My only sentiments on DLP TVs is someone please teach the little girl standing next to the elephant in the Texas Instruments ad the proper pronunciation of the word "mirrors".
Unless, of course, there actually is some magical new technology known as "meers".
Email me at coastalnet.com about that handheld scanner.
Re:Don't freak out, little troll
on
Who won?
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· Score: 1
Whether at this late date Bush should be removed from office, I don't know. I certainly wouldn't mind seeing him go, but there are good arguments that he shouldn't...
If you were at Kent State perhaps you can answer a question for me.
Back in the day they said that 4 died of their wounds. I have a memory of reading a letter to the editor in Rolling Stone a few months later concerning their coverage of the shootings at Kent State. As I recall the letter purported to be from the parents of a student who was among those shot and they said that he died later from his wounds.
Since then I've never seen any mention of a fifth death as a result of the shootings. If you were still around there after the shootings perhaps you can remember whether there was any mention later of a fifth fatality?
As this is a little off-topic you can email me at coastalnet.com instead of answering here if you prefer.
Re:...Unless you have a recount
on
Who won?
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· Score: 1
I'm talking about a piece of paper that the voter gets upon voting that says "This is how your vote was recorded".
It can tell you that you voted for Perot and actually add one in the Nader column. You can have a piece of paper that says you voted Perot and a screen that says your vote was recorded as being for Perot and a computer that's cheating for Nader. You can even have a second screen that tells a voting official that you voted for Perot as he looks at your piece of paper that says you voted for Perot and still have your vote reported at the end of the night as having been for Nader.
I said worse than useless (or, as The Doctor would say, "has a negative utility factor") because it creates a false sense of security.
Re:Paper trails are worse than useless
on
Who won?
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· Score: 1
And I can put a gun to your head or threaten to fire you or offer you a bribe and say "Sit down here at this computer and show me how you voted." Sure you can enter a number other than your own, but who knows if it will come up with what you want the other person to think your votes were. If you have a system where anyone can prove, once they've turned in their ballot, to anyone else, voluntarily or under duress, how they voted, you make extortion and vote buying possible.
Other than that it's an intriguing idea.
Paper trails are worse than useless
on
Who won?
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· Score: 1
It's trivial to get a computer to print one thing and do something else.
You know whether or not an ATM screws up your account but you have no way of knowing if it added up everybody's account correctly.
Somewhere out there on the intarweb tube is a story about how the Cleveland Plain Dealer had conducted pre-election polling for years and been impressively close to how the elections turned out each time and then along came the 2004 elections and they were wildly off in certain precincts, all of whom went for Bush. It's worth looking for.
Which makes the time before we found out that being one of the United States of America was only voluntary up until the actual granting of statehood "those days".:-)
When we say "Rent-A-Cop" here in the U.S., it's a somewhat derisive reference to security guards and such who are not "sworn law enforcement officers", but employees of businesses, either the one they are guarding or the one renting them to the place they are guarding. They have no jurisdiction or powers of arrest and often do not carry firearms and are not licensed to in the context of their job, although usually they do wear a uniform, although rarely a particularly sharp looking one.
The name of this country is "The United States of America" and it's citizens are Americans...
No, we are citizens of The United States of America. There is no country whose name is America. Referring to us as Americans or to our nation as America are commonly accepted colloquialisms, but not strictly accurate.
Frankly, I'm not too thrilled that "The United States of America" is used as a singular construction, rather than plural, these days, either.
"I wonder how he got caught. Anyone has any info on that?"
Actually he didn't get caught, the computer did.
The family made the mistake of talking to the police before they talked to a lawyer and once the kid admitted looking at "Playboy"-type images the cops donned their blinders and got their Nancy Grace on.
I always put the mouse on COM2/IRQ3 and the internal modem on COM3/IRQ4 (after setting it for that with jumpers in the good old pre-PCI, pre-Plug-n-pray days) and never had a problem. In the rare event that I was using the other serial port (COM1/IRQ4) it was probably for hideously slow file transfer and the modem wasn't in use anyway.
With the advent of PCI and PnP and winmodems, I sometimes wound up having to "install" COM5 to keep the modem from trying to steal one of the higher IRQs that I wanted for the NIC or a scanner.
The PS2 keyboard port was the same old keyboard port with a smaller jack/plug, and was therefore just as hot-swappable as the original, but the PS2 mouse port wasn't just a dedicated serial port with a different plug/jack from the old 9 (or 25) pin serial port where only 4 or 5 pins had been used anyway, they came up with a whole new protocol, different from the keyboard protocol and different from the old serial port mouse protocol and, as far as I can tell, deliberately designed to annoy and inconvenience both users and the designers of KVM switches and to make hot-swapping the mouse screw up as many things as possible.
Speaking of standardized spots for peripherals, is it just me, or when ATX forced everybody to switch to PS2 mice and a different IRQ, did they just not work as well?
If digital media was available for sale at a reasonable price...
Should be "...were available..." or "If a digital medium was available..."
As for this question of magical imaginary DRM,sure, fine, as long as it has no effect on hardware whatsoever.
I don't want to pay extra so that manufacturers can include stuff I don't want to limit what the hardware can do, and I don't want uncrippled hardware unavailable at reasonable prices because everybody is concentrating on making and selling crippled hardware because the majority of the buying public has been conned into buying those devices. 56K hardware modems never came down in price due to mass production because the market was stolen by WinModems which appeared to cost less but required a greater CPU investment and often OS lock-in.
I shouldn't have to pay more for hardware and settle for reduced choice as well just because somebody else might violate copyright anymore than I should have to pay more for a car because they all have to have disabling devices built in that detect whether the vehicle is being used for the getaway in a bank robbery.
If you've got the time and money and a community college nearby, you might be able to get into a 1 year electronic servicing program and get a good grounding in the basics. After that you'll be able to teach yourself without letting the magic smoke out of quite so many components.
PayPal is not a registered financial institution (bank, savings/loan, credit union or any similar) and therefore unable to collect "float" interest on deposited monies.
Unfortunately that was their original business plan and they didn't find out that they couldn't do it that way until they were already up and running and so they suddenly found themselves scrambling to figure out how to survive and it's been a cluster**** ever since.
It's possible that the lies are coming from the example's BellNorth. Let's say that BellNorth also offers "NorthPhone", a VOIP service available (for a price) to anyone with an account with any ISP. They now have a financial incentive to want their VOIP packets to be more equal than other VOIP packets over any and all data paths they control. They also have an incentive to try to fool the public into thinking that keeping all VOIP packets equal everywhere on the internet is really all about letting Google get a free ride.
Airliners don't fly high enough for explosive decompression. You could blow a hole in the side of a plane the size of a desk and it'll just be a little windy.
There's an Aloha Airlines flight attendant who would no doubt vigorously disagree, had she survived.
300 people should win against 5 terrorists with box cutters. The fact that they didn't leads me to believe that while they may not have deserved to die, they didn't make much of an effort to live.
Are you speaking of the plane that crashed in the field, or one of the other three that crashed into buildings?
Prior to September 11, 2001 it was accepted wisdom that the best way to minimize casualties in the event of an airliner hijacking was to co-operate with the hijackers, because the underlying assumption was that the hijackers wanted something other than the use of a big flying suicide bomb. (People used to hijack planes to get taken to Havana, or to force the release of "political" prisoners, or something, but, whatever it was, they were offering to trade the safety of the passengers and plane for it.)
No doubt the people on the first three planes thought that was the case and decided to sit there quietly rather than get some stewardess's eyes gouged out or provoking the hijackers into settng off the explosives they claimed to have, figuring that eventually they would land somewhere and some government would work out some deal with the hijackers.
By the time the passengers on the fourth plane found out that doing nothing meant dying in a crash anyway, that plane had already been hijacked--the hijackers were already in command of the cockpit.
Undoing that without crashing the plane is much more difficult than preventing the hijackers from gaining control in the first place, which you would only do if you knew in advance that you faced certain death if you failed.
Every single 1000F and 1500F cap on the board needed replacement, so an old PIII board became the donor.
Of course, it was around the time of the PII/PIII BX chipset boards that all those capacitor disease capacitors were being used by mobo manufacturers, so if you got good ones off of your board you rolled the dice and got lucky. Better just to order new ones from digi-key or somebody.
So, while my first instinct is "how do you make a solid capacitor? Doesn't it work by keeping a charged capacitance between two nearby electrical circuits seperated by a vacuum?"
Anytime you have two conductors separated by an insulator you have a capacitor, or at least capacitance.
If you put a sheet of wax paper between two sheets of aluminum foil, that's a capacitor. If you replace the wax paper with a layer of air, it's still a capacitor. If you replace the air with a vacuum, it's still a capacitor. You can even replace the vacuum with a non-conductive liquid. It'll still be a capacitor.
As long as whatever separates the two conductors is an insulator, then you've got a capacitor.
Electrolytic capacitors use stuff that's a sort of paste, or "goo", which, combined with a layer of oxidation on the inner surface of one of the conductors, makes up the insulator. "Solid" capacitors use something that's, well, solid.
If you have a further interest, Googling for "capacitor disease" may prove instructional.
In your second statement about electrolytics.. Electrolytic caps are used for decoupling power leads to ground mostly and they have to have a DC bias maintained on them to work.. they can only pass AC if the signal does not reverse bias the capacitor. They are almost never used in audio filtering circuits for passing audio signals.
They are, however, often used to pass audio (or other AC) while blocking DC. For example, in virtually any phantom power application. The alternative is a bigger, heavier, and much more costly transformer for the same level of audio quality.
Somehow I don't believe that you really are an electrical engineer. While not all EEs are experts on electronics, s/he seems to know what s/he is talking about.
If I were feeling particularly snarky just now I would observe that somehow I do believe that you're an anonymous coward.
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Unless, of course, there actually is some magical new technology known as "meers".
Rots of ruck!
Email me at coastalnet.com about that handheld scanner.
And one great argument--President Cheney.
Back in the day they said that 4 died of their wounds. I have a memory of reading a letter to the editor in Rolling Stone a few months later concerning their coverage of the shootings at Kent State. As I recall the letter purported to be from the parents of a student who was among those shot and they said that he died later from his wounds.
Since then I've never seen any mention of a fifth death as a result of the shootings. If you were still around there after the shootings perhaps you can remember whether there was any mention later of a fifth fatality?
As this is a little off-topic you can email me at coastalnet.com instead of answering here if you prefer.
It can tell you that you voted for Perot and actually add one in the Nader column. You can have a piece of paper that says you voted Perot and a screen that says your vote was recorded as being for Perot and a computer that's cheating for Nader. You can even have a second screen that tells a voting official that you voted for Perot as he looks at your piece of paper that says you voted for Perot and still have your vote reported at the end of the night as having been for Nader.
I said worse than useless (or, as The Doctor would say, "has a negative utility factor") because it creates a false sense of security.
Other than that it's an intriguing idea.
You know whether or not an ATM screws up your account but you have no way of knowing if it added up everybody's account correctly.
Somewhere out there on the intarweb tube is a story about how the Cleveland Plain Dealer had conducted pre-election polling for years and been impressively close to how the elections turned out each time and then along came the 2004 elections and they were wildly off in certain precincts, all of whom went for Bush. It's worth looking for.
Which makes the time before we found out that being one of the United States of America was only voluntary up until the actual granting of statehood "those days". :-)
When we say "Rent-A-Cop" here in the U.S., it's a somewhat derisive reference to security guards and such who are not "sworn law enforcement officers", but employees of businesses, either the one they are guarding or the one renting them to the place they are guarding. They have no jurisdiction or powers of arrest and often do not carry firearms and are not licensed to in the context of their job, although usually they do wear a uniform, although rarely a particularly sharp looking one.
No, we are citizens of The United States of America. There is no country whose name is America. Referring to us as Americans or to our nation as America are commonly accepted colloquialisms, but not strictly accurate.
Frankly, I'm not too thrilled that "The United States of America" is used as a singular construction, rather than plural, these days, either.
Actually he didn't get caught, the computer did.
The family made the mistake of talking to the police before they talked to a lawyer and once the kid admitted looking at "Playboy"-type images the cops donned their blinders and got their Nancy Grace on.
With the advent of PCI and PnP and winmodems, I sometimes wound up having to "install" COM5 to keep the modem from trying to steal one of the higher IRQs that I wanted for the NIC or a scanner.
The PS2 keyboard port was the same old keyboard port with a smaller jack/plug, and was therefore just as hot-swappable as the original, but the PS2 mouse port wasn't just a dedicated serial port with a different plug/jack from the old 9 (or 25) pin serial port where only 4 or 5 pins had been used anyway, they came up with a whole new protocol, different from the keyboard protocol and different from the old serial port mouse protocol and, as far as I can tell, deliberately designed to annoy and inconvenience both users and the designers of KVM switches and to make hot-swapping the mouse screw up as many things as possible.
Speaking of standardized spots for peripherals, is it just me, or when ATX forced everybody to switch to PS2 mice and a different IRQ, did they just not work as well?
Should be "...were available..." or "If a digital medium was available..."
As for this question of magical imaginary DRM,sure, fine, as long as it has no effect on hardware whatsoever.
I don't want to pay extra so that manufacturers can include stuff I don't want to limit what the hardware can do, and I don't want uncrippled hardware unavailable at reasonable prices because everybody is concentrating on making and selling crippled hardware because the majority of the buying public has been conned into buying those devices. 56K hardware modems never came down in price due to mass production because the market was stolen by WinModems which appeared to cost less but required a greater CPU investment and often OS lock-in.
I shouldn't have to pay more for hardware and settle for reduced choice as well just because somebody else might violate copyright anymore than I should have to pay more for a car because they all have to have disabling devices built in that detect whether the vehicle is being used for the getaway in a bank robbery.
If you've got the time and money and a community college nearby, you might be able to get into a 1 year electronic servicing program and get a good grounding in the basics. After that you'll be able to teach yourself without letting the magic smoke out of quite so many components.
You actually got through to customer service?
Unfortunately that was their original business plan and they didn't find out that they couldn't do it that way until they were already up and running and so they suddenly found themselves scrambling to figure out how to survive and it's been a cluster**** ever since.
It's possible that the lies are coming from the example's BellNorth. Let's say that BellNorth also offers "NorthPhone", a VOIP service available (for a price) to anyone with an account with any ISP. They now have a financial incentive to want their VOIP packets to be more equal than other VOIP packets over any and all data paths they control. They also have an incentive to try to fool the public into thinking that keeping all VOIP packets equal everywhere on the internet is really all about letting Google get a free ride.
There's an Aloha Airlines flight attendant who would no doubt vigorously disagree, had she survived.
Are you speaking of the plane that crashed in the field, or one of the other three that crashed into buildings?
Prior to September 11, 2001 it was accepted wisdom that the best way to minimize casualties in the event of an airliner hijacking was to co-operate with the hijackers, because the underlying assumption was that the hijackers wanted something other than the use of a big flying suicide bomb. (People used to hijack planes to get taken to Havana, or to force the release of "political" prisoners, or something, but, whatever it was, they were offering to trade the safety of the passengers and plane for it.)
No doubt the people on the first three planes thought that was the case and decided to sit there quietly rather than get some stewardess's eyes gouged out or provoking the hijackers into settng off the explosives they claimed to have, figuring that eventually they would land somewhere and some government would work out some deal with the hijackers.
By the time the passengers on the fourth plane found out that doing nothing meant dying in a crash anyway, that plane had already been hijacked--the hijackers were already in command of the cockpit.
Undoing that without crashing the plane is much more difficult than preventing the hijackers from gaining control in the first place, which you would only do if you knew in advance that you faced certain death if you failed.
Of course, it was around the time of the PII/PIII BX chipset boards that all those capacitor disease capacitors were being used by mobo manufacturers, so if you got good ones off of your board you rolled the dice and got lucky. Better just to order new ones from digi-key or somebody.
Anytime you have two conductors separated by an insulator you have a capacitor, or at least capacitance.
If you put a sheet of wax paper between two sheets of aluminum foil, that's a capacitor. If you replace the wax paper with a layer of air, it's still a capacitor. If you replace the air with a vacuum, it's still a capacitor. You can even replace the vacuum with a non-conductive liquid. It'll still be a capacitor.
As long as whatever separates the two conductors is an insulator, then you've got a capacitor.
Electrolytic capacitors use stuff that's a sort of paste, or "goo", which, combined with a layer of oxidation on the inner surface of one of the conductors, makes up the insulator. "Solid" capacitors use something that's, well, solid.
If you have a further interest, Googling for "capacitor disease" may prove instructional.
They are, however, often used to pass audio (or other AC) while blocking DC. For example, in virtually any phantom power application. The alternative is a bigger, heavier, and much more costly transformer for the same level of audio quality.
Somehow I don't believe that you really are an electrical engineer. While not all EEs are experts on electronics, s/he seems to know what s/he is talking about.If I were feeling particularly snarky just now I would observe that somehow I do believe that you're an anonymous coward.