I find this personal mobility devices pathetic for able bodied people.
Why aren't we satisfied with walking anymore? I will be walking 30 minutes twice a day from September.
The only issue is boredom and wasting of time. I will counter this with podcasts.
Walking for exercise in your "spare" time is a good idea, if you HAVE any spare time. Quite a few people don't these days, especially on a work day. Not to mention, an hour spent walking 5 miles to work could be better utilized as ((10 minutes of more intense physical exercise + 5 minutes of driving to work in a car) OR (15 minutes bicycling to work)) + 45 minutes of charging someone $10-$400 an hour for doing actual profitable work.
My business-class FIOS in Seattle is 20/20 with a static IP. I run servers on it. No caps. No limits. About $130 a month. That's like $6.50 a megabit. I can't even get Cogent for that in a carrier-neutral facility unless I commit to a gigabit for 2-3 years. The hardware at the house seems to be clocked for 256mbps and everyone I've talked to says the fiber they use for drops is theoretically good for a gigabit. (no idea what's out there on the road lead though)
I currently have analog Comcast cable, but they're forcing the digital transition next month. Just did some shopping and in the long run FIOS is cheaper and has more than twice as many channels, so I'll be telling Comcast to go piss up a rope in a week or so.
So how much was the 200 billion in imaginary money worth to the insanely retarded people in the real world who forked over real world cash for it?
The Darwin awards are a grand invention but they can only be awarded posthumously. We need something to mock world-class (but less-lethal) stupidity like this as well. Maybe the "PT Barnum Awards". They could be given out in televised public ceremonies and the "winner" plastered all over the internet for the amusement of the less-stupid.
Additionally, in most places there were only 3 broadcast TV stations, 4 if you were lucky enough to have a PBS affiliate in town. Cable was just getting started. If your TV had a remote, it was probably a "clicker" that struck a steel bar creating a harmonic tone that triggered an audio receiver in the TV. A lot of people you knew still had a black & white set.
Rock music on FM radio was pretty new. Not many years earlier, FM was all classical and "old people" music.
There was only one telephone company and one phone book. It was illegal to plug anything into the phone system that they didn't build and provide to you. There were no answering machines or fax machines.
Only the wealthy "jet set" rode on airplanes.
Gas was 33 cents a gallon. Your family car weighed at least 2 tons and had a V-8 engine with 300 horsepower or more. Premium gasoline was 102-104 octane as measured by the old method.
Comic books were 15 cents, having jumped up from the 12 cents of the Silver Age at the end of the 60's. Pretty much everyone read LIFE Magazine, which was mostly pictures and articles about the Viet Nam war
Solder was 60% lead, and you could roll your own electronics with parts from Radio Shack or a half dozen electronics mail-order catalogs.
Most of the pennies in circulation were solid copper and you could still occasionally find a quarter, 50 cent piece, or dollar coin in your pocket change that was solid silver. Old Canadian nickels had something like 8 flat sides and didn't work in US vending machines. They were being phased out but you still saw them now and then.
It cost 8 cents to mail a 1st-class letter.
Coke and Pepsi were made with cane sugar.
Young whippersnappers were ALWAYS on your lawn because there were no personal computers, cell phones, video games, MTV, or microwaveable hot pockets to keep them indoors and out of sight.
I just drove from Seattle to Las Vegas and back (I-5 down, 99 and I-5 on the way up - about 1300 miles each way). I have T-mobile. I don't recall losing voice signal on my G-1 at any point. My data connection dropped from 3g to Edge between cities but I had at least Edge on both my G-1 and my GC-89 card the entire trip. (probably spent 12 hours online)
I have a lot of spare drives (250/300/500) from my web hosting business because I rotate them out every couple of years. I found a 16-bay 4u case on ebay for chump change, grabbed some cheap Hipoint cards, and set to work building a backup storage array using software raid. As it turns out, the case was cheap because some of the caddy connections were sketchy, and of course the cheap cards would randomly "not see" a drive now and then. After spending way too much time troubleshooting and configuring things, I finally got it all set up and working. Had 4 TB of backup storage. Unfortunately, I never bothered to MEASURE the damned case, which turned out to be 26" deep. This conflicted somewhat with my 24" rack, especially when attempting to close the rear door.
Plan B: Garage sale with a 16-bay case and dozens of hard drives available. A D-link 321 NAS with built-in web server (for config), ftp, telnet, a 1gbps ethernet port, and a pair of WD 2 TB drives in RAID0. Roughly $500 for 4TB. It's barely larger than the 2 drives and I have it stashed in another building on the far end of my property. Honestly, DIY just isn't worth is sometimes.
... corn has been described as being "edible oil", due to it taking 2 calories of oil energy to create 1 calorie of corn energy.
Bullshit. For millions of years, corn (and its ancestors) grew happily in the wild, uncultivated earth with only sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide for sustenance. For thousands of years, up until the mid-20th century, it grew on cultivated land with the addition of animal waste as a fertilizer. Just because we currently use petroleum-enhanced fertilizers to increase yields and lessen the need for crop rotation does NOT mean that they are in any way "required".
...it takes 9 pounds of corn to make 1 pound of cow.
More bullshit. Cattle are currently fattened in feedlots using corn because it means higher profits from higher yield and more marbled (and therefore more expensive) muscle tissue. 100% natural-grass-fed cattle use up ZERO pounds of corn, and that's pretty much all they had to eat before they were domesticated.
While I'm at it, I'm getting really sick of the most egregious lies that keep getting trotted out around here regarding the amount of petroleum products that are "REQUIRED" by modern farm machinery to grow and process "natural" foods. Again, just because it's currently fashionable and economically desirable to do things that way does NOT make it MANDATORY. The vast majority of farm equipment runs on diesel fuel, which is easily replaced with biodiesel or alcohol. Stationary machinery that is currently powered directly by fossil fuels or with electricity generated using those same fuels are often in geographical areas where electricity can be economically generated by wind, solar, burning biomass, methane from waste processing, or nuclear. In fact, combines and tractors don't move very fast or very far. There's no reason they couldn't operate with a couple tons of batteries and hi-torque locomotive drives instead of those Cat & Cummins diesels
A lot of you seem to forget that there are vast stretches of farmland in the wide-open west that already have the majority of their power generated by nuclear and/or hydroelectric systems. In short, the only reason we aren't weaning ourselves off of "edible oil" is the greed and corruption of the US government (specifically farmbelt senators-for-sale), big agri-business, and especially the global petroleum cartels.
If an alien armada landed tomorrow and vacuumed out 100% of the oil and coal reserves on this planet, we'd suffer for a decade or two, probably losing a big chunk of the population to starvation and wars over food, but eventually we'd ramp back up using alternate energy sources and within a generation, Hummer would be a viable vehicle brand again (possibly as Electra-Hummer or something) and we'd all be right back to not giving a rat's ass about where energy came from or how much of it we're using.
If, as you say, they did produce sperm from a female, won't it only have chromosome pair XX? And if this is used to impregnate another female with chromosome pair XX, it will only produce females and no males. I think there might also be a chance of losing genetic diversity here.
The problem with a large percentage of the current batch of idiots trying to earn a living on the internet is that they provide nothing of value to the PUBLIC in return for their income. Their clients are the ad companies and YOU are the product. They entice you to their online properties with news, gossip, commentary, etc, but none of that is the product. It's simply bait. Their only purpose is to generate income. The content (like news) is secondary, and if they could sell ad space without any content at all, they would. They don't give a fuck about you or your interests beyond how you can be manipulated to click on ads. These kinds of sites are simply parasites on the network, exactly the way commercial broadcast networks (who operate under the same business model) are parasites on the public airwaves. I don't "owe" these money-grubbing MBA douchebags ANYTHING, which is why I use AdBlockPlus and have owned 4 Tivos for about a decade (before that, I time-shifted/skipped ads with VCRs).
I happen to generate 7 figures a year selling digital content on my 400+ websites that have NO external ads. I sell digital goods directly to a willing public and the datacenter, servers, and bandwidth are paid for out of the profits. I also host a number of sites (forums, blogs, free content, etc) that generate no income of any kind because they don't need to. The delivery resources are already paid for by the digital content I sell and the additional traffic generates more eyeballs for MY ads (simple images and standard href links) that are pimping MY products. It's a closed system, fully automated, uses no javascript, loads instantly, and I earn a living by providing goods to people who are actively seeking them out instead of whoring their eyeballs out to marketing middle-men.
Unfortunately, these vultures finance a lot of the commercial internet the same way junk mailers subsidize the US postal service, so they aren't going anywhere. I simply choose not to participate in their bullshit business model. I already pay thousands of $$$ per month for my bandwidth, so I don't owe anyone a fucking thing for what I do or where I go on the internet. If you can't earn a living from your "content" without selling 3rd-party advertising, then your business model sucks and you deserve to go bankrupt. Leave ecommerce to people who know what they are doing.
Windows update is often turned off by the user because the Windows OS is such an incredible, poorly-designed piece of shit that every trivial update REQUIRES a reboot. My Win2k/XP machines work 24/7 and all of them have ongoing open projects in various applications, active terminal windows with running process on my servers, local scheduled backup processes, and all kinds of other monitoring applications that CANNOT be shut down randomly because Windows decides it want to reboot itself every fucking day.
Microsoft could cure most of their security problems at the consumer level by simply fixing their junk OS so it can upgraded/updated as necessary without requiring a reboot for anything but kernel updates. I'd run automatic updates myself if they eliminated the possibility that my work would be lost or a critical application would be shut down for no good reason. Until that day comes, automatic updates stays OFF.
WTF are you talking about??? Terrestrial digital TV is 2-way. Lineup changes could be done in the set-top box at any time. Sophisticated billing systems at the head-end would take care of the paperwork. Satellite systems could simply call in via the customer's broadband or the internal dialup modem. If anything, call centers would employ FEWER people.
The G-1 has all the "killer apps" I need at the moment - Accuweather, Google Maps with GPS, an IP Cam viewer so I can monitor my security cams at home and at my datacenter, SSH client, voice recorder, handy tools like data conversions, a level, a ruler and of course the Magic 8-ball. The browser works for the kind of things I need every day - my MRTG graphs, logging into my switches, routers, and remote-reboot controllers. It doesn't do SlashDot for shit though...someone needs to work on that.
Seriously, anyone judging a smart phone based solely on the camera, eye-candy, and "gaming experience" is probably 12 years old. Mine is a tool to help me earn a living first, and a toy second.
Standard audio cassette tape travels at 1 7/8 ips (inches of tape per second past the heads) and is complete and total SHIT. No amount of DBS/Dolby "magic" and expensive playback electronics can fix that. Audio cassettes have the lowest fidelity of any analog format in history and only the mega-stoned could tolerate listening to them. 8-tracks ran at 3 3/4 ips. Twice as fast. That means twice the headroom, twice the high frequency information, and half the tape noise. Consumer reel-to-reel ran at 3 3/4 and 7 1/2 ips for another doubling of quality. Semi-pro machines ran at 7 1/2 and 15 ips. Pro machines ran at 15 and 30 ips. (at $200 per reel for 2" multitrack tape, studios didn't run at 30ips much, usually just for jazz and classical)
The number of heads above 3 had fuck-all to do with anything. Having separate heads for playback, recording, and erase allowed the magnetic gap to be optimized for a single task. Cassettes were 2-sided and expensive decks often had more heads but only so you didn't have to flip the tape or move the heads to play the other side. It was still a $100 saddle on a $10 horse.
Cassette tape is so insanely inferior to vinyl that I won't even dignify your comparison by responding. I'm guessing your only experience with a turntable involved mangled children's records on a battery-operated "record player" adorned with Disney characters.
Washington state hasn't had a sales tax on food since the 70's. A federal sales tax would need the same exemption if they want to avoid riots in the streets. The "poor" already pay taxes on most other retail sales plus a gazillion taxes on utilities and communications. They DON'T generally pay income taxes, but use the most tax-supported social services; welfare, medicaid, prisons/jails/courts/public defenders, public schools (because they breed like rabbits), rehab services, subsidized housing and transportation, etc.
Why SHOULDN'T they start making at least a token payment towards their own upkeep? The poor who are willing to steal and rob when they run out of money are going to do so anyway whether it's the taxman or their crack dealer who takes their last dollar. They're scum and there's no reason to even consider them, except when figuring out how many jail cells you need. The poor who have some kind of morality and work ethic will be driven to EARN more money or SPEND LESS money on non-essentials if they find they can't afford the things they need to get by.
This appears to be a low-voltage and flexible version of the electrostatic transducer, which was first prototyped around 90 years ago. Not NEW, just IMPROVED.
A friend had a set of Magnaplanars the size of doors back in the 70's. They sounded great with an additional low-frequency driver. (didn't call them subwoofers back then because the bottom octave didn't really exist yet in recordings - vinyl records were rolled off at 50hz to keep the phonograph needle from being kicked out of the record groove by subsonics)
Slashdot Mirror
I find this personal mobility devices pathetic for able bodied people.
Why aren't we satisfied with walking anymore? I will be walking 30 minutes twice a day from September.
The only issue is boredom and wasting of time. I will counter this with podcasts.
Walking for exercise in your "spare" time is a good idea, if you HAVE any spare time. Quite a few people don't these days, especially on a work day. Not to mention, an hour spent walking 5 miles to work could be better utilized as ((10 minutes of more intense physical exercise + 5 minutes of driving to work in a car) OR (15 minutes bicycling to work)) + 45 minutes of charging someone $10-$400 an hour for doing actual profitable work.
"Except" and "accept" are both homophonic (same sound)
Nonsense.
ACCEPT's sound was sort of ACDC-ish, but gayer.
EXCEPT is a whiny emo-pop-numetal band with a Flash website
My business-class FIOS in Seattle is 20/20 with a static IP. I run servers on it. No caps. No limits. About $130 a month. That's like $6.50 a megabit. I can't even get Cogent for that in a carrier-neutral facility unless I commit to a gigabit for 2-3 years. The hardware at the house seems to be clocked for 256mbps and everyone I've talked to says the fiber they use for drops is theoretically good for a gigabit. (no idea what's out there on the road lead though)
I currently have analog Comcast cable, but they're forcing the digital transition next month. Just did some shopping and in the long run FIOS is cheaper and has more than twice as many channels, so I'll be telling Comcast to go piss up a rope in a week or so.
So how much was the 200 billion in imaginary money worth to the insanely retarded people in the real world who forked over real world cash for it?
The Darwin awards are a grand invention but they can only be awarded posthumously. We need something to mock world-class (but less-lethal) stupidity like this as well. Maybe the "PT Barnum Awards". They could be given out in televised public ceremonies and the "winner" plastered all over the internet for the amusement of the less-stupid.
Additionally, in most places there were only 3 broadcast TV stations, 4 if you were lucky enough to have a PBS affiliate in town. Cable was just getting started. If your TV had a remote, it was probably a "clicker" that struck a steel bar creating a harmonic tone that triggered an audio receiver in the TV. A lot of people you knew still had a black & white set.
Rock music on FM radio was pretty new. Not many years earlier, FM was all classical and "old people" music.
There was only one telephone company and one phone book. It was illegal to plug anything into the phone system that they didn't build and provide to you. There were no answering machines or fax machines.
Only the wealthy "jet set" rode on airplanes.
Gas was 33 cents a gallon. Your family car weighed at least 2 tons and had a V-8 engine with 300 horsepower or more. Premium gasoline was 102-104 octane as measured by the old method.
Comic books were 15 cents, having jumped up from the 12 cents of the Silver Age at the end of the 60's. Pretty much everyone read LIFE Magazine, which was mostly pictures and articles about the Viet Nam war
Solder was 60% lead, and you could roll your own electronics with parts from Radio Shack or a half dozen electronics mail-order catalogs.
Most of the pennies in circulation were solid copper and you could still occasionally find a quarter, 50 cent piece, or dollar coin in your pocket change that was solid silver. Old Canadian nickels had something like 8 flat sides and didn't work in US vending machines. They were being phased out but you still saw them now and then.
It cost 8 cents to mail a 1st-class letter.
Coke and Pepsi were made with cane sugar.
Young whippersnappers were ALWAYS on your lawn because there were no personal computers, cell phones, video games, MTV, or microwaveable hot pockets to keep them indoors and out of sight.
I dunno...Bush 2 was the biggest cocksucker to ever sit in the Whitehouse.
I just drove from Seattle to Las Vegas and back (I-5 down, 99 and I-5 on the way up - about 1300 miles each way). I have T-mobile. I don't recall losing voice signal on my G-1 at any point. My data connection dropped from 3g to Edge between cities but I had at least Edge on both my G-1 and my GC-89 card the entire trip. (probably spent 12 hours online)
Just for reference:
Area of Sweden - 173,732 square miles
Area of USA - 3,537,441 square miles
Population of Sweden - around 9 million (2000 census)
Population of USA - around 282 million (2000 census)
Paved roads in Sweden - 61,000 miles
Paved roads in USA - 3,933,985 miles
These two countries can hardly be compared, considering their wildly different infrastructure expenditures and population densities.
I am here in Switzerland and our cleaning lady makes 39 CHF (about 35 USD) per hour! We can't find anything less.
Well, you could...you know...do your OWN fucking cleaning. Or pump out some kids and make THEM do it.
What happened to the can-do, damn-the-torpedoes attitude that got us to the moon?
Lawsuits and juries of idiots happened
I have a lot of spare drives (250/300/500) from my web hosting business because I rotate them out every couple of years. I found a 16-bay 4u case on ebay for chump change, grabbed some cheap Hipoint cards, and set to work building a backup storage array using software raid. As it turns out, the case was cheap because some of the caddy connections were sketchy, and of course the cheap cards would randomly "not see" a drive now and then. After spending way too much time troubleshooting and configuring things, I finally got it all set up and working. Had 4 TB of backup storage. Unfortunately, I never bothered to MEASURE the damned case, which turned out to be 26" deep. This conflicted somewhat with my 24" rack, especially when attempting to close the rear door.
Plan B: Garage sale with a 16-bay case and dozens of hard drives available. A D-link 321 NAS with built-in web server (for config), ftp, telnet, a 1gbps ethernet port, and a pair of WD 2 TB drives in RAID0. Roughly $500 for 4TB. It's barely larger than the 2 drives and I have it stashed in another building on the far end of my property. Honestly, DIY just isn't worth is sometimes.
... corn has been described as being "edible oil", due to it taking 2 calories of oil energy to create 1 calorie of corn energy.
Bullshit. For millions of years, corn (and its ancestors) grew happily in the wild, uncultivated earth with only sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide for sustenance. For thousands of years, up until the mid-20th century, it grew on cultivated land with the addition of animal waste as a fertilizer. Just because we currently use petroleum-enhanced fertilizers to increase yields and lessen the need for crop rotation does NOT mean that they are in any way "required".
...it takes 9 pounds of corn to make 1 pound of cow.
More bullshit. Cattle are currently fattened in feedlots using corn because it means higher profits from higher yield and more marbled (and therefore more expensive) muscle tissue. 100% natural-grass-fed cattle use up ZERO pounds of corn, and that's pretty much all they had to eat before they were domesticated.
While I'm at it, I'm getting really sick of the most egregious lies that keep getting trotted out around here regarding the amount of petroleum products that are "REQUIRED" by modern farm machinery to grow and process "natural" foods. Again, just because it's currently fashionable and economically desirable to do things that way does NOT make it MANDATORY. The vast majority of farm equipment runs on diesel fuel, which is easily replaced with biodiesel or alcohol. Stationary machinery that is currently powered directly by fossil fuels or with electricity generated using those same fuels are often in geographical areas where electricity can be economically generated by wind, solar, burning biomass, methane from waste processing, or nuclear. In fact, combines and tractors don't move very fast or very far. There's no reason they couldn't operate with a couple tons of batteries and hi-torque locomotive drives instead of those Cat & Cummins diesels
A lot of you seem to forget that there are vast stretches of farmland in the wide-open west that already have the majority of their power generated by nuclear and/or hydroelectric systems. In short, the only reason we aren't weaning ourselves off of "edible oil" is the greed and corruption of the US government (specifically farmbelt senators-for-sale), big agri-business, and especially the global petroleum cartels.
If an alien armada landed tomorrow and vacuumed out 100% of the oil and coal reserves on this planet, we'd suffer for a decade or two, probably losing a big chunk of the population to starvation and wars over food, but eventually we'd ramp back up using alternate energy sources and within a generation, Hummer would be a viable vehicle brand again (possibly as Electra-Hummer or something) and we'd all be right back to not giving a rat's ass about where energy came from or how much of it we're using.
Think of the beauty, the peace, the lesbo sex !!!
Think of civilization collapsing because of a spider....
If, as you say, they did produce sperm from a female, won't it only have chromosome pair XX? And if this is used to impregnate another female with chromosome pair XX, it will only produce females and no males.
I think there might also be a chance of losing genetic diversity here.
Don't you mean GENDER diversity?
The problem with a large percentage of the current batch of idiots trying to earn a living on the internet is that they provide nothing of value to the PUBLIC in return for their income. Their clients are the ad companies and YOU are the product. They entice you to their online properties with news, gossip, commentary, etc, but none of that is the product. It's simply bait. Their only purpose is to generate income. The content (like news) is secondary, and if they could sell ad space without any content at all, they would. They don't give a fuck about you or your interests beyond how you can be manipulated to click on ads. These kinds of sites are simply parasites on the network, exactly the way commercial broadcast networks (who operate under the same business model) are parasites on the public airwaves. I don't "owe" these money-grubbing MBA douchebags ANYTHING, which is why I use AdBlockPlus and have owned 4 Tivos for about a decade (before that, I time-shifted/skipped ads with VCRs).
I happen to generate 7 figures a year selling digital content on my 400+ websites that have NO external ads. I sell digital goods directly to a willing public and the datacenter, servers, and bandwidth are paid for out of the profits. I also host a number of sites (forums, blogs, free content, etc) that generate no income of any kind because they don't need to. The delivery resources are already paid for by the digital content I sell and the additional traffic generates more eyeballs for MY ads (simple images and standard href links) that are pimping MY products. It's a closed system, fully automated, uses no javascript, loads instantly, and I earn a living by providing goods to people who are actively seeking them out instead of whoring their eyeballs out to marketing middle-men.
Unfortunately, these vultures finance a lot of the commercial internet the same way junk mailers subsidize the US postal service, so they aren't going anywhere. I simply choose not to participate in their bullshit business model. I already pay thousands of $$$ per month for my bandwidth, so I don't owe anyone a fucking thing for what I do or where I go on the internet. If you can't earn a living from your "content" without selling 3rd-party advertising, then your business model sucks and you deserve to go bankrupt. Leave ecommerce to people who know what they are doing.
Windows update is often turned off by the user because the Windows OS is such an incredible, poorly-designed piece of shit that every trivial update REQUIRES a reboot. My Win2k/XP machines work 24/7 and all of them have ongoing open projects in various applications, active terminal windows with running process on my servers, local scheduled backup processes, and all kinds of other monitoring applications that CANNOT be shut down randomly because Windows decides it want to reboot itself every fucking day.
Microsoft could cure most of their security problems at the consumer level by simply fixing their junk OS so it can upgraded/updated as necessary without requiring a reboot for anything but kernel updates. I'd run automatic updates myself if they eliminated the possibility that my work would be lost or a critical application would be shut down for no good reason. Until that day comes, automatic updates stays OFF.
WTF are you talking about??? Terrestrial digital TV is 2-way. Lineup changes could be done in the set-top box at any time. Sophisticated billing systems at the head-end would take care of the paperwork. Satellite systems could simply call in via the customer's broadband or the internal dialup modem. If anything, call centers would employ FEWER people.
I know somebody here knows the answer to this:
What is the best place to find a hooker online?
The first rule of usenet is...
The G-1 has all the "killer apps" I need at the moment - Accuweather, Google Maps with GPS, an IP Cam viewer so I can monitor my security cams at home and at my datacenter, SSH client, voice recorder, handy tools like data conversions, a level, a ruler and of course the Magic 8-ball. The browser works for the kind of things I need every day - my MRTG graphs, logging into my switches, routers, and remote-reboot controllers. It doesn't do SlashDot for shit though...someone needs to work on that.
Seriously, anyone judging a smart phone based solely on the camera, eye-candy, and "gaming experience" is probably 12 years old. Mine is a tool to help me earn a living first, and a toy second.
You are either trolling or seriously retarded.
Standard audio cassette tape travels at 1 7/8 ips (inches of tape per second past the heads) and is complete and total SHIT. No amount of DBS/Dolby "magic" and expensive playback electronics can fix that. Audio cassettes have the lowest fidelity of any analog format in history and only the mega-stoned could tolerate listening to them. 8-tracks ran at 3 3/4 ips. Twice as fast. That means twice the headroom, twice the high frequency information, and half the tape noise. Consumer reel-to-reel ran at 3 3/4 and 7 1/2 ips for another doubling of quality. Semi-pro machines ran at 7 1/2 and 15 ips. Pro machines ran at 15 and 30 ips. (at $200 per reel for 2" multitrack tape, studios didn't run at 30ips much, usually just for jazz and classical)
The number of heads above 3 had fuck-all to do with anything. Having separate heads for playback, recording, and erase allowed the magnetic gap to be optimized for a single task. Cassettes were 2-sided and expensive decks often had more heads but only so you didn't have to flip the tape or move the heads to play the other side. It was still a $100 saddle on a $10 horse.
Cassette tape is so insanely inferior to vinyl that I won't even dignify your comparison by responding. I'm guessing your only experience with a turntable involved mangled children's records on a battery-operated "record player" adorned with Disney characters.
Saying 'Theora is Ogg' is not actually incorrect, and it might get you laid at parties.
I'm fairly certain that I would not WANT to get laid at most parties where video codecs are being discussed and debated.
/sausage festival
Washington state hasn't had a sales tax on food since the 70's. A federal sales tax would need the same exemption if they want to avoid riots in the streets. The "poor" already pay taxes on most other retail sales plus a gazillion taxes on utilities and communications. They DON'T generally pay income taxes, but use the most tax-supported social services; welfare, medicaid, prisons/jails/courts/public defenders, public schools (because they breed like rabbits), rehab services, subsidized housing and transportation, etc.
Why SHOULDN'T they start making at least a token payment towards their own upkeep? The poor who are willing to steal and rob when they run out of money are going to do so anyway whether it's the taxman or their crack dealer who takes their last dollar. They're scum and there's no reason to even consider them, except when figuring out how many jail cells you need. The poor who have some kind of morality and work ethic will be driven to EARN more money or SPEND LESS money on non-essentials if they find they can't afford the things they need to get by.
NINE states have no income tax.
This appears to be a low-voltage and flexible version of the electrostatic transducer, which was first prototyped around 90 years ago. Not NEW, just IMPROVED.
A friend had a set of Magnaplanars the size of doors back in the 70's. They sounded great with an additional low-frequency driver. (didn't call them subwoofers back then because the bottom octave didn't really exist yet in recordings - vinyl records were rolled off at 50hz to keep the phonograph needle from being kicked out of the record groove by subsonics)
The COLOR GRAY is spelled #AAAAAA in the civilized world.