Frankly, I don't know what the hype about iPod-phones is...the ability to play MP3s from your phone has been around for several years. My Cingular 2125 (HTC Tornado, rebranded), much like other smartphones/PDA phones, has a MiniSD slot and I can watch videos and listen to music with it.
The hype about "iPod phones" is that they'd have a MP3-playing phone that's the ease-of-use equivalent of the iPod.
The iPod, just as a hardware device, is admittedly slick, but it's not that wonderful. It's a hard drive, a funny-shaped battery, a microprocessor, and some controls in a white Lexan box. What gives it most of its value is the integration with iTunes and the automatic syncronization/updating. It's totally brainless -- you never have to worry about what music is on your portable versus what is on your computer (assuming you have one of the larger iPods). When the iPod first came out, this was the selling feature for it, compared to other, smaller-capacity players. You plugged it in, it did its thing, and you could grab the player and go.
I don't know of a cellphone that offers that. You have to add or copy the songs manually, and that's a drag; geeks might be okay with it, but a whole lot of mainstream consumers won't, especially if they use iTunes as their jukebox/music-manager already. People have come to expect total integration from a music player, and anything that offers less just isn't going to fly.
I owned a pre-iPod, flash-based music player. It was called the Pontis, and it was pretty forward-thinking when it was released. It used MMC cards, so the capacity was virtually unlimted, it had great battery life, and it was rugged as hell. But it sucked. It sucked because any time you wanted to add more music to it, you had to fire up a separate program and move the files to it. Later I think they achieved some jukebox integration, but it was with programs that were clunky (Musicmatch) and generally less elegant than iTunes. This is about where cellphones are now; nobody has figured out how to really integrate a cellular phone with the computer, in the same way that Apple integrated the MP3 player.
IMO, it's relentlessly stupid to involve a cable in this integration. A cellphone's integration should be even more transparent than the iPod's, because it ought to do it all wirelessly. Make a playlist in iTunes, and the next time you bring your phone within Bluetooth range of the computer, it gets updated (along with your Address Book, Calendar, etc.). When you have that kind of seamlessness, you will have an iPod equivalent. Otherwise, all you have is a Pontis equivalent.
...a list of ALL programs that can be accessed using alt-TAB
Erm, which is exactly what you get if you press Command-Tab on a Mac. (That's OpenApple-Tab to all you old-school folks out there.) Except instead of a vertical list, it's displayed left to right, which I've always found faster to read. And the applications are ordered by last use, so pressing Command-Tab quickly switches you back to the last application, pressing tab twice gets you the application before that, etc. I think it's a much better interface than WinXP's or Linux's app switchers, although I admit the differences are minimal.
The lack of virtual desktops on Mac OS is a bit of a drag, though. There aren't a lot of features that I think MacOS is lacking, but that's one of them. I understand that it might confuse some new users, but I think it could be enabled as a preference or something.
I'd just like to point out that based on what I've heard, a great many of the people who will vote to ban gay marriage, will relax their opposition considerably when it's called a "civil union."
There is a very large segment of the American public -- too big, in my opinion, to write it off as a 'vast right-wing conspiracy' -- that is just inherently uncomfortable with and opposed to the idea of gay marriage. However, when faced with 'civil unions' or something similar, a lot of the people in the middle are okay with it. A 'civil union' doesn't have the sexual, procreative, and family baggage that goes along with 'marriage,' but could potentially have all of the tax benefits, inheritance benefits, etc., which are the basis of the calls for gay marriage in the first place.
There are certainly people who are just going to oppose anything which gets close to even acknowledging that gay people exist, on principle. But they're in the minority; I think (and I believe there are polls that back me up here), that if the gay lobby were to avoid calling their goal 'marriage,' they would encounter less opposition, and deny their political enemies a lot of ammunition and support.
Anyway, this is all OT to the actual article, but I thought it was relevant to the thread.
I think you pretty well voiced the feelings of a lot of people on this issue, myself included.
Pity you got modded down for it, though. Ah, well -- the Slashdot hivemind is a fickle thing.
I think Blizzard is both within their rights, and correct to do so,if (and when) they bar advertising both by religious and sexual-preference (and political, if they exist) based guilds. If they want to exist, fine; but they can keep their advertising off-line.
If this is true -- which I agree with you, I think it is -- then why bother going after people for trading electronic bits online? People really want that "clothy box," as someone famous I can't remember right now once put it, not a big txt or rtf or pdf file.
I'm pretty sure that JK Rowling could have given out all the text to all the HP novels on the internet from day one, and probably still would have made a fortune selling actual paper copies of it.
I don't know how this translates to other media, though; I don't think people care very much whether their satellite television comes from a 'real' DirectTV dish, or a pirate one they bought in Chinatown for $75; there's no packaging that's equivalent to a book anymore that you can easily control the manufacture and distribution of.
Doesn't matter -- it still runs into the fundamental flaw of DRM, in that you can't give an untrusted individual both the ciphertext and the decryption keys, and not give them access to the plaintext. It just doesn't work.
You can't give someone a safe with a bar of gold in it, and the combination to the safe, and then let them take that safe home and expect them not to be able to take the bar of gold out. They have all the information necessary to do it, and eventually somebody will.
When you start going down that road, where you end up is in an 'arms race' between the people who make DRM, and the people who unlock content and redistribute it. There's no end, and eventually everyone just ends up with computers, the cases of which are totally filled with epoxy, and wired with self-destruct mechanisms.
DRM isn't a winnable fight, but the battle could really be obnoxious in the mean time.
How long after they require all this tracking till they specify how many of X applicants you must have to obtain a federal contract?
These already exist. There are government contracts -- particularly defense ones -- which get marked as being for "minority owned businesses only." There's probably some sort of special term or code for them, but I can't think of it right now.
It's basically almost like having a non-bidded contract, because none of the serious players (the big contracting companies) are able to bid. The cost to the taxpayer goes up dramatically, and most of the time what happens is some nominally minority-owned contracting company that nobody's ever heard of will get the contract at an inflated price, get themselves down as the 'prime contractor' on paper, then turn around and subcontract it out to one of the big name contractors at what they would have normally done the work for anyway.
Basically, all that happens is a few well-connected "minorities" skim a healthy percentage off of some giant taxpayer funded projects, and the big contractors still get their regular rate. But the politicians get to talk about how many projects went to minorities this year, so it's all good.
I used to do that also, until I figured out that, as a member of this country's majority, it really hurts me in the long run not to respond.
Basically, Affirmative Action is a quota system. They get away with not calling it a "quota," because instead of having a particular number of minorities that an employer is supposed to hire, it's supposed to be proportional to their applicant pool.
So if I, as a white person, decline to respond, it just doesn't get factored in to the statistics for the applicant pool at all. But in all likelihood, most minorities who apply for the position will respond, because they believe it won't hurt and might help them (which is logical). The result is that the statistics for the applicant pool become skewed in favor of minorities -- that is, they show minorities as being falsely under-represented. As a result, pressure gets put on the employer to hire more minorities, for reasons unrelated to job qualifications.
It's the same (and potentially even more serious) when dealing with college or graduate school admissions, because I believe their criteria for diversity are even more stringent than employers'.
So really, if you're a white person, you're only shooting yourself and other members of the majority in the foot by declining to respond.
Anyone else have a feeling of deja vu? (Today is the 7th, the original article was posted on the 2nd. Five days -- most people probably still have their comments in their history page. Quick, do a copy-paste -- double that karma!)
I'll sum up the most salient points I remember from the other discussion: -AOL will still have a whitelist for non-commercial mailinglists and the like to add themselves to, if they want to include a large number of AOL members -Messages which aren't on the whitelist or who don't pay for Goodmail service will have their images and links removed -The biggest (legitimate) user of this service would seem to be profit-generating promotional emails, like the ones that get sent out by airlines, travel agencies, etc. -The general hivemind concensus seems to be that nobody likes AOL anyway, and this is just another reason to avoid dealing with them
An article on how to set up iChat to interoperate with MSN and Yahoo Messenger, using a Jabber server as a gateway. Mac-centric, obviously, but it gives an overview of what you'd need to do. The MSN-Jabber translation is all done by the server -- there's nothing really interesting going on at the client end. I think the MSN stuff is handled by this piece of software.
At one point I found a site which listed Jabber servers and showed what protocol-gatways they had running, but I can't find that list anymore. The examples used on the link above are in the Czech Republic, kind of a long haul for a US-originated and -bound packet.
There are jabber servers around which act as bridges to other networks, like AIM, MSN, Yahoo, etc. You still need to have accounts on those services in order to use them, though.
A while back there was an article in one of the Mac mags on how to use a system like this so that you could use iChat as a multi-protocol client -- get MSN and Yahoo Messenger functionality within iChat. It was sort of a neat hack... I gave it a shot, but eventually I just switched to Adium and haven't looked back. (Except when I want to transfer files, which is shaky in the Gaim-based programs if one person is behind a firewall.)
I have AdBlock (vers. 0.5.2.055) and Filterset.G installed on Firefox 1.0.7, and it seems to work fine for me. Unfortunately I don't know the version of Filterset.G that I'm using, but it's not more than a few months old.
I don't understand what exactly would break GMail -- AdBlock doesn't filter out Google's text ads (at least mine doesn't), and wouldn't do anything anyway unless Google was in the block list. So I'm not sure why they're recommending that people remove it, as opposed to warning people not to blacklist Google.
I'll be interested to hear what the reasoning behind this is.
Of course, that mode is more a false sense of security than anything, since your buddy could be using some client other than the Google one, which would blithely ignore the instruction. (Unless this feature is part of the standard protocol, which would be news to me.)
So unless you're absolutely sure what the person on the other end is using, you really can't trust such a thing. I wouldn't be too surprised if there are corporate IM clients developed (perhaps they're here already) that have logging that cannot be defeated.
Maybe this is an impossible question to answer at the moment, if the service hasn't rolled out, but how does a person access their logs?
I assume that it saves stuff, if you request it, regardless of whether you're using the Google Talk web interface (so via GMail) or through the regular Google Talk desktop app (or Gaim, etc.). That's an assumption, but I think it would be pretty useless if it only logged when you used the web interface.
Is the only way to access the logs through the web interface, by logging into Gmail? Or is there a way to access them via a desktop program?
Personally I'm not too impressed if you have to log into the web interface. I use Gmail, but I do it through POP and don't ever actually go to the Gmail.com website (except when I'm travelling). A system that required me to go to a web site to get my chat logs wouldn't be particularly helpful, although I like the idea of being able to pull them up from anywhere if I want them.
Frankly I guess I'm just not really down with the idea of the web browser as the way in to traditional desktop services like Gmail and IM. Gmail's interface is great, don't get me wrong -- but it's "great" for a webmail interface. Compared to a real desktop email program, it sucks. I like being able to access stuff everywhere, and I like Gmail because it doesn't force me to use their web site when I'm at home. I hope that they keep up with that duality as they implement new features.
I understand F18's and beyond can't fly safely without fly-by-wire, this system would be even worse.
How would this system be worse? In an F-18, you've strapped a human being into a vunerable system, which could potentially be disabled and result in their death.
With a UAV, if the system is disabled, the UAV craters, and some guy in a bunker at Nellis AFB has to do a lot of paperwork.
I prefer the latter situation. Planes are not going to become less complex -- fly by wire is here to stay; UAVs just make the "wire" a lot longer.
You've got to go subsonic and let loose the payload if you want any chance of hitting your target.
I'm not sure that I buy this claim.
If the bomb was guided, as many of them tend to be, and had a system for decreasing its own velocity (i.e., is a somewhat unfortunately-named 'retarded bomb'), then it could be released from the aircraft at a very high speed, change its flight characteristics so as to shed airspeed, and then guide itself to its target.
I know I'm minimizing what would have to be a very complicated process, but it doesn't seem that difficult. A bomb follows the same type of ballistic trajectory after being released from an aircraft that a missile warhead (an inbound ballistic missile, anyway) does, and they go supersonic and have a circular error probability that's measured in feet.
I don't see any reason why it would be impossible.
Erm, I'm as much a fan of General Atomics as the next guy (cool name, IMO), but I'm not sure that they're either "little," nor are they "thumbing [their] nose" at anyone.
There are three Air Force squadrons of their products (the Predators), and I'm pretty sure the USAF didn't just buy them over the phone with an Amex card. I of course can't say for sure, but it seems like they probably went through the same acquisition channels as everyone else.
Care to clarify your point? Maybe I'm misunderstanding. I think the Predator and the Mariner are cool as hell, but they're not something you just order up and send to your buddy who's over in the Gulf along with a spare Ka-Bar and a few titty mags.
This has historically almost always been true. In the past -- up until the advent of penicillin, anyway -- the big killer was always disease. I think the biggest threat now is accidental, non-combat injuries.
It's ironic, but one of the statistics that shows how well a military is doing its job, is how high a percentage of casualties are actually the result of combat. If that number is high (and the overall number of casualties are low, obviously) than things are generally assumed to be working well, you have good force-protection, etc. If it's low, then obviously you have to start figuring out what the hell is hurting your people, aside from the enemy.
Unrelated, but I've heard it said several times that it's statistically safer for an 18-year-old black man to be in a military unit in the Persian Gulf than it is to be that same man in some neighborhoods in a few major cities. I remember hearing that after Gulf War I, I wonder if it still holds true.
I'm not agreeing nor disagreeing with most of the points you made, I just thought I'd throw in my personal experience -- I've used a pair of SR80s with a 3G iPod, and think they sound great. I've tried them with an external amplifier (Headwise 'Cmoy', Google it), and frankly didn't think that the (slight) increase in the noise floor was worth it. I don't listen to music at a high enough volume to saturate the iPod's built-in amplifier, apparently. For someone with a different listening style, it might be critical though.
The openness of the Grados is their biggest strength but also biggest weakness. In the OP's case, it would be nice because he'd be able to hear his surroundings; on the other hand if seriously listening to music is your goal, you need a very quiet place to do it in, with the Grados. Otherwise you'll still have outside sounds (HVAC, cooling fans, etc.) in the mix. Which is no different than you'd have with a regular speakered Hifi, but it's just something to consider. I guess it falls into the "audiophile nitpicking" category of complains, however.
Anyway, I recommend the SR80s, but get them from a local shop (the Grado people will tell you where one is if you ask).
I think I know the perfect product for you... get yourself a pair of these. Sure, you'll look like you just walked off the flight deck of the USS Enterprise (the real one), but you can order practically any combination of microphone element and speaker elements you want, with either XLR plugs or bare ends. They have the same amount of noise reduction as their industrial hearing protectors, too. (I use a set of the hearing protectors for handgun shooting, and they do work as advertised.)
And it just looks so much more serious than those cheesy dictation headsets. When you're wearing one of those things, you mean some sort of business. They even have an accessory so that you can wear your tinted aviator shades at the same time, without carving divots in your head. Or if you feel like doing some desk-chair acrobatics, you can strap it to your face.
Course, they will set you back about a deuce and a half.
I think the solution there is get headphones on which the foam surrounds are replacable, and get them from a manufacturer that's likely to still be in business when it's time to get a new set.
Personally I'm a fan of Grado Labs, since I think they satisfy both these objectives, but I'm sure there are other companies that would fit the bill. The surrounds pop on and off fairly easily, and the cord is also replacable (although you'd need a soldering iron -- or send them back to the factory, which I'm sure is the legit method).
Although they're not what the OP is looking for, I also have several products from the David Clark Company, which makes hearing protectors, headphones, and communication headsets (they apparently also make anti-G suits for pilots, which I was not aware of). I have a pair of hearing protectors from them that is close to 35 years old, and they're still making them. I just got a new set of foam surrounds for them, and they might as well be brand new. (It's the model 10A, if anyone's checking.)
There's no reason why properly maintained, well-built analog gear ought not last you long enough to pass along to your kids.
I agree with you on the Grados in general, but I disagree about the SR80s not being worth it.
I went down to my local hifi shop (you must buy Grados from an authorized distributer or else no warranty) to get the 60s and just on a lark did a 'blind test' of the 60s and 80s and I thought there was a very noticable difference in sound. I think the difference may be mostly due to the different ear ear surrounds and cushioning, although I suppose it could be the cable as well. The differences between the 60s and 80s are that the 80s have a 4-conductor cable and different foam pads, and are made in the Grado factory in Brooklyn; the 60s have a 2-conductor cable and are made on contract in either China or Taiwan, I forget which.
I'm not quite sure what you mean about "non-amp-driven" listening... I challenge you to find a source that will drive 32 ohm headphones that's not driven by an amplifier (a really big crystal radio?). I'm assuming you were referring to external amplifier, but as they're both 32-ohm/98-dB-SPL@1mv cans, I don't think that there's any reason why you'd want to use an amp on the 80s and not the 60s.
At any rate, I've used the Grados with the Headwise 'cmoy' amp, and I didn't think the difference in sound quality was that dramatic at the volumes that you'd want to use in an office environment. I don't know how the amplification stages are in the OP's portable player, but the iPod gets my Grados uncomfortably loud without any distortion that I can hear.
I think the real deciding factor between the 60s and 80s is whether a person thinks they can treat them well enough and not destroy them. If you're going to throw them in a bookbag or something, or run the cord over with your desk chair -- don't get either, go down to WalMart and get a pair of whatever trash Sony is making this week. If you're ready to put a little money into something that you'll probably be able to enjoy for a few years assuming you take care of them, I think the extra money for the 80s is justified.
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Frankly, I don't know what the hype about iPod-phones is...the ability to play MP3s from your phone has been around for several years. My Cingular 2125 (HTC Tornado, rebranded), much like other smartphones/PDA phones, has a MiniSD slot and I can watch videos and listen to music with it.
The hype about "iPod phones" is that they'd have a MP3-playing phone that's the ease-of-use equivalent of the iPod.
The iPod, just as a hardware device, is admittedly slick, but it's not that wonderful. It's a hard drive, a funny-shaped battery, a microprocessor, and some controls in a white Lexan box. What gives it most of its value is the integration with iTunes and the automatic syncronization/updating. It's totally brainless -- you never have to worry about what music is on your portable versus what is on your computer (assuming you have one of the larger iPods). When the iPod first came out, this was the selling feature for it, compared to other, smaller-capacity players. You plugged it in, it did its thing, and you could grab the player and go.
I don't know of a cellphone that offers that. You have to add or copy the songs manually, and that's a drag; geeks might be okay with it, but a whole lot of mainstream consumers won't, especially if they use iTunes as their jukebox/music-manager already. People have come to expect total integration from a music player, and anything that offers less just isn't going to fly.
I owned a pre-iPod, flash-based music player. It was called the Pontis, and it was pretty forward-thinking when it was released. It used MMC cards, so the capacity was virtually unlimted, it had great battery life, and it was rugged as hell. But it sucked. It sucked because any time you wanted to add more music to it, you had to fire up a separate program and move the files to it. Later I think they achieved some jukebox integration, but it was with programs that were clunky (Musicmatch) and generally less elegant than iTunes. This is about where cellphones are now; nobody has figured out how to really integrate a cellular phone with the computer, in the same way that Apple integrated the MP3 player.
IMO, it's relentlessly stupid to involve a cable in this integration. A cellphone's integration should be even more transparent than the iPod's, because it ought to do it all wirelessly. Make a playlist in iTunes, and the next time you bring your phone within Bluetooth range of the computer, it gets updated (along with your Address Book, Calendar, etc.). When you have that kind of seamlessness, you will have an iPod equivalent. Otherwise, all you have is a Pontis equivalent.
...a list of ALL programs that can be accessed using alt-TAB
Erm, which is exactly what you get if you press Command-Tab on a Mac. (That's OpenApple-Tab to all you old-school folks out there.) Except instead of a vertical list, it's displayed left to right, which I've always found faster to read. And the applications are ordered by last use, so pressing Command-Tab quickly switches you back to the last application, pressing tab twice gets you the application before that, etc. I think it's a much better interface than WinXP's or Linux's app switchers, although I admit the differences are minimal.
The lack of virtual desktops on Mac OS is a bit of a drag, though. There aren't a lot of features that I think MacOS is lacking, but that's one of them. I understand that it might confuse some new users, but I think it could be enabled as a preference or something.
I'd just like to point out that based on what I've heard, a great many of the people who will vote to ban gay marriage, will relax their opposition considerably when it's called a "civil union."
There is a very large segment of the American public -- too big, in my opinion, to write it off as a 'vast right-wing conspiracy' -- that is just inherently uncomfortable with and opposed to the idea of gay marriage. However, when faced with 'civil unions' or something similar, a lot of the people in the middle are okay with it. A 'civil union' doesn't have the sexual, procreative, and family baggage that goes along with 'marriage,' but could potentially have all of the tax benefits, inheritance benefits, etc., which are the basis of the calls for gay marriage in the first place.
There are certainly people who are just going to oppose anything which gets close to even acknowledging that gay people exist, on principle. But they're in the minority; I think (and I believe there are polls that back me up here), that if the gay lobby were to avoid calling their goal 'marriage,' they would encounter less opposition, and deny their political enemies a lot of ammunition and support.
Anyway, this is all OT to the actual article, but I thought it was relevant to the thread.
I think you pretty well voiced the feelings of a lot of people on this issue, myself included.
Pity you got modded down for it, though. Ah, well -- the Slashdot hivemind is a fickle thing.
I think Blizzard is both within their rights, and correct to do so,if (and when) they bar advertising both by religious and sexual-preference (and political, if they exist) based guilds. If they want to exist, fine; but they can keep their advertising off-line.
It's my understanding that the 'quotas' have something to do with the company's own applicant pool.
So if your applicant pool is 10% minority and your business is only 1% minority, you could potentially be in trouble.
I'm not sure though how close you have to be to your applicant pool, or what the review/audit/complaint process is like.
I am likewise interested, if anyone wants to shed some light on the issue.
We crave packaging and something to show off.
If this is true -- which I agree with you, I think it is -- then why bother going after people for trading electronic bits online? People really want that "clothy box," as someone famous I can't remember right now once put it, not a big txt or rtf or pdf file.
I'm pretty sure that JK Rowling could have given out all the text to all the HP novels on the internet from day one, and probably still would have made a fortune selling actual paper copies of it.
I don't know how this translates to other media, though; I don't think people care very much whether their satellite television comes from a 'real' DirectTV dish, or a pirate one they bought in Chinatown for $75; there's no packaging that's equivalent to a book anymore that you can easily control the manufacture and distribution of.
Doesn't matter -- it still runs into the fundamental flaw of DRM, in that you can't give an untrusted individual both the ciphertext and the decryption keys, and not give them access to the plaintext. It just doesn't work.
You can't give someone a safe with a bar of gold in it, and the combination to the safe, and then let them take that safe home and expect them not to be able to take the bar of gold out. They have all the information necessary to do it, and eventually somebody will.
When you start going down that road, where you end up is in an 'arms race' between the people who make DRM, and the people who unlock content and redistribute it. There's no end, and eventually everyone just ends up with computers, the cases of which are totally filled with epoxy, and wired with self-destruct mechanisms.
DRM isn't a winnable fight, but the battle could really be obnoxious in the mean time.
How long after they require all this tracking till they specify how many of X applicants you must have to obtain a federal contract?
These already exist. There are government contracts -- particularly defense ones -- which get marked as being for "minority owned businesses only." There's probably some sort of special term or code for them, but I can't think of it right now.
It's basically almost like having a non-bidded contract, because none of the serious players (the big contracting companies) are able to bid. The cost to the taxpayer goes up dramatically, and most of the time what happens is some nominally minority-owned contracting company that nobody's ever heard of will get the contract at an inflated price, get themselves down as the 'prime contractor' on paper, then turn around and subcontract it out to one of the big name contractors at what they would have normally done the work for anyway.
Basically, all that happens is a few well-connected "minorities" skim a healthy percentage off of some giant taxpayer funded projects, and the big contractors still get their regular rate. But the politicians get to talk about how many projects went to minorities this year, so it's all good.
Your tax dollars at work.
I used to do that also, until I figured out that, as a member of this country's majority, it really hurts me in the long run not to respond.
Basically, Affirmative Action is a quota system. They get away with not calling it a "quota," because instead of having a particular number of minorities that an employer is supposed to hire, it's supposed to be proportional to their applicant pool.
So if I, as a white person, decline to respond, it just doesn't get factored in to the statistics for the applicant pool at all. But in all likelihood, most minorities who apply for the position will respond, because they believe it won't hurt and might help them (which is logical). The result is that the statistics for the applicant pool become skewed in favor of minorities -- that is, they show minorities as being falsely under-represented. As a result, pressure gets put on the employer to hire more minorities, for reasons unrelated to job qualifications.
It's the same (and potentially even more serious) when dealing with college or graduate school admissions, because I believe their criteria for diversity are even more stringent than employers'.
So really, if you're a white person, you're only shooting yourself and other members of the majority in the foot by declining to respond.
Anyone else have a feeling of deja vu? (Today is the 7th, the original article was posted on the 2nd. Five days -- most people probably still have their comments in their history page. Quick, do a copy-paste -- double that karma!)
I'll sum up the most salient points I remember from the other discussion:
-AOL will still have a whitelist for non-commercial mailinglists and the like to add themselves to, if they want to include a large number of AOL members
-Messages which aren't on the whitelist or who don't pay for Goodmail service will have their images and links removed
-The biggest (legitimate) user of this service would seem to be profit-generating promotional emails, like the ones that get sent out by airlines, travel agencies, etc.
-The general hivemind concensus seems to be that nobody likes AOL anyway, and this is just another reason to avoid dealing with them
http://allforces.com/2005/05/06/ichat-to-msn-throu gh-jabber/
An article on how to set up iChat to interoperate with MSN and Yahoo Messenger, using a Jabber server as a gateway. Mac-centric, obviously, but it gives an overview of what you'd need to do. The MSN-Jabber translation is all done by the server -- there's nothing really interesting going on at the client end. I think the MSN stuff is handled by this piece of software.
At one point I found a site which listed Jabber servers and showed what protocol-gatways they had running, but I can't find that list anymore. The examples used on the link above are in the Czech Republic, kind of a long haul for a US-originated and -bound packet.
Well, that's not exactly the whole story.
... I gave it a shot, but eventually I just switched to Adium and haven't looked back. (Except when I want to transfer files, which is shaky in the Gaim-based programs if one person is behind a firewall.)
There are jabber servers around which act as bridges to other networks, like AIM, MSN, Yahoo, etc. You still need to have accounts on those services in order to use them, though.
A while back there was an article in one of the Mac mags on how to use a system like this so that you could use iChat as a multi-protocol client -- get MSN and Yahoo Messenger functionality within iChat. It was sort of a neat hack
I have AdBlock (vers. 0.5.2.055) and Filterset.G installed on Firefox 1.0.7, and it seems to work fine for me. Unfortunately I don't know the version of Filterset.G that I'm using, but it's not more than a few months old.
I don't understand what exactly would break GMail -- AdBlock doesn't filter out Google's text ads (at least mine doesn't), and wouldn't do anything anyway unless Google was in the block list. So I'm not sure why they're recommending that people remove it, as opposed to warning people not to blacklist Google.
I'll be interested to hear what the reasoning behind this is.
Of course, that mode is more a false sense of security than anything, since your buddy could be using some client other than the Google one, which would blithely ignore the instruction. (Unless this feature is part of the standard protocol, which would be news to me.)
So unless you're absolutely sure what the person on the other end is using, you really can't trust such a thing. I wouldn't be too surprised if there are corporate IM clients developed (perhaps they're here already) that have logging that cannot be defeated.
Maybe this is an impossible question to answer at the moment, if the service hasn't rolled out, but how does a person access their logs?
I assume that it saves stuff, if you request it, regardless of whether you're using the Google Talk web interface (so via GMail) or through the regular Google Talk desktop app (or Gaim, etc.). That's an assumption, but I think it would be pretty useless if it only logged when you used the web interface.
Is the only way to access the logs through the web interface, by logging into Gmail? Or is there a way to access them via a desktop program?
Personally I'm not too impressed if you have to log into the web interface. I use Gmail, but I do it through POP and don't ever actually go to the Gmail.com website (except when I'm travelling). A system that required me to go to a web site to get my chat logs wouldn't be particularly helpful, although I like the idea of being able to pull them up from anywhere if I want them.
Frankly I guess I'm just not really down with the idea of the web browser as the way in to traditional desktop services like Gmail and IM. Gmail's interface is great, don't get me wrong -- but it's "great" for a webmail interface. Compared to a real desktop email program, it sucks. I like being able to access stuff everywhere, and I like Gmail because it doesn't force me to use their web site when I'm at home. I hope that they keep up with that duality as they implement new features.
I understand F18's and beyond can't fly safely without fly-by-wire, this system would be even worse.
How would this system be worse? In an F-18, you've strapped a human being into a vunerable system, which could potentially be disabled and result in their death.
With a UAV, if the system is disabled, the UAV craters, and some guy in a bunker at Nellis AFB has to do a lot of paperwork.
I prefer the latter situation. Planes are not going to become less complex -- fly by wire is here to stay; UAVs just make the "wire" a lot longer.
You've got to go subsonic and let loose the payload if you want any chance of hitting your target.
I'm not sure that I buy this claim.
If the bomb was guided, as many of them tend to be, and had a system for decreasing its own velocity (i.e., is a somewhat unfortunately-named 'retarded bomb'), then it could be released from the aircraft at a very high speed, change its flight characteristics so as to shed airspeed, and then guide itself to its target.
I know I'm minimizing what would have to be a very complicated process, but it doesn't seem that difficult. A bomb follows the same type of ballistic trajectory after being released from an aircraft that a missile warhead (an inbound ballistic missile, anyway) does, and they go supersonic and have a circular error probability that's measured in feet.
I don't see any reason why it would be impossible.
Erm, I'm as much a fan of General Atomics as the next guy (cool name, IMO), but I'm not sure that they're either "little," nor are they "thumbing [their] nose" at anyone.
There are three Air Force squadrons of their products (the Predators), and I'm pretty sure the USAF didn't just buy them over the phone with an Amex card. I of course can't say for sure, but it seems like they probably went through the same acquisition channels as everyone else.
Care to clarify your point? Maybe I'm misunderstanding. I think the Predator and the Mariner are cool as hell, but they're not something you just order up and send to your buddy who's over in the Gulf along with a spare Ka-Bar and a few titty mags.
This has historically almost always been true. In the past -- up until the advent of penicillin, anyway -- the big killer was always disease. I think the biggest threat now is accidental, non-combat injuries.
It's ironic, but one of the statistics that shows how well a military is doing its job, is how high a percentage of casualties are actually the result of combat. If that number is high (and the overall number of casualties are low, obviously) than things are generally assumed to be working well, you have good force-protection, etc. If it's low, then obviously you have to start figuring out what the hell is hurting your people, aside from the enemy.
Unrelated, but I've heard it said several times that it's statistically safer for an 18-year-old black man to be in a military unit in the Persian Gulf than it is to be that same man in some neighborhoods in a few major cities. I remember hearing that after Gulf War I, I wonder if it still holds true.
For crying out loud, it should be obvious that you can nail people to a measuring stick!
True, but I prefer using wood screws. They really have a lot more holding power. You should give them a try sometime.
I'm not agreeing nor disagreeing with most of the points you made, I just thought I'd throw in my personal experience -- I've used a pair of SR80s with a 3G iPod, and think they sound great. I've tried them with an external amplifier (Headwise 'Cmoy', Google it), and frankly didn't think that the (slight) increase in the noise floor was worth it. I don't listen to music at a high enough volume to saturate the iPod's built-in amplifier, apparently. For someone with a different listening style, it might be critical though.
The openness of the Grados is their biggest strength but also biggest weakness. In the OP's case, it would be nice because he'd be able to hear his surroundings; on the other hand if seriously listening to music is your goal, you need a very quiet place to do it in, with the Grados. Otherwise you'll still have outside sounds (HVAC, cooling fans, etc.) in the mix. Which is no different than you'd have with a regular speakered Hifi, but it's just something to consider. I guess it falls into the "audiophile nitpicking" category of complains, however.
Anyway, I recommend the SR80s, but get them from a local shop (the Grado people will tell you where one is if you ask).
Real Men use uncontrolled-mode claymore AP mines.
You do go through a lot of interns this way, though.
I think I know the perfect product for you ... get yourself a pair of these. Sure, you'll look like you just walked off the flight deck of the USS Enterprise (the real one), but you can order practically any combination of microphone element and speaker elements you want, with either XLR plugs or bare ends. They have the same amount of noise reduction as their industrial hearing protectors, too. (I use a set of the hearing protectors for handgun shooting, and they do work as advertised.)
And it just looks so much more serious than those cheesy dictation headsets. When you're wearing one of those things, you mean some sort of business. They even have an accessory so that you can wear your tinted aviator shades at the same time, without carving divots in your head. Or if you feel like doing some desk-chair acrobatics, you can strap it to your face.
Course, they will set you back about a deuce and a half.
I think the solution there is get headphones on which the foam surrounds are replacable, and get them from a manufacturer that's likely to still be in business when it's time to get a new set.
Personally I'm a fan of Grado Labs, since I think they satisfy both these objectives, but I'm sure there are other companies that would fit the bill. The surrounds pop on and off fairly easily, and the cord is also replacable (although you'd need a soldering iron -- or send them back to the factory, which I'm sure is the legit method).
Although they're not what the OP is looking for, I also have several products from the David Clark Company, which makes hearing protectors, headphones, and communication headsets (they apparently also make anti-G suits for pilots, which I was not aware of). I have a pair of hearing protectors from them that is close to 35 years old, and they're still making them. I just got a new set of foam surrounds for them, and they might as well be brand new. (It's the model 10A, if anyone's checking.)
There's no reason why properly maintained, well-built analog gear ought not last you long enough to pass along to your kids.
I agree with you on the Grados in general, but I disagree about the SR80s not being worth it.
... I challenge you to find a source that will drive 32 ohm headphones that's not driven by an amplifier (a really big crystal radio?). I'm assuming you were referring to external amplifier, but as they're both 32-ohm/98-dB-SPL@1mv cans, I don't think that there's any reason why you'd want to use an amp on the 80s and not the 60s.
I went down to my local hifi shop (you must buy Grados from an authorized distributer or else no warranty) to get the 60s and just on a lark did a 'blind test' of the 60s and 80s and I thought there was a very noticable difference in sound. I think the difference may be mostly due to the different ear ear surrounds and cushioning, although I suppose it could be the cable as well. The differences between the 60s and 80s are that the 80s have a 4-conductor cable and different foam pads, and are made in the Grado factory in Brooklyn; the 60s have a 2-conductor cable and are made on contract in either China or Taiwan, I forget which.
I'm not quite sure what you mean about "non-amp-driven" listening
At any rate, I've used the Grados with the Headwise 'cmoy' amp, and I didn't think the difference in sound quality was that dramatic at the volumes that you'd want to use in an office environment. I don't know how the amplification stages are in the OP's portable player, but the iPod gets my Grados uncomfortably loud without any distortion that I can hear.
I think the real deciding factor between the 60s and 80s is whether a person thinks they can treat them well enough and not destroy them. If you're going to throw them in a bookbag or something, or run the cord over with your desk chair -- don't get either, go down to WalMart and get a pair of whatever trash Sony is making this week. If you're ready to put a little money into something that you'll probably be able to enjoy for a few years assuming you take care of them, I think the extra money for the 80s is justified.