I'm pretty ticked at Dish's product/service, too, and the only reason we still have it is for my live-in mother-in-law (long story). However, when she moves out, so does Dish.
I once had periodic problems with the box (a 521 recorder, when they FIRST came out) locking up. In spite of numerous mentions in online groups about "bad software", the tech support guy recommended I NOT use a surge supressor. He said they can cause problems.
On an unrelated call a year later, I was chatting with 2nd level tech support while they were looking up my records and I mentioned that I thought the compression ratio of their signal had gone way up - very blocky images sometimes, and other artifacts you normally only see on the web. The tech guy (same guy as the prior year - unique name) had apparently been promoted and informed me that they don't compress the signal before sending it out over the satellite, and that the supplier uplevel of them (content originators) must be doing something.
Please don't presume to tell me how a surge supressor, a satellite broadcast or a video codec works!
What's to stop these ghosts being maliciously "trained" to give the wrong answer.
Can't you read behind the acronym? DLCA?? Good Grief! It's only one letter off of the DMCA, which I think means that if you do "hack" or screw with the ghosts in any way, that you get a lesser fine/imprisonment than the real DMCA.
by the time we can see anything appreciable in the system, we'll actually BE there. These changes take place REALLY slowly, and we'll all have evolved into "pure energy" beings by the time anything firmer than a large dust-bunny is in place.
Excellent call. Those who care, will abide by the list, while those who don't will either brute force it, or brute-force email addresses in the "TO" box anyway. The list wouldn't even interest or concern them, since they're already "running the alphabet" @ every domain under the sun already.
The catch is that since email addresses are relatively short, it's pretty easy to brute-force them out of the list. Just run through the alphanumerics and you've got 'em.
a@a.com (not on list) b@a.com (not on list)... jsmith@ibm.com (bingo!) jsmiti@ibm.com (not on list)...
I'm actually a vegan (for my own reasons) and found your story hysterical (oops - there's a word with sexist roots!)
She went in there looking for a fight and the store failed to give her one. Then you gave the cashier a victory they weren't expecting. Good one!!
Seriously - some people need to grow thicker skin or something. I go into almost any place, find the one or two things I can eat, and go with it - no picking fights with the staff and no attempts to convert the people I'm with.
While niggardly is archaic, it (and many other words) may have drifted out of favor in part because of the connotations, or - more likely - confusion with "n-word". Regardless, it's still creeps up in school readings of Charles Dickens.
Also: Mark Twain's stories often come up in book bannings because of the more obvious use of what we now consider epithets.
I especially like your point about the identification of the objector as the "true racist" in the story. The more generally definition of racist (applies to sexist, classist, etc. too) isn't one who discriminates based upon race, but one who distinguishes based on race. Truly: "discriminate" doesn't necessarily mean to "treat badly", but to "treat different" and I think you caught the essence.
I'm seriously wondering about access times with this method.
When you're talking about archiving millions of pages of scanned legal records, such as birth certificates, etc., you wonder if the access time is better than the current methods. For large scale operations, not only do you have media rotation and seeking going on, but the cute robotic arm picking the correct WORM disk out of the silo, etc.
The advantage of having anywhere near ROM-chip level access times to a nice cubic meter of this stuff would be great! Additionally: multiple, concurrent access to the same or different stores should be an improvement.
I hate when an article stresses facts that are the normal to push for some radical changes.
Obligatory example: you can often get a knee-jerk reaction out of someone if you tell them that in the US, 40% of all sick days are taken on Monday or Friday.
Common reactions include "slacker" and "lazy", when a moment's pause will convince you that nothing's amiss.
I remember when MTV first started out when they billed themselves as 24 hour commercial free music.
The problem MTV ran into with the "we're a video radio station" format was that advertisers they eventually courted couldn't pick a demographic. For example, if you were a manufacturer of audiophile electronics, you couldn't be sure your spot would be stuck in the middle of a 'ten song Britney block' or something.
They slowly moved to blocks of genres, and in-house programming, and the rest is history.
You're talking to the same people who have had an incorrect US flag since as long as I remember.
Hey - You're right! It looked a little odd - so I zoomed it up a bunch and sure enough: 12 stripes! I wonder which colony they dropped?
(Reminds me of the time I was driving home from work and some guy had painted a US flag on the side windows of his Chevy Blazer. As a former teacher, it saddened me that this "patriot" figured we only had 36 states - six rows of six stars. Also, in his world, there were 15 colonies/stripes.)
Sounds a lot like the Mango Medley file system (for Windows) and Coda (for Unix/Linux systems). Info at nearest Google-search.
The Mango system was only produced for versions of Windows up to 95, with spotty NT support. The premise was pretty cool: each user of the system allocated part of their hard drive to a single network share. All of this space was added up and appeared as a single shared mapping to the network. Each file was copied to two users for safety. If a user accessed a file, they would get a copy and someone else would lose it. If someone's computer became unavailable, the rest of the system would reconfigure. It was sort of a large RAID-1 system.
Coda information available here: http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu/
Hollywood needs to stop promoting smoking worldwide...
Hollywood directly isn't bringing about this connection, and the tobacco industry isn't directly encouraging it. Rather, a number of highly sought actors, actresses, directors, etc., all of whom smoke, have been pushing smoking into their roles and movies. Not necessarily because the smoking is relevant to the acting, but because the actors want to be able to smoke on set. Pretty simple.
There have been a few paid product-placements by tobacco firms, but it's the exception, rather than the rule.
http://www.tobaccofree.org/films.html is one place to look for more info, but honestly, Google will turn up tons of links, too.
Of course, running your life entirely on cash has its own pitfalls.
With the advent of RICO laws in the US, the mere holding of a large amount of cash is subject to extra scrutiny. If you choose to pull your entire paycheck out as cash each week and pay things off in cash, you run the risk of: losing the cash, getting the cash stolen, or...
getting the cash confiscated as possible drug money. Charges do not have to be pressed against you, but the cash, and there's little-to-no recourse in retrieving the money. Get pulled over for a minor traffic violation at the end of a quota month, and that could be the end of it.
There's been some noise being made by courts and pols about it being overly broad and being used as a supplemental source of money for local police departments, but given the more recent and broader laws on the books, I don't think this cash cow is going anywhere, soon.
Also, making any purchase (such as a car) of $10K or more warrants all sorts of paperwork with the treasury department to the effect that it is NOT illicit money, and making frequent large cash transactions of just under $10K - to escape scrutiny - is referred to as "stacking", and can also result in all sorts of nasty investigations and seizures all on its own.
However, they are truly rounding, so the net result can "lie" either way. While they may sell at 1595cc engine as a 1.6L, they also will sell a 1605cc engine as 1.6L.
This is especially more common when they switch units, as it makes less sense to promote a "1.595L" engine.
An exception to this working either way was that brief period (correct me if I miss the exact number) when the Ford Mustang went to a 4932cc engine, but still kept the 5.0 badge. I think that only lasted one year.
For engines, it sometimes starts turning into a "pissing contest," where the larger engine will "win" the bragging wars.
Re:As I sit in my office at 4 AM.. I find it sad..
on
Solar Window Panes
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· Score: 1
Agreed; way too much "wasted" lighting in the name of appearances. Most of the office lighting seems aimed to glare off the screen, too. We all have little flourescent fixtures mounted under the shelf in each cube, too, but of little use.
A couple of us revolted last year and found a switch combination that only put about a third of the office into darkness, but the boss nixed it soon enough.
I would love to be able to kill all of the lights above me (probably about 400W per employee) and use the ONE desk lamp.
Yeah, it gets pretty hairy doesn't it. If only there were an easier way to tax all of this efficiently, this wouldn't be an issue. Something that accounts for vehicle weight and miles driven. Those two together determine much of the road wear/tear.
Gas use is the closest there probably is.
And yes, for the given "car volume", a hybrid isn't necessarily the lightest car around. In fact, the battery system often adds quite a bit of weight. My Insight weighs more than a few other cars on the road, too. Those pure electric cars can be quite heavy, once you've added up all the batteries.
Using the weight of the vehicle is primarily reserved for trucks and penalties - notice the "weigh stations" in most states.
How about Oregon just taxes everyone the same and let gas usage determine fees - nahh that's too easy.
There's a guy on the yahoo honda-hybrid board who regularly has to go in to get his electric car emmissions checked. It's quite funny when the tech can't find a place to put the probe, but quite a pain when he has to go through all of the red tape for an exemption.
What does vehicle weight have to do with whether or not it's a hybrid? Wouldn't a hybrid weigh more than the identical car in a non-hybrid form due to the battery and other extra equipment?
You are right in that the weight of the vehicle doesn't enter into it, however, when the law was enacted, and even to this day, the hybrids tend to be lighter vehicles. Not necessarily because they're hybrids, but because they tend to be "showcase" vehicles of low mileage. Some early estimates said that a hybrid engine could squeeze between 15 and 30% better mileage, all other vehicle characteristics being the same. I would submit that making a 12/15 (city/hwy mpg)Ford Expedition into a hybrid would only bring it up to about 15/18, not making a strong sales case for the vehicle.
Re: road damage. Up until recently with the advent of hybrids, road wear/tear was directly related to vehicle weight, and vehicle weight almost directly translates into mpg. (Allow me some wiggle room with HOW related it all is.) If ALL vehicles were hybrid, but all other tech were kept the same, then gas usage (and taxes) would drop and road damage would remain the same. THAT is precisely the future scenario that led to the registration surcharge in that state.
But, you are right that commercial vehicles cause most of the damage. Here in the Chicago area, the roads are quite the crappiest in the country, in large part because this is a major trucking hub. The trucks pay higher taxes, and the money eventually finds its way back to the roads, but it means that at any given time, huge stretches of roadway are under construction.
I believe you are correct, sir. The net weight of the skinny-tired car would be the same, but the pounds/in^2 (insert local measure unit here) would go up.
Here in the Chicago suburbs, roads take a TREMENDOUS beating, in part due to the fact that this is a major trucking hub. The net weight of the vehicles is pretty high.
Side point: tire inflation pressure is one of the easiest ways to get "free mileage". Dealers have been notorious for selling cars (new and used) with under-inflated tires to make the ride nice and smooth, but at a sacrifice of mileage. For six months, my Insight couldn't beat 50MPG (sticker says 56/55 for the CVT model). Turns out that the tires were at 26 pounds all around. They're SUPPOSED to be at 38/35 (front/rear). Inflating the tires brought me up to the sticker mileage pretty quickly, and going a little higher (40/40) got me into the 60s easily enough.
I then checked the family Passat Wagon and it was five pounds low. Mother-in-law's Jeep was ten pounds low and tires were visibly rounded.
Next time you're behind a car on the road, look at the tires and see if they LOOK low. Often, the driver side of many SUVs is down a few pounds, and looks it.
Agreed. While I ultimately bought the Honda Insight for my daily commute, I looked at the TDIs for quite a while.
I visited a friend in Tucson once for a long weekend. He had the Jetta TDI at the time and including him, there were five of us in that car touring the city for days. With mountains. The car didn't even breathe hard.
After 400 miles, the car still had half a tank left.
People often look at cars as strictly a numbers game, but the TDIs (and hybrids and electrics) can be foolers. All get their pull from very strong, early torque. A good electric job with "only" 60 horsepower has tremendous torque early on, and can seriously give most Mustangs and Camaros a run for the money up to about 30MPH, which is how lots of us suburban/city people live: 0-30-0-45-0, etc.
Another exmaple of great torque early on are VW's 1.8T engines, which are rated for (depending on model year) 150-190 horsepower, but are incredibly strong right off the line. The turbo is actually ALWAYS engaged, but engages gradually more as the revs climb, giving the engine a very flat torque and power curve. "Turbo lag", as the term normally means, doesn't exist.
It's often said that people "buy horsepower but drive torque." Something to remember.
For quite a while, the Insights were besting Miata's and many other "small" cars in class "H" races, I believe, not through big engines, but strong, early torque and very tight handling. I haven't kept up, lately.
which gives you a state income tax break for buying a hybrid, but charges you DOUBLE-FEES every year for registering it.
Since Oregon gets so much of its road fund from gas taxes, some bright people in congress got the idea of charging hybrids (and electrics) more money to register them. One of the gov. officials actually was quoted as saying that hybrid and electric car owners aren't paying "their fair share" of road fees. Arguably, a two-thousand pound car with skinny tires probably has the least effect on roads and road repair.
Nobody brought up the idea of free registration for gas-guzzlers.;)
(By the way, my screen name is not necessarily because I'm a great thinker, but because I own a Honda Insight!)
Slashdot Mirror
I once had periodic problems with the box (a 521 recorder, when they FIRST came out) locking up. In spite of numerous mentions in online groups about "bad software", the tech support guy recommended I NOT use a surge supressor. He said they can cause problems.
On an unrelated call a year later, I was chatting with 2nd level tech support while they were looking up my records and I mentioned that I thought the compression ratio of their signal had gone way up - very blocky images sometimes, and other artifacts you normally only see on the web. The tech guy (same guy as the prior year - unique name) had apparently been promoted and informed me that they don't compress the signal before sending it out over the satellite, and that the supplier uplevel of them (content originators) must be doing something.
Please don't presume to tell me how a surge supressor, a satellite broadcast or a video codec works!
Dropping them really soon, now.
(on second thought - the school is in Denmark - and probably the DLCA doesn't apply.)
Can't you read behind the acronym? DLCA?? Good Grief! It's only one letter off of the DMCA, which I think means that if you do "hack" or screw with the ghosts in any way, that you get a lesser fine/imprisonment than the real DMCA.
Microsoft Windows Professional 2000
Has anyone got a cache of this as ASCII art or something?
by the time we can see anything appreciable in the system, we'll actually BE there. These changes take place REALLY slowly, and we'll all have evolved into "pure energy" beings by the time anything firmer than a large dust-bunny is in place.
Excellent call. Those who care, will abide by the list, while those who don't will either brute force it, or brute-force email addresses in the "TO" box anyway. The list wouldn't even interest or concern them, since they're already "running the alphabet" @ every domain under the sun already.
Good idea, but....
... ...
The catch is that since email addresses are relatively short, it's pretty easy to brute-force them out of the list. Just run through the alphanumerics and you've got 'em.
a@a.com (not on list)
b@a.com (not on list)
jsmith@ibm.com (bingo!)
jsmiti@ibm.com (not on list)
She went in there looking for a fight and the store failed to give her one. Then you gave the cashier a victory they weren't expecting. Good one!!
Seriously - some people need to grow thicker skin or something. I go into almost any place, find the one or two things I can eat, and go with it - no picking fights with the staff and no attempts to convert the people I'm with.
Also: Mark Twain's stories often come up in book bannings because of the more obvious use of what we now consider epithets.
I especially like your point about the identification of the objector as the "true racist" in the story. The more generally definition of racist (applies to sexist, classist, etc. too) isn't one who discriminates based upon race, but one who distinguishes based on race. Truly: "discriminate" doesn't necessarily mean to "treat badly", but to "treat different" and I think you caught the essence.
When you're talking about archiving millions of pages of scanned legal records, such as birth certificates, etc., you wonder if the access time is better than the current methods. For large scale operations, not only do you have media rotation and seeking going on, but the cute robotic arm picking the correct WORM disk out of the silo, etc.
The advantage of having anywhere near ROM-chip level access times to a nice cubic meter of this stuff would be great! Additionally: multiple, concurrent access to the same or different stores should be an improvement.
Obligatory example: you can often get a knee-jerk reaction out of someone if you tell them that in the US, 40% of all sick days are taken on Monday or Friday.
Common reactions include "slacker" and "lazy", when a moment's pause will convince you that nothing's amiss.
Morbo: "Exit poll show evil underdog Richard Nixon trailing with estimated zero votes."
Human female: "The time is 7:59 and the robot polls are now opening." (short pause) "And robot votes are now in. Nixon has won."
Morbo: "Morbo congratulates our gargantuan cyborg president. May death come quickly to his enemies."
The problem MTV ran into with the "we're a video radio station" format was that advertisers they eventually courted couldn't pick a demographic. For example, if you were a manufacturer of audiophile electronics, you couldn't be sure your spot would be stuck in the middle of a 'ten song Britney block' or something.
They slowly moved to blocks of genres, and in-house programming, and the rest is history.
Hey - You're right! It looked a little odd - so I zoomed it up a bunch and sure enough: 12 stripes! I wonder which colony they dropped?
(Reminds me of the time I was driving home from work and some guy had painted a US flag on the side windows of his Chevy Blazer. As a former teacher, it saddened me that this "patriot" figured we only had 36 states - six rows of six stars. Also, in his world, there were 15 colonies/stripes.)
The Mango system was only produced for versions of Windows up to 95, with spotty NT support. The premise was pretty cool: each user of the system allocated part of their hard drive to a single network share. All of this space was added up and appeared as a single shared mapping to the network. Each file was copied to two users for safety. If a user accessed a file, they would get a copy and someone else would lose it. If someone's computer became unavailable, the rest of the system would reconfigure. It was sort of a large RAID-1 system.
Coda information available here: http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu/
Hollywood directly isn't bringing about this connection, and the tobacco industry isn't directly encouraging it. Rather, a number of highly sought actors, actresses, directors, etc., all of whom smoke, have been pushing smoking into their roles and movies. Not necessarily because the smoking is relevant to the acting, but because the actors want to be able to smoke on set. Pretty simple.
There have been a few paid product-placements by tobacco firms, but it's the exception, rather than the rule.
http://www.tobaccofree.org/films.html is one place to look for more info, but honestly, Google will turn up tons of links, too.
With the advent of RICO laws in the US, the mere holding of a large amount of cash is subject to extra scrutiny. If you choose to pull your entire paycheck out as cash each week and pay things off in cash, you run the risk of: losing the cash, getting the cash stolen, or...
getting the cash confiscated as possible drug money. Charges do not have to be pressed against you, but the cash, and there's little-to-no recourse in retrieving the money. Get pulled over for a minor traffic violation at the end of a quota month, and that could be the end of it.
There's been some noise being made by courts and pols about it being overly broad and being used as a supplemental source of money for local police departments, but given the more recent and broader laws on the books, I don't think this cash cow is going anywhere, soon.
Also, making any purchase (such as a car) of $10K or more warrants all sorts of paperwork with the treasury department to the effect that it is NOT illicit money, and making frequent large cash transactions of just under $10K - to escape scrutiny - is referred to as "stacking", and can also result in all sorts of nasty investigations and seizures all on its own.
What's next: RFID money?
This is especially more common when they switch units, as it makes less sense to promote a "1.595L" engine.
An exception to this working either way was that brief period (correct me if I miss the exact number) when the Ford Mustang went to a 4932cc engine, but still kept the 5.0 badge. I think that only lasted one year.
For engines, it sometimes starts turning into a "pissing contest," where the larger engine will "win" the bragging wars.
(Slightly off-topic, but I still love Brian's Rice Boy Page)
A couple of us revolted last year and found a switch combination that only put about a third of the office into darkness, but the boss nixed it soon enough.
I would love to be able to kill all of the lights above me (probably about 400W per employee) and use the ONE desk lamp.
Gas use is the closest there probably is.
And yes, for the given "car volume", a hybrid isn't necessarily the lightest car around. In fact, the battery system often adds quite a bit of weight. My Insight weighs more than a few other cars on the road, too. Those pure electric cars can be quite heavy, once you've added up all the batteries.
Using the weight of the vehicle is primarily reserved for trucks and penalties - notice the "weigh stations" in most states.
How about Oregon just taxes everyone the same and let gas usage determine fees - nahh that's too easy.
There's a guy on the yahoo honda-hybrid board who regularly has to go in to get his electric car emmissions checked. It's quite funny when the tech can't find a place to put the probe, but quite a pain when he has to go through all of the red tape for an exemption.
You are right in that the weight of the vehicle doesn't enter into it, however, when the law was enacted, and even to this day, the hybrids tend to be lighter vehicles. Not necessarily because they're hybrids, but because they tend to be "showcase" vehicles of low mileage. Some early estimates said that a hybrid engine could squeeze between 15 and 30% better mileage, all other vehicle characteristics being the same. I would submit that making a 12/15 (city/hwy mpg)Ford Expedition into a hybrid would only bring it up to about 15/18, not making a strong sales case for the vehicle.
Re: road damage. Up until recently with the advent of hybrids, road wear/tear was directly related to vehicle weight, and vehicle weight almost directly translates into mpg. (Allow me some wiggle room with HOW related it all is.) If ALL vehicles were hybrid, but all other tech were kept the same, then gas usage (and taxes) would drop and road damage would remain the same. THAT is precisely the future scenario that led to the registration surcharge in that state.
But, you are right that commercial vehicles cause most of the damage. Here in the Chicago area, the roads are quite the crappiest in the country, in large part because this is a major trucking hub. The trucks pay higher taxes, and the money eventually finds its way back to the roads, but it means that at any given time, huge stretches of roadway are under construction.
Here in the Chicago suburbs, roads take a TREMENDOUS beating, in part due to the fact that this is a major trucking hub. The net weight of the vehicles is pretty high.
Side point: tire inflation pressure is one of the easiest ways to get "free mileage". Dealers have been notorious for selling cars (new and used) with under-inflated tires to make the ride nice and smooth, but at a sacrifice of mileage. For six months, my Insight couldn't beat 50MPG (sticker says 56/55 for the CVT model). Turns out that the tires were at 26 pounds all around. They're SUPPOSED to be at 38/35 (front/rear). Inflating the tires brought me up to the sticker mileage pretty quickly, and going a little higher (40/40) got me into the 60s easily enough.
I then checked the family Passat Wagon and it was five pounds low. Mother-in-law's Jeep was ten pounds low and tires were visibly rounded.
Next time you're behind a car on the road, look at the tires and see if they LOOK low. Often, the driver side of many SUVs is down a few pounds, and looks it.
I visited a friend in Tucson once for a long weekend. He had the Jetta TDI at the time and including him, there were five of us in that car touring the city for days. With mountains. The car didn't even breathe hard.
After 400 miles, the car still had half a tank left.
People often look at cars as strictly a numbers game, but the TDIs (and hybrids and electrics) can be foolers. All get their pull from very strong, early torque. A good electric job with "only" 60 horsepower has tremendous torque early on, and can seriously give most Mustangs and Camaros a run for the money up to about 30MPH, which is how lots of us suburban/city people live: 0-30-0-45-0, etc.
Another exmaple of great torque early on are VW's 1.8T engines, which are rated for (depending on model year) 150-190 horsepower, but are incredibly strong right off the line. The turbo is actually ALWAYS engaged, but engages gradually more as the revs climb, giving the engine a very flat torque and power curve. "Turbo lag", as the term normally means, doesn't exist.
It's often said that people "buy horsepower but drive torque." Something to remember.
For quite a while, the Insights were besting Miata's and many other "small" cars in class "H" races, I believe, not through big engines, but strong, early torque and very tight handling. I haven't kept up, lately.
Since Oregon gets so much of its road fund from gas taxes, some bright people in congress got the idea of charging hybrids (and electrics) more money to register them. One of the gov. officials actually was quoted as saying that hybrid and electric car owners aren't paying "their fair share" of road fees. Arguably, a two-thousand pound car with skinny tires probably has the least effect on roads and road repair.
Nobody brought up the idea of free registration for gas-guzzlers. ;)
(By the way, my screen name is not necessarily because I'm a great thinker, but because I own a Honda Insight!)