There is (was?) a pay-restroom right by the western end of the Charles Bridge in Prague, presumably to fleece the high volume of crossing foreign tourists. You pay the big beefy man sitting at the window, he hands you a few squares of toilet paper, and gives you a big thumbs up and a "Good luck!" What service. Ah, free enterprise.
Yeah, definitely not cool from the standpoint of visitors, but still highly amusing.
I've used vob2mpg, etc, in the past. However, I like the MKV format, and for my application, MKV is fine as the prime (really, only) use is from a home theater PC. MakeMKV was a simple, easy to use solution that just worked. If I want to put a movie on my phone, I'd shrink it anyway, so I'd convert it to MP4 at that time. (Likewise, it is simple to rip an HD disc to MKV, then Handbrake* it to a smaller h.264 MKV.)
As an aside, I've have TONS of issues with MP4 -- compatibility, non-seeking files, invalid streams -- and none with MKV. My BluRay player supports MKV too, for that matter.
I wanted a home theater PC with instant-access to all of my films. My solution was as follows:
(a) Rip all discs to hard drive, (b) Index and link to files with software solution
In detail: (a) I chose to go with MakeMKV for most of my ripping. It rips the mpeg2/4 video directly to an mkv file, without reencoding, and you can choose all the tracks you want to go with it. (I.e., some titles I rip multiple audio streams and subtitles, some I take just English 2.0). For me, I just ripped the main title from each film; if I want to see the special features later, I'll take the box down off the shelf and pop the disk in. (Special features don't really matter to me that much.) Each rip averages 3 to 6Gb. Now MKV, while a great file format, isn't compatible with some (especially older) consumer electronics. You can always re-encode, if you really need to make a particular title portable. And for my Blu Ray / HD-DVD titles, I re-encoded anyway. I found a 1080P 6Gb-target-size h.264 two-pass re-encode to be indistinguishable on my 52" TV from the original. In fact, it's probably quite a bit of overkill.
For storage, I have a couple of 3Tb drives in an external enclosure, with a duplicate unit for backup. (Got them for a song before the manic price gouging going on now started!.) So far, it's holding over 500 titles and several TV series, and plenty of room to grow. And I can always increase capacity.
(b) For keeping track of everything, I eventually went with Collectorz.com Movie Collector. I've tried many solutions, both free and payware, and Movie Collector was the one that fit my needs the best. (There is a lot of good software out there -- look around!) As I ripped my collection in my spare time, I simply scanned in the UPC on the back of each film using an old CueCat barcode scanner. The software then populates all of the data for the film. Once the film was ripped, I simply linked the title in Movie Collector to the video file on the hard drives. Now I can visually browse my entire collection and watch any title at the click of a mouse. And it's nice to be able to go, "Hey, how many Humphrey Bogart movies do I own?" and find out with a simple filter.
What worked for me might or might not fit your needs, but hopefully it gives you ideas.
The EU Treaty establishes four fundamental "internal market freedoms" which are the free movement of goods, services, people, and capital within the EU, without regard to national borders.
Article 28 of the Treaty affirmatively prohibits "quantitative restrictions" on trade. The court in du Roi (Procureur du Roi v Dassonville (1974)) found a "quantitative restriction" to be anything "capable of hindering, directly or indirectly, actually or potentially, intra-community trade." That's a very broad definition.
Article 30 exempts "Industrial Property" -- so, patents as defined under the Paris Convention -- but not copyrights under the Berne convention. If I recall correctly, that argument had been tried, and the Court found that the distribution right under Berne was curtailed by the prohibition on artificial partitioning of the markets under the EU treaty.
So overall it's not hard to see why the court would find such an exclusivity agreement to a single nation to be invalid.
>> These days most employers have some boilerplate they hand out when you take a job that says they will do this if they feel it necessary. Really you should assume they monitoring you while you are on the job, if for no reason than protect themselves from things like that $2 billion loss UBS is stuck with. >>
The point is that these were government workers. Your constitutional rights trump most of what they would ask you to waive. And courts have said that, say, your fourth amendment right require informed consent to waive, which a blanket waiver cannot satisfy.
I should have clarified. Yes, I updated the firmware when the issue became known and never experienced problems before or after, until now. I've run across threads mentioning that the first firmware released to correct the issue...didn't. Perhaps I nabbed that one without realizing it.
1.That's what backups are for. 2. I think that Seagate will fix it for you so that the data is recovered.
1. The video on the drive hadn't been worked with to be backed up yet; this is an additional 1Tb of raw footage. I've got 2Tb of completed video with a 2Tb backup already. And a crapload of DVDs padded by DVDisaster. I'm pretty serious about backups. 2. IF my issue was with the publicized bug, I've heard they offered free data recovery. If self-recovery doesn't work, I'll end up putting in a warranty claim and hoping its covered. Otherwise, it could be $300-500+, which I'd probably not pay. It'd just be a reaaaaaal pain to redo the recordings.
The bug is that if the pointer to the current log entry is evenly divisible by 64 (or some magic number like that), the powerup selftest code crashes and the drive never completes selftest.
Yeah, I remember reading a thread on./ at the time from one of the Seagate engineers. I think it was something like, if the drive wrote a 360th log entry, but then powered off before writing the 361st, it got stuck. I created worse issues in assembly programming in college a decade ago, but thankfully my mistakes didn't make it to production. D'oh.
I've got a spliceable USB cable arriving tomorrow, so we'll see how it goes. Fingers crossed.
I have one of the Seagate 7200.11 drives I bought in Sept 2009 that had the firmware issue at launch. Never experienced any problem with it myself, always passed all tests, and SMART status was great. Night before last, it disappeared under Windows. I shut down, checked the cables, rebooted and...failed SMART on boot. I should have done some more testing then, but I rebooted to run a disk scanner (Ultimate Boot CD - hightly recommend keeping a burn around) and it stopped being detected by bios. That quick - no warning, nothing.
The disk spins up to speed, then clicks several times before spinning down. After much looking, I found several people who'd had a similar issue and were able to resolve it via the serial interface, so I have some test tools and cables on the way. Hopefully I can get it reset and accessible again.
It's still under warranty (5 years, thank god), but I want the DATA on the blasted thing and don't want to spend 10x its cost. I have redundant copies of the important stuff (family photos, genealogy research, documents, music), but have probably 60 hours of old family 8mm & VHS recordings on there I hadn't gotten time to go through yet.
It doesn't surprise me much. I went to school from EE & CmpE, but the department had absorbed the CS program and I knew/worked with most of those students as well. I would say that 50% of the CS grads were one-trick ponies. They could hack together a program in MFC and that was it. They've probably gone on to be managers:-) Day to day IT work (building computers, installing software, setting up networks, etc) is not taught in a CS program -- it is IT, not CS, after all -- but one does kind of expect people in the CS field to at least have a minimal IT competence, right?
There were, of course, a few CS people I thought very highly of and would hire in a minute, including a guy who I would definitely hire if I ever wanted to knock over the world's banks. (Seems like there is always one brilliant and misguided computer hacker in every class.) On the other hand, there were definitely some class anchors. One guy I remember asking me a question that floored me. Bear in mind, this came from a senior CS major, final semester, in an advanced compilers class. "I just read the project assignment but...what's a command prompt?" Really. He wasn't faking. He'd never done any programming in anything but a GUI, never done any manual debugging, and had only ever owned a Mac.
I changed gears for grad school (physics / nuclear) and then law school, but I always loved the low-level CS/CmpE stuff. Chip design, assembly programming (barring the x86 instruction set - blech), electronics/software interfacing. Kind of miss it, especially when I get some cool project idea in my head and have zero equipment to implement it with.
There is an amusing-yet-horridly-terrifying story about one of Fermi's fission experiments, which took place underneath a football field at the University of Chicago, early in the war. Now, at that time, fission was only a theoretical proposition; nobody really knew what would happen when a sustainable reaction began. (E.g., some people thought they would set the atmosphere on fire.)
The experiment that day involved the gathering together of the first critical mass of fissile material -- literally a pile of uranium and graphite blocks. To control the reaction, Fermi had a cadmium rod dangling from a rope over a pulley (and an automatic safety rod too, to be fair, that they didn't know would work). When the reaction hit the point of being self-sustaining, one of his colleagues would take an axe and chop the rope, dropping the control rod back in place to absorb the excess neutrons and halt the reaction before it was too late.
Growing up in Ohio, some of the pronunciations for local places are horrible.
The first are mostly just anglicizations. Not awful, but sometimes quaint, odd, and hickish. There are a lot more that I'm forgetting. Lima - "LYE-muh". Ravenna - "Ruh-VEN-nuh" Medina - "Meh-DYE-nuh" Berlin - "BER-lin' " Milan - "MYE-lin' Vienna - "VYE-en-nah" Bellefontaine - "Bell Fountin' " Ack.
Then they just get really bad and annoying.
Nevada - "Nuh-VAY-duh". Really. And most locals pronounce the state Nuh-vah-da or Nuh-vad-ah, so what gives? Mantua - "MAN-uh-way." The Italians are laughing and Shakespeare must be turning in his grave. Versailles - "Vur-SAILS" Ugh.
They'll just get you like Al Capone. You didn't pay taxes on your illegal activities? Well, we can't imprison you for murder, racketeering, gambling, and bootlegging, but any money you didn't report as coming from those activities? BAM! Prison for tax evasion.
Good god, I hated professors who did that, who told us to "sit and listen" because there was no need to take notes, they were already provided. It isn't even just that the slides provided where often terrible; it has to do with my personal style of learning. The very act of writing down lecture notes -- which for me involves summarizing, synthesizing, and integrating the subject matter being discussed -- is how I learn. I will probably never again look at what I wrote down either.
This was especially true for me in engineering or physics. Working my way through complex equations was the only way to really understand them; it was ten times harder to try to follow pre-printed steps for me. In law school, I would write analytical summaries of the material I had heard or read to retain knowledge. Worked fine.
And while I think it would have been just awful for taking notes in engineering (with all of the equations, diagrams, etc), the laptop was a godesend for the massive volume of notes taken during law school. I seriously wonder how many trees are slaughtered at the end of every semester when people print out their notes to prepare for finals. Most classes, I ended up with 50-150 pages of dense typewritten notes. While I didn't print those out like some did -- as I noted, I usually never look at my notes again -- I would still create and print out a 5-20 page outline of the essentials to study for each of my classes.
A large part of opinion on this really comes down to how the student learns, I think. For me, I learn best by listening to a lecture, writing it down (which includes thinking about the material and summarizing / synthesizing it), and then never looking at my notes again. It's the act of writing / transferring it that works for me; the actual notes are superfluous for me afterwards. It about killed me when a professor who was big into powerpoint would quickly flip through densely packed slides -- I just couldn't absorb it and telling me not to take notes, that they were available to print out, didn't cut it. I had a couple of rough classes where the material itself wasn't bad, but I could have learned the same material in a class hour listening and notetaking that actually took me 4-5 hours to muddle through slides instead. (My undergraduate was in physics, EE, CS).
Some people, on the other hand, learned best by reading and repetition and I suppose this would work for them. Not me. Even in law school, with its horrifying amount of reading, it was the oral lectures and notetaking that cemented the material for me.
I like lots of light. Bright-sunny-day kind of light, especially in the bleak middle of a grey winter. I took the three lamps in my room with 100w incandescent bulbs and replaced them... with three 105w CFLs. I had to special order them online, since I have yet to see a Home Depot/Lowes/Walmart/Target/etc with anything close.
They're big suckers, but they fit a standard socket, use basically the same amount of energy, and they give me almost 1600-incandescent-watt equivalent of light (21,000 lumens). Great way to wake up in the early morning.
This is a good place for it, so I'm going to be the shill and plug the new iPhone app my friend helped develop for his company. It interfaces with that company's product line for complete home automation. Lighting control, home theatre control, video & security equipment, climate control, you name it. Their prices place their product in the luxury category, in my opinion, but it's a great start -- and the end result is pretty sweet.
I still stick to my 15 year old X10 equipment, a home theatre PC, and some apps I developed awhile pack, but if you've got the funds, I recommend checking them out. When they were testing their iPhone app, it got a lot of previously uninterested people a lot more interested:-)
Well, I happened to be by my local CC yesterday and went in to see what they had left. Very little, but I did get some deals. Today they were selling off all of their racks, shelves, etc.
I got: Two toner cartridges for my laser printer @ $14 each. A PCMCIA USB port for my laptop with broken USB @ $3 Several DVD-R DL disks for $0.40 each.
On the one hand it is said that they are gone, because there is basically no competition hereabouts (unless I want to drive 70 miles to Best Buy), but on the other hand, it took a 90% discount to get me to buy from them.
Something may be considered obscene only if all three apply:
(1) The average person, applying contemporary community [local] standards, would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest
(2) The work depicts or describes sexual conduct in a patently offensive way [specifically defined by applicable state law];
(3) the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value. [This branch of the test is based on national, not local, standards.]
~ ~ ~
Profanity is something else entirely. It is going to be covered by the 1st amendment. See Cohen v. California (Supreme Court said that the message "F*CK the Draft" in big letters on the back of a man's jacket was constitutionally protected political speech.)
Justice Harlan's arguments can be constructed in three major points: First, states (California) cannot censor their citizens in order to make a "civil" society. Second, knowing where to draw the line between harmless heightened emotion and vulgarity can be difficult. Thirdly, people bring passion to politics and vulgarity is simply a side effect of a free exchange of ideasâ"no matter how radical they may be. --wikipedia
Basically, if South Carolina's law could conceivably be applied to censor such speech (which, duh, it certainly can) then it will be unconstitutional for broadness, among other things. If this thing somehow miraculously makes it into law, the Federal Courts will not take kindly to it.
Incidentally, I used to only do occasional backups of my data until I had a major loss of some (thankfully) non-essential files. I healthy dose of paranoia and a modest investment of time & money should safeguard my data for a long time to come now.
For my valuable data (documents, family pictures, etc) I keep (a) the originals on my hard drive (b) a second set on another, offsite computer (c) a third set on an external RAID-0 array, which I power up only when in use, and (d) a bi-annual DVD backup on quality media with lots of error correction
I used to keep all sorts of parity data for the DVD media (QuickPar, etc), but recently discovered a program called DVDisaster which actually lets you augment the ISO/filesystem of the DVD itself with the redundant data. I typically archive 2Gb of files with 2 to 2.4Gb of error correction data per disk. I figure that should give me a hefty boost in reliability, especially if I follow good DVD storage practices.
Obviously, also keep a copy of the DVDisaster program handy. It's open-source GPLv2 and multi-platform. I include it in each ISO.
Low security (1) Write down all of your passwords/accounts and seal them in an envelope with instructions on what to do with them. You can put this in a safe, a safety deposit box, or even leave it with your attorney/trusted friend/trustee/named executor.
Higher Security (2) Encrypt your data. Put it in a secure location, like a safety deposit box. Give the password/cipher-key to the trusted person you want to take care of things, along with instructions on how to retrieve the information and what to do with it. When you die, they get the key to your safety deposit box, either from you, or your attorney/trustee.
Estate planning doesn't have to be difficult or complex. While I don't recommend it, you can create a simple revocable trust in a couple of paragraphs yourself that takes care of 99% of what you want to do. Consult an attorney to find out what your options are - you don't have to spend a fortune.
I'd also like to chime in about RAID 5. Since most people use it as a cheap backup solution, they often set it up with a minimum number of drives, such as 3 (2 data, 1 striping/redundant). Don't forget that there are other ways to set it up! You could do 2 data, 4 redundant, and 2 hot-swap (just waiting for a failure to come online) or many other combos. RAID 5 can be fast, safe, and best of all very flexible.
In the USA, "freedom to contract" tends to trump. However, you generally can't contract out of criminal laws, nor laws passed under the auspices of a state's general police powers (health, public welfare & safety, etc.) This might be valid as a waiver of a statutorily created right (I mean, you can even waive many constitutional rights), but I'd certainly argue it being unconscionable. Uneven bargaining power, the reason they ask you to waive it in the first place (entirely to their benefit, against an apparent legislative preference), the relative sophistication of the consumer and the inability to make an informed decision, the conspicuousness of such a clause, etc, etc, etc.
>>Hedy Lamer is famous for being the woman who more or less invented and patented an early form of CDMA in 1940. Hedy Lamarr, actually. Wow, cool. I'm a huge aficionado of classic film and I never knew that about her. Would that other actors actually contributed something worthwhile to society (or at least *realized* that they aren't.)
Jerry O'Connell's recent spoof of Tom Cruise was priceless in that respect:-)
"It's a great privilege to be an actor, because you know that... you really are of no help to anyone."
A treaty Commitment under the WTO agreements basically means that you will permit market access by other WTO members to a particular good/service, and that you will treat it as you would your own good/service in your own country (National Treatment.)
The USA had a treaty Commitment under the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), which is one of the major WTO agreements stemming from the 1994 Uruguay Round of negotiations that created the WTO. Antigua argued, and a WTO panel and appeals body both agreed that the particular Commitment covered Gambling & Betting Services. The US before, during, and after all of the decisions against them refused to allow Antiguan gambling services into the United States, while arguably allowing similar activities to operate domestically. (Or at least being capricious about enforcement and refusing to clarify decades-old ambiguous legislation.)
Another WTO Agreement is the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights agreement (TRIPS), covering international copyrights, patents, etc. Because Antigua is so small and the USA is so big, normal damages seemed inadequate to stop the USA from continuing their WTO-defiant behavior. Antigua has the right to ask for variances in other related WTO agreements instead - although it is quite unusual, and has only been used one time before, and then only as a threat. So they said, "Hey - the US was and still is in violation of their WTO obligations. We would like relief in the form of a waiver of some of their WTO rights until they conform."
That's the really, really simplified version. There are a lot of other issues going on, especially definitional.
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There is (was?) a pay-restroom right by the western end of the Charles Bridge in Prague, presumably to fleece the high volume of crossing foreign tourists. You pay the big beefy man sitting at the window, he hands you a few squares of toilet paper, and gives you a big thumbs up and a "Good luck!" What service. Ah, free enterprise.
Yeah, definitely not cool from the standpoint of visitors, but still highly amusing.
I've used vob2mpg, etc, in the past. However, I like the MKV format, and for my application, MKV is fine as the prime (really, only) use is from a home theater PC. MakeMKV was a simple, easy to use solution that just worked. If I want to put a movie on my phone, I'd shrink it anyway, so I'd convert it to MP4 at that time. (Likewise, it is simple to rip an HD disc to MKV, then Handbrake* it to a smaller h.264 MKV.)
As an aside, I've have TONS of issues with MP4 -- compatibility, non-seeking files, invalid streams -- and none with MKV. My BluRay player supports MKV too, for that matter.
*VidCoder, actually. Less headache, more options.
I wanted a home theater PC with instant-access to all of my films. My solution was as follows:
(a) Rip all discs to hard drive,
(b) Index and link to files with software solution
In detail:
(a) I chose to go with MakeMKV for most of my ripping. It rips the mpeg2/4 video directly to an mkv file, without reencoding, and you can choose all the tracks you want to go with it. (I.e., some titles I rip multiple audio streams and subtitles, some I take just English 2.0). For me, I just ripped the main title from each film; if I want to see the special features later, I'll take the box down off the shelf and pop the disk in. (Special features don't really matter to me that much.) Each rip averages 3 to 6Gb. Now MKV, while a great file format, isn't compatible with some (especially older) consumer electronics. You can always re-encode, if you really need to make a particular title portable. And for my Blu Ray / HD-DVD titles, I re-encoded anyway. I found a 1080P 6Gb-target-size h.264 two-pass re-encode to be indistinguishable on my 52" TV from the original. In fact, it's probably quite a bit of overkill.
For storage, I have a couple of 3Tb drives in an external enclosure, with a duplicate unit for backup. (Got them for a song before the manic price gouging going on now started!.) So far, it's holding over 500 titles and several TV series, and plenty of room to grow. And I can always increase capacity.
(b) For keeping track of everything, I eventually went with Collectorz.com Movie Collector. I've tried many solutions, both free and payware, and Movie Collector was the one that fit my needs the best. (There is a lot of good software out there -- look around!) As I ripped my collection in my spare time, I simply scanned in the UPC on the back of each film using an old CueCat barcode scanner. The software then populates all of the data for the film. Once the film was ripped, I simply linked the title in Movie Collector to the video file on the hard drives. Now I can visually browse my entire collection and watch any title at the click of a mouse. And it's nice to be able to go, "Hey, how many Humphrey Bogart movies do I own?" and find out with a simple filter.
What worked for me might or might not fit your needs, but hopefully it gives you ideas.
Just to supply some more information:
The EU Treaty establishes four fundamental "internal market freedoms" which are the free movement of goods, services, people, and capital within the EU, without regard to national borders.
Article 28 of the Treaty affirmatively prohibits "quantitative restrictions" on trade. The court in du Roi (Procureur du Roi v Dassonville (1974)) found a "quantitative restriction" to be anything "capable of hindering, directly or indirectly, actually or potentially, intra-community trade." That's a very broad definition.
Article 30 exempts "Industrial Property" -- so, patents as defined under the Paris Convention -- but not copyrights under the Berne convention. If I recall correctly, that argument had been tried, and the Court found that the distribution right under Berne was curtailed by the prohibition on artificial partitioning of the markets under the EU treaty.
So overall it's not hard to see why the court would find such an exclusivity agreement to a single nation to be invalid.
>>
These days most employers have some boilerplate they hand out when you take a job that says they will do this if they feel it necessary. Really you should assume they monitoring you while you are on the job, if for no reason than protect themselves from things like that $2 billion loss UBS is stuck with.
>>
The point is that these were government workers. Your constitutional rights trump most of what they would ask you to waive. And courts have said that, say, your fourth amendment right require informed consent to waive, which a blanket waiver cannot satisfy.
I should have clarified. Yes, I updated the firmware when the issue became known and never experienced problems before or after, until now. I've run across threads mentioning that the first firmware released to correct the issue...didn't. Perhaps I nabbed that one without realizing it.
1. The video on the drive hadn't been worked with to be backed up yet; this is an additional 1Tb of raw footage. I've got 2Tb of completed video with a 2Tb backup already. And a crapload of DVDs padded by DVDisaster. I'm pretty serious about backups.
2. IF my issue was with the publicized bug, I've heard they offered free data recovery. If self-recovery doesn't work, I'll end up putting in a warranty claim and hoping its covered. Otherwise, it could be $300-500+, which I'd probably not pay. It'd just be a reaaaaaal pain to redo the recordings.
Yeah, I remember reading a thread on ./ at the time from one of the Seagate engineers. I think it was something like, if the drive wrote a 360th log entry, but then powered off before writing the 361st, it got stuck. I created worse issues in assembly programming in college a decade ago, but thankfully my mistakes didn't make it to production. D'oh.
I've got a spliceable USB cable arriving tomorrow, so we'll see how it goes. Fingers crossed.
I have one of the Seagate 7200.11 drives I bought in Sept 2009 that had the firmware issue at launch. Never experienced any problem with it myself, always passed all tests, and SMART status was great. Night before last, it disappeared under Windows. I shut down, checked the cables, rebooted and...failed SMART on boot. I should have done some more testing then, but I rebooted to run a disk scanner (Ultimate Boot CD - hightly recommend keeping a burn around) and it stopped being detected by bios. That quick - no warning, nothing.
The disk spins up to speed, then clicks several times before spinning down. After much looking, I found several people who'd had a similar issue and were able to resolve it via the serial interface, so I have some test tools and cables on the way. Hopefully I can get it reset and accessible again.
It's still under warranty (5 years, thank god), but I want the DATA on the blasted thing and don't want to spend 10x its cost. I have redundant copies of the important stuff (family photos, genealogy research, documents, music), but have probably 60 hours of old family 8mm & VHS recordings on there I hadn't gotten time to go through yet.
Fun, useless fact of the day: :-)
There's an old English unit called the Pottle that is two quarts.
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pottle
It doesn't surprise me much. I went to school from EE & CmpE, but the department had absorbed the CS program and I knew/worked with most of those students as well. I would say that 50% of the CS grads were one-trick ponies. They could hack together a program in MFC and that was it. They've probably gone on to be managers :-) Day to day IT work (building computers, installing software, setting up networks, etc) is not taught in a CS program -- it is IT, not CS, after all -- but one does kind of expect people in the CS field to at least have a minimal IT competence, right?
There were, of course, a few CS people I thought very highly of and would hire in a minute, including a guy who I would definitely hire if I ever wanted to knock over the world's banks. (Seems like there is always one brilliant and misguided computer hacker in every class.) On the other hand, there were definitely some class anchors. One guy I remember asking me a question that floored me. Bear in mind, this came from a senior CS major, final semester, in an advanced compilers class. "I just read the project assignment but...what's a command prompt?" Really. He wasn't faking. He'd never done any programming in anything but a GUI, never done any manual debugging, and had only ever owned a Mac.
I changed gears for grad school (physics / nuclear) and then law school, but I always loved the low-level CS/CmpE stuff. Chip design, assembly programming (barring the x86 instruction set - blech), electronics/software interfacing. Kind of miss it, especially when I get some cool project idea in my head and have zero equipment to implement it with.
There is an amusing-yet-horridly-terrifying story about one of Fermi's fission experiments, which took place underneath a football field at the University of Chicago, early in the war. Now, at that time, fission was only a theoretical proposition; nobody really knew what would happen when a sustainable reaction began. (E.g., some people thought they would set the atmosphere on fire.)
The experiment that day involved the gathering together of the first critical mass of fissile material -- literally a pile of uranium and graphite blocks. To control the reaction, Fermi had a cadmium rod dangling from a rope over a pulley (and an automatic safety rod too, to be fair, that they didn't know would work). When the reaction hit the point of being self-sustaining, one of his colleagues would take an axe and chop the rope, dropping the control rod back in place to absorb the excess neutrons and halt the reaction before it was too late.
It's a fun read. "The First Atomic Pile"
Growing up in Ohio, some of the pronunciations for local places are horrible.
The first are mostly just anglicizations. Not awful, but sometimes quaint, odd, and hickish. There are a lot more that I'm forgetting.
Lima - "LYE-muh".
Ravenna - "Ruh-VEN-nuh"
Medina - "Meh-DYE-nuh"
Berlin - "BER-lin' "
Milan - "MYE-lin'
Vienna - "VYE-en-nah"
Bellefontaine - "Bell Fountin' " Ack.
Then they just get really bad and annoying.
Nevada - "Nuh-VAY-duh". Really. And most locals pronounce the state Nuh-vah-da or Nuh-vad-ah, so what gives?
Mantua - "MAN-uh-way." The Italians are laughing and Shakespeare must be turning in his grave.
Versailles - "Vur-SAILS" Ugh.
They'll just get you like Al Capone. You didn't pay taxes on your illegal activities? Well, we can't imprison you for murder, racketeering, gambling, and bootlegging, but any money you didn't report as coming from those activities? BAM! Prison for tax evasion.
Good god, I hated professors who did that, who told us to "sit and listen" because there was no need to take notes, they were already provided. It isn't even just that the slides provided where often terrible; it has to do with my personal style of learning. The very act of writing down lecture notes -- which for me involves summarizing, synthesizing, and integrating the subject matter being discussed -- is how I learn. I will probably never again look at what I wrote down either.
This was especially true for me in engineering or physics. Working my way through complex equations was the only way to really understand them; it was ten times harder to try to follow pre-printed steps for me. In law school, I would write analytical summaries of the material I had heard or read to retain knowledge. Worked fine.
And while I think it would have been just awful for taking notes in engineering (with all of the equations, diagrams, etc), the laptop was a godesend for the massive volume of notes taken during law school. I seriously wonder how many trees are slaughtered at the end of every semester when people print out their notes to prepare for finals. Most classes, I ended up with 50-150 pages of dense typewritten notes. While I didn't print those out like some did -- as I noted, I usually never look at my notes again -- I would still create and print out a 5-20 page outline of the essentials to study for each of my classes.
A large part of opinion on this really comes down to how the student learns, I think. For me, I learn best by listening to a lecture, writing it down (which includes thinking about the material and summarizing / synthesizing it), and then never looking at my notes again. It's the act of writing / transferring it that works for me; the actual notes are superfluous for me afterwards. It about killed me when a professor who was big into powerpoint would quickly flip through densely packed slides -- I just couldn't absorb it and telling me not to take notes, that they were available to print out, didn't cut it. I had a couple of rough classes where the material itself wasn't bad, but I could have learned the same material in a class hour listening and notetaking that actually took me 4-5 hours to muddle through slides instead. (My undergraduate was in physics, EE, CS).
Some people, on the other hand, learned best by reading and repetition and I suppose this would work for them. Not me. Even in law school, with its horrifying amount of reading, it was the oral lectures and notetaking that cemented the material for me.
I like lots of light. Bright-sunny-day kind of light, especially in the bleak middle of a grey winter. I took the three lamps in my room with 100w incandescent bulbs and replaced them... with three 105w CFLs. I had to special order them online, since I have yet to see a Home Depot/Lowes/Walmart/Target/etc with anything close.
They're big suckers, but they fit a standard socket, use basically the same amount of energy, and they give me almost 1600-incandescent-watt equivalent of light (21,000 lumens). Great way to wake up in the early morning.
http://apps.life-ware.com/iclient/
This is a good place for it, so I'm going to be the shill and plug the new iPhone app my friend helped develop for his company. It interfaces with that company's product line for complete home automation. Lighting control, home theatre control, video & security equipment, climate control, you name it. Their prices place their product in the luxury category, in my opinion, but it's a great start -- and the end result is pretty sweet.
I still stick to my 15 year old X10 equipment, a home theatre PC, and some apps I developed awhile pack, but if you've got the funds, I recommend checking them out. When they were testing their iPhone app, it got a lot of previously uninterested people a lot more interested :-)
Well, I happened to be by my local CC yesterday and went in to see what they had left. Very little, but I did get some deals. Today they were selling off all of their racks, shelves, etc.
I got:
Two toner cartridges for my laser printer @ $14 each.
A PCMCIA USB port for my laptop with broken USB @ $3
Several DVD-R DL disks for $0.40 each.
On the one hand it is said that they are gone, because there is basically no competition hereabouts (unless I want to drive 70 miles to Best Buy), but on the other hand, it took a 90% discount to get me to buy from them.
Not quite. We're a common law nation and the courts have defined what obscenity is. Sort of. And it isn't what you probably think.
The Miller Test
Something may be considered obscene only if all three apply:
(1) The average person, applying contemporary community [local] standards, would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest
(2) The work depicts or describes sexual conduct in a patently offensive way [specifically defined by applicable state law];
(3) the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value. [This branch of the test is based on national, not local, standards.]
~ ~ ~
Profanity is something else entirely. It is going to be covered by the 1st amendment. See Cohen v. California (Supreme Court said that the message "F*CK the Draft" in big letters on the back of a man's jacket was constitutionally protected political speech.)
Justice Harlan's arguments can be constructed in three major points: First, states (California) cannot censor their citizens in order to make a "civil" society. Second, knowing where to draw the line between harmless heightened emotion and vulgarity can be difficult. Thirdly, people bring passion to politics and vulgarity is simply a side effect of a free exchange of ideasâ"no matter how radical they may be. --wikipedia
Basically, if South Carolina's law could conceivably be applied to censor such speech (which, duh, it certainly can) then it will be unconstitutional for broadness, among other things. If this thing somehow miraculously makes it into law, the Federal Courts will not take kindly to it.
Incidentally, I used to only do occasional backups of my data until I had a major loss of some (thankfully) non-essential files. I healthy dose of paranoia and a modest investment of time & money should safeguard my data for a long time to come now.
For my valuable data (documents, family pictures, etc) I keep
(a) the originals on my hard drive
(b) a second set on another, offsite computer
(c) a third set on an external RAID-0 array, which I power up only when in use, and
(d) a bi-annual DVD backup on quality media with lots of error correction
I used to keep all sorts of parity data for the DVD media (QuickPar, etc), but recently discovered a program called DVDisaster which actually lets you augment the ISO/filesystem of the DVD itself with the redundant data. I typically archive 2Gb of files with 2 to 2.4Gb of error correction data per disk. I figure that should give me a hefty boost in reliability, especially if I follow good DVD storage practices.
Obviously, also keep a copy of the DVDisaster program handy. It's open-source GPLv2 and multi-platform. I include it in each ISO.
There are any number of options.
Low security
(1) Write down all of your passwords/accounts and seal them in an envelope with instructions on what to do with them. You can put this in a safe, a safety deposit box, or even leave it with your attorney/trusted friend/trustee/named executor.
Higher Security
(2) Encrypt your data. Put it in a secure location, like a safety deposit box. Give the password/cipher-key to the trusted person you want to take care of things, along with instructions on how to retrieve the information and what to do with it. When you die, they get the key to your safety deposit box, either from you, or your attorney/trustee.
Estate planning doesn't have to be difficult or complex. While I don't recommend it, you can create a simple revocable trust in a couple of paragraphs yourself that takes care of 99% of what you want to do.
Consult an attorney to find out what your options are - you don't have to spend a fortune.
I'd also like to chime in about RAID 5. Since most people use it as a cheap backup solution, they often set it up with a minimum number of drives, such as 3 (2 data, 1 striping/redundant). Don't forget that there are other ways to set it up! You could do 2 data, 4 redundant, and 2 hot-swap (just waiting for a failure to come online) or many other combos. RAID 5 can be fast, safe, and best of all very flexible.
In the USA, "freedom to contract" tends to trump. However, you generally can't contract out of criminal laws, nor laws passed under the auspices of a state's general police powers (health, public welfare & safety, etc.) This might be valid as a waiver of a statutorily created right (I mean, you can even waive many constitutional rights), but I'd certainly argue it being unconscionable.
Uneven bargaining power, the reason they ask you to waive it in the first place (entirely to their benefit, against an apparent legislative preference), the relative sophistication of the consumer and the inability to make an informed decision, the conspicuousness of such a clause, etc, etc, etc.
>>Hedy Lamer is famous for being the woman who more or less invented and patented an early form of CDMA in 1940.
:-)
... you really are of no help to anyone."
Hedy Lamarr, actually. Wow, cool. I'm a huge aficionado of classic film and I never knew that about her. Would that other actors actually contributed something worthwhile to society (or at least *realized* that they aren't.)
Jerry O'Connell's recent spoof of Tom Cruise was priceless in that respect
"It's a great privilege to be an actor, because you know that
In Brief:
A treaty Commitment under the WTO agreements basically means that you will permit market access by other WTO members to a particular good/service, and that you will treat it as you would your own good/service in your own country (National Treatment.)
The USA had a treaty Commitment under the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), which is one of the major WTO agreements stemming from the 1994 Uruguay Round of negotiations that created the WTO. Antigua argued, and a WTO panel and appeals body both agreed that the particular Commitment covered Gambling & Betting Services. The US before, during, and after all of the decisions against them refused to allow Antiguan gambling services into the United States, while arguably allowing similar activities to operate domestically. (Or at least being capricious about enforcement and refusing to clarify decades-old ambiguous legislation.)
Another WTO Agreement is the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights agreement (TRIPS), covering international copyrights, patents, etc. Because Antigua is so small and the USA is so big, normal damages seemed inadequate to stop the USA from continuing their WTO-defiant behavior. Antigua has the right to ask for variances in other related WTO agreements instead - although it is quite unusual, and has only been used one time before, and then only as a threat. So they said, "Hey - the US was and still is in violation of their WTO obligations. We would like relief in the form of a waiver of some of their WTO rights until they conform."
That's the really, really simplified version. There are a lot of other issues going on, especially definitional.