"Sweet. Contracts are up by %15, we cut half
our customer service department, and this new
report shows that people don't like it. But
they keep buying it, so we'll keep shovelling
it!
You forgot the step that makes it ever-so-much
more offensive...
"...people don't like it. So they switch
before their contract runs out, then have
to pay the rest of their contract off and
our early termination fee. Of course, the loss
of a customer doesn't matter, because for every
one going out, we have someone coming in equally
annoyed at our competition".
Once they have your signature on the dotted
line, they have an actual incentive to
piss you off enough to drop them early. Why
would they provide customer service?
I don't really get this. I've got a 40 GB
drive and another 160 GB drive. What use would
it be to add my old 2 GB disk?
Simple... Use it as your swap/pagefile disk.
2GB works well for most modern machines, and by
the time that seems tight, we'll have started
making similar jokes about "mere" 40GB drives.
You might worry that such an old drive runs
so slowly that it would actually reduce
performance, despite taking a load of your
main drive, but I speak from personal experience
on this. My secondary machine (ie, my SO's)
has 192MB of RAM, with a truly ancient 540MB
drive in in purely for the pagefile - Truly
amazing improvement in speed compared to
putting the pagefile on the C drive. On my main
machine, I have a 1.2GB as a dedicated pagefile
drive, and while not quite such a drastic
improvement (I also have enough memory that it
rarely needs to page, beyond Windows' stupid
usage algorithm that flogs the disk twice a
second no matter how much memory you
have/use), it still gave a very noticeable
improvement.
One warning, though, don't put an old HDD on the
same IDE channel as a DVD burner - Even if it
doesn't downgrade the channel to PIO, it will
get enough traffic to greatly increase your
risk of burning coasters. Again, I say this
from experience.:-(
Does anyone really think that PC's will
be made illegal?
Currently? No.
At the moment, this would provide just one more
universally-violated law for our so-called
"leaders" to enforce arbitrarily, to punish
those daring to espouse dissenting viewpoints.
A number (possibly a large number, but not
enough to spook the sheep) of key rabble-rousers
who dare to stand up for their rights would
quietly vanish into the US prison system, as
our "real" leaders, our corporate masters, slowly
and patiently shift public perception to the
point where they can actually outlaw
the PC.
At that time, we'll all have very tightly
locked-down "internet appliance"-like
devices to do email (scanned for "bad"
ideas, of course) and buy things from honest
upstanding internet vendors (and possibly
to stream advertising to us, which of course
we would lack the ability to block). The
general purpose PC will vanish, since
no good, honest, law-abiding Citizen would need
such a subversive device to go about their
daily purchasing and watching of mind-numbing
prepackaged content.
And for the mods, if you consider this "Funny",
as a sort of over-the-top 1984-esque joke,
you've missed the point entirely.
grep is not done within an integrated design
environment.
Many IDEs allow running shell/batch scripts,
and outputting the results to an in-IDE window.
So yes, it could run within such an
environment. In fact, I have personally used
grep in such a manner (though admittedly not
to look for "TODO").
I use Linux for all my "important" machines - Masq'ing
gateway/firewall, file server, even personal code
development.
But for day-to-day use? Win2k (I would not say the same
about any other version) simply works easier. Download
something, install it, and it works. Under Linux, I find
binary packages often have (non-obvious) dependancies I
need to track down. Source packages require configuring,
building, and installing, and often it takes a few tries
to get it to a functional state (and I say that as someone
who has, in a formal employment capacity, produced custom
embedded distros from scratch).
Also, relating to the "download something" point - Most of
the "productivity" type programs, particularly dev tools,
I can get better versions for Linux. For entertainment,
though (and really, if we didn't consider PCs as basically
for entertainment, we'd all still have P2/300's), you just
don't have an even remotely comparable number of
games and such for Linux.
Overall, I would consider Linux "ready for the desktop" in
the workplace. At home, Windows will hold its own for a good
number of years to come.
But the FCC is an overgrown bureaucracy that
does much, much more than that. Better to ditch
the FCC and establish a new, small body to
allocate spectrum than to continue to feed this
enormous beast that by-and-large does more harm
than good.
Thank you! Most insightful comment in this
entire topic, so far.
Fairly allocating spectrum, and going after
those who violate such allocations, serves the
greater good. It means quite a few of the
RF-carried services we depend on (not just TV
and broadcast radio, but also police/emergency
comms, cell phones, shortwave, 802.11, etc)
continue to work well.
Selling blocks of spectrum to the highest
bidder... Well, that I consider a tad less
kosher, but offhand I can't suggest a better
way to do it under a capitalist economic
system.
But content filtering (ie, censorship)?
Absolutely not. The government has no role
playing around with morality. If the "community
standards" the FCC claims to play by really
applied, any so-called "offensive" broadcasters
would cease to exist as a simple matter of
economics. The FCC has very neatly circumvented
both the letter and the intent of the first
amendment (and to a lesser degree, the fourth
through eigth inclusive, thanks to their purely
unilateral process of imposing sanctions
entirely separate from the normal US legal
system). With the FCC acting as a government
agency, I find that entirely
unacceptable - Nothing less than an end-run
around our basic legal rights in the US.
So, I agree with you completely. Trim them
back to only allocation and enforcement
thereof (preferably via the US courts rather
than as an effectively private police force),
and chuck the rest.
I pay for the decreased electric bill with
headaches from the 60hz flicker
Try getting the high frequency CFs... Regular
fluorescents bother me as well, and the HF ones
do not. But anyway...
The builder of the machine decided to use
parts that suited his needs and desires.
Why the hell do you care?
I coundn't care less if he wanted to
use a live yak as the case to this machine
(actually, that sounds like a neat idea, IMO).
But the FP post has the title "Constructing A
Low-Power 2U Wireless Rack-Box", which, to me,
implies a goal of minimizing power consumption.
If he prefers blue lights to an extra three
seconds of battery life, cool, doesn't bother
me. But I figured I might point out that such
a choice does involve a tradeoff, however
small, of coolness-for-battery-time.
I use ThumbsPlus 6.0 by Cerious software, it
makes thumbnails and stores them in an SQL or
Access97 compatible database. You can add keywords
to the files for searching, etc. It also makes web
pages with thumbnails, etc, etc.
Hmm... I use TP5, and agree that as far as
quickly going through tons of pics, including
batch processing, you just can't beat it. Not
exactly The Gimp in its manipulation abilities,
but simply amazing as an all-purpose digital
photo viewer.
For searching, though, how do you do that
in 6? perhaps 5 just doesn't have it, but
that does indeed sound convenient...
As an aside... Do your comments go into the
EXIF data, or only into the DB? If the
latter, I'd worry quite a bit about the DB
getting corrupted (at least with TP5, that
has happened to me probably half a dozen
times; never a problem, since it just takes
a few seconds longer to rescan the thumbnails,
but if I actually stored metadata in the DB,
I would have lost it all).
I store mine in folders by date, in
c:\photos\yyyy\yyyymmdd\DSCNxxxx.jpg,
and it works very well for me.
I did that, until I started wondering what
the hell I had taken a picture of just a few
weeks later.
I now use a location-based directory tree
(country/state/placename/*.jpg), with
the files themselves in the format
"YYYYMMDD-some_sort_of_description.jpg".
I find this works just as well organizationally
(if you need to sort them by date later, you
still can), while conveying quite a lot more
information to someone not residing inside
my skull (or just myself, after I've forgotten
the details).
Of course, I have a few too many descriptions
like "an interesting rock/cloud/tree/graffiti"
to make that mean much anymore, but at least
"aunt mildred getting sloshed at cousin phil's
wedding" still conveys some meaning.:-)
Right, because the extra 200mw those
LEDs use is really going to destroy the
environment.
Nope. But if one has the goal of the most
energy-efficient system possible, using less
than optimal parts for no reason other than
"coolness" seems particularly unwise.
For a comparison (and to demonstrate my point,
since two responders called me just plain wrong),
a typical red LED has a peak current draw of
30ma, with the minimum continuous activity
draw of only 2-3ma. A typical blue LED peaks
at 50ma (not that much higher), but has a
minimum of 20ma. 10x higher.
Now, compare that to home lighting. A typical
incandescent bulb uses 80W. A typical compact
fluorescent of similar brigtness draws 14W...
only a sixth, rather than a tenth compared
with the LEDs, and that one change can lower
your electric bill by a third.
So yes, my hair dryer uses 20x what my old
incandescent light bulbs did, but that doesn't
mean I upgraded to 100W bulbs just for the
hell of it.
Like, for example, the "principle" involved
in creating a respectable 'zine about
a given topic out of love for that topic,
then selling out to the highest bidder?
I get your point, but the situation just
doesn't fit it. When dave sold out, he lost
the right to say anything about the principles
of those to whom he sold. If he wanted to
maintain creative control, he shouldn't have
sold in the first place. What, did he think
someone would actually pay him just to keep
offering a free product? Anyone that truly
benevolent would have simply offered free
hosting, rather than a buyout.
Now, I won't argue that he may regret his
decision. But failure to read the fine print,
or making any assumptions about the
buyer's intent, doesn't magically give him the
right to complain.
IIRC, SciAm did a writeup of various anti-aging
drugs a few months ago, including that one. I
may have the magazine wrong (Pharmacy Today?
JACS? Science? Nature? I don't have the
relevant issue at hand), but I remember the
mention of CMX-1152 as a seeming "miracle" drug,
except for the problem of its toxicity at doses
entirely too near those having therapeutic
value.
Of course, as with all such studies, the data
comes from mice rather than humans, so humans
may tolerate it better (then again, it also
might just not work as well (or at all) in
humans <G>). So take that with a grain
of salt.
CMX-1152 a.k.a. ROHLEN seems to be a credible
way of relieving oxidative stress.
...With one major problem: Extreme variability
in effective dosages among individuals, and a
TI < 2 (meaning, less than twice the amount
that will convey maximum benefit will begin to
cause damage; almost all (non-cancer) drugs in
common use have TI's greater than four, with
most over ten).
As a starting point for something better
tolerated, however, I agree it looks very
promising.
A quick trip to rottentomatoes.com will
give you an idea of just how far your head
is up your ass.
On its own merits, as a movie, I'd call it
"decent". Slow, but watchable.
It doesn't exist in isolation as a movie, however.
It attempted to adapt one of (if not the)
greatest fantasy novels of all time. In that
regard, I consider it a failure.
Reading your vociferous complaints about
completely minor issues in LOTR
Tolkien bordered on the obsessive in his plot
consistency. He left almost nothing dangling
when it no longer had relevance, and left absolutely
nothing dangling at the beginning of its scope.
The movie did not manage the same (as I mentioned,
the Hobbit weapons provide a nice example of
that). Those "minor issues", or rather, that
Tolkien did deal with the minutiae rather
than try to gloss them over, makes the difference
between "generic fantasy story" and "masterpiece"
I consider it even worse that Jackson tried including
material that Tolkien did not (such as the massively
increased female presence - Hey, I like eye candy as
much as the next guy, but it just has very very little
place in LotR). If he can't even manage to follow
the books, what made him think he could add to
it?
If you want to take an abusive stance simply because
I consider it a poor rendition of the books, hey,
not a problem. Just stating my opinion. I would
mention, though, as equally invalid evidence to your
links, that I've found people who read LotR before
seeing the movies had a lot more problems
with it than those reading the books once the
movies gave them a popularity boost.
Personally, I just thank God that this
decade has had the LOTR trilogy to call
its own. It was what we were hoping the
new Star Wars movies would be.
So I guess I do count as the only
person who really disliked LotR (the movie,
I loved the books, many moons ago)?
Gollum, while well-done as far as his looks
and voice went, really annoyed me.
No better than Jar-Jar, IMO.
And let's not forget some of the "minor"
oversights, such as Strider just
happening to have an assortment of
Hobbit-sized weapons on him, allowing
Jackson to skip quite a few minutes of
final footage (hey, if you've already
committed to 3+ hours, don't wimp out
at another 15 minutes here and there,
go the whole way). Or the presence of
females - other than Galadriel and Eowyn,
both serving a very specific (and fairly
short) purpose, Tolkien only gave the
rest a passing reference (Arwen, for
example, should have barely even counted
as more than an abstraction to give
Aragorn some motivation). Or making
Gimly into comic relief... Sure, dwarves
in human society usually get used
for humor, but Tolkien's dwarves most
certainly would not (think "short Klingon",
rather than "midget" for the right idea).
No, I consider LotR just as bad as the SW
prequels. I'll agree with those who have
said they look forward more to the next
Harry Potter movie than to SW:Ep3.
Cellphones are not a monopoly, yet are
still regulated.
Actually, in many areas (such as my own), a
single cell carrier does have a
monopoly (ignoring the amazingly
expensive satellite phones). I have a
choice of US Cellular or nothing.
> Two, making sure everyone can have
a phone.
How is Vonage exempt from this?
Because not everyone even has a computer
yet.
Additionally, although you may well
consider this unfair, the requirement that
POTS carriers provide access to everyone
satisfies the need for some form of phone
service for emergency communication. Thus,
"other" communication services, such as
AIM, Vonage, and even cellular carriers,
do not need to guarantee service everywhere.
> And three, dealing with the property
rights involved in laying physical lines.
Maybe, but most companies deal with that
privately.
I take it you've never had the local phone
company tell you (not "ask" you) that they
plan to build a line across your lawn? Let
me assure you, they may try to do it privately,
but it counts as a very much one-sided
negotiation. Thus the need to regulate them
in that area, to prevent such abuses (which
still occur despite regulation) as
plunking down a cell tower in your front
yard, or making a residential neighborhood
look like the inside of a 1960's computer.
Why should a company not have to follow the
same rules everyone else has to follow?
Because the purpose those rules serve does not
apply to VOIP. It has nothing to do with
"fairness" or "why not", rather, with "why".
Why would rules geared toward situations that
have no relevance to VOIP get applied anyway?
Vonage won't knock on my front door with a
declaration of eminant domain to steal the
five feet of my yard fronting the road. Verizon
can and does.
Vonage doesn't sarcastically tell me to switch
to another local provider (which does not exist
in many places) when I call with a complaint.
Verizon can and does.
Just because they transmit their phone calls
over the internet instead of private fiberoptic
lines? I fail to see your point.
If you only use that as your distinction, in isolation,
I agree that it seems insufficient to ward off the
threat of regulation. That does not, however,
count as the only distinction, nor does it even
count as the most important. The others I mentioned
have far more relevance to the issue of
regulation.
the state has every right (and obligation)
to deal with it like any other telephone
service.
Why?
The massive web of regulation on POTS carriers
exists for three reasons - One, dealing with them
having a monopoly in many areas. Two, making
sure everyone can have a phone. And
three, dealing with the property rights involved
in laying physical lines.
In the case of VOIP, none of those apply.
Almost no barrier-to-entry exists (TW just
stepped up to the plate, for example), and
even if it did, you don't need to pick only
a "local" company, one anywhere in the world
can provide the service. It doesn't matter
if everyone can have VOIP, because everyone
can already have a phone. And VOIP uses
virtual connections, making the use
of land-lines irrelevant, WAP, satellite,
or even carrier pigeon would work just
as well (might get a bit of a delay on
that last one, though).
So yes, at the "pick up handset, dial, and
speak" level, VOIP looks like a traditional
telephone. But if you look at the reason
for all the regulation involved, VOIP looks
more like a small purple rabbit than like
a telephone.
Apparently a judge somewhere has been
shown enough information to think that a
search of the site is warranted...
"A judge somewhere"... Exactly the problem,
here. Thanks to the lack of clear jurisdictions
containing a given website, the FBI can pretty
much take their pick of every judge in the
country to find one willing to issue a warrant
on this. Consider me not exactly inspired
with confidence on the justification for the
issue of this warrant.
Gotta trust the system
No, we don't. Hear that sound? The founding
fathers just broke mach-1 turning over in thier
graves at your suggestion. A significant portion
of the US constitution describes how to properly
replace it when, not if, we need to
overthrow an overly oppressive government. We
cannot, and should not, trust the system. The system
exists to extract real labor from you in exchange for
purely token compensation. Nothing more, nothing
less.
If you still trust the system, I hope you've
enjoyed coming out of your coma. But I have
to tell you, things have changed. The "system"
allows you your freedom only because you haven't
become a visible enough target yet, not
because you haven't committed any crimes (and
trust me, we've all committed crimes,
breaking laws we don't even know exist, ones
that include mutually exclusive (and thus
impossible to comply with) terms. The "system"
leaves us alone until it needs us to vanish,
then it simply has to pick a crime with which
to charge us.
Or am I the only one who has terms and
conditions which say that I am responsible for
everything that passes over my connection?
No, most of us have similar terms with our ISP.
However, so far in this discussion, people seem
to have completely failed to realize that we deal
with two distinct layers of accountability.
The AUP only apply to the ISP's dealing with us,
it doesn't extend beyond the continuation of
them providing a service in exchange for us
paying a set fee.
So, at the ISP level, your AUP applies. If you
do this and something happens, expect to get
TOSsed immediately. No questions or appeals,
just find a new ISP.
At the legal level, though, in order to
get whacked with a criminal conviction, some
lawyer would need to demostrate either that you
commited the primary crime (impossible with no
logging unless you stupidly re-associated
yourself with one of your own accounts outside
your WLAN), or that your deliberately set up
your WAP to permit such crimes. Considering
the general security of an out-of-the-box
WAP, I consider both of those unlikely.
Now, we could also consider the civil
law level, but that gets a lot more sticky, since
you lose if you most likely satisfy one
of the above two conditions. But, on the bright
side, civil law does not equal criminal
law - You might have to pay a few bucks, but
you don't have to live with Bubba for 15
years.
I use Mozilla with a User-Agent toolbar,
specifically to deal with sites that only do
a dumb string check for User-Agent.
Could you post a link, please (Or enough
info to search for it on Google)?
I've wanted exactly such an option for quite a
while, and although I've tried a couple, none
worked well (awkward, or just had no effect). I
think sometime around Mozilla 1.4, they broke
a lot of the older interface stuff (from the
backward compatibility POV, I don't really
consider it "broken"), so older themes and
other cool add-ons (such as a UA toolbar)
no longer work.
In all liklyhood, this is exactly what
happened. Freenet could very well go and
get another PayPal account and move on. But
this is Slashdot, and so of course it has
to be something shaky on PayPal's part in
an attempt to kill off Freenet.
If I want to donate (less than a certain
amount - $300, IIRC?) to a presidential
candidate anonymously, I can do so.
If I want to drop a few grand into Santa's
bucket around Christmas, I don't need to
provide three forms of ID.
But if I want to donate $20 to Freenet,
I can't do so anonymously?
Sorry, unacceptible. For large transfers, yes,
certain tax laws apply. For small amounts,
PayPal has no right to arbitrarily decide
to freeze accounts without a damned good
reason. Sure, they don't count as a bank, but
they still count as a company holding my
(or whomever's) money. If I overpay on
my phone bill, MCI can't just "freeze" my
account with a positive balance and tell
me to go pound sand. Same with any other
company. Same with PayPal - If they have
posession of someone's money, they can't
just randomly decide to keep it for
themselves.
Try it yourself if you refuse to believe
me. I made the method very clear.
Fair enough. It sounds like you do indeed
know what you talk about, so I'll give Lavc
a try. Perhaps I'll switch as well.:-)
Some MPEG4 features use up a lot of CPU time
for very little advantage.
QPel and B-Frames come to mind as examples of
that. However, they do indeed boost the
quality somewhat. Not a lot, but if you
can afford to wait... That said:
Time is not important if you do a very
small volume of mpeg4 encoding. I do not.
I have a TV-tuner card, and I can keep my
CPU busy almost constantly even with
MPlayer/Lavc.
There we have the key difference. You encode
a lot of material, I do not. As I said
originally, if encode time really matters most
to you, not a problem. It seems that encode
time does matter quite a lot for you (and
for a lot of people... I too would rather use
MPEG-4 for PVR, if it didn't flog the CPU
so hard).
I think, though, that your situation doesn't
justify criticizing XviD (or fans thereof)
for taking so long to encode - It simply serves
a different purpose, both equally valid. Currently,
if you want the highest possible quality in
the smallest file, XviD gives that (or RV9,
judging by Doom9's comparison, but IMO I found
their RV9 caps a tad muddy looking). Different
goals, different codecs.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
"Sweet. Contracts are up by %15, we cut half our customer service department, and this new report shows that people don't like it. But they keep buying it, so we'll keep shovelling it!
You forgot the step that makes it ever-so-much more offensive...
"...people don't like it. So they switch before their contract runs out, then have to pay the rest of their contract off and our early termination fee. Of course, the loss of a customer doesn't matter, because for every one going out, we have someone coming in equally annoyed at our competition".
Once they have your signature on the dotted line, they have an actual incentive to piss you off enough to drop them early. Why would they provide customer service?
I don't really get this. I've got a 40 GB drive and another 160 GB drive. What use would it be to add my old 2 GB disk?
:-(
Simple... Use it as your swap/pagefile disk. 2GB works well for most modern machines, and by the time that seems tight, we'll have started making similar jokes about "mere" 40GB drives.
You might worry that such an old drive runs so slowly that it would actually reduce performance, despite taking a load of your main drive, but I speak from personal experience on this. My secondary machine (ie, my SO's) has 192MB of RAM, with a truly ancient 540MB drive in in purely for the pagefile - Truly amazing improvement in speed compared to putting the pagefile on the C drive. On my main machine, I have a 1.2GB as a dedicated pagefile drive, and while not quite such a drastic improvement (I also have enough memory that it rarely needs to page, beyond Windows' stupid usage algorithm that flogs the disk twice a second no matter how much memory you have/use), it still gave a very noticeable improvement.
One warning, though, don't put an old HDD on the same IDE channel as a DVD burner - Even if it doesn't downgrade the channel to PIO, it will get enough traffic to greatly increase your risk of burning coasters. Again, I say this from experience.
Does anyone really think that PC's will be made illegal?
Currently? No.
At the moment, this would provide just one more universally-violated law for our so-called "leaders" to enforce arbitrarily, to punish those daring to espouse dissenting viewpoints. A number (possibly a large number, but not enough to spook the sheep) of key rabble-rousers who dare to stand up for their rights would quietly vanish into the US prison system, as our "real" leaders, our corporate masters, slowly and patiently shift public perception to the point where they can actually outlaw the PC.
At that time, we'll all have very tightly locked-down "internet appliance"-like devices to do email (scanned for "bad" ideas, of course) and buy things from honest upstanding internet vendors (and possibly to stream advertising to us, which of course we would lack the ability to block). The general purpose PC will vanish, since no good, honest, law-abiding Citizen would need such a subversive device to go about their daily purchasing and watching of mind-numbing prepackaged content.
And for the mods, if you consider this "Funny", as a sort of over-the-top 1984-esque joke, you've missed the point entirely.
grep is not done within an integrated design environment.
Many IDEs allow running shell/batch scripts, and outputting the results to an in-IDE window. So yes, it could run within such an environment. In fact, I have personally used grep in such a manner (though admittedly not to look for "TODO").
Wrong. Read the patent.
Ah... Okay:
"while true; do grep TODO *.c; done".
Still one line, though.
But remember, if we outlaw grep, only criminals will have grep.
Ease of use and availability of software.
I use Linux for all my "important" machines - Masq'ing gateway/firewall, file server, even personal code development.
But for day-to-day use? Win2k (I would not say the same about any other version) simply works easier. Download something, install it, and it works. Under Linux, I find binary packages often have (non-obvious) dependancies I need to track down. Source packages require configuring, building, and installing, and often it takes a few tries to get it to a functional state (and I say that as someone who has, in a formal employment capacity, produced custom embedded distros from scratch).
Also, relating to the "download something" point - Most of the "productivity" type programs, particularly dev tools, I can get better versions for Linux. For entertainment, though (and really, if we didn't consider PCs as basically for entertainment, we'd all still have P2/300's), you just don't have an even remotely comparable number of games and such for Linux.
Overall, I would consider Linux "ready for the desktop" in the workplace. At home, Windows will hold its own for a good number of years to come.
But the FCC is an overgrown bureaucracy that does much, much more than that. Better to ditch the FCC and establish a new, small body to allocate spectrum than to continue to feed this enormous beast that by-and-large does more harm than good.
Thank you! Most insightful comment in this entire topic, so far.
Fairly allocating spectrum, and going after those who violate such allocations, serves the greater good. It means quite a few of the RF-carried services we depend on (not just TV and broadcast radio, but also police/emergency comms, cell phones, shortwave, 802.11, etc) continue to work well.
Selling blocks of spectrum to the highest bidder... Well, that I consider a tad less kosher, but offhand I can't suggest a better way to do it under a capitalist economic system.
But content filtering (ie, censorship)? Absolutely not. The government has no role playing around with morality. If the "community standards" the FCC claims to play by really applied, any so-called "offensive" broadcasters would cease to exist as a simple matter of economics. The FCC has very neatly circumvented both the letter and the intent of the first amendment (and to a lesser degree, the fourth through eigth inclusive, thanks to their purely unilateral process of imposing sanctions entirely separate from the normal US legal system). With the FCC acting as a government agency, I find that entirely unacceptable - Nothing less than an end-run around our basic legal rights in the US.
So, I agree with you completely. Trim them back to only allocation and enforcement thereof (preferably via the US courts rather than as an effectively private police force), and chuck the rest.
I pay for the decreased electric bill with headaches from the 60hz flicker
Try getting the high frequency CFs... Regular fluorescents bother me as well, and the HF ones do not. But anyway...
The builder of the machine decided to use parts that suited his needs and desires. Why the hell do you care?
I coundn't care less if he wanted to use a live yak as the case to this machine (actually, that sounds like a neat idea, IMO). But the FP post has the title "Constructing A Low-Power 2U Wireless Rack-Box", which, to me, implies a goal of minimizing power consumption. If he prefers blue lights to an extra three seconds of battery life, cool, doesn't bother me. But I figured I might point out that such a choice does involve a tradeoff, however small, of coolness-for-battery-time.
I use ThumbsPlus 6.0 by Cerious software, it makes thumbnails and stores them in an SQL or Access97 compatible database. You can add keywords to the files for searching, etc. It also makes web pages with thumbnails, etc, etc.
Hmm... I use TP5, and agree that as far as quickly going through tons of pics, including batch processing, you just can't beat it. Not exactly The Gimp in its manipulation abilities, but simply amazing as an all-purpose digital photo viewer.
For searching, though, how do you do that in 6? perhaps 5 just doesn't have it, but that does indeed sound convenient...
As an aside... Do your comments go into the EXIF data, or only into the DB? If the latter, I'd worry quite a bit about the DB getting corrupted (at least with TP5, that has happened to me probably half a dozen times; never a problem, since it just takes a few seconds longer to rescan the thumbnails, but if I actually stored metadata in the DB, I would have lost it all).
I store mine in folders by date, in c:\photos\yyyy\yyyymmdd\DSCNxxxx.jpg, and it works very well for me.
:-)
I did that, until I started wondering what the hell I had taken a picture of just a few weeks later.
I now use a location-based directory tree (country/state/placename/*.jpg), with the files themselves in the format "YYYYMMDD-some_sort_of_description.jpg".
I find this works just as well organizationally (if you need to sort them by date later, you still can), while conveying quite a lot more information to someone not residing inside my skull (or just myself, after I've forgotten the details).
Of course, I have a few too many descriptions like "an interesting rock/cloud/tree/graffiti" to make that mean much anymore, but at least "aunt mildred getting sloshed at cousin phil's wedding" still conveys some meaning.
Right, because the extra 200mw those LEDs use is really going to destroy the environment.
Nope. But if one has the goal of the most energy-efficient system possible, using less than optimal parts for no reason other than "coolness" seems particularly unwise.
For a comparison (and to demonstrate my point, since two responders called me just plain wrong), a typical red LED has a peak current draw of 30ma, with the minimum continuous activity draw of only 2-3ma. A typical blue LED peaks at 50ma (not that much higher), but has a minimum of 20ma. 10x higher.
Now, compare that to home lighting. A typical incandescent bulb uses 80W. A typical compact fluorescent of similar brigtness draws 14W... only a sixth, rather than a tenth compared with the LEDs, and that one change can lower your electric bill by a third.
So yes, my hair dryer uses 20x what my old incandescent light bulbs did, but that doesn't mean I upgraded to 100W bulbs just for the hell of it.
...and most importantly lots of blue LEDs
You may have meant that as a joke, but blue LEDs suck quite a lot more power than red or green ones.
When you care about power consumption, rather than coolness, come back and ask again.
The whole Linux movement is about principle.
Like, for example, the "principle" involved in creating a respectable 'zine about a given topic out of love for that topic, then selling out to the highest bidder?
I get your point, but the situation just doesn't fit it. When dave sold out, he lost the right to say anything about the principles of those to whom he sold. If he wanted to maintain creative control, he shouldn't have sold in the first place. What, did he think someone would actually pay him just to keep offering a free product? Anyone that truly benevolent would have simply offered free hosting, rather than a buyout.
Now, I won't argue that he may regret his decision. But failure to read the fine print, or making any assumptions about the buyer's intent, doesn't magically give him the right to complain.
How did you learn that?
IIRC, SciAm did a writeup of various anti-aging drugs a few months ago, including that one. I may have the magazine wrong (Pharmacy Today? JACS? Science? Nature? I don't have the relevant issue at hand), but I remember the mention of CMX-1152 as a seeming "miracle" drug, except for the problem of its toxicity at doses entirely too near those having therapeutic value.
Of course, as with all such studies, the data comes from mice rather than humans, so humans may tolerate it better (then again, it also might just not work as well (or at all) in humans <G>). So take that with a grain of salt.
CMX-1152 a.k.a. ROHLEN seems to be a credible way of relieving oxidative stress.
...With one major problem: Extreme variability
in effective dosages among individuals, and a
TI < 2 (meaning, less than twice the amount
that will convey maximum benefit will begin to
cause damage; almost all (non-cancer) drugs in
common use have TI's greater than four, with
most over ten).
As a starting point for something better tolerated, however, I agree it looks very promising.
A quick trip to rottentomatoes.com will give you an idea of just how far your head is up your ass.
On its own merits, as a movie, I'd call it "decent". Slow, but watchable.
It doesn't exist in isolation as a movie, however. It attempted to adapt one of (if not the) greatest fantasy novels of all time. In that regard, I consider it a failure.
Reading your vociferous complaints about completely minor issues in LOTR
Tolkien bordered on the obsessive in his plot consistency. He left almost nothing dangling when it no longer had relevance, and left absolutely nothing dangling at the beginning of its scope. The movie did not manage the same (as I mentioned, the Hobbit weapons provide a nice example of that). Those "minor issues", or rather, that Tolkien did deal with the minutiae rather than try to gloss them over, makes the difference between "generic fantasy story" and "masterpiece"
I consider it even worse that Jackson tried including material that Tolkien did not (such as the massively increased female presence - Hey, I like eye candy as much as the next guy, but it just has very very little place in LotR). If he can't even manage to follow the books, what made him think he could add to it?
If you want to take an abusive stance simply because I consider it a poor rendition of the books, hey, not a problem. Just stating my opinion. I would mention, though, as equally invalid evidence to your links, that I've found people who read LotR before seeing the movies had a lot more problems with it than those reading the books once the movies gave them a popularity boost.
Personally, I just thank God that this decade has had the LOTR trilogy to call its own. It was what we were hoping the new Star Wars movies would be.
So I guess I do count as the only person who really disliked LotR (the movie, I loved the books, many moons ago)?
Gollum, while well-done as far as his looks and voice went, really annoyed me. No better than Jar-Jar, IMO.
And let's not forget some of the "minor" oversights, such as Strider just happening to have an assortment of Hobbit-sized weapons on him, allowing Jackson to skip quite a few minutes of final footage (hey, if you've already committed to 3+ hours, don't wimp out at another 15 minutes here and there, go the whole way). Or the presence of females - other than Galadriel and Eowyn, both serving a very specific (and fairly short) purpose, Tolkien only gave the rest a passing reference (Arwen, for example, should have barely even counted as more than an abstraction to give Aragorn some motivation). Or making Gimly into comic relief... Sure, dwarves in human society usually get used for humor, but Tolkien's dwarves most certainly would not (think "short Klingon", rather than "midget" for the right idea).
No, I consider LotR just as bad as the SW prequels. I'll agree with those who have said they look forward more to the next Harry Potter movie than to SW:Ep3.
Cellphones are not a monopoly, yet are still regulated.
Actually, in many areas (such as my own), a single cell carrier does have a monopoly (ignoring the amazingly expensive satellite phones). I have a choice of US Cellular or nothing.
> Two, making sure everyone can have a phone.
How is Vonage exempt from this?
Because not everyone even has a computer yet.
Additionally, although you may well consider this unfair, the requirement that POTS carriers provide access to everyone satisfies the need for some form of phone service for emergency communication. Thus, "other" communication services, such as AIM, Vonage, and even cellular carriers, do not need to guarantee service everywhere.
> And three, dealing with the property rights involved in laying physical lines.
Maybe, but most companies deal with that privately.
I take it you've never had the local phone company tell you (not "ask" you) that they plan to build a line across your lawn? Let me assure you, they may try to do it privately, but it counts as a very much one-sided negotiation. Thus the need to regulate them in that area, to prevent such abuses (which still occur despite regulation) as plunking down a cell tower in your front yard, or making a residential neighborhood look like the inside of a 1960's computer.
Why should a company not have to follow the same rules everyone else has to follow?
Because the purpose those rules serve does not apply to VOIP. It has nothing to do with "fairness" or "why not", rather, with "why". Why would rules geared toward situations that have no relevance to VOIP get applied anyway?
Vonage won't knock on my front door with a declaration of eminant domain to steal the five feet of my yard fronting the road. Verizon can and does.
Vonage doesn't sarcastically tell me to switch to another local provider (which does not exist in many places) when I call with a complaint. Verizon can and does.
Just because they transmit their phone calls over the internet instead of private fiberoptic lines? I fail to see your point.
If you only use that as your distinction, in isolation, I agree that it seems insufficient to ward off the threat of regulation. That does not, however, count as the only distinction, nor does it even count as the most important. The others I mentioned have far more relevance to the issue of regulation.
the state has every right (and obligation) to deal with it like any other telephone service.
Why?
The massive web of regulation on POTS carriers exists for three reasons - One, dealing with them having a monopoly in many areas. Two, making sure everyone can have a phone. And three, dealing with the property rights involved in laying physical lines.
In the case of VOIP, none of those apply. Almost no barrier-to-entry exists (TW just stepped up to the plate, for example), and even if it did, you don't need to pick only a "local" company, one anywhere in the world can provide the service. It doesn't matter if everyone can have VOIP, because everyone can already have a phone. And VOIP uses virtual connections, making the use of land-lines irrelevant, WAP, satellite, or even carrier pigeon would work just as well (might get a bit of a delay on that last one, though).
So yes, at the "pick up handset, dial, and speak" level, VOIP looks like a traditional telephone. But if you look at the reason for all the regulation involved, VOIP looks more like a small purple rabbit than like a telephone.
Apparently a judge somewhere has been shown enough information to think that a search of the site is warranted...
"A judge somewhere"... Exactly the problem, here. Thanks to the lack of clear jurisdictions containing a given website, the FBI can pretty much take their pick of every judge in the country to find one willing to issue a warrant on this. Consider me not exactly inspired with confidence on the justification for the issue of this warrant.
Gotta trust the system
No, we don't. Hear that sound? The founding fathers just broke mach-1 turning over in thier graves at your suggestion. A significant portion of the US constitution describes how to properly replace it when, not if, we need to overthrow an overly oppressive government. We cannot, and should not, trust the system. The system exists to extract real labor from you in exchange for purely token compensation. Nothing more, nothing less.
If you still trust the system, I hope you've enjoyed coming out of your coma. But I have to tell you, things have changed. The "system" allows you your freedom only because you haven't become a visible enough target yet, not because you haven't committed any crimes (and trust me, we've all committed crimes, breaking laws we don't even know exist, ones that include mutually exclusive (and thus impossible to comply with) terms. The "system" leaves us alone until it needs us to vanish, then it simply has to pick a crime with which to charge us.
Or am I the only one who has terms and conditions which say that I am responsible for everything that passes over my connection?
No, most of us have similar terms with our ISP.
However, so far in this discussion, people seem to have completely failed to realize that we deal with two distinct layers of accountability. The AUP only apply to the ISP's dealing with us, it doesn't extend beyond the continuation of them providing a service in exchange for us paying a set fee.
So, at the ISP level, your AUP applies. If you do this and something happens, expect to get TOSsed immediately. No questions or appeals, just find a new ISP.
At the legal level, though, in order to get whacked with a criminal conviction, some lawyer would need to demostrate either that you commited the primary crime (impossible with no logging unless you stupidly re-associated yourself with one of your own accounts outside your WLAN), or that your deliberately set up your WAP to permit such crimes. Considering the general security of an out-of-the-box WAP, I consider both of those unlikely.
Now, we could also consider the civil law level, but that gets a lot more sticky, since you lose if you most likely satisfy one of the above two conditions. But, on the bright side, civil law does not equal criminal law - You might have to pay a few bucks, but you don't have to live with Bubba for 15 years.
PS - IANAL.
I use Mozilla with a User-Agent toolbar, specifically to deal with sites that only do a dumb string check for User-Agent.
Could you post a link, please (Or enough info to search for it on Google)?
I've wanted exactly such an option for quite a while, and although I've tried a couple, none worked well (awkward, or just had no effect). I think sometime around Mozilla 1.4, they broke a lot of the older interface stuff (from the backward compatibility POV, I don't really consider it "broken"), so older themes and other cool add-ons (such as a UA toolbar) no longer work.
Yeah but do they run... oh... wait... nevermind.
;-)
You forgot "Just imagine a Beowulf cluster of these"...
(Actually, for the price/performance ratio, I'd rather have a cluster of Athlon XP 2600's. But that would require thinking outside-the-joke).
In all liklyhood, this is exactly what happened. Freenet could very well go and get another PayPal account and move on. But this is Slashdot, and so of course it has to be something shaky on PayPal's part in an attempt to kill off Freenet.
If I want to donate (less than a certain amount - $300, IIRC?) to a presidential candidate anonymously, I can do so.
If I want to drop a few grand into Santa's bucket around Christmas, I don't need to provide three forms of ID.
But if I want to donate $20 to Freenet, I can't do so anonymously?
Sorry, unacceptible. For large transfers, yes, certain tax laws apply. For small amounts, PayPal has no right to arbitrarily decide to freeze accounts without a damned good reason. Sure, they don't count as a bank, but they still count as a company holding my (or whomever's) money. If I overpay on my phone bill, MCI can't just "freeze" my account with a positive balance and tell me to go pound sand. Same with any other company. Same with PayPal - If they have posession of someone's money, they can't just randomly decide to keep it for themselves.
Try it yourself if you refuse to believe me. I made the method very clear.
:-)
:-)
Fair enough. It sounds like you do indeed know what you talk about, so I'll give Lavc a try. Perhaps I'll switch as well.
Some MPEG4 features use up a lot of CPU time for very little advantage.
QPel and B-Frames come to mind as examples of that. However, they do indeed boost the quality somewhat. Not a lot, but if you can afford to wait... That said:
Time is not important if you do a very small volume of mpeg4 encoding. I do not. I have a TV-tuner card, and I can keep my CPU busy almost constantly even with MPlayer/Lavc.
There we have the key difference. You encode a lot of material, I do not. As I said originally, if encode time really matters most to you, not a problem. It seems that encode time does matter quite a lot for you (and for a lot of people... I too would rather use MPEG-4 for PVR, if it didn't flog the CPU so hard).
I think, though, that your situation doesn't justify criticizing XviD (or fans thereof) for taking so long to encode - It simply serves a different purpose, both equally valid. Currently, if you want the highest possible quality in the smallest file, XviD gives that (or RV9, judging by Doom9's comparison, but IMO I found their RV9 caps a tad muddy looking). Different goals, different codecs.