The Supreme Court has no enforcement arm whatsoever, and relies completely on voluntary compliance with its orders.
The Court can fine the bejesus out of you if you don't comply. I vaguely remember that the Judge who decreed that Nixon had to hand over the Watergate tapes was asked what he would do if Nixon refused. The judge replied that he would fine him enough to essentially bankrupt him.
Not sure why the courts didn't do that in the Jackson case. Maybe because the case involved the State of Georgia stealing land from the Cherokee and nobody, including the courts, really cared.
What irony, so-called scientists are supposedly smart enough to falsify the "theory of evolution"; yet they don't and they are to stupid to falsify things like irreducible design or irreducible complexity?
Biologists devise experiments to test Evolution all the time. Those experiments have helped refine the theory but have so far failed to provide any evidence that the theory is wrong.
This is how falsifiability works. A theory predicts that under conditions X, we should observe Y if we perturb the system by doing Z. If we do not observe Y after doing Z, then we had better provide an explanation. One explanation is that the theory is wrong. Hasn't happened yet with Evolution.
ID, OTOH, is not a scientific theory because it offers no repeatable experiments that can be used to test hypotheses about the consequences of its description of the world. ID is outside the domain of science but rather belongs in the domain of religious faith.
Wow, that is just mind boggling at how they can be "selectively intelligent" when it suits their purpose, sounds more like politics than science!!!
No, sounds more like you don't really understand how science works. Look, I don't go so far as Dawkins does in that that I regard ID as impossible. There are many folks who see no condradiction at all in believing in a Supreme Being and Evolution at the same time. I just don't believe that a system that requires a Supreme Being in order to explain the world is science and therefore should not be taught in science classes in public schools.
Evolution is also falsifiable if you cannot show how a biological structure could develop through small, incremental, accidental changes to the genome. This is the heart of the ID argument. It proposes that evolution fails to show exactly that--complex, interdependant structures that show design, rather than accidental happenstance. It's not enough to invent a story that sorta-kinda explains it, you have to show biological evidence.
Er, uh, no. A theory essentially becomes a Theory under the preponderance of evidence rules of civil proceedure. Those who would refute the Theory must provide evidence that contradicts the Theory. Waving your arms and claiming that life is too complex for Evolution to explain is not providing evidence that refutes Evolution since Evolution can, in fact, explain that complexity.
Evolution pretends to be self-evident...
No, neither the theory nor the scientists who study it have any such delusions. The details of Evolutionary Theory are hard to grasp and take much study. But like fools who think that parroting the words "Supply and Demand" makes one an Economist, people with no training in Evolution believe that they know enough to debunk it.
In order to prove evolution you'll have to prove to me a stack of pre-conceived notions in as many disciplines.
It is not up to me to prove Evolution to you. It is up to you to describe and conduct an experiment whose results are inconsistent with the Theory. No one has done that to date.
Evolution is easily falsifiable. Just find a dead human inside a tyrannosaurus and the Theory of Evolution will have been falsified since the theory says this can't happen. As to hypothesis testing, Evolution provides many specific hypotheses that can be tested. Most of the biology journals are full of such tests. Indeed, much of modern biology simply would not exist without the Theory of Evolution.
The "Theory" of Intelligent Design, on the other hand, is not falsifiable, is not a Theory as most philosophers of science define a Theory, and is not science.
Evolution is based entirely on observation and theory building and has no hypothesis testing beyond showing simple species-specific traits can be passed along.
Sounds like your high school was one of those where teaching Evolution was avoided, something all too common these days since many teachers are terrified of controversy. But instead of remaining ignorant, try reading a book by Richard Dawkins or Steven Jay Gould.
For a company that flys over 1300 flights a day, it means they averaged a change every flight every day. That's insanely high.
Depends on what's meant by a "change." Sure, 1300 planes (100% of flights) rerouted per day for a month is insane, but if one flight attendent being replaced by another is a "change," then 1300 per day during/after a major snowstorm across half the US might not be all that insane. Just having to cancel/delay/reroute ~20% of your daily flights for a month might be enough to hit the limit.
2. How much money can be made by knowing what the actual risk is. If you don't know the risk, you estimate high, and put lots of dollars in a reserve account. If you do know the risk accurately, you usually can greatly lower reserves to accurately meet even very bad case estimated losses, and use the rest of the money to fund interest-generating ventures.
This approach usually defines risk independently (typically as variance around a mean) for each individual item. The items are then observed (or just assumed) to have low enough correlations so that if one item fails, enough others are OK so that the reserves need only cover the probability of a small number of failures.
Hedge fund LTCM
took this strategy to the limit by borrowing heavily -- in effect reducing reserves to a large negative number. LTCM essentially made money by noting when the cost differences of various instruments were out of line with their historic risk patterns. But even Nobel Prize Winners can't estimate all potentially significant risks correctly. Once in a great while, everything crashes together and reserves aren't enough, let alone negative reserves. When the Russian debt crisis happened in the fall of 1998, all of the instruments LTCM dealt in suddenly moved in lockstep as investors around the world fled to safer things like TBills. When LTCM died, they almost took the capital markets down with them because large international banks had loaned LTCM their play money based on those risk models.
The "Designed for Windows XP" logo requires the software to run under a low privileged user
account (except for tools that need high privilege - administrative tools, backup software and the like). You need to bitch at Intuit and demand they meet this basic standard.
This, too, is the fault of Microsoft. If you design the O/S such that it's difficult or impossible to run apps as a normal user, this is the result.
I refuse to believe that it is difficult or impossible to write an app for MS OSs that does not require the app to be run as admin. This is more often than not the fault of application programmers who are too damn lazy to write user specific data to the user's home directory instead of to either the system or the app's installation directory thus requiring the user to be admin or have write perms on the system directories.
A lot of what MS has written is buggy and full of security holes, but too many applications have carried over bad practices from the days when Win 3.1 was a single user system.
The first time a unit is actually ordered and purposefully told to attack a rioting/rebellious crowd. Nothing kills morale more than taking out the people you are sworn to protect - not by accident, or lack of training, but by explicit command. All the laws and procedures setup now would be chucked out the window in a full style reveloutionary counter-action. Picking sides will halve, or quarter, the ranks.
VoIP is subject to regulation. Others have already mentioned E911. But there is also the issue of FBI wiretap access to VoIP phone calls. The VoIP Cos are gonna pass the costs of these "services" on to consumers just like Ma Bell and its kiddies have done since day one.
My brother (a USian) was hassled 4 or 5 years ago by Canadian Immigration after a flight from California for having only a Calif drivers license and not having a passport. He told them that if they wouldn't let him in, he wouldn't be able to buy the $2 million worth of high tech test equipment from the Canadian firm that he was on his way to visit. They backed down fast.
These new requirements won't last. Canada and the US are each others biggest trading partners and there is too much at stake to let passports get in the way. There are over 100 million border crossings each year between the US and Canada. 15 million vehicles cross every year between Windsor and Detroit. Every time the President has asked Congress to allocate funds or require more security between the US and Canada, Congress has ignored him due to the large number of Congressmen whose districts would be hurt by such efforts (think WI, MN, MI, OH, PA, NY on trade or drive I-75 and check out all the cars from Ontario headed to FL - thats a lot of votes from both parties).
That's funny because cable companies think otherwise. Did you know that cable companies actually have to put a physical device on the line to stop the analog cable TV signal from coming through when you have naked Broadband?
Which explains why TW/RR in Columbus charges $X for broadband if you are already paying for cable TV and $X + $Y for broadband alone where $Y is the cost for basic cable TV. It is probably cheaper for TW to just charge you for the basic cable TV anyway rather than futz with installing an additional filter.
Java has already fragmented into several mostly compatible forks. IBM has their own JVM, as does Apple, Oracle, Borland, and there are a wide range of Free Software Java-alike systems.
If those "forks" aren't 100% compatible, they are not Java(tm). IBM, Apple, Oracle, and Borland pay good money to Sun to make sure that their Java(tm) Virtual Machines pass the required tests in order to call themselves Java(tm). There is no way that Sun has lost control of Java(tm) in spite of what some wishful/.ers want to believe.
Heck, right now Mono is doing a better job of enticing Free Software advocates than Sun is.
And since when do open democracies take to the streets by the millions to topple presidents? That's mob rule, not democracy! And it only seems to happen in places like the Ukraine, Kyrzygstan, and Lebanon, where the people are tired of their corrupt politicians and petty dictators.
Like, maybe, Lyndon Baines Johnson who, faced with massive anti-Vietnam war protests that convinced Eugene McCarthy that LBJ could be beat, chose not to run again. Yes, youngster, US Presidents have been toppled by street demonstrations.
Also, we are somewhat cautious about what happened with Unix - it splintered into eight applications -- until McNealy (Scott McNealy, chief executive of Sun) finally announced he won the battle and had the one surviving Unix out there. We think Linux has the possibility of going the same route," said Rasmussen.
There are still a lot of folks buying AIX and HP/UX. Using Rasmussen's logic, all that has to happen is for Red Hat to announce that they have the "One True Surviving Linux (tm)" and the problem of forking is forever solved.
I agree with the parent. The problem of multiple Unix versions has been overblown by folks who clearly haven't done a lot of real application development on Unix.
In companies, mail may need to be kept for legal reasons. Mozilla just proved it is unusable for the corporate world.
Corps w/ email retention poilicies will save email in a central location by grabbing it as it moves through the SMTP server. No one in their right mind relies on end users and email client software in order to meet retention policies.
A couple of point to add: The ruler of Kashmir at the time, Maharaja Hari Singh, was a Hindu. But the majority of Kashmir is Muslim (w/ significant Hindu, Sihk, and Tibetan Buddhist minorities) and they have never been very happy with his choice (or did Lord Mountbatten force him? India may have sent troops into Srinigar before Hari Singh officially asked for them.) to join India. There have been a number of UN Resolutions on the conflict that have called for Pakistan's withdrawl and for India to hold a plebiscite. The UN Resolutions have been ignored by both sides.
The original Kashmiri militants wanted Kashmir to be independent from both India and Pakistan. Many of the Muslim truck drivers who gave me rides when I was illegally hitchhiking in Indian J&K in the mid 1980s were contemptuous of both countries. More recently, with the rise of Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and with Pakistan's overt support, Islamic militants who seem to want Kashmir to join Pakistan have taken the lead in the insurgency. But it is unclear if their desire to join with Pakistan is simply a result of the fact that Pakistan was training many of them and then helping to infiltrate them across the Line-Of-Control. There are still groups who want independence and it is unclear if the Paki trained militants really represent the desires of most Kashmiris, or even those of most of the insurgents. The BBC has a good overview of the conflict.
The magnetic stripe standards, of course. The card is a test card I printed while I was building an ID card system for a client. The front lists the track standard and the allowed chars:
Track 1 (IATA data max. 76 chars):
!"#$%&'()*+,-./0123456789:;<=>@ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRS TUVWXYZ[\]^ _
Will Macromedia Flash Player 6 work with all screen readers and other assistive technologies?
Microsoft Active Accessibility (MSAA) makes it easier for all assistive technologies to incorporate support for Macromedia Flash Player. Once the contents of a Macromedia Flash movie are placed under MSAA, it is up to the individual assistive technology to render that content for the user. Since MSAA support is a new feature of Macromedia Flash Player, many assistive technologies still do not know how to handle the information made available under MSAA. At the release of Macromedia Flash MX, Window-Eyes from GW Micro is the first product to take advantage of the improvements in Macromedia Flash Player.
Well, since it only works on MS platforms, most assistive technologies don't work with MSAA, and there are better ways of accomplishing the desired result, I can only say
That's what people said about coaxial cable, too...
Adding a new set of wires to the poles behind my house is a trivial expense compared to the cost of digging up my street and laying new water pipes. The pole behind my house has two cables for two companies and there are only limited barriers to adding new cables. Water distribution is a classic example of a natural monopoly. The monopoly exists because of the cost structure of providing the good, not because of government regulations. In fact, the opposite is true: government ownership and/or regulation are designed to prevent the natural monopolist from earning more than the normal profit they would otherwise earn if they had put their capital into a competetive industry instead of the monopoly.
but when government regulations restricted the ability to compete directly between cable companies for individual consumers, a few media companies went to the trouble and expense of launching satelites into geo-stationary orbit for a work-around.
Satellites were not a workaround to cable regulations. They are a technology that drastically reduced the cost of shipping television signals to consumers. One satellite can cover an area that would take (thousands?, millions?, a whole lot!) miles of cable to cover.
We have no way of knowing how much better (or worse) our water service would be if it were open to the free market. I'm making an educated guess that it would be quite a bit better.
That's not an educated guess. It only demonstrates that you never took microeconomics 101.
The sad thing is, the moment broadband becomes a government utility, competition ends, and with it any reason for anybody to push the technology farther.
The Ohio bill looks like it might be designed to prevent this problem. It seems to say that muni owned systems are OK, but the muni can't use its franchise power to prevent competition and seems to restrict the muni to no more than 50% market share.
Notice how your water service has not changed much in the last 50 years? Bottled water and tap filters are big business to overcome the chlorine-heavy (and in some cases awful-tasting) local utility water, but nobody is lining up to offer to pipe better water to your house, because they would be competing with a baseline service run by the local governments.
In this case, I think its because they wouldn't get enough customers to justify digging up the streets and installing their own water pipes. Also, if people pay sewer fees based on H2O usage, then the new service would have to make arrangements to share their customer usage data with the muni water and sewer division. There are just too many cost headaches to make distributing water to homes via pipes a competetive industry.
Slashdot Mirror
The Supreme Court has no enforcement arm whatsoever, and relies completely on voluntary compliance with its orders.
The Court can fine the bejesus out of you if you don't comply. I vaguely remember that the Judge who decreed that Nixon had to hand over the Watergate tapes was asked what he would do if Nixon refused. The judge replied that he would fine him enough to essentially bankrupt him.
Not sure why the courts didn't do that in the Jackson case. Maybe because the case involved the State of Georgia stealing land from the Cherokee and nobody, including the courts, really cared.
What irony, so-called scientists are supposedly smart enough to falsify the "theory of evolution"; yet they don't and they are to stupid to falsify things like irreducible design or irreducible complexity?
Biologists devise experiments to test Evolution all the time. Those experiments have helped refine the theory but have so far failed to provide any evidence that the theory is wrong.
This is how falsifiability works. A theory predicts that under conditions X, we should observe Y if we perturb the system by doing Z. If we do not observe Y after doing Z, then we had better provide an explanation. One explanation is that the theory is wrong. Hasn't happened yet with Evolution.
ID, OTOH, is not a scientific theory because it offers no repeatable experiments that can be used to test hypotheses about the consequences of its description of the world. ID is outside the domain of science but rather belongs in the domain of religious faith.
Wow, that is just mind boggling at how they can be "selectively intelligent" when it suits their purpose, sounds more like politics than science!!!
No, sounds more like you don't really understand how science works. Look, I don't go so far as Dawkins does in that that I regard ID as impossible. There are many folks who see no condradiction at all in believing in a Supreme Being and Evolution at the same time. I just don't believe that a system that requires a Supreme Being in order to explain the world is science and therefore should not be taught in science classes in public schools.
Evolution is also falsifiable if you cannot show how a biological structure could develop through small, incremental, accidental changes to the genome. This is the heart of the ID argument. It proposes that evolution fails to show exactly that--complex, interdependant structures that show design, rather than accidental happenstance. It's not enough to invent a story that sorta-kinda explains it, you have to show biological evidence.
Er, uh, no. A theory essentially becomes a Theory under the preponderance of evidence rules of civil proceedure. Those who would refute the Theory must provide evidence that contradicts the Theory. Waving your arms and claiming that life is too complex for Evolution to explain is not providing evidence that refutes Evolution since Evolution can, in fact, explain that complexity.
Evolution pretends to be self-evident...
No, neither the theory nor the scientists who study it have any such delusions. The details of Evolutionary Theory are hard to grasp and take much study. But like fools who think that parroting the words "Supply and Demand" makes one an Economist, people with no training in Evolution believe that they know enough to debunk it.
In order to prove evolution you'll have to prove to me a stack of pre-conceived notions in as many disciplines.
It is not up to me to prove Evolution to you. It is up to you to describe and conduct an experiment whose results are inconsistent with the Theory. No one has done that to date.
Evolution is easily falsifiable. Just find a dead human inside a tyrannosaurus and the Theory of Evolution will have been falsified since the theory says this can't happen. As to hypothesis testing, Evolution provides many specific hypotheses that can be tested. Most of the biology journals are full of such tests. Indeed, much of modern biology simply would not exist without the Theory of Evolution.
The "Theory" of Intelligent Design, on the other hand, is not falsifiable, is not a Theory as most philosophers of science define a Theory, and is not science.
Evolution is based entirely on observation and theory building and has no hypothesis testing beyond showing simple species-specific traits can be passed along.
Sounds like your high school was one of those where teaching Evolution was avoided, something all too common these days since many teachers are terrified of controversy. But instead of remaining ignorant, try reading a book by Richard Dawkins or Steven Jay Gould.
For a company that flys over 1300 flights a day, it means they averaged a change every flight every day. That's insanely high.
Depends on what's meant by a "change." Sure, 1300 planes (100% of flights) rerouted per day for a month is insane, but if one flight attendent being replaced by another is a "change," then 1300 per day during/after a major snowstorm across half the US might not be all that insane. Just having to cancel/delay/reroute ~20% of your daily flights for a month might be enough to hit the limit.
2. How much money can be made by knowing what the actual risk is. If you don't know the risk, you estimate high, and put lots of dollars in a reserve account. If you do know the risk accurately, you usually can greatly lower reserves to accurately meet even very bad case estimated losses, and use the rest of the money to fund interest-generating ventures.
This approach usually defines risk independently (typically as variance around a mean) for each individual item. The items are then observed (or just assumed) to have low enough correlations so that if one item fails, enough others are OK so that the reserves need only cover the probability of a small number of failures.
Hedge fund LTCM took this strategy to the limit by borrowing heavily -- in effect reducing reserves to a large negative number. LTCM essentially made money by noting when the cost differences of various instruments were out of line with their historic risk patterns. But even Nobel Prize Winners can't estimate all potentially significant risks correctly. Once in a great while, everything crashes together and reserves aren't enough, let alone negative reserves. When the Russian debt crisis happened in the fall of 1998, all of the instruments LTCM dealt in suddenly moved in lockstep as investors around the world fled to safer things like TBills. When LTCM died, they almost took the capital markets down with them because large international banks had loaned LTCM their play money based on those risk models.
The "Designed for Windows XP" logo requires the software to run under a low privileged user account (except for tools that need high privilege - administrative tools, backup software and the like). You need to bitch at Intuit and demand they meet this basic standard.
Meanwhile, try the MS Application Compatibility Toolkit which can fake out apps that require absurd priviledges. Or try Susan Bradley's fix.
This, too, is the fault of Microsoft. If you design the O/S such that it's difficult or impossible to run apps as a normal user, this is the result.
I refuse to believe that it is difficult or impossible to write an app for MS OSs that does not require the app to be run as admin. This is more often than not the fault of application programmers who are too damn lazy to write user specific data to the user's home directory instead of to either the system or the app's installation directory thus requiring the user to be admin or have write perms on the system directories.
A lot of what MS has written is buggy and full of security holes, but too many applications have carried over bad practices from the days when Win 3.1 was a single user system.
The first time a unit is actually ordered and purposefully told to attack a rioting/rebellious crowd. Nothing kills morale more than taking out the people you are sworn to protect - not by accident, or lack of training, but by explicit command. All the laws and procedures setup now would be chucked out the window in a full style reveloutionary counter-action. Picking sides will halve, or quarter, the ranks.
Unless they are asked to shoot rebelious college students.
VoIP is subject to regulation. Others have already mentioned E911. But there is also the issue of FBI wiretap access to VoIP phone calls. The VoIP Cos are gonna pass the costs of these "services" on to consumers just like Ma Bell and its kiddies have done since day one.
See Official Matrox Site for the Parahelia drivers. Seems the latest version (1.4.1) was made available 12 April 2005. Driver README.
Matrox has had free open source drivers for their cards for quite a while. Hasn't seemed to impact ATI and Nvidia yet. Still, one can hope.
My brother (a USian) was hassled 4 or 5 years ago by Canadian Immigration after a flight from California for having only a Calif drivers license and not having a passport. He told them that if they wouldn't let him in, he wouldn't be able to buy the $2 million worth of high tech test equipment from the Canadian firm that he was on his way to visit. They backed down fast.
These new requirements won't last. Canada and the US are each others biggest trading partners and there is too much at stake to let passports get in the way. There are over 100 million border crossings each year between the US and Canada. 15 million vehicles cross every year between Windsor and Detroit. Every time the President has asked Congress to allocate funds or require more security between the US and Canada, Congress has ignored him due to the large number of Congressmen whose districts would be hurt by such efforts (think WI, MN, MI, OH, PA, NY on trade or drive I-75 and check out all the cars from Ontario headed to FL - thats a lot of votes from both parties).
That's funny because cable companies think otherwise. Did you know that cable companies actually have to put a physical device on the line to stop the analog cable TV signal from coming through when you have naked Broadband?
Which explains why TW/RR in Columbus charges $X for broadband if you are already paying for cable TV and $X + $Y for broadband alone where $Y is the cost for basic cable TV. It is probably cheaper for TW to just charge you for the basic cable TV anyway rather than futz with installing an additional filter.
Java has already fragmented into several mostly compatible forks. IBM has their own JVM, as does Apple, Oracle, Borland, and there are a wide range of Free Software Java-alike systems.
/.ers want to believe.
.net (most of which have zero to do with Mono or MS's .net) and Java would still have a near 10-1 advantage.
If those "forks" aren't 100% compatible, they are not Java(tm). IBM, Apple, Oracle, and Borland pay good money to Sun to make sure that their Java(tm) Virtual Machines pass the required tests in order to call themselves Java(tm). There is no way that Sun has lost control of Java(tm) in spite of what some wishful
Heck, right now Mono is doing a better job of enticing Free Software advocates than Sun is.
Yeah, right. But we can measure the relative popularity. Here are 3435 Java projects but only 60 results for Mono and just 146 results for C#. Heck, we can even throw in the 395 results for
And since when do open democracies take to the streets by the millions to topple presidents? That's mob rule, not democracy! And it only seems to happen in places like the Ukraine, Kyrzygstan, and Lebanon, where the people are tired of their corrupt politicians and petty dictators.
Like, maybe, Lyndon Baines Johnson who, faced with massive anti-Vietnam war protests that convinced Eugene McCarthy that LBJ could be beat, chose not to run again. Yes, youngster, US Presidents have been toppled by street demonstrations.
And even if they can't find all of the DNA, they'd just have to stir in some frog DNA and let the T-Rex fix itself.
But the article gets even dumber:
Also, we are somewhat cautious about what happened with Unix - it splintered into eight applications -- until McNealy (Scott McNealy, chief executive of Sun) finally announced he won the battle and had the one surviving Unix out there. We think Linux has the possibility of going the same route," said Rasmussen.
There are still a lot of folks buying AIX and HP/UX. Using Rasmussen's logic, all that has to happen is for Red Hat to announce that they have the "One True Surviving Linux (tm)" and the problem of forking is forever solved.
I agree with the parent. The problem of multiple Unix versions has been overblown by folks who clearly haven't done a lot of real application development on Unix.
In companies, mail may need to be kept for legal reasons. Mozilla just proved it is unusable for the corporate world.
Corps w/ email retention poilicies will save email in a central location by grabbing it as it moves through the SMTP server. No one in their right mind relies on end users and email client software in order to meet retention policies.
A couple of point to add: The ruler of Kashmir at the time, Maharaja Hari Singh, was a Hindu. But the majority of Kashmir is Muslim (w/ significant Hindu, Sihk, and Tibetan Buddhist minorities) and they have never been very happy with his choice (or did Lord Mountbatten force him? India may have sent troops into Srinigar before Hari Singh officially asked for them.) to join India. There have been a number of UN Resolutions on the conflict that have called for Pakistan's withdrawl and for India to hold a plebiscite. The UN Resolutions have been ignored by both sides.
The original Kashmiri militants wanted Kashmir to be independent from both India and Pakistan. Many of the Muslim truck drivers who gave me rides when I was illegally hitchhiking in Indian J&K in the mid 1980s were contemptuous of both countries. More recently, with the rise of Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and with Pakistan's overt support, Islamic militants who seem to want Kashmir to join Pakistan have taken the lead in the insurgency. But it is unclear if their desire to join with Pakistan is simply a result of the fact that Pakistan was training many of them and then helping to infiltrate them across the Line-Of-Control. There are still groups who want independence and it is unclear if the Paki trained militants really represent the desires of most Kashmiris, or even those of most of the insurgents. The BBC has a good overview of the conflict.
The magnetic stripe standards, of course. The card is a test card I printed while I was building an ID card system for a client. The front lists the track standard and the allowed chars:
S TUVWXYZ[\]^ _
Track 1 (IATA data max. 76 chars):
!"#$%&'()*+,-./0123456789:;<=>@ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQR
Track2 (ABA data, max 37 chars): 0123456789;;<=>
Track 3(TTS data, max. 104 chars):
0123456789:;<=>
The allowed chars have been encoded onto the stripe on the back.
Will Macromedia Flash Player 6 work with all screen readers and other assistive technologies?
Microsoft Active Accessibility (MSAA) makes it easier for all assistive technologies to incorporate support for Macromedia Flash Player. Once the contents of a Macromedia Flash movie are placed under MSAA, it is up to the individual assistive technology to render that content for the user. Since MSAA support is a new feature of Macromedia Flash Player, many assistive technologies still do not know how to handle the information made available under MSAA. At the release of Macromedia Flash MX, Window-Eyes from GW Micro is the first product to take advantage of the improvements in Macromedia Flash Player.
Well, since it only works on MS platforms, most assistive technologies don't work with MSAA, and there are better ways of accomplishing the desired result, I can only say
Bzzzt. Thanks for playing.
P.S. The Macromedia Accessibility FAQ page does not pass all of the Priority 1,2 and 3 accessibility checkpoints of the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0.
That's what people said about coaxial cable, too...
Adding a new set of wires to the poles behind my house is a trivial expense compared to the cost of digging up my street and laying new water pipes. The pole behind my house has two cables for two companies and there are only limited barriers to adding new cables. Water distribution is a classic example of a natural monopoly. The monopoly exists because of the cost structure of providing the good, not because of government regulations. In fact, the opposite is true: government ownership and/or regulation are designed to prevent the natural monopolist from earning more than the normal profit they would otherwise earn if they had put their capital into a competetive industry instead of the monopoly.
but when government regulations restricted the ability to compete directly between cable companies for individual consumers, a few media companies went to the trouble and expense of launching satelites into geo-stationary orbit for a work-around.
Satellites were not a workaround to cable regulations. They are a technology that drastically reduced the cost of shipping television signals to consumers. One satellite can cover an area that would take (thousands?, millions?, a whole lot!) miles of cable to cover.
We have no way of knowing how much better (or worse) our water service would be if it were open to the free market. I'm making an educated guess that it would be quite a bit better.
That's not an educated guess. It only demonstrates that you never took microeconomics 101.
The sad thing is, the moment broadband becomes a government utility, competition ends, and with it any reason for anybody to push the technology farther.
The Ohio bill looks like it might be designed to prevent this problem. It seems to say that muni owned systems are OK, but the muni can't use its franchise power to prevent competition and seems to restrict the muni to no more than 50% market share.
Notice how your water service has not changed much in the last 50 years? Bottled water and tap filters are big business to overcome the chlorine-heavy (and in some cases awful-tasting) local utility water, but nobody is lining up to offer to pipe better water to your house, because they would be competing with a baseline service run by the local governments.
In this case, I think its because they wouldn't get enough customers to justify digging up the streets and installing their own water pipes. Also, if people pay sewer fees based on H2O usage, then the new service would have to make arrangements to share their customer usage data with the muni water and sewer division. There are just too many cost headaches to make distributing water to homes via pipes a competetive industry.