Lastly, if you have FiOS internet, why not get Vonage, or another VoIP phone service? More features, less money, and you already have the battery-backup issue anyway. I think the problem is that, suppose some day down the road, you want to get DSL instead of fiber? You're screwed. If you didn't know to stop the VZ boys from pulling the copper, you're now their customer, basically forever.
Or what if you move into a house where the previous owner wasn't smart enough to stop them from pulling the copper? Guess you're locked in, too.
It strikes me as a blatantly unethical business practice, which serves no purpose except to eliminate competition by getting around rules that were intended to mandate sharing of infrastructure, but which the telcos have subverted and kept from being applied to fiber.
If it wasn't any of these things, the horrible truths you have already noticed about it would have led to its destruction long ago. That's not much of a compelling argument. By that notion, if the government of the United States launched its missiles tomorrow and glassed all the predominantly Muslim countries in the world, and then followed up with land forces to finish the genocide, until any trace of Islam had been wiped off the Earth, then secularism would be provably a better philosophy than Islam, as evidenced by the fact that Islam would not longer exist.
That seems rather hollow. Using social success as a measure for the superiority of a meme only works if you can control for external factors; if that meme is the only thing differentiating two groups. Since that's almost never the case, you need to consider other factors.
A belief system might be helpful at one point in social evolution, but unhelpful, even harmful, at a later state; or one society might just be luckier in terms of access to natural resources, allowing itself to build faster and conquer its neighbors, even though it carries the weight of a harmful belief system like a terminal disease, waiting to erupt later.
Using outcomes from inequal start conditions as a measure of objective superiority only works on infinitely long timescales. In the real world, it's a poor metric.
Well, until fairly recently in the Western tradition, it was fairly dangerous to be openly non-religious or anti-religious. It only makes sense that a smart person would, at the very least, adopt the correct appearances.
Who's to say what those individuals would have thought did they not exist in an environment which more or less required religion in order to be taken seriously (or not be harassed or killed)? It's difficult, probably impossible, to pull any of them out from their environment.
But you're giving religion a ridiculous amount of credit to say, simply because a lot of people who were smart also were religious, that their being religious led to their being smart. A lot of criminals were also religious; do we lay them at the Church's doorstep, too?
What do you mean no mainstream church insists that its followers take the Bible literally? Every church that teaches creationism insists on a literal interpretation, and sadly they aren't insignificant in number. The literalist Churches make a lot of noise, but in terms of hard numbers -- either as a fraction of U.S. population as a whole, or even as fractions of practicing Christians -- they're actually not that big. They have a political and social voice that's completely out of line with their numbers (the reasons for this I'll leave to others, or for another day).
Baptist churches as a whole, most of which are not literalists/textualists but where most of the literalists fall, together comprise about ~15% of U.S. Christians. Pentecostals, Mormons, and other sects which take radically different views of Christianity are somewhere down between 1-3%, I think.
There are some communities that are significantly or overwhelmingly populated by Biblical literalists, which is where they get a lot of press, but there's no valid comparison between literalist Christians in the U.S. and literalist Muslims in Saudi Arabia or Iran. There's a huge gulf there.
I was under the impression that standard DVDs use a different type of laser for reading and recording than blu ray.
So is this some type of hybrid/dual laser device? Or is it a blu ray that uses the blue laser to record on conventional DVDs? Or what exactly? They do. However, Blu-Ray players also have the correct laser so that they can read conventional DVDs and CDs. I'm not sure if they do this with a totally separate diode, or if they have a diode that can be switched between two different wavelengths, or what. But it would be pretty dumb to make a "next gen" video disc player that wasn't backwards compatible.
What this machine (the one in TFA) does, I think, is record a regular DVD-R with highly compressed HD video. This isn't that much of a trick; right now you can go to Apple's site (or a lot of other places on the net) and get tons of HD content as Quicktime or MPEG-4 files. They're just dumping it onto a disc in the format and filesystem structure that a Blu-Ray player expects.
Basically, this is just an HD version of some of the CD/DVD crossover formats that were popular for bootlegs a few years back. There were a bunch of unofficial formats that basically involved building a DVD or VCD filesystem and putting MPEG-2 content onto a CD. (SVCD was probably the most popular.) If you used a low enough bitrate, you could fit a movie onto a disc or two at reasonable -- or at least watchable -- quality.
That's what they're doing here. They're using DVD media, but taking HD content, compressing it -- assumedly at a much lower bitrate than a store-bought Blu-Ray disc would -- and making a faux Blu-Ray disc, one with 9GB of capacity instead of ~30.
Personally I've always wondered why people didn't do something like this from the beginning. There's no reason why you have to wait for Blu-Ray or HD DVD to get HD movies on disc. Particularly if you're willing to swap or flip discs, you can get perfectly watchable HD content on standard dual-layer discs, if it's properly and intelligently compressed. My feeling has always been that the media companies and the studios really wanted the new disc formats, because it's an opportunity to force everyone to purchase a new player, and jack the price of movies up to $50 each for a while. Plus they can tack on a lot of new copy-protection that they wouldn't have gotten with a simpler format (one that was just MPEG-4 AVC video on a UDF filesystem, for example). And all that interactive shit that they love to burden discs with.
At the very least, this format will probably be the final nail in the coffin of D-VHS (which is too bad, I thought D-VHS was pretty neat, and a true "bit bucket" digital-tape format would be awesome if it ever got popular), and if it's not overburdened or totally hobbled by copy-protection, might even have a chance at doing well, at least until the cost of Blu-Ray writers and discs come down to DVD-like levels (say sub-$1 a disc).
Unfortunately I think most CAPTCHAs use JS; it's been a while since I've been to a site that didn't make me turn it on to get through login/registration. I have no idea why this is, since people have been doing login pages since before JS was around or popular, but now it seems like the way every idiot is doing it.
Basically, the solution is to build in an (optional) method to the mainstream Linux distributions so that users can purchase and install legitimate codecs, or get them with the distribution pre-installed. The parent company of Lindows purchased the rights to the codecs' IP already, so it's really a matter of taking them and working the licenses into Ubuntu or a similar, more popular distro.
Yes, this would make the resulting distro non-free, in the same way that pre-installing a proprietary video driver would, and it would mean that there would be a charge to the user for each machine that they got with Linux on it. However, it would still be far cheaper than Windows (remember: Windows has to pay for the same IP licenses, it's just built into the cost of the entire OS; with Linux, that would be your only cost), and as a result you'd get a machine that could deal with modern multimedia and video out of the box, or with at most a one-click install. None of the current hunting around on forums for instructions that come with a lot of "wink, wink, nudge, nudge, informational-purposes-only" disclaimers.
Code is kept "secret" because the companies, rightly or wrongly, think it gives them a competitive advantage. I'm not saying this is never true, in fact I think it's probably the case more often than not. But at least in some cases, I've known/seen companies who have indicated a willingness to open-source their code -- meaning that they've thought about the competitive aspects and realize that it's not going to hurt, and might help, them -- suddenly drag their feet at the last minute, or spend months or years "preparing" to open-source their code. I think this is directly related to embarrassment over the poor state of their codebase.
I think there's a feeling that in order to open-source something, you have to have it all wrapped up in a neat little bundle, that you can't just take last Tuesday's CVS checkout and dump it onto a web server somewhere as a tarball, even if that's what the community really, really wants. (A dirty tarball today being better than a slick project and a wiki and everything in three years.)
I've actually seen this happen; you can get management on board with the OSS concept in the abstract, but when it comes to actually giving out their code, and they start feeling like it might make them look bad... suddenly they clam up and come up with excuses. This is most apparent when the code being considered is abandonware or otherwise dead, and the only effect it could possibly have is to hurt a competitor; companies (and individuals) are paranoid of the damage to their reputation that messy code could have, particularly if lots of insecurities or design flaws are exposed.
For reasons that had nothing to do with any intuition of an impending collapse (I was actually most annoyed that they didn't play nicely with Mac Quicken), I moved all my deposits from NetBank to USAA a few months ago. I've been very happy with USAA; they offer more online features and a better website UI than NetBank did, excellent customer service, and ATM-fee reimbursement (up to $10/mo or so). Their interest rates on checking aren't quite as high, but that's a small price to pay, particularly since it serves as encouragement to not build up a big balance in checking, but instead keep savings in a savings account and investments in investment accounts. USAA also doesn't gouge you if you want paper statements, although they give you the option to disable them and get everything online if you want.
In retrospect, now I know why the people at NetBank didn't seem too surprised when I closed my account down and moved everything out. At the time I was a little surprised that they didn't try to keep me as a customer at all, particularly since I'd been with them since the very beginning.
When NetBank first started, they were really a joy to work with. Their website was first-rate, their customer service was awesome (I recall calling them up in the middle of the night once and getting an actual human operator, not a "push x for foo" prompt tree), and they had a lot of nice little extras. Initially, they even sent out paper account statements on color, 3-hole-punched letterhead.
The nice paper for the statements went away in the first round of cost cutting, as did the human operator on the phone. The second round was charging $3/mo. for paper statements at all, and charging for checks. Then the website stopped getting any updates. And the last straw for me was when they did something funny to the backend system, and I started having to click "download transactions" twice in Mac Quicken in order to get it to download (the first try would *always* fail). After a few years of that, I got fed up and decided to leave.
When I first read about the IBM/Lenovo split, I recall that Lenovo got the rights to some very specific uses of the IBM and "Think" (e.g. "ThinkPad", ThinkWhatever) trademarks, for a certain amount of time. I'm not sure when that expires, but I don't doubt that they could be making ones and still using the brand (and why not, it's a solid brand -- I would).
From what I've heard, most of the negative comments about the "new" Lenovo units are about the value-priced (grey) ones, and fewer are about the actual ThinkPads. Most of the negative things I have heard about the ThinkPads are about the keyboards, and it seems to be a hit-or-miss thing (the keyboards from one factory are preferred by some users over the others).
A whole lot of engineers calculated a lot of transfer orbits (not just Earth-Mars) with slide rules. In some ways they can be a lot safer than using a calculator, since they don't give you a false sense of precision.
E.g., divide 52 by 7 on a calculator, and it will spit out 7.428571428571, a completely correct although ridiculous answer when dealing with real-world quantities, since it blows away the precision of the input numbers. Slide rules require you to constantly consider the number of decimal places that you want, and encourage you to only write down the correct number of digits (so you might do the same result and put down 7.4).
Personally, I think some of the best engineering ever accomplished by man has been conducted mostly by slide rules. I wouldn't go so far as to say that we've necessarily regressed since then -- computers are great, don't get me wrong -- but it's not right to simply write off slide rules. They had very distinct benefits and I think students would be well suited if they were kept around as a pedagogical tool.
The biggest manufacturer (under its own brand) that I'm aware of in Taiwan is Acer. They recently spun off their manufacturing arms as Wistron, but it's still based in Taiwan also. You can read about their global operations here.
Granted, like most everybody else, they do a lot of manufacturing in the PRC, but I find something that's only manufactured there (with the bulk of the profits going elsewhere) to be a lot less offensive than something that's designed, manufactured, and wholly brought to market by a PRC firm. (Of course, if what you find offensive about the PRC is worker abuses and not its geopolitics, then you should probably be even more bothered by stuff outsourced there for manufacturing.)
But Wistron is pretty diversified, in addition to the three locations in the PRC, they have their HQ, main R&D, and a manufacturing center in Taiwan, a service center in Japan, a factory in the Czech Republic, a service center in the Netherlands, a factory in Juarez, a service center in Dallas and a customer service center in Round Rock. They're openly traded on the Taiwan exchange and although I can't find a breakdown of all major holders that would definitively exclude the PRC government, their major holder is Acer (at ~35%).
I think you could buy from them in reasonably clear conscience, plus you'd have the additional bonus of giving the profits to a Taiwanese company, which ought to get you some sort of anti-PRC karma points somewhere.
If you know someone at IBM (seriously, they have like 250-300,000 employees, if you don't know someone who works there, one of your friends does) it's still possible to buy used IBM-branded ThinkPads from the employee surplus store. I know a friend who just did it, and there aren't any restrictions on buying gear from the store for non-employees ("family and friends"); in fact they encourage it. The employee doesn't even need to pay for it or anything.
"Voting with your wallet" works on a local scale, but not on an international scale. And attacking a successful "chinese company" because you do not agree with the policies of the (oppressive) government of China is racist That's a load of crap.
Do you think that people should stop buying from Coke, Microsoft, Apple, GM, Ford, yada-yada-yada because they aren't happy with the occupation in Iraq?? Yes, as a matter of fact, I do. And it's already happened; the popularity of American 'cultural exports' (which includes movies and music as well as luxury goods like branded soft drinks) has taken a hit in some parts of the world due to the sinking popularity of the U.S. That's part of how the market works, and it's one of the reasons why there's a lot of anti-Bush sentiment in Hollywood (and was even before it became really cool to be anti-Bush); foreign-policy bungling costs them big bucks on the international market.
I'm really glad that the OP is taking a stand for something he believes in; just by doing that he's head and shoulders above most of America. Although a single person's actions might be insignificant, if more people avoided Chinese-branded (or if they can, Chinese-made generally), in favor of Korean, Taiwanese, Japanese, etc., or even domestic products, it might give them a bit of a wake-up call, particularly since it would directly affect the businessmen and factory-owners who hold real power there.
I don't think there's anything illegal with it, provided that you have the permission of the person who's providing the actual uplink, so that you're not stealing their bandwidth.
I once got involved with a group of people who wanted to deploy a system like that; basically a mesh network of wireless nodes. There was a linux distribution around that turned a computer with a wifi card into a mesh node, doing all sorts of neat intelligent routing. You could have multiple uplinks in the mesh at various points and packets would automatically pick the best route, it would route around damage, you could use cards with multiple wireless NICs to do long-distance WiFi point-to-point connections (although using external antennas with consumer wifi gear is technically a violation of FCC rules).
Unfortunately what hobbled the system was the limited number of Wifi cards supported by Linux. We wanted to use donated hardware and most of the wireless cards we could acquire cheaply weren't compatible. The situation might be better now (this was 4-5 years ago).
The main problem with Wifi or any other very low power system is that you need a LOT of nodes. That's why WiMax looks better; it can use higher power levels and thus you need a lot fewer nodes.
The critics were right, the Verizon ban is a precursor of what a net without net neutrality would look like: occasional partisan decisions by corporations are rapidly reversed as the businesses attempt to eliminate themselves from the decision process. So basically, the corporations get to do anything they want, until they do something egregious and politically incorrect enough for it to make the front page of the New York Times, at which point they say 'oops!' and make some show of backing off?
What do you do about the political causes that aren't powerful enough to have some Times reporter's direct line? Guess they're S.O.L.
Water-based designs are all flawed in that they can melt down when the cooling goes out. This is patently untrue. You can design a water-moderated reactor with a negative void coefficient such that a loss-of-coolant accident will shut the reaction down. That's not to say that the reactor won't be damaged, but just because a reactor is water-cooled, doesn't mean it's waiting to go Chernobyl on you.
Actually you *decrease* the surface area (relative to total volume of water) by damming it up. This leads to some very significant environmental problems because it decreases the dissolved O2 levels in the water.
Think of a flowing river, particularly one with rapids (because that's the kind of area where you want to build a dam, somewhere where there's an elevation change), versus a still pond. There's a lot more evaporation (and oxygenation) going on when the water is flowing.
That said, I think the GP's point is bogus. Most of the dams in the U.S. are actually there for flood-control or irrigation, not for power. Even the really big power dams (think Hoover) really have a main purpose of irrigation. Very little water is "wasted" for power generation; power generation is sort of a bonus.
In fact, something like 98% of the dams in the U.S. that *could* be used for power generation, especially microgeneration and distributed-power, aren't; the water just expends its energy heating itself up as it goes down some sluiceway somewhere. Now that's a waste. Just by putting small turbines back into some of the many industrial locations that were originally designed with water power in mind (of which there are many, particularly in the Northeast), we'd generate a significant amount of power and also go a long way towards decentralizing our power grid and making it more fault and terrorism-resistant.
Most of the problems the SuperPhoenix had weren't related to it being a breeder, or really the overall reactor concept at all; they were direct results of some (in hindsight) really dumb design choices by the French engineers. In particular, their liquid-metal coolant (I think it was sodium-potassium, NaK) caused them no end of problems, and led to most of the downtime. If they had stuck with a more conventional design for the reactor support equipment, they probably would have been a lot more successful.
But the French have a history of making some... unique engineering choices. The SuperPhoenix fits in well to that lineage, and shouldn't really be taken as a condemnation of breeder reactors generally.
The U.S. military has never learned especially well during peacetime. We're just flat-out bad at changing when we don't have a proverbial gun to our head. The military establishment is too resistant to change, and too in love with its own ideas. This is not a modern phenomenon.
Look back at U.S. military history, we usually begin major conflicts by getting in way over our heads -- arguably getting the crap kicked out of us (sometimes after some initial easy success) -- going "oh, shit," going back to the drawing board, and then coming up with something that actually works.
Look at the beginning of the North Africa campaign in WWII, or heavy losses against the insurgents in the Philippines in the early 20th century (which led, incidentally, to the development of modern handguns, among other things). Parallels to Korea and Vietnam is harder, because we were arguably unsuccessful there, and I think part of the reason has to do with us never finding a particularly successful strategy. And each time there has been a major paradigm shift in warfare, major contingents within the U.S. military have resisted it until it was overwhelmingly proved to be obsolete.
I don't think we've gotten there in Iraq. Our initial success gave us a feeling of complacency, and allowed us to believe that our strategy, tactics, and equipment was up to the job, when in reality we should have been engaged in a much more active process of rewriting the books in light of the new enemy. (The fact that most of those 'books,' most of our understanding of what war is, gets taken from World War Two and not from, say, the Philippines, which would be a much better parallel, doesn't help either.)
When I said "Back before the internet became popular," I mean specifically broadband Internet access, and I mean 'popular for sharing media, particularly music.'
Really what I'm talking about was that span of (depending where you lived, it was longer if you were out in the sticks than in an urban area) about 3-5 years or so where a lot of people had CD writers but only a select few people had broadband internet access and the knowledge of how to use it to get music.
That period was (IMO) the peak of physical-media music swapping. Once Napster got popular, the number of people I knew who were swapping around burned CDs dropped dramatically. Although interestingly, I've seen it start to increase in popularity again recently; I think there's a perception particularly among non-technical people that P2P is dangerous and difficult to use, but passing a DVD of MP3s around the office isn't.
You're assuming that the friend actually paid for the CD. If the friend is willing to let you copy CDs in the first place, why assume that the friend actually bought the CD? It's probably a lot more likely that what you're copying is their copy, that they made from somebody else's copy... etc. Back before the internet became popular, and CD copying was more common than it was today, it wasn't rare to get many generations of copying from a single original, particularly in a high-density environment like a school or college. (Not that there's really any way to tell how many generations down from the original you are; that's the beauty of it being digital.)
There's no inherent difference between digital copying that involves physical media, and copying onto more easily-erasable storage. You can copy a ton of music in MP3 format if you burn it to a DVD and sneakernet it, too; if you put 4.3GB of music on a DVD and pass it around a dorm, with each person copying it to their hard drive, you can probably share more music faster than if you used bittorrent (particularly if people near the top of the chain make additional DVD copies after they have their own hard-drive copy).
The 'revenue environment' leaks like a sieve either way.
Banks aren't allowed to loan out more than they accept as deposits, so they always have assets on the books that are worth more than their debts. The second part of this sentence is true, the first part of it is not.
Under fractional-reserve rules, a bank can make loans in excess of its deposits -- that's what fractional-reserve banking means. However, it should never, at any time, have more loans outstanding than it has in total assets, including all the collateral that people have pledged in order to secure the loans. (Whether this is actually always true is debatable, and in fact I think it's probably not; when the housing market slumped, suddenly the banks had a lot more money loaned out than the collateral on those loans -- the houses -- was actually worth. Ideally, this would not happen.)
The key to fractional reserve banking is that it allows a bank to treat the borrower's promise to repay a loan as an asset, which it can then loan out again (in part).
I can't imagine a more ignorant economic theory than one that implies production or wealth has anything to do whatsoever to a government monopoly "currency". The supply of currency (if currency == money supply) can indeed affect economic growth and production, because they can affect inflation and deflation, which in turn affect things like the labor market, capital investments, and personal savings behavior. If you had a fixed amount of currency in the world, prices for goods would deflate slowly over time, as more new things of value were created. (Assuming you have an expanding population and resource bases, as has been true historically almost forever, although it's probably not sustainable for very much longer, admittedly.)
Inflation and deflation have fairly significant and (at least within the world of economics, which is by its nature fuzzy) well-understood relationships with other parts of the economy, including unemployment* and purchasing behaviors, which have obvious effects on production. Since the money supply can affect inflation and deflation, it has a definite -- although admittedly indirect -- impact on overall production.
Now, it's an open question whether an inflationary or deflationary market is better. The generally accepted truth among mainstream U.S. economists today is that a small degree of inflation (say 3% per year or less) is healthy. However, there are some people who have some decent arguments for why a softly deflating market, as you would get with a finite, nonexpanding currency, could be good also. I'll be honest and say that I don't really have the basis to evaluate most of these arguments on their merits, so I won't try to summarize them. But it's easy to see how people will act differently in an inflating and deflating market: in an inflating market, it makes sense to keep all of your money invested, since anything you have sitting under your mattress will lose value, all by itself. In a deflationary market, your money gains in purchasing power just by sitting untouched, so it makes sense to delay expenses as long as you can, since they become cheaper over time. There are other, more subtle effects, also.
* For the relationship of unemployment to inflation, see Phillips curve.
The $250,000 was not "created", in truth, the "house-dollars" are actually other people's "savings-account-dollars", "rainy-day-dollars" and "retirement-dollars". The bank gives you some of those other people's dollars, and in turn, gives those other people "interest-dollars" from you and others. This is absolutely untrue. If you read about fractional-reserve banking, you'd understand that when a bank makes a loan, it really does create the money; it does not simply loan out previous deposits. Or at least, only a small fraction of the loan is from deposits, the majority of it is created by the bank. Understanding this is absolutely critical to any discussion about the modern financial system.
The idea that a bank takes in deposits and then loans them out is a gross oversimplification, and ignores one of the largest effects of banks in a modern economy, namely that they create money on an as-needed basis, and back the newly-created money with mortgaged assets. That's what the whole argument over fractional-reserve vs full-reserve banking is about: some people (the ones advocating full-reserve) think this is not a great idea.
And indirectly, fractional-reserve banking is part of why so many people are upset about the current "sub-prime" mortgage crisis. Because banks create money when they make loans, if a bank loans out money to someone whose assets aren't worth as much as they claimed they were (e.g., they said they make a lot more money than they do, or the house's value was inflated at the time of the loan), then the money that the bank created while making the loan isn't backed up by anything. That is generally, to put it lightly, considered to be a bad thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Or what if you move into a house where the previous owner wasn't smart enough to stop them from pulling the copper? Guess you're locked in, too.
It strikes me as a blatantly unethical business practice, which serves no purpose except to eliminate competition by getting around rules that were intended to mandate sharing of infrastructure, but which the telcos have subverted and kept from being applied to fiber.
That seems rather hollow. Using social success as a measure for the superiority of a meme only works if you can control for external factors; if that meme is the only thing differentiating two groups. Since that's almost never the case, you need to consider other factors.
A belief system might be helpful at one point in social evolution, but unhelpful, even harmful, at a later state; or one society might just be luckier in terms of access to natural resources, allowing itself to build faster and conquer its neighbors, even though it carries the weight of a harmful belief system like a terminal disease, waiting to erupt later.
Using outcomes from inequal start conditions as a measure of objective superiority only works on infinitely long timescales. In the real world, it's a poor metric.
Well, until fairly recently in the Western tradition, it was fairly dangerous to be openly non-religious or anti-religious. It only makes sense that a smart person would, at the very least, adopt the correct appearances.
Who's to say what those individuals would have thought did they not exist in an environment which more or less required religion in order to be taken seriously (or not be harassed or killed)? It's difficult, probably impossible, to pull any of them out from their environment.
But you're giving religion a ridiculous amount of credit to say, simply because a lot of people who were smart also were religious, that their being religious led to their being smart. A lot of criminals were also religious; do we lay them at the Church's doorstep, too?
Baptist churches as a whole, most of which are not literalists/textualists but where most of the literalists fall, together comprise about ~15% of U.S. Christians. Pentecostals, Mormons, and other sects which take radically different views of Christianity are somewhere down between 1-3%, I think.
There are some communities that are significantly or overwhelmingly populated by Biblical literalists, which is where they get a lot of press, but there's no valid comparison between literalist Christians in the U.S. and literalist Muslims in Saudi Arabia or Iran. There's a huge gulf there.
So is this some type of hybrid/dual laser device? Or is it a blu ray that uses the blue laser to record on conventional DVDs? Or what exactly? They do. However, Blu-Ray players also have the correct laser so that they can read conventional DVDs and CDs. I'm not sure if they do this with a totally separate diode, or if they have a diode that can be switched between two different wavelengths, or what. But it would be pretty dumb to make a "next gen" video disc player that wasn't backwards compatible.
What this machine (the one in TFA) does, I think, is record a regular DVD-R with highly compressed HD video. This isn't that much of a trick; right now you can go to Apple's site (or a lot of other places on the net) and get tons of HD content as Quicktime or MPEG-4 files. They're just dumping it onto a disc in the format and filesystem structure that a Blu-Ray player expects.
Basically, this is just an HD version of some of the CD/DVD crossover formats that were popular for bootlegs a few years back. There were a bunch of unofficial formats that basically involved building a DVD or VCD filesystem and putting MPEG-2 content onto a CD. (SVCD was probably the most popular.) If you used a low enough bitrate, you could fit a movie onto a disc or two at reasonable -- or at least watchable -- quality.
That's what they're doing here. They're using DVD media, but taking HD content, compressing it -- assumedly at a much lower bitrate than a store-bought Blu-Ray disc would -- and making a faux Blu-Ray disc, one with 9GB of capacity instead of ~30.
Personally I've always wondered why people didn't do something like this from the beginning. There's no reason why you have to wait for Blu-Ray or HD DVD to get HD movies on disc. Particularly if you're willing to swap or flip discs, you can get perfectly watchable HD content on standard dual-layer discs, if it's properly and intelligently compressed. My feeling has always been that the media companies and the studios really wanted the new disc formats, because it's an opportunity to force everyone to purchase a new player, and jack the price of movies up to $50 each for a while. Plus they can tack on a lot of new copy-protection that they wouldn't have gotten with a simpler format (one that was just MPEG-4 AVC video on a UDF filesystem, for example). And all that interactive shit that they love to burden discs with.
At the very least, this format will probably be the final nail in the coffin of D-VHS (which is too bad, I thought D-VHS was pretty neat, and a true "bit bucket" digital-tape format would be awesome if it ever got popular), and if it's not overburdened or totally hobbled by copy-protection, might even have a chance at doing well, at least until the cost of Blu-Ray writers and discs come down to DVD-like levels (say sub-$1 a disc).
Unfortunately I think most CAPTCHAs use JS; it's been a while since I've been to a site that didn't make me turn it on to get through login/registration. I have no idea why this is, since people have been doing login pages since before JS was around or popular, but now it seems like the way every idiot is doing it.
ESR has a proposed solution to this in one of his essays: http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/world-domination/world-domination-201.html
Basically, the solution is to build in an (optional) method to the mainstream Linux distributions so that users can purchase and install legitimate codecs, or get them with the distribution pre-installed. The parent company of Lindows purchased the rights to the codecs' IP already, so it's really a matter of taking them and working the licenses into Ubuntu or a similar, more popular distro.
Yes, this would make the resulting distro non-free, in the same way that pre-installing a proprietary video driver would, and it would mean that there would be a charge to the user for each machine that they got with Linux on it. However, it would still be far cheaper than Windows (remember: Windows has to pay for the same IP licenses, it's just built into the cost of the entire OS; with Linux, that would be your only cost), and as a result you'd get a machine that could deal with modern multimedia and video out of the box, or with at most a one-click install. None of the current hunting around on forums for instructions that come with a lot of "wink, wink, nudge, nudge, informational-purposes-only" disclaimers.
I think there's a feeling that in order to open-source something, you have to have it all wrapped up in a neat little bundle, that you can't just take last Tuesday's CVS checkout and dump it onto a web server somewhere as a tarball, even if that's what the community really, really wants. (A dirty tarball today being better than a slick project and a wiki and everything in three years.)
I've actually seen this happen; you can get management on board with the OSS concept in the abstract, but when it comes to actually giving out their code, and they start feeling like it might make them look bad
For reasons that had nothing to do with any intuition of an impending collapse (I was actually most annoyed that they didn't play nicely with Mac Quicken), I moved all my deposits from NetBank to USAA a few months ago. I've been very happy with USAA; they offer more online features and a better website UI than NetBank did, excellent customer service, and ATM-fee reimbursement (up to $10/mo or so). Their interest rates on checking aren't quite as high, but that's a small price to pay, particularly since it serves as encouragement to not build up a big balance in checking, but instead keep savings in a savings account and investments in investment accounts. USAA also doesn't gouge you if you want paper statements, although they give you the option to disable them and get everything online if you want.
In retrospect, now I know why the people at NetBank didn't seem too surprised when I closed my account down and moved everything out. At the time I was a little surprised that they didn't try to keep me as a customer at all, particularly since I'd been with them since the very beginning.
When NetBank first started, they were really a joy to work with. Their website was first-rate, their customer service was awesome (I recall calling them up in the middle of the night once and getting an actual human operator, not a "push x for foo" prompt tree), and they had a lot of nice little extras. Initially, they even sent out paper account statements on color, 3-hole-punched letterhead.
The nice paper for the statements went away in the first round of cost cutting, as did the human operator on the phone. The second round was charging $3/mo. for paper statements at all, and charging for checks. Then the website stopped getting any updates. And the last straw for me was when they did something funny to the backend system, and I started having to click "download transactions" twice in Mac Quicken in order to get it to download (the first try would *always* fail). After a few years of that, I got fed up and decided to leave.
In hindsight, I guess my timing was pretty good.
When I first read about the IBM/Lenovo split, I recall that Lenovo got the rights to some very specific uses of the IBM and "Think" (e.g. "ThinkPad", ThinkWhatever) trademarks, for a certain amount of time. I'm not sure when that expires, but I don't doubt that they could be making ones and still using the brand (and why not, it's a solid brand -- I would).
From what I've heard, most of the negative comments about the "new" Lenovo units are about the value-priced (grey) ones, and fewer are about the actual ThinkPads. Most of the negative things I have heard about the ThinkPads are about the keyboards, and it seems to be a hit-or-miss thing (the keyboards from one factory are preferred by some users over the others).
A whole lot of engineers calculated a lot of transfer orbits (not just Earth-Mars) with slide rules. In some ways they can be a lot safer than using a calculator, since they don't give you a false sense of precision.
E.g., divide 52 by 7 on a calculator, and it will spit out 7.428571428571, a completely correct although ridiculous answer when dealing with real-world quantities, since it blows away the precision of the input numbers. Slide rules require you to constantly consider the number of decimal places that you want, and encourage you to only write down the correct number of digits (so you might do the same result and put down 7.4).
Personally, I think some of the best engineering ever accomplished by man has been conducted mostly by slide rules. I wouldn't go so far as to say that we've necessarily regressed since then -- computers are great, don't get me wrong -- but it's not right to simply write off slide rules. They had very distinct benefits and I think students would be well suited if they were kept around as a pedagogical tool.
The biggest manufacturer (under its own brand) that I'm aware of in Taiwan is Acer. They recently spun off their manufacturing arms as Wistron, but it's still based in Taiwan also. You can read about their global operations here.
Granted, like most everybody else, they do a lot of manufacturing in the PRC, but I find something that's only manufactured there (with the bulk of the profits going elsewhere) to be a lot less offensive than something that's designed, manufactured, and wholly brought to market by a PRC firm. (Of course, if what you find offensive about the PRC is worker abuses and not its geopolitics, then you should probably be even more bothered by stuff outsourced there for manufacturing.)
But Wistron is pretty diversified, in addition to the three locations in the PRC, they have their HQ, main R&D, and a manufacturing center in Taiwan, a service center in Japan, a factory in the Czech Republic, a service center in the Netherlands, a factory in Juarez, a service center in Dallas and a customer service center in Round Rock. They're openly traded on the Taiwan exchange and although I can't find a breakdown of all major holders that would definitively exclude the PRC government, their major holder is Acer (at ~35%).
I think you could buy from them in reasonably clear conscience, plus you'd have the additional bonus of giving the profits to a Taiwanese company, which ought to get you some sort of anti-PRC karma points somewhere.
If you know someone at IBM (seriously, they have like 250-300,000 employees, if you don't know someone who works there, one of your friends does) it's still possible to buy used IBM-branded ThinkPads from the employee surplus store. I know a friend who just did it, and there aren't any restrictions on buying gear from the store for non-employees ("family and friends"); in fact they encourage it. The employee doesn't even need to pay for it or anything.
I'm really glad that the OP is taking a stand for something he believes in; just by doing that he's head and shoulders above most of America. Although a single person's actions might be insignificant, if more people avoided Chinese-branded (or if they can, Chinese-made generally), in favor of Korean, Taiwanese, Japanese, etc., or even domestic products, it might give them a bit of a wake-up call, particularly since it would directly affect the businessmen and factory-owners who hold real power there.
I don't think there's anything illegal with it, provided that you have the permission of the person who's providing the actual uplink, so that you're not stealing their bandwidth.
I once got involved with a group of people who wanted to deploy a system like that; basically a mesh network of wireless nodes. There was a linux distribution around that turned a computer with a wifi card into a mesh node, doing all sorts of neat intelligent routing. You could have multiple uplinks in the mesh at various points and packets would automatically pick the best route, it would route around damage, you could use cards with multiple wireless NICs to do long-distance WiFi point-to-point connections (although using external antennas with consumer wifi gear is technically a violation of FCC rules).
Unfortunately what hobbled the system was the limited number of Wifi cards supported by Linux. We wanted to use donated hardware and most of the wireless cards we could acquire cheaply weren't compatible. The situation might be better now (this was 4-5 years ago).
The main problem with Wifi or any other very low power system is that you need a LOT of nodes. That's why WiMax looks better; it can use higher power levels and thus you need a lot fewer nodes.
What do you do about the political causes that aren't powerful enough to have some Times reporter's direct line? Guess they're S.O.L.
Actually you *decrease* the surface area (relative to total volume of water) by damming it up. This leads to some very significant environmental problems because it decreases the dissolved O2 levels in the water.
Think of a flowing river, particularly one with rapids (because that's the kind of area where you want to build a dam, somewhere where there's an elevation change), versus a still pond. There's a lot more evaporation (and oxygenation) going on when the water is flowing.
That said, I think the GP's point is bogus. Most of the dams in the U.S. are actually there for flood-control or irrigation, not for power. Even the really big power dams (think Hoover) really have a main purpose of irrigation. Very little water is "wasted" for power generation; power generation is sort of a bonus.
In fact, something like 98% of the dams in the U.S. that *could* be used for power generation, especially microgeneration and distributed-power, aren't; the water just expends its energy heating itself up as it goes down some sluiceway somewhere. Now that's a waste. Just by putting small turbines back into some of the many industrial locations that were originally designed with water power in mind (of which there are many, particularly in the Northeast), we'd generate a significant amount of power and also go a long way towards decentralizing our power grid and making it more fault and terrorism-resistant.
Most of the problems the SuperPhoenix had weren't related to it being a breeder, or really the overall reactor concept at all; they were direct results of some (in hindsight) really dumb design choices by the French engineers. In particular, their liquid-metal coolant (I think it was sodium-potassium, NaK) caused them no end of problems, and led to most of the downtime. If they had stuck with a more conventional design for the reactor support equipment, they probably would have been a lot more successful.
... unique engineering choices. The SuperPhoenix fits in well to that lineage, and shouldn't really be taken as a condemnation of breeder reactors generally.
But the French have a history of making some
The U.S. military has never learned especially well during peacetime. We're just flat-out bad at changing when we don't have a proverbial gun to our head. The military establishment is too resistant to change, and too in love with its own ideas. This is not a modern phenomenon.
Look back at U.S. military history, we usually begin major conflicts by getting in way over our heads -- arguably getting the crap kicked out of us (sometimes after some initial easy success) -- going "oh, shit," going back to the drawing board, and then coming up with something that actually works.
Look at the beginning of the North Africa campaign in WWII, or heavy losses against the insurgents in the Philippines in the early 20th century (which led, incidentally, to the development of modern handguns, among other things). Parallels to Korea and Vietnam is harder, because we were arguably unsuccessful there, and I think part of the reason has to do with us never finding a particularly successful strategy. And each time there has been a major paradigm shift in warfare, major contingents within the U.S. military have resisted it until it was overwhelmingly proved to be obsolete.
I don't think we've gotten there in Iraq. Our initial success gave us a feeling of complacency, and allowed us to believe that our strategy, tactics, and equipment was up to the job, when in reality we should have been engaged in a much more active process of rewriting the books in light of the new enemy. (The fact that most of those 'books,' most of our understanding of what war is, gets taken from World War Two and not from, say, the Philippines, which would be a much better parallel, doesn't help either.)
When I said "Back before the internet became popular," I mean specifically broadband Internet access, and I mean 'popular for sharing media, particularly music.'
Really what I'm talking about was that span of (depending where you lived, it was longer if you were out in the sticks than in an urban area) about 3-5 years or so where a lot of people had CD writers but only a select few people had broadband internet access and the knowledge of how to use it to get music.
That period was (IMO) the peak of physical-media music swapping. Once Napster got popular, the number of people I knew who were swapping around burned CDs dropped dramatically. Although interestingly, I've seen it start to increase in popularity again recently; I think there's a perception particularly among non-technical people that P2P is dangerous and difficult to use, but passing a DVD of MP3s around the office isn't.
You're assuming that the friend actually paid for the CD. If the friend is willing to let you copy CDs in the first place, why assume that the friend actually bought the CD? It's probably a lot more likely that what you're copying is their copy, that they made from somebody else's copy ... etc. Back before the internet became popular, and CD copying was more common than it was today, it wasn't rare to get many generations of copying from a single original, particularly in a high-density environment like a school or college. (Not that there's really any way to tell how many generations down from the original you are; that's the beauty of it being digital.)
There's no inherent difference between digital copying that involves physical media, and copying onto more easily-erasable storage. You can copy a ton of music in MP3 format if you burn it to a DVD and sneakernet it, too; if you put 4.3GB of music on a DVD and pass it around a dorm, with each person copying it to their hard drive, you can probably share more music faster than if you used bittorrent (particularly if people near the top of the chain make additional DVD copies after they have their own hard-drive copy).
The 'revenue environment' leaks like a sieve either way.
Under fractional-reserve rules, a bank can make loans in excess of its deposits -- that's what fractional-reserve banking means. However, it should never, at any time, have more loans outstanding than it has in total assets, including all the collateral that people have pledged in order to secure the loans. (Whether this is actually always true is debatable, and in fact I think it's probably not; when the housing market slumped, suddenly the banks had a lot more money loaned out than the collateral on those loans -- the houses -- was actually worth. Ideally, this would not happen.)
The key to fractional reserve banking is that it allows a bank to treat the borrower's promise to repay a loan as an asset, which it can then loan out again (in part).
Inflation and deflation have fairly significant and (at least within the world of economics, which is by its nature fuzzy) well-understood relationships with other parts of the economy, including unemployment* and purchasing behaviors, which have obvious effects on production. Since the money supply can affect inflation and deflation, it has a definite -- although admittedly indirect -- impact on overall production.
Now, it's an open question whether an inflationary or deflationary market is better. The generally accepted truth among mainstream U.S. economists today is that a small degree of inflation (say 3% per year or less) is healthy. However, there are some people who have some decent arguments for why a softly deflating market, as you would get with a finite, nonexpanding currency, could be good also. I'll be honest and say that I don't really have the basis to evaluate most of these arguments on their merits, so I won't try to summarize them. But it's easy to see how people will act differently in an inflating and deflating market: in an inflating market, it makes sense to keep all of your money invested, since anything you have sitting under your mattress will lose value, all by itself. In a deflationary market, your money gains in purchasing power just by sitting untouched, so it makes sense to delay expenses as long as you can, since they become cheaper over time. There are other, more subtle effects, also.
* For the relationship of unemployment to inflation, see Phillips curve.
The idea that a bank takes in deposits and then loans them out is a gross oversimplification, and ignores one of the largest effects of banks in a modern economy, namely that they create money on an as-needed basis, and back the newly-created money with mortgaged assets. That's what the whole argument over fractional-reserve vs full-reserve banking is about: some people (the ones advocating full-reserve) think this is not a great idea.
And indirectly, fractional-reserve banking is part of why so many people are upset about the current "sub-prime" mortgage crisis. Because banks create money when they make loans, if a bank loans out money to someone whose assets aren't worth as much as they claimed they were (e.g., they said they make a lot more money than they do, or the house's value was inflated at the time of the loan), then the money that the bank created while making the loan isn't backed up by anything. That is generally, to put it lightly, considered to be a bad thing.