Yeah, actually a better "hands-on" demo would be to have a vertical pipe full of air in a swimming pool, preferably in the deep end of the pool, with the upper end open and exposed to the atmosphere. At the submerged end of the pipe, a remote controlled valve could be attached. You could have kids dive down, and put their mouths around the bottom of the pipe, then open the valve.
When their lungs are sucked out of their bodies, the kids will truly appreciate the power of vacuum. The survival rate for this demo would probably be pretty low, since most kids rely on their lungs to breathe.
As you say, this is an off-topic thread, of course.
I think the idea behind "well-regulated" might mean that the people (whoever they are) MUST be in control of the militia. That is to say, the 2nd ammendment in no way justifies private armies, but is designed to encourage every able-bodied man (or person, nowadays) to take seriously his (or her) obligation to defend the country against hostile takeover.
Since I admit that this is off-topic, and posted with "No Score +1 bonus," and since this is a reply to a reply to a reply, and thus will not be read by many people, please don't mod me down!
MM
For this simple demonstration of vacuum you need an orange, a vessel (a drinking glass or cup with a diameter smaller than the orange), a small piece of combustible paper, and a match or lighter, to ignite the small piece of paper.
Put the paper in the vessel. Ignite the piece of paper. While the flame is going strong, push the orange firmly against the opening of the vessel. The flame will starve off to nothing pretty fast. More importantly, the gasses inside the vessel will cool rapidly, creating a vacuum inside the vessel.
You will then find that the orange is stuck quite stubbornly against the mouth of the vessel.
I have a 3 mega-pixel digital camera, and I love it. But I have a gripe with this story.
For some reason, no one ever mentions dynamic range in ccd/film comparisons, but this is a place where I believe film soundly tromps the ccd.
If you look at digital photos shot in a very high-contrast environment (such as almost anywhere on a bright sunny day), you will notice that either the bright areas are totally white, or the dark areas are totally black. There is no way to expose the shot so that you get detail in both.
Slide film, in particular, is excellent when it comes to capturing detail in the shadows, even in very high contrast scenes. The human eye has much greater dynamic range than the CCD, so this isn't totally without merit.
I guess that this dynamic range would be roughly analagous to getting 14-bits per pixel, per color from a digital camera, instead of the usual 8.
Granted, it is very hard to preserve all this detail on display. About the only way is to project the image onto a screen. Still, as far as I can tell, digital isn't even close to film in dynamic range, and there doesn't seem to be any improvement trend. 24bpp has become the standard.
The law is code; it should be enforced by machines
There's a problem with this.
There are laws on the books today which, if they were regularly enforced, might be considered opressive. The reason they continute to be on the books is that detection is currently fairly difficult, so they are enforced infrequently. Also it is MUCH harder to repeal laws than to pass them.
If we create an aparatus of total detection and enforcement with automatic penalties, then these laws will suddenly be enforced completely. The net effect will be almost like suddenly passing a large number of intrusive laws. In short, the enforcement regime will have changed to something that was not envisioned by the original authors of the law, and the change of regime will not be subject to any real legislative review. Also, many people (esp those who lean the libertarian way) may have objected to the law when it was first passed, but decided that since it was unenforceable, there was no point in protesting it.
Another problem is that technological systems always have a human element which can lead to the very same corruption that you fear, only in the machine enforcement case, it is much harder to demonstrate the human corruption element to a jury. (I assume you still want a jury?)
The example network given in the article was not Starbucks, but George Washington hospital, where Cheney apparently went for heart surgery.
It seems to me that it is not a stretch to imagine that a serious assasin might find information of interest from George Washington hospital if Cheney were to be re-admitted.
Also, you didn't propose an alternate explanation for their motivations.
Also also, with all the pork-barrel politics that we have, I would think that government spending watchdogs could find something more important to worry about than secret service agents doing a little war driving.
Chris McFarland, head of the Secret Service's Electronic Crimes Task Force, said his agents have begun evaluating computer security along with other concerns when they scout out a place where the president or other protected dignitary will go.
McFarland said, for example, that agents have had extensive discussions with officials at George Washington Hospital about improving its wireless network security.
While the agents plan to offer their expertise to anyone who asks, they are focusing on places most important to their mission of protecting public officials. The hospital is several blocks from the White House and treated Vice President Dick Cheney ( news - web sites) during his heart problems.
You are right. UDP is clearly better than raw ethernet.
What is RTP?
As a first step, the UDP packets could be totally hard-wired. That is the source and destination MAC ID's could be stored in a configuration rom, as could all the IP's. This would allow the whole thing to work without ARP. I am trying to stick to total one-way communication and avoid having do an actual TCP/IP stack.
I don't know enough about TCP/IP to do even a minimal implementation in an FPGA. If I need the whole stack I'll have to go to an embedded processor running linux or uClinux or something. For now I want to avoid that.
In the long run, someone (possibly me) could do a standards compliant FPGA, that could at least do ARP, and maybe deal with some ICMP messages if that is required by whatever standards apply.
It is always nice to be able to ping devices on a LAN.
I have basically decided to actually do this. I'll do some mail-list searching and lurking for a bit and then probably make contact with the SDR guys.
Yeah, I was thinking that using gig ethernet raw frames would make a pretty good data transport mechanism, but I don't know how feasible it is to read raw frames from a typical gig ethernet adapter. (If anyone wants to weigh-in on this question, it would be appreciated...)
It would be nice to not have to do arp or deal with any real buffering, but just build the frame as you go, and stuff the CRC at the end. Send the frame as a broadcast packet. Maybe you could have two single-frame buffers, and fill one while you send the other, etc.
If you can keep the hardware design job really simple, maybe the cost of the ADC and transport cold be kept reasonable. I am thinking, one PLD or FPGA, one or two SRAM's if necessary, one ADC, and one gig-e PHY device. I am thinking that in very small quantities, this could be done for a few hundred dollars in chip costs. Boards, as always, will be a problem.
Actually, I might be willing to work on this. It sounds like fun.
We'll need a little "guidance from the courts," I guess.;-)
To me, it sounds as though they are distributing derivative works. As I understand it, they are making copies. That in itself (under copyright law) can be illegal in some cases.
In fact, there is no doubt that they are *creating* derivative works. So, I guess there are two questions: 1) do they have the right to create these derivative works, and 2) does the fact that they cooperatively own the media on which the derivative works are stored somehow mitigate the distribution aspect of the case?
I guess I still see it as a no-brainer. I think the courts will rule against the distributors.
The films are copyrighted, and ripping scenes out is creating a derivative work.
Clean flicks is distributing derivative works without permission.
I mean, either copyright law is applicable or it's not. If it is, you can't redistribute derivative works witout permission. If it isn't, the GPL is meaningless, because permission is not required.
Morally, I don't recognize an automatic right to re-distribute derivative works, and when it is done for profit, there is really no reasonable defense.
When the first high top speed bikes came out (I think the Ninja 1000 was the first) there were a lot of articles mentioning that the only way they could get to such high speeds (160 mph or so) was by being incredibly aerodynamic.
Weight wasn't that much of a concern in a bike designed for high top speed. IIRC, although the bike was reasonably fast (and really fast compared to a car) off the line and in the quarter mile, it wasn't a record breaker.
14 billion gallons of gas per year? That sounds low.
According to one chart I found (http://www.public-i.org/Latam_Importsl_tables.htm ), The US imported in the year 2000 about 4 million barrels of crude oil per day from Latin America and the Persian Gulf combined. One barrel can make about 20 gallons of gasoline, and there are 365 days in a year, so that works out to:
4,000,000 * 365 * 20 = 29,200,000,000
So that is 29 billion gallons of gas made from oil imported into the US in the year 2000. That's more than twice as much as you said. I doubt it has come down that much since 2000, but I don't know.
I didn't check any of your other math or statistics, but 45 MPG sounds pretty high for anything shaped like an SUV!
Electric cars sound great, but how is the electricity that they need normally produced? Burning coal?
The same way electricity is produced for other uses. By a mixture of hydro-electric, coal-burning, gas-burning, oil-burning, and nuclear power plants, in no particular order. And I may have left some out.
But keep in mind that by using the electric grid interface, you shift the pollution source from a small, mobile, inefficient and hard to monitor power plant (automobile) to a large, (relatively) efficient, easy to monitor and regulate power plant.
And if and when we develop cleaner power plant technologies, the benefit automatically accrues to everybody. For example, if we ever find a way to create bio-reactors that harness incident sunlight to liberate oxygen and hydrogen, then we can use the hydrogen in large power plants just as easily (perhaps even more so) as we could in automobiles.
I'm not saying that pure electric cars with storage batteries is the way to go. I'm just pointing out that there is more to it than your question would imply.
You seem to be laboring under some illusions, and you are taking for granted quite a bit of analysis.
First of all, your statement that "Energy doens't come from nowhere and if we all had electric cars then there would just be more coal burning power plants," applies equally well to fuel-cell cars.
The fuel in a fuel-cell has chemical potential energy, which is converted into electrical potential energy, and then kinetic potential energy. But to create the fuel requires putting energy in up front. There are a lot of candidate fuels for fuel cell technology, but the bottom line is that you either need to make fuel by putting energy in, or convert an existing fuel into a useable form. In the former case, you need to put fuel in to the system, in the latter you are using fuel. I know that in theory, you could use solar to directly liberate hydrogen or something, but for now that is not going to happen. And in any event, that same technology could be used to replace coal plants, too, which nullifies your complaint about pure electric cars.
Then you seem to imply that there is no energy efficiency gain from compressed air cars. I am somewhat willing to believe this, but do you have some kind of argument which supports this implicit claim?
Something that you are overlooking is economy of scale in large power plants. While it is true that if we were all driving electric cars, we would need a beefed-up electric grid, it is also true that big electric plants are more efficient than cars in extracting energy, and that they are also easier to regulate and monitor.
Also, one of the reasons that hybrid electric vehicles get good overall mileage is that the motor is optimized for a narrow load range, unlike conventional automobile motors which have to supply reasonable torque over a wide RPM range. This means that the hybrid power plants can be more efficient and/or simpler.
Finally, I have never seen a detailed energy analysis of the fuel-cell energy cycle. If you postulate wide-scale adoption of this technology, does it actually lead to reduced consumption of fossil fuels or not? I am willing to believe that it does, but I am not swayed by your unsupported assertion.
The Supreme court has already ruled that police can't use infrared cameras on a house or other dwelling without a warrant, and infrared cameras are PASSIVE.
Any radar-based police surveillence will almost certainly require a warrant or real emergency (e.g., hostage situation).
69. We find no validity to the statement from USGPSIC that an operator would modify the
UWB antenna to change operating frequency or bandwidth or that equipment that has been damaged in
such a fashion would continue to be operated.
I guess the FCC committee is unaware of the pringles can mod for 802.11!
I suggest that you don't change any of your RAM latency settings, and if you do, make sure you test your system very thouroughly before you trust it.
The latencies (and a variety of other stuff) are spec'd by the RAM chip manufacturer (which means you can look them up for yourself if you read the chip number off of the RAM chips on your DIMM) and stored in a small ROM on your DIMM. Whoever designs the DIMM has to put the right info in the ROM. Then, during bootup, the BIOS is supposed to read these settings from the ROM using the SMBus protocol, and configure the chipset accordingly. This whole process is called Serial Presence Detect, or SPD. It is mentioned in the PC-100 RAM (and subsequent) specifications. In fact, I think it is now a JEDEC spec.
While I don't know for sure, I would guess that most DIMM and BIOS designers did this right. (I know I did when I had to do it;-)
Build up a new linux system from scratch, following the instructions at linuxfromscratch.org.
Then, build and install XFree. Then GTK, Enlightenment (plus all its dependencies) then Mozilla (plus its dependencies).
DO NOT run make clean, and don't remove the original tarballs.
Now shoot about 200 digital photos over a period of several months. Store all the photos on the hard drive.
You still think you've got plenty of room? Think again. Sure, you can make clean once you get the stuff installed properly, but if you keep downloading newer versions and building and installing them, and you keep taking digital photos, you are going to run out of space again.
It is a French conspiracy. They were unhappy with the zero hour being, essentially, a British posession(Greenwich Mean Time or GMT), and so they had it renamed. And not only did they change it, but they used the akward, noun-followd-by-modifier format so it sounds funny to us (Universal Time Coordinated, instead of Universal Coordinated Time).
It seems to me that it probably could damage your binocs (exactly as you say). On the other hand, I used my binocs in the same fashion to view a solar eclipse, even when it was only about 20% eclipsed, and they still work fine. FWIW they are expensive 7x50 marine binoculars. They are gas-tight and filled with nitrogen.
I guess, since binocs transmit 9x% of the light, the power absorption is very low, once you get them adjusted so that the image is going through them. (But as you say, while you are adjusting, the image may briefly get projected on the edges somewhere, which can't be good.)
If you are worried about it, you could use something opaque like heavy paper to reduce the aperture of the objective. Or obtain some neutral density filters.
Another way to observe the sun is with a pinhole camera, although that is a bit more involved.
I think you are underestimating the effect that the DOJ case has had on MSFT. They have had to mind their P's and Q's, now, and the case brought a lot of criticism out of the closet and into the open where ordinary consumers could see it.
But who knows. It happened the way it happened, and we'll never know what would have happened if the DOJ hadn't brought suit.
My ISP (SBC/PacBell) stopped carrying everything in alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.* (or similar), about a year ago. I only know this because they sent a printed notice to me telling me about it. I don't have any mp3's.
I think usenet is too distributed to go after in any direct sense, but I am sure my ISP dropped all the mp3 stuff because of either a direct complaint or fear of prosecution in the future.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, actually a better "hands-on" demo would be to have a vertical pipe full of air in a swimming pool, preferably in the deep end of the pool, with the upper end open and exposed to the atmosphere. At the submerged end of the pipe, a remote controlled valve could be attached. You could have kids dive down, and put their mouths around the bottom of the pipe, then open the valve.
When their lungs are sucked out of their bodies, the kids will truly appreciate the power of vacuum. The survival rate for this demo would probably be pretty low, since most kids rely on their lungs to breathe.
By the way, that 33ft/atm is for sea water only.
In fresh water it is closer to 34 feet.
MM
--
As you say, this is an off-topic thread, of course.
I think the idea behind "well-regulated" might mean that the people (whoever they are) MUST be in control of the militia. That is to say, the 2nd ammendment in no way justifies private armies, but is designed to encourage every able-bodied man (or person, nowadays) to take seriously his (or her) obligation to defend the country against hostile takeover.
Here is a URL to a (pro-gun) discussion of this idea:
http://www.2asisters.org/unabridged.htm
Since I admit that this is off-topic, and posted with "No Score +1 bonus," and since this is a reply to a reply to a reply, and thus will not be read by many people, please don't mod me down!
MM
Right. The funny thing is that "rubbing alcohol" says "isopropanol" right on the label.
I have associated the two ever since I was a child!
I have seen windshield wiper fluid antifreeze that had methanol in it. I don't remember the details, such as concentration.
MM
--
For this simple demonstration of vacuum you need an orange, a vessel (a drinking glass or cup with a diameter smaller than the orange), a small piece of combustible paper, and a match or lighter, to ignite the small piece of paper.
Put the paper in the vessel. Ignite the piece of paper. While the flame is going strong, push the orange firmly against the opening of the vessel. The flame will starve off to nothing pretty fast. More importantly, the gasses inside the vessel will cool rapidly, creating a vacuum inside the vessel.
You will then find that the orange is stuck quite stubbornly against the mouth of the vessel.
Kids usually like this.
I have a 3 mega-pixel digital camera, and I love it. But I have a gripe with this story.
For some reason, no one ever mentions dynamic range in ccd/film comparisons, but this is a place where I believe film soundly tromps the ccd.
If you look at digital photos shot in a very high-contrast environment (such as almost anywhere on a bright sunny day), you will notice that either the bright areas are totally white, or the dark areas are totally black. There is no way to expose the shot so that you get detail in both.
Slide film, in particular, is excellent when it comes to capturing detail in the shadows, even in very high contrast scenes. The human eye has much greater dynamic range than the CCD, so this isn't totally without merit.
I guess that this dynamic range would be roughly analagous to getting 14-bits per pixel, per color from a digital camera, instead of the usual 8.
Granted, it is very hard to preserve all this detail on display. About the only way is to project the image onto a screen. Still, as far as I can tell, digital isn't even close to film in dynamic range, and there doesn't seem to be any improvement trend. 24bpp has become the standard.
Just my $0.02
MM
--
There are laws on the books today which, if they were regularly enforced, might be considered opressive. The reason they continute to be on the books is that detection is currently fairly difficult, so they are enforced infrequently. Also it is MUCH harder to repeal laws than to pass them.
If we create an aparatus of total detection and enforcement with automatic penalties, then these laws will suddenly be enforced completely. The net effect will be almost like suddenly passing a large number of intrusive laws. In short, the enforcement regime will have changed to something that was not envisioned by the original authors of the law, and the change of regime will not be subject to any real legislative review. Also, many people (esp those who lean the libertarian way) may have objected to the law when it was first passed, but decided that since it was unenforceable, there was no point in protesting it.
Another problem is that technological systems always have a human element which can lead to the very same corruption that you fear, only in the machine enforcement case, it is much harder to demonstrate the human corruption element to a jury. (I assume you still want a jury?)
--
MM
The example network given in the article was not Starbucks, but George Washington hospital, where Cheney apparently went for heart surgery.
It seems to me that it is not a stretch to imagine that a serious assasin might find information of interest from George Washington hospital if Cheney were to be re-admitted.
Also, you didn't propose an alternate explanation for their motivations.
Also also, with all the pork-barrel politics that we have, I would think that government spending watchdogs could find something more important to worry about than secret service agents doing a little war driving.
MM
--
MM
--
You are right. UDP is clearly better than raw ethernet.
What is RTP?
As a first step, the UDP packets could be totally hard-wired. That is the source and destination MAC ID's could be stored in a configuration rom, as could all the IP's. This would allow the whole thing to work without ARP. I am trying to stick to total one-way communication and avoid having do an actual TCP/IP stack.
I don't know enough about TCP/IP to do even a minimal implementation in an FPGA. If I need the whole stack I'll have to go to an embedded processor running linux or uClinux or something. For now I want to avoid that.
In the long run, someone (possibly me) could do a standards compliant FPGA, that could at least do ARP, and maybe deal with some ICMP messages if that is required by whatever standards apply.
It is always nice to be able to ping devices on a LAN.
I have basically decided to actually do this. I'll do some mail-list searching and lurking for a bit and then probably make contact with the SDR guys.
MM
--
Yeah, I was thinking that using gig ethernet raw frames would make a pretty good data transport mechanism, but I don't know how feasible it is to read raw frames from a typical gig ethernet adapter. (If anyone wants to weigh-in on this question, it would be appreciated...)
It would be nice to not have to do arp or deal with any real buffering, but just build the frame as you go, and stuff the CRC at the end. Send the frame as a broadcast packet. Maybe you could have two single-frame buffers, and fill one while you send the other, etc.
If you can keep the hardware design job really simple, maybe the cost of the ADC and transport cold be kept reasonable. I am thinking, one PLD or FPGA, one or two SRAM's if necessary, one ADC, and one gig-e PHY device. I am thinking that in very small quantities, this could be done for a few hundred dollars in chip costs. Boards, as always, will be a problem.
Actually, I might be willing to work on this. It sounds like fun.
MM
--
We'll need a little "guidance from the courts," I guess. ;-)
To me, it sounds as though they are distributing derivative works. As I understand it, they are making copies. That in itself (under copyright law) can be illegal in some cases.
In fact, there is no doubt that they are *creating* derivative works. So, I guess there are two questions: 1) do they have the right to create these derivative works, and 2) does the fact that they cooperatively own the media on which the derivative works are stored somehow mitigate the distribution aspect of the case?
I guess I still see it as a no-brainer. I think the courts will rule against the distributors.
MM
--
This one is easy.
The films are copyrighted, and ripping scenes out is creating a derivative work.
Clean flicks is distributing derivative works without permission.
I mean, either copyright law is applicable or it's not. If it is, you can't redistribute derivative works witout permission. If it isn't, the GPL is meaningless, because permission is not required.
Morally, I don't recognize an automatic right to re-distribute derivative works, and when it is done for profit, there is really no reasonable defense.
MM
--
When the first high top speed bikes came out (I think the Ninja 1000 was the first) there were a lot of articles mentioning that the only way they could get to such high speeds (160 mph or so) was by being incredibly aerodynamic.
Weight wasn't that much of a concern in a bike designed for high top speed. IIRC, although the bike was reasonably fast (and really fast compared to a car) off the line and in the quarter mile, it wasn't a record breaker.
MM
--
14 billion gallons of gas per year? That sounds low.
m ), The US imported in the year 2000 about 4 million barrels of crude oil per day from Latin America and the Persian Gulf combined. One barrel can make about 20 gallons of gasoline, and there are 365 days in a year, so that works out to:
According to one chart I found (http://www.public-i.org/Latam_Importsl_tables.ht
4,000,000 * 365 * 20 = 29,200,000,000
So that is 29 billion gallons of gas made from oil imported into the US in the year 2000. That's more than twice as much as you said. I doubt it has come down that much since 2000, but I don't know.
I didn't check any of your other math or statistics, but 45 MPG sounds pretty high for anything shaped like an SUV!
MM
--
The same way electricity is produced for other uses. By a mixture of hydro-electric, coal-burning, gas-burning, oil-burning, and nuclear power plants, in no particular order. And I may have left some out.
But keep in mind that by using the electric grid interface, you shift the pollution source from a small, mobile, inefficient and hard to monitor power plant (automobile) to a large, (relatively) efficient, easy to monitor and regulate power plant.
And if and when we develop cleaner power plant technologies, the benefit automatically accrues to everybody. For example, if we ever find a way to create bio-reactors that harness incident sunlight to liberate oxygen and hydrogen, then we can use the hydrogen in large power plants just as easily (perhaps even more so) as we could in automobiles.
I'm not saying that pure electric cars with storage batteries is the way to go. I'm just pointing out that there is more to it than your question would imply.
MM
--
You seem to be laboring under some illusions, and you are taking for granted quite a bit of analysis.
First of all, your statement that "Energy doens't come from nowhere and if we all had electric cars then there would just be more coal burning power plants," applies equally well to fuel-cell cars.
The fuel in a fuel-cell has chemical potential energy, which is converted into electrical potential energy, and then kinetic potential energy. But to create the fuel requires putting energy in up front. There are a lot of candidate fuels for fuel cell technology, but the bottom line is that you either need to make fuel by putting energy in, or convert an existing fuel into a useable form. In the former case, you need to put fuel in to the system, in the latter you are using fuel. I know that in theory, you could use solar to directly liberate hydrogen or something, but for now that is not going to happen. And in any event, that same technology could be used to replace coal plants, too, which nullifies your complaint about pure electric cars.
Then you seem to imply that there is no energy efficiency gain from compressed air cars. I am somewhat willing to believe this, but do you have some kind of argument which supports this implicit claim?
Something that you are overlooking is economy of scale in large power plants. While it is true that if we were all driving electric cars, we would need a beefed-up electric grid, it is also true that big electric plants are more efficient than cars in extracting energy, and that they are also easier to regulate and monitor.
Also, one of the reasons that hybrid electric vehicles get good overall mileage is that the motor is optimized for a narrow load range, unlike conventional automobile motors which have to supply reasonable torque over a wide RPM range. This means that the hybrid power plants can be more efficient and/or simpler.
Finally, I have never seen a detailed energy analysis of the fuel-cell energy cycle. If you postulate wide-scale adoption of this technology, does it actually lead to reduced consumption of fossil fuels or not? I am willing to believe that it does, but I am not swayed by your unsupported assertion.
MM
--
The Supreme court has already ruled that police can't use infrared cameras on a house or other dwelling without a warrant, and infrared cameras are PASSIVE.
Any radar-based police surveillence will almost certainly require a warrant or real emergency (e.g., hostage situation).
MM
--
MM
--
I suggest that you don't change any of your RAM latency settings, and if you do, make sure you test your system very thouroughly before you trust it.
;-)
The latencies (and a variety of other stuff) are spec'd by the RAM chip manufacturer (which means you can look them up for yourself if you read the chip number off of the RAM chips on your DIMM) and stored in a small ROM on your DIMM. Whoever designs the DIMM has to put the right info in the ROM. Then, during bootup, the BIOS is supposed to read these settings from the ROM using the SMBus protocol, and configure the chipset accordingly. This whole process is called Serial Presence Detect, or SPD. It is mentioned in the PC-100 RAM (and subsequent) specifications. In fact, I think it is now a JEDEC spec.
While I don't know for sure, I would guess that most DIMM and BIOS designers did this right. (I know I did when I had to do it
MM
--
I love the idea of software defined radio. I may get involved in the project in some fashion.
Would you care to speculate on the probability of success for those who want to pass legislation aimed at "plugging the analog hole?"
I ask because it seems to me that such mis-guided legislation would be poison to many endeavors, yours included.
respectfully,
Mamba-mamba
--
Oh yeah?
Try this:
Build up a new linux system from scratch, following the instructions at linuxfromscratch.org.
Then, build and install XFree.
Then GTK, Enlightenment (plus all its dependencies) then Mozilla (plus its dependencies).
DO NOT run make clean, and don't remove the original tarballs.
Now shoot about 200 digital photos over a period of several months. Store all the photos on the hard drive.
You still think you've got plenty of room? Think again. Sure, you can make clean once you get the stuff installed properly, but if you keep downloading newer versions and building and installing them, and you keep taking digital photos, you are going to run out of space again.
Personally, I like 40-80 gig drives.
It is a French conspiracy. They were unhappy with the zero hour being, essentially, a British posession(Greenwich Mean Time or GMT), and so they had it renamed. And not only did they change it, but they used the akward, noun-followd-by-modifier format so it sounds funny to us (Universal Time Coordinated, instead of Universal Coordinated Time).
MM
--
It seems to me that it probably could damage your binocs (exactly as you say). On the other hand, I used my binocs in the same fashion to view a solar eclipse, even when it was only about 20% eclipsed, and they still work fine. FWIW they are expensive 7x50 marine binoculars. They are gas-tight and filled with nitrogen.
I guess, since binocs transmit 9x% of the light, the power absorption is very low, once you get them adjusted so that the image is going through them. (But as you say, while you are adjusting, the image may briefly get projected on the edges somewhere, which can't be good.)
If you are worried about it, you could use something opaque like heavy paper to reduce the aperture of the objective. Or obtain some neutral density filters.
Another way to observe the sun is with a pinhole camera, although that is a bit more involved.
MM
--
I think you are underestimating the effect that the DOJ case has had on MSFT. They have had to mind their P's and Q's, now, and the case brought a lot of criticism out of the closet and into the open where ordinary consumers could see it.
But who knows. It happened the way it happened, and we'll never know what would have happened if the DOJ hadn't brought suit.
MM
--
My ISP (SBC/PacBell) stopped carrying everything in alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.* (or similar), about a year ago. I only know this because they sent a printed notice to me telling me about it. I don't have any mp3's.
I think usenet is too distributed to go after in any direct sense, but I am sure my ISP dropped all the mp3 stuff because of either a direct complaint or fear of prosecution in the future.
MM
--