I'm sure no matter what MS puts in this "new" hardware, the hackers will find a way to make Linux run on it no problem. They'll probably do some crap with signing the software, like on the XBox. The big questions are, will hacking it void your warrantee, will hacking it violate the DMCA, etc. Obviously no legitimate business is going to violate the law in order to get Linux to run on an MS computing appliance.
Anyway I doubt if it's really going to be THAT different from current PC hardware. In fact the core architecture probably won't be ANY different. What we're seeing here is probably a group of bundled proprietary officially supported USB devices or something with extra special attention paid to the drivers courtesy of MS. Basicly it's just an appliance computer, which like the iOpeners aren't really any different hardware-wise from real computers.
So in that case there's not much stopping any other industry group from getting together and setting other open standards for this type of operation. Sorry MS, but using caller ID to pull up a person's picture when they call is NOT revolutionary. The important thing here is that it's an integrated appliance system. It's not a tough system to implement, and I'm sure we could see decent OSS solutions pretty quickly.
I just wonder how proprietary the hardware and software components of this system are really going to be... I guess that remains to be seen.
Thats all nice, but I can still get a lot more PC for that money, or an equivilent PC for less money.
As far as I can see there are only two reasons to buy a Mac:
You really like OS-X
You really don't like wintel hardware (I put myself in this catagory, although I'm too poor to actually buy a Mac)
Mac price/performance is still sub par.
I wish there was some other cheap, high performance, non wintel hardware out there. Look at the automobile market, there are about a zillion different kinds of cars with a zillion different kinds of engines and a zillion different kinds of transmissions, etc. But in the computer world you really only get a choice between two platforms, Apple and wintel. Sure you could argue that you can buy whatever CPU you want, like an AMD or an Intel, but I don't see the difference between them to be as drastic as the difference between a Wankle and an I-4. This one-size-fits-all hardware platform mentality sucks.
Dude, bone up on your electronics. 100 volts is nothing. Your Indiglo (tm) backlight uses THOUSANDS of volts. The only thing that limites the amount of voltage a device can use is it's insulation, and we have some pretty damn cheap and good insulating materials kicking around. The real limitation is current, since conductors can only carry a limited amount of it, and high currents lead to losses through resistance. The higher the voltage the lower the current, the less loss due to resistance, as per Ohm's law. So high voltage is a GOOD thing.
Re:Journaling File System: for those who don't kno
on
Looking at Longhorn
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· Score: 4, Informative
No journaling file system guarantees that any unsaved data will be preserved in the event of a system crash. Data that's in RAM in the disk write cache is lost in the event of a crash. That has nothing to do with the file system.
Journaling file systems are transaction based. If a transaction fails partway through (IE the system crashes) the state of the disk is the same as if the transaction had never started, and is thus always consistent.
You would have to be doing something extra weird to risk corrupting an entire ext2 volume in the event of a crash. Also the article doesn't mention that ext3 IS ext2 with a journal added, it's not a totally different file system. In fact an ext3 file system that is cleanly unmounted can be mounted as an ext2 file system, FYI.
Example: the Linux kernel developers use proprietary BitKeeper rather than free CVS, because BitKeeper is simply a better tool.
Whoa whoa, lets be clear here. Bitkeeper is better for THAT job. Linux kernel development is so fast paced and so much code comes in from so many different sources that CVS couldn't handle it. Linux kernel development is an unusual case. CVS is totally fine for most projects. Even RCS is sufficient for small projects with one developer.
Sometimes using free software vs. superior commercial software is a matter of principle. I value my principles very highly.
Binary delta storage?? So what? Yeah rename would be nice. Changesets. But I would hardly call those "vital features". Hell RCS is sufficient for most small projects with only one developer. Bitkeeper really shines in the area of massivly multi-developer projects. CVS is fine for any small to medium sized projects. It's also free (as in beer). I've never heard of ClearCase.
I "graduated" high school in 97. In previous years the HS had a very active computer club. Unfortunately, all of the intelligent, active, motivated members were seniors, and all graduated and left my freshman year. The club was never the same. There were only three of us freshman with any interest in the club, and one of them was one of those old-school arrogant pompus ass holier than thou unix slackware zealot who hated to help anybody with anything so he always came off as being smarter than everybody simply because he didn't share his knowledge. I hate people like that. Anyway the club floundered and our 8-line BBS which had 1000 users a few years earlier dropped to about 50 active users thanks to the Internet. We wiped it and made a linux box but we weren't able to offer shell accounts to the general student body due to fears that we would use it to download porn, bomb recipies, etc (not that anybody really needed a shell account on that machine to do so. I sure didn't.) So that never went very far.
A very similar story has unfolded here at my college. All the cool people left a year before I got here, some idiots took over the club and drove everybody else away, and now it sucks. All we do is run one linux box, which is admitedly a bitchin linux box (dual 1.4ghz P4s, 1gig ram). We finally got rid of the assholes but so far the club hasn't garnered much new interest.
Anyway the point has been made here but I'll reiterate that computers are now ubiquitous. You can't really just have a general "computer club" anymore. You should really try to focus on something more specific, like computer games, computer programming, computer hardware, whatever the members are interested in. Nobody is going to want to sit around and swap floppy disks with the latest freeware like they used to.
So a couple of things to do: 1. Keep it FUN! It's a CLUB, it's supposed to be recreational. 2. DON'T LET IDIOTS ADMIN YOUR BOXEN. Choose admins based on their level of capability, not their seniority. This isn't Japan. If you maintain servers that aren't strictly for experimentation, make reliability the absolute priority. There's nothing that will piss people off more than waking up to find that the admin has formatted the server in the night for no particular reason and all of the projects they've been working on are lost (it happened here). 3. KEEP IT FUN! Find activities that everyone can enjoy, and keep it simple and FUN. 4. The only reason to form a high school computer club vs joining an online chatroom or something is to socialize in real life with your neighbors. Don't let people forget that it's a social activity. 5. Keep it fun.
Use GPS to map the locations of any openings where you can get a signal, IE gutter drains, manholes, etc. Inside the drains, use traditional surveying techniques. I am not a civil engineering major so I can't help you much there. You might also build some kind of radio location system based on the troglophone. That would be a very interesting project, although one that I would have absolutely no interest in:)
We are talking about microwave radiation here, not about power lines! The radiation emitted from power lines is in the 50-Hz range, while microwaves are in the GHz (1E9 Hz) range. Naturally, the higher the frequency, the more damage the radiation can do (this is elementary quantum mechanics: the energy of a photon is given by planck's constant times the frequency). Comparing microwaves to power lines therefore does not make sense at all.
Light is a SHITLOAD higher frequency that microwave radiationa and I have high-powered light sources on all around me whenever I'm awake and I don't have cancer yet. Your point is totally invalid. The effects of EM energy on humans is related to frequency but NOT because higher frequencies carry greater quantum energy. The damage potential is related to the physical aspects of the materials. Microwave ovens transmit at the exact wavelength that is equal to the size of a water molecule, thus exciting those molecules. Go up or down a few megahertz and it doesn't work at all. VHF radio waves are potentially more harmful than microwaves, because VHF wavelengths are in the neighborhood of the size of a human body, and thus your body has the capacity to recieve them efficiently. Your body doesn't have the capacity to receive microwaves efficiently at all. Certain wavelengths may be dangerous, you wouldn't want to use anything that's going to excite any cells, or important molecules. If no matter in your body happens to resonate at the particular wavelength in question, then you are 100% transparent and the waves will simply pass harmlessly through you.
Also lets not forget that "microwaves" are commonly defined as all wavelengths from 3GHz to 300GHz! That's a pretty freakin huge band. 300GHz waves behave COMPLETELY different from 3GHz waves (see the recent terahertz imaging posts here on/.).
So lets not go around propagating half truths, OK?
In a sense he has a point about Linux being an immature
operating system
Immature how? Granted Linux isn't an ideal operating system, it has it's rough edges. But IMO it's rough edges are fewer and smoother than almost any other OS available today. Overall it's actually quite mature, compared to many many other OSes. Windows is still playing catchup to Linux in some areas (although Linux is trying to catch up to Windows in others, like GUI desktops). Anyway one of the nice things about Linux is that for the most part everybody is aware of and open about the rough areas, and they're on the task list to be eventually addressed.
I think that if you look at the 2.5 kernel from a OS theory standpoint, you see the most mature OS available. The scheduling improvements alone are really quite amazing, and IMO will catapult Linux far ahead of the competition.
If my memory serves me correctly, CDMA is a form of spread-spectrum modulation. It's fairly resistant to evesdropping by your average crook, although there's no doubt that big brother can tune in if he wants. Hell he doesn't even necessarily need to receive your signal, he could have the phone company tap it at the cell site. I don't know much about other types of cell phones.
One thing you could do, if you can use your cell phone as a modem (I think most digital phones can do this at fairly high speed) then you can just iphone or something similar but tunnel the stream through an encryption layer. It would probably be better to apply encryption within the codec, and use some type of encryption that is highly tolerant of dropped packets, thus enabling you to use UDP streams.
I guess I don't know of anything like this off the top of my head.
Re:So race is nurture, not nature?
on
Genome Surprise
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· Score: 1
PC bullshit. Merriam Webster gives the following definition for "race":
1 : a breeding stock of animals 2 a : a family, tribe, people, or nation belonging to the same stock b : a class or kind of people unified by community of interests, habits, or characteristics <the English race> 3 a : an actually or potentially interbreeding group within a species; also : a taxonomic category (as a subspecies) representing such a group b : BREED c : a division of mankind possessing traits that are transmissible by descent and sufficient to characterize it as a distinct human type
So it seems that the correct usage of the word "race" does not imply "a separate species" whatsoever, in fact that would be counter to it's definition. I certainly wasn't trying to imply "separate species". Given the definition of "race" it would seem unlikely that there is truely more genetic variation within races than between them. Perhaps the author of the article was being overbroad with the word "race" and lumping, for example, all dark-skinned people together in one race, and all light-skinned people together in another race. The reality is that there are many many races. Hell before the industrial age most people lived their entire life in a small geographical area so almost every group of people in a small geographical area could be considered a race. But whatever. My point is that the statement that "there is no genetic basis for race" is preposterous given that one definition of "race" is "inherited traits".
This microwave rocket sounds totally pussy compared to the frikkin LASER powered rocket I saw on Discovery (or was it TLC? I never watch TLC anymore since it's all Trading Spaces now.)
Anyway the laser "rocket" is actually a very lightweight aluminum puck about a foot in diameter, with a some funky curves. They shoot high powered laser pulses up its ass and that superheats the air underneith it, the expansion of which propells the rocket upwards. The pulses fire at about 500Hz so the damn thing sounds like a pulsejet. But at last check it reached an altitude of 71 meters and a flight time of 12.7 seconds. Microwave rocket eat your heart out!:)
So race is nurture, not nature?
on
Genome Surprise
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· Score: 1
I don't get it, is this to say that if a black baby is raised by white parents, it will turn white? Huh? Did I miss something? If race isn't genetic, then what the hell is it? Is there something OTHER than genes that makes people white or black etc? If so then we know A LOT LESS about human biology than we think we do.
On the flight down I had a backpack full of 3 ham radio handi-talkies, many spare battery packs, two drop-in chargers, my Dell Axim, a bunch of food, two full water bottles, a GPS, and an LED flashlight. I took everything out of my pockets and put it all in my pack. I didn't set off the metal detector, but they did take all of the stuff out of my pack. The guy had to ask his manager if I could fly with my ham radios. The manager said yes, if they passed the explosive screening. That wasn't a big deal, it only took a couple of minutes. I was a little suprised that they only screened the radios themselves, and not the spare batteries or chargers, which would be a lot easier to hide bombs in. Anyway the radios passed (of course), and I packed everything back into my bag and boarded my flight. My friend got the 3rd degree and got searched and questioned for a half hour because he didn't know to take his laptop out of it's bag. Bizzare.
In DC, security was pretty tight everwhere, but some places where noticably tighter than others. Some things are just closed, like the Capital, and the federal mint. The tightest security was at the Suprime Court, where they didn't allow you to carry any electronic devices or bags of any kind into the court, and they made you walk through two metal detectors. Thankfully they offered a free coatcheck and also $.25 lockers.
Most places (IE all the museams, and the washington monument) just made you walk through a metal detector and then hand searched and or xrayed your bag. At the Smithsonian museam of natural history, the security woman opened my full backpack, and saw my granola bars right on top, and asked for one. I gave her one and she didn't bother searching the rest of my bag. Okay...
On the flight back they didn't even take anything out of my pack (which was still full of ham radios and other electronics), and my friend remembered to take out his laptop and also cruised right through. Then our flight got cancelled. The put us on a different flight that was supposed to have left 5 minutes earlier but they held it for us. We (all nine of us) ran to the gate where and NTS guy told us to all line up for a random re-screaning with a want and he also wanted to rifle through our bags. Then the stewardess told us to get on the plane. The NTS guy waved at me to get in line but the stewardess pushed me towards the gate and said "just get on the plane" so I did. They didn't make me get back off, and after the rest of my group was re-screned we flew home.
Honestly I think most of the security precautions I encountered were overkill, and would also be completely ineffective against all but the most bumbling of bad guys.
They've even shown video of dead Iraqis on Foxnews. Based on your comment I must assume that you haven't actually been watching the war coverage, because if anything I think it's shown the public how gritty and awful war really is. I've been watching the news a lot lately and I have seen video (from embedded reporters) of dead and wounded Iraqis, bloody dirty marines, that burning american ammo truck and the brave marine who jumped into the one next to it to try and save it. The firefights. What the hell have you been watching, Barney the Dinosaur?
Quick! Quick! Somebody compile an XScale optimized version of CE! It's about god damn time one was available. Even just an XScale optimized GAPI library would probably result in a 2x frame rate improvement in PocketMVP. Somebody get on this, stat! I can't wait for/don't want to use CE.NET.
Countryman http://www.geocities.com/RainForest/Vines/6074/mov cm.htm Countryman is about a rastafarian super-hero, of sorts, named Countryman. From holywood.com, "A peaceful Rastafarian fisherman becomes an unwitting player in an international political scheme when an airplane crashes into a nearby swamp. Later, when violence breaks loose, he displays an almost magical ability in hand-to-hand combat." With a soundtrack featuring Bob Marley and many other big names in reggae, Countryman is THE all time classic reggae movie. Unfortunately it's difficult to find.
Homegrown This review from http://www.lycaeum.org/books/reviews/review.22710. 1422863305.shtml pretty much sums it up "Homegrown is set in the lush "green triangle" of northern California, where the scenery is breathtakingly gorgeous, the dope is potent and profitable, and everyone - everyone - is in on the business. The film revolves around three growers: Jack, the overseer (Billy Bob Thornton, the guy behind Sling Blade), Carter, the botanical whiz (Hank Azaria, best known (to me, at least) from the Simpsons), and Harlan, the aspiring kid in it for the free samples as much as the money (Ryan Phillippe). They are camping out, attending their crop, when their boss Malcolm (John Lithgow in a wonderful cameo) shows up in a helicopter for a surprise inspection only to be shot by the pilot. The trio are left with a body, a lot of pot, and a possible murder rap. The plot evolves wonderfully as they sort out Malcolm's business and family connections and try to cash in on 1500 pounds of killer weed. Along the way, they meet a variety of wonderful characters: Lucy (Kelly Lynch), revolving girlfriend and manicurist (and I'm not talking about nail polish, either), Danny (Jon Bon Jovi), the super-smooth buyer, Sierra (Jamie Lee Curtis), the matriarch of the farming community, and Judge Reinhold as a decent, upstanding crooked cop who is smart enough to recognize pot as the fountainhead of prosperity in his community." These guys aren't the biggest names in movies, but they are all big names. With a lineup like this, I'm suprised this movie wasn't more popular. I guess it was stigmatized by being about growing weed.
BTW it seems like a lot of people haven't noticed that this isn't just SOFTWARE they're talking about, it's HARDWARE too. From the article (which I guess nobody read)
As you know, applications and
devices that meet or exceed Microsoft's technical requirements will be awarded the Designed for Windows XP logo... Please be aware that Office Depot is immediately requiring all products that connect to a Personal Computer and Notebook Computer must pass these Designed for Windows XP logo requirements to be considered for retail distribution through our stores.
I don't have an Office Depot near me, so I don't know what they're selling right now. I do know that if you walk into Staples, Circuit City, or Best Buy, they have a TON of crap that "connects" to computers. They will NEVER follow Office Depot's example, they would lose a SHITLOAD of business. Do you really think that they'll pull every keyboard, joystick, printer, stick of RAM, etc that isn't XP certified? What about multimedia speaker systems? Are Alienware cases supposed to get XP certification?
Another good example is Radio Shack. Shit, are they supposed to get every FAN and HEATSINK and power supply Y-cable M$ certified for XP? Right... Office Depot is going to be the loser here. Nobody else is going to go along with this steaming pile of crap.
Slashdot Mirror
Or can it?
I'm sure no matter what MS puts in this "new" hardware, the hackers will find a way to make Linux run on it no problem. They'll probably do some crap with signing the software, like on the XBox. The big questions are, will hacking it void your warrantee, will hacking it violate the DMCA, etc. Obviously no legitimate business is going to violate the law in order to get Linux to run on an MS computing appliance.
Anyway I doubt if it's really going to be THAT different from current PC hardware. In fact the core architecture probably won't be ANY different. What we're seeing here is probably a group of bundled proprietary officially supported USB devices or something with extra special attention paid to the drivers courtesy of MS. Basicly it's just an appliance computer, which like the iOpeners aren't really any different hardware-wise from real computers.
So in that case there's not much stopping any other industry group from getting together and setting other open standards for this type of operation. Sorry MS, but using caller ID to pull up a person's picture when they call is NOT revolutionary. The important thing here is that it's an integrated appliance system. It's not a tough system to implement, and I'm sure we could see decent OSS solutions pretty quickly.
I just wonder how proprietary the hardware and software components of this system are really going to be... I guess that remains to be seen.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstech nology/134689749_winhec06.html
I may yet eat my words.
As far as I can see there are only two reasons to buy a Mac:
- You really like OS-X
- You really don't like wintel hardware (I put myself in this catagory, although I'm too poor to actually buy a Mac)
Mac price/performance is still sub par.I wish there was some other cheap, high performance, non wintel hardware out there. Look at the automobile market, there are about a zillion different kinds of cars with a zillion different kinds of engines and a zillion different kinds of transmissions, etc. But in the computer world you really only get a choice between two platforms, Apple and wintel. Sure you could argue that you can buy whatever CPU you want, like an AMD or an Intel, but I don't see the difference between them to be as drastic as the difference between a Wankle and an I-4. This one-size-fits-all hardware platform mentality sucks.
Dude, bone up on your electronics. 100 volts is nothing. Your Indiglo (tm) backlight uses THOUSANDS of volts. The only thing that limites the amount of voltage a device can use is it's insulation, and we have some pretty damn cheap and good insulating materials kicking around. The real limitation is current, since conductors can only carry a limited amount of it, and high currents lead to losses through resistance. The higher the voltage the lower the current, the less loss due to resistance, as per Ohm's law. So high voltage is a GOOD thing.
No journaling file system guarantees that any unsaved data will be preserved in the event of a system crash. Data that's in RAM in the disk write cache is lost in the event of a crash. That has nothing to do with the file system.
Journaling file systems are transaction based. If a transaction fails partway through (IE the system crashes) the state of the disk is the same as if the transaction had never started, and is thus always consistent.
You would have to be doing something extra weird to risk corrupting an entire ext2 volume in the event of a crash. Also the article doesn't mention that ext3 IS ext2 with a journal added, it's not a totally different file system. In fact an ext3 file system that is cleanly unmounted can be mounted as an ext2 file system, FYI.
Sometimes using free software vs. superior commercial software is a matter of principle. I value my principles very highly.
Binary delta storage?? So what? Yeah rename would be nice. Changesets. But I would hardly call those "vital features". Hell RCS is sufficient for most small projects with only one developer. Bitkeeper really shines in the area of massivly multi-developer projects. CVS is fine for any small to medium sized projects. It's also free (as in beer). I've never heard of ClearCase.
I "graduated" high school in 97. In previous years the HS had a very active computer club. Unfortunately, all of the intelligent, active, motivated members were seniors, and all graduated and left my freshman year. The club was never the same. There were only three of us freshman with any interest in the club, and one of them was one of those old-school arrogant pompus ass holier than thou unix slackware zealot who hated to help anybody with anything so he always came off as being smarter than everybody simply because he didn't share his knowledge. I hate people like that. Anyway the club floundered and our 8-line BBS which had 1000 users a few years earlier dropped to about 50 active users thanks to the Internet. We wiped it and made a linux box but we weren't able to offer shell accounts to the general student body due to fears that we would use it to download porn, bomb recipies, etc (not that anybody really needed a shell account on that machine to do so. I sure didn't.) So that never went very far.
A very similar story has unfolded here at my college. All the cool people left a year before I got here, some idiots took over the club and drove everybody else away, and now it sucks. All we do is run one linux box, which is admitedly a bitchin linux box (dual 1.4ghz P4s, 1gig ram). We finally got rid of the assholes but so far the club hasn't garnered much new interest.
Anyway the point has been made here but I'll reiterate that computers are now ubiquitous. You can't really just have a general "computer club" anymore. You should really try to focus on something more specific, like computer games, computer programming, computer hardware, whatever the members are interested in. Nobody is going to want to sit around and swap floppy disks with the latest freeware like they used to.
So a couple of things to do:
1. Keep it FUN! It's a CLUB, it's supposed to be recreational.
2. DON'T LET IDIOTS ADMIN YOUR BOXEN. Choose admins based on their level of capability, not their seniority. This isn't Japan. If you maintain servers that aren't strictly for experimentation, make reliability the absolute priority. There's nothing that will piss people off more than waking up to find that the admin has formatted the server in the night for no particular reason and all of the projects they've been working on are lost (it happened here).
3. KEEP IT FUN! Find activities that everyone can enjoy, and keep it simple and FUN.
4. The only reason to form a high school computer club vs joining an online chatroom or something is to socialize in real life with your neighbors. Don't let people forget that it's a social activity.
5. Keep it fun.
Use GPS to map the locations of any openings where you can get a signal, IE gutter drains, manholes, etc. Inside the drains, use traditional surveying techniques. I am not a civil engineering major so I can't help you much there. You might also build some kind of radio location system based on the troglophone. That would be a very interesting project, although one that I would have absolutely no interest in :)
In other news, Americans are now referring to "Belgian waffles" as "freedom waffles".
Also lets not forget that "microwaves" are commonly defined as all wavelengths from 3GHz to 300GHz! That's a pretty freakin huge band. 300GHz waves behave COMPLETELY different from 3GHz waves (see the recent terahertz imaging posts here on
So lets not go around propagating half truths, OK?
I thought the missing matter was in all the packing materials for all the equipment the scientists kept buying to try and find the missing matter.
Or in this case pig and mammoth DNA :)
I think that if you look at the 2.5 kernel from a OS theory standpoint, you see the most mature OS available. The scheduling improvements alone are really quite amazing, and IMO will catapult Linux far ahead of the competition.
If my memory serves me correctly, CDMA is a form of spread-spectrum modulation. It's fairly resistant to evesdropping by your average crook, although there's no doubt that big brother can tune in if he wants. Hell he doesn't even necessarily need to receive your signal, he could have the phone company tap it at the cell site. I don't know much about other types of cell phones.
One thing you could do, if you can use your cell phone as a modem (I think most digital phones can do this at fairly high speed) then you can just iphone or something similar but tunnel the stream through an encryption layer. It would probably be better to apply encryption within the codec, and use some type of encryption that is highly tolerant of dropped packets, thus enabling you to use UDP streams.
I guess I don't know of anything like this off the top of my head.
This microwave rocket sounds totally pussy compared to the frikkin LASER powered rocket I saw on Discovery (or was it TLC? I never watch TLC anymore since it's all Trading Spaces now.)
:)
Anyway the laser "rocket" is actually a very lightweight aluminum puck about a foot in diameter, with a some funky curves. They shoot high powered laser pulses up its ass and that superheats the air underneith it, the expansion of which propells the rocket upwards. The pulses fire at about 500Hz so the damn thing sounds like a pulsejet. But at last check it reached an altitude of 71 meters and a flight time of 12.7 seconds. Microwave rocket eat your heart out!
I don't get it, is this to say that if a black baby is raised by white parents, it will turn white? Huh? Did I miss something? If race isn't genetic, then what the hell is it? Is there something OTHER than genes that makes people white or black etc? If so then we know A LOT LESS about human biology than we think we do.
On the flight down I had a backpack full of 3 ham radio handi-talkies, many spare battery packs, two drop-in chargers, my Dell Axim, a bunch of food, two full water bottles, a GPS, and an LED flashlight. I took everything out of my pockets and put it all in my pack. I didn't set off the metal detector, but they did take all of the stuff out of my pack. The guy had to ask his manager if I could fly with my ham radios. The manager said yes, if they passed the explosive screening. That wasn't a big deal, it only took a couple of minutes. I was a little suprised that they only screened the radios themselves, and not the spare batteries or chargers, which would be a lot easier to hide bombs in. Anyway the radios passed (of course), and I packed everything back into my bag and boarded my flight. My friend got the 3rd degree and got searched and questioned for a half hour because he didn't know to take his laptop out of it's bag. Bizzare.
In DC, security was pretty tight everwhere, but some places where noticably tighter than others. Some things are just closed, like the Capital, and the federal mint. The tightest security was at the Suprime Court, where they didn't allow you to carry any electronic devices or bags of any kind into the court, and they made you walk through two metal detectors. Thankfully they offered a free coatcheck and also $.25 lockers.
Most places (IE all the museams, and the washington monument) just made you walk through a metal detector and then hand searched and or xrayed your bag. At the Smithsonian museam of natural history, the security woman opened my full backpack, and saw my granola bars right on top, and asked for one. I gave her one and she didn't bother searching the rest of my bag. Okay...
On the flight back they didn't even take anything out of my pack (which was still full of ham radios and other electronics), and my friend remembered to take out his laptop and also cruised right through. Then our flight got cancelled. The put us on a different flight that was supposed to have left 5 minutes earlier but they held it for us. We (all nine of us) ran to the gate where and NTS guy told us to all line up for a random re-screaning with a want and he also wanted to rifle through our bags. Then the stewardess told us to get on the plane. The NTS guy waved at me to get in line but the stewardess pushed me towards the gate and said "just get on the plane" so I did. They didn't make me get back off, and after the rest of my group was re-screned we flew home.
Honestly I think most of the security precautions I encountered were overkill, and would also be completely ineffective against all but the most bumbling of bad guys.
They've even shown video of dead Iraqis on Foxnews. Based on your comment I must assume that you haven't actually been watching the war coverage, because if anything I think it's shown the public how gritty and awful war really is. I've been watching the news a lot lately and I have seen video (from embedded reporters) of dead and wounded Iraqis, bloody dirty marines, that burning american ammo truck and the brave marine who jumped into the one next to it to try and save it. The firefights. What the hell have you been watching, Barney the Dinosaur?
Quick! Quick! Somebody compile an XScale optimized version of CE! It's about god damn time one was available. Even just an XScale optimized GAPI library would probably result in a 2x frame rate improvement in PocketMVP. Somebody get on this, stat! I can't wait for/don't want to use CE .NET.
.NET. Right.
Hooray for misuse of punctuation.
Countrymanv cm.htm
. 1422863305.shtml pretty much sums it up
http://www.geocities.com/RainForest/Vines/6074/mo
Countryman is about a rastafarian super-hero, of sorts, named Countryman. From holywood.com, "A peaceful Rastafarian fisherman becomes an unwitting player in an international political scheme when an airplane crashes into a nearby swamp. Later, when violence breaks loose, he displays an almost magical ability in hand-to-hand combat." With a soundtrack featuring Bob Marley and many other big names in reggae, Countryman is THE all time classic reggae movie. Unfortunately it's difficult to find.
Homegrown
This review from http://www.lycaeum.org/books/reviews/review.22710
"Homegrown is set in the lush "green triangle" of northern California, where the scenery is breathtakingly gorgeous, the dope is potent and profitable, and everyone - everyone - is in on the business. The film revolves around three growers: Jack, the overseer (Billy Bob Thornton, the guy behind Sling Blade), Carter, the botanical whiz (Hank Azaria, best known (to me, at least) from the Simpsons), and Harlan, the aspiring kid in it for the free samples as much as the money (Ryan Phillippe). They are camping out, attending their crop, when their boss Malcolm (John Lithgow in a wonderful cameo) shows up in a helicopter for a surprise inspection only to be shot by the pilot. The trio are left with a body, a lot of pot, and a possible murder rap. The plot evolves wonderfully as they sort out Malcolm's business and family connections and try to cash in on 1500 pounds of killer weed. Along the way, they meet a variety of wonderful characters: Lucy (Kelly Lynch), revolving girlfriend and manicurist (and I'm not talking about nail polish, either), Danny (Jon Bon Jovi), the super-smooth buyer, Sierra (Jamie Lee Curtis), the matriarch of the farming community, and Judge Reinhold as a decent, upstanding crooked cop who is smart enough to recognize pot as the fountainhead of prosperity in his community."
These guys aren't the biggest names in movies, but they are all big names. With a lineup like this, I'm suprised this movie wasn't more popular. I guess it was stigmatized by being about growing weed.
If you want to open a video game rental store, then Acts of Gord is required reading.
"Who is this Gord? Well, let me tell you about Gord."
I don't have an Office Depot near me, so I don't know what they're selling right now. I do know that if you walk into Staples, Circuit City, or Best Buy, they have a TON of crap that "connects" to computers. They will NEVER follow Office Depot's example, they would lose a SHITLOAD of business. Do you really think that they'll pull every keyboard, joystick, printer, stick of RAM, etc that isn't XP certified? What about multimedia speaker systems? Are Alienware cases supposed to get XP certification?
Another good example is Radio Shack. Shit, are they supposed to get every FAN and HEATSINK and power supply Y-cable M$ certified for XP? Right... Office Depot is going to be the loser here. Nobody else is going to go along with this steaming pile of crap.