"And, in a cruelly ironic twist, everything else changed but the d-pad is still split... because Nintendo has a patent on a 4-way cross controller."
"Had." The patent expired before the release of the Dreamcast (and, of course, the PS2), Which is why the Dreamcast controller had one.
Of course, Sony couldn't be bothered with updating the DS2 over the DS, so instead focused on the flop that was pressure-sensitive buttons instead of a new D-pad.
"I post news to indymedia and I would not sell to papers. Also, a lot of papers wouldn't touch 98% of the articles on indymedia because they don't follow their corporate lines and would damage their sponsorship from other companies."
The whole concept of "journalistic privilege" relies entirely on "The Man" telling people who does and who does not warrant this privilege. As soon as you start applying a double standard, there has to be someone in place to define that standard and hand out such privileges. Medical, spousal and legal privileges all rely on state licensing boards to decide who gets that privilege, and that's all but literally true for journalistic privileges as well.
So either IM takes the egalitarian approach and asks for no special so-called "free speech" privileges beyond what the average person gets, or IM has to start behaving like those corporate entities you denegrate in order to qualify for that privilege.
As an aside, it seems to me that jounalistic privilege is less a matter of "freedom of speech" so much as "freedom from responsiblity for what is said." I don't know how things work in the UK, but here in the US the only people who truly have that sort of protection according to the constitution are memebers of Congress (art I, sec 6, clause 1), and even that only applies to things said during session.
"At most all they need to do is mirror the drive,"
That still requires access to the original data in a controlled environment.
"In the previous case all they really needed was the cooperation of Rackspace in supplying the needed data."
Um... NO! Welcome to the World of Law, where claims of evidence-tampering is more than enough to make or break a criminal case. In this situation, you do not let a third party touch the evidence in any way, shape or form, instead making very measured and well-documented steps in a controlled environment.
"Why don't they just dust it where it is?"
Possible != feasable. On-the-spot dusting is usually reserved for cases where the object being dusted is immovable (say, a wall). And even in those cases, in order to create the required controlled environment, they order you out of the house and surround the place with police tape while they work, doing any dismantling that's needed on the spot. It's actually less of an inconvenience to the owner to have the item taken into police custody and examined off-site.
"In any case, as per above, this particular case is more like they impounded your typewriter, your desk, everything in it, all of your files and all of your customer's files."
Only if your typewriter and desk are inexplicably welded to your filing cabinet.
I admit that I don't know what Sony's current offerings look like now, but I'm typing this on a Vaio running off of a 900 MHz Duron.
I got it after deciding my home would be "Intel free" after learning I couldn't put a modified K6 chip into an Intel motherboard because it wasn't GenuineIntel and the board refused to boot.
Personally, I like the idea of pursuing more creative ideas than more burdensome legislation, the government telling me to "buck up and take it." Especially when the legislation you're asking for is from the same folks that gave us USA PATRIOT.
Because it's easier to convince people to let you put a bajillion microsatellites into orbit than it is to convince them to let you build another nuclear power plant.
"(you can also replace ft/in by 12, yd/ft by 3...)
Yes, you can. The difference is that, in SI, you must. The SI standard for length is the meter and only the meter, and units that want to stay within the bounds of SI have to be based soley on the meter (and not the centimeter, lest you start using CGS units, which are just as frowned upon as feet and pounds).
In US units, there's no rule saying that you can't use inches of wall thickness and square feet of wall area in the same unit name, avoiding the cancelling out of like units (unless you really want to invoke the conversion factor). There is no One True Unit of Length that must be preferred in all instances.
Similarly, in energy transfer, in the US you can talk about Btu/s, Btu/h, ft-lb/s or ft-lb/h, using whichever measure of energy is more convenient to your purposes (thermal or mechanical energy) and measured over whichever time interval you find most useful. In SI, there is only W. All energy must be J (kilowatt-hours are not allowed by SI) and all time intervals must be s (other time units are allowed on their own, but not in unit definitions).
Neither. The US uses the "short" ton of 2000 lb. Everybody (US or otherwise) tends to write 1000 kg as "tonne" and the people who might have used the imperial ("long") ton of 2240 lb are no longer allowed to.
The abbreviations of units based on proper names (K, J, W, N) are capitalized, but when spelled out they start with a lower-case letter (kelvin, joule, watt, newton).
Then you're limiting you're usefulness in the workplace. Even if everything in the US (and exported to the US) was manufactured to SI specifications tomorrow, there's still older equipment to maintain. And if you refuse to figure out what size metric socket is needed to turn a 1/2-inch bolt because it's against your religion, that's one less application for HR to consider.
"Me, I would fire every engineer who would not use the metric system for calculations."
Straw man. I said in the sentence immediately before your selective quote that I used both in that particular course, just like just about every student in every engineering course in every US school.
"but thing is, it works,"
So do US units, to exactly the same degree. US units have been defined in terms of SI units since the Nineteenth Century.
The difference is in application. SI units tend to be tied to certain hidebound rules of use and stigmas that aren't attached to US units.
Power is always measured in watts, whether we're talking about cooling capacity or electricity. So does this mean if I plug a 5.25 kW air-conditioner into the wall that it will pull 5.25 kJ of heat out of the air per second, or that it will consume 5.25 kJ of electricity per second, or (even worse) both? In the US, you're allowed to use tons for cooling capacity even while still using watts for electrical power.
SI requires you to measure energy transfer per second, even if you're more interested in hours or days (which you are in HVAC). SI requires you to always use meters instead of centimeters in unit definitions (and cancel when able), leaving you with ambiguous units like "watt per meter-kelvin" instead of "btu-inch per hour-square foot-degree Rankine." When you're dealing with wall areas and insulation thicknesses and analyzing the heating and cooling requirements of a room over the course of hours, it's actually less work to use US units than SI units because of all the rules BIPM churns out on the proper use of SI.
"Very many troubles can be escaped this way."
Others are introduced by the insistence on one set of units over another. Was the Mars Orbiter lost because the manufacturer didn't use SI, or was it lost because NASA insisted on SI when every other customer in the aerospace industry insists on US units? The civillian world does things like measure airplane altitudes in units of 30.48 cm and ships cargo in containers 12.192 m in length because demanding that everything be done in SI would cause "very many troubles."
SI vs US is ultimately arbitrary. Both have advantages and disadvantages. But demanding that everybody in the world use SI in all instances involves as much hubris as demanding everybody in the world speak English in all instances.
" but last time I checked, a nine degree Fahrenheit difference was a difference of five degrees Celsius,"
... which means 10 is 5 5/9, rounding up to 6. Guess I didn't use the word "about" enough times for you.
But hey, if you really wanna get anal, do it right.
"assuming that 273 K = 32 degF,"
32 degrees Fahrenheit is 273.15 kelvin.
"The temperatures chosen were freezing and boiling of water at 1 atm pressure, in case anyone didn't know."
At 101 325 Pa, water boils at 373.124 kelvin. Celsius/= centigrade. The freezing point is also flakey, but not within three decimal places at least. This is why all modern temperature scales are pegged to the triple point (273.16 K)instead of trying to correlate two data points that move around with respect to each other.
"The correct Fahrenheit boiling point of water (at 1 atm) is 212 degF.)"
Try 211.953 degrees Fahrenheit.
Oh, and the first letter of SI units (like kelvin) is never capitalized.
Meh. There's a reason why I turned off the bonuses, and I decided to respond to the usual "US units are t3h suxx0rs!/. is too US-centric!" bitchings before they started.:)
"Ton" here refers to a "ton of cooling," a measure of power. It was originally intended to mean "the power required to melt one ton of ice in 24 hours." Since that varies based on a bunch of conditions, it was pegged at 12,000 Btu/h.
When they changed the definition of "calorie" to mean 4.1868 J, converting Celsius to Fahrenheit and grams to pounds gives us a conversion factor of 1 ton of cooling being exactly 3 516.852 842 066 7 W.
In other words, each a/c unit is about 5.25 kW of cooling each, or 10.5 kW total.
Oh, and 83 degrees Fahrenheit is about 301 kelvin and a ten-degree Fahrenheit difference is a difference of 6 kelvin.
(According to my old HVAC prof, there's been little to no progress in "metricizing" the industry in the US. Having used both systems in his course, I'd say I prefer US units, if only because the unit descriptions on things like insulative properties make more sense when the units for thickness and area don't naturally cancel each other out.)
(And it could be worse. Most home a/c units are labelled on the box as putting out x number of Btu, suggesting they're disposable.)
Disclaimer: I'm 2 time zones away from Utah and the closest I've been to it is 6 miles over it.
At any rate, I wouldn't say Utah is "dragging down the nation" all that much, if at all. You can't really talk about Utah without talking about Mormons, but my experience is that, while they may be quirky and even a little annoying at times, they're nowhere near as vitriolic as Evangelicals in general and Baptists in particular.
Part of it has to do with history, I think: other than sending out missionaries on bicycles, Mormons have learned the hard way to keep to themselves. Baptists may be up in arms about a government conspiracy out to get them when they can't put the Ten Commandments in a courthouse, but I haven't seen the US Army shoot at them yet. They also haven't been forced to alter their religious teachings in order to be considered for statehood.
(I'm partly sympathetic, but I'm mostly just ashamed of my government w/r/t Mormons.)
Even on television they seem far more sedate in pushing their religion than your average group of Baptists. They don't start out with threats of damnation, they just want to start by mailing you a book.
Another poster mentioned Senator Hatch, but let's face it: it takes 51 senators to get a bad bill through, and Hatch is only one man. You can't blame all those bad votes on Utah or Mormons. However, Baptists have the entire Bible Belt to play with (with the help of some sympathetic Catholics in Louisiana).
At any rate, if you're looking for someone to blame, I'd look elsewhere for now. Another poster mentioned Washington, D. C.
Conspiratorialist trolls have already pointed out that the missing top stripe represents the "First State," Delaware. Its absence represents the anti-corporatist feelings of Slashdot, and Delaware tends to be a tax haven for big businesses to incorporate in.
So long as you're still within the US, I've got four words for you: "full faith and credit." If that phrase can be used to legally compel sympathizers to return fugitive slaves, it can be used to jail spammers.
Personally, I'm using EarthLink on top of bright house.
At any rate, we don't know what the contract terms EarthLink has in place with the to-the-curb providers and how they may differ from the terms individual users get. It very well may be that cable providers give EarthLink customers some sort of preferential treatment.
We also don't know about any differences there might be in the networks above the physical layer to the end-user.
"because we don't have to worry about not saying negative things about our sponsors, unlike a magazine like PC World."... he says below a Microsoft ad...
Slashdot Mirror
"There are other things you can buy in Manhattan, you know!"
:)
Yeah, but most Slashdotters wouldn't even know what to do with a "lady of the eveing."
"And, in a cruelly ironic twist, everything else changed but the d-pad is still split ... because Nintendo has a patent on a 4-way cross controller."
"Had." The patent expired before the release of the Dreamcast (and, of course, the PS2), Which is why the Dreamcast controller had one.
Of course, Sony couldn't be bothered with updating the DS2 over the DS, so instead focused on the flop that was pressure-sensitive buttons instead of a new D-pad.
"the Atari 2600 joystick was still a lot of fun"
Yeah, when they worked.
I did like the paddle controllers, though. Warlords is the SSB:M of the 1980's.
"DIE WESLEY DIE!"
That's German for "The Wesley the," right?
"I post news to indymedia and I would not sell to papers. Also, a lot of papers wouldn't touch 98% of the articles on indymedia because they don't follow their corporate lines and would damage their sponsorship from other companies."
The whole concept of "journalistic privilege" relies entirely on "The Man" telling people who does and who does not warrant this privilege. As soon as you start applying a double standard, there has to be someone in place to define that standard and hand out such privileges. Medical, spousal and legal privileges all rely on state licensing boards to decide who gets that privilege, and that's all but literally true for journalistic privileges as well.
So either IM takes the egalitarian approach and asks for no special so-called "free speech" privileges beyond what the average person gets, or IM has to start behaving like those corporate entities you denegrate in order to qualify for that privilege.
As an aside, it seems to me that jounalistic privilege is less a matter of "freedom of speech" so much as "freedom from responsiblity for what is said." I don't know how things work in the UK, but here in the US the only people who truly have that sort of protection according to the constitution are memebers of Congress (art I, sec 6, clause 1), and even that only applies to things said during session.
"At most all they need to do is mirror the drive,"
That still requires access to the original data in a controlled environment.
"In the previous case all they really needed was the cooperation of Rackspace in supplying the needed data."
Um... NO! Welcome to the World of Law, where claims of evidence-tampering is more than enough to make or break a criminal case. In this situation, you do not let a third party touch the evidence in any way, shape or form, instead making very measured and well-documented steps in a controlled environment.
"Why don't they just dust it where it is?"
Possible != feasable. On-the-spot dusting is usually reserved for cases where the object being dusted is immovable (say, a wall). And even in those cases, in order to create the required controlled environment, they order you out of the house and surround the place with police tape while they work, doing any dismantling that's needed on the spot. It's actually less of an inconvenience to the owner to have the item taken into police custody and examined off-site.
"In any case, as per above, this particular case is more like they impounded your typewriter, your desk, everything in it, all of your files and all of your customer's files."
Only if your typewriter and desk are inexplicably welded to your filing cabinet.
"Her Majesty's Pleasure"
If that's what gets her off then she's one kinky broad.
"Viao A64 based systems"
I admit that I don't know what Sony's current offerings look like now, but I'm typing this on a Vaio running off of a 900 MHz Duron.
I got it after deciding my home would be "Intel free" after learning I couldn't put a modified K6 chip into an Intel motherboard because it wasn't GenuineIntel and the board refused to boot.
"Lucky you to get that stunning nimpho supermodel as your GF!"
And yet, for some reason, she wants to have the lights off...
Personally, I like the idea of pursuing more creative ideas than more burdensome legislation, the government telling me to "buck up and take it." Especially when the legislation you're asking for is from the same folks that gave us USA PATRIOT.
Because it's easier to convince people to let you put a bajillion microsatellites into orbit than it is to convince them to let you build another nuclear power plant.
"(you can also replace ft/in by 12, yd/ft by 3...)
Yes, you can. The difference is that, in SI, you must. The SI standard for length is the meter and only the meter, and units that want to stay within the bounds of SI have to be based soley on the meter (and not the centimeter, lest you start using CGS units, which are just as frowned upon as feet and pounds).
In US units, there's no rule saying that you can't use inches of wall thickness and square feet of wall area in the same unit name, avoiding the cancelling out of like units (unless you really want to invoke the conversion factor). There is no One True Unit of Length that must be preferred in all instances.
Similarly, in energy transfer, in the US you can talk about Btu/s, Btu/h, ft-lb/s or ft-lb/h, using whichever measure of energy is more convenient to your purposes (thermal or mechanical energy) and measured over whichever time interval you find most useful. In SI, there is only W. All energy must be J (kilowatt-hours are not allowed by SI) and all time intervals must be s (other time units are allowed on their own, but not in unit definitions).
Neither. The US uses the "short" ton of 2000 lb. Everybody (US or otherwise) tends to write 1000 kg as "tonne" and the people who might have used the imperial ("long") ton of 2240 lb are no longer allowed to.
The abbreviations of units based on proper names (K, J, W, N) are capitalized, but when spelled out they start with a lower-case letter (kelvin, joule, watt, newton).
"Eek, I wouldn't do that, ever."
Then you're limiting you're usefulness in the workplace. Even if everything in the US (and exported to the US) was manufactured to SI specifications tomorrow, there's still older equipment to maintain. And if you refuse to figure out what size metric socket is needed to turn a 1/2-inch bolt because it's against your religion, that's one less application for HR to consider.
"Me, I would fire every engineer who would not use the metric system for calculations."
Straw man. I said in the sentence immediately before your selective quote that I used both in that particular course, just like just about every student in every engineering course in every US school.
"but thing is, it works,"
So do US units, to exactly the same degree. US units have been defined in terms of SI units since the Nineteenth Century.
The difference is in application. SI units tend to be tied to certain hidebound rules of use and stigmas that aren't attached to US units.
Power is always measured in watts, whether we're talking about cooling capacity or electricity. So does this mean if I plug a 5.25 kW air-conditioner into the wall that it will pull 5.25 kJ of heat out of the air per second, or that it will consume 5.25 kJ of electricity per second, or (even worse) both? In the US, you're allowed to use tons for cooling capacity even while still using watts for electrical power.
SI requires you to measure energy transfer per second, even if you're more interested in hours or days (which you are in HVAC). SI requires you to always use meters instead of centimeters in unit definitions (and cancel when able), leaving you with ambiguous units like "watt per meter-kelvin" instead of "btu-inch per hour-square foot-degree Rankine." When you're dealing with wall areas and insulation thicknesses and analyzing the heating and cooling requirements of a room over the course of hours, it's actually less work to use US units than SI units because of all the rules BIPM churns out on the proper use of SI.
"Very many troubles can be escaped this way."
Others are introduced by the insistence on one set of units over another. Was the Mars Orbiter lost because the manufacturer didn't use SI, or was it lost because NASA insisted on SI when every other customer in the aerospace industry insists on US units? The civillian world does things like measure airplane altitudes in units of 30.48 cm and ships cargo in containers 12.192 m in length because demanding that everything be done in SI would cause "very many troubles."
SI vs US is ultimately arbitrary. Both have advantages and disadvantages. But demanding that everybody in the world use SI in all instances involves as much hubris as demanding everybody in the world speak English in all instances.
... which means 10 is 5 5/9, rounding up to 6. Guess I didn't use the word "about" enough times for you.
/= centigrade. The freezing point is also flakey, but not within three decimal places at least. This is why all modern temperature scales are pegged to the triple point (273.16 K)instead of trying to correlate two data points that move around with respect to each other.
But hey, if you really wanna get anal, do it right.
"assuming that 273 K = 32 degF,"
32 degrees Fahrenheit is 273.15 kelvin.
"The temperatures chosen were freezing and boiling of water at 1 atm pressure, in case anyone didn't know."
At 101 325 Pa, water boils at 373.124 kelvin. Celsius
"The correct Fahrenheit boiling point of water (at 1 atm) is 212 degF.)"
Try 211.953 degrees Fahrenheit.
Oh, and the first letter of SI units (like kelvin) is never capitalized.
Meh. There's a reason why I turned off the bonuses, and I decided to respond to the usual "US units are t3h suxx0rs! /. is too US-centric!" bitchings before they started. :)
"(including two 1.5 ton ACs)"
"Ton" here refers to a "ton of cooling," a measure of power. It was originally intended to mean "the power required to melt one ton of ice in 24 hours." Since that varies based on a bunch of conditions, it was pegged at 12,000 Btu/h.
When they changed the definition of "calorie" to mean 4.1868 J, converting Celsius to Fahrenheit and grams to pounds gives us a conversion factor of 1 ton of cooling being exactly 3 516.852 842 066 7 W.
In other words, each a/c unit is about 5.25 kW of cooling each, or 10.5 kW total.
Oh, and 83 degrees Fahrenheit is about 301 kelvin and a ten-degree Fahrenheit difference is a difference of 6 kelvin.
(According to my old HVAC prof, there's been little to no progress in "metricizing" the industry in the US. Having used both systems in his course, I'd say I prefer US units, if only because the unit descriptions on things like insulative properties make more sense when the units for thickness and area don't naturally cancel each other out.)
(And it could be worse. Most home a/c units are labelled on the box as putting out x number of Btu, suggesting they're disposable.)
(Well, they probably are...)
Disclaimer: I'm 2 time zones away from Utah and the closest I've been to it is 6 miles over it.
At any rate, I wouldn't say Utah is "dragging down the nation" all that much, if at all. You can't really talk about Utah without talking about Mormons, but my experience is that, while they may be quirky and even a little annoying at times, they're nowhere near as vitriolic as Evangelicals in general and Baptists in particular.
Part of it has to do with history, I think: other than sending out missionaries on bicycles, Mormons have learned the hard way to keep to themselves. Baptists may be up in arms about a government conspiracy out to get them when they can't put the Ten Commandments in a courthouse, but I haven't seen the US Army shoot at them yet. They also haven't been forced to alter their religious teachings in order to be considered for statehood.
(I'm partly sympathetic, but I'm mostly just ashamed of my government w/r/t Mormons.)
Even on television they seem far more sedate in pushing their religion than your average group of Baptists. They don't start out with threats of damnation, they just want to start by mailing you a book.
Another poster mentioned Senator Hatch, but let's face it: it takes 51 senators to get a bad bill through, and Hatch is only one man. You can't blame all those bad votes on Utah or Mormons. However, Baptists have the entire Bible Belt to play with (with the help of some sympathetic Catholics in Louisiana).
At any rate, if you're looking for someone to blame, I'd look elsewhere for now. Another poster mentioned Washington, D. C.
Conspiratorialist trolls have already pointed out that the missing top stripe represents the "First State," Delaware. Its absence represents the anti-corporatist feelings of Slashdot, and Delaware tends to be a tax haven for big businesses to incorporate in.
So long as you're still within the US, I've got four words for you: "full faith and credit." If that phrase can be used to legally compel sympathizers to return fugitive slaves, it can be used to jail spammers.
Personally, I'm using EarthLink on top of bright house.
At any rate, we don't know what the contract terms EarthLink has in place with the to-the-curb providers and how they may differ from the terms individual users get. It very well may be that cable providers give EarthLink customers some sort of preferential treatment.
We also don't know about any differences there might be in the networks above the physical layer to the end-user.
"including the tech teams of last years presidential campaigns."
Will they be checking for weapons at the door?
"because we don't have to worry about not saying negative things about our sponsors, unlike a magazine like PC World." ... he says below a Microsoft ad...
"As of September 2004, more than 50% of US internet users have broadband (including DSL) at home."
Per user, or per household?
Does "home" include college dorms?
Same with Windows XP, and the resolution of 1024x768 and above.
Per household or per workstation? Just home or also offices?
"and the resolution of 1024x768 and above."
Per household or per television in use?