Bulletproofing will keep them from replacing shot-up cameras, but it's not going to help them catch the guy that shot the camera. If you shoot bullet-proof glass (glass-polycarbonate-glass sandwich), the inner layer of polycarbonate turns white from the impact stress, and the glass cracks and spiders. Combine that with an opaque chunk of hot lead imbedded in all this, and your camera isn't going to be seeing the perp too well.
The bulletproofing seems unnecessary anyway, since you can't hit squat with the gansta style sideways grip that I'm sure all the hip homies in Chicago are using.
"(How close do sats have to be if you want to avoid moving dishes?)"
If we are talking about the older C-band and Ku-band consumer satellite dishes that are ~10 feet in diameter, they are almost all motorized and you can only receive one satellite without moving the dish. Each C-band satellite broadcasts (if I remember correctly) 24 channels, the odd numbered having horizontal and the even numbered channels being vertically polarized (maybe I got those backwards).
This polarization made changing channels interesting. If you jumped from odd-numbered to odd-numbered channel (or stayed on the evens), the channels changed quickly. Stepping up or down through odd-even-odd-even was slower because the feedhorn had to repolarize for each channel. Took an extra second or so.
Changing satellites was even slower. There were over a dozen satellites, and moving the dish from one end of the arc to the other took about 30 seconds. We still have VCR tapes that where the VCR started recording (on a timer), and then the satellite receiver came on and repositioned the dish, recording on the tape a snow-random channel-snow-random channel effect as the dish passed intermediary satellites.
This is all going by memory when I lived at home and my parents had an Echostar receiver and a 10-foot dish in the backyad, long before the current rage of offset 18-inch fixed dishes. Probably 1990-1995ish. So I might have some details wrong, sorry.
Those big dishes have one advantage over the little guys, though. Feeds. You could watch some poor reporter stand in the rain, pick their nose, whatever for half an hour before s/he went live for their report. Sometimes boring but sometimes entertaining... better than the crap they broadcast on the little dishes these days, anyway.
"If functionality was everything - noone would ever download a skin"
Yep. I run Winamp with the default skin, Firefox with the default theme, Windows 2k with the default settings, and I change XP to Classic Theme and Classic Start Menu. I had to disable the stupid skin on WMP and get back to the 'boring' mode, and disabling 'visualizaions' was the second thing I did. No wallpaper on any of my desktops, just the default blue.
No software I own is skinned for looks....except Blackbox on Linux, but if you've ever used Blackbox, that's not saying much.
"Ease of learning for infrequent users, ease of use for heavy users, easy to customize to meet particular user's needs."
Which is why I think computers should know the experience level of the user, and adjust accordingly. Have an OS-wide setting "Newbie, Amateur, Expert". In Newbie mode, OS and applications (who read this environment variable) have Clippy, wizards, balloons, popups, confirmation dialogs, and that other crap. In Expert mode, all the fluff is turned off and your computer no longer treats you like a half-wit, brain-damaged, retarded imbecile. Amateur mode is some happy medium.
Of course, there are some people like Korn shell, vi, or emacs users that would also need a 'Masochist' mode.
Aye, there's the rub. I work for a contracting company, and their 401(k) plan is 100% employee-contributed. I chose to invest on my own, thank you very much. Aside from your employer not paying into it, you can earn the same or better interest by finding good investments yourself.
I don't know, I think I prefer the product placement to outright ads. Ads jar you out of your show or movie, making it more difficult to really enjoy the show. When I watch episodes I've recorded and cut the commercials from, I find I "get into" the show and identify with the characters more etc.
Then again, at least I can cut out or skip commercials, something I can't do with product placement. Yeah, let's keep the ad breaks please.:)
Forgive me if I am skeptical. A flashlight bulb has a very slow response time; feed it a low-frequency square wave, you get a sine(ish) wave. Feed it a high-frequency square wave and you get a steady light. I have a hard time beleiving that a flashlight bulb could transmit a 10,000Hz audio signal -- those light bulbs in your house? They run on A/C, but they stay bright enough in between cycles that you don't see the 50 or 60Hz flicker.
Not that I would doubt a 3 digit UID, who also lives next door to the Beast, but maybe someone can explain this apparent non sequitur?
Yeah, but whatever you do, don't use an inverted tachyon beam! It would depolarize the cronoton particles, creating a feedback loop in the main deflector array that would inevitably lead to a plot complication.
I use an rsnapshot-style system on a Windows 2000 Server using cygwin and a some nested Bash scripts. No perl etc necessary, just Bash. Yep, NTFS supports hardlinks under cygwin!
I've set it up so that on the backup server, I can create a folder that corresponds to a server hostname and within that, folders that correspond to rsync 'exports'. The script scans these directories and connects to the servers and exports that match, then pulls an rsync down.
On the server to be backed up, I install rsync --daemon or cwRsync (Windows port of rsync) and configure it to be read-only and only allow the backup server to connect (based on IP).
I chose Windows for my backup server so that I could use NTFS's 'File and Folder Compression'. Four 120GB IDE hard drives configured as a software JBOD gives me (optimistically) nearly a terabyte of compressed data. That's my main remaining gripe about Linux BTW, the lack of a good compressed read/write filesystem. There was an old e2compr, but I don't think it was ever ported to the 2.4 kernel. I would dearly love to use Linux instead of Windows, but I really need the compression!
The system works great, I highly recommend it. I've had nothing but trouble with tape drives, tapes are slow, and restoring something from tape is a chore. With this system, I just pop open the UNC path to my backup server from my workstation and drag'n'drop to restore whatever I want.
And the price? I'm guessing a low-end PC and four IDE hard drives is probably less expensive than a tape drive and 480GB worth of tapes. I don't know since I've blissfully ignored tape technology for some time now.:)
I've heard people use 'whack' in reference to backslashes; i.e., "whack whack servername whack sharename". You have to be careful who you say this around, though.
I didn't say anything about who would be in business longer or make more money; I was merely addressing the legal aspects.
However, consider the populatity of 'super saver cards' or 'price club memberships' pushed by many retailers. If you don't give them your personal info and get their little card, you don't get sale prices or can't use checks. I consider the practice highly offensive and I take my business elsewhere. Yet, retailers that continue such disgusting practices (such as Albertsons grocery stores) continue to stay in business. It's the same as the email spam problem: there are too many suckers and idiots out there who keep the slimeballs in business.
Nope! That's *not* discrimination. You can discriminate all you want -- for example, only boys are allowed in Boy Scouts, which is completely legal even though it discriminates against the girls. In fact, the Boy Scouts went through a whole gay discrimination thing with the Supreme Court ultimately ruling that the Scouts can discriminate against gay men being leaders.
There is a very short list of prohibited discriminations, and then only in certain situations (getting a loan for a house, getting Social Security, etc). But outside of those very narrow restrictions, you can discriminate whomever you darn well please.
I changes the volume. If you consider a filled oxygen tank, the sucker is heavy and will sink like a rock. Use the oxygen inside of that tank to inflate a baloon, and it will shoot to the surface.
Yes, the mass stays the same. But that doesn't matter when it comes to buoyancy. The mass-to-volume ratio is the determining factor. May seem counterintuitive, but it works.
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Bulletproofing will keep them from replacing shot-up cameras, but it's not going to help them catch the guy that shot the camera. If you shoot bullet-proof glass (glass-polycarbonate-glass sandwich), the inner layer of polycarbonate turns white from the impact stress, and the glass cracks and spiders. Combine that with an opaque chunk of hot lead imbedded in all this, and your camera isn't going to be seeing the perp too well.
The bulletproofing seems unnecessary anyway, since you can't hit squat with the gansta style sideways grip that I'm sure all the hip homies in Chicago are using.
(a.k.a. "The Jeopardy Guy")
And here I thought the Jeopardy Guy was Alex Trebek.
"(How close do sats have to be if you want to avoid moving dishes?)"
If we are talking about the older C-band and Ku-band consumer satellite dishes that are ~10 feet in diameter, they are almost all motorized and you can only receive one satellite without moving the dish. Each C-band satellite broadcasts (if I remember correctly) 24 channels, the odd numbered having horizontal and the even numbered channels being vertically polarized (maybe I got those backwards).
This polarization made changing channels interesting. If you jumped from odd-numbered to odd-numbered channel (or stayed on the evens), the channels changed quickly. Stepping up or down through odd-even-odd-even was slower because the feedhorn had to repolarize for each channel. Took an extra second or so.
Changing satellites was even slower. There were over a dozen satellites, and moving the dish from one end of the arc to the other took about 30 seconds. We still have VCR tapes that where the VCR started recording (on a timer), and then the satellite receiver came on and repositioned the dish, recording on the tape a snow-random channel-snow-random channel effect as the dish passed intermediary satellites.
This is all going by memory when I lived at home and my parents had an Echostar receiver and a 10-foot dish in the backyad, long before the current rage of offset 18-inch fixed dishes. Probably 1990-1995ish. So I might have some details wrong, sorry.
Those big dishes have one advantage over the little guys, though. Feeds. You could watch some poor reporter stand in the rain, pick their nose, whatever for half an hour before s/he went live for their report. Sometimes boring but sometimes entertaining... better than the crap they broadcast on the little dishes these days, anyway.
"rather than the self-defense spray"
Oh, don't pass off the self-defense stuff so quickly. Getting blasted with 5 million SHU is enough to ruin anyone's day.
"it had better be pleasing to my eyes"
;)
Well, to be precise, skins are displaeasing and plain is pleasing to my eyes.
"If functionality was everything - noone would ever download a skin"
...except Blackbox on Linux, but if you've ever used Blackbox, that's not saying much.
Yep. I run Winamp with the default skin, Firefox with the default theme, Windows 2k with the default settings, and I change XP to Classic Theme and Classic Start Menu. I had to disable the stupid skin on WMP and get back to the 'boring' mode, and disabling 'visualizaions' was the second thing I did. No wallpaper on any of my desktops, just the default blue.
No software I own is skinned for looks.
"Ease of learning for infrequent users, ease of use for heavy users, easy to customize to meet particular user's needs."
Which is why I think computers should know the experience level of the user, and adjust accordingly. Have an OS-wide setting "Newbie, Amateur, Expert". In Newbie mode, OS and applications (who read this environment variable) have Clippy, wizards, balloons, popups, confirmation dialogs, and that other crap. In Expert mode, all the fluff is turned off and your computer no longer treats you like a half-wit, brain-damaged, retarded imbecile. Amateur mode is some happy medium.
Of course, there are some people like Korn shell, vi, or emacs users that would also need a 'Masochist' mode.
Aye, there's the rub. I work for a contracting company, and their 401(k) plan is 100% employee-contributed. I chose to invest on my own, thank you very much. Aside from your employer not paying into it, you can earn the same or better interest by finding good investments yourself.
"why the 22 vs 15 i have no idea"
I suspect the missing 7 watts are consumed by the power supply converting the 120VAC to ~3VDC.
"and the slight speech impediment"
I noticed that too, with a bit of surprise (I thought all actors, virtual or otherwise, were supposed to be [physically] perfect). I kind of liked it.
And Elastigirl *is* hot. Those hips....
Perfect. I would much rather subscribe to a series than a channel.
Let me rephrase that: "Grass-roots produced, bittorrent-distributed, GPL licensed software will replace commercial software eventually."
I see that happening *today*, _without_ money involved. I have no trouble believing it can be the same for media.
That is so true it hurts.
I don't know, I think I prefer the product placement to outright ads. Ads jar you out of your show or movie, making it more difficult to really enjoy the show. When I watch episodes I've recorded and cut the commercials from, I find I "get into" the show and identify with the characters more etc.
:)
Then again, at least I can cut out or skip commercials, something I can't do with product placement. Yeah, let's keep the ad breaks please.
Me too, as soon as ST:Voyager ended. My wife watches the news on our ATI TV Tuner card once in a while, but my real TV isn't even hooked up right now.
:-/
On the downside, I spend a lot more time on the internet now.
Forgive me if I am skeptical. A flashlight bulb has a very slow response time; feed it a low-frequency square wave, you get a sine(ish) wave. Feed it a high-frequency square wave and you get a steady light. I have a hard time beleiving that a flashlight bulb could transmit a 10,000Hz audio signal -- those light bulbs in your house? They run on A/C, but they stay bright enough in between cycles that you don't see the 50 or 60Hz flicker.
Not that I would doubt a 3 digit UID, who also lives next door to the Beast, but maybe someone can explain this apparent non sequitur?
Yeah, but whatever you do, don't use an inverted tachyon beam! It would depolarize the cronoton particles, creating a feedback loop in the main deflector array that would inevitably lead to a plot complication.
I use an rsnapshot-style system on a Windows 2000 Server using cygwin and a some nested Bash scripts. No perl etc necessary, just Bash. Yep, NTFS supports hardlinks under cygwin!
:)
I've set it up so that on the backup server, I can create a folder that corresponds to a server hostname and within that, folders that correspond to rsync 'exports'. The script scans these directories and connects to the servers and exports that match, then pulls an rsync down.
On the server to be backed up, I install rsync --daemon or cwRsync (Windows port of rsync) and configure it to be read-only and only allow the backup server to connect (based on IP).
I chose Windows for my backup server so that I could use NTFS's 'File and Folder Compression'. Four 120GB IDE hard drives configured as a software JBOD gives me (optimistically) nearly a terabyte of compressed data. That's my main remaining gripe about Linux BTW, the lack of a good compressed read/write filesystem. There was an old e2compr, but I don't think it was ever ported to the 2.4 kernel. I would dearly love to use Linux instead of Windows, but I really need the compression!
The system works great, I highly recommend it. I've had nothing but trouble with tape drives, tapes are slow, and restoring something from tape is a chore. With this system, I just pop open the UNC path to my backup server from my workstation and drag'n'drop to restore whatever I want.
And the price? I'm guessing a low-end PC and four IDE hard drives is probably less expensive than a tape drive and 480GB worth of tapes. I don't know since I've blissfully ignored tape technology for some time now.
I though 'bang' was an exclamation point? Hence the term "hash bang slash bin bash" to begin a shell script?
An unqualified 'slash' is a forward slash.
I've heard people use 'whack' in reference to backslashes; i.e., "whack whack servername whack sharename". You have to be careful who you say this around, though.
Uh... so presumably, there have been exactly as many astronauts as scuba divers, so your argument is valid?
I didn't say anything about who would be in business longer or make more money; I was merely addressing the legal aspects.
However, consider the populatity of 'super saver cards' or 'price club memberships' pushed by many retailers. If you don't give them your personal info and get their little card, you don't get sale prices or can't use checks. I consider the practice highly offensive and I take my business elsewhere. Yet, retailers that continue such disgusting practices (such as Albertsons grocery stores) continue to stay in business. It's the same as the email spam problem: there are too many suckers and idiots out there who keep the slimeballs in business.
Nope! That's *not* discrimination. You can discriminate all you want -- for example, only boys are allowed in Boy Scouts, which is completely legal even though it discriminates against the girls. In fact, the Boy Scouts went through a whole gay discrimination thing with the Supreme Court ultimately ruling that the Scouts can discriminate against gay men being leaders.
There is a very short list of prohibited discriminations, and then only in certain situations (getting a loan for a house, getting Social Security, etc). But outside of those very narrow restrictions, you can discriminate whomever you darn well please.
No, but the bladder is. :)
I changes the volume. If you consider a filled oxygen tank, the sucker is heavy and will sink like a rock. Use the oxygen inside of that tank to inflate a baloon, and it will shoot to the surface.
Yes, the mass stays the same. But that doesn't matter when it comes to buoyancy. The mass-to-volume ratio is the determining factor. May seem counterintuitive, but it works.