I know it sounds gross, but if you push on it really hard with the palm of your other hand, most likely it will sort of squish and your body will reabsorb everything from it. I had one of those develop about ten years ago when I was working a ton of hours correcting OCR'ed text files. My mother told me how her doctor had squashed one on her wrist, so I tried it. It took a few tries, but worked.:)
I'm a former Aussie living in America - I'm more than a little jaded about the Australian government given my recent experiences. It has to be one of the only countries in the world that will strip a naturally born citizen of their citizenship against their will. (Complicated immigration story.)
I tend to agree with the statement about complacency of the citizens. It's kind of similar in countries where the British system of government prevailed. There was such a history of the government ceding its rights to citizens through the political process that the citizens seem to come to trust that the government will not treat them improperly. Perhaps not so much trust, but there's less vigilance to jump up and fight restrictions on liberty.
You have to look at the parallel between the banning of guns in Australia and the banning of guns within Australia. Once your population abrogates their responsibility and capability to physically protect their liberties, you have to question their gumption and capability to even politically protect their liberties.
I wish them luck... the frog's water is getting hot...
Yeah, but the information was discarded when the file was compressed, not decoded. The best you can ever get out of a lossily compressed file is the intended decoding. If you choose to re-encode it and lose more data, that's your choice. If you wanted to use the MS format files portably without losing more information, you'd just need to transfer them in their original format and crack them on a machine where you're willing to store the expanded representation.
I've never encoded, decoded, and re-encoded an MP3 to see how much generational loss there is.
It's probably true in general for network stations that programming is oriented toward the LCD. Less so for some of the more fringey cable stations which are more likely to target specific audiences. If you're looking for it, higher quality topical information can sometimes be found.
The pseudo-news crap like HardCopy, Dateline NBC etc. have to be about the most annoying shows on television to me these days. Guaranteed to trigger an instant channel switch when one of those comes on. The false drama in those programs is pretty sickening, and is often exploitative.
I agree that there are many good news sources, for me the television is rarely where I learn things first. Reading the local newspaper every day has been a touchstone for me since I was little, and is still my most consistent source of world news. I listen to a local AM radio news station for about half an hour each morning getting ready for work. The rest gets filled in by the net and the TV I guess.
I'm not sure if the trend of TV toward entertainment is all bad. I think it was John Laroquette who really didn't like TV, felt that it was very poorly suited for serious topics and that the best it could really provide was a smile or a laugh.
For me, the television is on most of the time that I am at home on weeknights. However, the television is not the focus of my activity, it's something there in the background while I work on my computer or work on other things. The only programming that ever gets my full attention is a live sporting event involving a team that I care about a lot. (Read: Broncos Games:) Even then it's hard to just sit still and watch - likely to get sidetracked when a commercial comes on.
I pay $43 a month for cable service and use at most about five or six of the available stations. My TV is generally on HBO or a sporting event, possibly a network comedy.
As far as I'm concerned, there is one thing that seriously needs to be done, and that is to divorce the cable wire from the content passed over it. I never liked the AOL sort of model where the connectivity and the content are provided by a single monolithic provider. The exclusive rights to provide content over their wires was given to the cable companies as part of their monopoly status necessary to get the infrastructure built. With cable being deregulated and opening up to other avenues of making money from the infrastructure, I think it is well past time to eliminate the monopoly on content provided through cable television. Let me buy my information access by the piece. If I had the ability to tailor the content coming into my TV rather than being forced to swallow (and subsidize) the same least common denominator of pablum as everybody else, the TV might get more of my interest. The cable company can charge me for the line capacity, and even make money as a middleman for content providers as far as I care... just let ME choose what I am buying.
Using USWest's Megabit with an independent local ISP. The Cisco 675 has always showed the line trained at 768K down 256K up. (Paying for 256K down, 128K up). The first two weeks I was using it with my ISP it seemed I was getting throttled right down to 256K. After about two weeks the throttle became 512K. I'm not sure if that's a judicious decision by my ISP based on observing my bandwidth usage for a couple of weeks or just the way things have worked out. I don't upload enough to have measured my actual throughput that direction.
Slashdot Mirror
I know it sounds gross, but if you push on it really hard with the palm of your other hand, most likely it will sort of squish and your body will reabsorb everything from it. I had one of those develop about ten years ago when I was working a ton of hours correcting OCR'ed text files. My mother told me how her doctor had squashed one on her wrist, so I tried it. It took a few tries, but worked. :)
Mryll
I'm a former Aussie living in America - I'm more than a little jaded about the Australian government given my recent experiences. It has to be one of the only countries in the world that will strip a naturally born citizen of their citizenship against their will. (Complicated immigration story.)
I tend to agree with the statement about complacency of the citizens. It's kind of similar
in countries where the British system of government prevailed. There was such a history of the government ceding its rights to citizens through the political process that the citizens seem to come to trust that the government will not treat them improperly. Perhaps not so much trust, but there's less vigilance to jump up and fight restrictions on liberty.
You have to look at the parallel between the banning of guns in Australia and the banning of guns within Australia. Once your population abrogates their responsibility and capability to physically protect their liberties, you have to question their gumption and capability to even politically protect their liberties.
I wish them luck... the frog's water is getting hot...
:We've got to protect the children!
:*snarl*
It's like George Carlin said, something like "I'm getting really sick of these fuckin' kids that are ruining my life..."
Yeah, but the information was discarded when the file was compressed, not decoded. The best you can ever get out of a lossily compressed file is the intended decoding. If you choose to re-encode it and lose more data, that's your choice. If you wanted to use the MS format files portably without losing more information, you'd just need to transfer them in their original format and crack them on a machine where you're willing to store the expanded representation.
I've never encoded, decoded, and re-encoded an MP3 to see how much generational loss there is.
Jeremy
Homepage
It's probably true in general for network stations that programming is oriented toward the LCD. Less so for some of the more fringey cable stations which are more likely to target specific audiences. If you're looking for it, higher quality topical information can sometimes be found.
:) Even then it's hard to just sit still and watch - likely to get sidetracked when a commercial comes on.
The pseudo-news crap like HardCopy, Dateline NBC etc. have to be about the most annoying shows on television to me these days. Guaranteed to trigger an instant channel switch when one of those comes on. The false drama in those programs is pretty sickening, and is often exploitative.
I agree that there are many good news sources, for me the television is rarely where I learn things first. Reading the local newspaper every day has been a touchstone for me since I was little, and is still my most consistent source of world news. I listen to a local AM radio news station for about half an hour each morning getting ready for work. The rest gets filled in by the net and the TV I guess.
I'm not sure if the trend of TV toward entertainment is all bad. I think it was John Laroquette who really didn't like TV, felt that it was very poorly suited for serious topics and that the best it could really provide was a smile or a laugh.
For me, the television is on most of the time that I am at home on weeknights. However, the television is not the focus of my activity, it's something there in the background while I work on my computer or work on other things. The only programming that ever gets my full attention is a live sporting event involving a team that I care about a lot. (Read: Broncos Games
I pay $43 a month for cable service and use at most about five or six of the available stations. My TV is generally on HBO or a sporting event, possibly a network comedy.
As far as I'm concerned, there is one thing that seriously needs to be done, and that is to divorce the cable wire from the content passed over it. I never liked the AOL sort of model where the connectivity and the content are provided by a single monolithic provider. The exclusive rights to provide content over their wires was given to the cable companies as part of their monopoly status necessary to get the infrastructure built.
With cable being deregulated and opening up to other avenues of making money from the infrastructure, I think it is well past time to eliminate the monopoly on content provided through cable television. Let me buy my information access by the piece. If I had the ability to tailor the content coming into my TV rather than being forced to swallow (and subsidize) the same least common denominator of pablum as everybody else, the TV might get more of my interest. The cable company can charge me for the line capacity, and even make money as a middleman for content providers as far as I care... just let ME choose what I am buying.
Agreed...
Using USWest's Megabit with an independent local ISP. The Cisco 675 has always showed the line trained at 768K down 256K up. (Paying for 256K down, 128K up). The first two weeks I was using it with my ISP it seemed I was getting throttled right down to 256K. After about two weeks the throttle became 512K. I'm not sure if that's a judicious decision by my ISP based on observing my bandwidth usage for a couple of weeks or just the way things have worked out. I don't upload enough to have measured my actual throughput that direction.