Correct, for a given power the current is inversely proportional to voltage, so bringing in the power at 5V instead of 120V takes thick, expensive, and unwieldy wires. I think this arrangement wouldn't make much sense unless the wires were about 5 feet long so you could put the supply on the floor -- if it has to sit next to the mainframe, you've just added more clutter. With a separate case and fan you've added $10-15 to the parts cost of the system, or $20-30 to the street price.
The other thing is, a long distance between the regulator and the load slows down the response to load variations and degrades the voltage regulation no matter how thick the wires are. High-speed rack-mounted electronics systems often put a regulator on each circuit card, with power distributed at an intermediate voltage, just to get the regulators a couple of feet closer to the loads. It might make sense to do this with PC's -- convert AC to 48 and 12VDC in a separate module, then put simple switching regulators on the motherboard to transform 48VDC to +5, +3.3, and whatever other voltages are needed. One part of this is already in place; most Pentium motherboards power the CPU with a switching regulator located right next to or even under the CPU socket.
The problem with the pass-through AC jack was that it usually had a quite limited current capacity -- it was OK for the tiny little monochrome monitors, but the early VGA monitors would overload it so they always came with standard cords to go straight to the power strip.
That was slipped into a bill at the end of session, apparently by a staffer who then left for a record company job. Congress overturned it less than a year later (not much longer than it took them to actually read the bill that they had voted in).
There was some discussion about that here. Format conversion is a real problem, and I have often had trouble accessing 5 year old files. So is media deterioration for off-line storage, and on-line storage is anything but permanent. Printed material is not exempt from those problems, it just takes a little longer for them to become serious; paper deteriorates to dust in 20 - 1,000 years depending on type of paper and storage conditions, and English itself has changed substantially in just 400 years: try reading Shakespeare without a glossary. Of course, at present the biggest problem with dead-tree information storage is that there are thousands of specialized journals, and pretty soon you've got to throw something out. Maybe it's basically a problem of a lack of standards -- 99.9% of it _should_be_ trashed, if you can just figure out which...
Thanks. "[The Rosetta project] micro-etches text as analog images on a 3" nickel disk at densities of up to 350,000 pages per disk. Since the encoding is a physical image (no 1's or 0's), there is no platform or format dependency" You read it with a microscope. It sounds kind of extreme, but it is what you need for really long-term storage without filling large buildings with paper. Where can I get such a system for archiving CAD drawings?
I'm glad to hear from someone with more experience with the process, but IMO all that reformatting is just another inefficiency of the dead-tree based system. And you are right that some costs are just shifted to the reader's printer -- but most people will only print what they intend to read fully. And then in my very limited experience, most of the journals are jealously guarded by libraries -- so if you are really interested, you xerox the article, at the same cost in materials and machine maintenance as laser printing, but a much higher labor cost.
There's no permanence, no durable record, in Online Publishing. That's true, and I am quite familiar with these issues from struggling to keep CAD drawing files usable for just 5 to 10 years. But dead-trees are only marginally better -- because no one can store even 10% of all the publications that exist now. The stamped CD and DVD formats are about as permanent as good paper, and far more compact, but that requires as much investment in tooling to stamp a disk as in typesetting a printed publication. What is needed is some sort of laser-etched-on-platinum disk.
Until then, the lack of a good long term storage solution for the few articles that are going to be useful in thirty years is no reason for not improving immediate access to scientific articles -- most of which have ephemeral value at best. I wonder how much work is needlessly duplicated while the articles are waiting at the printers? And if you don't trust the on-line archive and do have storage space, print the key articles out on acid-free paper, it will cost far less than trying to subscribe to all the printed journals.
That is, the reviewers are more carefully selected from a pool of better people, and they take the job more seriously... Duh, I know that. No offense meant to anyone except first-posters and the goat.sxe nuts, but/. is a toy system where half the contributors are idiots. That doesn't mean it might not be a usable prototype for a serious system.
Suppose you tweaked the parameters by awarding "karma" within particular areas of expertise, requiring lots of karma to do any reviewing, and giving the reviewers unlimited mod points restricted to their particular area. Also enable reviewers to mark up a paper and send it back for changes. Start the system off by picking some eminent scientists to review each area. Then their ratings eventually elevate other top people into reviewers, etc. Would it ultimately be any different than the present peer-review system?
One thing I don't understand though -- what motivates the reviewers to work that hard? As I understand it, most aren't paid.
We also, later in the process, pay for the SGML markup, proofing, printing, distribution, administration of the subscriptions
As I understand it, most scientific papers are submitted electronically in printable form (Tex, or formatted word processor documents), and scientific journals do not need a lot of fancy formatting. For the rest -- that's the cost of your inefficient, dead-tree based process, not the intrinsic cost of publication.
Web servers do have to be paid for, of course, but they are a lot cheaper than dead trees. And someone has to be paid to run the peer review process -- but I thought the reviewers themselves were unpaid.
I'm not much into this sort of mathematics -- but one thing I do know is that people can see "patterns" in purely random data. (Constellations, Schiaparelli's Martian "canals", all mystics,...) And an infite random file should include every possible finite sequence. That is, if it's really random and really long, somewhere in there should be 1,2,3,4,..., and 2,4,6,8,..., and so on. What you need for this challenge is to find just one sequence in a finite random file that continues for long enough to exceed the length of the program that generates it, by enough to also cover the code to copy the rest of the data from file to file.
That is, you need a program less than m bytes long that copies bytes 1 to n, generates 1,2,3,...,m, and copies bytes n+1 through the end of file. Since the program size doesn't scale with the length of the sequence, there is some m for which this will be true. And then you ask for a random file long enough to ensure that 1,2,3,...,m will be somewhere in it. (I don't know how to calculate the required length, and I've got a feeling the file might have to be sent as truckloads of 40G tapes...)
Of course, the challenge doesn't promise that the file will be entirely random. It might be the output of a quantum random number generator, filtered to eliminate obvious sequences. But if it's filtered, it's not random, and some form of actual compression should give a slight reduction.
This is not a usable compression algorithm -- it's just a one-time trick that squeezes a few bytes out of one particular extremely large file, with far more work than compressing any file is worth. But it would meet the terms of the challenge.
The one problem is that the journals do one vital service -- they run the peer review system that filters out the garbage. Find a way to do that on zero budget, and persuade the universities that "publication" does not require dead trees, and the scientists would quite happily FTP their articles into an on-line database instead of messing with the journals.
Myabe they could learn from/.'s moderation system?
In some countries, the functions of the dot and comma within numbers are the opposite. That is, in the US it's 15,817.00, elsewhere it might be 15.817,00. Except we've probably corrupted them so they are never sure which system is in use anymore...
The parallel is far from exact (musicians get about 10% of the retail price, scientists often have to pay to get published), but there are similarities. Few musicians live on their royalties -- around $1.50 in royalties from each CD has to be split several ways, and few of them willingly stick to the modest lifestyle that will pay for. The CD's and air time enrich the record companies, and give the musicians publicity so their live concerts can pack them in, and this is where the successful ones make real money. Scientists publish papers to build a reputation that lets them move to more prominent positions, or to get more and larger research grants. They would consider it crude to describe that as "garnering publicity so they can get pay raises" -- but I don't see the difference.
Scientists working for universities use these journals to exchange information and to build their reputations. That is, they write up the results of an experiment, a study, or (very rarely) a new discovery, and send it off to a journal covering that field. The journal gets other scientists to "peer review" it, that is to check for errors and to rate how interesting it is. (Sort of like/. modding conducted by snail mail.) If it passes, then eventually it is printed on dead trees and mailed out. At salary review time (or the academic equivalent, whatever that is), the scientist points to published papers as evidence that he has done some worthwhile science. And now and then, who sent a paper in first becomes critical in deciding who gets the Nobel prize.
Other scientists refer to these journals so they will be building on work already done rather than duplicating it. However, a relevant article may have been published in one of dozens of different journals, so indexing journals and searching for prior work are difficult, time-consuming, and error-prone jobs. And once you have located possibly interesting articles in the indexes, you still have to obtain the articles themselves. University libraries are not able to buy or to store all the dead-tree journals, so you have to try to borrow journals from somewhere else, or pay for reprints.
By putting whole articles into an on-line database, the scientists can do a full-text search if necessary, can download interesting articles immediately, and scientific research should progress just a little faster. The authors also benefit from better exposure. (At least the better articles get better exposure, whether this is a benefit for a particular scientist or not depends...)
However, the journals fear that this will bite them in the pocketbook. The specialized journals get some advertising revenue, but not nearly as much as news magazines. So they depend on subscriptions to cover part of the editorial and peer review expenses as well as printing and postage. And so the subscription prices are high, and if the same articles will soon be appearing on-line, many people will save their money and wait. And of course the journals also lose those reprint fees, and fees for when they re-issue last years 12 issues on a roll of microfilm, etc. On the other hand, journals get the scientific articles free, aside from editing and peer review which only cost about 10% of their budget. While I understand the journals' financial concerns, I think that ultimately the on-line articles are going to be far more significant than the dead tree issues; somehow journals are going to have to adjust or else perish.
And it's a good thing to see authors of any sort banding together and insisting on keeping control of their work.
I suspect that a good enough mathematician with the right expertise probably could meet that challenge without "cheating" by shifting data into the directory. In the simplest case, if Goldman derived the file from a psuedo-random number generator, you guess the formula used, then your "decompressor" is the generator and your "compressed file" is the seed value. More generally (like if the data was truly random from an inherently random quantum process), you try matching pseudo-random (did I finally get the spelling right?) formulas against parts of the file until you hit something that fortuitously matches for long enough. Snip that segment out of the data file. Write the "decompressor" to copy all the bytes before, then generate the pseudo-random sequence, then copy the rest of the bytes.
However, I think if you are genius enough to make that work, you probably have easier ways of making $5,000...
Re ADFS, Goldman apparently believed that the FAQ on his website excluded storing parts of the file in the catalog, for instance by creating a filename out of the first N data characters. If it had been explicitly stated in the two paragraphs of the challenge, I think that would have prevented the use of the ADFS to store a small file in the same allocation block as the catalog, but Goldman was sloppy...
You cannot get real space saving's by Patrick's method -- the extra directory entries created will always be larger than the data removed from the file. Think of the smallest possible directory structure -- an array of pointers. (Files aren't named, you get them by number. Files are stored sequentially, so you don't need a length -- EOF is the last byte before the next file starts.) To accomodate files up to 2^n, the pointers have to be n bits long. Patrick's trick is to split the file at a particular sequence of m bits, m being less than n so you can be sure that that sequence will be found within a 2^n length random file. So you take away m bits and add n bits for every split.
But Goldman's challenge was not clearly worded in this regard, even though he was apparently aware of possible cheats involving hiding data in the directory. As Patrick said, if a 1,000 byte file could have been duplicated by a 499 byte decompression program and a 500 byte data file, there is no doubt that it would have met the challenge even though it would have taken more HD space.
I haven't seen much research that wasn't funded by the gov't -- or by companies making alcohol, tobacco, or prescription drugs. NORML doesn't have much money, and non-gov't-approved researchers seem to have a lot of difficulty getting the licenses to experiment with marijuana...
Some LCD's take an analog input (VGA connector), and some use a digital input. The analog input is good for compatibility, but actually the LCD cells require digital signals, so the video card is doing a D/A conversion, then the LCD circuits digitize that -- you might lose some picture sharpness in the double conversion. It's easier to drive digital signals through 200 feet of cable, so most probably they are using a special video interface with digital outputs.
And do you think it isn't already easy for kids to get drugs? Get out in the real world. It's easier for them to buy illegal drugs than it is for them to buy liquor. (And after 60 years of gov't funded, slanted research, it's not all that clear whether alcohol+cigarettes are less dangerous than many illegal drugs.)
It wasn't exactly the same -- this lawsuit was about spam from the plaintiff's ISP saying something like "We know you opted out, but we want to give you another chance to opt in." What the TILJ was proposing was a one-time mailing from a company you had no previous dealings with -- that is, the e-mail equivalent of the "cold" sales call.
Considering how many new businesses are created every day, I'm not sure I'd want to allow that either, but it is a much smaller problem than repeated spams. And the Supreme Court long ago decided that it was a violation of the 1st Amendment for local gov'ts could to ban Jehovah's Witnesses or door-to-door salesmen from making a first unsolicited call. I think the same would apply to e-mail: they can spam you once -- but the gov't can make it illegal for the same organization to send you a second unsolicited e-mail, and I hope it does.
Re:Yeah, but now we know the CEO is illiterate
on
Buried in email?
·
· Score: 2
True, sometimes. We used to have a corporate VP whose memos sounded worse than an impromptu Bush speech. The top (and only) MIS guy here finally printed one out, edited it with blue and red pencil for spelling, grammar, and nonsense, and posted it on his office door. He didn't know the VP was about to fly up here for a visit...
Remarkably, that VP is long gone, and the MIS guy is still here. 8-)
Darn, I'm out of mod points. This is very funny -- and unfortunately, I'm sure some corporations are actually putting out memos much like this. Yes, I spend an hour a day on e-mail; 50 minutes of that is dealing with real company business. If those people had to track me down on the phone or come over to my desk (1) I wouldn't get much else done between the interruptions, and (2) they'd be wasting many hours, because either my phone would be busy, there'd be a line forming at my desk, or I'd be off at someone else's desk waiting for him or her to get off the phone.
The pay scale is twice what it was (after correcting for inflation) when I went to school in the 1950's and 60's. The teaching is worse. Besides the administrators getting paid twice as much, there seem to be three times as many of them. But they are obviously more bone-headed than ever.
You don't get better quality just by paying more. You get better quality by checking the quality of what you get, letting people know when they aren't performing well, and firing those that continue to do badly -- and then paying more if that's what it takes to get and keep the good people. But the education establishment's top priority has always been to prevent any effective teacher-rating system from taking root. And paying more without quality control just attracts more deadwood.
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Correct, for a given power the current is inversely proportional to voltage, so bringing in the power at 5V instead of 120V takes thick, expensive, and unwieldy wires. I think this arrangement wouldn't make much sense unless the wires were about 5 feet long so you could put the supply on the floor -- if it has to sit next to the mainframe, you've just added more clutter. With a separate case and fan you've added $10-15 to the parts cost of the system, or $20-30 to the street price.
The other thing is, a long distance between the regulator and the load slows down the response to load variations and degrades the voltage regulation no matter how thick the wires are. High-speed rack-mounted electronics systems often put a regulator on each circuit card, with power distributed at an intermediate voltage, just to get the regulators a couple of feet closer to the loads. It might make sense to do this with PC's -- convert AC to 48 and 12VDC in a separate module, then put simple switching regulators on the motherboard to transform 48VDC to +5, +3.3, and whatever other voltages are needed. One part of this is already in place; most Pentium motherboards power the CPU with a switching regulator located right next to or even under the CPU socket.
The problem with the pass-through AC jack was that it usually had a quite limited current capacity -- it was OK for the tiny little monochrome monitors, but the early VGA monitors would overload it so they always came with standard cords to go straight to the power strip.
That was slipped into a bill at the end of session, apparently by a staffer who then left for a record company job. Congress overturned it less than a year later (not much longer than it took them to actually read the bill that they had voted in).
There was some discussion about that here. Format conversion is a real problem, and I have often had trouble accessing 5 year old files. So is media deterioration for off-line storage, and on-line storage is anything but permanent. Printed material is not exempt from those problems, it just takes a little longer for them to become serious; paper deteriorates to dust in 20 - 1,000 years depending on type of paper and storage conditions, and English itself has changed substantially in just 400 years: try reading Shakespeare without a glossary. Of course, at present the biggest problem with dead-tree information storage is that there are thousands of specialized journals, and pretty soon you've got to throw something out. Maybe it's basically a problem of a lack of standards -- 99.9% of it _should_be_ trashed, if you can just figure out which...
Thanks. "[The Rosetta project] micro-etches text as analog images on a 3" nickel disk at densities of up to 350,000 pages per disk. Since the encoding is a physical image (no 1's or 0's), there is no platform or format dependency" You read it with a microscope. It sounds kind of extreme, but it is what you need for really long-term storage without filling large buildings with paper. Where can I get such a system for archiving CAD drawings?
I'm glad to hear from someone with more experience with the process, but IMO all that reformatting is just another inefficiency of the dead-tree based system. And you are right that some costs are just shifted to the reader's printer -- but most people will only print what they intend to read fully. And then in my very limited experience, most of the journals are jealously guarded by libraries -- so if you are really interested, you xerox the article, at the same cost in materials and machine maintenance as laser printing, but a much higher labor cost.
There's no permanence, no durable record, in Online Publishing. That's true, and I am quite familiar with these issues from struggling to keep CAD drawing files usable for just 5 to 10 years. But dead-trees are only marginally better -- because no one can store even 10% of all the publications that exist now. The stamped CD and DVD formats are about as permanent as good paper, and far more compact, but that requires as much investment in tooling to stamp a disk as in typesetting a printed publication. What is needed is some sort of laser-etched-on-platinum disk.
Until then, the lack of a good long term storage solution for the few articles that are going to be useful in thirty years is no reason for not improving immediate access to scientific articles -- most of which have ephemeral value at best. I wonder how much work is needlessly duplicated while the articles are waiting at the printers? And if you don't trust the on-line archive and do have storage space, print the key articles out on acid-free paper, it will cost far less than trying to subscribe to all the printed journals.
That is, the reviewers are more carefully selected from a pool of better people, and they take the job more seriously... Duh, I know that. No offense meant to anyone except first-posters and the goat.sxe nuts, but /. is a toy system where half the contributors are idiots. That doesn't mean it might not be a usable prototype for a serious system.
Suppose you tweaked the parameters by awarding "karma" within particular areas of expertise, requiring lots of karma to do any reviewing, and giving the reviewers unlimited mod points restricted to their particular area. Also enable reviewers to mark up a paper and send it back for changes. Start the system off by picking some eminent scientists to review each area. Then their ratings eventually elevate other top people into reviewers, etc. Would it ultimately be any different than the present peer-review system?
One thing I don't understand though -- what motivates the reviewers to work that hard? As I understand it, most aren't paid.
I think the physicists did this 10 years ago.
We also, later in the process, pay for the SGML markup, proofing, printing, distribution, administration of the subscriptions
As I understand it, most scientific papers are submitted electronically in printable form (Tex, or formatted word processor documents), and scientific journals do not need a lot of fancy formatting. For the rest -- that's the cost of your inefficient, dead-tree based process, not the intrinsic cost of publication.
Web servers do have to be paid for, of course, but they are a lot cheaper than dead trees. And someone has to be paid to run the peer review process -- but I thought the reviewers themselves were unpaid.
I'm not much into this sort of mathematics -- but one thing I do know is that people can see "patterns" in purely random data. (Constellations, Schiaparelli's Martian "canals", all mystics, ...) And an infite random file should include every possible finite sequence. That is, if it's really random and really long, somewhere in there should be 1,2,3,4,..., and 2,4,6,8,..., and so on. What you need for this challenge is to find just one sequence in a finite random file that continues for long enough to exceed the length of the program that generates it, by enough to also cover the code to copy the rest of the data from file to file.
That is, you need a program less than m bytes long that copies bytes 1 to n, generates 1,2,3,...,m, and copies bytes n+1 through the end of file. Since the program size doesn't scale with the length of the sequence, there is some m for which this will be true. And then you ask for a random file long enough to ensure that 1,2,3,...,m will be somewhere in it. (I don't know how to calculate the required length, and I've got a feeling the file might have to be sent as truckloads of 40G tapes...)
Of course, the challenge doesn't promise that the file will be entirely random. It might be the output of a quantum random number generator, filtered to eliminate obvious sequences. But if it's filtered, it's not random, and some form of actual compression should give a slight reduction.
This is not a usable compression algorithm -- it's just a one-time trick that squeezes a few bytes out of one particular extremely large file, with far more work than compressing any file is worth. But it would meet the terms of the challenge.
The one problem is that the journals do one vital service -- they run the peer review system that filters out the garbage. Find a way to do that on zero budget, and persuade the universities that "publication" does not require dead trees, and the scientists would quite happily FTP their articles into an on-line database instead of messing with the journals.
/.'s moderation system?
Myabe they could learn from
In some countries, the functions of the dot and comma within numbers are the opposite. That is, in the US it's 15,817.00, elsewhere it might be 15.817,00. Except we've probably corrupted them so they are never sure which system is in use anymore...
The parallel is far from exact (musicians get about 10% of the retail price, scientists often have to pay to get published), but there are similarities. Few musicians live on their royalties -- around $1.50 in royalties from each CD has to be split several ways, and few of them willingly stick to the modest lifestyle that will pay for. The CD's and air time enrich the record companies, and give the musicians publicity so their live concerts can pack them in, and this is where the successful ones make real money. Scientists publish papers to build a reputation that lets them move to more prominent positions, or to get more and larger research grants. They would consider it crude to describe that as "garnering publicity so they can get pay raises" -- but I don't see the difference.
Scientists working for universities use these journals to exchange information and to build their reputations. That is, they write up the results of an experiment, a study, or (very rarely) a new discovery, and send it off to a journal covering that field. The journal gets other scientists to "peer review" it, that is to check for errors and to rate how interesting it is. (Sort of like /. modding conducted by snail mail.) If it passes, then eventually it is printed on dead trees and mailed out. At salary review time (or the academic equivalent, whatever that is), the scientist points to published papers as evidence that he has done some worthwhile science. And now and then, who sent a paper in first becomes critical in deciding who gets the Nobel prize.
Other scientists refer to these journals so they will be building on work already done rather than duplicating it. However, a relevant article may have been published in one of dozens of different journals, so indexing journals and searching for prior work are difficult, time-consuming, and error-prone jobs. And once you have located possibly interesting articles in the indexes, you still have to obtain the articles themselves. University libraries are not able to buy or to store all the dead-tree journals, so you have to try to borrow journals from somewhere else, or pay for reprints.
By putting whole articles into an on-line database, the scientists can do a full-text search if necessary, can download interesting articles immediately, and scientific research should progress just a little faster. The authors also benefit from better exposure. (At least the better articles get better exposure, whether this is a benefit for a particular scientist or not depends...)
However, the journals fear that this will bite them in the pocketbook. The specialized journals get some advertising revenue, but not nearly as much as news magazines. So they depend on subscriptions to cover part of the editorial and peer review expenses as well as printing and postage. And so the subscription prices are high, and if the same articles will soon be appearing on-line, many people will save their money and wait. And of course the journals also lose those reprint fees, and fees for when they re-issue last years 12 issues on a roll of microfilm, etc. On the other hand, journals get the scientific articles free, aside from editing and peer review which only cost about 10% of their budget. While I understand the journals' financial concerns, I think that ultimately the on-line articles are going to be far more significant than the dead tree issues; somehow journals are going to have to adjust or else perish.
And it's a good thing to see authors of any sort banding together and insisting on keeping control of their work.
I suspect that a good enough mathematician with the right expertise probably could meet that challenge without "cheating" by shifting data into the directory. In the simplest case, if Goldman derived the file from a psuedo-random number generator, you guess the formula used, then your "decompressor" is the generator and your "compressed file" is the seed value. More generally (like if the data was truly random from an inherently random quantum process), you try matching pseudo-random (did I finally get the spelling right?) formulas against parts of the file until you hit something that fortuitously matches for long enough. Snip that segment out of the data file. Write the "decompressor" to copy all the bytes before, then generate the pseudo-random sequence, then copy the rest of the bytes.
However, I think if you are genius enough to make that work, you probably have easier ways of making $5,000...
Re ADFS, Goldman apparently believed that the FAQ on his website excluded storing parts of the file in the catalog, for instance by creating a filename out of the first N data characters. If it had been explicitly stated in the two paragraphs of the challenge, I think that would have prevented the use of the ADFS to store a small file in the same allocation block as the catalog, but Goldman was sloppy...
You cannot get real space saving's by Patrick's method -- the extra directory entries created will always be larger than the data removed from the file. Think of the smallest possible directory structure -- an array of pointers. (Files aren't named, you get them by number. Files are stored sequentially, so you don't need a length -- EOF is the last byte before the next file starts.) To accomodate files up to 2^n, the pointers have to be n bits long. Patrick's trick is to split the file at a particular sequence of m bits, m being less than n so you can be sure that that sequence will be found within a 2^n length random file. So you take away m bits and add n bits for every split.
But Goldman's challenge was not clearly worded in this regard, even though he was apparently aware of possible cheats involving hiding data in the directory. As Patrick said, if a 1,000 byte file could have been duplicated by a 499 byte decompression program and a 500 byte data file, there is no doubt that it would have met the challenge even though it would have taken more HD space.
I haven't seen much research that wasn't funded by the gov't -- or by companies making alcohol, tobacco, or prescription drugs. NORML doesn't have much money, and non-gov't-approved researchers seem to have a lot of difficulty getting the licenses to experiment with marijuana...
Some LCD's take an analog input (VGA connector), and some use a digital input. The analog input is good for compatibility, but actually the LCD cells require digital signals, so the video card is doing a D/A conversion, then the LCD circuits digitize that -- you might lose some picture sharpness in the double conversion. It's easier to drive digital signals through 200 feet of cable, so most probably they are using a special video interface with digital outputs.
And do you think it isn't already easy for kids to get drugs? Get out in the real world. It's easier for them to buy illegal drugs than it is for them to buy liquor. (And after 60 years of gov't funded, slanted research, it's not all that clear whether alcohol+cigarettes are less dangerous than many illegal drugs.)
best of all, no one would get hurt.
Does that mean the Peruvians no longer get to shoot down purveyors of "the opiate of the masses?"
It wasn't exactly the same -- this lawsuit was about spam from the plaintiff's ISP saying something like "We know you opted out, but we want to give you another chance to opt in." What the TILJ was proposing was a one-time mailing from a company you had no previous dealings with -- that is, the e-mail equivalent of the "cold" sales call.
Considering how many new businesses are created every day, I'm not sure I'd want to allow that either, but it is a much smaller problem than repeated spams. And the Supreme Court long ago decided that it was a violation of the 1st Amendment for local gov'ts could to ban Jehovah's Witnesses or door-to-door salesmen from making a first unsolicited call. I think the same would apply to e-mail: they can spam you once -- but the gov't can make it illegal for the same organization to send you a second unsolicited e-mail, and I hope it does.
True, sometimes. We used to have a corporate VP whose memos sounded worse than an impromptu Bush speech. The top (and only) MIS guy here finally printed one out, edited it with blue and red pencil for spelling, grammar, and nonsense, and posted it on his office door. He didn't know the VP was about to fly up here for a visit...
Remarkably, that VP is long gone, and the MIS guy is still here. 8-)
Darn, I'm out of mod points. This is very funny -- and unfortunately, I'm sure some corporations are actually putting out memos much like this. Yes, I spend an hour a day on e-mail; 50 minutes of that is dealing with real company business. If those people had to track me down on the phone or come over to my desk (1) I wouldn't get much else done between the interruptions, and (2) they'd be wasting many hours, because either my phone would be busy, there'd be a line forming at my desk, or I'd be off at someone else's desk waiting for him or her to get off the phone.
The pay scale is twice what it was (after correcting for inflation) when I went to school in the 1950's and 60's. The teaching is worse. Besides the administrators getting paid twice as much, there seem to be three times as many of them. But they are obviously more bone-headed than ever.
You don't get better quality just by paying more. You get better quality by checking the quality of what you get, letting people know when they aren't performing well, and firing those that continue to do badly -- and then paying more if that's what it takes to get and keep the good people. But the education establishment's top priority has always been to prevent any effective teacher-rating system from taking root. And paying more without quality control just attracts more deadwood.