Or setup a webpage that generates a random screen of characters including all characters you might use. If they logged mouse location, and even know the url to the page you used, it wont be the same, and unless they took screen shots or also timestamp and save the copy buffer, wont know what was actually used.
plastic tubing and a non-toxic, non-flammable liquid are used to overcome evaporation issues,
If it is truly sealed, there should never be any "evaporation issues," as there is no where for it to evaporate to. Being non-toxic, non-flammable has nothing to do with it, I can think of another very common non-flammable non-toxic (in most of its forms and uses) compound thats readily available but is NOT used specifically because it tends to boil at relatively low temps and low pressures: Dihydrogen monoxide. As for plastic tubing, what else are you going to make it from? Metal? You could, but most systems I have seen use clear PVC tubing, with florescent coolant and blacklights to add the "bling" effect. Copper piping would actually be more efficient (by allowing much higher pressure in the loop) and less likely to leak if done correctly, but would cost a bunch more due to the metals current pricing.
You can only use my tax money if I get to own it. Let one company own the last mile, and sell it to providers. No provider can own last mile, and no last mile company can provide access. It works for electricity in Houston...
I hope your "electricity in houston" bit is just sarcasm (see below)... While I agree that it would work for telecom stuff, using this model for other utilities like Electric, Gas, Water is just silly. They do the same for natural gas service in Atlanta. They hyped it up a bunch before it happened, the big de-regulation switch that would drastically reduce prices as different companies got to set their own rates and start a price war to get customers. The problem is, its one pipe, it can carry only one thing, indiscriminately, and you still have to pay the original Gas company that does own the pipes to maintain them. Basically what you get is a bunch of billing companies, that do little more than devise ways of creative billing. All the gas that goes through the pipe is the same, since they cant exactly route only "their" gas to your house. Oh, and that price drop they were saying it would bring? Right, prices went UP, way UP. Several companies have been sued, and there are lawsuits waiting for others even now about their shady practices. Electric is the same, its one set of wires, you either get it or you dont, and all the "different" companies would just be finding ways to creatively bill their customers, while still paying the same maintenance fees to the line owner. Check the bills before deregulation and after, in generic utilities like these, they almost always go UP once the govt removes their pricing regulations (Enron (a Houston based company) anyone?).
For telecom services, since they can specifically route their services to the endpoints directly, this would work much better. Rather than just re-billing (which some CLECs actually do anyway), companies can lease the circuits and paths through the networks to provide access to their customers on top of the last mile providers. In fact, this model is already in widespread use, specifically due to Telecom deregulation. DSL providers other than the LEC (AT&T) use this model (or a slight derivative, depending on how much the LEC does for them). The only diff would be to force AT&T to split again, and this time require them to split into a physical infrastructure company and a separate access/billing/services company, and force them to allow equal access to all (no preferential treatment to their "own" services), something I would definitely like to see.
Because the people are saving with their $99 for Internet/phone/cable deal!!!! Bundle and save today!!!!!!
* for the first 6 months, then only $199.99 each month thereafter
Besides their apparent sadism by implementing filters and such (same RIAA/SCO business model, just change "Sue customers" to "prevent from using what they paid for"), Their advertised offers always have very tiny fine print, hidden in the margins and borders of the mass mailings, mentioning that oh yeh, the price quoted above in the bold 1000pt font is good only for a couple months before we double or triple it, and you are still locked in to us for a year! That is the main reason Im staying away from them. Besides, I got higher up/down bandwidth AND static IPs (something else comcast WONT do) for a MUCh cheaper price from DSL Extreme</happycustomershamelessplug>. If you sign up, feel free to use me as a referral (username there same as here).
...They don't have to have a copy downloaded directly from the defendant. I would have to think another copy of the same checksum'd (and verified) file from one of their other many defendants would probably pass muster in court. Then you'd just need to show the logs....
But that would go against their argument about what "Fair Use" is. To them, a song copied from CD using the same bit rate, having the same checksum, etc as another already ripped file is not "the same" because the bits are not the same bits. Its the argument they make about how downloading a song that you already own on CD is not fair use, and thus they can sue you for doing so. Thus they have already undermined that route of prosecution.
...which I built after reading through the AVS forums (iirc) on the subject, though it also shows up on lumenlabs forums and several other pages. Google DB4 DIY for hits. Its very directional, gives GREAT results, can be stacked with multiple "bays" and the design is very very similar to this hoverman design, the main difference at a glance is that the zig-zag elements in the hoverman are a single piece, whereas the DB4 style uses individual separate elements. I Built mine from scrap metal window screen as the reflector, scrap 1x2 as the center support, and some solid wire for the elements and a border to hold the screen's shape. A bit of antenna wire, hotglue, and some faucet washers and screws round out all the hardware needed, and it cost next to nothing since it was all scrap. Actual size maybe 18"x12" I think. Anyway, worth a look as well.
The fact that this is patented is example enough that the system is broken, and method patents are ludicrous. Business method patents even more so. At least they go into detail on describing this method...
To reply to myself... seriously though, "fighting" pr0n is about like the war on drugs. Its a way for politicians to look good in the face of supporters and contributors that dump $$ to their campaigns and give them the votes that keep them in business, while actually doing little towards what it intends to accomplish. Its the "thinkofthechildrens!!!" effect. Because on average most parents these days seem to expect everyone else to protect their kids and make the whole world G rated and safe so they dont have to do anything themselves, and will file lawsuits and cause problems the instant its not. Most people dont have the understanding of how to protect their kids from online pr0n (if they even try), so they expect someone else to do it for them. Its similar reasons that caused such a huge uproar over a nipple being shown on tv, neglecting the fact that most kids suck on one for the first few years of their lives, and for more similar reasons (ultraconservativereligiouscontrolfreaks) that you wont hear swearwords on TV or radio. Its not like parents have a way to filter out such content on there own right??? Ohyeh, V-chip (another government mandated protection bit), and now hardware in dvd players that can actively filter only the "objectionable" content (walk by the dvd players in Target, most have one on a motion activated display setup thing), but we still must prevent obscene material from ever hitting our eternally virgin eyes and ears since the act that makes babies is dirty and should never happen or even be known about!
The fact that simply knowing someone's ssn (for US peoples, of course) can expose them to all sorts of credit fraud is dumb. Granted, the system was created back before any of this online stuff was even imagined, but it is well overdue for a revamp. First, expand it past the 3-2-4 digit number. With the current population, 33% *should* be in active use by live people right now. Numbers are probably already being re-issued, and will soon lead to numbers being shared if its not expanded, which will only complicate things further.
What is needed, if they want to keep the system at least a little similar, is to simply add a PIN. Keep the pin separate, never printed, just like a PIN for a bank card. The PIN must be used for opening any account or using the SSN in any manner an ID thief might. For general use only ssn is required, same as it is today. This alone would cut back on ID theft, as it would break the current method of "ssn + name = free$$" by requiring a PIN that only the original holder of the SSN should know, rather than requiring a simple to find number and some info thats publicly available.
attempting to address societal grand challenges such as global climate change, water resource management, new energy sources..
With that many cores, they will need to find new energy sources just to power it, and re-think water resource management as they redirect the river to cool the thing and to prevent it from causing global climate change itself!
...start losing customers to ISPs who don't screw with their customers connections constantly.
Name one. No, seriously. Name a broadband ISP in Atlanta that doesn't screw with their customers' connections. I dare you!
Granted, its business oriented, but they do have plans for home use as well (employees or CEO/Presidents of the customer-company and other partners, and not the cheapest, but damn cheap for T1 service), but Cbeyond doesnt "screw" with the connection more than a QOS setting to give RTP priority for the VoIP lines you paid for (which, if you dont use, 100% of data traffic goes through unaffected anyways). If you dont pay, they will turn it off, though that hardly counts, and sometimes *gasp* the line might have an issue (bridgetaps courtesy bellsouth/ATT or their crappy last mile copper) that takes the ILEC (Bellsouth/ATT) a while to fix (their lines, so they have to do the werk on their schedule (normally 4hr commit)). But like I said, its mainly a business service, so that probably disqualifies it from the running anyway, even if it is T1/bundled T1s based service based in Atlanta. (former employee of their activations group and eventually one of their noc automation developers).
People, stop asking for minority report screens already.
That particular shot was acutally from the Matrix trillogy...
Think about how much time you spend in front of your computer. Now imagine what it would feel like if during all that time, your arms were raised in front of your face.
Not very comfortable, is it? Because we have become lazy, sitting still all day, barely moving our fingers to do all our work. Actually, these types of interfaces would work much better in some cases than others, so I dont think using them would mean using them with nothing else, just as an addition to a mouse/keyboard. More like how a drafting tablet assists artists/engineers/draftsmen by giving mapped coordinate input and menus for specific applications while the mouse is used for more generalized cursor movements.
There is a free market of vehicle builders - and has been since the dawn of the space age. Boeing, etc have extensive and current experience in developing and operating launchers.
NASA's only significant "living" experience is the Space Shuttle.
Which, actually, Rockwell International (now Boeing, Orbiter) designed and built under contract and in joint partnership with Lockheed (Martin Marietta, the ET) and Thiokol/Boeing (SRBs), which form the United Space Aliance (USA). Its what happens when anything is done by a government agency: contract out to the lowest bidder while packing the project full of pork to spread about and make politicians and their affiliates happy.
So why haven't either of you returned them? With issues like that I would have returned them to the store in short order.
Honestly: because while it sucks, once tuned to a station, its 100x better than crappy analog channels (I dont have cable/dish/sattelite, this is NTSC/ATSC), and can tune HD stations as well, which broadcast 5.1dolby digital that this spits out its optical port to my stereo... AND, panasonic promised all the problems would be fixed in a firmware update disc. Mine is being returned, I just have to deal with Panasonic vs BestBuy since waiting on the promised fix from the manufacturer produced nothing but pushing the thing past the 30day return window for BestBuy, so its now a battle to see who will actually take it back. Actually, I will be walking in to the BestBuy with it tomorrow and persisting until I can get a refund, even if it takes forcing the manager to sit down with the evil thing and try to get it to work well. Besides, in researching the problems I have had, other customers say that when trying to return the unit, (enter megastore here) claims its not "defective" since its functions do work, and that not being convenient is not enough to make it defective, or some BS along those lines.
Since the "neutral" line is actually ground as well (it ties to the grounding bar at your breaker panel), the "Ground" wire itself is really just an extra protection in case one of the wires goes bad or electricity flows to where it shouldnt. This case of electrical shocks (pun not intended)is due to improper grounding in the power supply brick of the power going from it to the laptop itself, and of the laptop's case against the innards of the machine. If it were just the lack of a 3rd pin on the power brick, then why does my macbook (and why did my powerbook before that) never shock me (both have a 2prong only plug, or 3prong cord, never been shocked with either in use)? It is simply a poor electrical design. And the "tingly" feeling is most likely AC current (dc would just lock your muscles, AC makes you twitch), rather than simple static buildup, meaning the circuits are actually leaking AC current from somewhere to the case, which should never happen since the power brick should only be sending DC to the laptop.
If most are like the Panasonic one Im about to return, then its simply because these have to be the buggiest, slowest crappiest devices ever sold. I got a DMR-EZ47V, which is a Panasonic DVD recorder/VCR/Digital Tuner. Well, I got it mainly for the digital tuner and dvd player, since analog reception at my house sucks (digital actually gives me MORE channels) and I have no other digital tuner, my DVD player is old and locks up from overheating half way through a disc, and my VCR is ancient and I want to piss off the MPAA and actually convert the tapes to disc rather than buy more DVDs.
Well, it would all be great, if it actually worked. First, it takes a good 30-45 seconds just to power on, unless you set it to "quick power up", which is basically having it ON but not on (draws something like only 100ma less than full poweron vs ~14ma draw if its completely off). Thats before ANY screen comes up or it allows you to do anything with it. IF you happen to have a DVD in it when you turn it on, it automagically plays the disc. No, theres no menu option to turn off autoplay, and thanks to the feature of not allowing you to skip through an FBI/copyright warning message you cant stop it until it gets to the DVD's main menu, tacking on another minute or so to the boot of the damned thing (pressing stop does nothing but display the red hand indicating you cant do that, and eject wont work either, until fully powered on and not on one of those screens).
Once it finally boots, you have to press the tv/vcr button to actually view its output via the RF inverter (chan3/4), or turn on your stereo to get the picture via RCA jack (unless you have hdmi, which I dont, but that probably has its own issues), UNLESS you had a disc in the drive, then it will have already changed modes for you. Changing channels takes a good 2 seconds each, and if you flip more than one at a time, you risk getting the channel display out of sync with the actual channel its displaying. Also, the channel info display that shows what program is on/next stops working after a couple minutes of use. The longer you leave it on, the slower it gets (memory leak?), and it can take 5+ seconds to respond to a button press on the remote (ie: you push channel up and wait, and a few seconds later it changes. If you push it again while waiting, it changes several channels). It has a tendency to lock up at a black screen while the unit itself displays "U99", which the manual says is "Error, power off/on to reset unit". Which brings up the unit's display itself.... it displays the clock, only while off. When on, it only displays the status of the drive, or an error message, and you cant change it to be informative at all, there is no option to show what channel its on or to have it just display the clock, while watching TV, it always displays "STOP".
So, it has a DVD recorder as well. Well, it would be nice if it ACTUALLY RECORDED A PROGRAM! But thanks to DRM and broadcast flags (in this case, copyright flags of some sort, or just another bug), you schedule a recording, set it up like the manual says (ie: set the shows time, duration, channel and recording quality, put in a blank disc, and power it off), verify that its set right by seeing the red recording indicator thingy, and come back later to find that the scheduled event has passed, but the damn thing didnt do anything. No explination, it just shows up as an event in the past that you can no longer change, and you have a blank DVD still in the drive. WTF. It also claims to play "DivX" encoded movies, but whats funny is the cheapass 4 year old player Im replacing with it could play alot more of the formats than this thing can, and when this one tries to actually play DivX, it over heats and locks up only a quarter through the movie, after starting to drop frames and cause massive pixelation.
I bitched to Panasonic about it, they shipped me a Firmware update disc, which made it respond a bit faster to remote control presses, and reduced the number of lockups, but the thing still locks up, ge
Slashdot Mirror
tm
tm
Earth: Mostly Harmless
Tm
tm
... they lump rapists in with flashersActually, urination in public will win you a spot there too...
If it is truly sealed, there should never be any "evaporation issues," as there is no where for it to evaporate to. Being non-toxic, non-flammable has nothing to do with it, I can think of another very common non-flammable non-toxic (in most of its forms and uses) compound thats readily available but is NOT used specifically because it tends to boil at relatively low temps and low pressures: Dihydrogen monoxide. As for plastic tubing, what else are you going to make it from? Metal? You could, but most systems I have seen use clear PVC tubing, with florescent coolant and blacklights to add the "bling" effect. Copper piping would actually be more efficient (by allowing much higher pressure in the loop) and less likely to leak if done correctly, but would cost a bunch more due to the metals current pricing.
Tm
I hope your "electricity in houston" bit is just sarcasm (see below)... While I agree that it would work for telecom stuff, using this model for other utilities like Electric, Gas, Water is just silly. They do the same for natural gas service in Atlanta. They hyped it up a bunch before it happened, the big de-regulation switch that would drastically reduce prices as different companies got to set their own rates and start a price war to get customers. The problem is, its one pipe, it can carry only one thing, indiscriminately, and you still have to pay the original Gas company that does own the pipes to maintain them. Basically what you get is a bunch of billing companies, that do little more than devise ways of creative billing. All the gas that goes through the pipe is the same, since they cant exactly route only "their" gas to your house. Oh, and that price drop they were saying it would bring? Right, prices went UP, way UP. Several companies have been sued, and there are lawsuits waiting for others even now about their shady practices. Electric is the same, its one set of wires, you either get it or you dont, and all the "different" companies would just be finding ways to creatively bill their customers, while still paying the same maintenance fees to the line owner. Check the bills before deregulation and after, in generic utilities like these, they almost always go UP once the govt removes their pricing regulations (Enron (a Houston based company) anyone?).
For telecom services, since they can specifically route their services to the endpoints directly, this would work much better. Rather than just re-billing (which some CLECs actually do anyway), companies can lease the circuits and paths through the networks to provide access to their customers on top of the last mile providers. In fact, this model is already in widespread use, specifically due to Telecom deregulation. DSL providers other than the LEC (AT&T) use this model (or a slight derivative, depending on how much the LEC does for them). The only diff would be to force AT&T to split again, and this time require them to split into a physical infrastructure company and a separate access/billing/services company, and force them to allow equal access to all (no preferential treatment to their "own" services), something I would definitely like to see.
tm
* for the first 6 months, then only $199.99 each month thereafter
Besides their apparent sadism by implementing filters and such (same RIAA/SCO business model, just change "Sue customers" to "prevent from using what they paid for"), Their advertised offers always have very tiny fine print, hidden in the margins and borders of the mass mailings, mentioning that oh yeh, the price quoted above in the bold 1000pt font is good only for a couple months before we double or triple it, and you are still locked in to us for a year! That is the main reason Im staying away from them. Besides, I got higher up/down bandwidth AND static IPs (something else comcast WONT do) for a MUCh cheaper price from DSL Extreme</happycustomershamelessplug>. If you sign up, feel free to use me as a referral (username there same as here).
tm
...They don't have to have a copy downloaded directly from the defendant. I would have to think another copy of the same checksum'd (and verified) file from one of their other many defendants would probably pass muster in court. Then you'd just need to show the logs....But that would go against their argument about what "Fair Use" is. To them, a song copied from CD using the same bit rate, having the same checksum, etc as another already ripped file is not "the same" because the bits are not the same bits. Its the argument they make about how downloading a song that you already own on CD is not fair use, and thus they can sue you for doing so. Thus they have already undermined that route of prosecution.
Tm
Miami's Drone
vs
the Imperial Probe Droia
you decide...
tm
Tm
Linky
Tm
... coastal what?I think that was posted from the village, and it auto-stripped the $%^@#@[NO CARRIER]
tm
</rant>
tm
What is needed, if they want to keep the system at least a little similar, is to simply add a PIN. Keep the pin separate, never printed, just like a PIN for a bank card. The PIN must be used for opening any account or using the SSN in any manner an ID thief might. For general use only ssn is required, same as it is today. This alone would cut back on ID theft, as it would break the current method of "ssn + name = free$$" by requiring a PIN that only the original holder of the SSN should know, rather than requiring a simple to find number and some info thats publicly available.
Tm
Tm
With that many cores, they will need to find new energy sources just to power it, and re-think water resource management as they redirect the river to cool the thing and to prevent it from causing global climate change itself!
Tm
Bob would be proud.
tm
One of those things gave me like a bagillion dollars once and all I typed into it was
e d24, 7f, e d25, ff, w, q
Who knows what they can do to photos????
tm
Name one. No, seriously. Name a broadband ISP in Atlanta that doesn't screw with their customers' connections. I dare you!
Granted, its business oriented, but they do have plans for home use as well (employees or CEO/Presidents of the customer-company and other partners, and not the cheapest, but damn cheap for T1 service), but Cbeyond doesnt "screw" with the connection more than a QOS setting to give RTP priority for the VoIP lines you paid for (which, if you dont use, 100% of data traffic goes through unaffected anyways). If you dont pay, they will turn it off, though that hardly counts, and sometimes *gasp* the line might have an issue (bridgetaps courtesy bellsouth/ATT or their crappy last mile copper) that takes the ILEC (Bellsouth/ATT) a while to fix (their lines, so they have to do the werk on their schedule (normally 4hr commit)). But like I said, its mainly a business service, so that probably disqualifies it from the running anyway, even if it is T1/bundled T1s based service based in Atlanta.(former employee of their activations group and eventually one of their noc automation developers).
Tm
That particular shot was acutally from the Matrix trillogy...
Think about how much time you spend in front of your computer. Now imagine what it would feel like if during all that time, your arms were raised in front of your face.Not very comfortable, is it? Because we have become lazy, sitting still all day, barely moving our fingers to do all our work. Actually, these types of interfaces would work much better in some cases than others, so I dont think using them would mean using them with nothing else, just as an addition to a mouse/keyboard. More like how a drafting tablet assists artists/engineers/draftsmen by giving mapped coordinate input and menus for specific applications while the mouse is used for more generalized cursor movements.
Tm
NASA's only significant "living" experience is the Space Shuttle.
Which, actually, Rockwell International (now Boeing, Orbiter) designed and built under contract and in joint partnership with Lockheed (Martin Marietta, the ET) and Thiokol/Boeing (SRBs), which form the United Space Aliance (USA). Its what happens when anything is done by a government agency: contract out to the lowest bidder while packing the project full of pork to spread about and make politicians and their affiliates happy.
Tm
Honestly: because while it sucks, once tuned to a station, its 100x better than crappy analog channels (I dont have cable/dish/sattelite, this is NTSC/ATSC), and can tune HD stations as well, which broadcast 5.1dolby digital that this spits out its optical port to my stereo... AND, panasonic promised all the problems would be fixed in a firmware update disc. Mine is being returned, I just have to deal with Panasonic vs BestBuy since waiting on the promised fix from the manufacturer produced nothing but pushing the thing past the 30day return window for BestBuy, so its now a battle to see who will actually take it back. Actually, I will be walking in to the BestBuy with it tomorrow and persisting until I can get a refund, even if it takes forcing the manager to sit down with the evil thing and try to get it to work well. Besides, in researching the problems I have had, other customers say that when trying to return the unit, (enter megastore here) claims its not "defective" since its functions do work, and that not being convenient is not enough to make it defective, or some BS along those lines.
tm
tm
Well, it would all be great, if it actually worked. First, it takes a good 30-45 seconds just to power on, unless you set it to "quick power up", which is basically having it ON but not on (draws something like only 100ma less than full poweron vs ~14ma draw if its completely off). Thats before ANY screen comes up or it allows you to do anything with it. IF you happen to have a DVD in it when you turn it on, it automagically plays the disc. No, theres no menu option to turn off autoplay, and thanks to the feature of not allowing you to skip through an FBI/copyright warning message you cant stop it until it gets to the DVD's main menu, tacking on another minute or so to the boot of the damned thing (pressing stop does nothing but display the red hand indicating you cant do that, and eject wont work either, until fully powered on and not on one of those screens).
Once it finally boots, you have to press the tv/vcr button to actually view its output via the RF inverter (chan3/4), or turn on your stereo to get the picture via RCA jack (unless you have hdmi, which I dont, but that probably has its own issues), UNLESS you had a disc in the drive, then it will have already changed modes for you. Changing channels takes a good 2 seconds each, and if you flip more than one at a time, you risk getting the channel display out of sync with the actual channel its displaying. Also, the channel info display that shows what program is on/next stops working after a couple minutes of use. The longer you leave it on, the slower it gets (memory leak?), and it can take 5+ seconds to respond to a button press on the remote (ie: you push channel up and wait, and a few seconds later it changes. If you push it again while waiting, it changes several channels). It has a tendency to lock up at a black screen while the unit itself displays "U99", which the manual says is "Error, power off/on to reset unit". Which brings up the unit's display itself.... it displays the clock, only while off. When on, it only displays the status of the drive, or an error message, and you cant change it to be informative at all, there is no option to show what channel its on or to have it just display the clock, while watching TV, it always displays "STOP".
So, it has a DVD recorder as well. Well, it would be nice if it ACTUALLY RECORDED A PROGRAM! But thanks to DRM and broadcast flags (in this case, copyright flags of some sort, or just another bug), you schedule a recording, set it up like the manual says (ie: set the shows time, duration, channel and recording quality, put in a blank disc, and power it off), verify that its set right by seeing the red recording indicator thingy, and come back later to find that the scheduled event has passed, but the damn thing didnt do anything. No explination, it just shows up as an event in the past that you can no longer change, and you have a blank DVD still in the drive. WTF. It also claims to play "DivX" encoded movies, but whats funny is the cheapass 4 year old player Im replacing with it could play alot more of the formats than this thing can, and when this one tries to actually play DivX, it over heats and locks up only a quarter through the movie, after starting to drop frames and cause massive pixelation.
I bitched to Panasonic about it, they shipped me a Firmware update disc, which made it respond a bit faster to remote control presses, and reduced the number of lockups, but the thing still locks up, ge