You don't _need_ to spend $2000 on speakers to get audiophile-quality equipment. There are plenty of high-quality speakers that cost less than $200 each. They won't be the best, but they'll be better for playing music than one of those 5.1 surround systems. The same applies to most other gear. Whether you need a hi-fi system or not is another question, however. Not all music requires a hi-fi system; in fact, some recordings might actually sound worse due to their defects being exposed.
Coffee is _supposed_ to be boiling hot when served, you fuckwad. Now, perhaps it shouldn't have been served in a styrofoam cup, but the woman was holding it in her crotch when she spilled it. That, my friend, is pure idiocy. Why is that so hard to understand?
There are several reasons. Today's computers have plenty of disk space and memory. Doesn't really matter if 50 icons take up 25 MB or 30MB. In either case, it's a very high-level format, and even rather complex images should fit in much less space than an equivalent PNG or GIF. ASCII formats are easier to handle with fewer bugs. The fact that it's XML means the system can simply use a single library to handle parsing, which means fewer bugs, security holes, and so on. SVG can easily be stored in a database, encapsulated inside other XML, HTML, and even text documents. Hell, you can print it out on a piece of paper and actually read the image elements. Finally, it's future-proof. You could actually scribble it on some clay tablets and be able to figure it out 2000 years down the road.
If you want to see why a binary format is bad, just look at SWF (Macromedia flash). Only one vendor has non-half-assed support for this open standard, and that's Macromedia.
2.4GHz microwave radiation causes water molecules to resonate (I can't remember whether it's the bond angle or length at this frequency - this is how microwave ovens work, I digress)
The fact that water molecules resonate at this frequency is absolutely irrelevant. All this means is that RF at this frequency will heat water. A microwave oven uses thousands of watts of power to do that -- at close range. A Wifi transmitter uses less than a watt, and is farther away. Clearly, the heating effect from that is absolutely negligible. There are no other special characteristics associated with 2.4GHz.
We humans are mainly water. Hence microwaves _at_the_right_frequency_ have an effect on our molecules too.
Sure it does. It might even heat up the water molecules a millionth of a degree, if you're lucky. But could that cause any negative effects? I think not.
The only molecules in your body which really matter are DNA molecules. Unless 2.4 GHz happens to also damage those, as well, you have nothing to worry about. And it is highly unlikely that a huge polymer molecule like DNA will resonate at the same frequency as water.
A wifi network is pervasive and always on. Would you sit your child in front of a working microwave oven all day?
Nice argument. If you jump into a vat of boiling water, you will die. So don't ever swim in the pool.
A microwave oven generates emissions orders of magnitude above wi-fi, even with all the shielding in place. And there have been ZERO negative health effects associated with that.
Apple really has a loser here. They are no longer dealing with Mac users, who would rather pay $500 than think 10% harder. Who in their right mind would pay 99 cents for a song encoded at a paltry 128k in some weird format? Only Apple zealots, who already buy hardware that is both slower and more expensive than common PC hardware. PC users are smarter and will simply use KaZaA.
Why is he so surprised he is being sued? Breaking the law is a serious matter, and he knew that perfectly well. I don't think there are any excuses. The pirate asshole is just trying to profit off of others' hard work that they put into creating the copy protected CDs.
If your cellphone functions inside the house, you are getting roughly as much (or more) RF from the tower as from a WiFi point. Now factor in all the other sources (satellites, microwave ovens, walkie-talkies, nearby cellphones, communcication towers, police radio, pagers, regular radio and so on). Obviously, a single wifi point does not matter much.
I had two Western Digital drives (100 and 120 gigs), one IBM drive (45 gigs), and one Maxtor drive (20 gigs) fail on me in the last year or two. That's out of maybe 10 hard drives installed in my home machines. All except the Maxtor were still under warranty. The two WD drives were fairly new. I usually have one small fan for each hard disk -- they run very cool. I do not abuse my drives physically, although I do use them quite heavily (on 24/7). All of these were fairly average 7200 RPM desktop drives. Draw your own conclusions.
Not exactly. Many people, particularly older people, will give in to high-pressure sales calls and eventually say "YES". That's where most of the money is made -- people may not need or want to replace their windows, roof, or siding, but they will do so due to the intimidating sales tactics. Cheaper things are even easier to sell like this -- a newspaper subscription or some random piece of junk is not very hard to sell like this.
Just wait till your hard drive crashes one day. CDs and DVDs are HELL of a lot more reliable than a 40+GB hard drive. I've never seen a CD or DVD disintegrate unless it was abused, but the life of a hard drive is measured in months. Most fail after 2-4 years. If carried around - much, much sooner.
They are allowing everyone to use the bandwith for legitimate purposes.
Not really. As a rule, IT should not meddle with anything that only involves downloading. That can be done much more easily -- shut off major consumers of uplink bandwidth, firewall kazaa upload traffic, use something like PacketHound to block uploads, and so on. In no case should they actively portscan and automatically block computers.
Most require? I haven't been to college in a good number of years, but that seems like a big load of crap to me.
I haven't done an extensive survey, but all of the universities I applied to (such as UIUC) had such a policy. Sure, they sometimes make exceptions (if you live with your parents, are married, have children, have disabilities that the university cannot accomodate and have a doctor's letter saying so, are over 21, and so on). As for widespreadness, a quick google search shows that such policies are rather common, especially at public institutions.
You think that Universities really care about not having people in the dorms?
Hell yes. Most universities require freshmen and even sophomores to live in the dorms citing various "campus involvement" aspects of university-run housing. The price of a dorm room (anywhere from $5k to $10k a year for a crappy double room) generally makes the real intent behind such policies crystal-clear.
Besides, if a university routinely does things that piss off the student body, there's a good chance that the university should be avoided. If you pay a shitload of money to the institution, it better damn well make sure that you receive what you are paying for. If their IT services do not give a shit about students, then chances are good that nobody else does, either.
It would be like trying to aim in Quake through a thick viscus fluid.
In that case, how the hell would anyone be able to actually aim? This is the stupidest thing I have ever heard.
If a human can do something in a game (such as aim), you can write a program to do it. If you have access to the game's internals, this task becomes easy. In any case, you would be able to write an aimbot that shoots more accurately than the best human player out there.
CD-keys are easy to reverse-engineer without the source. There have been keygens created for every game that uses one. However, these are useless for online play because the odds of hitting a key that has been issued but is not yet registered are very, very low.
You can't write a game that is impossible to cheat in. Cheating usually involves stuff like transparent walls, knowing where the enemies are, getting extra crap, et cetera. Most of this is on the client side, and you can't put it all on the server. So, the only means of cheating prevention is security through obscurity. But then, most security is like that.
Just for the record: buying candy-coated, largely proprietary, overpriced computers from Apple does not make you a l33t h4x0r, cool, or attractive. Grow the fuck up. You sound like you're 14 years old. Is that a pretty good guess of your age?
Just for the record, there were hard disk players YEARS before apple came out with their overpriced candy-coated models. What is wrong with you fucked-up apple-cock-sucking zealots?
I know that aquarium enthusiasts hate chlorine. My point was that there isn't an organized lobby around it like there is around flouride. There's a reason the flouride present in water doesn't kill fish but chlorine does. The flouride is present in fairly small amounts. 1ppm is not a whole lot. In my city, chlorine is present in about twice that concentration, and the maximum permissible level is higher. This stuff is about equally poisonous as fluoride -- it's basically the same chemical as chlorine bleach.
My opinion: there is something more behind the fluoride lobby than meets the eye. Don't know what that would be, unfortunately.
Yes, and by reading this post you agree to let me use your credit card and have sex with your girlfriend. Furthermore, you have just agreed to buy me a new Ferrari. If you keep on reading, you will also have to give up your first-born child.
If you want good teeth, don't eat sugar. flouride doesn't come into it.
The amount of sugar you eat affects your teeth very little. I eat tons, and I haven't had a cavity in a while. Now, before I moved to the US and started drinking flouridated water, I used to get them all the freaking time. So I do think flouride makes a difference.
Oh yeah, and here's another bit of news for you. Water companies actually add chlorine and sometimes ammonia in significantly greater concentrations than fluoride. Chlorine is from the same chemical group as flouride and is about as poisonous. Yet I haven't seen a single complaint about chlorination.
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The server-side stuff is all reasonably stable. Mandrake also does some nice optimizations that other distros don't.
You don't _need_ to spend $2000 on speakers to get audiophile-quality equipment. There are plenty of high-quality speakers that cost less than $200 each. They won't be the best, but they'll be better for playing music than one of those 5.1 surround systems. The same applies to most other gear. Whether you need a hi-fi system or not is another question, however. Not all music requires a hi-fi system; in fact, some recordings might actually sound worse due to their defects being exposed.
Coffee is _supposed_ to be boiling hot when served, you fuckwad. Now, perhaps it shouldn't have been served in a styrofoam cup, but the woman was holding it in her crotch when she spilled it. That, my friend, is pure idiocy. Why is that so hard to understand?
There are several reasons. Today's computers have plenty of disk space and memory. Doesn't really matter if 50 icons take up 25 MB or 30MB. In either case, it's a very high-level format, and even rather complex images should fit in much less space than an equivalent PNG or GIF. ASCII formats are easier to handle with fewer bugs. The fact that it's XML means the system can simply use a single library to handle parsing, which means fewer bugs, security holes, and so on. SVG can easily be stored in a database, encapsulated inside other XML, HTML, and even text documents. Hell, you can print it out on a piece of paper and actually read the image elements. Finally, it's future-proof. You could actually scribble it on some clay tablets and be able to figure it out 2000 years down the road.
If you want to see why a binary format is bad, just look at SWF (Macromedia flash). Only one vendor has non-half-assed support for this open standard, and that's Macromedia.
2.4GHz microwave radiation causes water molecules to resonate (I can't remember whether it's the bond angle or length at this frequency - this is how microwave ovens work, I digress)
The fact that water molecules resonate at this frequency is absolutely irrelevant. All this means is that RF at this frequency will heat water. A microwave oven uses thousands of watts of power to do that -- at close range. A Wifi transmitter uses less than a watt, and is farther away. Clearly, the heating effect from that is absolutely negligible. There are no other special characteristics associated with 2.4GHz.
We humans are mainly water. Hence microwaves _at_the_right_frequency_ have an effect on our molecules too.
Sure it does. It might even heat up the water molecules a millionth of a degree, if you're lucky. But could that cause any negative effects? I think not.
The only molecules in your body which really matter are DNA molecules. Unless 2.4 GHz happens to also damage those, as well, you have nothing to worry about. And it is highly unlikely that a huge polymer molecule like DNA will resonate at the same frequency as water.
A wifi network is pervasive and always on. Would you sit your child in front of a working microwave oven all day?
Nice argument. If you jump into a vat of boiling water, you will die. So don't ever swim in the pool.
A microwave oven generates emissions orders of magnitude above wi-fi, even with all the shielding in place. And there have been ZERO negative health effects associated with that.
The SMTP protocol does not allow this; once a mail server has agreed to accept a message, it MUST accept the ENTIRE message.
In that case, how can an SMTP server refuse large attachments like many of them do?
Apple really has a loser here. They are no longer dealing with Mac users, who would rather pay $500 than think 10% harder. Who in their right mind would pay 99 cents for a song encoded at a paltry 128k in some weird format? Only Apple zealots, who already buy hardware that is both slower and more expensive than common PC hardware. PC users are smarter and will simply use KaZaA.
Why is he so surprised he is being sued? Breaking the law is a serious matter, and he knew that perfectly well. I don't think there are any excuses. The pirate asshole is just trying to profit off of others' hard work that they put into creating the copy protected CDs.
If your cellphone functions inside the house, you are getting roughly as much (or more) RF from the tower as from a WiFi point. Now factor in all the other sources (satellites, microwave ovens, walkie-talkies, nearby cellphones, communcication towers, police radio, pagers, regular radio and so on). Obviously, a single wifi point does not matter much.
I had two Western Digital drives (100 and 120 gigs), one IBM drive (45 gigs), and one Maxtor drive (20 gigs) fail on me in the last year or two. That's out of maybe 10 hard drives installed in my home machines. All except the Maxtor were still under warranty. The two WD drives were fairly new. I usually have one small fan for each hard disk -- they run very cool. I do not abuse my drives physically, although I do use them quite heavily (on 24/7). All of these were fairly average 7200 RPM desktop drives. Draw your own conclusions.
Not exactly. Many people, particularly older people, will give in to high-pressure sales calls and eventually say "YES". That's where most of the money is made -- people may not need or want to replace their windows, roof, or siding, but they will do so due to the intimidating sales tactics. Cheaper things are even easier to sell like this -- a newspaper subscription or some random piece of junk is not very hard to sell like this.
Nothing[1] you can do can block this number from being delivered.
Use a payphone and/or some other public phone.
Just wait till your hard drive crashes one day. CDs and DVDs are HELL of a lot more reliable than a 40+GB hard drive. I've never seen a CD or DVD disintegrate unless it was abused, but the life of a hard drive is measured in months. Most fail after 2-4 years. If carried around - much, much sooner.
They are allowing everyone to use the bandwith for legitimate purposes.
Not really. As a rule, IT should not meddle with anything that only involves downloading. That can be done much more easily -- shut off major consumers of uplink bandwidth, firewall kazaa upload traffic, use something like PacketHound to block uploads, and so on. In no case should they actively portscan and automatically block computers.
Most require? I haven't been to college in a good number of years, but that seems like a big load of crap to me.
I haven't done an extensive survey, but all of the universities I applied to (such as UIUC) had such a policy. Sure, they sometimes make exceptions (if you live with your parents, are married, have children, have disabilities that the university cannot accomodate and have a doctor's letter saying so, are over 21, and so on). As for widespreadness, a quick google search shows that such policies are rather common, especially at public institutions.
You think that Universities really care about not having people in the dorms?
Hell yes. Most universities require freshmen and even sophomores to live in the dorms citing various "campus involvement" aspects of university-run housing. The price of a dorm room (anywhere from $5k to $10k a year for a crappy double room) generally makes the real intent behind such policies crystal-clear.
Besides, if a university routinely does things that piss off the student body, there's a good chance that the university should be avoided. If you pay a shitload of money to the institution, it better damn well make sure that you receive what you are paying for. If their IT services do not give a shit about students, then chances are good that nobody else does, either.
It would be like trying to aim in Quake through a thick viscus fluid.
In that case, how the hell would anyone be able to actually aim? This is the stupidest thing I have ever heard.
If a human can do something in a game (such as aim), you can write a program to do it. If you have access to the game's internals, this task becomes easy. In any case, you would be able to write an aimbot that shoots more accurately than the best human player out there.
CD-keys are easy to reverse-engineer without the source. There have been keygens created for every game that uses one. However, these are useless for online play because the odds of hitting a key that has been issued but is not yet registered are very, very low.
You can't write a game that is impossible to cheat in. Cheating usually involves stuff like transparent walls, knowing where the enemies are, getting extra crap, et cetera. Most of this is on the client side, and you can't put it all on the server. So, the only means of cheating prevention is security through obscurity. But then, most security is like that.
Is this a troll or are you just a retarded assmonkey? It's hard to tell, there are too many retarded assclowns running around Slashdot these days.
Just for the record: buying candy-coated, largely proprietary, overpriced computers from Apple does not make you a l33t h4x0r, cool, or attractive. Grow the fuck up. You sound like you're 14 years old. Is that a pretty good guess of your age?
Just for the record, there were hard disk players YEARS before apple came out with their overpriced candy-coated models. What is wrong with you fucked-up apple-cock-sucking zealots?
I know that aquarium enthusiasts hate chlorine. My point was that there isn't an organized lobby around it like there is around flouride. There's a reason the flouride present in water doesn't kill fish but chlorine does. The flouride is present in fairly small amounts. 1ppm is not a whole lot. In my city, chlorine is present in about twice that concentration, and the maximum permissible level is higher. This stuff is about equally poisonous as fluoride -- it's basically the same chemical as chlorine bleach.
My opinion: there is something more behind the fluoride lobby than meets the eye. Don't know what that would be, unfortunately.
Yes, and by reading this post you agree to let me use your credit card and have sex with your girlfriend. Furthermore, you have just agreed to buy me a new Ferrari. If you keep on reading, you will also have to give up your first-born child.
If you want good teeth, don't eat sugar. flouride doesn't come into it.
The amount of sugar you eat affects your teeth very little. I eat tons, and I haven't had a cavity in a while. Now, before I moved to the US and started drinking flouridated water, I used to get them all the freaking time. So I do think flouride makes a difference.
Oh yeah, and here's another bit of news for you. Water companies actually add chlorine and sometimes ammonia in significantly greater concentrations than fluoride. Chlorine is from the same chemical group as flouride and is about as poisonous. Yet I haven't seen a single complaint about chlorination.