The responses to this article seem to all question the switching speed of LEDs. Even the least expensive LEDs are capable of at least 100kHz operation, with many, many, common LEDs capable of operating at several MHz. Remember, most of the fiber-based transceivers use LEDs, not laser diodes. I've used LED-based 3com equipment over a 2 km 62.5/125 um MM fiber link without trouble. These LEDs (not IR LEDs) were easily able to handle 10 Mbps.
Contrary to popular belief, alcohol breath tests (in the US, anyway) do not detect the presence of alcohol itself, but a metabolized result - excess CO2 in the breath, I think.
I don't think I'm better off if my elected offical wastes money for my sake, although you're probably correct in that the general electorate thinks so.
Wasting money generally drains money from my pocket, so I'd be less likely to vote for someone that spends friviously. My point was that a voter would be much more likely to re-elect someone if their paycheck increased during their term instead of having 4 lane roads that lead nowhere and other pork-barrel projects.
I guess You've not read this article in the current Issue of Scientific American. I block-quote the following for your perusal (emphasis mine):
In the camera-filled U.K., the London borough of Newham claimed its pilot scheme produced a 21 percent drop in crimes "against the person" and unprecedented decreases in criminal property damage, vehicle-related crime, and burglary. In August 2001 the U.K. approved a further £79 million (about $114 million) for 250 new CCTV systems. Simon Davies, a fellow at the London School of Economics and the founder and director of Privacy International, estimates that the country has at least 1.5 million CCTV cameras now in place.
Jason Ditton, professor of law at the University of Sheffield in England and director of the Scottish Center for Criminology in Glasgow, is one of the few academic sources of CCTV information. His research, funded by the government's Scottish Office, shows that the cameras are not cost-effective and that they reduce neither crime nor the fear of crime. His 1999 study of CCTV in Glasgow's city center revealed that although crime fell in the areas covered by the cameras, the drop was insignificant once general crime trends were taken into account. Even worse results were in Sydney, Australia, where a $1-million system accounted for an average of one arrest every 160 daysa quarter of the Glasgow rate, which Ditton thought was poor.
Moreover, it is not clear how much of a role the displacement effectthe shifting of crime from one area to anotherplays. A Sydney city council's report indicates that the cameras probably displaced some crime to areas outside the lens's view. And therein lies a fundamental design conflict. For the cameras to be an effective deterrent, everyone has to know they're there; however, to be effective in spotting criminals they need to be covert.
That would create a class based government system (as if it isn't already). Because then only rich people could afford to serve the government, because the working class would have to work to eat.
I'd like to see every elected offical be paid the average salary of his constituents while in office. This would encourage him to legislate in favor of the personal wealth of his constituents instead of taxing them to death.
More directly, those who choose to act against others die, those who have no choice live. The whole pro-life, pro-death penalty thing is about people making their own choices and then living with the consequences of their choices.
In the liberal mind there are no consequences (society is to blame, he had a difficult childhood, he should be able to do whatever he wants...), and no idea of wrong-vs-right, so anything goes.
Slight correction - the player did not call home to check if you were eligible to play the movie. Each player had NVRAM onboard that stored the serial ID number of each disk played. If you played the same movie within 48 hrs, your player knew this was a replay and didn't record that fact in NVRAM.
Once a month or so, the player called home and reconciled the players idea of what was a first playing vs what was a replay.
For instance, if I was the first person to play a movie, the play time of that specific disk would be recorded in my players NVRAM. If I then lent that disk to a friend, his player would think it was a free play until it called home and found that that particular disk had already been played, so the friend would be charged $2.99. A pretty nifty setup, I think. If you registered more than one player per household, it would also know that replays were allowed between those players.
All DivX players would also play normal DVD's. There were no 'DivX-only' players made. The DivX feature (which I really liked, by the way) was a hardware add-on board to an already manufacturer-designed DVD player, along with the firmware to handle the DivX-specific functions. I have the RCA Proscan model, and it works fine. It was before the day of video CDs, but it works fine on DVDs.
Perhaps the DVD mechanism is broken in your uncle's player.
For example, hoofed animals with longer necks could reach the juiciest leaves on tall trees and therefore tended to eat well, live longer, and have more offspring. Eventually, they evolved into giraffes. Those with shorter necks died out.
Oh! I guess those aren't zebras and horses and springboks I see running around.
Re:Coming from a store owner...
on
The Euro
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· Score: 1
I can't think of a time I bought something with cash to avoid it being on my statement.
You're not married, are you? 8-)
Re:Coming from a store owner...
on
The Euro
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· Score: 1
i was just wondering, why on earth would a business in London accept euros anyway? Do they accept dollars? Or any other foreign currency for that matter? I don't think so. So why accept the euro, which is a foreign currency for Britain?
Most countries accept currency from neighboring ones along their border. Remember that England has Ireland via hydrofoil and all of europe (thanks to the chunnel) just a hop, skip, and a jump away.
When I toured the UK in 1984, the towns on the Scotland/England border accepted either pound. All of the places I've been in the Caribbean accept local currency or the $US (at extremely vendor-beneficial exchange rates!)
It is good business to accept the currency that's in the pockets of your potential customers, especially when you can set the accepted exchange rate.
Re:Coming from a store owner...
on
The Euro
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· Score: 1
I don't think the linking of you to your purchases is necessarily the worst abuse of currency tracking. My fear would be lending someone some money, and having that bill end up with blood on it at a crime scene, or as evidence in a drug bust. Who's they come after? The person who last had that bill 'registered' to them. No thanks.
I never thought about this before - how difficult is it to get a cash machine to handle bills of different physical sizes?
Here in the US it is difficult to find a cash machine that handles anything other than $20 bills. Some will do $20's and $5's. 7-Eleven (a large convenience store chain) used to have a machine that would give exact amounts to the penny (it was intended as a paycheck-cashing machine). I don't know if they still have them or not.
Re:Issues with the euro in day-to-day life
on
The Euro
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· Score: 1
Why don't they mint a -1 cent coin? Then I could hand the clerk two dollars and a -1 cent coin. There's your $1.99!
Don't you think it'd be a bad idea to place a multi-billion dollar satellite in an area of space where the sun "...focuses all electromagnetic radiation passing it to a resolution beyond anything possible with human engineering." ? In order to be useful (i.e. have an electromagnetic image in focus) the 'scope would have to be near the focal point where DC-gamma radiation levels would be unbelievably high.
Also, is a 76 hour one-way light travel time going to cause problems? We have enough angst waiting for stuff from mars.
You mean something like rohypnol? Or one of these?
I have heard anecdotal evidence that they've been using drugs like this for quite a while in emergency rooms to take advantage of the amnesia-inducing effect for those who have suffered a very traumatic experience - nearly burning to death, violent rape, etc.
Killing or threatening to kill is only one aspect of terrorism. Disrupting business in order to cause havoc is another. I agree that they probably don't have a particular axe to grind, but that doesn't excuse the fact that their actions cause massive disruption of personal, corporate, and governmental business.
Making people afraid to visit web sites and afraid to open email is a mild form of undirected terror, I'd say.
This reminds me of an idiot mother who gave their young child a 5 mW laser pointer to play with.
I was in a restaurant, and got a blast of red light in the eye. I noticed a child playing with a bright laser pointer. I wagged my finger at him for shining it in my eyes, and went on eating dinner. Later, I looked over, and much to my horror the mother had left the table and the kid was shining the pointer directly into his little brother's eye, who took it as a test of manhood not to look away. Having more balls than brains, I took it away from him and returned it to his mother (who returned 15 minutes later - she was on the payphone across the street) with a suggestion that she not allow the child to play with such a non-toy. She wasn't happy that I intervened (and threatened to call the cops), but I mentioned that walking away from two sub-4 year olds at a restaurant (knives on the table, dangerous toy, etc) wasn't exactly something that she'd want me to mention to social services.
Oh god, I thought I was the only one who saved and scrimped to buy a stringy floppy! I still remember that sounnd - wee-WAH, wee-WAH, hummm....
What memories - I thought it was the cat's meow, that stringy floppy. It was way faster and more reliable than the silly cassette player, and certainly more cool. Those tapes were unbelieveably skinny; something like a 16th on an inch!
Core wasn't the only kind of magnetic memory. Do you remember bubble memory? It actually had little magnetic bubbles that paraded past a read/write head in a kind of magnetic conga line. It also retained its configuration between power cycles. It was horribly slow, and accessed the bits serially as they glided past the heads.
Here's a great page that shows how they worked.
Wow, you mean kinda like Divx used to do? You bought the disc, and the 48 hr timer started when you watched it. If you wanted to watch it again after the 48 hr period was up, it'd charge you a couple of bucks, and off you go.
Divx got the heck beat out of it here from a lack of understanding of how it worked and the usual FUD from its competitors. I found it extremely useful - it encouraged you to view movies that you might not otherwise choose since the only investment was the $3.00 purchase of the disc. If you liked the movie enough to want to buy a DVD of it, then you're only out $3 for the experiment. It also had the potential to have first-run movies available much sooner, since the possibility of 1337 h4x0r5 getting the digital stream was quite remote.
Oh well, another useful technology shot down by FUD...
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The responses to this article seem to all question the switching speed of LEDs. Even the least expensive LEDs are capable of at least 100kHz operation, with many, many, common LEDs capable of operating at several MHz. Remember, most of the fiber-based transceivers use LEDs, not laser diodes. I've used LED-based 3com equipment over a 2 km 62.5/125 um MM fiber link without trouble. These LEDs (not IR LEDs) were easily able to handle 10 Mbps.
Contrary to popular belief, alcohol breath tests (in the US, anyway) do not detect the presence of alcohol itself, but a metabolized result - excess CO2 in the breath, I think.
Wasting money generally drains money from my pocket, so I'd be less likely to vote for someone that spends friviously. My point was that a voter would be much more likely to re-elect someone if their paycheck increased during their term instead of having 4 lane roads that lead nowhere and other pork-barrel projects.
That would create a class based government system (as if it isn't already). Because then only rich people could afford to serve the government, because the working class would have to work to eat.
I'd like to see every elected offical be paid the average salary of his constituents while in office. This would encourage him to legislate in favor of the personal wealth of his constituents instead of taxing them to death.
More directly, those who choose to act against others die, those who have no choice live. The whole pro-life, pro-death penalty thing is about people making their own choices and then living with the consequences of their choices.
In the liberal mind there are no consequences (society is to blame, he had a difficult childhood, he should be able to do whatever he wants...), and no idea of wrong-vs-right, so anything goes.
Jesus saves sinners and redeems them for valuable cash prizes!
Jesus saves, he shoots, he scores!!!
That would be the FLIR system - Forward Looking InfraRed.
Slight correction - the player did not call home to check if you were eligible to play the movie. Each player had NVRAM onboard that stored the serial ID number of each disk played. If you played the same movie within 48 hrs, your player knew this was a replay and didn't record that fact in NVRAM.
Once a month or so, the player called home and reconciled the players idea of what was a first playing vs what was a replay.
For instance, if I was the first person to play a movie, the play time of that specific disk would be recorded in my players NVRAM. If I then lent that disk to a friend, his player would think it was a free play until it called home and found that that particular disk had already been played, so the friend would be charged $2.99. A pretty nifty setup, I think. If you registered more than one player per household, it would also know that replays were allowed between those players.
All DivX players would also play normal DVD's. There were no 'DivX-only' players made. The DivX feature (which I really liked, by the way) was a hardware add-on board to an already manufacturer-designed DVD player, along with the firmware to handle the DivX-specific functions. I have the RCA Proscan model, and it works fine. It was before the day of video CDs, but it works fine on DVDs.
Perhaps the DVD mechanism is broken in your uncle's player.
For example, hoofed animals with longer necks could reach the juiciest leaves on tall trees and therefore tended to eat well, live longer, and have more offspring. Eventually, they evolved into giraffes. Those with shorter necks died out.
Oh! I guess those aren't zebras and horses and springboks I see running around.
This song au mp3 real (by Scott Brookman) sums up my feelings exactly.
You mean like from here? I had the same idea...
I can't think of a time I bought something with cash to avoid it being on my statement.
You're not married, are you? 8-)
i was just wondering, why on earth would a business in London accept euros anyway? Do they accept dollars? Or any other foreign currency for that matter? I don't think so. So why accept the euro, which is a foreign currency for Britain?
Most countries accept currency from neighboring ones along their border. Remember that England has Ireland via hydrofoil and all of europe (thanks to the chunnel) just a hop, skip, and a jump away.
When I toured the UK in 1984, the towns on the Scotland/England border accepted either pound. All of the places I've been in the Caribbean accept local currency or the $US (at extremely vendor-beneficial exchange rates!)
It is good business to accept the currency that's in the pockets of your potential customers, especially when you can set the accepted exchange rate.
I don't think the linking of you to your purchases is necessarily the worst abuse of currency tracking. My fear would be lending someone some money, and having that bill end up with blood on it at a crime scene, or as evidence in a drug bust. Who's they come after? The person who last had that bill 'registered' to them. No thanks.
I never thought about this before - how difficult is it to get a cash machine to handle bills of different physical sizes?
Here in the US it is difficult to find a cash machine that handles anything other than $20 bills. Some will do $20's and $5's. 7-Eleven (a large convenience store chain) used to have a machine that would give exact amounts to the penny (it was intended as a paycheck-cashing machine). I don't know if they still have them or not.
Why don't they mint a -1 cent coin? Then I could hand the clerk two dollars and a -1 cent coin. There's your $1.99!
Don't you think it'd be a bad idea to place a multi-billion dollar satellite in an area of space where the sun "...focuses all electromagnetic radiation passing it to a resolution beyond anything possible with human engineering." ? In order to be useful (i.e. have an electromagnetic image in focus) the 'scope would have to be near the focal point where DC-gamma radiation levels would be unbelievably high.
Also, is a 76 hour one-way light travel time going to cause problems? We have enough angst waiting for stuff from mars.
You mean something like rohypnol? Or one of these?
I have heard anecdotal evidence that they've been using drugs like this for quite a while in emergency rooms to take advantage of the amnesia-inducing effect for those who have suffered a very traumatic experience - nearly burning to death, violent rape, etc.
Killing or threatening to kill is only one aspect of terrorism. Disrupting business in order to cause havoc is another. I agree that they probably don't have a particular axe to grind, but that doesn't excuse the fact that their actions cause massive disruption of personal, corporate, and governmental business.
Making people afraid to visit web sites and afraid to open email is a mild form of undirected terror, I'd say.
This reminds me of an idiot mother who gave their young child a 5 mW laser pointer to play with.
I was in a restaurant, and got a blast of red light in the eye. I noticed a child playing with a bright laser pointer. I wagged my finger at him for shining it in my eyes, and went on eating dinner. Later, I looked over, and much to my horror the mother had left the table and the kid was shining the pointer directly into his little brother's eye, who took it as a test of manhood not to look away. Having more balls than brains, I took it away from him and returned it to his mother (who returned 15 minutes later - she was on the payphone across the street) with a suggestion that she not allow the child to play with such a non-toy. She wasn't happy that I intervened (and threatened to call the cops), but I mentioned that walking away from two sub-4 year olds at a restaurant (knives on the table, dangerous toy, etc) wasn't exactly something that she'd want me to mention to social services.
Oh god, I thought I was the only one who saved and scrimped to buy a stringy floppy! I still remember that sounnd - wee-WAH, wee-WAH, hummm....
What memories - I thought it was the cat's meow, that stringy floppy. It was way faster and more reliable than the silly cassette player, and certainly more cool. Those tapes were unbelieveably skinny; something like a 16th on an inch!
Thanks for the memory...
Core wasn't the only kind of magnetic memory. Do you remember bubble memory? It actually had little magnetic bubbles that paraded past a read/write head in a kind of magnetic conga line. It also retained its configuration between power cycles. It was horribly slow, and accessed the bits serially as they glided past the heads. Here's a great page that shows how they worked.
Wow, you mean kinda like Divx used to do? You bought the disc, and the 48 hr timer started when you watched it. If you wanted to watch it again after the 48 hr period was up, it'd charge you a couple of bucks, and off you go.
Divx got the heck beat out of it here from a lack of understanding of how it worked and the usual FUD from its competitors. I found it extremely useful - it encouraged you to view movies that you might not otherwise choose since the only investment was the $3.00 purchase of the disc. If you liked the movie enough to want to buy a DVD of it, then you're only out $3 for the experiment. It also had the potential to have first-run movies available much sooner, since the possibility of 1337 h4x0r5 getting the digital stream was quite remote.
Oh well, another useful technology shot down by FUD...