If I were a tax paying parent with a child in this school district I would have a serious problem with this. The school districts determine a budget based on the services they choose to provide and then the government extracts that money from the community at gunpoint (or more specifically at the threat of placing a lien on property and/or garnishing wages, these actions would presumably lead to armed government forces taking you into custody if you fought back long and hard enough.)
These extracurricular activities are paid for out of the school budget. Every taxpayer in the community is charged regardless of whether they benefit from the services, but at least the assumption is that if they have children or grandchildren in the school system then those kids will have the service available.
If the school district imposes relevant requirements (such as a physical exam prior to joining a sports team) in order to allow kids to participate that's fair. However, when it comes to unrelated out of school requirements that's the slippery slope. If this policy is acceptable because you consider extracurriculars to be a privilege then at what point do you draw the line?
What if the requirement was that a student must agree not to join a political party if they want to be allowed to participate in extracurricular activities? What if the school required students to agree not to be muslim if they want to participate in extracuricular activities? Would you argue that that's not a 1st amendment violation? After all, the school isn't forcing a religion on them, it's just setting a prerequisite for participation in a "privilege" of an "optional" extracurricular activity.
That being said, if a kid posts evidence of actual illegal activity on a public forum without first establishing a long posting history of fictional illegal activity then the kid is just stupid and ought to be smacked for being stupid. It's just common sense that if you're going to do something illegal you shouldn't blab about it. Either obey the law (like I do) or break the law and cover your tracks. Anything else is just monumentally stupid.
No, he's saying that the Enron debacle was already illegal. The appropriate response of the government when a law is broken is to enforce the law. Passing a new law is a stupid response.
Of course, this would require that the executive branch do its job properly. The legislative branch should be solely concerned with ensuring that we have the absolute minimum laws possible to make all the "bad" stuff illegal while not making any "good" stuff illegal.
The executive branch should spend all its time making sure that it precisely follows the intent of the legislative branch. Of course that'll never happen.
Hmm, I just took a look at that thread and all the posts I read looked like they deserved a -1. I feel like it was a waste of my time even reading them, but I did. If there were anything in there that didn't deserve a -1 I didn't see it.
I'm not sure what you think astroturfing means, but I'm just a person who has wasted too much money on an unreliable X10 home automation system. I haven't bought any Insteon stuff and I said so. Home automation certainly seems to me like a topic where Slashdot readers will have a fair amount of experience and knowlegeable opinions about what works and what doesn't.
If you've got something specific against Insteon I'd love to hear it so I don't waste my money. If you've got nothing of value to add to the conversation though . . .
One of the big advantages of Myth is its support for transcoding the recordings after they're done, removing commercials automatically, and archiving them to, say, DivX or XviD format. You're not going to be doing that with a 1 GHZ processor on a Mini ITX board.
Is that really one of the big advantages? Because I've wanted to do that and it's the main reason I started messing around with MythTV years ago, but I've never found any clear documentation on how to do it and I haven't had any luck getting it to work.
Commercial detection in MythTV seems too bad to be usable. It's very unclear from the documentation how transcoding is supposed to work. When I did some experimenting with it all I got were unplayable recordings that look awful.
It might be my hardware. The PVR350 seems really limited. I have to access the UI over a VNC session because I can't get it to display the UI on the TV and I can't get lirc working. All the various howtos seem very specific to particular Linux distributions and I think they also skip key steps.
I wish I could get my MythTV box fully functional. I've spent far more on it over the years than I have on my Tivo and it still doesn't measure up. It can do more "stuff" but it does it in a much less polished way. In this latest attempt, the IR receiver on my PVR350 doesn't work, though it did work in a previous incarnation.
The core MythTV documentation is severely lacking. There are lots of good tutorials out there, but since every tutorial focuses on a specific set of hardware you can waste a lot of time if you have slightly different hardware than the tutorial.
Anybody know how to keep my MythTV box from locking up when the disk gets full? I have a separate partition just for recordings, but MythTV can't seem to figure out that it should delete old ones when the partition is full. I never had to configure my Tivo to handle this very obvious issue.
I keep working on my MythTV box because I know that my series 1 Tivo will fail someday, but unless there are some major improvements in the MythTV documentation and code I expect that I'll keep using my Tivo until it dies.
Not me. Mozilla had it much better with a single box that could handle url or search with ease. I know there's a workaround for Firefox, but it doesn't work 100% of the time and it has to be set up on each machine. I use way too many computers.
I still end up typing search terms in the Firefox URL bar from time to time and then have to copy and paste them to the search box
Actually, one could consider GTAAACTTGAAAA intelligible. If you consider that the without sequencing DNA is just a bit of goo in a cell nucleus. By "decoding" it into a string of letters with a well recognized "code" for mapping between letters and bases you've translated it into something that can be written or spoken.
Intelligible doesn't mean that everyone who reads it understand it. Open any high level math textbook and show a formula at random to an intelligent person who doesn't study math. Most likely they won't understand it, but that doesn't mean the formula is unitelligible.
Now, writing a DNA sequence using only four letters will result in a much longer formula than an elegant math equation using symbols that require years of study just to understand what a single symbol means, but that's just a question of information density. "Decoding" from chemical to written equivalent of chemical does make the information intelligible even if it's not easily understandable.
I'll pay for DVDs. I've bought lots of them. I just wish I could get them all into a single player so that I can choose a DVD to watch as easily as I pick a show off of my Tivo Now Showing menu. I haven't yet been able to get Mythtv or anything else to do that.
What sort of latency is there with this approach? I bought a Mac Mini on a whim when I saw a decent sale price on it. I was thinking about perhaps buying an Airport Express and using the Mini as a DVD player (there's no discrete way to route audio cables to my stereo due to the layout of my condo) but it seems that that's a completely unworkable solution due to shortcomings in the Airport Express.
Well, I don't have a concert hall available, but I often plug my iPod into a cheap (couple hundred dollar) power mixer in a small (100 seat) theatre or a somewhat more expensive mixing console with separate power amps in a slightly larger (220 seat) theatre. It works fine for background music while building and painting and sounds better than the most common alternative which is a boom box playing FM radio. No one has ever complained about the sound quality.
I've also played sound effects for various shows by plugging my laptop's line out into the mixer. For recording I use an Edirol UA-5, but I stopped bothering to bring it for performances because there's just no significant difference between the UA-5 and my laptop's built in line out when played through an inexpensive mixer in a somewhat reflective black box style theatre.
If you're plagued by super iritable ears, you have my sympathy. If you're not, be thankful. Accept that having average hearing is a blessing, not a curse. A person with average hearing gets as much (maybe more) pleasure out of moderately priced audio hardware as an audiophile gets out of exorbitantly priced hardware. Be thankful if you aren't plagued with hearing all these flaws people on Slashdot moan about.
Let me just say that I'm glad that you didn't design my Tivo remote. Personally I use a learning remote that I've trained from my Tivo remote, but I use almost all of the buttons you listed as unnecessary at least a couple times per week.
Also I absolutely hate scrolling through songs on my iPod. I have over 5000 tracks on my iPod and scrolling through a list of artist names either takes forever or kicks the scroll into "hyper" where it jumps way towards the end of the alphabet. I would hate it if my Tivo lost the page up - page down buttons in favor of some wacky multispeed scroll.
I don't know if you're one of those people designing web sites with microscopic fonts in a tiny strip, but if you are I should point out that most of the time I avoid your sites.
On the rare occasions that Google leads me to your site for some information that I critically need I hold down the Control key and tap the + sign three or four times to make your fonts readable. Wow does you're layoug f*cking suck reading a couple words per line across a tiny column pinched between obnoxious adds and pointless useless menus. And the fact that it won't expand when I widen my browser window (you didn't actually think my browser winow is wider than half my screen did you?) your stupid narrow text column doesn't expand, instead just the blank space expands.
I wonder if I might visit your site more often if it didn't look so horrible. I guess we'll never know.
Lucent's Brick firewall is a dedicated appliance that's very easy to use and manage. Throughput is terrific and the price is reasonable. The Brick runs Inferno, an operating system which traces its roots back to Bell Labs, the birthplace of Unix.
The bricks are managed using an easy to use GUI that is Java based and runs on Windows or Unix. The management station is separate from the Brick hardware, but can be anything, even just your desktop Win2K Pro box. The managment station is not in the path of traffic, it's just a computer behind the firewall.
Configuration is simple and the reporting functions are easy to use. The learning curve is very shallow, but the Brick is capable of quite advanced functions.
Failover is incredibly simple, just buy a second identical brick and check one checkbox in the managment GUI.
This link is to the model 150, but there are lots of models. They all work the same way, what you pay just determines the amount of throughput and number of interfaces.
I've got one and you're sort of right. Square is not particularly important, its search pattern does get into all the areas of a room.
Cables are a big problem. Not just computer cables, if you have floor lamps or anything else where a power cord runs long the base of a wall Roomba will get caught on it and pull the cord away from the wall.
Rugs are also a big problem. Wall to wall carpeting is fine and solid floors are fine, but Roomba can't climb from my hardwood floor onto the area rug in my living room. Even if I start it on the rug, it immediately drives off the rug and spends the rest of the cycle cleaning the perimeter around the outside of the rug without being able to get back on.
Cats are a big problem. Not with Roomba, just in general. Cat claws carpet, loosens a thread, Roomba sees loose thread and sucks it up, unravelling carpet and jamming Roomba's roller brush.
Steps are a problem. Roomba has drop sensors but the don't always work. I've repeatedly found my Roomba upside down after flipping off a single step down. I wouldn't trust Roomba to clean the area adjacent to the top of a staircase.
Beds are a problem. If you have a bed skirt or sheets or blankets that dangle down to the floor, Roomba will get caught in them.
Chairs are a problem. I have several chairs just the right size for Roomba to get wedged into the space between the legs. You wouldn't beleive how persistent Roomba is about wedging itself in tight.
Other than that it works great. The cleaning suction is strong and the rotating brush works well. It picks up a lot of dirt and dust.
Basically Roomba is like a baby. You have to baby proof a house when you have a baby and you have to Roomba proof a house if you want to have a Roomba.
I haven't personally tested gas mileage, but a web search shows the following:
Honda Pilot 18/24 (city/highway) (2wd) Toyota Highlander 18/24 (city/highway) (4wd) Ford Explorer 15/10 (city/highway) (4wd)
Now granted the real mileage of a lead foot driver will be lower, and these aren't necessarily the absolute maxed out versions of these vehicles (biggest engine, heaviest load), but I'd say that you're the one who's full of shit.
Certainly the biggest SUV, with biggest engine, pulling its maximum rated towing load may very well drop down as low as 5 mpg, but that's hardly a fair comparison. Lots of people are driving SUVs with much better gas mileage than that.
I've become very dependent on smart playlists. Basically all of my listening is based on dynamically generated playlists on a variety of constantly updating criteria. Some examples of my commonly used playlists are:
- 3, 4, or 5 star rating but not audiobook, podcast, or holiday - 4 or 5 star rating but not audiobook, podcast, or holiday - 5 star rating but not audiobook, podcast, or holiday - Genre rock and not played in the last 30 days - Alternative and not played in the last 30 days - Last played yesterday - Last played in the past week (these are for identifying that song I heard recently but don't remember what it was) - No rating and not audiobook, podcast, or holiday (I use this playlist for "rating sessions" so obviously I need to be able to rate songs from whatever interface I'm using) - Most frequently played songs
I've been spoiled. I just can't go back to any music playback system that doesn't keep track of how I've rated each song, how many times I've played it, and when I played it last.
No, of course not. He should pay. And it certainly shouldn't be a cozy "Hilton" prison. These financial crimes cause enormous harm to vast numbers of people.
That article is one of the least coherent things to appear on Slashdot, and that's quite an achievment. I never really liked stream of conciousness in high school and I can't say that I like it any better on a web page than in paperback. I can't imagine what posessed anyone to submit that story or what caused an "editor" to post it. It just doesn't have any content.
The romans posed the question "Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?"
I would be in favor of a system to track the movements of all cars and issue speeding violations as long as the data is a matter of public record and it can be proven (for example, via Freedom of Information requests) that all traffic regulations are being strictly enforce on all public officials, including elected official, appointed official, off duty police and their families, friends, and relatives, and anybody else in a position of influence.
If a speed limit is too low, I'm sure it would get rapidly fixed if there were 100% enforcement of fines and penalties against senators and representatives.
If a speed limit is, in fact, valid and legitimate for safety reasons then 100% enforcement is certainly a good thing.
The problem occurs when traffic regulations are constructed in such a way that everybody violates them because they are unreasonable and the police use them as a means of selectively grabbing people they have an illegitimate beef against.
That doesn't look very expandable. Are there any relatively inexpensive solutions for housing a significant number of disks (5-10) or is it only professional grade equipment that can manage that?
I bought a Mini ITX setup including a PVR350 (because the Epia is too gutless to do video compression, but people claimed it worked well with the PVR350 offloading the MPEG2 work).
I don't have a PVR yet. For starters, the PVR350 ran way too hot for the Mini ITX case. The Epia itself is low powered, but with a PVR350 in the single PCI slot the outside of the case was very hot to the touch.
Also, several Linux distributions, including KnoppMyth, wouldn't boot at all. I finally did get Debian loaded, but the instructions on the web at the time for loading MythTV on Debian referenced non-functioning URLs to be added to apt.sources.
I have since put the Mini ITX aside and moved the PVR350 into a cheap Dell server. MythTV does work, but with some issues. First, I never did get the video output on the PVR350 and the VGA output on the Dell working at the same time. It's a major hassle to switch back and forth. (My KVM is in a different room than the TV, so doing anything keyboard related while using the PVR350 TV output is significant physical exercise) Secondly, the video "polish" of MythTV is severely lacking. Fine tuning the size and position of the display was tedious (and I never needed to do that with Tivo). Even after fine tuning, MythTV happily runs text right off the screen.
I'm contemplating putting Win2K and SageTV on that Dell with the PVR350, but it's not a high priority since my Series 1 Tivo continues to work flawlessly as it has for 3-4 years.
I've never even done any MythTV development, never tried to modify it in any way, but just in setting it up I've spend thousands of dollars worth of my time (at my current rate of pay) and not gotten it to a state where it works as well as Tivo. Hobbies are fun, if Mini ITX is yours, that's great. If Mini ITX isn't your hobby, and if you aren't prototyping something that you plan to mass produce, Mini ITX isn't worth your time.
I just searched Google for dodge ram and every single result related to Dodge Ram trucks. The official sites were at the top, including sponsered links, and there were lots of other relatated sites. Nothing non-truck related on the first page.
Looks to me like Google functions flawlessly in this case. If a person can't be bothered to type dodge when it's a Dodge Ram they're looking for that sounds to me like PEBKAC.
That would be like going to any of the mapping web sites and typing in your street name without city or state. Just dumb. Names get reused, deal with it, be specific.
Slashdot Mirror
If I were a tax paying parent with a child in this school district I would have a serious problem with this. The school districts determine a budget based on the services they choose to provide and then the government extracts that money from the community at gunpoint (or more specifically at the threat of placing a lien on property and/or garnishing wages, these actions would presumably lead to armed government forces taking you into custody if you fought back long and hard enough.)
These extracurricular activities are paid for out of the school budget. Every taxpayer in the community is charged regardless of whether they benefit from the services, but at least the assumption is that if they have children or grandchildren in the school system then those kids will have the service available.
If the school district imposes relevant requirements (such as a physical exam prior to joining a sports team) in order to allow kids to participate that's fair. However, when it comes to unrelated out of school requirements that's the slippery slope. If this policy is acceptable because you consider extracurriculars to be a privilege then at what point do you draw the line?
What if the requirement was that a student must agree not to join a political party if they want to be allowed to participate in extracurricular activities? What if the school required students to agree not to be muslim if they want to participate in extracuricular activities? Would you argue that that's not a 1st amendment violation? After all, the school isn't forcing a religion on them, it's just setting a prerequisite for participation in a "privilege" of an "optional" extracurricular activity.
That being said, if a kid posts evidence of actual illegal activity on a public forum without first establishing a long posting history of fictional illegal activity then the kid is just stupid and ought to be smacked for being stupid. It's just common sense that if you're going to do something illegal you shouldn't blab about it. Either obey the law (like I do) or break the law and cover your tracks. Anything else is just monumentally stupid.
No, he's saying that the Enron debacle was already illegal. The appropriate response of the government when a law is broken is to enforce the law. Passing a new law is a stupid response.
Of course, this would require that the executive branch do its job properly. The legislative branch should be solely concerned with ensuring that we have the absolute minimum laws possible to make all the "bad" stuff illegal while not making any "good" stuff illegal.
The executive branch should spend all its time making sure that it precisely follows the intent of the legislative branch. Of course that'll never happen.
Hmm, I just took a look at that thread and all the posts I read looked like they deserved a -1. I feel like it was a waste of my time even reading them, but I did. If there were anything in there that didn't deserve a -1 I didn't see it.
I'm not sure what you think astroturfing means, but I'm just a person who has wasted too much money on an unreliable X10 home automation system. I haven't bought any Insteon stuff and I said so. Home automation certainly seems to me like a topic where Slashdot readers will have a fair amount of experience and knowlegeable opinions about what works and what doesn't.
If you've got something specific against Insteon I'd love to hear it so I don't waste my money. If you've got nothing of value to add to the conversation though . . .
Doesn't look too interesting to me. All I see is a page full of ads. Are you sure that's the domain name you intended to post?
One of the big advantages of Myth is its support for transcoding the recordings after they're done, removing commercials automatically, and archiving them to, say, DivX or XviD format. You're not going to be doing that with a 1 GHZ processor on a Mini ITX board.
Is that really one of the big advantages? Because I've wanted to do that and it's the main reason I started messing around with MythTV years ago, but I've never found any clear documentation on how to do it and I haven't had any luck getting it to work.
Commercial detection in MythTV seems too bad to be usable. It's very unclear from the documentation how transcoding is supposed to work. When I did some experimenting with it all I got were unplayable recordings that look awful.
It might be my hardware. The PVR350 seems really limited. I have to access the UI over a VNC session because I can't get it to display the UI on the TV and I can't get lirc working. All the various howtos seem very specific to particular Linux distributions and I think they also skip key steps.
I wish I could get my MythTV box fully functional. I've spent far more on it over the years than I have on my Tivo and it still doesn't measure up. It can do more "stuff" but it does it in a much less polished way. In this latest attempt, the IR receiver on my PVR350 doesn't work, though it did work in a previous incarnation.
The core MythTV documentation is severely lacking. There are lots of good tutorials out there, but since every tutorial focuses on a specific set of hardware you can waste a lot of time if you have slightly different hardware than the tutorial.
Anybody know how to keep my MythTV box from locking up when the disk gets full? I have a separate partition just for recordings, but MythTV can't seem to figure out that it should delete old ones when the partition is full. I never had to configure my Tivo to handle this very obvious issue.
I keep working on my MythTV box because I know that my series 1 Tivo will fail someday, but unless there are some major improvements in the MythTV documentation and code I expect that I'll keep using my Tivo until it dies.
Who here likes the Search box in Firefox?
Not me. Mozilla had it much better with a single box that could handle url or search with ease. I know there's a workaround for Firefox, but it doesn't work 100% of the time and it has to be set up on each machine. I use way too many computers.
I still end up typing search terms in the Firefox URL bar from time to time and then have to copy and paste them to the search box
Actually, one could consider GTAAACTTGAAAA intelligible. If you consider that the without sequencing DNA is just a bit of goo in a cell nucleus. By "decoding" it into a string of letters with a well recognized "code" for mapping between letters and bases you've translated it into something that can be written or spoken.
Intelligible doesn't mean that everyone who reads it understand it. Open any high level math textbook and show a formula at random to an intelligent person who doesn't study math. Most likely they won't understand it, but that doesn't mean the formula is unitelligible.
Now, writing a DNA sequence using only four letters will result in a much longer formula than an elegant math equation using symbols that require years of study just to understand what a single symbol means, but that's just a question of information density. "Decoding" from chemical to written equivalent of chemical does make the information intelligible even if it's not easily understandable.
I'll pay for DVDs. I've bought lots of them. I just wish I could get them all into a single player so that I can choose a DVD to watch as easily as I pick a show off of my Tivo Now Showing menu. I haven't yet been able to get Mythtv or anything else to do that.
What sort of latency is there with this approach? I bought a Mac Mini on a whim when I saw a decent sale price on it. I was thinking about perhaps buying an Airport Express and using the Mini as a DVD player (there's no discrete way to route audio cables to my stereo due to the layout of my condo) but it seems that that's a completely unworkable solution due to shortcomings in the Airport Express.
Well, I don't have a concert hall available, but I often plug my iPod into a cheap (couple hundred dollar) power mixer in a small (100 seat) theatre or a somewhat more expensive mixing console with separate power amps in a slightly larger (220 seat) theatre. It works fine for background music while building and painting and sounds better than the most common alternative which is a boom box playing FM radio. No one has ever complained about the sound quality.
I've also played sound effects for various shows by plugging my laptop's line out into the mixer. For recording I use an Edirol UA-5, but I stopped bothering to bring it for performances because there's just no significant difference between the UA-5 and my laptop's built in line out when played through an inexpensive mixer in a somewhat reflective black box style theatre.
If you're plagued by super iritable ears, you have my sympathy. If you're not, be thankful. Accept that having average hearing is a blessing, not a curse. A person with average hearing gets as much (maybe more) pleasure out of moderately priced audio hardware as an audiophile gets out of exorbitantly priced hardware. Be thankful if you aren't plagued with hearing all these flaws people on Slashdot moan about.
Let me just say that I'm glad that you didn't design my Tivo remote. Personally I use a learning remote that I've trained from my Tivo remote, but I use almost all of the buttons you listed as unnecessary at least a couple times per week.
Also I absolutely hate scrolling through songs on my iPod. I have over 5000 tracks on my iPod and scrolling through a list of artist names either takes forever or kicks the scroll into "hyper" where it jumps way towards the end of the alphabet. I would hate it if my Tivo lost the page up - page down buttons in favor of some wacky multispeed scroll.
I don't know if you're one of those people designing web sites with microscopic fonts in a tiny strip, but if you are I should point out that most of the time I avoid your sites.
On the rare occasions that Google leads me to your site for some information that I critically need I hold down the Control key and tap the + sign three or four times to make your fonts readable. Wow does you're layoug f*cking suck reading a couple words per line across a tiny column pinched between obnoxious adds and pointless useless menus. And the fact that it won't expand when I widen my browser window (you didn't actually think my browser winow is wider than half my screen did you?) your stupid narrow text column doesn't expand, instead just the blank space expands.
I wonder if I might visit your site more often if it didn't look so horrible. I guess we'll never know.
Fear not, I won't visit your site.
Lucent's Brick firewall is a dedicated appliance that's very easy to use and manage. Throughput is terrific and the price is reasonable. The Brick runs Inferno, an operating system which traces its roots back to Bell Labs, the birthplace of Unix.
0 17-STID+10080-SOID+1649-LOCL+1,00.html
The bricks are managed using an easy to use GUI that is Java based and runs on Windows or Unix. The management station is separate from the Brick hardware, but can be anything, even just your desktop Win2K Pro box. The managment station is not in the path of traffic, it's just a computer behind the firewall.
Configuration is simple and the reporting functions are easy to use. The learning curve is very shallow, but the Brick is capable of quite advanced functions.
Failover is incredibly simple, just buy a second identical brick and check one checkbox in the managment GUI.
http://www.lucent.com/products/solution/0,,CTID+2
This link is to the model 150, but there are lots of models. They all work the same way, what you pay just determines the amount of throughput and number of interfaces.
I've got one and you're sort of right. Square is not particularly important, its search pattern does get into all the areas of a room.
Cables are a big problem. Not just computer cables, if you have floor lamps or anything else where a power cord runs long the base of a wall Roomba will get caught on it and pull the cord away from the wall.
Rugs are also a big problem. Wall to wall carpeting is fine and solid floors are fine, but Roomba can't climb from my hardwood floor onto the area rug in my living room. Even if I start it on the rug, it immediately drives off the rug and spends the rest of the cycle cleaning the perimeter around the outside of the rug without being able to get back on.
Cats are a big problem. Not with Roomba, just in general. Cat claws carpet, loosens a thread, Roomba sees loose thread and sucks it up, unravelling carpet and jamming Roomba's roller brush.
Steps are a problem. Roomba has drop sensors but the don't always work. I've repeatedly found my Roomba upside down after flipping off a single step down. I wouldn't trust Roomba to clean the area adjacent to the top of a staircase.
Beds are a problem. If you have a bed skirt or sheets or blankets that dangle down to the floor, Roomba will get caught in them.
Chairs are a problem. I have several chairs just the right size for Roomba to get wedged into the space between the legs. You wouldn't beleive how persistent Roomba is about wedging itself in tight.
Other than that it works great. The cleaning suction is strong and the rotating brush works well. It picks up a lot of dirt and dust.
Basically Roomba is like a baby. You have to baby proof a house when you have a baby and you have to Roomba proof a house if you want to have a Roomba.
I haven't personally tested gas mileage, but a web search shows the following:
Honda Pilot 18/24 (city/highway) (2wd)
Toyota Highlander 18/24 (city/highway) (4wd)
Ford Explorer 15/10 (city/highway) (4wd)
Now granted the real mileage of a lead foot driver will be lower, and these aren't necessarily the absolute maxed out versions of these vehicles (biggest engine, heaviest load), but I'd say that you're the one who's full of shit.
Certainly the biggest SUV, with biggest engine, pulling its maximum rated towing load may very well drop down as low as 5 mpg, but that's hardly a fair comparison. Lots of people are driving SUVs with much better gas mileage than that.
I've become very dependent on smart playlists. Basically all of my listening is based on dynamically generated playlists on a variety of constantly updating criteria. Some examples of my commonly used playlists are:
- 3, 4, or 5 star rating but not audiobook, podcast, or holiday
- 4 or 5 star rating but not audiobook, podcast, or holiday
- 5 star rating but not audiobook, podcast, or holiday
- Genre rock and not played in the last 30 days
- Alternative and not played in the last 30 days
- Last played yesterday
- Last played in the past week (these are for identifying that song I heard recently but don't remember what it was)
- No rating and not audiobook, podcast, or holiday (I use this playlist for "rating sessions" so obviously I need to be able to rate songs from whatever interface I'm using)
- Most frequently played songs
I've been spoiled. I just can't go back to any music playback system that doesn't keep track of how I've rated each song, how many times I've played it, and when I played it last.
No, of course not. He should pay. And it certainly shouldn't be a cozy "Hilton" prison. These financial crimes cause enormous harm to vast numbers of people.
That article is one of the least coherent things to appear on Slashdot, and that's quite an achievment. I never really liked stream of conciousness in high school and I can't say that I like it any better on a web page than in paperback. I can't imagine what posessed anyone to submit that story or what caused an "editor" to post it. It just doesn't have any content.
The romans posed the question "Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?"
I would be in favor of a system to track the movements of all cars and issue speeding violations as long as the data is a matter of public record and it can be proven (for example, via Freedom of Information requests) that all traffic regulations are being strictly enforce on all public officials, including elected official, appointed official, off duty police and their families, friends, and relatives, and anybody else in a position of influence.
If a speed limit is too low, I'm sure it would get rapidly fixed if there were 100% enforcement of fines and penalties against senators and representatives.
If a speed limit is, in fact, valid and legitimate for safety reasons then 100% enforcement is certainly a good thing.
The problem occurs when traffic regulations are constructed in such a way that everybody violates them because they are unreasonable and the police use them as a means of selectively grabbing people they have an illegitimate beef against.
That doesn't look very expandable. Are there any relatively inexpensive solutions for housing a significant number of disks (5-10) or is it only professional grade equipment that can manage that?
I bought a Mini ITX setup including a PVR350 (because the Epia is too gutless to do video compression, but people claimed it worked well with the PVR350 offloading the MPEG2 work).
I don't have a PVR yet. For starters, the PVR350 ran way too hot for the Mini ITX case. The Epia itself is low powered, but with a PVR350 in the single PCI slot the outside of the case was very hot to the touch.
Also, several Linux distributions, including KnoppMyth, wouldn't boot at all. I finally did get Debian loaded, but the instructions on the web at the time for loading MythTV on Debian referenced non-functioning URLs to be added to apt.sources.
I have since put the Mini ITX aside and moved the PVR350 into a cheap Dell server. MythTV does work, but with some issues. First, I never did get the video output on the PVR350 and the VGA output on the Dell working at the same time. It's a major hassle to switch back and forth. (My KVM is in a different room than the TV, so doing anything keyboard related while using the PVR350 TV output is significant physical exercise) Secondly, the video "polish" of MythTV is severely lacking. Fine tuning the size and position of the display was tedious (and I never needed to do that with Tivo). Even after fine tuning, MythTV happily runs text right off the screen.
I'm contemplating putting Win2K and SageTV on that Dell with the PVR350, but it's not a high priority since my Series 1 Tivo continues to work flawlessly as it has for 3-4 years.
I've never even done any MythTV development, never tried to modify it in any way, but just in setting it up I've spend thousands of dollars worth of my time (at my current rate of pay) and not gotten it to a state where it works as well as Tivo. Hobbies are fun, if Mini ITX is yours, that's great. If Mini ITX isn't your hobby, and if you aren't prototyping something that you plan to mass produce, Mini ITX isn't worth your time.
I just searched Google for dodge ram and every single result related to Dodge Ram trucks. The official sites were at the top, including sponsered links, and there were lots of other relatated sites. Nothing non-truck related on the first page.
Looks to me like Google functions flawlessly in this case. If a person can't be bothered to type dodge when it's a Dodge Ram they're looking for that sounds to me like PEBKAC.
That would be like going to any of the mapping web sites and typing in your street name without city or state. Just dumb. Names get reused, deal with it, be specific.