From my experience working with LN in the lab is that getting even tiny drops on your hands is like getting splattered with hot cooking oil and to get a good splash from it I'd expect would create a flash frostbite burn.
Oh, let's not get wimpy! You can pour (a bit) of LN2 into your palm, quickly turn it over, and not get frostbite. Tiny drops are no big deal, just shake them off quick. You are to some extent insulated by the gaseous N2.
Safety goggles OTOH are probably a really good idea. Aprons are good too (I once had a bit of LN2 go down my pants into my crotch - it gets ya jumping!)
Along the same lines, I've wondered about the security of the keyless entry systems in cars.
In 1986, I went out to my gray Ford Escort in a school parking lot, unlocked the trunk and opened it. Funny thing was, there was a light mounted in the trunk that wasn't there before. Upon further examination, I realized that this wasn't MY gray Ford Escort, I parked a few aisles over...
I'm hoping that key technology has advanced since then;)
So are there any examples of a pure free market economy in the world? If not, which countries qualify as the closest to pure?
According to the "Economic Freedom of the World" report from the Cato Institute, the most free economies are Hong Kong and Singapore, followed by the USA, New Zealand, United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, and Switzerland.
It should be noted, of course, that economic freedom is different depending on where you are. For example, the UK has introduced private alternatives to their old-age pension system, whereas meddling with Social Security in the US is still the "third rail" of politics.
Western European countries generally ranked high in all areas except size of government and labor market regulation.
Life expectancy is higher among more economically free nations, and they also enjoy higher levels of income and faster levels of growth. The poorest 10% earn much more income in economically free countries.
The bottom five nations in terms of economic freedom were the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Myanmar, Guinea-Bissau, Algeria and Ukraine. However North Korea and Cuba were not included in the report since their data is not available.
Because despite living within 10 miles from AOL, PSINet, WorldCom, as well as big corp. offices of several other well known firms, there is still no viable broadband for most people out here in Loudoun County.
You can get DSL in Leesburg - which city are you in?
Evidently, a demopublican government has not quite een able to stem corporate misdeeds...
Moreover, libertarians of all types do believe that fraud is a crime.
On HMOs - an HMO is a way of making your health care expenses be less by combining mutual insurance with centralized health care rationing. HMOs have a higher chance of killing you than straight insurance or just paying your doctor yourself. It just happens that either of those safer alternatives are more expensive. You roll the dice when you stick to your HMO doctor. At any time, you are free to go to a full-cost doctor as well.
Unfortunately, medicine is an imperfect art. Even full-paying a doctor doesn't assure a mistake or a bizarre reaction won't happen.
Should medical care be more affordable? Perhaps, but the Federal Government pays 50% of medical bills in the US, leading to higher utilization of medical care and higher prices (especially for those outside of Medicare/caid).
You make the call if this is good or bad.
The Libertarin Party has been a supporter of tax-deducatable self-insurance through expansion of medical savings account laws. It's another option.
My wife had no desire for a diamond. Here is what she wrote:
"Show her you'll love her for the next millennium." "How else can 3 months salary last an eternity?" I'm so fed up with all the millennium diamond ring commercials on TV. I'm one of the few women who doesn't understand the big deal about diamonds. I certainly wouldn't want someone to propose to me with a generic token on a generic day like New Years! Some people think that diamonds are females' way of testing their mates to see how far they will go for them (if you buy the theory that women are constantly seeking the perfect father for their children and men are constantly seeking ways of spreading their sperm). I think diamond rings exist primarily to impress others.
The nightmare scenario for him, of course, would be that he couldn't be able to time-shift News Hour [pbs.org], Washington Week [pbs.org], and The McLaughlin Group [mclaughlin.com] because of digital no-record flags. He tells me that the majority of the TV he watches is recorded with only a small portion being live.
As far as I can see, there is no real PBS policy on DTV DRM at this point. I doubt there will be use of the broadcast flag, but I suppose it could happen.
DRM has always been the "honor system" for PBS member stations. PBS satellite interconnection feeds currently are not actively encrypted (the Digicipher platform is used for compression, but the key is never changed). Moreover, there is a totally in-the-clear PBS C-band analog satellite feed available in the US.
In Maryland, you are only allowed to use deadly force when confronted with immediate risk of bodily harm. Furthermore you have a "duty to retreat" if possible, rather than use deadly force.
In all states, however, you have a "duty to worry about the civil case," because while few criminal juries would find you guilty of anything for a reasonable shoot, few civil juries will turn down the opportunity to make you pay millions for it. I suppose it comes down to a quick calculation on the value of your life.
Zimbabwe have a record of developing crops to meet their climate. Wheat in particular. Crops just do not grow once planted they have to be suitable for the climate. Most the GM designs so far do not meet the needs of countries outside the developed world.
Even if the corn was NOT-GM, there would be a risk of a foreign species contaminating existing species in a foreign country. But no one seems to care about that.
They want some of that bandwidth back by 2006, and the only way they're going to get it (and make sure that people can watch TV) is by forcing Sony et/al to start going digital now.
The weird thing is that one analog TV channel is the same "width" as one DTV channel. What is happening is that through the process of the digital conversion, analog stations are being pulled out of UHF channels 52-69. This happens because stations in the upper UHF are given new DTV assignments outside the upper UHF, then in 2007 they will give up their analog channels in the upper UHF.
So it is more of a "defragmentation" of the broadcast spectrum.
Then you'd have to change the ATSC standards to include the MPEG-4 codec, which would introduce a problem of compatibility. There's zero compatibility between MPEG-2 and MPEG-4
Actually this is not needed. You can encapsulate IP packets in MPEG-2, and then send whatever you want in IP (well, UDP). MPEG-4, Windows Media, Real, QuickTime, Ogg Vorbis, MP3, Usenet news...
At the 2002 NAB Convention, KLAS did a 1 Mbps Windows Media stream over their DTV signal. It looked pretty good. The device to receive IP is about the size of a pack of playing cards, and plugs into your computer through the USB port.
They want digitial tuners in TV's. But they didn't say they wanted HDTV tuners in TV's. At first I thought there wasn't a difference, but now I'm not sure.
DTV does not equal HDTV. Digital stations send a 19 Mbps MPEG-2 transport stream. You can split it up any way you want.
That 19 Mbps transport stream could either be one single HD program, one 15 Mbps HD program and one 4 Mbps SD program, or four 4.5 Mbps SD programs. Your DTV receiver will let you choose between the offerings if there are more than one per RF channel....or it could be three 4.5 Mbps SD video programs, and 4.5 Mbps of MPEG-2 encapsulated IP traffic.
To watch HD in full resolution, you need an HD capable television. Most modern computer monitors can do this as well.
To receive DTV of any kind, you need a DTV receiver. These are much rarer than HD-capable televisions right now though.
The good news is that existing analog antenna systems work fine with DTV.
TVs are also used to receive cable signals, and cable TV is outside the scope of FCC's excuse for existing, since it's not using the airwaves.
Not true for two reasons: 1) cable TV is regulated by the FCC, because it regulates "communications", not only wireless ones. But...
2) Mandating an ATSC MPEG-2 DTV receiver on television sets could also make digital cable boxes cheaper. Instead of doing the tough job of MPEG-2 video decoding, they would only convert from 32 QAM RF signalling to 8 QAM RF signalling.
#2 would also benefit broadcasting in general, in that there are a lot of incompatabilities between digital cable and DTV in areas such as program information signalling (PSIP), interactive television (OpenTV vs. Wink etc.), and such. Right now, digital cable and DTV digital signals must be handled very differently, despite the fact that they both use MPEG-2.
It's not clear why this should cost $200. The radio part of a cell phone costs about $10 in quantity, and that's a very good digital radio tranceiver.
The $200 part is not really an RF issue, but the ability to demultiplex and decode the 19 Mbps MPEG-2 digital transport stream, creating either standard definition or high-definition decoded video for display on the television set (and perhaps also a standard def downconverted version of a high-def program for non-high-def sets.)
And, oh yeah, there are a range of different bitrates and formats for the digital video.
I doubt the $200 number will stand with mass-production, but it will be "significant," perhaps $50 or so.
Seeing as how the government is mandating TV stations to turn off their analog feed at the end of 2006, and given a lot of Federal money going to support the buildout of DTV stations, I suppose this legislation makes some sense.
The University of Maryland School of Architecture requires Calculus I and Physics I & II to graduate. But no CAD classes required...("it's just a tool").
BTW, are you sure you really want to be an architect? Do you really want to earn less than a school teacher and spend 50-60 hours per week at your job without getting paid for overtime? (Or if you do get paid hourly, it is de-rated so you still make very little)
Do you want to spend endless days of CAD doing drafting of the princicpal's "designs" and CD's (construction directives, i.e. changes)?
Do you want to go back to grad school, get your Master's, and then not make any more when you go back to work?
Or do you have the needed capital and sales skills to start your own practice? (Despite the fact that most people and companies don't give a dang about architecture, i.e. Ryland Homes and office parks).
Maybe you REALLY love construction. That might be a saving grace.
Don't expect architecture to be about creativity. That day is long gone. Even the "rock stars" like Gehry are basically reduced to doing near copies of their existing work.
I ran a search on the most popular statistic--the odds of being hit by lightning. Turns out there's even controversy about that. The odds cited [stats.org] range from 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 5 million.
I was hit by lightning...OK, I was a very small parallel part of the circuit, but it hurt like heck!
Slashdot Mirror
From my experience working with LN in the lab is that getting even tiny drops on your hands is like getting splattered with hot cooking oil and to get a good splash from it I'd expect would create a flash frostbite burn.
Oh, let's not get wimpy! You can pour (a bit) of LN2 into your palm, quickly turn it over, and not get frostbite. Tiny drops are no big deal, just shake them off quick. You are to some extent insulated by the gaseous N2.
Safety goggles OTOH are probably a really good idea. Aprons are good too (I once had a bit of LN2 go down my pants into my crotch - it gets ya jumping!)
Along the same lines, I've wondered about the security of the keyless entry systems in cars.
;)
In 1986, I went out to my gray Ford Escort in a school parking lot, unlocked the trunk and opened it. Funny thing was, there was a light mounted in the trunk that wasn't there before. Upon further examination, I realized that this wasn't MY gray Ford Escort, I parked a few aisles over...
I'm hoping that key technology has advanced since then
So are there any examples of a pure free market economy in the world? If not, which countries qualify as the closest to pure?
According to the "Economic Freedom of the World" report from the Cato Institute, the most free economies are Hong Kong and Singapore, followed by the USA, New Zealand, United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, and Switzerland.
It should be noted, of course, that economic freedom is different depending on where you are. For example, the UK has introduced private alternatives to their old-age pension system, whereas meddling with Social Security in the US is still the "third rail" of politics.
Western European countries generally ranked high in all areas except size of government and labor market regulation.
Life expectancy is higher among more economically free nations, and they also enjoy higher levels of income and faster levels of growth. The poorest 10% earn much more income in economically free countries.
The bottom five nations in terms of economic freedom were the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Myanmar, Guinea-Bissau, Algeria and Ukraine. However North Korea and Cuba were not included in the report since their data is not available.
Because despite living within 10 miles from AOL, PSINet, WorldCom, as well as big corp. offices of several other well known firms, there is still no viable broadband for most people out here in Loudoun County.
You can get DSL in Leesburg - which city are you in?
Evidently, a demopublican government has not quite een able to stem corporate misdeeds...
Moreover, libertarians of all types do believe that fraud is a crime.
On HMOs - an HMO is a way of making your health care expenses be less by combining mutual insurance with centralized health care rationing. HMOs have a higher chance of killing you than straight insurance or just paying your doctor yourself. It just happens that either of those safer alternatives are more expensive. You roll the dice when you stick to your HMO doctor. At any time, you are free to go to a full-cost doctor as well.
Unfortunately, medicine is an imperfect art. Even full-paying a doctor doesn't assure a mistake or a bizarre reaction won't happen.
Should medical care be more affordable? Perhaps, but the Federal Government pays 50% of medical bills in the US, leading to higher utilization of medical care and higher prices (especially for those outside of Medicare/caid).
You make the call if this is good or bad.
The Libertarin Party has been a supporter of tax-deducatable self-insurance through expansion of medical savings account laws. It's another option.
Ron Paul, a former Libertarian Party Presidential candidate, is in Congress...
You can get the GNU-Darwin x86 distribution here, and discuss Darwin x86 here.
The real question is when will you be able to take "off the shelf" components and put together something that can pretty much match an Avid system.
Does anyone remember stand-along word processors? I imagine that dedicated video editors might go that way as well.
We are even getting very close to the point where broadcast quality video servers can built out of off-the-shelf components.
The nightmare scenario for him, of course, would be that he couldn't be able to time-shift News Hour [pbs.org], Washington Week [pbs.org], and The McLaughlin Group [mclaughlin.com] because of digital no-record flags. He tells me that the majority of the TV he watches is recorded with only a small portion being live.
As far as I can see, there is no real PBS policy on DTV DRM at this point. I doubt there will be use of the broadcast flag, but I suppose it could happen.
DRM has always been the "honor system" for PBS member stations. PBS satellite interconnection feeds currently are not actively encrypted (the Digicipher platform is used for compression, but the key is never changed). Moreover, there is a totally in-the-clear PBS C-band analog satellite feed available in the US.
Already there is the Virtual Sex Machine.
You can see a video of it about 2/3rds of the way down the page here. Scary stuff!
"Hi, I'm from Al Quaeda records, and I'm here to hack your computer!"
Enough said.
In Maryland, you are only allowed to use deadly force when confronted with immediate risk of bodily harm. Furthermore you have a "duty to retreat" if possible, rather than use deadly force.
In all states, however, you have a "duty to worry about the civil case," because while few criminal juries would find you guilty of anything for a reasonable shoot, few civil juries will turn down the opportunity to make you pay millions for it. I suppose it comes down to a quick calculation on the value of your life.
Zimbabwe have a record of developing crops to meet their climate. Wheat in particular. Crops just do not grow once planted they have to be suitable for the climate. Most the GM designs so far do not meet the needs of countries outside the developed world.
Even if the corn was NOT-GM, there would be a risk of a foreign species contaminating existing species in a foreign country. But no one seems to care about that.
They want some of that bandwidth back by 2006, and the only way they're going to get it (and make sure that people can watch TV) is by forcing Sony et/al to start going digital now.
The weird thing is that one analog TV channel is the same "width" as one DTV channel. What is happening is that through the process of the digital conversion, analog stations are being pulled out of UHF channels 52-69. This happens because stations in the upper UHF are given new DTV assignments outside the upper UHF, then in 2007 they will give up their analog channels in the upper UHF.
So it is more of a "defragmentation" of the broadcast spectrum.
Then you'd have to change the ATSC standards to include the MPEG-4 codec, which would introduce a problem of compatibility. There's zero compatibility between MPEG-2 and MPEG-4
Actually this is not needed. You can encapsulate IP packets in MPEG-2, and then send whatever you want in IP (well, UDP). MPEG-4, Windows Media, Real, QuickTime, Ogg Vorbis, MP3, Usenet news...
At the 2002 NAB Convention, KLAS did a 1 Mbps Windows Media stream over their DTV signal. It looked pretty good. The device to receive IP is about the size of a pack of playing cards, and plugs into your computer through the USB port.
The Australian government has already declared by 2008 all TV transmissions will be exclusively digital.
Analog television turn-off is mandated by the FCC in the US for December 31, 2006.
They want digitial tuners in TV's. But they didn't say they wanted HDTV tuners in TV's. At first I thought there wasn't a difference, but now I'm not sure.
...or it could be three 4.5 Mbps SD video programs, and 4.5 Mbps of MPEG-2 encapsulated IP traffic.
DTV does not equal HDTV. Digital stations send a 19 Mbps MPEG-2 transport stream. You can split it up any way you want.
That 19 Mbps transport stream could either be one single HD program, one 15 Mbps HD program and one 4 Mbps SD program, or four 4.5 Mbps SD programs. Your DTV receiver will let you choose between the offerings if there are more than one per RF channel.
To watch HD in full resolution, you need an HD capable television. Most modern computer monitors can do this as well.
To receive DTV of any kind, you need a DTV receiver. These are much rarer than HD-capable televisions right now though.
The good news is that existing analog antenna systems work fine with DTV.
The fact remains that, even with 4 megabit to deal with, digital cable can't quite cut through the mustard of inferior compression
Then you'll like over-the-air HDTV, with 19 Mbps and 5.1 surround sound...
BTW, PBS DigitalTV Site.
TVs are also used to receive cable signals, and cable TV is outside the scope of FCC's excuse for existing, since it's not using the airwaves.
Not true for two reasons: 1) cable TV is regulated by the FCC, because it regulates "communications", not only wireless ones. But...
2) Mandating an ATSC MPEG-2 DTV receiver on television sets could also make digital cable boxes cheaper. Instead of doing the tough job of MPEG-2 video decoding, they would only convert from 32 QAM RF signalling to 8 QAM RF signalling.
#2 would also benefit broadcasting in general, in that there are a lot of incompatabilities between digital cable and DTV in areas such as program information signalling (PSIP), interactive television (OpenTV vs. Wink etc.), and such. Right now, digital cable and DTV digital signals must be handled very differently, despite the fact that they both use MPEG-2.
It's not clear why this should cost $200. The radio part of a cell phone costs about $10 in quantity, and that's a very good digital radio tranceiver.
The $200 part is not really an RF issue, but the ability to demultiplex and decode the 19 Mbps MPEG-2 digital transport stream, creating either standard definition or high-definition decoded video for display on the television set (and perhaps also a standard def downconverted version of a high-def program for non-high-def sets.)
And, oh yeah, there are a range of different bitrates and formats for the digital video.
I doubt the $200 number will stand with mass-production, but it will be "significant," perhaps $50 or so.
Seeing as how the government is mandating TV stations to turn off their analog feed at the end of 2006, and given a lot of Federal money going to support the buildout of DTV stations, I suppose this legislation makes some sense.
The University of Maryland School of Architecture requires Calculus I and Physics I & II to graduate. But no CAD classes required...("it's just a tool").
BTW, are you sure you really want to be an architect? Do you really want to earn less than a school teacher and spend 50-60 hours per week at your job without getting paid for overtime? (Or if you do get paid hourly, it is de-rated so you still make very little)
Do you want to spend endless days of CAD doing drafting of the princicpal's "designs" and CD's (construction directives, i.e. changes)?
Do you want to go back to grad school, get your Master's, and then not make any more when you go back to work?
Or do you have the needed capital and sales skills to start your own practice? (Despite the fact that most people and companies don't give a dang about architecture, i.e. Ryland Homes and office parks).
Maybe you REALLY love construction. That might be a saving grace.
Don't expect architecture to be about creativity. That day is long gone. Even the "rock stars" like Gehry are basically reduced to doing near copies of their existing work.
Just a warning!
The big question is, when will Ricochet be turned back on nation-wide??
I ran a search on the most popular statistic--the odds of being hit by lightning. Turns out there's even controversy about that. The odds cited [stats.org] range from 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 5 million.
I was hit by lightning...OK, I was a very small parallel part of the circuit, but it hurt like heck!