification letters to veterans, servicemembers, and reservists whose personal information was included on the stolen computer equipment.
I got the same letter. They used some tricky wording in there or I am looking into it too deeply.
Here is a piece of that letter.. The employee's home was burglarized and this data was stolen. The data contained identifying information including names, social security numbers, and dates of birth for up to 26.5 million veterans and some spouses, as well as some disability ratings. As a result of this incident, information identifiable with you was potentially exposed to others. It is important to note that the affected data did not include any of VA's electronic health records or any financial information.
Is everyone that got a letter confirmed to have data on that laptop? The sentence that begins with "As a result of" does not make that clear. If my name and data was in that database, then my data was exposed to others, not potentially. You could view this as your data was potentially on this laptop which is why they may have used "up to 26.5 million", because they are not really sure exactly how many? Seems like the letter is intentionally confusing.
What forensic tools is that? Is there any way in hell to determine when a read head moves over a piece of data? If there is (which I do not see how), how could it determine with any resolution of when that head passed over the data? One week, one month, one hour ago etc.. What ever magical thing they messure would have to decay away over time with some consistancy to determine WHEN it was last read.
On that note, boot up with Knoppix, mount hda1 read only (which is the default), mount a network share through lin neighborhood and copy \mnt\hda1 to \home\user\mounts\server\share. Shut off laptop and remove Knoppix cd. You can do that whole process in minutes and all with a gui if you'd like! We do that exact process at least once a week from tanked XP laptops that we need data from.
To get back to reality, if Joe random stole that laptop and was playing with it, he would probably not have the desire and knowledge to do the Knoppix thing or really even care about the actual data on the laptop at all. Someone specifically targetting this VA employee and that data could easily do it.
In the 1980-1984 range, I was just becoming a teen and video games and arcades were popping up everywhere. Centipede, Pac-Man, Missle Command, Frogger, Tron, Defender, Joust, Burger Time, Dig Dug, Excitebike, Pole Position, Track and Field, Donkey Kong, Galaga, Spy Hunter and many many more.
For home gaming, I had an Intellivision, a C64, and an Atari 2600 in that same time frame and I probably still used some of my handheld games like the classic Mattel Football, the green rev 2 Mattel Football, Battlestar Galactica and some others.
I believe the quantity they sell leads to less hanging out and going bad. They do not sell "by the pound" like a traditional supermarket as there is no loose produce in bins that you can pick through. Everything is presorted in a box or in a bag. I personally don't know anyone that uses 50lb sacks of softball sized yellow onions but Costco sells palettes of them every day. I think the minimum for bananas is a bag with 3 bunches and they are typicially still very green.
Sure, when I was eight, the initial thing that attracted me to a computer was the games, but as soon as I learned about programming (which was also at age eight) and the ability to create applications for utility purposes, science, etc., that initial attraction immediately turned into admiration of the tool.
Get off your soap box, your pathetic attempt to degrade everyone that plays games is rather odd way of looking at things. Playing games is a form of entertainment. Television shows, playing horseshoes, playing cards, reading a book, browsing the internet, posting on slashdot, going to the movies, listening to music, watching an auto race, or for some, watching ants climb up a tree are all forms of entertainment. Sorry you feel that part of peoples lives are a "distraction from reality; a complete and total time sink".
The ablility to play games on a PC (or any computer) is not a requirement. If I did not play games on mine, I would still have the same exact "tool" funcionality that you speak so highly of, the ability to play games and the availability of games does not take away any functionality of a computer at all. Maybe instead of playing BF2 for two hours tonight, I should have sat in front of my computer and discovered something for the will of man but you know what? I had a 12 hour day at work today and I find it fun and relaxing playing that game with my friends.
What service did you try? I thought XM just started commercial on the music stations and Sirius only has very short blurbs on thier music stations, 5-15 seconds at most every few songs anf only about offerings on other Sirius stations. Both services have DJ's though but the content they discuss is typcially short and about the music they are playing or maybe some guest DJ or something. I enjoy Sirius myself. The problem I have is constantly changing stations, not because I am not satisified with the content but more for exploring the content afraid i might be missing something else. I bounce around from the talk stations and music stations and even listen to some of the radio show channels like Discovery and CNN.
The article implies that HD radio will open new and exciting opportunities for variety and choices. Well, that opportunity was always there for regular radio as well. How is the introduction of HD going to change anything about what content will be played? The same owners will own the HD portion as well. I assume in all but maybe the largest metro areas, there were still FM stations available. I remember in the recent past, the existing conglomerate national station owners lobbied the FCC which eventually killed low power "regional" stations because of some questionable interference claims. That concept would have given people a choice as well. I don't expect anything different this time.
I can spend 5-10 hours ripping and encoding a movie that might not look too bad after tweaking the encoding or I can download the same thing in 30 minutes and the quality is often much better then my own rip. Why do I want rips of my DVDs? Because I have a generic media center PC attached to my entertainment center and one of the functions it provides is the ability to click a few buttons and watch any one of my movies. I download some television shows as well but most I record myself with that same PC. For my audio files, ripping myself is easier and not as time consuming as the movies and I have a much better chance of getting better quality myself because I encode in flac.
I can not speak about the others but the Bhopal Disaster was not engineering related, it was lack of preventative maintence and/or not following procedures. You could agree that if it was designed better, they would need less preventative maintenace but design and maintenance are both required to maintain safety.
On cable connections, you're sharing the connection
Are you implying that DSL is not shared? The only part of DSL that is not shared is from your house to the CO. From there it is shared as the bandwidth in and out of your CO is shared by everyone that terminates in that CO, I guess the only person you would not share that CO bandwidth with is if you were connecting directly to one of your neighbors.
On a side note. I have Comcast. I can always got my advertised speed any time of the day or night. Not all areas are maxed out or "oversold".
My friend and I went in on some chemicals to make some fireworks (potassium perchlorate and various fine dark aluminum powders, various things for color, some cardboard tubes and plastic cylinders, wicks etc..). After the second year of buying the chemicals, he received a letter in the mail with a US Justice Department letterhead reminding him that using those combinations of chemicals to make explosives is a federal offense. No tin foil hats here, big brother IS and was watching.
1) Looking for bootleg videos? Jimmy is selling them on the corner of 5th and Main, look for the guy with a red shirt. They are priced much cheaper then the stores.
2) Don't buy bootleg videos from Jimmy, that dude with the red shirt near 5th and Main, they are not authorized videos, the video quality is not good and he is ripping off the MPAA and what he is doing is illegal.
Both sentences give the same information. If you want bootleg videos, dude on the corner has them. If push came to shove, I bet the local authorities would charge the person in 1 with contributing to the illegal activity but not the person in 2. In both methods, the person is not actually distributing anything.
I have that same card on a W2K3 server. In the past 2 years, I've had to rebuild the array (a mirror set) at least 10 times and not once because of an actual HD failure. Every time the array gets marked as failed, the server locks up as well. Maybe I just have a bad card but this is definatly one instance where I'd be much better off with no raid and just use the drives themselves. The server data is backed up to tape anyway so that raid setup has caused many more problems then it saved so far.
Do you mean a car battery connected to the output side of the PSU? I can see where that would work but what about when that car battery voltage gets low because of a cell shortage or when the power was out for a long time and it discharged. I'd think you would have to have some type of current limiting device to prevent overloading the PSU in those situations when the power comes back on. I believe most lead acid batteries have an internal resistence of far less then 1 ohm (some even 10-30 miliohm) so even a 1 or 2 volt difference between the car battery and the PSU output would cause the battery to draw a huge amount of current. You may already know this but Voltage/Resistance=Current so you can put some numbers in there if you'd like. This issue is not the case for other rechargable batteries because they have higher internal resistance so you could get by without one. That low resistance is why lead acid batteries are prefered in many applications that draw huge short term demands because they can deliver huge amounts of current as well. Of course I have no hard numbers and obviously your setup works so maybe I am just over analyzing it.
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The companies that handle the rebates for the store and/or product manufactor, has a vested interest in making it as hard as possible to actually get your rebate back. The less they send back, the more they and the company making the product make.
Every bad experience someone has with rebates is because of that as the rebate concept is litered with corruption.
At least 50% of the rebates I have sent in have been rejected by the processing company for one reason or another, incomplete data, some mysterious condition was not met like they recieved it late, they could not read my receipt, etc.. I had a rebate for some software rejected because the company claimed the rebate was only valid in the US and Hawaii was not in the US! When I called to complain, I was told there was nothing they can do because that rebate offer expired. Often times you call the number (if they have one), and you will hear some bogus reason and they need a copy of everything you sent to them faxed in. Suddenly you qualify this time now you just have to wait another 8-12 weeks for that check that is in an envelope that looks like junk mail (which you may throw away) and the check expires in like 14 days.
Rebate can work but the current system is abused too much that consumers are getting screwed.
You do not shop at stores with rebates or do not buy products with rebates? I think just about every computer and electronics retailer uses mail in rebates (which hopefully that changes). You must have a long list of places to avoid. I only buy products with rebates if I was going to buy that specific model anyway but I still look at the inital cost when comparing. Some examples would be my Sirius radio and service, my cell phone and a few others.
One of the many reasons that I really really can't stand Bestbuy and go out of my way to avoid buying something from them was the rebates, like I said though, that is only one of the reasons.
I did notice in the last month or so, they seem to have scaled back on the amount of rebates. Typically, 90% of the weekly sales items were infested with rebates. That number has gone down. Maybe it was a test?
What you are suggesting is that one larger company with a controlling interest in a much larger area will increase competition. I am still confused. Maybe we are using different definitions of competition [1].
There are reasons those negotiations may take six months. The carriers and the municipalities do not have the same goals, that should be the flag that it is probably not in your best interest to eliminate that process. Of course moving it to the state level will still result in negotitions but you remove the powerful voice the local communities had in the negotiations. Probably leaving a watered down contract that will benefit less people overall. What would you think about a national franchise deal? Using your logic, that would be the best way to go, only one contract to negotiate and that will cover everyones needs in the country.
Okay, we move to your plan. Comcast now has the entire state of VA negotiated under one contract. Where is the increased competition from and how do I use that competition? Why and how would anyone else even attempt to get a presense in the state of VA?
Verizon negotiated with my county for the FIOS roll out. One of the requirements my country set for Verizon was they can enter the country with this program if they have it available within a specific time period to every house in every area that meets a certain density requirement, something like 7-10 houses per square mile. I have NO confidence that requirement would have been included had Verizon been dealing with the entire state and not just my county. Those hearings and contract negotiations are public. I've heard and read quite a few from my county. Maybe other areas are different but my county has the residents best interests in mind and has the power to hold the providers accountable for thier actions in the county.
Again, anything short of pure open access and separation of last mile from service will not increase competition.
[1] Competition defined as:
The act of competing, as for profit or a prize; rivalry.
Rivalry between two or more businesses striving for the same customer or market.
If other companies can get a single franchise from a state, rather than each and every municipality, it becomes far easier to start providing alternative television services. This is what we call competition.
I do not understand how your arrived at that assumption. How is state level franchising going to increase competition?
I would say one company having a franchise deal over an entire state is NOT competition. Of course one company having a franchise over individual single counties/municipalities is not either. The advantage of smaller individual franchises is the local areas get to negotiate thier own contracts which I think would be better service that area. If the franchises were at the state level, you would risk getting a one size fits all which would not be an advantage when servicing rural AND suburban areas. IMHO, the only thing that would increase competition would be open access but I believe that concept eventually died off under the same argument you bring here... the innovation and expansion card! That gets played way to often by the telco and cable companies. I view that claim the same way I view "it is for terrorism" or "think of the children". Last milers claim they will innovate and expand if condition 1 is met. We all buy into it and condition 1 is allowed. One year later, they claim they will innovate and expand if a new condition 2 is met. We all buy into it and condition 2 is allowed, rinse lather repeat.
With true open access, any company can provide any service anywhere and you can pick and choose. Without seperating the last mile from the service, I feel that will NEVER happen.
I have another post in this article describing my speed issues as well. I've also tried the setting you suggested in the past and that had no noticable change at all. Maybe that is useful for short bursts with a few files. The bottleneck always seems to be how Windows treats or handles large amounts of files. It might not even be the amount of files but the latency or overhead involved with opening and closing a file multiplied by the number you have adds up to significant delays. Anything above 10k or more files becomes a problem regardless of the location, type of media, or connection and bandwidth that your medium has. It could by local between two hard drives, a portable drive and an internal, or over a network with TCP/IP or IPX.
Your tip combined with other general tips and practices from others will help but I have not found a combination that even comes close to the typical everyday throughput you should expect of the hardware being used.
I've noticed this as well. At work we move hundreds of thousands of files from firwire/usb drives and other computers on a frequent basis. Windows takes a LOOONG time to handle large directories and large amounts of files. Even selecting a directory on a dual CPU/8GB ram server class hardware with RAID 0+1 10-15K ultra SCSI drives to get the properites of that directory (total size and file count)can take over 30 minutes if it contains over 50k files in the below sub directories. Try moving those directories and files to or from a firewire drive can literally take 24-48 hours even though the total bytes may only be 500-750GB. Doing the same transfer over to a network computer takes even longer. Hell, even moving them from one SAN to another SAN from the same physical server with 2 HBA's (one to each SAN) is terrible.
We completely skip the gui and go command line with robocopy, still slow but prevents strange mid transfer lockups and eliminates the confusion from using the GUI because robocopy reports files as they are transfered and reports the final results when complete. Not just that inaccurate copy dialog box that the Windows gui provides.
A vet I work with did not receive the letter, the other three of us that are vets, did. I can not confirm this but I was told by another person that the VA has no detailed records on specific vets until that vet does business with the VA. Meaning, once you contact the VA for assitance (GI bill usage, VA home loan, transition assistance etc..), your "military records" are transfered and maintained from that point on by the VA. Again, I have no idea if that is true or not.
Damn, I hate to reply to myself so soon but the VA web site had my answer. I guess I was confused by the letter and I assumed every Vet was sent one.
To whom is VA sending letters?
VA is sending individual notification letters to veterans, servicemembers, and reservists whose personal information was included on the stolen computer equipment.
Well that sucks.
I got the same letter. They used some tricky wording in there or I am looking into it too deeply.
Here is a piece of that letter..
The employee's home was burglarized and this data was
stolen. The data contained identifying information including names, social security
numbers, and dates of birth for up to 26.5 million veterans and some spouses, as well as
some disability ratings. As a result of this incident, information identifiable with you was
potentially exposed to others. It is important to note that the affected data did not include
any of VA's electronic health records or any financial information.
Is everyone that got a letter confirmed to have data on that laptop? The sentence that begins with "As a result of" does not make that clear. If my name and data was in that database, then my data was exposed to others, not potentially. You could view this as your data was potentially on this laptop which is why they may have used "up to 26.5 million", because they are not really sure exactly how many? Seems like the letter is intentionally confusing.
What forensic tools is that?
Is there any way in hell to determine when a read head moves over a piece of data? If there is (which I do not see how), how could it determine with any resolution of when that head passed over the data? One week, one month, one hour ago etc.. What ever magical thing they messure would have to decay away over time with some consistancy to determine WHEN it was last read.
On that note, boot up with Knoppix, mount hda1 read only (which is the default), mount a network share through lin neighborhood and copy \mnt\hda1 to \home\user\mounts\server\share. Shut off laptop and remove Knoppix cd. You can do that whole process in minutes and all with a gui if you'd like! We do that exact process at least once a week from tanked XP laptops that we need data from.
To get back to reality, if Joe random stole that laptop and was playing with it, he would probably not have the desire and knowledge to do the Knoppix thing or really even care about the actual data on the laptop at all. Someone specifically targetting this VA employee and that data could easily do it.
Okay, Maybe I am a little older..
In the 1980-1984 range, I was just becoming a teen and video games and arcades were popping up everywhere.
Centipede, Pac-Man, Missle Command, Frogger, Tron, Defender, Joust, Burger Time, Dig Dug, Excitebike, Pole Position, Track and Field, Donkey Kong, Galaga, Spy Hunter and many many more.
For home gaming, I had an Intellivision, a C64, and an Atari 2600 in that same time frame and I probably still used some of my handheld games like the classic Mattel Football, the green rev 2 Mattel Football, Battlestar Galactica and some others.
I believe the quantity they sell leads to less hanging out and going bad. They do not sell "by the pound" like a traditional supermarket as there is no loose produce in bins that you can pick through. Everything is presorted in a box or in a bag. I personally don't know anyone that uses 50lb sacks of softball sized yellow onions but Costco sells palettes of them every day. I think the minimum for bananas is a bag with 3 bunches and they are typicially still very green.
Sure, when I was eight, the initial thing that attracted me to a computer was the games, but as soon as I learned about programming (which was also at age eight) and the ability to create applications for utility purposes, science, etc., that initial attraction immediately turned into admiration of the tool.
Get off your soap box, your pathetic attempt to degrade everyone that plays games is rather odd way of looking at things. Playing games is a form of entertainment. Television shows, playing horseshoes, playing cards, reading a book, browsing the internet, posting on slashdot, going to the movies, listening to music, watching an auto race, or for some, watching ants climb up a tree are all forms of entertainment. Sorry you feel that part of peoples lives are a "distraction from reality; a complete and total time sink".
The ablility to play games on a PC (or any computer) is not a requirement. If I did not play games on mine, I would still have the same exact "tool" funcionality that you speak so highly of, the ability to play games and the availability of games does not take away any functionality of a computer at all. Maybe instead of playing BF2 for two hours tonight, I should have sat in front of my computer and discovered something for the will of man but you know what? I had a 12 hour day at work today and I find it fun and relaxing playing that game with my friends.
What service did you try? I thought XM just started commercial on the music stations and Sirius only has very short blurbs on thier music stations, 5-15 seconds at most every few songs anf only about offerings on other Sirius stations. Both services have DJ's though but the content they discuss is typcially short and about the music they are playing or maybe some guest DJ or something. I enjoy Sirius myself. The problem I have is constantly changing stations, not because I am not satisified with the content but more for exploring the content afraid i might be missing something else. I bounce around from the talk stations and music stations and even listen to some of the radio show channels like Discovery and CNN.
The article implies that HD radio will open new and exciting opportunities for variety and choices. Well, that opportunity was always there for regular radio as well. How is the introduction of HD going to change anything about what content will be played? The same owners will own the HD portion as well. I assume in all but maybe the largest metro areas, there were still FM stations available. I remember in the recent past, the existing conglomerate national station owners lobbied the FCC which eventually killed low power "regional" stations because of some questionable interference claims. That concept would have given people a choice as well. I don't expect anything different this time.
I can spend 5-10 hours ripping and encoding a movie that might not look too bad after tweaking the encoding or I can download the same thing in 30 minutes and the quality is often much better then my own rip. Why do I want rips of my DVDs? Because I have a generic media center PC attached to my entertainment center and one of the functions it provides is the ability to click a few buttons and watch any one of my movies. I download some television shows as well but most I record myself with that same PC. For my audio files, ripping myself is easier and not as time consuming as the movies and I have a much better chance of getting better quality myself because I encode in flac.
I can not speak about the others but the Bhopal Disaster was not engineering related, it was lack of preventative maintence and/or not following procedures. You could agree that if it was designed better, they would need less preventative maintenace but design and maintenance are both required to maintain safety.
On cable connections, you're sharing the connection
Are you implying that DSL is not shared? The only part of DSL that is not shared is from your house to the CO. From there it is shared as the bandwidth in and out of your CO is shared by everyone that terminates in that CO, I guess the only person you would not share that CO bandwidth with is if you were connecting directly to one of your neighbors.
On a side note. I have Comcast. I can always got my advertised speed any time of the day or night. Not all areas are maxed out or "oversold".
Wow, I was sure you were wrong on the one party rule but a search showed my otherwise. Here is a link with more details of the different states.
I guess those letters were sent to quite a few people. Thanks for the link.
My friend and I went in on some chemicals to make some fireworks (potassium perchlorate and various fine dark aluminum powders, various things for color, some cardboard tubes and plastic cylinders, wicks etc..). After the second year of buying the chemicals, he received a letter in the mail with a US Justice Department letterhead reminding him that using those combinations of chemicals to make explosives is a federal offense. No tin foil hats here, big brother IS and was watching.
To ways to word the same thing:
1) Looking for bootleg videos? Jimmy is selling them on the corner of 5th and Main, look for the guy with a red shirt. They are priced much cheaper then the stores.
2) Don't buy bootleg videos from Jimmy, that dude with the red shirt near 5th and Main, they are not authorized videos, the video quality is not good and he is ripping off the MPAA and what he is doing is illegal.
Both sentences give the same information. If you want bootleg videos, dude on the corner has them. If push came to shove, I bet the local authorities would charge the person in 1 with contributing to the illegal activity but not the person in 2. In both methods, the person is not actually distributing anything.
I have that same card on a W2K3 server. In the past 2 years, I've had to rebuild the array (a mirror set) at least 10 times and not once because of an actual HD failure. Every time the array gets marked as failed, the server locks up as well. Maybe I just have a bad card but this is definatly one instance where I'd be much better off with no raid and just use the drives themselves. The server data is backed up to tape anyway so that raid setup has caused many more problems then it saved so far.
Do you mean a car battery connected to the output side of the PSU? I can see where that would work but what about when that car battery voltage gets low because of a cell shortage or when the power was out for a long time and it discharged. I'd think you would have to have some type of current limiting device to prevent overloading the PSU in those situations when the power comes back on. I believe most lead acid batteries have an internal resistence of far less then 1 ohm (some even 10-30 miliohm) so even a 1 or 2 volt difference between the car battery and the PSU output would cause the battery to draw a huge amount of current. You may already know this but Voltage/Resistance=Current so you can put some numbers in there if you'd like. This issue is not the case for other rechargable batteries because they have higher internal resistance so you could get by without one. That low resistance is why lead acid batteries are prefered in many applications that draw huge short term demands because they can deliver huge amounts of current as well. Of course I have no hard numbers and obviously your setup works so maybe I am just over analyzing it.