I thought the RIAA had a part in this, noticing references to Kazaa and DMCA. I find it a little unusual that Sharman had a part in it. Oddly enough the links are still quite available, and search results now point to K++ (a better Kazaa derivative), and the original links are still available. Seems almost like a "Screw you" gesture by google to Sharman if you ask me.
Just goes to show that once the cat is out of the bag on the net, its almost impossible to recover it.
The only benchmarks that should matter are: does it run Photoshop/Premiere/Final Cut Pro faster?
I could care less that my computer is a 11.5 compared to 10.32 on another machine. That means nothing to the end user.
The pure definition of any GREAT game:
Easy to learn, difficult to master.
Pong, Tetris, Mario Bros, Quake, etc. Think about it. If only every game designer stuck to this maxim.
This is one area that electric cars may be able to provide a valuable service in what's known as vehicle to grid. A small company in california has been doing a lot of research on the topic and it looks promising. Theoretically, if you get enough electric cars that are plugged into the grid whenever they're not in use, they can provide near-realtime load balancing by remote dispatching from the power company. Say the power surge that took out the grid happened, but this time with a few hundred thousand electric cars plugged into it. The company could send a broadcast to the cars to absorb the extra load within a few seconds, and stop the cascading failure. Conversely, if there's a sudden demand spike, the cars could be ordered to temporarily supply it until the spike subsided.
Obviously there's many technical hurdles but the general idea is very cool.
People should just quit hiring attornies and start hiring assasins instead. When someone tries to sue you for letting people login to your website, have them killed. Problem solved! Probably cheaper than a lawyer too. What does a typical assasin run these days?
It doesn't take an economist or a lawyer to understand point 4 - sharing copyrighted content that you do not have rights to millions of people would have DEFINITELY have a substantial impact upon the value of the copyrighted work.
Playing devils advocate for a minute here... First of all, yes it almost definitely hurts the sales of the canned crap that sells millions of copies off of a name, not the quality of the music, and people download and find out, gasp, it's crap and they don't buy the album. BUT, on the flipside, what about the thousands of bands who could never afford marketing who are now being exposed on a level unprecented in history to millions around the world for free? Ones who would never sell over 1,000 albums anyway, but can grow into large successes because of the net? Unfortunately, I can't recall any particular groups that this has happened to(Anyone care to chime in?) but it is a very plausible scenario. I know from personal experience that I am exposed to a ton of electronic music that is limited to a 1,000 copy distribution (on vinyl nonetheless) and was otherwise impossible to get legally.
Point of the argument, it's always a gray area, no matter how you look at it.
With the Yellow Top batteries, this is possible. However, a production car would probably use Gel Cell or AGM (Absorbed Glass Mat) batteries which do not leak sulfuric acid when punctured or cut in half or what have you.
Well, there IS some truth to all that hoopla. I know a distrubutor of arcade machines, and heard from a salesmen that a middle eastern man was buying up all the available machines of Sega's Airline Pilots, an uber-realistic arcade machine for flying jumbo jets. In some months after, they realized what was up and reported the guy to the FBI, but by then it was too late (not sure if that part happened after 9/11 or not.) Still, goes to show, at least the terrorists think the games are realistic enough now....
The theoretical maximum for efficiency of a solsr cell made of one material is 30%. You can make 'em out of two materials and get up to 50%, but I believe the manufacturing of these is impractical or impossible. In other words, you will never get more than 3-4000 kW out of current photovoltaic cell technologies. Not to mention that this is more or less wasted, as it takes on average 10-15 hP to maintain a typical vehicle's speed on the interstate. Vehicles with higher drag coeffecients (Read: SUVs) can take as much as 20 HP to keep going (These numbers are what I vaguely recall from my experience in dyno testing SUVs...).
More photovoltaic cell info here: http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/MSD-fu ll-spectrum-solar-cell.html
The big question is, will solar cells become cheap enough to mount to the roof of an electric car to keep the batteries fairly charged? (Say your battery dies, just sit on the side of the road for a few hours and you might have enough to make it to a charging station!)
What about existing magnetic inventory control tags that are deactivated at the register? I know many stores use these, are easily embedded in the products, and don't invade privacy as much. I don't see how the RFID labor-intensive process will gain adoptance over the relatively passive inventory control of the existing magnetic tags -- intervention is only required when a tag is either accidentally not deactivated or someone is actually stealing something.
And, of course, Apple must let go their firmware, so that Mac clones will be available again.
Once again: Why? How will this benefit Apple? How will it benefit consumers?
More simply put, you don't use up your firmware and have to replentish it every other week...
Having been in a small mail order business for quite a while, I can tell you why US companies hate shipping internationally:
It's a pain in the ass.
An international package takes at least 3 times the paperwork to fulfill. There's a 4-part customs form, customs declarations, and not to mention ungodly postage. It also screws up shipping calculations. In the US, you can safely charge a flat rate fee for shipping and that's that. You can even run actual shipping rates through the current USPS And FedEx rate tables. Now, bump it up to international shipping. You HAVE To insure everything that goes international, since the package is handed off between organizations many times if you use the US Post Office. UPS and FedEx are ungodly expensive internationally and hardly pay to use. Not to mention that many international customers don't have English as their first language making correspondance that much more difficult.
Now what about your return policy? I sure as hell don't want to be sending a call tag for $100 to get a computer shipped back to me because they didn't like it and it's broken. It's just impossible to provide the same level of customer service to someone not in the same country as you.
So if you were wondering, that's why US Companies hate shipping abroad. Canada and Mexico are a little easier since they have more relaxed borders, but still a pain in the butt.
2 anyone can make a copy of the image as long as it was at least 90% smaller or 110% larger than the original
I don't believe this is quite true in the sense of copyright, however I do seem to remember reading somewher that this is true for making copies of US currency, so that it wouldn't be confused with real currency.
Any smart person would say more than half of the people in this nation would like to outlaw telemarketing. You would THINK that with a democratic society then it would be outlawed...
The system is broken...
I see most people scoff at the idea of buying fuel cell cartridges for their laptop. Well, then this laptop isn't for you -- you have easy access to electricity. This is revolutionary because now you have a portable computer ANYWHERE, and you can recharge it with a little cartridge instead of lugging a huge generator with you.
Hello military and 3rd world applications. I can see a brand new market -- deploy some these bad boys, set up a wireless access point, and you have an instant internet community with no other power infrastructure.
This is another step in getting computing power to the third world and closing the digital divide.
I see they're using digital to revolutionize shortwave, why not revolutionize the TV band of the spectrum? Anyone these days either uses cable or dish for the most part, why not ditch all the analog counterparts and transmit digitally on the same spectrum? You could cram hundreds of channels in space of a few.
Food for thought.
* Ford currently gets LESS gas milage now on it's 25th aniversary than it did with the original Model-T. Model-T got 25 mpg. New Explorer gets 16. You don't even WANT to know what the Excursion and Expedition get.
http://www.motortrend.com/features/news/112_news1
This is a completely asinine comment. The Ford Model T did far more damage to the environment than 100 explorers. There were NO emissions controls on that engine, which means your hydrocarbons and NOx and all those nasties were off the chart. Cars of today are hundreds of times cleaner than cars back then. If everyone drove that model T today, you think smog is bad now? You'd have to leave the cities. With the stock explorer emissions, you'd run out of gas before you could give yourself carbon monoxide poisioning in the garage.
Low mileage != bad for the environment. If you burn 10 gallons of gas in a clean matter, it turns into CO2 and water for the most part, and the C02 is soaked up by plants and algae in the ocean.
Re:For those unfortunate times...
on
42-Volt Autos
·
· Score: 1
Important things to know:
A "42V" system is actually a 36V battery and a 42V alternator -- the battery would be the same as 3 12V batteries in series, whereas 42v would be the charging voltage of the system. It's the same way that your 12V car system is actually at around 14V when your alternator is on.
Second, there is no way to "put some electronic thingy on the charging posts to automatically sense 12V", that's simply impossible. A 12V-42v stepup circuit that would be capable of running the starter -- hundreds of amps -- would be ridiculously expensive and you will probably never see that in a car.
So, yes, the car companies have brains. Don't criticize something you are unfamiliar with.
Anyway, there would definitely be some major repercussions if someone hooked a 12V system to a 42V system -- the 12V system would likely be destroyed from the voltage surge.
What you will likely see in the near term future, if 42V systems become adopted, will be hybrid 12/42 systems, with the low voltage running all the traditional electronics in the vehicle and the high voltage used for exotic systems like drive-by-wire and brake-by-wire. There will be alternators available that can output both voltages, or a DC/DC converter can be used to step down and provide a 12V output from a 42V system.
This won't be the first time that the standard has shifted -- autos uses to run on 6V systems and the common ground wasn't standardized back then. Some vehicles used to use positive as the lead connected to the chasis. People will adapt, there will be some minor problems, but one thing for sure is that jumping the vehicle will be a low design priority on the list.
Has anyone actually found SMS to be remotely useful? I can see some rare instances, such as being in somewhere you can't talk, but can't it wait? One of my friends sent me an SMS once, but in trying to reply I found it was clunky, hard to use, and slow as hell. So I called him back. It was much easier.
Until they can increase the speed you can use SMS, I just find it easier to have it completely disabled.
OBD2 (as was mentioned earlier) is a standard on every current production car for emissions compliance. The recording 30 seconds of data around a sensor fault is just a feature convenient for the mechanic when he's diagnosing your car. It just so happens that you get a lot of sensor faults when your car explodes, so of course that gets recorded. With that said, the standard set of data being recorded, while interesting, does NOT include GPS data or a voice recording of the driver beforehand or any of that other conspiracy theory crap: Currently, the standard OBD2 mandates that the following signals are recorded: Engine Temp, Engine Speed, Vehicle Speed, Spark Advance, Mass Airflow Sensor, Manifold Pressure, Engine Load, Intake Air Temp, Oxygen Sensor status, and a few other little things. That's it.
If you're that worried about them getting to your data after a wreck, go find your ECU and rip it out and beat it with a hammer. It's usually located near one of the kick panels or sometimes in the engine compartment. But really, if the wreck was your fault, quit being an asshole and fess up to it and save us all the headache.
One thing that spammers frequently misquote is our own constitution. The first admendment protects freedom of speech for *INDIVIDUALS*, NOT CORPORATIONS or other business entities.
Corporations are not guaranteed any rights under the first admendment.
Slashdot Mirror
Obviously the spiders are from omicron-persei 8. "Why doesn't Ross, the largest of the Friends, simply eat the others?"
I thought the RIAA had a part in this, noticing references to Kazaa and DMCA. I find it a little unusual that Sharman had a part in it. Oddly enough the links are still quite available, and search results now point to K++ (a better Kazaa derivative), and the original links are still available. Seems almost like a "Screw you" gesture by google to Sharman if you ask me. Just goes to show that once the cat is out of the bag on the net, its almost impossible to recover it.
The only benchmarks that should matter are: does it run Photoshop/Premiere/Final Cut Pro faster? I could care less that my computer is a 11.5 compared to 10.32 on another machine. That means nothing to the end user.
The pure definition of any GREAT game: Easy to learn, difficult to master. Pong, Tetris, Mario Bros, Quake, etc. Think about it. If only every game designer stuck to this maxim.
This is one area that electric cars may be able to provide a valuable service in what's known as vehicle to grid. A small company in california has been doing a lot of research on the topic and it looks promising. Theoretically, if you get enough electric cars that are plugged into the grid whenever they're not in use, they can provide near-realtime load balancing by remote dispatching from the power company. Say the power surge that took out the grid happened, but this time with a few hundred thousand electric cars plugged into it. The company could send a broadcast to the cars to absorb the extra load within a few seconds, and stop the cascading failure. Conversely, if there's a sudden demand spike, the cars could be ordered to temporarily supply it until the spike subsided. Obviously there's many technical hurdles but the general idea is very cool.
You know what the say, the drummer is that guy that hangs out with the musicians...
People should just quit hiring attornies and start hiring assasins instead. When someone tries to sue you for letting people login to your website, have them killed. Problem solved! Probably cheaper than a lawyer too. What does a typical assasin run these days?
It doesn't take an economist or a lawyer to understand point 4 - sharing copyrighted content that you do not have rights to millions of people would have DEFINITELY have a substantial impact upon the value of the copyrighted work.
Playing devils advocate for a minute here... First of all, yes it almost definitely hurts the sales of the canned crap that sells millions of copies off of a name, not the quality of the music, and people download and find out, gasp, it's crap and they don't buy the album. BUT, on the flipside, what about the thousands of bands who could never afford marketing who are now being exposed on a level unprecented in history to millions around the world for free? Ones who would never sell over 1,000 albums anyway, but can grow into large successes because of the net? Unfortunately, I can't recall any particular groups that this has happened to(Anyone care to chime in?) but it is a very plausible scenario. I know from personal experience that I am exposed to a ton of electronic music that is limited to a 1,000 copy distribution (on vinyl nonetheless) and was otherwise impossible to get legally.
Point of the argument, it's always a gray area, no matter how you look at it.
With the Yellow Top batteries, this is possible. However, a production car would probably use Gel Cell or AGM (Absorbed Glass Mat) batteries which do not leak sulfuric acid when punctured or cut in half or what have you.
Well, there IS some truth to all that hoopla. I know a distrubutor of arcade machines, and heard from a salesmen that a middle eastern man was buying up all the available machines of Sega's Airline Pilots, an uber-realistic arcade machine for flying jumbo jets. In some months after, they realized what was up and reported the guy to the FBI, but by then it was too late (not sure if that part happened after 9/11 or not.) Still, goes to show, at least the terrorists think the games are realistic enough now....
The theoretical maximum for efficiency of a solsr cell made of one material is 30%. You can make 'em out of two materials and get up to 50%, but I believe the manufacturing of these is impractical or impossible. In other words, you will never get more than 3-4000 kW out of current photovoltaic cell technologies. Not to mention that this is more or less wasted, as it takes on average 10-15 hP to maintain a typical vehicle's speed on the interstate. Vehicles with higher drag coeffecients (Read: SUVs) can take as much as 20 HP to keep going (These numbers are what I vaguely recall from my experience in dyno testing SUVs...).
u ll-spectrum-solar-cell.html
More photovoltaic cell info here: http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/MSD-f
The big question is, will solar cells become cheap enough to mount to the roof of an electric car to keep the batteries fairly charged? (Say your battery dies, just sit on the side of the road for a few hours and you might have enough to make it to a charging station!)
What about existing magnetic inventory control tags that are deactivated at the register? I know many stores use these, are easily embedded in the products, and don't invade privacy as much. I don't see how the RFID labor-intensive process will gain adoptance over the relatively passive inventory control of the existing magnetic tags -- intervention is only required when a tag is either accidentally not deactivated or someone is actually stealing something.
More simply put, you don't use up your firmware and have to replentish it every other week...
Simple fix to that.
Get caller ID.
Tell your phone company to block any calls that don't have phone numbers (Almost ALL telemarkets block caller ID when calling).
Problem solved!
Might piss off your friends who do it, but I want to know who's calling before I pick up.
Having been in a small mail order business for quite a while, I can tell you why US companies hate shipping internationally:
It's a pain in the ass.
An international package takes at least 3 times the paperwork to fulfill. There's a 4-part customs form, customs declarations, and not to mention ungodly postage. It also screws up shipping calculations. In the US, you can safely charge a flat rate fee for shipping and that's that. You can even run actual shipping rates through the current USPS And FedEx rate tables. Now, bump it up to international shipping. You HAVE To insure everything that goes international, since the package is handed off between organizations many times if you use the US Post Office. UPS and FedEx are ungodly expensive internationally and hardly pay to use. Not to mention that many international customers don't have English as their first language making correspondance that much more difficult.
Now what about your return policy? I sure as hell don't want to be sending a call tag for $100 to get a computer shipped back to me because they didn't like it and it's broken. It's just impossible to provide the same level of customer service to someone not in the same country as you.
So if you were wondering, that's why US Companies hate shipping abroad. Canada and Mexico are a little easier since they have more relaxed borders, but still a pain in the butt.
I don't believe this is quite true in the sense of copyright, however I do seem to remember reading somewher that this is true for making copies of US currency, so that it wouldn't be confused with real currency.
Any smart person would say more than half of the people in this nation would like to outlaw telemarketing. You would THINK that with a democratic society then it would be outlawed...
The system is broken...
I see most people scoff at the idea of buying fuel cell cartridges for their laptop. Well, then this laptop isn't for you -- you have easy access to electricity. This is revolutionary because now you have a portable computer ANYWHERE, and you can recharge it with a little cartridge instead of lugging a huge generator with you.
Hello military and 3rd world applications. I can see a brand new market -- deploy some these bad boys, set up a wireless access point, and you have an instant internet community with no other power infrastructure.
This is another step in getting computing power to the third world and closing the digital divide.
I see they're using digital to revolutionize shortwave, why not revolutionize the TV band of the spectrum? Anyone these days either uses cable or dish for the most part, why not ditch all the analog counterparts and transmit digitally on the same spectrum? You could cram hundreds of channels in space of a few. Food for thought.
* Ford currently gets LESS gas milage now on it's 25th aniversary than it did with the original Model-T. Model-T got 25 mpg. New Explorer gets 16. You don't even WANT to know what the Excursion and Expedition get. http://www.motortrend.com/features/news/112_news1 This is a completely asinine comment. The Ford Model T did far more damage to the environment than 100 explorers. There were NO emissions controls on that engine, which means your hydrocarbons and NOx and all those nasties were off the chart. Cars of today are hundreds of times cleaner than cars back then. If everyone drove that model T today, you think smog is bad now? You'd have to leave the cities. With the stock explorer emissions, you'd run out of gas before you could give yourself carbon monoxide poisioning in the garage. Low mileage != bad for the environment. If you burn 10 gallons of gas in a clean matter, it turns into CO2 and water for the most part, and the C02 is soaked up by plants and algae in the ocean.
Important things to know:
A "42V" system is actually a 36V battery and a 42V alternator -- the battery would be the same as 3 12V batteries in series, whereas 42v would be the charging voltage of the system. It's the same way that your 12V car system is actually at around 14V when your alternator is on.
Second, there is no way to "put some electronic thingy on the charging posts to automatically sense 12V", that's simply impossible. A 12V-42v stepup circuit that would be capable of running the starter -- hundreds of amps -- would be ridiculously expensive and you will probably never see that in a car.
So, yes, the car companies have brains. Don't criticize something you are unfamiliar with.
Anyway, there would definitely be some major repercussions if someone hooked a 12V system to a 42V system -- the 12V system would likely be destroyed from the voltage surge.
What you will likely see in the near term future, if 42V systems become adopted, will be hybrid 12/42 systems, with the low voltage running all the traditional electronics in the vehicle and the high voltage used for exotic systems like drive-by-wire and brake-by-wire. There will be alternators available that can output both voltages, or a DC/DC converter can be used to step down and provide a 12V output from a 42V system.
This won't be the first time that the standard has shifted -- autos uses to run on 6V systems and the common ground wasn't standardized back then. Some vehicles used to use positive as the lead connected to the chasis. People will adapt, there will be some minor problems, but one thing for sure is that jumping the vehicle will be a low design priority on the list.
Has anyone actually found SMS to be remotely useful? I can see some rare instances, such as being in somewhere you can't talk, but can't it wait? One of my friends sent me an SMS once, but in trying to reply I found it was clunky, hard to use, and slow as hell. So I called him back. It was much easier. Until they can increase the speed you can use SMS, I just find it easier to have it completely disabled.
Now you'll have librarians running around going Input? Input!!! Need More Input!!!
OBD2 (as was mentioned earlier) is a standard on every current production car for emissions compliance. The recording 30 seconds of data around a sensor fault is just a feature convenient for the mechanic when he's diagnosing your car. It just so happens that you get a lot of sensor faults when your car explodes, so of course that gets recorded. With that said, the standard set of data being recorded, while interesting, does NOT include GPS data or a voice recording of the driver beforehand or any of that other conspiracy theory crap:
Currently, the standard OBD2 mandates that the following signals are recorded:
Engine Temp, Engine Speed, Vehicle Speed, Spark Advance, Mass Airflow Sensor, Manifold Pressure, Engine Load, Intake Air Temp, Oxygen Sensor status, and a few other little things. That's it.
If you're that worried about them getting to your data after a wreck, go find your ECU and rip it out and beat it with a hammer. It's usually located near one of the kick panels or sometimes in the engine compartment. But really, if the wreck was your fault, quit being an asshole and fess up to it and save us all the headache.
One thing that spammers frequently misquote is our own constitution. The first admendment protects freedom of speech for *INDIVIDUALS*, NOT CORPORATIONS or other business entities. Corporations are not guaranteed any rights under the first admendment.