I heard it will be a joint announcement between Apple and Google about a Google OS that has a Google Browser that runs exclusively on the new PowerBook G5s. THIS WILL BE AWESOME!!!
Not only that. But the new OS will ship with a free copy of Duke Nukem Forever. NOW THAT'S AWESOME.
in that lost and far-away decade of the Jerry Pournelle described in an article in Galaxy that was later reprinted in A Step Farther Out some space suit research that David Clark did in the late 1960s. This was for suits that would provide pressure via a skin tight fit. Unfortunately NASA stopped doing this research and stuck with the suits we have today, which are large, cumbersome, heavy and extremely expensive. Pournelle described how these suits would work in a couple of his novels including Birth of Fire and Exiles to Glory, it's nice to see that NASA is now getting their shit together and restarting this research.
The emergence of MP3 players has been built on the availability of terrabytes of stolen material being circulated. Is it in Sony's best interest to implicitly support this movement through the introduction of MP3 devices that will undoubtably be used to play, and encourag further dissemination of, pirated Sony content? I don't think it's an easy question to answer, and I can understand Sony's hesitancy.
What utter shit. Do you work for the RIAA or is there some other reason you've bought into their party line? I started ripping MP3s in 1998 back in the days of WinAmp. I used my own CDs and did it because I found it convenient to be able to carry several hours of music on my laptop without having to drag around a bunch of CDs. Fast-forward to 2005. My 62 year old father and my step mother are into MP3s, they both have iPods, Dad has two SliMP3s and rips everything onto his hard disk as soon as he buys it. He doesn't have illicitly copied music ("Piracy" is such a bullshit term for this, I suppose we should consider ourselves lucky that the RIAA didn't try to use "genocide" to describe violating copyright) and refuses to get any. Ditto for me. I don't copy stuff off of the net because it's usually copied at crap bitrates and because I have better things to do with my bandwidth. I'd be willing to bet that there are quite a few MP3 users out there who behave in a fashion similar to me and my father.
Are there a lot of people out there who download stuff of the net? Yes. Are there guys who have terabytes of crap that they've downloaded that they don't listen to? Yes. But there are also a lot of people who like MP3 because it gives them greater control over and mobility with their music collections. Of course it's not in the interested of the RIAA to admit to or even hint at this rather basic fact. Rather they want to blow the "piracy" issue up as much as possible. The goal of the RIAA is to require you to pay for a license every single time you want to listen to a piece of music. The RIAA wants to replace the concept of owning a piece of music on a CD with the concept of "licensing" that the software industry enjoys. Want to listen to that song in your car? Better buy an RIAA mobile license? Want to listen to the same song in your house? Do you have an RIAA home license? Want to listen to the same song while you're at the gym? Do you have an RIAA mobile player license?
The RIAA, and the companies, including Sony, that back it, live by shitting on their customers, and their stupidity has bitten them in the ass because most people, when given a choice, refuse to pay money to have someone shit on them. Look at the astounding non-success of DVD-Audio and SACD. Both of these are technically superior formats to the audio CD, providing better bandwidth, dynamic range and multi-channel capacity. Sony has even gone so far as to build SACD playback capability into all of their DVD players. Except no one is buying SACDs or DVD-Audio. Why? Well one reason is the copy protection. You can't copy DVD-Audio disks or SACDs onto your PC and in a bit of stupidity that is absolutely astounding if you want to play them back through a DVD-Audio or SACD player in a multi-channel environment you have to run six separate analog audio connections, one for each channel, from the player to the receiver. Was this technically necessary? No, it could have gone over a digital connection such as TOSlink or SPDIF, but some brainiac at Sony, the designers of SACD, and in the DVD-Audio working group said "Wait, if we have a digital bitstream people might "pirate" it. We should require everyone to use a bunch of analog cables so that it will be difficult if not impossible to "pirate" our signal. Of course requiring analog hookups also meant that the bass management circuitry in most home theatre receivers, which worked in the digital domain, didn't work with SACD and DVD-Audio players, meaning that you had to either buy an external bass management box, buy five full size speakers and forget about using a sub/satellite combination or
It was inevitable. Sure, we've discovered galaxies,stars, planets, etc with it, but beyond that, is there a practical use for this information? Did we ever find life out there? No. Just more rocks, gas, and nothingness.
Don't get me wrong. I think space exploration is fascinating, but there are enough problems on this planet that money spent finding literal nothingness could be used to help solve. (e.g. tsunami relief, world hunger, etc)
Honestly, I'm glad the white house made this decision. Unfortunately, I'm worried where the money's going to go and be used for because it's hard not to wonder in an age with a government so ignorant such as the US's. Just my 2c.
OK, I know I'm responding to a troll. I know this is stupid but my.02c is this: "Fuck the poor". Fuck 'em. I'm tired of hearing about how we can't do space exploration until every fucking poor person on the planet is fed. Want to help poor people? Sterilize them so they can't breed more poor children and perpetuate their problems. "Can't feed 'em? Don't breed 'em!" should be our new motto. Admittedly this is not PC, but fuck that too. Oh, and for all of the people who are so fucking concerned about the poor, why don't you stop surfing/., turn off your PCs, get off of your fucking asses and actually go help the poor? Work in a soup kitchen or something, sell your kidneys and donate the money you receive to tsunami relief. Think of all the problems on this planet that you could solve if you weren't selfishly sitting on your fat ass and surfing/..
it will be a huge advance. Right now if you get 3rd degree burns over 40 percent of your body you're basically dead as their isn't enough skin on the rest of your body to graft to the parts of your body that are burned. So since your skin is your primary barrier against infection you generally get an infection and die.
Another problem with skin grafts is that they motherfucking hurt! Jesus H. God do they motherfucking hurt! I spent eight weeks in a hospital in 2003 and ended up with about 200 square inches of donor site and goddamnit it hurt! I ended up having my left leg amputated below the knee because it had been crushed and my tibia and fibula were broken in three places and even after that I'd have to say that the skin grafts were the most painful thing that happened to me. Any surgical procedure where the doctor describes it as "We take this device called a dermatome, which looks like a rotary cheese grater, and run it back and forth over the donor site to harvest a thin layer of skin" is not going to be any fun to go through and afterwards the donor sites are red and raw like a serious case of road rash.
If they could print up enough skin, quickly enough it would be a huge, huge, huge advance. I wish them the best of luck.
iMac, who they start the story with, is a complete fucktard and that his bit of expensive stupidity has nothing to do with region coding? Here's someone who buys a piece of equipment from a foreign vendor and based solely on the fact that other pieces of equipment from this vendor have worked for him assumes that this one will too. Apparently this guy was too fucking stupid to look at the spec sheet for the iMac, which will state what electrical frequency the unit is designed to work with, what voltage it is designed to work with and how many amps it will draw and then compare that to his local electrical system to see if the frequency and voltage is the same. I hope that Apple technical support told him to go pound sand in his ass when he called them.
fucked up. But before Cory gets all pissy about this he should talk to the officials in his own country. The last two times I went into Canada from Washington State, which has been in the last six months, I had to tell the Canadian border agents where I lived, what I did for a living, where I was staying in Canada, why I was going to Canada and how long I was going to stay in Canada. I'm still trying to figure out how where I lived and what I do for a living is in any way, shape or form relevant to any legitimate security concerns the Canadian government might have.
Because without these rich people you would have no job from which to take home a paycheck?
Let's see, Yeah, without Bill Gates and the shitty overpriced OS he pushes I wouldn't be able to make a living as a Linux systems administrator. And without Paul Allen I wouldn't have to pay higher sales taxes to pay for his football stadium and exhibition center. I guess that I should erect a temple to both of them for being so wonderful and beneficent.
And what would we do without such wonderful rich people as Paris Hilton and Nicole Ritchie? Think of all of the wonderful productive advances they've made and all of the little people they've employed. Then there are the Bushes and the Kennedys. Without them where would we all be?
Do you jack-off while listening to Ayn Rand books on tape? It sure sounds as if you do. I've got news for you Rand was crazy as a shithouse rat and Horatio Alger wrote fiction and there are a hell of a lot of rich people out there who got that way only because they had rich parents and have worked really hard to make sure that the system is stacked in their favor. Don't believe me? Check out the Bush or Kennedy families.
Social Security could be put on a sounder financial basis by eliminating the portion of the tax paid by corporations, increasing the amount of income subject to FICA witholding and applying FICA witholding to all income including short and long term capital gains, interest income, etc. Right now SS acts as a brake on employment, it's a "payroll" tax, and the percentage paid by corporations works to discourage them from employing people and it also really screws over the self-employed.
The idea that SS taxes shouldn't be applied to capital gains and other forms of income is basically a huge giveaway to the rich. Now I know that some/.'er is going to talk about how we are in an ownership society and lots of people who aren't rich own stock and blah, blah, fucking blah, but if you look at the numbers you'll see that the people who make most of the money from capital gains and the like are pretty damned wealthy. I see no reason why they should enjoy a separate tax system designed to shield their gains while those of us who take home a paycheck as our primary source of income have an entirely separate tax system.
Pu-244 exists in nature and has a half life of 80 million years. If you're talking about Pu-239 thru -242, you should specify those particular isotopes.
Yes, and the planet Earth is about 4.5 billion years old, which works out to 56 half-lifes of Pu-244, which means that if there was a quantity X of Pu-244 on Earth 4.5 billion years ago there is now X/2^56 of it. Or to look at it another way in order for there to be one ton of Pu-244 distributed through the crust of the Earth nowadays there would have had to have been 72,057,594,037,927,936 tons of it back then.
Saying that Pu-244 exists in nature is pedantically correct, yet totally stupid. Yes it exists in nature, no it does not exist in nature in any quantities you can detect without a mass-spectrometer or outside the heart of a supernova.
but thank God for the Republican congress and George W. Bush. This stupid piece of shit legislative idea that Corzine and Lautenberg, two of the most corrupt pieces of shit in the US Senate, intend to introduce is going to be DOA, with good riddance. Taking a fairly reliable piece of equipment such as a double action revolver or single action automatic pistol and larding it up with a bunch of electronics to keep dumbshits from getting killed is positively stupid. The only reason that this legislation is being pushed is to make it more of a pain in the ass to own firearms, it has nothing to do with any purported concern for the safety of gun-owners that Corzine and Lautenberg might claim to have.
Since the anti-gun-fascists get shot down every time they try to introduce an out and out ban they do what the anti-abortion-fascists do, they try to ban the practice they disagree with by making the people who want to own guns (or who want to have an abortion) jump through a bunch of hoops before they can do so.
Cops don't have to worry about this. The New Jersey law specifically exempts them from this requirement. The reason for this exemption is that the various police associations looked at this and realized what a completely fucking stupid idea it was and wanted to have nothing to do with it.
Oh, man, you don't know how many times I see that on resumes today. Everyone who has a blog and wrote some little rinky dink peice of software under their little fake business puts that on their resume. Fact is, they are just another out of work programmer trying to fill the 3 year gap.
The one I love to see on resumes is "HTML programmer". "HTML programmer"? WTF is that? What did you do before that? WordPerfect and WordStar programming? When I have an embarassing gap in my resume I usually lie and say that I was a transvestite cabaret dancer. It might not be true but it does get HRs attention.
They need to kill off the floppy disk, RS-232 and IEEE 1284 parallel ports. The only thing I've had to use a floppy for in the last six years is loading device drivers for third party storage controllers during the installation of various versions of Windoze (because Windoze is too fucking braindead, even if you have a CD-ROM on the system, to load device drivers from anything other than a floppy). Other than that floppies are a dead technology. Ditto for the parallel and RS-232 serial ports. If you really need RS-232 buy a USB to RS-232 converter or PCI card, otherwise get that crap off of the motherboard.
would be a means of grafting titanium or another metal into bone and having it protrude from the body without the possibility of infection. Lower limb prosthetics are suspended with either straps, friction sleeves, various vacuum locking systems or some combination. I've used both friction sleeves and a vacuum system (left leg, below-knee amputation) and while these work pretty well there are issues with proprioception of the prosthetic limb. Implanting a post that the prosthetic could be attached to would increase proprioception, thus making it easier to manipulate the artificial limb. It would also reduce if not eliminate the problems that amps have with skin breakdown in their sockets and the need to add or remove padding from your socket during the day as your residual limb (stump) shrinks or expands.
I have heard of some work that was done with this for upper body prostheses, but it was not load bearing, so there's still a lot of work to do.
Of course you also need to educate insurance companies about the value of a good prostheses. I find it amazing that there are insurance programs out there that will provide full coverate for all sorts of horrible life threatening diseases, even if there is little chance of recovery, but will not cover prosthetics and orthotics.
Now that you want to put several drives together, you are inclined to look at redundancy and fault-tolerance. This is what RAID is for.
That's why I figured on putting in the Adaptec SATA RAID controller. If I lose a drive every six months (dubious, but I'll buy into your assumption) I don't lose all of my data. If I have everything on one big honkin' drive, and lose it every four years I do lose all of my data. Having to restore all of this from another media sux, I'dmuch prefer to install another disk and rebuild a RAID volume.
Personally I RAID pretty much everything now. It's cheap and I'd rather spend the extra 150 bux or so to buy an extra drive than spend a bunch of time trying to restore a system. The only system in my house that I don't have either software or hardware RAID on is my desktop WinXP box that I use for playing games and the Mac that I have hooked up to my stereo. Everything else gets RAID 1 for the main disk and to further my paranoia about data loss I have a couple of firewire drives that I keep inside of a Pelican case that I store in a fireproof safe.
Video files are generally at least two orders of magnitude larger than audio files, so while it has been feasible for the last few years to build an MP3 server to store all of your music (and now it's even feasible for most geeks to build one to store their music in a compressed, lossless format) the same hasn't been true for DVDs.
But last night I was looking at the price for Hitachi's 400Gb IDE drive ($368 on at newegg.com) and figured that I could throw a pretty decent video server together for about five kilobux. I was thinking of getting a big case and power supply, eight of these drives and an Adaptec eight port SATA raid controller. Set up a Linux system, set up the drives and RAID controller as RAID-5 and you could get about 2,500Gb of storage, which works out to about 265 DVD images (assuming that each image was a from a dual layer disc and 9.4 Gb in size. Use SMB over gigabit ethernet to mount these images to your clients and then play whatever you like. Eight 500 Gb drives would give you about 3,200Gb of storage which works out to 340 images (making the same assumptions about the size of each DVD). I'm sure there are better ways of doing this, this is just what I came up with off of the top of my head.
Note that this assumes that you're not doing any processing on the DVDs. With a tool such as DVD-Shrink you could increase the amount of images you were able to store by stripping out alternate soundtracks, extra features and even the menus. And with DiVX re-encoding you might be able to (I don't know much about DiVX so comments would be appreciated) reprocess the video streams so that they used less space but were not visibly reduced in quality. If I had a spare 5 kilobux to blow right now I'd build one of these as a mighty heigh-ho and fuck you to Bill Gates, Jack Valenti and all of the other assholes in Hollywood and have the pleasure of having a whole-house video solution.
Sorry, but i don't agree. Digital is a lower quality representation packaged in a more convenient format.. Nothing more. Nothing less.
And I CAN tell the difference.
Christ, more luddite horseshit from another "audiophile". Can analog recordings be better than digital ones? Certainly they can, in the early years of the CD revolution a lot of CDs were remastered with the RIAA equalization curves that were used to master LPs, which meant that you superimposed an unsuitable equalization curve over a media that had essentially flat reproduction, which made it sound like crap. As engineers got more used to digital music this became less and less of a problem (although it's been replaced with the "let's master this fucker as loud as we can" problem). But as far as the supposed superiority of analog to digital give me a break.
Let's look at some of the fun artifacts you get with analog media such as LPs (I assume that you're referring to LPs because most of the "audiophiles" out there turn their noses up at commercially mastered
cassette tapes). With LP playback you get to deal with cracks and pops caused by static on the record, wow and flutter from your turntable, cracks and pops caused by dust on the record. Now, if you keep your records clean and maintain your stylus and go through all of the happy horseshit that owning a turntable requires you can minimize this. But then you also have to deal with the fact that unless you're buying quality pressings, such as those from the Nautilus SuperDisc line of recordings or the Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab Original Master Recording series or their later Anadisq 200 series, the stock used to press most vinyl recordings was utter crap, which limited the ultimate quality of any vinyl pressing right out of the box. Then of course there's the fact that every single time you play that record you degrade its quality. Strangely enough though most "audiophiles" who disdain digital aren't consistent with their LP collections, if they were, and if their ears were as good as they claim, they'd have to toss an album out after say a dozen playings since its quality would have degraded.
As far as being able to tell the difference, a claim which so many "audiophiles" have made I'm sure you can. The vinyl recording is going to have less dynamic range, it has to because if it has too much dynamic range the stylus will pop out of the groove. What most audiophiles completely ignore is the fact that the pure music they claim to love so much has had the living Jesus processed out of it before it even hits the master. The frequency response is going to be different because of the preemphasis and deemphasis that the RIAA equalization, which was designed to deal with the mechanical limitations of the turntable, will not produce completely flat playback.
I would love to see an ABX comparison where "audiophiles" who claim to be able to tell the difference between digital and analog and prefer the latter, were put into a listening room. They would listen to a recording of either a compact disc played through an equalizer to degrade the sound quality, change the frequency response and reduce the dynamic range or a standard LP. I'd be willing to bet that without too much tweaking on the CD side of things you could make the CD sound like an LP recording to the golden ears of all of the supposed "audiophiles" out there. Perhaps someone should make a box that plugs in between a digital source such as a CD player and the pre-amp that does exactly this and then charge "audiophiles" out the wazoo for it. Sure, some people might claim that taking their money with a scam like this is wrong, but "audiophiles" are such suckers and easy marks that it's almost wrong not to take their money away from them.
No kidding, there was recently a case at Virginia Mason Medical Center in Seattle where a woman who was admitted for a routine procedure was killed when she was injected with the chlorhexidine solution used to prep the skin prior to catheterization instead of the contrast dye. So much for human oversight.
I wonder how much it would cost to build a couple of rovers or static landers and orbiters that would have a guaranteed life of ten years or so and how much it would cost to monitor them. It would be cool to have monitoring capabilities on each planet of the solar system, sort of a cosmic early warning system.
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Not only that. But the new OS will ship with a free copy of Duke Nukem Forever. NOW THAT'S AWESOME.
What utter shit. Do you work for the RIAA or is there some other reason you've bought into their party line? I started ripping MP3s in 1998 back in the days of WinAmp. I used my own CDs and did it because I found it convenient to be able to carry several hours of music on my laptop without having to drag around a bunch of CDs. Fast-forward to 2005. My 62 year old father and my step mother are into MP3s, they both have iPods, Dad has two SliMP3s and rips everything onto his hard disk as soon as he buys it. He doesn't have illicitly copied music ("Piracy" is such a bullshit term for this, I suppose we should consider ourselves lucky that the RIAA didn't try to use "genocide" to describe violating copyright) and refuses to get any. Ditto for me. I don't copy stuff off of the net because it's usually copied at crap bitrates and because I have better things to do with my bandwidth. I'd be willing to bet that there are quite a few MP3 users out there who behave in a fashion similar to me and my father.
Are there a lot of people out there who download stuff of the net? Yes. Are there guys who have terabytes of crap that they've downloaded that they don't listen to? Yes. But there are also a lot of people who like MP3 because it gives them greater control over and mobility with their music collections. Of course it's not in the interested of the RIAA to admit to or even hint at this rather basic fact. Rather they want to blow the "piracy" issue up as much as possible. The goal of the RIAA is to require you to pay for a license every single time you want to listen to a piece of music. The RIAA wants to replace the concept of owning a piece of music on a CD with the concept of "licensing" that the software industry enjoys. Want to listen to that song in your car? Better buy an RIAA mobile license? Want to listen to the same song in your house? Do you have an RIAA home license? Want to listen to the same song while you're at the gym? Do you have an RIAA mobile player license?
The RIAA, and the companies, including Sony, that back it, live by shitting on their customers, and their stupidity has bitten them in the ass because most people, when given a choice, refuse to pay money to have someone shit on them. Look at the astounding non-success of DVD-Audio and SACD. Both of these are technically superior formats to the audio CD, providing better bandwidth, dynamic range and multi-channel capacity. Sony has even gone so far as to build SACD playback capability into all of their DVD players. Except no one is buying SACDs or DVD-Audio. Why? Well one reason is the copy protection. You can't copy DVD-Audio disks or SACDs onto your PC and in a bit of stupidity that is absolutely astounding if you want to play them back through a DVD-Audio or SACD player in a multi-channel environment you have to run six separate analog audio connections, one for each channel, from the player to the receiver. Was this technically necessary? No, it could have gone over a digital connection such as TOSlink or SPDIF, but some brainiac at Sony, the designers of SACD, and in the DVD-Audio working group said "Wait, if we have a digital bitstream people might "pirate" it. We should require everyone to use a bunch of analog cables so that it will be difficult if not impossible to "pirate" our signal. Of course requiring analog hookups also meant that the bass management circuitry in most home theatre receivers, which worked in the digital domain, didn't work with SACD and DVD-Audio players, meaning that you had to either buy an external bass management box, buy five full size speakers and forget about using a sub/satellite combination or
Don't get me wrong. I think space exploration is fascinating, but there are enough problems on this planet that money spent finding literal nothingness could be used to help solve. (e.g. tsunami relief, world hunger, etc)
Honestly, I'm glad the white house made this decision. Unfortunately, I'm worried where the money's going to go and be used for because it's hard not to wonder in an age with a government so ignorant such as the US's. Just my 2c.
OK, I know I'm responding to a troll. I know this is stupid but my .02c is this: "Fuck the poor". Fuck 'em. I'm tired of hearing about how we can't do space exploration until every fucking poor person on the planet is fed. Want to help poor people? Sterilize them so they can't breed more poor children and perpetuate their problems. "Can't feed 'em? Don't breed 'em!" should be our new motto. Admittedly this is not PC, but fuck that too. Oh, and for all of the people who are so fucking concerned about the poor, why don't you stop surfing /., turn off your PCs, get off of your fucking asses and actually go help the poor? Work in a soup kitchen or something, sell your kidneys and donate the money you receive to tsunami relief. Think of all the problems on this planet that you could solve if you weren't selfishly sitting on your fat ass and surfing /..
Another problem with skin grafts is that they motherfucking hurt! Jesus H. God do they motherfucking hurt! I spent eight weeks in a hospital in 2003 and ended up with about 200 square inches of donor site and goddamnit it hurt! I ended up having my left leg amputated below the knee because it had been crushed and my tibia and fibula were broken in three places and even after that I'd have to say that the skin grafts were the most painful thing that happened to me. Any surgical procedure where the doctor describes it as "We take this device called a dermatome, which looks like a rotary cheese grater, and run it back and forth over the donor site to harvest a thin layer of skin" is not going to be any fun to go through and afterwards the donor sites are red and raw like a serious case of road rash.
If they could print up enough skin, quickly enough it would be a huge, huge, huge advance. I wish them the best of luck.
Let's see, Yeah, without Bill Gates and the shitty overpriced OS he pushes I wouldn't be able to make a living as a Linux systems administrator. And without Paul Allen I wouldn't have to pay higher sales taxes to pay for his football stadium and exhibition center. I guess that I should erect a temple to both of them for being so wonderful and beneficent.
And what would we do without such wonderful rich people as Paris Hilton and Nicole Ritchie? Think of all of the wonderful productive advances they've made and all of the little people they've employed. Then there are the Bushes and the Kennedys. Without them where would we all be?
Do you jack-off while listening to Ayn Rand books on tape? It sure sounds as if you do. I've got news for you Rand was crazy as a shithouse rat and Horatio Alger wrote fiction and there are a hell of a lot of rich people out there who got that way only because they had rich parents and have worked really hard to make sure that the system is stacked in their favor. Don't believe me? Check out the Bush or Kennedy families.
The idea that SS taxes shouldn't be applied to capital gains and other forms of income is basically a huge giveaway to the rich. Now I know that some /.'er is going to talk about how we are in an ownership society and lots of people who aren't rich own stock and blah, blah, fucking blah, but if you look at the numbers you'll see that the people who make most of the money from capital gains and the like are pretty damned wealthy. I see no reason why they should enjoy a separate tax system designed to shield their gains while those of us who take home a paycheck as our primary source of income have an entirely separate tax system.
Yes, and the planet Earth is about 4.5 billion years old, which works out to 56 half-lifes of Pu-244, which means that if there was a quantity X of Pu-244 on Earth 4.5 billion years ago there is now X/2^56 of it. Or to look at it another way in order for there to be one ton of Pu-244 distributed through the crust of the Earth nowadays there would have had to have been 72,057,594,037,927,936 tons of it back then.
Saying that Pu-244 exists in nature is pedantically correct, yet totally stupid. Yes it exists in nature, no it does not exist in nature in any quantities you can detect without a mass-spectrometer or outside the heart of a supernova.
Since the anti-gun-fascists get shot down every time they try to introduce an out and out ban they do what the anti-abortion-fascists do, they try to ban the practice they disagree with by making the people who want to own guns (or who want to have an abortion) jump through a bunch of hoops before they can do so.
The one I love to see on resumes is "HTML programmer". "HTML programmer"? WTF is that? What did you do before that? WordPerfect and WordStar programming? When I have an embarassing gap in my resume I usually lie and say that I was a transvestite cabaret dancer. It might not be true but it does get HRs attention.
I have heard of some work that was done with this for upper body prostheses, but it was not load bearing, so there's still a lot of work to do.
Of course you also need to educate insurance companies about the value of a good prostheses. I find it amazing that there are insurance programs out there that will provide full coverate for all sorts of horrible life threatening diseases, even if there is little chance of recovery, but will not cover prosthetics and orthotics.
Get off my ass? That's crazy talk!
That's why I figured on putting in the Adaptec SATA RAID controller. If I lose a drive every six months (dubious, but I'll buy into your assumption) I don't lose all of my data. If I have everything on one big honkin' drive, and lose it every four years I do lose all of my data. Having to restore all of this from another media sux, I'dmuch prefer to install another disk and rebuild a RAID volume.
Personally I RAID pretty much everything now. It's cheap and I'd rather spend the extra 150 bux or so to buy an extra drive than spend a bunch of time trying to restore a system. The only system in my house that I don't have either software or hardware RAID on is my desktop WinXP box that I use for playing games and the Mac that I have hooked up to my stereo. Everything else gets RAID 1 for the main disk and to further my paranoia about data loss I have a couple of firewire drives that I keep inside of a Pelican case that I store in a fireproof safe.
But last night I was looking at the price for Hitachi's 400Gb IDE drive ($368 on at newegg.com) and figured that I could throw a pretty decent video server together for about five kilobux. I was thinking of getting a big case and power supply, eight of these drives and an Adaptec eight port SATA raid controller. Set up a Linux system, set up the drives and RAID controller as RAID-5 and you could get about 2,500Gb of storage, which works out to about 265 DVD images (assuming that each image was a from a dual layer disc and 9.4 Gb in size. Use SMB over gigabit ethernet to mount these images to your clients and then play whatever you like. Eight 500 Gb drives would give you about 3,200Gb of storage which works out to 340 images (making the same assumptions about the size of each DVD). I'm sure there are better ways of doing this, this is just what I came up with off of the top of my head.
Note that this assumes that you're not doing any processing on the DVDs. With a tool such as DVD-Shrink you could increase the amount of images you were able to store by stripping out alternate soundtracks, extra features and even the menus. And with DiVX re-encoding you might be able to (I don't know much about DiVX so comments would be appreciated) reprocess the video streams so that they used less space but were not visibly reduced in quality. If I had a spare 5 kilobux to blow right now I'd build one of these as a mighty heigh-ho and fuck you to Bill Gates, Jack Valenti and all of the other assholes in Hollywood and have the pleasure of having a whole-house video solution.
And I CAN tell the difference.
Christ, more luddite horseshit from another "audiophile". Can analog recordings be better than digital ones? Certainly they can, in the early years of the CD revolution a lot of CDs were remastered with the RIAA equalization curves that were used to master LPs, which meant that you superimposed an unsuitable equalization curve over a media that had essentially flat reproduction, which made it sound like crap. As engineers got more used to digital music this became less and less of a problem (although it's been replaced with the "let's master this fucker as loud as we can" problem). But as far as the supposed superiority of analog to digital give me a break.
Let's look at some of the fun artifacts you get with analog media such as LPs (I assume that you're referring to LPs because most of the "audiophiles" out there turn their noses up at commercially mastered cassette tapes). With LP playback you get to deal with cracks and pops caused by static on the record, wow and flutter from your turntable, cracks and pops caused by dust on the record. Now, if you keep your records clean and maintain your stylus and go through all of the happy horseshit that owning a turntable requires you can minimize this. But then you also have to deal with the fact that unless you're buying quality pressings, such as those from the Nautilus SuperDisc line of recordings or the Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab Original Master Recording series or their later Anadisq 200 series, the stock used to press most vinyl recordings was utter crap, which limited the ultimate quality of any vinyl pressing right out of the box. Then of course there's the fact that every single time you play that record you degrade its quality. Strangely enough though most "audiophiles" who disdain digital aren't consistent with their LP collections, if they were, and if their ears were as good as they claim, they'd have to toss an album out after say a dozen playings since its quality would have degraded.
As far as being able to tell the difference, a claim which so many "audiophiles" have made I'm sure you can. The vinyl recording is going to have less dynamic range, it has to because if it has too much dynamic range the stylus will pop out of the groove. What most audiophiles completely ignore is the fact that the pure music they claim to love so much has had the living Jesus processed out of it before it even hits the master. The frequency response is going to be different because of the preemphasis and deemphasis that the RIAA equalization, which was designed to deal with the mechanical limitations of the turntable, will not produce completely flat playback.
I would love to see an ABX comparison where "audiophiles" who claim to be able to tell the difference between digital and analog and prefer the latter, were put into a listening room. They would listen to a recording of either a compact disc played through an equalizer to degrade the sound quality, change the frequency response and reduce the dynamic range or a standard LP. I'd be willing to bet that without too much tweaking on the CD side of things you could make the CD sound like an LP recording to the golden ears of all of the supposed "audiophiles" out there. Perhaps someone should make a box that plugs in between a digital source such as a CD player and the pre-amp that does exactly this and then charge "audiophiles" out the wazoo for it. Sure, some people might claim that taking their money with a scam like this is wrong, but "audiophiles" are such suckers and easy marks that it's almost wrong not to take their money away from them.