Just think of bikes as skinny little cars, and everything will make more sense.
An excellent idea - how can we get the blasted bike riders to get that through their skulls? I've seen so many bike riders in their little spandex suits zipping along the country roads around my house ignoring every stop sign so they don't ruin their workout. They're in their own little world (or 'zone', probably), and consider themselves above the law and not a 'narrow car'.
I'm sorry you had a bad experience with DivX - it was very misunderstood by almost everyone, including tech experts and CC salespeople. In fact, when it was unveiled at CEBIT, the supposedly tech-savvy reporters claimed that it streamed the movie over the 2400 baud modem!
You're correct that they lacked the special features of 'real' DVDs. Certainly I think the intent to have additional content was there, but it never gained enough momentum to justify the added time it would've taken to add the special features. It was probably more important to get lots of popular titles out at all first.
As for the video quality, what the person you talked to may have meant was that the video quality was the same (no loss due to encryption).
I'm not sure what information you were worried about being sent back to DivX - I think it only sent the ID number of your player and the serial numbers of the movies you'd watched since its last call home. The box itself knew which movies had been played on it, so it could handle the 48 hr viewing period autonomously.
I truly enjoyed my DivX player for what it was. I could pick up 5 or 6 movies I'd thought I'd like to see, stick them on the shelf, and watch them when I got around to it, perhaps months later. We had a DivX sharing webpage at work where we could borrow co-workers discs. It worked out well!
I know it might border on heresy, but why not have the ISP actively manage the mailing lists? Here's an example:
Suppose I publish Gland Nut Weekly, and I use fatboys.net as my ISP. I register myself with the ISP, giving them the name of my mailing list, and the names/email addresses of the allowed publishers. When I have an issue ready to publish, I send it to fatboys.net, who then sends it to the current subscribers on the list.
Other ISPs can 'trust' that the email sent by fatboys.net isn't spam, since fatboys handles the mailing list, fatboys.net can be sure they're not a source of spam (and look like one of the good guys) since they're handling the mailing list, and the publisher benefits from having the ISP send the actual mail at high speed and without having to employ tricks to get around outbound spam filters. Whaddya think?
What about using solar power? As the article stated, these things should be placed in desert regions, which typically have very high insolation levels. They're also very lacking in water, which is a by-product of this process. I can imagine one of these in the middle of a desert running autonomously creating a mini-oasis to support a small village.
...I don't see much need for the prioritizing anyways.
This issue came up after the Sept 11th WTC and Pentagon attacks. They issued phones to police/fire/rescue that had some sort of priority over normal cell phones. They also claimed that is wouldn't cause normal peoples' phones to drop calls or get fast busy signals (How's that???)
As for allowing the user to choose the priority of their outbound call, how about having a $1.00/call surcharge for each high priority call made? That'd keep people from leaving the phone of 'high'.
And yeah, it seems pretty obvious to me too. But some people are married to the top-down, centralized approach I guess...
Sometimes the reason for top-down, centralized management is regulatory - in the US, the FCC probably requires each cell sites' frequencies to be declared on a license. It'd be kinda hard to allow dynamic configuration when the regulatory body requires fixed freqs/cell. Just my $0.02.
Here's a link to a great 2MB PDF on the subject. At 125kHz, it's really simple to recover the data. Note that antennas at that frequency are pretty large, and could, say, be wrapped around the trim of a doorway, or around the opening in the floor for a staircase, etc... you'd never know who was reading your key. Match a doorway reader with a digital camera, and poof! You've got an automatic ID database generator!
since he probably would've refused to turn off all electronic devices during takeoff and landing. I know the article says he agreed to turn his junk off and back on after they'd already started messing with him, but I bet he'd have refused once on the plane. (The article mentioned he agreed to do it reluctantly even though it might cause data loss and brain damage - yeah, right!)
I don't want some retard geek-boy fiddling around with my safety on the plane - they should have offered to check him as luggage.
or did most if not all of the pronunciations of words in the Sci-Fi channel's version change? It was as if they decided to move the syllabic emphasis around for fun. Perhaps it was because the producer/director was a non-native English speaker and we were used to the original version. Just a thought...
Chani (chAHnee) -> chAInee feydakin (faidAHkeen) -> fuh DYKE en
I always thought witholding was a clever way to hide just how much we pay in taxes. I'm sure very few people look at their gross pay - they just want to know what their 'take home' is. It's the same way with gasoline - don't tell anyone how much each gallon is taxed, and they won't complain.
If I remember my high school physics, centripedal acceleration was a = v^2/r. If we assume the 58 feet mentioned in the article is the radius of the thing, we get 364.4 ft for the diameter. They mention 15 rev/min, which is 0.25 rev/s, making the velocity of the people compartment 91.1 ft/s. Doing the math, (91.1^2/58) gives you 4.47 G, right?
2500 calories per MRE? I have a "Chunky Beef Stew and Components" in front of me, and it has 593 calories. Perhaps you mean that eating a day's worth of these things will provide 2500 cals?
They're really not that bad - I take them on hunting trips and such.
He went on to explain that everybody knows how sensitive human eyes are...
Except my opthamologist - the brightest light I've ever seen was at his office. First he dilated my pupils, then he shined a bazillion watt light into my eyes. Jeez! I saw blue blobs for a week after that!
Since neutrinos interact only weakly with ordinary matter and carry no electrical charge, how in the world do you aim them? All we've got is ordinary matter and electric/magnetic fields, all of which neutrinos ignore.
Are they planning to do some sort of temporal correlation to tell the difference between a solar and 'man-made' neutrino at the detector? As I recall, the sun produces mostly one type of neutrino. Does the accelerator at Fermilab produce another sort?
Gee, that's funny. I've noticed the opposite trend. Back in high school in the early 80's (cough!), the theatres here in Richmond, VA were huge. 'Ridge Cinema' had four or five enormous screens, with sense-surround or whatever it was called. (Remember Battlestar Galactica used it...).
Now, the Virginia Center Commons theatre is like a 20-plex, but with much smaller screens. Here's my theory: Say a real blockbuster comes out. You can show it on 5 of your 20 screens and still meet demand. You can even stagger the start times to limit the wait for the customer. As interest dwindles, you can reduce the number of screens in use (freeing them up for other flix), while still offering the movie in essentially full viewing rooms.
In the case of the old, large-screen model, as interest waned you'd be wasting all that space to continue to offer the movie, and would be unable to show anything else. I think it makes a heckuva lotta sense, actually.
As I recall, the LED itself was doing the transmitting. Here's a quote from the 3Com installation manual (emphasis mine):
Optical Safety
Under most normal viewing
conditions there is no eye hazard from
the Tx LED. It is recommended
however, that the LED is not viewed
through any magnifying device, whilst
powered on.
I recall that the pattern on light emitted was not narrowly focused as I would've expected from a laser, and that the laser versions of the card in question were much more expensive and could operate 20+ km.
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Just think of bikes as skinny little cars, and everything will make more sense.
An excellent idea - how can we get the blasted bike riders to get that through their skulls? I've seen so many bike riders in their little spandex suits zipping along the country roads around my house ignoring every stop sign so they don't ruin their workout. They're in their own little world (or 'zone', probably), and consider themselves above the law and not a 'narrow car'.
In my hometown, and older woman was killed when hit by a mountain bike. In fact, this has happened multiple times.
You mean she was killed multiple times? How'd that happen?
Are you sure that wasn't Corinthian Leather? 8-)
You're correct that they lacked the special features of 'real' DVDs. Certainly I think the intent to have additional content was there, but it never gained enough momentum to justify the added time it would've taken to add the special features. It was probably more important to get lots of popular titles out at all first.
As for the video quality, what the person you talked to may have meant was that the video quality was the same (no loss due to encryption).
I'm not sure what information you were worried about being sent back to DivX - I think it only sent the ID number of your player and the serial numbers of the movies you'd watched since its last call home. The box itself knew which movies had been played on it, so it could handle the 48 hr viewing period autonomously.
I truly enjoyed my DivX player for what it was. I could pick up 5 or 6 movies I'd thought I'd like to see, stick them on the shelf, and watch them when I got around to it, perhaps months later. We had a DivX sharing webpage at work where we could borrow co-workers discs. It worked out well!
How did Circuit City's salespeople lie to you about DivX?
fast food stock shares they shorted just before announcing this??? 8-)
I know it might border on heresy, but why not have the ISP actively manage the mailing lists? Here's an example:
Suppose I publish Gland Nut Weekly, and I use fatboys.net as my ISP. I register myself with the ISP, giving them the name of my mailing list, and the names/email addresses of the allowed publishers. When I have an issue ready to publish, I send it to fatboys.net, who then sends it to the current subscribers on the list.
Other ISPs can 'trust' that the email sent by fatboys.net isn't spam, since fatboys handles the mailing list, fatboys.net can be sure they're not a source of spam (and look like one of the good guys) since they're handling the mailing list, and the publisher benefits from having the ISP send the actual mail at high speed and without having to employ tricks to get around outbound spam filters. Whaddya think?
This issue came up after the Sept 11th WTC and Pentagon attacks. They issued phones to police/fire/rescue that had some sort of priority over normal cell phones. They also claimed that is wouldn't cause normal peoples' phones to drop calls or get fast busy signals (How's that???)
As for allowing the user to choose the priority of their outbound call, how about having a $1.00/call surcharge for each high priority call made? That'd keep people from leaving the phone of 'high'.
And yeah, it seems pretty obvious to me too. But some people are married to the top-down, centralized approach I guess...
Sometimes the reason for top-down, centralized management is regulatory - in the US, the FCC probably requires each cell sites' frequencies to be declared on a license. It'd be kinda hard to allow dynamic configuration when the regulatory body requires fixed freqs/cell. Just my $0.02.
what would [you]... make it do?
Here's a link to a great 2MB PDF on the subject. At 125kHz, it's really simple to recover the data. Note that antennas at that frequency are pretty large, and could, say, be wrapped around the trim of a doorway, or around the opening in the floor for a staircase, etc... you'd never know who was reading your key. Match a doorway reader with a digital camera, and poof! You've got an automatic ID database generator!
Looks more like the thing "Rollergirl" used on Fat B*stard...
since he probably would've refused to turn off all electronic devices during takeoff and landing. I know the article says he agreed to turn his junk off and back on after they'd already started messing with him, but I bet he'd have refused once on the plane. (The article mentioned he agreed to do it reluctantly even though it might cause data loss and brain damage - yeah, right!)
I don't want some retard geek-boy fiddling around with my safety on the plane - they should have offered to check him as luggage.
or did most if not all of the pronunciations of words in the Sci-Fi channel's version change? It was as if they decided to move the syllabic emphasis around for fun. Perhaps it was because the producer/director was a non-native English speaker and we were used to the original version. Just a thought...
Chani (chAHnee) -> chAInee
feydakin (faidAHkeen) -> fuh DYKE en
I always thought witholding was a clever way to hide just how much we pay in taxes. I'm sure very few people look at their gross pay - they just want to know what their 'take home' is. It's the same way with gasoline - don't tell anyone how much each gallon is taxed, and they won't complain.
13 feet? That barely registers on my giganto-meter. 13 meters, maybe. 13 feet, nah!
If I remember my high school physics, centripedal acceleration was a = v^2/r. If we assume the 58 feet mentioned in the article is the radius of the thing, we get 364.4 ft for the diameter. They mention 15 rev/min, which is 0.25 rev/s, making the velocity of the people compartment 91.1 ft/s. Doing the math, (91.1^2/58) gives you 4.47 G, right?
They're really not that bad - I take them on hunting trips and such.
He went on to explain that everybody knows how sensitive human eyes are...
Except my opthamologist - the brightest light I've ever seen was at his office. First he dilated my pupils, then he shined a bazillion watt light into my eyes. Jeez! I saw blue blobs for a week after that!
I did a some web searching and haven't found what exactly is implanted into Steve Mann's body.
Certainly not a rationally-functioning brain or an ounce of common sense...
Since neutrinos interact only weakly with ordinary matter and carry no electrical charge, how in the world do you aim them? All we've got is ordinary matter and electric/magnetic fields, all of which neutrinos ignore.
Are they planning to do some sort of temporal correlation to tell the difference between a solar and 'man-made' neutrino at the detector? As I recall, the sun produces mostly one type of neutrino. Does the accelerator at Fermilab produce another sort?
How about "SunTan" ©? Har Har, get it - Sun (as in stars)...Tan (as in Beige)...
Gee, that's funny. I've noticed the opposite trend. Back in high school in the early 80's (cough!), the theatres here in Richmond, VA were huge. 'Ridge Cinema' had four or five enormous screens, with sense-surround or whatever it was called. (Remember Battlestar Galactica used it...).
Now, the Virginia Center Commons theatre is like a 20-plex, but with much smaller screens. Here's my theory: Say a real blockbuster comes out. You can show it on 5 of your 20 screens and still meet demand. You can even stagger the start times to limit the wait for the customer. As interest dwindles, you can reduce the number of screens in use (freeing them up for other flix), while still offering the movie in essentially full viewing rooms.
In the case of the old, large-screen model, as interest waned you'd be wasting all that space to continue to offer the movie, and would be unable to show anything else. I think it makes a heckuva lotta sense, actually.
As I recall, the LED itself was doing the transmitting. Here's a quote from the 3Com installation manual (emphasis mine):I recall that the pattern on light emitted was not narrowly focused as I would've expected from a laser, and that the laser versions of the card in question were much more expensive and could operate 20+ km.