Are we sure that Jango is dead? All I saw was a suit of body armor or something get its helmet sliced off, almost as though it were a 'droid. Seems the bottom of the helmet and the top of the torso were carefully kept aimed away from the view of the audience. (We at least got a glimpse of the "inner" Darth Maul.) And shouldn't the kid have freaked out even a little bit, maybe even trying to put the head back on the torso for just a moment before collapsing with grief, or going postal and grabbing the nearest thing he could use for a weapon to get revenge, instead of just standing there stoically regarding the helmet like Hamlet talking to Yoric's skull?
Re:Information from someone who wrote the book:
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They may have electrolyte but they don't have electrolytic. One's a noun, the other is an adjective.
Once you learn to regard any and every piece of software from MS as beta you aren't in for fewer nasty surprises, but it's more along the lines of not knowing when they will happen, rather than not knowing whether they will.
Read "Man of High Fidelity" about Edwin Armstrong, inventor of broadband FM (the audio system used for television and the FM broadcast band). Sarnoff and RCA did pretty much the same thing to him.
What's strange here is Sarnoff's thing for "...the best engineers out of the best universities..." considering his own start as a penniless immigrant working as a radio-telegraph operator who just happened to be in the right place at the right time--he was on duty when the Titanic hit the iceburg and stayed on duty around the clock for a day or three relaying messages to, from, and about the sinking and the rescue efforts. Horatio Alger could have written his story. Seems he'd have a greater regard for "rugged individualists", but apparently not.
"Destroying the earth's oil wouldn't destroy our industrial potential..."
Do you have any idea how many things are made from petroleum? Insulation for wires, the clear part of CDs and DVDs, the lens for the lasers that read them, anything plastic in general, various medicines, and the list goes on and on. Perhaps some of that stuff can be made from coal instead, but how do we know that any complex hydrocarbons would be safe from these "bugs"?
Considering that the insulation on many, if not most, electrical wires is made out of something made out of petroleum, anything that put the petroleum business out of business would put technology out of business.
Petroleum is used to make so many things other than fuel that it's almost a sin to burn it, at least until we can grow more the way we can with trees. Not that I'm expecting that any time soon.
Spammers are already wasting our time and our money. Why can't we sue them now?
Oh, that's right. Things are set up to make it even more of a hassle to actually track them down and figure out exactly who has legal jurisdiction. Glad the post office doesn't work that way or the mailman would be at the door with "postage-due" junk mail every day.
And don't you love the way that anyone who actually gets a decent amount of use out of their connection is demonized by the cable companies as an "Internet Hog". They just want us to pay for the sizzle and to not expect there to be any actual meat on the plate.
"Nonetheless, even if you or I can build a A-D convertor, can the average person on the street?"
The average person on the street isn't equipped to turn out devices that let you get cable or satellite for free, so that's why you never hear of anyone having such a device.
You probably already know that you can make an ADC from a resistor string and some op-amp comparators. It might not be the very best one in the world but it would be an ADC. Is the government going to force a recall of all semiconductors? Will you have to pass a lie detector test and an FBI background check before you can buy a government-approved soldering iron that has to be connected to your phone line as well so that it can "phone home" to report what circuits you used it on? Will lead-tin and other conductive alloys with relatively low melting points become controlled substances? Will the Solder Police break down your door late some night on an anonymous tip? Will they trip over the Semiconductor Police when they do?
If you separate the provider of the wire from the provider of the signal on the wire (and prohibit the wire provider from being in the signal providing business), then any time there's anything wrong, won't each blame the other, just like when the software company blames your hardware and the hardware company blames your software?
Of course if the wire provider is also in the signal business (phone company, cable company, electricity company), then they will have an incentive to make sure that the wire works so that they can sell the signal, but only as long as you are buying the signal from them and not from some other signal selling company.
AM and FM broadcasters (and VHF and UHF television stations for that matter) do not lease the bandwidth from the FCC, they are granted a time-limited license (which they can usually get renewed again and again if they don't screw up too badly) to broadcast at a certain power from a particular geographic location on a certain frequency "in the public interest". They do pay certain fees to the FCC (and if they break the rules they may wind up paying fines), and they are allowed to sell a certain percentage of airtime to advertisers in order to finance the costs of operation and provide a profit, but what they pay to the government is nowhere near the amount of money which they can make with that government granted monopoly over that frequency in that community in a good market.
As far as the government having a say over what content they broadcast, it must satisfy the requirement "to operate in the public interest".
Apparently "must see" has taken on a new meaning. What's next? Armed thugs coming to your house to keep you from changing away from NBC on Thursday nights?
So does that mean I can hack the Discovery Channel signal to get program listings for a homebrew PVR without having to pay a subscription above and beyond the cable subscription which already pays for me to be able to watch The Discovery Channel?
"Bad assumption by RIAA: If someone hears a song, even if it sucks, they will buy it."
Actually that's all too true, unfortunately. Granted, whether a song sucks or not is a matter of personal opinion, but more than once I've seen people hear something "ahead of time" and hate and ridicule it, but a few months later, after it's been made "popular", they love it.
Look at it this way. In addition to their fear of web radio sending out the music as digital instead of analog and people being able to easily copy it to their hard drives and from there to everywhere instead of having to screw around with a tuner, an antenna, and worrying about running out of tape in the middle of the song they've waited through a bunch of other songs (and lots of commercials) to get, webcasting would let the record companies have a lot of moderately sucessful artists instead of just one or two Brittany Spears or Celine Dion or InSync or whoever's big these days. That means pressing a lot of different CDs simultaneously on different machines instead of cranking out the same one over and over again. Semi-fixed costs, such as studio time, cover art expenses, music video production expenses, etc. that become a smaller and smaller percentage of the cost of pressing each CD as the number of CDs pressed goes up don't become a smaller and smaller percentage if you're pressing a lot of different CDs instead of a lot of copies of the same CD. A million CDs from just one act means more profit than 10 acts each selling only one-hundred thousand CDs or one hundred different acts each selling only ten thousand CDs.
Also, webcasting would let new, not part of a multimedia conglomerate, record companies come into being to compete with the big guys.
Of course if the law were changed so that the big record companies could be the ones owning half or more of the radio stations on your dial this whole issue would quietly disappear and if you think that you hear the same songs over and over again now...
What was wrong with the internal NIC and why did you feel compelled to feed the landfill instead of seeing how big a hard drive it would take and figuring out something cool to use them for?
Sweeps are a giant con game except that the mark is fully aware of what's going on and goes along with it anyway.
Networks run "special" programming during sweeps to artificially inflate viewership numbers and then base their ad rates on those inflated numbers, but the ad agencies don't seem bothered enough about being lied to this way to actually do anything about it even though they are the ones placing the ads that provide the networks' income stream. Then again, ad agencies often get paid a percentage of the sponsor's expenditure, so the more the ads cost, the more they make.
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Are we sure that Jango is dead? All I saw was a suit of body armor or something get its helmet sliced off, almost as though it were a 'droid. Seems the bottom of the helmet and the top of the torso were carefully kept aimed away from the view of the audience. (We at least got a glimpse of the "inner" Darth Maul.) And shouldn't the kid have freaked out even a little bit, maybe even trying to put the head back on the torso for just a moment before collapsing with grief, or going postal and grabbing the nearest thing he could use for a weapon to get revenge, instead of just standing there stoically regarding the helmet like Hamlet talking to Yoric's skull?
They may have electrolyte but they don't have electrolytic. One's a noun, the other is an adjective.
Capacitors don't have electrolytic, they are, in some cases, electrolytic capacitors, depending upon what they use as a dielectric.
Once you learn to regard any and every piece of software from MS as beta you aren't in for fewer nasty surprises, but it's more along the lines of not knowing when they will happen, rather than not knowing whether they will.
What's strange here is Sarnoff's thing for "...the best engineers out of the best universities..." considering his own start as a penniless immigrant working as a radio-telegraph operator who just happened to be in the right place at the right time--he was on duty when the Titanic hit the iceburg and stayed on duty around the clock for a day or three relaying messages to, from, and about the sinking and the rescue efforts. Horatio Alger could have written his story. Seems he'd have a greater regard for "rugged individualists", but apparently not.
Do you have any idea how many things are made from petroleum? Insulation for wires, the clear part of CDs and DVDs, the lens for the lasers that read them, anything plastic in general, various medicines, and the list goes on and on. Perhaps some of that stuff can be made from coal instead, but how do we know that any complex hydrocarbons would be safe from these "bugs"?
If they're running a server then aren't they more likely to be uploading than downloading? Isn't uploading over cable already throttled down?
Petroleum is used to make so many things other than fuel that it's almost a sin to burn it, at least until we can grow more the way we can with trees. Not that I'm expecting that any time soon.
Apparently you missed the sarcasm here just as badly as the moderator who rated it "insightful".
It's the bandwidth that's going to get gauged, i.e., measured. Whoever loses lots of money in the process is the one getting gouged.
Oh, that's right. Things are set up to make it even more of a hassle to actually track them down and figure out exactly who has legal jurisdiction. Glad the post office doesn't work that way or the mailman would be at the door with "postage-due" junk mail every day.
And don't you love the way that anyone who actually gets a decent amount of use out of their connection is demonized by the cable companies as an "Internet Hog". They just want us to pay for the sizzle and to not expect there to be any actual meat on the plate.
Isn't measurement at a distance that NASA golden oldie, telemetry?
Well, in that case you could steer with your ..., uh, never mind.
You do realise that you just pretty much described the Internal Revenue Service, don't you?
Sorry, you're only going to be allowed to use sealed armatures with built in copy protection. No more winding your own with plain old magnet wire.
The average person on the street isn't equipped to turn out devices that let you get cable or satellite for free, so that's why you never hear of anyone having such a device.
You probably already know that you can make an ADC from a resistor string and some op-amp comparators. It might not be the very best one in the world but it would be an ADC. Is the government going to force a recall of all semiconductors? Will you have to pass a lie detector test and an FBI background check before you can buy a government-approved soldering iron that has to be connected to your phone line as well so that it can "phone home" to report what circuits you used it on? Will lead-tin and other conductive alloys with relatively low melting points become controlled substances? Will the Solder Police break down your door late some night on an anonymous tip? Will they trip over the Semiconductor Police when they do?
Of course if the wire provider is also in the signal business (phone company, cable company, electricity company), then they will have an incentive to make sure that the wire works so that they can sell the signal, but only as long as you are buying the signal from them and not from some other signal selling company.
As far as the government having a say over what content they broadcast, it must satisfy the requirement "to operate in the public interest".
Apparently "must see" has taken on a new meaning. What's next? Armed thugs coming to your house to keep you from changing away from NBC on Thursday nights?
So does that mean I can hack the Discovery Channel signal to get program listings for a homebrew PVR without having to pay a subscription above and beyond the cable subscription which already pays for me to be able to watch The Discovery Channel?
Actually that's all too true, unfortunately. Granted, whether a song sucks or not is a matter of personal opinion, but more than once I've seen people hear something "ahead of time" and hate and ridicule it, but a few months later, after it's been made "popular", they love it.
Also, webcasting would let new, not part of a multimedia conglomerate, record companies come into being to compete with the big guys.
Of course if the law were changed so that the big record companies could be the ones owning half or more of the radio stations on your dial this whole issue would quietly disappear and if you think that you hear the same songs over and over again now...
What was wrong with the internal NIC and why did you feel compelled to feed the landfill instead of seeing how big a hard drive it would take and figuring out something cool to use them for?
Networks run "special" programming during sweeps to artificially inflate viewership numbers and then base their ad rates on those inflated numbers, but the ad agencies don't seem bothered enough about being lied to this way to actually do anything about it even though they are the ones placing the ads that provide the networks' income stream. Then again, ad agencies often get paid a percentage of the sponsor's expenditure, so the more the ads cost, the more they make.