What I want to know, is it possible to make CFLs that oscillate above 60Hz? Fluorescent lights flicker too much for my tastes.
Any flicker is likely to be at twice the supply frequency. The lamps are actually more efficent at producing light at a higher frequency. Problem is that to do this you need to add an oscillator to the circuit. Which adds cost, but also space. Which can be a problem with a lamp intended to fit in the same space as an incandescent one.
Recessed fixtures in and of themselves are not terribly efficient, as are upwards-pointing fixtures. If the recessed fixture has a vent hole to the attic, it can also increase your heating/cooling bills substantially by allowing outside air in.
Especially when you have an incandescent lamp in them. Since this creates it's own convention current up through the fixture.
I'd rather have an OS that run's today's software correctly and not that from 10 years ago rather than the reverse. I'd say if one needs to run Mac OS software from 10 years ago, there's an easy solution - buy a Mac from 10 years ago, which at this point will probably set you back $100.
Though there's the problem of reliability when it comes to old hardware. You might be better off with a VM approach, especially if your software is 15, 20, 50, etc years old.
Part of the reason why their job is mind-numbingly complicated is because they need to support legasy software. A whole lot of 16-bit DOS apps written 15 years ago still run on current versions of Windows. These are not ports, or recompilations, but the same binaries.
This might be more a consequence of only the binaries being available. Thus the application cannot be ported or recompiled. Of course the sensible thing to do would be to run these apps in their own custom virtual machine...
The increase in costs of manufacturing coins has to be addressed eventually. Britain reduced the size of their coins several years ago. New Zealand did the same this year, and also changed their coins to plated steel and removed the 5 cent coin from circulation.
British "copper" coins were changed to plated steel some years ago. The older coins (many of which are still in circulation) are now worth more than their face value as scrap metal.
Removing the pennies from circulation and making the nickel smaller would be worth considering.
The only effective way to remove coins from circulation is to change their physical size.
I am Australian and I think that the rounding of the 1c and 2c coins was a very insightful thing to do.
But I didn't agree with changing over $2 notes to $2 coins. I can understand changing over $1 coins but I think the mint went too far with $2 coins. If anything thats made a difference to how much weight in coins we carry in our pockets.
The reason is that coins are rather more durable and longer lasting than notes. Even plastic ones.
The bomb in this article was a test bomb built to 1/10 scale. It ripped a hole in the deck under the seat large enough to disable the hydraulics so the pilots had to control the plane by adjusting the engine thrust.
Actually the flight controls in the 747 run through the cabin ceiling rather than the floor. Dispite the bomb blowing a hole in the floor it did not puncture the fuselage.
Additionally, the specific plane had it's central fuel tank one row behind the location of the bomb. If it was any other 747, it would have been directly above the central fuel tank, destroying the plane.
Or rather the terrorist hoped that doing this would cause something like TWA 800. The floor over the CWT is rather tougher than that over the cargo compartments, since this is part of the wing box, a major structual element of the plane. It also serves as a preassure bulkhead between the preassurised upper cabin and the unpreassurised wing.
Either that, or conspiracy idiots are yelling that it must be an inside jobs because muslims are too stupid to pull it off.The whole Al Quaeda thing is suffed full of conspiracy theories in the first place.
Let us assume for the moment that there really was a plot. Instead of a photo-op and a few headlines, the smart thing to do would have been to continue efforts to infiltrate the group, gather more evidence and when there is a case, quietly arrest the suspects and let the justice system do it's job
AFAIK this exactly what the "police" involved were trying to do. Until the "politicans" got involved.
Unfortunately, the people who make homeland security policies seem to make decisions based on theater rather than plain-old boring police work. One gets you headlines, and the other gets you results. What a shame that massaging their own egos is priority #1.
If anything it's worst than that. Those setting the policies are activly preventing the "lower downs" from doing an effective job.
UK intelligence agencies have said (off-the-record of course) that they wanted to continue observing the group and taking notes, getting contacts and so on.
All consistent with "good old-fashioned detective work".
It was said at the time that the push to make arrests came from the US intelligence service and that this was in spite of vocal opposition from those watching "the group". Now, from what I understand, the only reference to actually attacking planes comes from the torture of someone in Pakistan. The person in question had fled the UK on suspision of murder charges. So, what do you get when you combine an untrustworthy person with torture? Fairytales.
The trustworthness of the person isn't that big a factor. Someone being tortured will tend to say whatever will stop the torture. Regardless of if this is witchcraft or a fantastic conspiracy theory...
By making these changes in the stack you can improve the windowswindows performance while reducing the windowsother performance.
Assuming no active device in the network takes exception to what Windows is doing. In which case performance with this MS/IP could drop through the floor compared with anything using standard IP.
apart from providing some "security" measures, is to lock Linux out of the corporate network. As soon as a Longhorn server goes into a network, then Linux boxes will have all sorts of problems.
There are all sorts of devices which have DHCP clients embedded in firmware. As well as every prior version of Windows.
They worked out an algorithm for scanning the structure of an ethernet network. Every Vista box on the network will participate in scanning the ethernet topology periodically, using spoofed MAC addresses. This process can determine the logical structure of the hubs, switches and wireless networks that are between machines. Using methods like this it will be perfectly reasonable for each machine on the network to know the total bandwidth that is available.
Whilst this might work for a simple network it could cause all sorts of problems. How is this going to interact with VLANs and Spanning Tree? Are the spoofed addresses obviously spoofed?
Firing guns may not be a factor of our genes, but our fight or flight response is. We teach children the concept of self control so that they don't run away all the time like whipped pups, or so they don't go postal on their schoolmates.
This a case of modifying a natural behaviour. Humans generally don't need to "run away like whipped pups", for the simple reason that they are typically high level predators. (Especially in groups.)
I'm just tired of the "you can't teach kids to abstain, so why bother" camp
It's more that you are expecting these people to do something entirely un-natural.
Enticing a third party to commit a crime should carry heavier penalties than doing the crime yourself. Especially when as in this case multiple third parties are enticed.
Problem is that enforcement of criminal law against "corporate people" is just lacking. It's not as if you'd really need any new laws, "conspiring to commit criminal acts" already covers this kind of situation.
Yes, but then they'll point out that when you downloaded that Naked Britney Spears Screensaver, you clicked on a EULA which authorised them to read all your bank passwords. The fact that no-one in their right mind would do so is irrelevant.
Or more likely the ELUA attached to the program said "We can change this however and whenever we like". With there being a piece of HTML somewhere on their website which says "We own anythihng on your computer".
Personally I'm getting close to the point where I'm going to completely disconnect my Windows PCs from the Net and just have a Linux box for web stuff... it's just not worth the risk of having my bank account emptied by Windows scumware.
Avoiding any banks who require Windows (with MSIE) for "(in)security reasons".
The installed software re-routes all of your internet traffic through comScore's proxy servers. In most cases, they're probably just monitoring the URL's you visit, but they also check check more specific information in some cases... they say they verify the user's demographics (name, address, it sounds like purchases are tracked as well), and depending on what they're doing research on at the time, they sometimes track P2P activity, audio streaming activity, instant messaging statistics, etc.
Even if they arn't "doing research" putting all your traffic though one bottleneck is unlikely to give you a good "Internet Experience"
why the hell don't the cops show up at the company's door, break it down, and arrest everyone responsible and make sure CNN news crews are there to record it and make a story out of it. Then maybe these stupid, evil marketing people will stop thinking they can get away with it! It's called illegal for a reason.
The police department which actually does this would arrive by helicoptor and have a nickname of "The Flying Pigs"...
They enforce it alright...when they feel like it. Like against some kid who happens to be poking around in his university's mainframe. but against a large company (read: potential campaign contributor)? i dont think so.
Good points (record labels are masters of funny accounting to avoid paying their artists) but keep in mind that the 2% net margin number I mentioned is what they reported to the street. There's absolutely no benefit to under-reporting your profitability when you're a publicly traded company. Your company's valuation is fundamental to your business.
Actually the valuation is important to the stock market business. Typically one share equates to one doller/pound/euro invested in a company, regardless of the stock market price.
Warner Music Group netted a 2% profit margin and an 8% operating margin last year. This isn't new -- nobody's going to believe this, but the record industry has always generally had shitty margins. The only record companies that typically do well are the media conglomerates who happen to own a record label; they can absorb bad performance into the company's overall numbers. But the record industry has always been, and probably always will be, a hugely speculative business.
Just about every business will try to minimise their on paper profits. Since these are the numbers which tend to determine their tax liability. When it comes to the recording industry they also want to avoid paying the people who actually do the work. Hence the entertainment industry (in general) is notorious for creative accounting methods.
Whilst still managing to carp about being hard done by.
Because "new distribution technologies" is a thorn they faced before, and successfully got on the side of the law?
Because the current law has adopted to aid their business model?
Wonder how much of that huge profit went into buying the current laws...
You see, the tax dollars you spend goes to a basic need. If you choose to not use it, you are still free to do so, but your tax money gets spent to create the infrastructure and keep the machine running. The government doesn't pay you to buy a Segue just because you're not using your portion of the automotive roadways. You arean't going to get "book vouchers" or "internet service credit vouchers" if you choose not to go to your local library. And you're not going to raid public education funds to send your kids to private school - they money doesn't magically reappear if you take your kid out.
You might well find that if you did have such a rebate system you wouldn't get that much money back. Worst case senario you could wind up paying more. Administering such a system isn't cheap especially with the requirement to verify claims...
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What I want to know, is it possible to make CFLs that oscillate above 60Hz? Fluorescent lights flicker too much for my tastes.
Any flicker is likely to be at twice the supply frequency. The lamps are actually more efficent at producing light at a higher frequency. Problem is that to do this you need to add an oscillator to the circuit. Which adds cost, but also space. Which can be a problem with a lamp intended to fit in the same space as an incandescent one.
Recessed fixtures in and of themselves are not terribly efficient, as are upwards-pointing fixtures. If the recessed fixture has a vent hole to the attic, it can also increase your heating/cooling bills substantially by allowing outside air in.
Especially when you have an incandescent lamp in them. Since this creates it's own convention current up through the fixture.
I'd rather have an OS that run's today's software correctly and not that from 10 years ago rather than the reverse. I'd say if one needs to run Mac OS software from 10 years ago, there's an easy solution - buy a Mac from 10 years ago, which at this point will probably set you back $100.
Though there's the problem of reliability when it comes to old hardware. You might be better off with a VM approach, especially if your software is 15, 20, 50, etc years old.
Part of the reason why their job is mind-numbingly complicated is because they need to support legasy software. A whole lot of 16-bit DOS apps written 15 years ago still run on current versions of Windows. These are not ports, or recompilations, but the same binaries.
This might be more a consequence of only the binaries being available. Thus the application cannot be ported or recompiled.
Of course the sensible thing to do would be to run these apps in their own custom virtual machine...
The increase in costs of manufacturing coins has to be addressed eventually. Britain reduced the size of their coins several years ago. New Zealand did the same this year, and also changed their coins to plated steel and removed the 5 cent coin from circulation.
British "copper" coins were changed to plated steel some years ago. The older coins (many of which are still in circulation) are now worth more than their face value as scrap metal.
Removing the pennies from circulation and making the nickel smaller would be worth considering.
The only effective way to remove coins from circulation is to change their physical size.
I am Australian and I think that the rounding of the 1c and 2c coins was a very insightful thing to do. But I didn't agree with changing over $2 notes to $2 coins. I can understand changing over $1 coins but I think the mint went too far with $2 coins. If anything thats made a difference to how much weight in coins we carry in our pockets.
The reason is that coins are rather more durable and longer lasting than notes. Even plastic ones.
The bomb in this article was a test bomb built to 1/10 scale. It ripped a hole in the deck under the seat large enough to disable the hydraulics so the pilots had to control the plane by adjusting the engine thrust.
Actually the flight controls in the 747 run through the cabin ceiling rather than the floor. Dispite the bomb blowing a hole in the floor it did not puncture the fuselage.
Additionally, the specific plane had it's central fuel tank one row behind the location of the bomb. If it was any other 747, it would have been directly above the central fuel tank, destroying the plane.
Or rather the terrorist hoped that doing this would cause something like TWA 800. The floor over the CWT is rather tougher than that over the cargo compartments, since this is part of the wing box, a major structual element of the plane. It also serves as a preassure bulkhead between the preassurised upper cabin and the unpreassurised wing.
Either that, or conspiracy idiots are yelling that it must be an inside jobs because muslims are too stupid to pull it off.The whole Al Quaeda thing is suffed full of conspiracy theories in the first place.
Let us assume for the moment that there really was a plot. Instead of a photo-op and a few headlines, the smart thing to do would have been to continue efforts to infiltrate the group, gather more evidence and when there is a case, quietly arrest the suspects and let the justice system do it's job
AFAIK this exactly what the "police" involved were trying to do. Until the "politicans" got involved.
Unfortunately, the people who make homeland security policies seem to make decisions based on theater rather than plain-old boring police work. One gets you headlines, and the other gets you results. What a shame that massaging their own egos is priority #1.
If anything it's worst than that. Those setting the policies are activly preventing the "lower downs" from doing an effective job.
UK intelligence agencies have said (off-the-record of course) that they wanted to continue observing the group and taking notes, getting contacts and so on.
All consistent with "good old-fashioned detective work".
It was said at the time that the push to make arrests came from the US intelligence service and that this was in spite of vocal opposition from those watching "the group". Now, from what I understand, the only reference to actually attacking planes comes from the torture of someone in Pakistan. The person in question had fled the UK on suspision of murder charges. So, what do you get when you combine an untrustworthy person with torture? Fairytales.
The trustworthness of the person isn't that big a factor. Someone being tortured will tend to say whatever will stop the torture. Regardless of if this is witchcraft or a fantastic conspiracy theory...
By making these changes in the stack you can improve the windowswindows performance while reducing the windowsother performance.
Assuming no active device in the network takes exception to what Windows is doing. In which case performance with this MS/IP could drop through the floor compared with anything using standard IP.
apart from providing some "security" measures, is to lock Linux out of the corporate network. As soon as a Longhorn server goes into a network, then Linux boxes will have all sorts of problems.
There are all sorts of devices which have DHCP clients embedded in firmware. As well as every prior version of Windows.
They worked out an algorithm for scanning the structure of an ethernet network. Every Vista box on the network will participate in scanning the ethernet topology periodically, using spoofed MAC addresses. This process can determine the logical structure of the hubs, switches and wireless networks that are between machines. Using methods like this it will be perfectly reasonable for each machine on the network to know the total bandwidth that is available.
Whilst this might work for a simple network it could cause all sorts of problems. How is this going to interact with VLANs and Spanning Tree? Are the spoofed addresses obviously spoofed?
Firing guns may not be a factor of our genes, but our fight or flight response is. We teach children the concept of self control so that they don't run away all the time like whipped pups, or so they don't go postal on their schoolmates.
This a case of modifying a natural behaviour. Humans generally don't need to "run away like whipped pups", for the simple reason that they are typically high level predators. (Especially in groups.)
I'm just tired of the "you can't teach kids to abstain, so why bother" camp
It's more that you are expecting these people to do something entirely un-natural.
Enticing a third party to commit a crime should carry heavier penalties than doing the crime yourself. Especially when as in this case multiple third parties are enticed.
Problem is that enforcement of criminal law against "corporate people" is just lacking. It's not as if you'd really need any new laws, "conspiring to commit criminal acts" already covers this kind of situation.
Yes, but then they'll point out that when you downloaded that Naked Britney Spears Screensaver, you clicked on a EULA which authorised them to read all your bank passwords. The fact that no-one in their right mind would do so is irrelevant.
Or more likely the ELUA attached to the program said "We can change this however and whenever we like". With there being a piece of HTML somewhere on their website which says "We own anythihng on your computer".
Personally I'm getting close to the point where I'm going to completely disconnect my Windows PCs from the Net and just have a Linux box for web stuff... it's just not worth the risk of having my bank account emptied by Windows scumware.
Avoiding any banks who require Windows (with MSIE) for "(in)security reasons".
The installed software re-routes all of your internet traffic through comScore's proxy servers. In most cases, they're probably just monitoring the URL's you visit, but they also check check more specific information in some cases... they say they verify the user's demographics (name, address, it sounds like purchases are tracked as well), and depending on what they're doing research on at the time, they sometimes track P2P activity, audio streaming activity, instant messaging statistics, etc.
Even if they arn't "doing research" putting all your traffic though one bottleneck is unlikely to give you a good "Internet Experience"
why the hell don't the cops show up at the company's door, break it down, and arrest everyone responsible and make sure CNN news crews are there to record it and make a story out of it. Then maybe these stupid, evil marketing people will stop thinking they can get away with it! It's called illegal for a reason.
The police department which actually does this would arrive by helicoptor and have a nickname of "The Flying Pigs"...
They enforce it alright...when they feel like it. Like against some kid who happens to be poking around in his university's mainframe. but against a large company (read: potential campaign contributor)? i dont think so.
Where's "Crackers" when he's needed?
So what good is the Computer Fraud and Abuse Title Act 18 Section 1030 if the FBI will not enforce it?
They probably do enforce it, just in a highly selective and political way.
Good points (record labels are masters of funny accounting to avoid paying their artists) but keep in mind that the 2% net margin number I mentioned is what they reported to the street. There's absolutely no benefit to under-reporting your profitability when you're a publicly traded company. Your company's valuation is fundamental to your business.
Actually the valuation is important to the stock market business. Typically one share equates to one doller/pound/euro invested in a company, regardless of the stock market price.
Warner Music Group netted a 2% profit margin and an 8% operating margin last year. This isn't new -- nobody's going to believe this, but the record industry has always generally had shitty margins. The only record companies that typically do well are the media conglomerates who happen to own a record label; they can absorb bad performance into the company's overall numbers. But the record industry has always been, and probably always will be, a hugely speculative business.
Just about every business will try to minimise their on paper profits. Since these are the numbers which tend to determine their tax liability. When it comes to the recording industry they also want to avoid paying the people who actually do the work. Hence the entertainment industry (in general) is notorious for creative accounting methods.
Because they're making a huge profit?
Whilst still managing to carp about being hard done by.
Because "new distribution technologies" is a thorn they faced before, and successfully got on the side of the law?
Because the current law has adopted to aid their business model?
Wonder how much of that huge profit went into buying the current laws...
FYI, this does not seem to affect Windows Media Player 11, which is available via Windows Update or the WMP site.
Problem is that WMP 11 contains even more DRM. DRM adds much more complexity to a media player, including the trusting of external sites.
You see, the tax dollars you spend goes to a basic need. If you choose to not use it, you are still free to do so, but your tax money gets spent to create the infrastructure and keep the machine running. The government doesn't pay you to buy a Segue just because you're not using your portion of the automotive roadways. You arean't going to get "book vouchers" or "internet service credit vouchers" if you choose not to go to your local library. And you're not going to raid public education funds to send your kids to private school - they money doesn't magically reappear if you take your kid out.
You might well find that if you did have such a rebate system you wouldn't get that much money back. Worst case senario you could wind up paying more. Administering such a system isn't cheap especially with the requirement to verify claims...