While there was a law mandating 911 access on deactivated phones, I've been told that (unlike analog cellphones), many or all of the most recent generation of digital phones do not. I doubt this is a change in the law (I'd think that I'd know if it were), but don't know if it's an oversight in current implementations of digital cellphone networks (how far down the priority list do you think *that* bug is?), or a semi-deliberate dodge.
Ordinarily I would investigate the roots of this apparent illegality myself before reapeating the tale, but since my aging parents have become enthusiastic cellphoe users (who'd never let their service lapse, as they often did in the 90's), researching it has become a lower priority for me personally. It's been empirically demonstrated to me twice, by two different techies using recently deactivated digital cellphones, but I still remain a bit skeptical - phones/networks *do* break down.
This might be a good cause for the community to pursue, if it is widely verified.
More importantly, it's something we should all know, in the event of an emergency.
I have a good grasp of math and space science, but I am deeply disturbed by the repeated declaration that Mars has a solar tidal bulge of "less than 1 cm". It calls to mind a perfectly smooth uniform spheroid with a tiny bulge, but Mars isn't smooth or uniform. It has muntains and gorges that are kilometer high or deep. It has massive geological formations (based on surface features) whose density variations would easily dwarf the proposed effect.
Even if you could map the surface of Mars down to millimeter resolution in 3 dimensions (which is very far from anything they are remotely claimed to have done), it would be highly problematic to even define what is meant by a sphere with a mean radius of more than 672,400,000 cm (and a highly heterogenous composition) having a 1 cm physical eccentricity due to a specific cause. An apparent 1.6 parts per trillion variation in mass distribution can't possibly be attributed to any one cause until we've completely mapped the entire volume of the planet. Large underground caverns or deposits of dense minerals can (and do) cause many times this much variation here on the much-measured Earth.
Can someone please explain how this finding could possibly make sense, given the many known, larger confounding factors, and the general paucity of data about the overall geology and underground 3-D mapping of Mars? To me, this smells like bad science. We don't know enough about Mars to make conclusive parts-per-trillion determination, much less confidently attribute them!
As a physician (and former researcher), I'm always surprised that, despite hundreds of media reports outlining the pharmaceutical company expenditures in some detail, the public doesn't seem to realize that the large pharmaceutical conglomerates spend several times as much on promotion and marketing as on R+D, clinical testing, etc.
Of course, it's not the public's fault if the facts are muddied. All too often, the media's brain-dead interpretation of "fairness" and "balance" consists of providing roughly equal time (or arguments of apparently roughly equal weight) even when that same outlet may already have thoroughly discredited a given argument. They are selling the appearance of fairness, after all. Actual fairness is as irrelevant as the *decrease* in aerodynamic performance caused by the rocket/jet fins and detailing of many cars in the 50/60's. Appearances are everything.
But to return to the pharmaceuticals companies: R+D is "a major expense" only after a tangled borderline perjurious accounting that was previously reserved for Ponzi schemes and the recording industry. Many of these ultra-expensive wonder drugs are sold for half as much in Canada, and a quarter the price or less in some parts of Europe, Asia or Africa. This wouldn't be the case if they were desperately trying to recoup genuine costs at their inflated US prices (because they'd be losing money on every non-US sale). They're just charging what the market will bear.
Further, as regards "innovation". Every week, I am bombarded by literally hundreds of ads (in medical journals, direct mailings an drug reps who barge in with no appointment, but are my sole source for "free samples" for my poor patients) for new wonderdrugs thhat are nothing more than 'me-too' knock-off. They move a hydroxyl group or a carbon atom on an existing drug, and run hundreds of tests (talk about expensive!) looking for some minute benefit over a current wonder drug (which they may also own). Almost invariably, the me-too is *less* effective or safe OVERALL than the existing drug (the lack of overall improvement is so consistent thatI sometimes think they're marketing the also-rans of the initial development effort - it would certainly be cheaper) Often the original 'wonder drug (progenitor of a new class) is itself only occassionally better than far cheaper and safer generic alternatives
Let me cite an example: in most cases, diuretics (drugs that cause you to urinate excess water) are both more effective and safer, at pennies a day, than Calcium Channel blockers and ACE (angiotensin convertine enzyme) inhibitors that cost several dollars a day -- for life! The study that proved this was one of the best and most unarguable in years, yet drug reps and execs will openly tell you that they aren't worried. "No one is pushing (marketing) cheap, safe diuretics which doctors have used for other purposes for centuries". Why do you think they market directly to patients? A few years ago, TVs and billboards were flooded with ads that didn't even specify what the drug was for, but urged "Ask your doctor". Perfectly healthy people came in, asking, afraid they were missing out on the Latest Greatest Thing.
Another example is the new anti-AIDS drug Fuzeon, widely hailed as an example of a drug whose high price ($20,570/yr = E19,000) is justified because it takes over 100 steps to prepare. Even if you accept their own figures justifying the cost, R+D was SFr 840 million ($620 million) and annual sales are projected to be $740 million per year, once hey hit full production (by which time, production costs are expected to be 10-15% of current levels)
Actually, I've been surprised that no one has noted that the detectible frequescies are almost certainly not the computers electrical signals or RFI *per se* but the resonances and beat frequencies of high frequency signals and/or general pseudoregularities in signals and pulses generated in various parts of the computer.
Most people are familiar with one definition of resonance - that even tiny signals can sum over time in a resonant cavity, physical object, circuit, etc, and build to remarkable amplitudes in a few hundred or thousands cycles.
Most people are also aware of harmonics. A square wave of amplitude 1 and frequency w can be defined as the sum of sine waves of amplitude 1/k and frequency k*w (where k is any odd integer) Of course, k*w is a *higher* frequency component,and soon gets too high to be transmitted in the system without attenuation, which leads to the inevitable rounding of the shoulders and imperfect on/off transitions of real-life digital square waves.
High frequencies can reinforce (pump) mechanical and electrical resonances that are any integral fraction w/n (where n is a positive integer) of the original signal, and to a lesser degree, any integral ratio of the signal frequency w (w * p/q , where p and q are integers) In both these cases, we get *lower* frequency effects (e.g. mechanical vibrations in physical objects like brackets, casise panels, etc.) which are more likely to be in the range of human perception.
Beat frequencies result whenever two different frequencies are mixed. (w1 -w2) so two very similar frequencies can easily create a frequency in the audio range.
There are a cacophony of signals inside a computer: system clocks, regularities in the pulse trains of certain signals (e.g. long term bit pattern repetition, to fill a window with a color) the various analog control signals inside a hard drive, sound card, tuner card, etc. -- plus all their multiples and fractions, plus all the mechanical resonances of every component and assembly inside the case.
It's not surprising that SOME of these signals or components will be sufficiently mutually self-reinforcing in an audible range, varying between computers and with various actions/tasks.
The mechanical resonances of physicial parts or assemblies in particular, are likely to fall in the audible range, and are likely to generate physical vibrations that that will be tramistted through the air as sound. This is a familiar effect to any discerning audiophile who has tried building their own speakers and enclosures.
In the Neolithic era, one primary fuel was JAMES WOOD Whose favorite Blues vocalist was NAT 'KING' COLE (which, along with charcoal, fueled the iron age) Who had an odd thing for the Popeye's girlfriend Olive Oyl (burned by Greeks and Romans in lamps) Who was also the favorite cartoon babe of OIL CAN BOYD (Hero of the petroleum age) Who, in a post-game interview, jumped HOWIE CARR (transportation tht began a social revolution) Who co-starred in a Gillete Mach III commercial with VIN DIESEL (who had actually been around forever, but is now regaining popularity) Who co-starred in "Internal Combustion" with... KEVIN BACON
Oddly, though Bill Gates has been railing against GNU's "viral license" for years now, I think he'd rather approve of this, genuinely viral, licensing.
I'll admit I didn't finish reading all the responses (I will - this subject has particular interest to me) but after plowing through ca 100 posts w/o any actual real World experience, I had to pipe up:
Slashdotters should realize that a decent (not great) PC with some free software and inexpensive hardware can be the key to nearly State-of-the-art (compared to the stuff in the retail chains) TV exceeding kilobuck HDTV sets. A spectacular home theater is within the reach of a dedicated high school fry cook working at McDonalds and living with their folks. In fact, get your folks to chip in, and it's *easy*. In Home Improvement, we call it "sweat equity": creating with work and know-how something that would cost mucho dinero to buy (plus learning a thing or two as a major benefit -- I can easily afford an HDTV at Best Buy, but that would be boring to me, or even pointless)
1) Some starting points for real-world solutions: AV Science: where I hang out now (esp. the HTPC forum, whose Linux section could use more programmers!) Keohi HDTV (they helped me get started, I assume they're still good) The Home Theater Spot: Admittedly, a home for guys with more dollars than sense, but at least they experiment instead of spouting sales literature at each other. They also had some great group buys from One-Call, which is as good as it gets for both support and service (if you want to buy)
2) Only now am I retiring my original HTPC (Home Theater PC), a Celeron-466 with 256 MB, a $20 TV card, and a $45 Matrox 450 DualHead with s-video, composite and XVGA outputs - a simple system that would still wow a lot of 'retail buyers'. I can't explain how it changed my TV viewing, how great it is to have a library of 150-300MB archived eps of my favorite shows, etc. Add a few sub-$1/GB HDDs (see Anandtech Hot Deals or FatWallet for bargains), and you'll wonder how you ever tolerated clumsy VHS tape libraries. For archiving, these same forums will tell you how to get 4x DVD-R recorders for as little as $140 at major chains (epending on sales)
3) My current aging workhorse is a Athlon 1700+XP ($209, barebones, from Outpost.com a year ago). I added memory, a sub-$300 MyHD card (some other HDTV cards are as good or better) and a few minor bits like a $50 Dolby Theater Sound card, etc. It'd be much cheaper today, and many of you already run gear that's much hotter than this. The software was mostly free and/or open source.
4) My favored output device is a Toshiba TLP650 LCD projector (native 1024x768, but with a nice 1600x1200 mode) cost $900 on eBay last year - a bit pricey, but that was last year and the last-gen prices are dropping fast. On President's Day (Monday) I got my GF a nice 640x480 projector to experiment with: under $100, and it exceeds the line resolution of any 'normal TV'. You can assemble a decent HTPC/projector for about the price of a "pretty nice" normal TV if cash is tight, and you'll have far more capability, like HDTV and HDTV *recording* (which runs a few kilobucks by itself, retail). Admittedly, I'm comparing "MSRP" TV prices to bargain-hunting for HDTV, but hackers have always been scroungers, right?
To me, the learning is the biggest benefit. I'm not a big fan of most TV, but building my HTPC has been a wonderful (and not *that* pricey) hobby. I don't need cable when most of what is sold locally as "digital cable" doesn't come close to the 1080i resolution I pick up with a $20 "double bowtie" antenna from Radio Shack (As a general rule, any antenna that calls itself an HDTV antenna will be *worse* than a cheap 1950's retro-looking double bowtie)
When your videos are always on your HDD, you'll rule in Geek Debates on SF tech or plots (one-click access encourages the invaluable habit of rigorous fact-checking). You can make outrageous SF music videos or parodies, and otherwise exercise your creative and intellectual side instead of being purely a passive couch potato. Modesty prevents me from linking my own videos, but I'd gladly recommend a friend's site of example TV-SF music videos and parodies
"Yeah yeah. It's a dupe. Funny that not a single reader emailed me in almost 2 hours to tell me."
The nature of this dupe (and the many others we've seen every month for years, unlike any other website I know) suggests that you don't particularly care. Fair enough. However...
The fact that not one single reader out of the possibly 100,000 who likely saw your site in those two hours felt it worthwhile to report it to you suggests that the overwhelming majority of your readers are quite convinced that you don't care, and are rapidly ceasing to care themselves.
React to this fact as you wish. The result you get will be exactly what you deserve. It'd be ironic and fitting if Slashdot, of all sites, decayed because its Editors assumed that its market share and user loyalty/inertia would assure -or entitle it to- continued success, despite its well known and oft-criticized shoddy implementation.
...Sounds like a few outfits Slashdot and its readers constantly rail against, doesn't it?
The Clearcast plan is is Out-and-out EVIL
on
Instant Concert CDs?
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
First off, as has been documented many times here on Slashdot, with links to business and musician articles, first hand accounts of musician readers, etc., only a handful (a *few* of the top 50 bands in only the most most populat genres) derive substantial income from recording sales. The rest -the vast bulk of musicians- make their living on concert performances. In fact, the studios have successfully pushed through laws (also reported here) stating that the artists who produce music -singers and musicians- are presumptively "work for hire" and are not entitled to residuals or royalties at all, unless their contracts happen to award them. For example, any public performance of a song has long generated a a residual or royalty for the composer (or owner of the lyric copyright) but not one cent for the band. Period.
The actual accounting (also reported in countless previous links) means that after the studio's self-declared expenses are deducted, the band not only rarely makes much beyond the initial advance, but often ends up owing the studio money on paper. This can lock them in, forcing them to sign for additional albums (to have the debt forgiven) and making it hard to switch labels.
I could enumerate many more abuses, but I'm sure others will -- if they're not sick of doing so.
NOW COMES THE EVIL PART
The studios (or RIAA) don't have any right to the music the musicians play in concert, unless there is a specific concert recording clause. This was the meat on the musician's table. but now the largest promoter in the nation will be making it a term of their contracts that bands must surrender most rights to the music in their precious live performances. Note: Clear Channel never said a word about paying artists. It's be a condition of the concert: "If you don't sign over the rights, you don't play in this town". [We've also seen plenty of articles on the strong-arm methods Clear Channel has used to build and enforce precisely this sort of monopoly.
This won't improve anything for most bands. It only applies to the known successes where Clear Channel expects to make a profit; the ones where CC is already profiting as the concert promoter. If Clear Channel didn't book you for a concert or performance, don't expect their audio truck.
In short: they are reaching deeper into the artist's pockets -- and removing (coopting) a potential source of revenue for the band itself. The recording industry was a historical artifact, like buggy whip makers. It gained its stranglehold because 100 years ago, musicians could not afford studio equipment. Now they can, so the strangle hold much be maintained in other ways.
This is a coerced corporate seizure of the band's rights to the proceeds of their own live *performances* (concerts, shows, etc.) which had been the last bastion of the musician. They are doing this preemptively, because it's now a small step from the club/concert audio feed to a burned CD -- and right now sales of such CDs could well belong to the musician, if the corporations are not careful!
I applaud the notion, but it betrays a profound cluelessness about the interstate -not to mention international- nature of spam, and the lack of any clear connection between cyber- and geographical address. In the first paragraphs, it becomes clear neither will survive the first legal challenge:
"The Colorado Junk E-Mail Law would require companies to pay an annual fee of up to $500 to access the registry. It would award consumers $10 for each unwanted message that they receive, assuming they are willing to take the spammer to court. If they win the case, their attorney's fees would be reimbursed.
In Missouri, companies would have free access to the list, but residents would be able to sue marketers for up to $5,000 for violating it.
Critics say the proposed opt-out lists are a futile version of equally futile statewide spam laws. (Both Colorado and Missouri already have statutes regulating unsolicited commercial e-mail.) "
Look, I hate spam as much as the next guy (I postmaster over a dozen domains), but the leagal history of most topics on Slashdot clearly shows that an ill-considered "solution" often does more damage than no solution at all (if only because when companies start lobbying for these *known* ineffectual measures alongside the clueless public, they be come (politically, pragmatically)) unstoppable in the eyes of politicians
Stupidity ensues.
The anti-"fax spam" laws only worked because faxes were still heavily concentrated in the offices of companies and professionals. They were affordable, but as someone who'd had faxes at work, school, as part of professional organizations, etc., since the 80's, I can assure you that when that law was passed, the fact that I had one at home 24/7 still surprised people. Though the standard modem was already a faxmodem, few had them configured and on (not to mention the whole consumer OS crash problem, which was a major problem, even if it was often better than it was in the mid-late 90's)
I can see your point, and I very much wish I could agree. For all it's inescapable logic, the empirical fact is: we've been showing "Blood on the Asphalt" type films in our schools for half a century, with little effect (measured by follow-up studies). Any number of painful injuries (one in particular) got weekly exposure for 15+ years on "America's Funniest Home Videos" and a hundred spin-offs, with little effect on behavior.
In fact, (and I'm not picking on you - your point made sense), court mandated driver education for adults (in lieu of penalty for 'first offenders') don't use such films *because* the studies show them to be ineffective. Our schools continue to use them for essentially the same reasons schools do such a poor job of educating in general (compared to what they *could* and *should* do)
When I buy new battery packs, I carefully open up the old ones (using an Xacto knife, solvents, the occasional touch of a Dremel cutting wheel, and whenever possible, repeated flexion or leverage of sonic welds and glue). I replace the cells with cheapo cells I buy on e-Bay.
Generally, my 'refills' last longer (to failure, not to discharge) than the original factory ones did. Conspiracy or just a side-effect of careless warehousing? Who knows? It does prove, however, that battery chemistry isn't at fault.
I think that averages are fully appropriate for predicting bulk behaviors on this scale. True. one could easily make more refined predictions to account for the nonlinear form of the equation, but this is a first order approximation. Further, I was being quite conservative, by sticking to Moor's law, which has held up quite well over several decades of computing advances. The extent of my conservatism was, coincidentally, confirmed in a Slashdot article less than 48 hours later, when Adi Shamir (the "S" in RSA, just as Rivest was the "R") proposed a possible 3-4 order of magnitude improvement in cost-effectiveness (which would correspond to 15-20 years of steady progress under Moore's Law) in a not completely unrelated class of matching problem (1024 bit RSA keys):
Even if we assume that no mathematical or algorithmic advances have been made in hash-cracking in the past 10 years (the above papers were written when Linux was known to only a few hundred, and MS was releasing Windows for Workgroups 3.11), current hardware trends would make it possible to spoof about 1000 files/month on $1M of hardware. or the top 10 downloaded files of 100 different bands per month. Another $1M doubles your output. Algorthm breakthroughs could easily make the output 10-1000x greater than the hardware trend alone.
I was, simply addressing the comment I quoted, which implied no collisions were known. (They are: an early example can be found in B. den Boer and A. Bosselaers, "Collisions for the compression function of MD5", Advances in Cryptology - Eurocrypt '93, Springer-Verlag, p. 293-304)
However, as an academic matter, I think it can be estimated that a modest corporate budget might construct an MD5 hash matching machine bank for under $1M, if an organization saw a commercial need that justified multiple units (reducing the cost per unit, as well documented in the articles on the custom designed EFF DES cracker)
Rivest was, of course, the R in RSA, and according to a somewhat outdated FAQ on the RSA Security website:
" Van Oorschot and Wiener [VW94] have considered a brute-force search for collisions (see Question 2.1.6) in hash functions, and they estimate a collision search machine designed specifically for MD5 (costing $10 million in 1994) could find a collision for MD5 in 24 days on average. The general techniques can be applied to other hash functions." [ P. van Oorschot and M. Wiener, Parallel collision search with application to hash functions and discrete logarithms, Proceedings of 2nd ACM Conference on Computer and Communication Security (1994)]
Applying Moore's Law as a rough guide, ignoring all the work on algorithms and programmable chip architecture in the past 10 years, a $10M machine would cost 1/64th as much today, or $156K to develop, and much less per unit in quanitity (i.e. parts/construction cost could be under $1K, so 850 units might be constructed for $1M) Again, I cite the EFF DES cracker as a very close example.
That still leaves us with 24 days per collision. If I may be forgiven for positing, purely for purposes of guesstimation, a Moore's Law scale for advances in this hot field of mathematics (which would probably not displayed a steady improvement, but would likely have had crucial breakthroughs in the past 10 years) then the 24 days would be 2.25 hours today. To be conservative: say 1-10/day
This is, of course, just a crude guesstimate, but I think that you would agree that a bank of 850 machines, a mere $1M in hardware, cranking out 10 exact matches for targeted files, per macthine, per day (8500 spoofed files per day) could present a significant contamination of the media pool.
I *DO NOT* believe that this represents a major enduring danger to P2P, or that the RIAA would actually construct such a bank. I merely note that $1M (plus operating costs) would be a drop in the bucket to the RIAA, and that the error bars go in both directions (i.e. current mathematical methods might be more efficient than a 1994 estimate, when MD5 was a fairly new, less researched algorithm.)
This is just an academic observation on the potential for MD5 collision matching since its introduction in '91. This is not my field. "Dammit Jim, I'm a doctor, not a Cryptographer."
> You could claim the big price if you could come up with two such files!
Really? I'd really appreciate some link or pointer to this "big prize". I have several completely distinct files with the same MD5 - and I didn't look too hard.
This is completely predictable under combinatorial mathematics. The simplest example I can provide, without making you do the math is "The Birthday Problem": we all know, from elementary brain teasers (and casual experience), that though there are 366 distinct days in the year, in a random group of 23 people, two probably share a birthday. (It's actually 22 or so in real life: unlike pure math, real life births are not truly random, but tend to cluster more in some months than others) (e.g.)
MD5 was developed by Professor Ronald L. Rivest in 1994 SPECIFICALLY as a 128 bit (16 byte) message digest with a faster implementation than SHA-1 (Variations are possible, of course) ON GENERAL PURPOSE PROCESSORS - disregarding the many fairly cheap commercial or custom hashing chips that are faster at hashing than your 'leetest game rig.
A fast hash is good for hashing - i.e. creating a *fairly* content-independent binary pseudoindex of a file. This does not guarantee that it is truly independent of the source -i.e. if the effect of a one-bit change in the input were unpredictable without recalculating the hash- that would make it useful for (e.g.) cryptography. (Google MDA5 cryptography and you'll find just one page!) A program can cheat by tweaking a few source bits to deliberately approach a desired hash output.
The creator of a deliberately degraded media file has an advantage that creators of "legitimate" data don't: they can fiddle with its bits freely to generate a desired MDA5 hash -- what do they care if it is slightly degraded? That's the point of releasing the files!
While one will indeed find this "fact" listed in many places, including a few physics texts, it may well be a fallacy. I've looked up the frequency absorption spectrum of water, and 2450 MHZ was not a peak. Unfortunately my "classic" paper link is now dead (I'd really appreciate a currently active and stable link even if it supercedes the paper I had and proves me wrong)
Moreover, anyone with equipment to measure the relevant range can see that microwaves are not tuned to a tight band. The frequency of any one oven varies far more than any the reasonable expectation for an absorption band in that range (depending on temperature, use, etc.) and the variance between ovens is greater still.
That's actually one specific reason why a resonance frequency is not used: the increase in efficiency that would result from picking an absorption peak (vs. simply reflecting the microwaves around inside the cavity 10-1000 times until a significant fraction is absorbed) simply wouldn't have been worth the effort and cost of precisely tuning each unit (at the time when microwaves first came out) Further, we are all aware of the accounts (admittedly potentially apocryphal) that relate the discovery of microwave cookery to an accidental exposure to a military radar dish. Military radars (excluding weather radars) generally avoid the water bands, because water vapor in the air would limit range.
I don't mean to criticize the Original Poster, since that "information" can indeed be found in reputable sources. I'd simply rather not see it repeated if it obscures and incorrectly explains the operation of microwave ovens and EM radiation.
Finally, even if the microwave radiation from a oven *did* operate on a resonance absorption band for water, the total power of a cell phone is tiny (mW-W). One would get orders of magnitude more tissue heating by stepping out into the sun or even another person (both things some techie types seem to avoid). In the absence of any specific epidemiological or other significant evidence of specific tissue or cellular disorders caused by the specific frequency bands used by cellular phones, their radiation can *only* be expected to produce nonspecific tissue heating.
Before you worry about microwaves, worry about other sources of energy like sunlight. Microwaves onlt *seem* "spookier" to certain people, while sunlight is far stronger in many, many specific bands than celphones over their entire range.
It might be wise to say say IANAMD, but I *am* an MD (with a degree in molecular biology). That doesn't make me an authority on epidemiology or molecular properties, but I like to think it does give me a small edge.
"If everyone had said that back in the 70's, we still all be sitting in front of a terminal with tapes whirring around behind us.
That's odd. I started programming in the 70's and a lot of what we're working on now is exactly what we were dreaming of then. If anything, we'd have been pretty shocked and horrified to know that we'd still be working on them after <heavenly choir>the Year 2000<heavenly choir> (which once seemed as distant and hallowed, yet imminent and all-conquering as any Messiah or deity)
We cursed the limitations of our hardware and software then, but we worked with them because they were all we had. We'd spend weeks trying to trim a kilobyte or a few cycles out of a loop, not because we were virtuous (we weren't) but because we had to. Those whirring disks ran 24/7 to do crude payroll jobs that would run minutes on a desktop today.
It's been well documented, here and elsewhere, that most of our routine computing doesn't really save us much time, if any, but is simply chasing that elusive 0.1% "better output" (documents, biz data, presentations, etc.) A high school frosh today would be ashamed to hand in a report that looked like the most painstakingly prepared reports prepared for President Nixon. The addition of kerning hasn't vastly improved the content of a high school report.
Among the early computers I worked on was a triple CDC Cyber7600, which (in its initial configuration as a mere dual Cyber6600) exceeded the total computing capacity of the Soviet Union, but had a fraction of the CPU power, storage, etc. of my laptop so where's my accurate voice transcription, much less my intelligent editing and automated personal research assistant? Text recognition is just about usable for some major applications, but handwriting recognition is still barely usable
Yes, many are happy with their PDA hand-print inputs (or whatever) but it's a singing pig, we've learned not to expect Pavarotti; we're amazed it's workable at all. In ten years, we *may* achieve our 1975 dreams, and call the current state 'crap', not because of added features, but because 95% success (if one can even achieve it) *is* crap performance that we'd never accept in other daily technologies. Contrast this with, say word processing: load a PDA with 1979's AppleWriter ][ word processor, (a 190K package) and *truly competent* speech- , text- or handwriting recognition (pick one) and you'll have something that'll fly off the shelf at a kilobuck a pop, and make the cover of Time.
I don't know your age, but I assume you recall the 70's. If so, you'll recognize that these functions that we expected "any year now" back then (and are still waiting for) are just a handfull of hundreds of basic functions that are clunking along today. Our standards have dropped. We haven't even implemented the feature set we were promised then
With the Web (hypertext), wireless networking, huge storage, and a thousand other technologies, we're finally getting close to the Dynabook, which in 1974, we were promised "by 1984 at the latest". In 1994, a dynabook would still have been a total world-changing breakthrough. in 2004, it may finally be here. Added features are nothing compared to competent basic functionality. We've had programs that claim to do all this stuff for 25 years, but we're still waiting for solid human-free performance (which is largely the point of having a computer do the job) on our 1975 dreams
Before you say creeping featurism pulled us out of the Dark Ages, just give me reliable, competent worry-free versions of the stuff that was outlined in the magazines in the 70's -- software that was being written on mainframes, knowing the PC and laptop were coming, someday, and is still only in what we'd have call "commercially released beta" form 30 years later
Not for the Geeks themselves (though I guarantee they would be good for many hours fo fun), but for geeks with kids in their lives, here are two books (both out of print, I believe, but available used on eBay)
I read these books as a 9 year old, did all the experiements, and to this day, I still find myself reciting basic principles from them to my colleagues in hospitals, molecular biology labs and other technical settings [a college degree in a related science doesn't fill in all the gaps of a practical understanding of the day-to-day world. An early exposure grounds you in the basics, and gets you seeing/thinking about things in chemical terms]
The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments (Robert Brent, 1960) (not any of the many variant titles) is head and shoulders above any other chemistry book I'd give a bright grade schooler. I hunted down a copy for my own kids, and they loved it.
Chemical Magic (forgot the authors) is one of the best of the many "cool effects to impress your friends" books out there.
Add a good grounding in stoichiometry, energies, entropy, electronegativity, and a few other basic things, and there's no telling how far it'll take them. I got thrown out of Chemistry in the first month of class (incompetent teacher wanted "her' answers on tests, not the correct ones) and took the Chemistry ACHs with no formal chemistry coursework. I got a 770 out of 800 (top 1%, beating all the advanced chem seniors at our school) and ended up placing out of a year of college chem, simply on the basis of having my eyes opened early. I ended up getting doctorates in Molecular Bio (which is largely chemistry) and Medicine, so those books must not have led me too far astray.
This may not be strictly applicable to the case as filed, but it is one of those freakish eye-openers that make you think twice about the world around you. It is easy to see how this open-ended law could be used in an entirely unintended way, over thrity years after it was signed, which has implications for the 'emergency' dimunition of civil rights in the post-911 security hysteria.
Under the Code of Federal Regulations, Title 14, Section 1221, adopted on July 16, 1969 [four days before Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon] and still in effect when I ran across it in the 90's, the chief administrator of NASA has extraordinary, almost dictatorial, powers when it comes to anything that returns from outer space.
For example, if you encounter an extraterrestrial object, you can be apprehended and detained (even secretly) for any duration at the discretion of the NASA Administrator (or his appointees) without a hearing, and the courts are explicitly denied the right to free you! Just encountering someone who encountered such an object was enough to make you subject to these terms! (In this case: man encounters lucite which encountered moon rock)
Don't take my word for it. The law is quoted below (I can't seen to link it on the gov website today). Freaky stuff! A very relevant caveat given today's security hysteria and open-ended blanket laws.
It's easy to see what they were afraid of (The first moon rocks were to arrive in a week, and the risks of exposure were unknown), but the law wasn't time-limited, and remained in effect for decades despite a steady trickle of questions from the public.
<tt> -CITE- 14 CFR PART 1211
-EXPCITE- Title 14 CHAPTER V PART 1211
-HEAD- PART 1211 - EXTRATERRESTRIAL EXPOSURE
-TEXT- Sec.
1211.100 Scope. 1211.101 Applicability. 1211.102 Definitions. 1211.103 Authority. 1211.104 Policy. 1211.105 Relationship with Departments of Health, Education, and Welfare and Agriculture. 1211.106 Cooperation with States, territories, and possessions. 1211.107 Court or other process. 1211.108 Violations. Authority: Secs. 203, 304, 72 Stat. 429, 433; 42 U.S.C. 2455, 2456, 2473; 18 U.S.C. 799; Art. IX, TIAS 6347 (18 UST 2416). Source: 34 FR 11975, July 16, 1969, unless otherwise noted.
-CITE- 14 CFR Sec. 1211.100
-EXPCITE- Title 14 CHAPTER V PART 1211
-HEAD- Sec. 1211.100 Scope.
-TEXT- This part establishes: (a) NASA policy, responsibility and authority to guard the Earth against any harmful contamination or adverse changes in its environment resulting from personnel, spacecraft and other property returning to the Earth after landing on or coming within the atmospheric envelope of a celestial body; and (b) Security requirements, restrictions and safeguards that are necessary in the interest of the national security.
-CITE- 14 CFR Sec. 1211.101
-EXPCITE- Title 14 CHAPTER V PART 1211
-HEAD- Sec. 1211.101 Applicability.
-TEXT- The provisions of this part apply to all NASA manned and unmanned space missions which land on or come within the atmospheric envelope of a celestial body and return to the Earth.
-CITE- 14 CFR Sec. 1211.102
-EXPCITE- Title 14 CHAPTER V PART 1211
-HEAD- Sec. 1211.102 Definitions.
-TEXT- (a) NASA and the Administrator mean, respectively the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration or his authorized representative (see Sec. 1204.509 of this chapter). <b> (b) Extraterrestrially exposed means the state or condition of any person, property, animal or other form of life or matter whatever, who or which has: (1) Touched directly or come within the atmospheric envelope of any other celestial body; or (2) Touched directly or been in close proximity to (or been exposed indirectly to) any person, property, animal or other form of life or matter who or which has been extraterrestrially exposed by virtue of paragraph (b)(1) of this section. For example, if person or thing 'A' touches the surface of the Moon, and on 'A's' return to the Earth, 'B' touches 'A' and, subsequently, 'C' touches 'B,' all of these - 'A' through 'C' inclusive - would be extraterrestrially exposed ('A' and 'B' directly; 'C' indirectly). (c) Quarantine means the detention, examination and decontamination of any person, property, animal or other form of life or matter whatever that is extraterrestrially exposed, and includes the apprehension or seizure of such person, property, animal or other form of life or matter whatever.</b> (d) Quarantine period means a period of consecutive calendar days as may be established in accordance with Sec. 1211.104(a). (e) United States means the 50 States, the District of Columbia, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, Guam, American Samoa and any other territory or possession of the United States, and in a territorial sense all places and waters subject to the jurisdiction of the United States.
-CITE- 14 CFR Sec. 1211.103
-EXPCITE- Title 14 CHAPTER V PART 1211
-HEAD- Sec. 1211.103 Authority.
-TEXT- (a) Sections 203 and 304 of the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958, as amended (42 U.S.C. 2473, 2455 and 2456). (b) 18 U.S.C. 799. (c) Article IX, Outer Space Treaty, TIAS 6347 (18 UST 2416). (d) NASA Management Instructions 1052.90 and 8020.13.
-CITE- 14 CFR Sec. 1211.104
-EXPCITE- Title 14 CHAPTER V PART 1211
-HEAD- Sec. 1211.104 Policy.
-TEXT- (a) Administrative actions. The Administrator or his designee as authorized by Sec. 1204.509 of this chapter shall in his discretion: (1) Determine the beginning and duration of a quarantine period with respect to any space mission; the quarantine period as it applies to various life forms will be announced. (2) Designate in writing quarantine officers to exercise quarantine authority. (3) Determine that a particular person, property, animal, or other form of life or matter whatever is extraterrestrially exposed and quarantine such person, property, animal, or other form of life or matter whatever. <b>The quarantine may be based only on a determination, with or without the benefit of a hearing, that there is probable cause to believe that such person, property, animal or other form of life or matter whatever is extraterrestrially exposed.</b> (4) Determine within the United States or within vessels or vehicles of the United States the place, boundaries, and rules of operation of necessary quarantine stations. (5) Provide for guard services by contract or otherwise, as may be necessary, to maintain security and inviolability of quarantine stations and quarantined persons, property, animals, or other form of life or matter whatever. (6) Provide for the subsistence, health, and welfare of persons quarantined under the provisions of this part. (7) Hold such hearings at such times, in such manner and for such purposes as may be desirable or necessary under this part, including hearings for the purpose of creating a record for use in making any determination under this part or for the purpose of reviewing any such determination. (8) Cooperate with the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare and the Department of Agriculture in accordance with the provisions of Sec. 1211.105. (9) Take such other actions as may be prudent or necessary and which are consistent with this part. (b) Quarantine. (1) During any period of announced quarantine, the property within the posted perimeter of the Lunar Receiving Laboratory at the Manned Spacecraft Center, Houston, Tex., is designated as the NASA Lunar Receiving Laboratory Quarantine Station. (2) Other quarantine stations may be established if determined necessary as provided in paragraph (a)(4) of this section. (3) During any period of announced quarantine, no person shall enter or depart from the limits of any quarantine station without permission of the cognizant NASA quarantine officer. During such period, the posted perimeter of a quarantine station shall be secured by armed guard. (4) Any person who enters the limits of any quarantine station during the quarantine period shall be deemed to have consented to the quarantine of his person if it is determined that he is or has become extraterrestrially exposed. (5) At the earliest practicable time, each person who is quarantined by NASA shall be given a reasonable opportunity to communicate by telephone with legal counsel or other persons of his choice.
-CITE- 14 CFR Sec. 1211.105
-EXPCITE- Title 14 CHAPTER V PART 1211
-HEAD- Sec. 1211.105 Relationship with Departments of Health, Education, and Welfare and Agriculture.
-TEXT- (a) If either the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare or the Department of Agriculture exercises its authority to quarantine an extraterrestrially exposed person, property, animal, or other form of life or matter whatever, NASA will, except as provided in paragraph (c) of this section, not exercise the authority to quarantine that same person, property, animal, or other form of life or matter whatever. In such cases, NASA will offer to these departments the use of the Lunar Receiving Laboratory Quarantine Station and such other service, equipment, personnel, and facilities as may be necessary to ensure an effective quarantine. (b) If neither the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare or the Department of Agriculture exercises its quarantine authority. NASA shall exercise the authority to quarantine an extraterrestrially exposed person, property, animal or other form of life or matter whatever. In such cases, NASA will inform these departments of such quarantine action and, in addition, may request the use of such service, equipment, personnel and facilities of other Federal departments and agencies as may be necessary to ensure an effective quarantine. (c) NASA shall quarantine NASA astronauts and other NASA personnel as determined necessary and all NASA property involved in any space mission.
-CITE- 14 CFR Sec. 1211.106
-EXPCITE- Title 14 CHAPTER V PART 1211
-HEAD- Sec. 1211.106 Cooperation with States, territories, and possessions.
-TEXT- Actions taken in accordance with the provisions of this part shall be exercised in cooperation with the applicable authority of any State, territory, possession or any political subdivision thereof.
-CITE- 14 CFR Sec. 1211.107
-EXPCITE- Title 14 CHAPTER V
PART 1211
-HEAD- <b> Sec. 1211.107 Court or other process.
-TEXT- (a) NASA officers and employees are prohibited from discharging from the limits of a quarantine station any quarantined person, property, animal or other form of life or matter whatever during order or other request, order or demand an announced quarantine period in compliance with a subpoena, show cause of any court or other authority without the prior approval of the General Counsel and the Administrator. (b) Where approval to discharge a quarantined person, property, animal or other form of life or matter whatever in compliance with such a request, order or demand of any court or other authority is not given, the person to whom it is directed shall, if possible, appear in court or before the other authority and respectfully state his inability to comply, relying for his action upon this Sec. 1211.107.</b>
-CITE- 14 CFR Sec. 1211.108
-EXPCITE- Title 14 CHAPTER V PART 1211
-HEAD- Sec. 1211.108 Violations.
-TEXT- Whoever, willfully violates, attempts to violate, or conspires to violate any provision of this part or any regulation or order issued under this part or who enters or departs from the limits of any quarantine station in disregard of the quarantine rules or regulations or without permission of the NASA quarantine officer shall be fined not more than $5,000 or imprisoned not more than 1 year, or both (18 U.S.C. 799). </tt>
I usually save VHS as 320x240 video compressed with the DivX4-fast motion codec, which only consumes 150-250MB/hour after removing commercials. A full seasons can be jammed in two roomier than average "standard" jewel cases (depending on the series). However since up to 560 hours of DivX4 video fits on a 80GB HD ($80 at Compugeeks.com) HDD is comparable to the cost of VHS tapes, and the CDs are mostly a hedge against HD failure.
A DVD-R recorder probably isn't an option if you're unemployed, but with a digital archive,you can copy a full season to a single DVD-R with no degradation when your finances rise or street prices fall.
I use a Pinnacle Studio Pro (rebadged as an IOmagic PVR. Cost: $30-$20 mail in rebate at Outpost.com when I bought my dad one in January) or a MyHD HDTV card (under $300 from Digital Connections)
1) save the program in MP2 format with the included application.
2) trim out the commercials (takes 2 minutes) with VirtualDub (a free open source Windows app). There are other similar free programs like AVIsynth D*scaler, etc, but I don't use them much.
3) VirtualDub encodes in your choice of codec and performs many other operations, like clean-up, enhancing, or resizing as it saves the file. The codecs, filters or plug-ins are available free from many archives (Google it) This processing/saving may take some time, depending on your CPU.
4) Periodically batch-burn CDs
A clean, well-encoded digital 320x240 video on a computer monitor can be better than a VHS tape. NTSC's 480 lines are actually two successive 240 line fields. The VHS standard can only resolve 400 of NTSC's 480 lines (two successive 200-line fields) but few VCRs can even resolve that much. And don't forget that the analog degradation of TV, VCR, and all connections, etc is cumulative.
The MyHD is more expensive, but it also turns your monitor into an HDTV - and have you priced *those* lately?. You won't want to keep the pure HDTV stream. It's compressed with MP2, but it's packetized and pretty sizable (2.5MB/sec or almost 2GB for an edited 1-hour episode). I resize to 320x240, but you might prefer to preserve the high def resolution (1080i) and make 1-2 episode VCDs in DivX
Currently, the total bond area in many metal-ceramic joints is limited to about 1 sq inch, which is a significant limitation for most objects. The surface of a ceramic piston sleeve in a metal engine can be 100 sq in or more. (I don't think this particular example is very promising for this new nanotech, it's just a size example)
The termal stress is reduced because the two dissimilar metals are not heated very much, the brazing or solder material is heated to the high required melting temp (from the inside of the joint, outwards, rather than from the outside in). Since the dissimilar materials are not heated as much, they will not expand as much, and hence will not contract as much wehn cooled. It is the absolute change in size (relative to the intramolecular bonds of the joint) that is most relevant to joint cracking
There also appears to be a small (ca. 1/4" = 6mm) data band around the outside edge of the normal CD data area. It's harder to see because of the light reflections (etc.), but can be made out at the cardinal points (top, bottom, left, right edges)
On certain CD formats, use ot the outer track may be required, but I can't rattle them off off-hand.
Undoubtedly authoring software will be written to allow more sophisticated embedding of images in the data area (e.g. leaving sectors that will be tattooed blank, and using the rest of each track).
However, before this added sophistication can be implemented, some mark will ahve to be created to allow the disk to be precisely oriented (e.g. a data pattern on a specific tract, or a mark made during blank manufacture). Current CD burnerss do not have this requirement (most formats can start writing anywhere around the CD, so it may be limited to second generation tatoo burners.
It would be easy to hack an existing CD-burner and software to orient and perform sector sparing, but for a hardware maker whose success relies on cost and high reliability, it's a much bigger job.
Yes, but how do you record TV shows? Are PVR's being sold in large numbers there, or have people moved to other tape formats, such as Hi-8 and DVC?
Just, FYI, here's a report form the trenches:
About six months ago, I bought an IOmagic PVR card ($39 from Outpost before a $20 rebate!) for my technically incompetent father who care barely check his e-mail, much less send an attachment) It installed cleanly and automagically when the CD was inserted (in Win95, later 98, on a old Celeron 466)
Admittedly, the bundled drivers and programs stank, but a quick web search would reveled that it was a rebadged Pinnacle Studio Pro, whose downloadable drivers and apps are much better - the controls are almost as easy as a VCR (not that he can program a VCR) The whole job is on a par with installing a modem and internet connection in Win95 - which many home users managed (despite learned helplessness if they had techie friends available)
The card was also auto detected and usable by most of the video capture, editing and other software I have acquired over the years (a few did require me to manually select the card from a list)
The video was quite good using the bundleded app, and the could be recordings played with any Open Source deinterlacing program (either to TV or computer monitor) at 480 lines progressive - better than VHS can achieve (VHS can't resolve better than 400 lines, and most VCRs resolve fewer than that)
Overall, a PVR card is cheaper, and provides better video than a VHS VCR (if not the 24/7 reliability, due to the OS), and is hardly a technical problem. Yet, even technophiles simply haven't bothered.
Sure, most people might not know this. Then again. most people don't know how to steal cable, yet in many neighborhoods, cable theft was the rule -- and the PC-PVR solution is perfectly legal.
I use a MyHD HDTV video card (Digital Connections), on a $200 Athlon 1700+XP Soyo barebones (Outpost). with $70 512MB DDRAM and a $70 80 GB HDD as a HDTV capable tuner/recorder/video server, and it all pretty much worked straight out of the box. Total cost was about the same as a HDTV tuner alone (if you buy a HDTV, you usually have to buy a separate HDTV tuner - $500-900 at Best Buy)
Okay, the average joe won't invest even the 2 hours it took to assemble and install, but it's a great afternoon project for any geek who is interested in video recording or sharing as more than an intellectual rant. Take the plunge.
You can use an existing computer. The Athlon is overkill for viewing or recording (I bought it for CPU intensive video editing/processing) I can do real work on the system as I view/record HDTV.
1) Any company that focuses on job search advice, recruiting, etc. gets paid when you switch jobs. If you stay at your job, they *lose* money (or effectiveness stats) they'd otherwise have made.
2) What makes a person post a web page (or even a reply in a thread)? Generally, a a bad experience is more motivating than a good experience. It gives the author a chance to vent.
2a) After a year or two, a person who stays is likely to have largely forgotten their decision if all goes well. A person who left for another job or had a bad experience with staying is more likely to think of that moment as a discrete turning point. You don't hear all the 'fat dumb and happy' cases - and 'fat dumb and happy' isn't a bad thing to be.
3) There's a selection bias in your choice of search terms. A person who is offered more money and stays will think of their situation in different words than a person who received identical offers and left. You yourself may have heard dozens of casual offers in the three years you were with your present company, but they passed forgotten. If you'd acted on one, that one offer would seem much more significant.
4) Many of the horror stories could have happened even if no outside job offer had been made, and therefore they are not strictly speaking a result of accepting the counteroffer. They were simply fortuitous opportunities to escape the carnage. It's no more relevant than the fact that stopping for coffee one morning resulted in you missing (or being involved in) a horrific car crash.
4a) A person who doesn't know that their company is about to go belly up (or be bought, etc) probably wasn't paying too much attention to their company's competitive situation. You should know your present workplace well (you certainly don't know your new one), and if you don't, you should start - whatever your decision. Blinders never help anyone.
I can think of many other hidden biases, but I think you get the idea.
Slashdot Mirror
While there was a law mandating 911 access on deactivated phones, I've been told that (unlike analog cellphones), many or all of the most recent generation of digital phones do not. I doubt this is a change in the law (I'd think that I'd know if it were), but don't know if it's an oversight in current implementations of digital cellphone networks (how far down the priority list do you think *that* bug is?), or a semi-deliberate dodge.
Ordinarily I would investigate the roots of this apparent illegality myself before reapeating the tale, but since my aging parents have become enthusiastic cellphoe users (who'd never let their service lapse, as they often did in the 90's), researching it has become a lower priority for me personally. It's been empirically demonstrated to me twice, by two different techies using recently deactivated digital cellphones, but I still remain a bit skeptical - phones/networks *do* break down.
This might be a good cause for the community to pursue, if it is widely verified.
More importantly, it's something we should all know, in the event of an emergency.
I have a good grasp of math and space science, but I am deeply disturbed by the repeated declaration that Mars has a solar tidal bulge of "less than 1 cm". It calls to mind a perfectly smooth uniform spheroid with a tiny bulge, but Mars isn't smooth or uniform. It has muntains and gorges that are kilometer high or deep. It has massive geological formations (based on surface features) whose density variations would easily dwarf the proposed effect.
Even if you could map the surface of Mars down to millimeter resolution in 3 dimensions (which is very far from anything they are remotely claimed to have done), it would be highly problematic to even define what is meant by a sphere with a mean radius of more than 672,400,000 cm (and a highly heterogenous composition) having a 1 cm physical eccentricity due to a specific cause. An apparent 1.6 parts per trillion variation in mass distribution can't possibly be attributed to any one cause until we've completely mapped the entire volume of the planet. Large underground caverns or deposits of dense minerals can (and do) cause many times this much variation here on the much-measured Earth.
Can someone please explain how this finding could possibly make sense, given the many known, larger confounding factors, and the general paucity of data about the overall geology and underground 3-D mapping of Mars? To me, this smells like bad science. We don't know enough about Mars to make conclusive parts-per-trillion determination, much less confidently attribute them!
Of course, it's not the public's fault if the facts are muddied. All too often, the media's brain-dead interpretation of "fairness" and "balance" consists of providing roughly equal time (or arguments of apparently roughly equal weight) even when that same outlet may already have thoroughly discredited a given argument. They are selling the appearance of fairness, after all. Actual fairness is as irrelevant as the *decrease* in aerodynamic performance caused by the rocket/jet fins and detailing of many cars in the 50/60's. Appearances are everything.
But to return to the pharmaceuticals companies: R+D is "a major expense" only after a tangled borderline perjurious accounting that was previously reserved for Ponzi schemes and the recording industry. Many of these ultra-expensive wonder drugs are sold for half as much in Canada, and a quarter the price or less in some parts of Europe, Asia or Africa. This wouldn't be the case if they were desperately trying to recoup genuine costs at their inflated US prices (because they'd be losing money on every non-US sale). They're just charging what the market will bear.
Further, as regards "innovation". Every week, I am bombarded by literally hundreds of ads (in medical journals, direct mailings an drug reps who barge in with no appointment, but are my sole source for "free samples" for my poor patients) for new wonderdrugs thhat are nothing more than 'me-too' knock-off. They move a hydroxyl group or a carbon atom on an existing drug, and run hundreds of tests (talk about expensive!) looking for some minute benefit over a current wonder drug (which they may also own). Almost invariably, the me-too is *less* effective or safe OVERALL than the existing drug (the lack of overall improvement is so consistent thatI sometimes think they're marketing the also-rans of the initial development effort - it would certainly be cheaper) Often the original 'wonder drug (progenitor of a new class) is itself only occassionally better than far cheaper and safer generic alternatives
Let me cite an example: in most cases, diuretics (drugs that cause you to urinate excess water) are both more effective and safer, at pennies a day, than Calcium Channel blockers and ACE (angiotensin convertine enzyme) inhibitors that cost several dollars a day -- for life! The study that proved this was one of the best and most unarguable in years, yet drug reps and execs will openly tell you that they aren't worried. "No one is pushing (marketing) cheap, safe diuretics which doctors have used for other purposes for centuries". Why do you think they market directly to patients? A few years ago, TVs and billboards were flooded with ads that didn't even specify what the drug was for, but urged "Ask your doctor". Perfectly healthy people came in, asking, afraid they were missing out on the Latest Greatest Thing.
Another example is the new anti-AIDS drug Fuzeon, widely hailed as an example of a drug whose high price ($20,570/yr = E19,000) is justified because it takes over 100 steps to prepare. Even if you accept their own figures justifying the cost, R+D was SFr 840 million ($620 million) and annual sales are projected to be $740 million per year, once hey hit full production (by which time, production costs are expected to be 10-15% of current levels)
Here are a couple of articles, for those who are still reading:
In U.S., marketing blurs into medicine
A more general analysis of the industry by the Markle Foundation (health care advocates)
Sorry for the rant.
Actually, I've been surprised that no one has noted that the detectible frequescies are almost certainly not the computers electrical signals or RFI *per se* but the resonances and beat frequencies of high frequency signals and/or general pseudoregularities in signals and pulses generated in various parts of the computer.
Most people are familiar with one definition of resonance - that even tiny signals can sum over time in a resonant cavity, physical object, circuit, etc, and build to remarkable amplitudes in a few hundred or thousands cycles.
Most people are also aware of harmonics. A square wave of amplitude 1 and frequency w can be defined as the sum of sine waves of amplitude 1/k and frequency k*w (where k is any odd integer) Of course, k*w is a *higher* frequency component,and soon gets too high to be transmitted in the system without attenuation, which leads to the inevitable rounding of the shoulders and imperfect on/off transitions of real-life digital square waves.
High frequencies can reinforce (pump) mechanical and electrical resonances that are any integral fraction w/n (where n is a positive integer) of the original signal, and to a lesser degree, any integral ratio of the signal frequency w (w * p/q , where p and q are integers) In both these cases, we get *lower* frequency effects (e.g. mechanical vibrations in physical objects like brackets, casise panels, etc.) which are more likely to be in the range of human perception.
Beat frequencies result whenever two different frequencies are mixed. (w1 -w2) so two very similar frequencies can easily create a frequency in the audio range.
There are a cacophony of signals inside a computer: system clocks, regularities in the pulse trains of certain signals (e.g. long term bit pattern repetition, to fill a window with a color) the various analog control signals inside a hard drive, sound card, tuner card, etc. -- plus all their multiples and fractions, plus all the mechanical resonances of every component and assembly inside the case.
It's not surprising that SOME of these signals or components will be sufficiently mutually self-reinforcing in an audible range, varying between computers and with various actions/tasks.
The mechanical resonances of physicial parts or assemblies in particular, are likely to fall in the audible range, and are likely to generate physical vibrations that that will be tramistted through the air as sound. This is a familiar effect to any discerning audiophile who has tried building their own speakers and enclosures.
In the Neolithic era, one primary fuel was JAMES WOOD ... KEVIN BACON
Whose favorite Blues vocalist was NAT 'KING' COLE (which, along with charcoal, fueled the iron age)
Who had an odd thing for the Popeye's girlfriend Olive Oyl (burned by Greeks and Romans in lamps)
Who was also the favorite cartoon babe of OIL CAN BOYD (Hero of the petroleum age)
Who, in a post-game interview, jumped HOWIE CARR (transportation tht began a social revolution)
Who co-starred in a Gillete Mach III commercial with VIN DIESEL (who had actually been around forever, but is now regaining popularity)
Who co-starred in "Internal Combustion" with
Or am I playing the game all wrong?
Oddly, though Bill Gates has been railing against GNU's "viral license" for years now, I think he'd rather approve of this, genuinely viral, licensing.
I'll admit I didn't finish reading all the responses (I will - this subject has particular interest to me) but after plowing through ca 100 posts w/o any actual real World experience, I had to pipe up:
Slashdotters should realize that a decent (not great) PC with some free software and inexpensive hardware can be the key to nearly State-of-the-art (compared to the stuff in the retail chains) TV exceeding kilobuck HDTV sets. A spectacular home theater is within the reach of a dedicated high school fry cook working at McDonalds and living with their folks. In fact, get your folks to chip in, and it's *easy*. In Home Improvement, we call it "sweat equity": creating with work and know-how something that would cost mucho dinero to buy (plus learning a thing or two as a major benefit -- I can easily afford an HDTV at Best Buy, but that would be boring to me, or even pointless)
1) Some starting points for real-world solutions:
AV Science: where I hang out now (esp. the HTPC forum, whose Linux section could use more programmers!)
Keohi HDTV (they helped me get started, I assume they're still good)
The Home Theater Spot: Admittedly, a home for guys with more dollars than sense, but at least they experiment instead of spouting sales literature at each other. They also had some great group buys from One-Call, which is as good as it gets for both support and service (if you want to buy)
2) Only now am I retiring my original HTPC (Home Theater PC), a Celeron-466 with 256 MB, a $20 TV card, and a $45 Matrox 450 DualHead with s-video, composite and XVGA outputs - a simple system that would still wow a lot of 'retail buyers'. I can't explain how it changed my TV viewing, how great it is to have a library of 150-300MB archived eps of my favorite shows, etc. Add a few sub-$1/GB HDDs (see Anandtech Hot Deals or FatWallet for bargains), and you'll wonder how you ever tolerated clumsy VHS tape libraries. For archiving, these same forums will tell you how to get 4x DVD-R recorders for as little as $140 at major chains (epending on sales)
3) My current aging workhorse is a Athlon 1700+XP ($209, barebones, from Outpost.com a year ago). I added memory, a sub-$300 MyHD card (some other HDTV cards are as good or better) and a few minor bits like a $50 Dolby Theater Sound card, etc. It'd be much cheaper today, and many of you already run gear that's much hotter than this. The software was mostly free and/or open source.
4) My favored output device is a Toshiba TLP650 LCD projector (native 1024x768, but with a nice 1600x1200 mode) cost $900 on eBay last year - a bit pricey, but that was last year and the last-gen prices are dropping fast. On President's Day (Monday) I got my GF a nice 640x480 projector to experiment with: under $100, and it exceeds the line resolution of any 'normal TV'. You can assemble a decent HTPC/projector for about the price of a "pretty nice" normal TV if cash is tight, and you'll have far more capability, like HDTV and HDTV *recording* (which runs a few kilobucks by itself, retail). Admittedly, I'm comparing "MSRP" TV prices to bargain-hunting for HDTV, but hackers have always been scroungers, right?
To me, the learning is the biggest benefit. I'm not a big fan of most TV, but building my HTPC has been a wonderful (and not *that* pricey) hobby. I don't need cable when most of what is sold locally as "digital cable" doesn't come close to the 1080i resolution I pick up with a $20 "double bowtie" antenna from Radio Shack (As a general rule, any antenna that calls itself an HDTV antenna will be *worse* than a cheap 1950's retro-looking double bowtie)
When your videos are always on your HDD, you'll rule in Geek Debates on SF tech or plots (one-click access encourages the invaluable habit of rigorous fact-checking). You can make outrageous SF music videos or parodies, and otherwise exercise your creative and intellectual side instead of being purely a passive couch potato. Modesty prevents me from linking my own videos, but I'd gladly recommend a friend's site of example TV-SF music videos and parodies
The nature of this dupe (and the many others we've seen every month for years, unlike any other website I know) suggests that you don't particularly care. Fair enough. However...
The fact that not one single reader out of the possibly 100,000 who likely saw your site in those two hours felt it worthwhile to report it to you suggests that the overwhelming majority of your readers are quite convinced that you don't care, and are rapidly ceasing to care themselves.
React to this fact as you wish. The result you get will be exactly what you deserve. It'd be ironic and fitting if Slashdot, of all sites, decayed because its Editors assumed that its market share and user loyalty/inertia would assure -or entitle it to- continued success, despite its well known and oft-criticized shoddy implementation.
The actual accounting (also reported in countless previous links) means that after the studio's self-declared expenses are deducted, the band not only rarely makes much beyond the initial advance, but often ends up owing the studio money on paper. This can lock them in, forcing them to sign for additional albums (to have the debt forgiven) and making it hard to switch labels.
I could enumerate many more abuses, but I'm sure others will -- if they're not sick of doing so.
NOW COMES THE EVIL PART
The studios (or RIAA) don't have any right to the music the musicians play in concert, unless there is a specific concert recording clause. This was the meat on the musician's table. but now the largest promoter in the nation will be making it a term of their contracts that bands must surrender most rights to the music in their precious live performances. Note: Clear Channel never said a word about paying artists. It's be a condition of the concert: "If you don't sign over the rights, you don't play in this town". [We've also seen plenty of articles on the strong-arm methods Clear Channel has used to build and enforce precisely this sort of monopoly.
This won't improve anything for most bands. It only applies to the known successes where Clear Channel expects to make a profit; the ones where CC is already profiting as the concert promoter. If Clear Channel didn't book you for a concert or performance, don't expect their audio truck.
In short: they are reaching deeper into the artist's pockets -- and removing (coopting) a potential source of revenue for the band itself. The recording industry was a historical artifact, like buggy whip makers. It gained its stranglehold because 100 years ago, musicians could not afford studio equipment. Now they can, so the strangle hold much be maintained in other ways.
This is a coerced corporate seizure of the band's rights to the proceeds of their own live *performances* (concerts, shows, etc.) which had been the last bastion of the musician. They are doing this preemptively, because it's now a small step from the club/concert audio feed to a burned CD -- and right now sales of such CDs could well belong to the musician, if the corporations are not careful!
"The Colorado Junk E-Mail Law would require companies to pay an annual fee of up to $500 to access the registry. It would award consumers $10 for each unwanted message that they receive, assuming they are willing to take the spammer to court. If they win the case, their attorney's fees would be reimbursed.
In Missouri, companies would have free access to the list, but residents would be able to sue marketers for up to $5,000 for violating it.
Critics say the proposed opt-out lists are a futile version of equally futile statewide spam laws. (Both Colorado and Missouri already have statutes regulating unsolicited commercial e-mail.) "
Look, I hate spam as much as the next guy (I postmaster over a dozen domains), but the leagal history of most topics on Slashdot clearly shows that an ill-considered "solution" often does more damage than no solution at all (if only because when companies start lobbying for these *known* ineffectual measures alongside the clueless public, they be come (politically, pragmatically))
unstoppable in the eyes of politicians
Stupidity ensues.
The anti-"fax spam" laws only worked because faxes were still heavily concentrated in the offices of companies and professionals. They were affordable, but as someone who'd had faxes at work, school, as part of professional organizations, etc., since the 80's, I can assure you that when that law was passed, the fact that I had one at home 24/7 still surprised people. Though the standard modem was already a faxmodem, few had them configured and on (not to mention the whole consumer OS crash problem, which was a major problem, even if it was often better than it was in the mid-late 90's)
I can see your point, and I very much wish I could agree. For all it's inescapable logic, the empirical fact is: we've been showing "Blood on the Asphalt" type films in our schools for half a century, with little effect (measured by follow-up studies). Any number of painful injuries (one in particular) got weekly exposure for 15+ years on "America's Funniest Home Videos" and a hundred spin-offs, with little effect on behavior.
In fact, (and I'm not picking on you - your point made sense), court mandated driver education for adults (in lieu of penalty for 'first offenders') don't use such films *because* the studies show them to be ineffective. Our schools continue to use them for essentially the same reasons schools do such a poor job of educating in general (compared to what they *could* and *should* do)
When I buy new battery packs, I carefully open up the old ones (using an Xacto knife, solvents, the occasional touch of a Dremel cutting wheel, and whenever possible, repeated flexion or leverage of sonic welds and glue). I replace the cells with cheapo cells I buy on e-Bay.
Generally, my 'refills' last longer (to failure, not to discharge) than the original factory ones did. Conspiracy or just a side-effect of careless warehousing? Who knows? It does prove, however, that battery chemistry isn't at fault.
In general, we agree more than disagree.
1 7&mode=nested&tid=93&tid=172
I think that averages are fully appropriate for predicting bulk behaviors on this scale. True. one could easily make more refined predictions to account for the nonlinear form of the equation, but this is a first order approximation. Further, I was being quite conservative, by sticking to Moor's law, which has held up quite well over several decades of computing advances. The extent of my conservatism was, coincidentally, confirmed in a Slashdot article less than 48 hours later, when Adi Shamir (the "S" in RSA, just as Rivest was the "R") proposed a possible 3-4 order of magnitude improvement in cost-effectiveness (which would correspond to 15-20 years of steady progress under Moore's Law) in a not completely unrelated class of matching problem (1024 bit RSA keys):
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/01/25/16132
I stupidly left out the following paragraph:
Even if we assume that no mathematical or algorithmic advances have been made in hash-cracking in the past 10 years (the above papers were written when Linux was known to only a few hundred, and MS was releasing Windows for Workgroups 3.11), current hardware trends would make it possible to spoof about 1000 files/month on $1M of hardware. or the top 10 downloaded files of 100 different bands per month. Another $1M doubles your output. Algorthm breakthroughs could easily make the output 10-1000x greater than the hardware trend alone.
Your points are well taken.
/day
I was, simply addressing the comment I quoted, which implied no collisions were known. (They are: an early example can be found in B. den Boer and A. Bosselaers, "Collisions for the compression function of MD5", Advances in Cryptology - Eurocrypt '93, Springer-Verlag, p. 293-304)
However, as an academic matter, I think it can be estimated that a modest corporate budget might construct an MD5 hash matching machine bank for under $1M, if an organization saw a commercial need that justified multiple units (reducing the cost per unit, as well documented in the articles on the custom designed EFF DES cracker)
Rivest was, of course, the R in RSA, and according to a somewhat outdated FAQ on the RSA Security website:
" Van Oorschot and Wiener [VW94] have considered a brute-force search for collisions (see Question 2.1.6) in hash functions, and they estimate a collision search machine designed specifically for MD5 (costing $10 million in 1994) could find a collision for MD5 in 24 days on average. The general techniques can be applied to other hash functions." [ P. van Oorschot and M. Wiener, Parallel collision search with application to hash functions and discrete logarithms, Proceedings of 2nd ACM Conference on Computer and Communication Security (1994)]
Applying Moore's Law as a rough guide, ignoring all the work on algorithms and programmable chip architecture in the past 10 years, a $10M machine would cost 1/64th as much today, or $156K to develop, and much less per unit in quanitity (i.e. parts/construction cost could be under $1K, so 850 units might be constructed for $1M) Again, I cite the EFF DES cracker as a very close example.
That still leaves us with 24 days per collision. If I may be forgiven for positing, purely for purposes of guesstimation, a Moore's Law scale for advances in this hot field of mathematics (which would probably not displayed a steady improvement, but would likely have had crucial breakthroughs in the past 10 years) then the 24 days would be 2.25 hours today. To be conservative: say 1-10
This is, of course, just a crude guesstimate, but I think that you would agree that a bank of 850 machines, a mere $1M in hardware, cranking out 10 exact matches for targeted files, per macthine, per day (8500 spoofed files per day) could present a significant contamination of the media pool.
I *DO NOT* believe that this represents a major enduring danger to P2P, or that the RIAA would actually construct such a bank. I merely note that $1M (plus operating costs) would be a drop in the bucket to the RIAA, and that the error bars go in both directions (i.e. current mathematical methods might be more efficient than a 1994 estimate, when MD5 was a fairly new, less researched algorithm.)
This is just an academic observation on the potential for MD5 collision matching since its introduction in '91. This is not my field. "Dammit Jim, I'm a doctor, not a Cryptographer."
Really? I'd really appreciate some link or pointer to this "big prize". I have several completely distinct files with the same MD5 - and I didn't look too hard.
This is completely predictable under combinatorial mathematics. The simplest example I can provide, without making you do the math is "The Birthday Problem": we all know, from elementary brain teasers (and casual experience), that though there are 366 distinct days in the year, in a random group of 23 people, two probably share a birthday. (It's actually 22 or so in real life: unlike pure math, real life births are not truly random, but tend to cluster more in some months than others) (e.g.)
MD5 was developed by Professor Ronald L. Rivest in 1994 SPECIFICALLY as a 128 bit (16 byte) message digest with a faster implementation than SHA-1 (Variations are possible, of course) ON GENERAL PURPOSE PROCESSORS - disregarding the many fairly cheap commercial or custom hashing chips that are faster at hashing than your 'leetest game rig.
A fast hash is good for hashing - i.e. creating a *fairly* content-independent binary pseudoindex of a file. This does not guarantee that it is truly independent of the source -i.e. if the effect of a one-bit change in the input were unpredictable without recalculating the hash- that would make it useful for (e.g.) cryptography. (Google MDA5 cryptography and you'll find just one page!) A program can cheat by tweaking a few source bits to deliberately approach a desired hash output.
The creator of a deliberately degraded media file has an advantage that creators of "legitimate" data don't: they can fiddle with its bits freely to generate a desired MDA5 hash -- what do they care if it is slightly degraded? That's the point of releasing the files!
While one will indeed find this "fact" listed in many places, including a few physics texts, it may well be a fallacy. I've looked up the frequency absorption spectrum of water, and 2450 MHZ was not a peak. Unfortunately my "classic" paper link is now dead (I'd really appreciate a currently active and stable link even if it supercedes the paper I had and proves me wrong)
The best I can do right now is " Absorption Spectrum of H2 18O in the Range 12 400...14 520 cm-1 [Journal of Molecular Spectroscopy 216, 77-80 (2002)]
Moreover, anyone with equipment to measure the relevant range can see that microwaves are not tuned to a tight band. The frequency of any one oven varies far more than any the reasonable expectation for an absorption band in that range (depending on temperature, use, etc.) and the variance between ovens is greater still.
That's actually one specific reason why a resonance frequency is not used: the increase in efficiency that would result from picking an absorption peak (vs. simply reflecting the microwaves around inside the cavity 10-1000 times until a significant fraction is absorbed) simply wouldn't have been worth the effort and cost of precisely tuning each unit (at the time when microwaves first came out) Further, we are all aware of the accounts (admittedly potentially apocryphal) that relate the discovery of microwave cookery to an accidental exposure to a military radar dish. Military radars (excluding weather radars) generally avoid the water bands, because water vapor in the air would limit range.
I don't mean to criticize the Original Poster, since that "information" can indeed be found in reputable sources. I'd simply rather not see it repeated if it obscures and incorrectly explains the operation of microwave ovens and EM radiation.
Finally, even if the microwave radiation from a oven *did* operate on a resonance absorption band for water, the total power of a cell phone is tiny (mW-W). One would get orders of magnitude more tissue heating by stepping out into the sun or even another person (both things some techie types seem to avoid). In the absence of any specific epidemiological or other significant evidence of specific tissue or cellular disorders caused by the specific frequency bands used by cellular phones, their radiation can *only* be expected to produce nonspecific tissue heating.
Before you worry about microwaves, worry about other sources of energy like sunlight. Microwaves onlt *seem* "spookier" to certain people, while sunlight is far stronger in many, many specific bands than celphones over their entire range.
It might be wise to say say IANAMD, but I *am* an MD (with a degree in molecular biology). That doesn't make me an authority on epidemiology or molecular properties, but I like to think it does give me a small edge.
That's odd. I started programming in the 70's and a lot of what we're working on now is exactly what we were dreaming of then. If anything, we'd have been pretty shocked and horrified to know that we'd still be working on them after <heavenly choir>the Year 2000<heavenly choir> (which once seemed as distant and hallowed, yet imminent and all-conquering as any Messiah or deity)
We cursed the limitations of our hardware and software then, but we worked with them because they were all we had. We'd spend weeks trying to trim a kilobyte or a few cycles out of a loop, not because we were virtuous (we weren't) but because we had to. Those whirring disks ran 24/7 to do crude payroll jobs that would run minutes on a desktop today.
It's been well documented, here and elsewhere, that most of our routine computing doesn't really save us much time, if any, but is simply chasing that elusive 0.1% "better output" (documents, biz data, presentations, etc.) A high school frosh today would be ashamed to hand in a report that looked like the most painstakingly prepared reports prepared for President Nixon. The addition of kerning hasn't vastly improved the content of a high school report.
Among the early computers I worked on was a triple CDC Cyber7600, which (in its initial configuration as a mere dual Cyber6600) exceeded the total computing capacity of the Soviet Union, but had a fraction of the CPU power, storage, etc. of my laptop so where's my accurate voice transcription, much less my intelligent editing and automated personal research assistant? Text recognition is just about usable for some major applications, but handwriting recognition is still barely usable
Yes, many are happy with their PDA hand-print inputs (or whatever) but it's a singing pig, we've learned not to expect Pavarotti; we're amazed it's workable at all. In ten years, we *may* achieve our 1975 dreams, and call the current state 'crap', not because of added features, but because 95% success (if one can even achieve it) *is* crap performance that we'd never accept in other daily technologies. Contrast this with, say word processing: load a PDA with 1979's AppleWriter ][ word processor, (a 190K package) and *truly competent* speech- , text- or handwriting recognition (pick one) and you'll have something that'll fly off the shelf at a kilobuck a pop, and make the cover of Time.
I don't know your age, but I assume you recall the 70's. If so, you'll recognize that these functions that we expected "any year now" back then (and are still waiting for) are just a handfull of hundreds of basic functions that are clunking along today. Our standards have dropped. We haven't even implemented the feature set we were promised then
With the Web (hypertext), wireless networking, huge storage, and a thousand other technologies, we're finally getting close to the Dynabook, which in 1974, we were promised "by 1984 at the latest". In 1994, a dynabook would still have been a total world-changing breakthrough. in 2004, it may finally be here. Added features are nothing compared to competent basic functionality. We've had programs that claim to do all this stuff for 25 years, but we're still waiting for solid human-free performance (which is largely the point of having a computer do the job) on our 1975 dreams
Before you say creeping featurism pulled us out of the Dark Ages, just give me reliable, competent worry-free versions of the stuff that was outlined in the magazines in the 70's -- software that was being written on mainframes, knowing the PC and laptop were coming, someday, and is still only in what we'd have call "commercially released beta" form 30 years later
I read these books as a 9 year old, did all the experiements, and to this day, I still find myself reciting basic principles from them to my colleagues in hospitals, molecular biology labs and other technical settings [a college degree in a related science doesn't fill in all the gaps of a practical understanding of the day-to-day world. An early exposure grounds you in the basics, and gets you seeing/thinking about things in chemical terms]
The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments (Robert Brent, 1960) (not any of the many variant titles) is head and shoulders above any other chemistry book I'd give a bright grade schooler. I hunted down a copy for my own kids, and they loved it.
Chemical Magic (forgot the authors) is one of the best of the many "cool effects to impress your friends" books out there.
Add a good grounding in stoichiometry, energies, entropy, electronegativity, and a few other basic
things, and there's no telling how far it'll take them. I got thrown out of Chemistry in the first month of class (incompetent teacher wanted "her' answers on tests, not the correct ones) and took the Chemistry ACHs with no formal chemistry coursework. I got a 770 out of 800 (top 1%, beating all the advanced chem seniors at our school) and ended up placing out of a year of college chem, simply on the basis of having my eyes opened early. I ended up getting doctorates in Molecular Bio (which is largely chemistry) and Medicine, so those books must not have led me too far astray.
Under the Code of Federal Regulations, Title 14, Section 1221, adopted on July 16, 1969 [four days before Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon] and still in effect when I ran across it in the 90's, the chief administrator of NASA has extraordinary, almost dictatorial, powers when it comes to anything that returns from outer space.
For example, if you encounter an extraterrestrial object, you can be apprehended and detained (even secretly) for any duration at the discretion of the NASA Administrator (or his appointees) without a hearing, and the courts are explicitly denied the right to free you! Just encountering someone who encountered such an object was enough to make you subject to these terms! (In this case: man encounters lucite which encountered moon rock)
Don't take my word for it. The law is quoted below (I can't seen to link it on the gov website today). Freaky stuff! A very relevant caveat given today's security hysteria and open-ended blanket laws.
It's easy to see what they were afraid of (The first moon rocks were to arrive in a week, and the risks of exposure were unknown), but the law wasn't time-limited, and remained in effect for decades despite a steady trickle of questions from the public.
I usually save VHS as 320x240 video compressed with the DivX4-fast motion codec, which only consumes 150-250MB/hour after removing commercials. A full seasons can be jammed in two roomier than average "standard" jewel cases (depending on the series). However since up to 560 hours of DivX4 video fits on a 80GB HD ($80 at Compugeeks.com) HDD is comparable to the cost of VHS tapes, and the CDs are mostly a hedge against HD failure.
A DVD-R recorder probably isn't an option if you're unemployed, but with a digital archive,you can copy a full season to a single DVD-R with no degradation when your finances rise or street prices fall.
I use a Pinnacle Studio Pro (rebadged as an IOmagic PVR. Cost: $30-$20 mail in rebate at Outpost.com when I bought my dad one in January) or a MyHD HDTV card (under $300 from Digital Connections)
1) save the program in MP2 format with the included application.
2) trim out the commercials (takes 2 minutes) with VirtualDub (a free open source Windows app). There are other similar free programs like AVIsynth D*scaler, etc, but I don't use them much.
3) VirtualDub encodes in your choice of codec and performs many other operations, like clean-up, enhancing, or resizing as it saves the file. The codecs, filters or plug-ins are available free from many archives (Google it) This processing/saving may take some time, depending on your CPU.
4) Periodically batch-burn CDs
A clean, well-encoded digital 320x240 video on a computer monitor can be better than a VHS tape. NTSC's 480 lines are actually two successive 240 line fields. The VHS standard can only resolve 400 of NTSC's 480 lines (two successive 200-line fields) but few VCRs can even resolve that much. And don't forget that the analog degradation of TV, VCR, and all connections, etc is cumulative.
The MyHD is more expensive, but it also turns your monitor into an HDTV - and have you priced *those* lately?. You won't want to keep the pure HDTV stream. It's compressed with MP2, but it's packetized and pretty sizable (2.5MB/sec or almost 2GB for an edited 1-hour episode). I resize to 320x240, but you might prefer to preserve the high def resolution (1080i) and make 1-2 episode VCDs in DivX
Currently, the total bond area in many metal-ceramic joints is limited to about 1 sq inch, which is a significant limitation for most objects. The surface of a ceramic piston sleeve in a metal engine can be 100 sq in or more. (I don't think this particular example is very promising for this new nanotech, it's just a size example)
The termal stress is reduced because the two dissimilar metals are not heated very much, the brazing or solder material is heated to the high required melting temp (from the inside of the joint, outwards, rather than from the outside in). Since the dissimilar materials are not heated as much, they will not expand as much, and hence will not contract as much wehn cooled. It is the absolute change in size (relative to the intramolecular bonds of the joint) that is most relevant to joint cracking
There also appears to be a small (ca. 1/4" = 6mm) data band around the outside edge of the normal CD data area. It's harder to see because of the light reflections (etc.), but can be made out at the cardinal points (top, bottom, left, right edges)
On certain CD formats, use ot the outer track may be required, but I can't rattle them off off-hand.
Undoubtedly authoring software will be written to allow more sophisticated embedding of images in the data area (e.g. leaving sectors that will be tattooed blank, and using the rest of each track).
However, before this added sophistication can be implemented, some mark will ahve to be created to allow the disk to be precisely oriented (e.g. a data pattern on a specific tract, or a mark made during blank manufacture). Current CD burnerss do not have this requirement (most formats can start writing anywhere around the CD, so it may be limited to second generation tatoo burners.
It would be easy to hack an existing CD-burner and software to orient and perform sector sparing, but for a hardware maker whose success relies on cost and high reliability, it's a much bigger job.
Yes, but how do you record TV shows? Are PVR's being sold in large numbers there, or have people moved to other tape formats, such as Hi-8 and DVC?
Just, FYI, here's a report form the trenches:
About six months ago, I bought an IOmagic PVR card ($39 from Outpost before a $20 rebate!) for my technically incompetent father who care barely check his e-mail, much less send an attachment) It installed cleanly and automagically when the CD was inserted (in Win95, later 98, on a old Celeron 466)
Admittedly, the bundled drivers and programs stank, but a quick web search would reveled that it was a rebadged Pinnacle Studio Pro, whose downloadable drivers and apps are much better - the controls are almost as easy as a VCR (not that he can program a VCR) The whole job is on a par with installing a modem and internet connection in Win95 - which many home users managed (despite learned helplessness if they had techie friends available)
The card was also auto detected and usable by most of the video capture, editing and other software I have acquired over the years (a few did require me to manually select the card from a list)
The video was quite good using the bundleded app, and the could be recordings played with any Open Source deinterlacing program (either to TV or computer monitor) at 480 lines progressive - better than VHS can achieve (VHS can't resolve better than 400 lines, and most VCRs resolve fewer than that)
Overall, a PVR card is cheaper, and provides better video than a VHS VCR (if not the 24/7 reliability, due to the OS), and is hardly a technical problem. Yet, even technophiles simply haven't bothered.
Sure, most people might not know this. Then again. most people don't know how to steal cable, yet in many neighborhoods, cable theft was the rule -- and the PC-PVR solution is perfectly legal.
I use a MyHD HDTV video card (Digital Connections), on a $200 Athlon 1700+XP Soyo barebones (Outpost). with $70 512MB DDRAM and a $70 80 GB HDD as a HDTV capable tuner/recorder/video server, and it all pretty much worked straight out of the box. Total cost was about the same as a HDTV tuner alone (if you buy a HDTV, you usually have to buy a separate HDTV tuner - $500-900 at Best Buy)
Okay, the average joe won't invest even the 2 hours it took to assemble and install, but it's a great afternoon project for any geek who is interested in video recording or sharing as more than an intellectual rant. Take the plunge.
You can use an existing computer. The Athlon is overkill for viewing or recording (I bought it for CPU intensive video editing/processing) I can do real work on the system as I view/record HDTV.
There are several types of bias at work here:
1) Any company that focuses on job search advice, recruiting, etc. gets paid when you switch jobs. If you stay at your job, they *lose* money (or effectiveness stats) they'd otherwise have made.
2) What makes a person post a web page (or even a reply in a thread)? Generally, a a bad experience is more motivating than a good experience. It gives the author a chance to vent.
2a) After a year or two, a person who stays is likely to have largely forgotten their decision if all goes well. A person who left for another job or had a bad experience with staying is more likely to think of that moment as a discrete turning point. You don't hear all the 'fat dumb and happy' cases - and 'fat dumb and happy' isn't a bad thing to be.
3) There's a selection bias in your choice of search terms. A person who is offered more money and stays will think of their situation in different words than a person who received identical offers and left. You yourself may have heard dozens of casual offers in the three years you were with your present company, but they passed forgotten. If you'd acted on one, that one offer would seem much more significant.
4) Many of the horror stories could have happened even if no outside job offer had been made, and therefore they are not strictly speaking a result of accepting the counteroffer. They were simply fortuitous opportunities to escape the carnage. It's no more relevant than the fact that stopping for coffee one morning resulted in you missing (or being involved in) a horrific car crash.
4a) A person who doesn't know that their company is about to go belly up (or be bought, etc) probably wasn't paying too much attention to their company's competitive situation. You should know your present workplace well (you certainly don't know your new one), and if you don't, you should start - whatever your decision. Blinders never help anyone.
I can think of many other hidden biases, but I think you get the idea.