used countless unlocked phones with my cingular plan that I never purchased from them, and they were never aware I owned.
Technically, GSM providers do know whether you use the original phone. Each handset has an identification number (the IMEI number) that you usually can retrieve by punching in the code *#06#. The phone sends the IMEI number to the network whenever it is switched on. The provider can - in theory - use the IMEI information to block stolen phones or to ensure that SIMs are only used with the original handset. AFAIK not much is done with the IMEI numbers over here in the Netherlands, apart from an occasional experiment to flood stolen handsets with text messages "This phone is stolen" and to prove that a suspect was at the place of a crime when he thought he was smart by changing the SIM chip.
why not just use two mics, one to record the ambient noise (positioned away from the voice mic) the other to record the voice (headset) then as you have two signals just subtract the ambient noise signal from the heaset signal
That won't work. For recognizable speech, you need frequencies up to 4 kHz, that is wavelengths down to 8.5 cm (3.3 inch for the metrically challenged). If the mics are just half that distance apart, then the phase difference will turn your substraction into an addition for that particular frequency.
Of course, you could use a direction-sensitive microphone, which basically contains a noise cancellation mechanism built into the cartridge which filters out sounds that come from behind and amplifies frontal sounds. But most simple headset microphones are not directional, because they have other disadvantages: they are slightly more expensive, usually bulkier, highly sensitive to contact vibrations from cable handling, they boost bass frequencies when placed close to the sound source, you need to align them correctly, and so on.
ANY evidence whatsoever that MSN's search results are less accessible to the blind?
If I use Opera's "ignore author style" mode, it seems that the MSN search homepage is reasonably clean. It's just that the search box doesn't appear earlier than after about 8 pages of links for shopping, news, sports, money, and so on, even though in the formatted version, the search box is near the top of the page. Both in Yahoo Search and the standard Google search, the search box is quite close to the logical top of the page.
I think you have been taking my comment too seriously.:) I pulled the numbers out of my hat, but a popular non-tech site I maintain has 96% Windows, 85% MSIE, 11% FF. For another site which is has a few popular LaTeX pages it is more like 70, 44, 37%, but let's face it, this is not representative for the general population.
imagine if every CPU screwed up 10% of the time, and applications like word processors and mail clients had to have 30% more code written to work around the bugs in CPUs.
You would be making a fuss about useless ideal standards. If 90% of the market is running this XYZ processor, then it is the de facto standard.:)
Yes, they paid the 497 in full back in 2004.. Quote: [EC spokesman] Mamer indicated that it was not unusual for companies to pay cash to cover such a penalty, and said about half of all organizations paying fines to the EC do the same.
I had no problems booking a ticket for the a german ICE
Yes, of course you can buy a ticket ten minutes before the train leaves. But you would probably have paid a different price if you had bought the ticket a week in advance. The German railways have 25% price reduction if you book at least 3 days in advance, and 50% if it is a return trip with a weekend inbetween. On many long-distance trains you need a seat reservation (you don't want to risk having to stand for 4 hours in a crowded train, do you?).
The Thalys high-speed train which goes from Netherlands to Paris has various rates with a factor 3 price difference. The cheapest rate is non-refundable if you cancel, and there are only a limited number of seats. A similar thing holds for the Swedish long-distance trains. I don't know about other countries in Europe.
Of course, nothing beats the intransparency of the airlines, that are allowed to advertise with "only 25 euros to city XXX". When you try too book, you discover that you have to book 2 months in advance, and that they charge 50 euros in additional fees.
on the best of the Japanese and European high-speed systems. (...) quiet (and the ability to change cars to get away from screaming babies), (...) and no need to pay outrageous change/cancel fees.
Too bad for you, in long-distance high-speed trains in Europe you usually need to reserve seats and the pricing system is as intransparent as the one used in air travel (cancellation fees, price depending on booking time and day of the week). After all, they are competing with the airline companies.
I can't imagine turning a bunch of neophytes loose with FrontPage (...) How did you ever get that to work out?
Well, I gave them a template and explained to them that they should only use the basic h1, h2, p, b, i tags and a couple of divs for figures. I made a stylesheet that would display every span or font element in ugly red letters to discourage them from sneaking in those forbidden tags.:-) I had to run the pages through a bunch of perl scripts anyway to generate a table of contents and other links.
It was more a problem to get the content in the first place. You know, many scientists don't give PR a high priority. As you can understand, nobody was bothered about the change in layout. Also not everybody wanted to touch Frontpage. I think I ended up hand-formatting quite a few texts from MS-Word documents, which was much faster than removing Word's HTML output.
Surgeons and CEOs can and will understand the use of <H1-6>, <strong> <div class="sidebar">, and so on.
Really? So you let them edit raw html? I once had to setup a website of a university department, where each researcher had to write a page about ongoing research. No way I could get them to do that, so I ended up letting them use frontpage (at least it's better than Word for this purpose), and then hand-editing it myself after filtering out the crap that Frontpage produces.
[Immigration laws] Unless you live in the EU, not very good, I'm afraid
Really? I have lived in Sweden for a few years and in science it is trivial to hire someone from outside the EU. The essential part is that the job agreement (for a job requiring a higher education) should be made in advance, so you can't just come to Sweden and start looking for a job.
it is hard to tell 'stoner hemp' and 'non-stoner hemp' apart.
Fiber hemp is cultivated to make long unbranched stems (like 3 meters high). THC Hemp is cultivated to be strongly branched, and lower, since it is the ends of the stems where the THC-rich flowers are.
Moreover, the THC comes from unpollinated female flowers. Putting the hemp in the middle of a field containing pollen-rich male plants is a surefire way to destroy the 'stoner hemp' harvest, as well as any illegal cannabis farm in a radius of several kilometers.:-)
I find it ironic that someone would ask slashdot about writing, given the overall level of literacy here,
I suppose that you mean that the literacy is substandard here? I would rather claim the opposite, especially when I read at treshold 2 or 3. Yes, there is the occasional it's/its/loose/lose mistake, but the vast majority of up-moderated posts is written well (both in grammar and in bringing across the message). I have proofread quite a few scientific manuscripts, most of them written by non-native speakers, and the average 2+ slashdot post is written far better. (I've also proofread manuscript by a native British guy whose grammar was fine, but whose desire to sound eloquent made it very hard to understand what he actually wanted to say).
If you are routinely reading everything at treshold -1, it looks like you have a bit too much spare time.;-)
but you have to subscribe to this service? which implies, to me, that you pay a fee (monthly/yearly). even if you don't use it.
For the Dutch Greenwheels, the cheapest subscription (with higher hourly rates) is €5 per month, which is close enough to "free" for me. I wonder why they bother anyway.
Cancer levels are something like 100 times background levels.
Since normally something like 1 in 4 persons will get some form of cancer during their life, this number cannot be true, unless you are only referring to certain rare types of cancer.
I googled for you and found:
Childhood leukaemia around processing plants such as Sellafield was claimed to have increased by a factor 14. [ref]
The normal incidence rate for above disease is about 50 per million children per year [PDF], i.e. a very small number. Ten times a small number is still a small number and the numbers are still debated for only having a marginal statistical significance (how many children live in the neighborhood of Sellafield?)
Sellafield used to -deliberately- dump radioactive waste directly into the sea. (ref). I suppose this is not the case in modern reprocessing plants.
As a result I'm forced to configure my web server to send text/html as MIME type, causing all the other browsers to interpret the document as HTML 4 instead of XHTML.
That's not necessary, that's what the "Accept" HTTP header is for. Put this or something similar in your.htaccess:
Slashdot's editorial quality has degraded in the last few years so much that I am thinking about deleting it from my bookmarks.
Calm down... Most people come to slashdot for the comments. The articles themselves only serve as a starting point for a discussion, which is often valuable since there are always people like you who really know what they're talking about.
What I do is keep one battery for daily usage and one for when I care about long life.
Lithium ion batteries deteriorate over time (20% per year) even if you don't use them, so this strategy is of limited use. The best way to store the other one is in the refrigerator, charged at 40% of the maximum capacity. See wikipedia.
The fundamental problems associated with young drivers are not that they're young, but that they are inexperienced.
Then why do insurance statistics show that it's mainly young males that get involved in traffic accidents? Do female drivers become experienced right after they take the exam? I'd say it's obvious that males, especially young ones, are more likely to take risks.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, you might be lucky enough that new images are taken right in this 2-week window, but don't bet on it.
Of course, you could use a direction-sensitive microphone, which basically contains a noise cancellation mechanism built into the cartridge which filters out sounds that come from behind and amplifies frontal sounds. But most simple headset microphones are not directional, because they have other disadvantages: they are slightly more expensive, usually bulkier, highly sensitive to contact vibrations from cable handling, they boost bass frequencies when placed close to the sound source, you need to align them correctly, and so on.
I think you have been taking my comment too seriously. :) I pulled the numbers out of my hat, but a popular non-tech site I maintain has 96% Windows, 85% MSIE, 11% FF. For another site which is has a few popular LaTeX pages it is more like 70, 44, 37%, but let's face it, this is not representative for the general population.
Don't bite the trolls.
The Thalys high-speed train which goes from Netherlands to Paris has various rates with a factor 3 price difference. The cheapest rate is non-refundable if you cancel, and there are only a limited number of seats. A similar thing holds for the Swedish long-distance trains. I don't know about other countries in Europe.
Of course, nothing beats the intransparency of the airlines, that are allowed to advertise with "only 25 euros to city XXX". When you try too book, you discover that you have to book 2 months in advance, and that they charge 50 euros in additional fees.
It was more a problem to get the content in the first place. You know, many scientists don't give PR a high priority. As you can understand, nobody was bothered about the change in layout. Also not everybody wanted to touch Frontpage. I think I ended up hand-formatting quite a few texts from MS-Word documents, which was much faster than removing Word's HTML output.
Really? I have lived in Sweden for a few years and in science it is trivial to hire someone from outside the EU. The essential part is that the job agreement (for a job requiring a higher education) should be made in advance, so you can't just come to Sweden and start looking for a job.
Fiber hemp is cultivated to make long unbranched stems (like 3 meters high). THC Hemp is cultivated to be strongly branched, and lower, since it is the ends of the stems where the THC-rich flowers are.
Moreover, the THC comes from unpollinated female flowers. Putting the hemp in the middle of a field containing pollen-rich male plants is a surefire way to destroy the 'stoner hemp' harvest, as well as any illegal cannabis farm in a radius of several kilometers. :-)
I suppose that you mean that the literacy is substandard here? I would rather claim the opposite, especially when I read at treshold 2 or 3. Yes, there is the occasional it's/its/loose/lose mistake, but the vast majority of up-moderated posts is written well (both in grammar and in bringing across the message). I have proofread quite a few scientific manuscripts, most of them written by non-native speakers, and the average 2+ slashdot post is written far better. (I've also proofread manuscript by a native British guy whose grammar was fine, but whose desire to sound eloquent made it very hard to understand what he actually wanted to say).
If you are routinely reading everything at treshold -1, it looks like you have a bit too much spare time. ;-)
For the Dutch Greenwheels, the cheapest subscription (with higher hourly rates) is €5 per month, which is close enough to "free" for me. I wonder why they bother anyway.
Since normally something like 1 in 4 persons will get some form of cancer during their life, this number cannot be true, unless you are only referring to certain rare types of cancer.
I googled for you and found:
Huh, this calls for pranks to lock hundreds of legitimate car owners out of their cars on a parking lot. :-)
Hmm, seems that my whois client doesn't know where to ask for EU domains...
That's not necessary, that's what the "Accept" HTTP header is for. Put this or something similar in your .htaccess:
Calm down... Most people come to slashdot for the comments. The articles themselves only serve as a starting point for a discussion, which is often valuable since there are always people like you who really know what they're talking about.
Lithium ion batteries deteriorate over time (20% per year) even if you don't use them, so this strategy is of limited use. The best way to store the other one is in the refrigerator, charged at 40% of the maximum capacity. See wikipedia.
Then why do insurance statistics show that it's mainly young males that get involved in traffic accidents? Do female drivers become experienced right after they take the exam? I'd say it's obvious that males, especially young ones, are more likely to take risks.