It sounds like a great way to tour the world on somebody else's nickel. Maybe I can bring back a tacky souvenier (or at least a sample of the water) from each location.
Anybody else here remember "Herbie the love bug?". The silly little VW that had no problem letting you know how it felt.
Still, I wouldn't mind paying for a vehicle that would lift it's rear tire like a dog and properly reward anybody who tried put a parking ticket on the windshield, or who parked too close and dinged me with their door.
I think I am going to wait a few weeks before putting SP2 on my XP machines. Let somebody else be the guinea pig, and I will wait for the fixes. Until then, I will just avoid IE, don't click on attachments, and trust in my (Linux) firewall to keep everything else out.
I swear to god, some April fools day NASA should re-release some old Apollo photos with a photoshopped ET holding hands with Buzz Aldrin, or perhaps a mars rover photo with some pyramids and the sphinx in the background. It will keep the crackpots (and tabloids) busy for years!
I guess that makes him (or it?) an outlaw. Or maybe future Furby's will be programmed to self-destruct if your 2 year old sings them a copyright tune, like the Barney theme or happy birthday. Does this make my telephone voice mail an illegal circumvention device? Somebody might call me up and hum a copyrighted song, better unplug it....
Has this guy ever thought of moving to N. Korea? I bet he would love it there. Too bad for him that East Germany no longer exists. He would have made a wonderful Stazi bureaucrat.
Actually, somebody should propose an amendment to his bill which would also hold liable the manufacturer of any technology which could be used to reproduce copyright printed matter as well, so we can outlaw computers, typewriters, photocopiers, paper, pens, etc. Just to show how looney this really gets.
Unfortunately, they will then claim that the hubble pictures were doctored, much like the hullabaloo about the "face" on mars. They claim NASA has been doctoring photos to cover up evidence of an advance civilization. Nothing much can be done about loons like that. If it is any consolation, Gallileo faced the same problem when he begged his critics to peer through his telescope and see for themselves. They refused, claiming the instrument was bewitched.
Also, I don't think even Hubble has sufficient resolving power to see the the lander itself, let alone the flag. There are plenty of other (simple) ways of proving the existance of the landing sites - on one mission, they left a large reflector dish facing earth. Scientists can bounce lasers off it to precisely measure the distance to the moon, and since the moon has no atmosphere, the reflector is still usable.
There is plenty of other evidence to debunk these guys, see http://www.badastronomy.com for details. You won't convince closed minds of course, but you can always refer doubters to this site.
Even at its peak, the Apollo program consumed only a tiny fraction of the US budget. What matters is that funding is high enough for a significant amount real work to be done, and more importantly that it is not subject to political whim.
What irked me, is that the Apollo 11 astronauts only spent 2 hours on the moon's surface, and much of that time was wasted on stuff like planting the flag, chatting with Nixon, etc. Far better to have spent the very limited time collecting samples, setting up experiments, and getting some real science done. Fortunately, a lot of the real work was covered in later missions but there is no telling when you might get back, and every landing site may yield unique data. It would have been interesting to explore the crater they nearly landed in. (Neil took the controls and overrode the computer which was going to plop them smack into a crater, with huge boulders strewn about - nice piece of flying)
I doubt the US would have put men on the moon, if they were not scared to death that the russians would get there first. I saw an interview with Buzz Aldrin last night, where he pretty well said as much, saying that this was an element of the cold war that they had won. How sad. And once this was accomplished, the budget was cut, despite the fact they had the Saturn V's in mass production at the time, and could have finished the planned missions for a relatively small cost. The NRE was over, and next Apollo rocket and crew was primed and ready to go. Go watch "2001 a space odyssey" (released in 1970) to see where it was widely thought we should have been by 2001.
Setting foot on another world was THE #1 defining moment of human civilization. 10,000 years from now, when we are hopefully spread across the galaxy, what historial event will stand out? A revolution in country X, a war in country Y? The raize and fall of empire Z? No, it will be the first steps off our home planet.
I can only hope in the next few years China makes a dash for Mars, and the west feels a need to upstage them. We should have been there by now.
the cartoon character who is standing behind a rapidly crumbling dam, and trying to stop the ever increasing leaks by plugging the holes with one limb after another. It is kind of like a slow motion version of this. At the moment, the various judges are giving them increasing lengths of rope to go hang themselves, which they are trying to spin into a victory. Their arguments on to the court in the DCC case, (insisting they identify the non-existant CPUs they run software they ditched 7 years ago) are absolutely looney. I can imagine the incredulous look on the judge's face, trying to rationalize their arguments. Why anyone would willingly do business with a company trying to sue their customers over such looney interpretations of a licencing agreement is beyond me.
Now, it is just a matter of waiting to see which hearing will deal the death blow to their house of cards. I don't think anybody in the industry takes them seriously anymore. The case has been reduced to comic relief.
I would suggest creating a valid email account with a name that is easily hit with a dictionary attack, aa@mydomain.com or something like that - but wouldn't normally be used. Any email which lands here is bound to be spam, and can be immediately be added to your spam filter, so it won't show up in your real mail.
If you want to get nasty, you can use it as an automated script to look for an "unsubscribe" or "remove" address inside the mail arriving here, and if one is found, have it send them a response with a 1 megabyte attachment a few dozen times over.
IANAL, (especially in England) but I think he may have a defence based on equitable estoppel. It certainly applies in Canada and the US - not sure about England. But if they had previously supported him and suddenly did a 180, then he has recourse to fight it, and recoup his legal costs.
http://www.legal-definitions.com/equitable-estop pe l.htm
They used to make illuminated dial watches from radium up until the 1950's. - I remember seeing an interview with a former factory worker who said the girls who painted the numbers and hands on the watch dials would routinely lick the brushes to ensure they kept a nice, crisp point.
Scientific American once had a facinating article about the history of radium, how it made the transition from a preciously sought after substance, to a deadly waste.
I would bet that given a week or so with a spectrum analyzer and your favorite tube amplifier, it would be possible to perfectly emulate the response characteristics, using a DSP, such that you couldn't reliably tell the difference in a blind listening test.
Listening tests can be highly subjective - for instance, if a woman comes in to buy a stereo system, a good sales person will steer her towards speakers with a better high frequency response, because on average, women have better hearing in this range.
There are a lot of psychoacoustic effects at work - you may insist that amplifier A sounds better than amplifier B, even though it can be proven that amplifier B has superior parametrics. The distortion introduced by amplifier A may be pleasing to your ear, thus it sounds "better" to you - perhaps richer or more full bodied, even though it is not as faithfully reproducing the signal appears at the input jacks.
I have encountered the same thing while running video parametrics at a customer site - Even if the video output is bang on from a technical point of view, the viewer gravitates towards the picture with the more pleasing flesh tones. (Even if the overall colour balance is off)
from a 1970's vintage copy of Popular Electronics. When the inputs are overloaded, transistors will clip the input signal with a very sharp transition. Tubes will transition out of the linear state more gradually. A clipped sine wave coming out of a tube amplifer will have rounded edges. This reduces the number and amplitude of high order harmonics present in the clipped output.
That being said, the obvious answer is not to overload the amplifier inputs. But if you really, really like the effect of an overloaded tube amplifer it is easy enough to simulate with a little filtering. (Analog or digital)
If you really want that old "vaccum tube" feel to the sound, try injecting just a touch of 60 or 120 Hz hum into the output.
1. Something to detect and disable really, annoying flash ads. Adblocking technology doesn't seem to work with flash, you have to rip it entirely out of your browser, or put up with annoying, flashing ads next to whatever you are reading. These things just burn up CPU cycles.
2. Detecting and disabling the very obnoxious ads that float around the screen.
3. Faster launch and reload times, smaller memory footprint
4. Better support for plug-ins. I was tring to move my mother over to Firefox, but couldn't get the streaming audio from her favorite radio station. Actually, how about emulation support for IE plug ins? (Yes, I would rather see native versions too, but the world doesn't spin the way you want it to)
Actually, it is perfectly possible to achieve reliable data transfer (or storage) through an unreliable medium, using error correction codes.
Even with a crappy chewed up tape, it is possible to pefectly recover the data, as long as the data is properly interleaved and a robust error correction code is used.
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It sounds like a great way to tour the world on somebody else's nickel. Maybe I can bring back a tacky souvenier (or at least a sample of the water) from each location.
Anybody else here remember "Herbie the love bug?". The silly little VW that had no problem letting you know how it felt.
Still, I wouldn't mind paying for a vehicle that would lift it's rear tire like a dog and properly reward anybody who tried put a parking ticket on the windshield, or who parked too close and dinged me with their door.
How times have changed:
When you say IUD, I think of a birth control device.
I think I am going to wait a few weeks before putting SP2 on my XP machines. Let somebody else be the guinea pig, and I will wait for the fixes. Until then, I will just avoid IE, don't click on attachments, and trust in my (Linux) firewall to keep everything else out.
I swear to god, some April fools day NASA should re-release some old Apollo photos with a photoshopped ET holding hands with Buzz Aldrin, or perhaps a mars rover photo with some pyramids and the sphinx in the background. It will keep the crackpots (and tabloids) busy for years!
Who else wants to set up a dairy farm on Diego Garcia? I am going to be RICH!!!!
(I couldn't find any other US territory further from Wisconsin)
I guess that makes him (or it?) an outlaw. Or maybe future Furby's will be programmed to self-destruct if your 2 year old sings them a copyright tune, like the Barney theme or happy birthday. Does this make my telephone voice mail an illegal circumvention device? Somebody might call me up and hum a copyrighted song, better unplug it....
Has this guy ever thought of moving to N. Korea? I bet he would love it there. Too bad for him that East Germany no longer exists. He would have made a wonderful Stazi bureaucrat.
Actually, somebody should propose an amendment to his bill which would also hold liable the manufacturer of any technology which could be used to reproduce copyright printed matter as well, so we can outlaw computers, typewriters, photocopiers, paper, pens, etc. Just to show how looney this really gets.
Unfortunately, they will then claim that the hubble pictures were doctored, much like the hullabaloo about the "face" on mars. They claim NASA has been doctoring photos to cover up evidence of an advance civilization. Nothing much can be done about loons like that. If it is any consolation, Gallileo faced the same problem when he begged his critics to peer through his telescope and see for themselves. They refused, claiming the instrument was bewitched.
Also, I don't think even Hubble has sufficient resolving power to see the the lander itself, let alone the flag. There are plenty of other (simple) ways of proving the existance of the landing sites - on one mission, they left a large reflector dish facing earth. Scientists can bounce lasers off it to precisely measure the distance to the moon, and since the moon has no atmosphere, the reflector is still usable.
There is plenty of other evidence to debunk these guys, see http://www.badastronomy.com for details. You won't convince closed minds of course, but you can always refer doubters to this site.
Even at its peak, the Apollo program consumed only a tiny fraction of the US budget. What matters is that funding is high enough for a significant amount real work to be done, and more importantly that it is not subject to political whim.
What irked me, is that the Apollo 11 astronauts only spent 2 hours on the moon's surface, and much of that time was wasted on stuff like planting the flag, chatting with Nixon, etc. Far better to have spent the very limited time collecting samples, setting up experiments, and getting some real science done. Fortunately, a lot of the real work was covered in later missions but there is no telling when you might get back, and every landing site may yield unique data. It would have been interesting to explore the crater they nearly landed in. (Neil took the controls and overrode the computer which was going to plop them smack into a crater, with huge boulders strewn about - nice piece of flying)
I doubt the US would have put men on the moon, if they were not scared to death that the russians would get there first. I saw an interview with Buzz Aldrin last night, where he pretty well said as much, saying that this was an element of the cold war that they had won. How sad. And once this was accomplished, the budget was cut, despite the fact they had the Saturn V's in mass production at the time, and could have finished the planned missions for a relatively small cost. The NRE was over, and next Apollo rocket and crew was primed and ready to go. Go watch "2001 a space odyssey" (released in 1970) to see where it was widely thought we should have been by 2001.
Setting foot on another world was THE #1 defining moment of human civilization. 10,000 years from now, when we are hopefully spread across the galaxy, what historial event will stand out? A revolution in country X, a war in country Y? The raize and fall of empire Z? No, it will be the first steps off our home planet.
I can only hope in the next few years China makes a dash for Mars, and the west feels a need to upstage them. We should have been there by now.
the cartoon character who is standing behind a rapidly crumbling dam, and trying to stop the ever increasing leaks by plugging the holes with one limb after another. It is kind of like a slow motion version of this. At the moment, the various judges are giving them increasing lengths of rope to go hang themselves, which they are trying to spin into a victory. Their arguments on to the court in the DCC case, (insisting they identify the non-existant CPUs they run software they ditched 7 years ago) are absolutely looney. I can imagine the incredulous look on the judge's face, trying to rationalize their arguments. Why anyone would willingly do business with a company trying to sue their customers over such looney interpretations of a licencing agreement is beyond me.
Now, it is just a matter of waiting to see which hearing will deal the death blow to their house of cards. I don't think anybody in the industry takes them seriously anymore. The case has been reduced to comic relief.
When I read the title of this article, was anybody else thinking it was some sort of (evil) Red Hat fork?
I would hate to see what they "snippers" would do if they found out you were actually a woman!
I would suggest creating a valid email account with a name that is easily hit with a dictionary attack, aa@mydomain.com or something like that - but wouldn't normally be used. Any email which lands here is bound to be spam, and can be immediately be added to your spam filter, so it won't show up in your real mail.
If you want to get nasty, you can use it as an automated script to look for an "unsubscribe" or "remove" address inside the mail arriving here, and if one is found, have it send them a response with a 1 megabyte attachment a few dozen times over.
They still haven't figured out how much money they made in the past 3 years!
Seriously!
IANAL, (especially in England) but I think he may have a defence based on equitable estoppel. It certainly applies in Canada and the US - not sure about England. But if they had previously supported him and suddenly did a 180, then he has recourse to fight it, and recoup his legal costs.
p pe l.htm
http://www.legal-definitions.com/equitable-esto
He has a great contender for "Robot Wars".
Fred Flinstone, with infinite miles to the gallon.
They used to make illuminated dial watches from radium up until the 1950's. - I remember seeing an interview with a former factory worker who said the girls who painted the numbers and hands on the watch dials would routinely lick the brushes to ensure they kept a nice, crisp point.
Scientific American once had a facinating article about the history of radium, how it made the transition from a preciously sought after substance, to a deadly waste.
It does kill the job market for MCSEs.
I would bet that given a week or so with a spectrum analyzer and your favorite tube amplifier, it would be possible to perfectly emulate the response characteristics, using a DSP, such that you couldn't reliably tell the difference in a blind listening test.
Listening tests can be highly subjective - for instance, if a woman comes in to buy a stereo system, a good sales person will steer her towards speakers with a better high frequency response, because on average, women have better hearing in this range.
There are a lot of psychoacoustic effects at work - you may insist that amplifier A sounds better than amplifier B, even though it can be proven that amplifier B has superior parametrics. The distortion introduced by amplifier A may be pleasing to your ear, thus it sounds "better" to you - perhaps richer or more full bodied, even though it is not as faithfully reproducing the signal appears at the input jacks.
I have encountered the same thing while running video parametrics at a customer site - Even if the video output is bang on from a technical point of view, the viewer gravitates towards the picture with the more pleasing flesh tones. (Even if the overall colour balance is off)
from a 1970's vintage copy of Popular Electronics. When the inputs are overloaded, transistors will clip the input signal with a very sharp transition. Tubes will transition out of the linear state more gradually. A clipped sine wave coming out of a tube amplifer will have rounded edges. This reduces the number and amplitude of high order harmonics present in the clipped output.
That being said, the obvious answer is not to overload the amplifier inputs. But if you really, really like the effect of an overloaded tube amplifer it is easy enough to simulate with a little filtering. (Analog or digital)
If you really want that old "vaccum tube" feel to the sound, try injecting just a touch of 60 or 120 Hz hum into the output.
1. Something to detect and disable really, annoying flash ads. Adblocking technology doesn't seem to work with flash, you have to rip it entirely out of your browser, or put up with annoying, flashing ads next to whatever you are reading. These things just burn up CPU cycles.
2. Detecting and disabling the very obnoxious ads that float around the screen.
3. Faster launch and reload times, smaller memory footprint
4. Better support for plug-ins. I was tring to move my mother over to Firefox, but couldn't get the streaming audio from her favorite radio station. Actually, how about emulation support for IE plug ins? (Yes, I would rather see native versions too, but the world doesn't spin the way you want it to)
Just as the guy walks by a group of Hell's angels, sombody hacks his t-shirt to display a prominant logo for a rival gang. Ouch!
> You said it yourself. "Reasonably reliable."
Actually, it is perfectly possible to achieve reliable data transfer (or storage) through an unreliable medium, using error correction codes.
Even with a crappy chewed up tape, it is possible to pefectly recover the data, as long as the data is properly interleaved and a robust error correction code is used.