Two ways to end the war: (1) Kill all terrorists. (2) Convert to Islam. Unfortunately, diplomacy is not a part of either
Of course, they see it as:
Two ways to end the war: (1) Kill all imperialist agressors. (2) Convert to Christianity. Unfortunately, diplomacy is not a part of either
But you are in the right of course. After all, you are American, and any bad things in your history don't get taught, and so by extending that it is IMPOSSIBLE for the USA to do any wrong. Yes Sirrie! Don't forget, we are talking about a document that states "all men are created equal", written by a bunch of guys who had SLAVES. So, in America, all white men are created equal. Then along came the religious fundamentalists, and now it's all Christian White Men are created equal.
Tho I do agree with you on the armed milita bit in some cases. 9-11 would not have happened if everyone on the plane had an airline-issue baseball bat.
The problem is that there is NO evidence that it was who the Bush administration says it is. All they have is:
The pristine condition passport "found" at ground zero
The phone calls made from the jets, which were a) not technically possible to make and b) the eye "witnesses" said they had red banadanas, when Al Qaidas colour is green. That just would not happen, it would be like the US going to war under a red hammer and sickle.
Flight manuals and a copy of the Koran found at the airport. Excuse me, but if you've been training for an operation for several years, you don't carry papers with you on the drive to the airport that would incriminate you if given a random stop/search by the local authorities.
A dozen other reasons that I can't be bothered to go into, such as the lack of video evidence of anything, despite the airports and the Pentagon being some of the most monitored places on the plannet.
The whole thing reeks. And the response of those in charge on the day is inconstistent with every standard operating proceedure in place.
Sounds way too much like Operation Northwinds to me, where the US intended justify an unprovoked war against Cuba, in order to "protect itself from terrorism".
It is possible to create an incident which will demonstrate convincingly that a Cuban aircraft has attacked and shot down a chartered civil airliner enroute from the United States to Jamaica, Guatemala, Panama or Venezuela. The destination would be chosen only to cause the flight plan route to cross Cuba. The passengers could be a group of college students off on a holiday or any grouping of persons with a common interest to support chartering a non-scheduled flight. - US Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1962
Ask most (American) people what they think communism is, and if they have any idea at all, it'll be something like totalitarianism.
That's deliberate. As is the ignorance surrounding the middle east. It's much easier to hate if you don't realise that the people over there are just like you.
Tonights homework is Duck and Cover : An effective safety zone for your children during global nuclear warfare, or a tool for instilling fear and hate at a young age?
No matter where you are from, your country will have a pro bias to some countries, and an anti against others. The US seems to be anti almost everyone except a few select nations, and even then all they can do is make (badly informed) jokes about our teeth.;-)
With all the Slashdot posts about software patents under consideration in the EU I don't know how you can say this. The problem has spread already, and it will only get worse.
I know, I've been following it. It just got shot down again this week. There seems to be a lot more support against it than elsewhere, thankfully. It may happen someday.:-(
As far as the latest gadget is concerned I'd say the iPod is pretty darn recent. You also cite the Segway, which is not exactly ancient technology.
I hate the iPod personally. They aren't the first mp3 player, and they are debatably one of the worst in terms of features, restrictions and that feeling that the owners of iTune have a proverbial boot stamping on your face. The iPod is a marvel of marketing and visual design. That's about it. But, yeah, it is a US product and it is a global phenomenum. However, mp3 players have been around for at least 5 years, hard-drive based ones for about 2 or 3 years. The litigation I speak of did actually hold back the technology, and the resultant compramise is iTunes.
I can't speak for RSS, but BitTorrent was invented by a guy living in Washington state. The US is certainly not lagging behind the rest of the world when it comes to either of these technologies.
It's not commercially viable though. It' not a product that's going to create jobs and feed families. Big business is trying to compete with free software, and the most likely outcome is that the free software will be banned to make the marketplace safer for the commercial interest.
Last I checked the war(s) are putting our economy deeper into debt, so I'm not sure this rationale stands up well.
Nah, war is good for the economy, always has been. What is being spent is being recycled through the arms industry, and it is creating jobs etc. Gives it a really good kickstart. Not morally agreeable, but that's the way it is.
I also haven't heard of any serious boycotts of US goods, as you imply.
There aren't any big campains or anything like that. The number of people visiting the US is hitting all time lows. People have a sour taste in their mouth about American products. It's not a boycot as such, just a general loss of sales. Voting with your wallet, as the saying goes.
It seems to me that this is just a kneejerk response to the elemental truth that English has superseeded French as the international language
I'd say that the only kneejerking is in the reporting of it, especially with the "not happy with" bit, which was quoted from the opening in the article. If you read the original editorial, you'll see that all he's done is come up with a French equivalent plan. The original article, in French (mangled a little by ), starts off commending Google for their status, the goes into how significant a thing this digitizing of print is. Quote:
The initial reaction, in front of this gigantic prospect, could be of pure and simple jubilation. Here what would take form, in the short run, the Messianic dream which was defined at the end of last century: all accessible savoirs of the world free on whole planet. Thus an equal opportunity finally restored, thanks to science, to the profit of the poor countries and the underprivileged populations.
Then he goes on to say that he doesn't want to see everything in the net being English, and that the French should do the same thing. He also mentions that English has dominated the movie world, backing up his thoughts that his own culture might disappear in the noise. Which is fair enough and he's correct.
The sooner the industry is choked with these obvious lock-out bullshit patents, the sooner development will grind to a total stop for fear of litigation. And as soon as that happens, the system will have to be reformed.
Nah, your economy will melt down before that happens, mass unemployement, food shortages etc. I'd say a civil war would be the most likely outcome.
Innovation will grind to a halt. Who wants to spend years reviewing a large program for potential patent violations? The only companies that will be able to write software will be those that have obtained cross-licensing agreements with one another. In other words, the big companies like MS and IBM.
Speak for yourself mate. This is a US only problem, it's not affecting the rest of us. What's happening is US inovation is speeding up on it's continual decline. Been that way for about 10 years I'd say, and the legal aspect has been a huge part of it. Come up with something new that replaces X? Get sued by the makers of X. When was the last time you heard of the latest gadget coming from the US? Or the take up of some new technology? Broadband was the last big US-led inovation I can think of, other than the segway. In terms of mobile phones, the US is about 3 years behind the UK, and we tail Japan by another year. Television; we'll we've had digital widescreen for about five years, with interactive programming for 3 of them and now recently video on demand (real, with pause controls etc).
Over on your side of the pond you are still debating broadcast-flags and the like! You can't do that to innovation, it's not innovative. Someone WILL come along and beat you to it. For example, BitTorrent and RSS is so much more elegant than over-the-air broadcasting, and it threatens to replace TV altogether. Where will the broadcast flag be then? And all the wavelengths auctioned off at high prices? Some one needs to pull their head out the sand quicktime!
The US is going to feel the pain from this for a long time. It's in the finacial shitter and it's digging a deeper hole for itself with each new corporate bought law. A lot of finacial experts believe that this is a large influnce on the "nation building" as they call it. While the war is a cost on the tax payer, it's incredibly good business and the spoils will filter down the economy and give it a kick start. But the world has gotten more complex, with more communication between everyone. You can't just go around starting wars everytime the moneys tight anymore. People start to boycot your products; they refuse to go to your country and you do lose out. It's a PR nightmare.
But that's thing nowadays. Countries mean squat. No one wants to be king or president. You get far more power and pay in business and it's far more obtainable. What the US government doesn't realise is that corporations can only be depended on to do one thing; whatever is in their own best interests. There will come a time when those businesses decide to move elsewhere, as that will be in their best interest. They hold no loyalty to the state. And when those rats leave the ship, there isn't going to be much left.
I prefer RAR myself, but there is a good reason to use zip; Windows XP supports zips using "Compressed Folders" out-the-box. That's a huge chunk of the market, which is especially high in non-skilled users. Zip is so popular/common that out of the others not using XP, the vast majority have zip already.
Some folk are afraid of installing programs. Especially with all the warnings we give them about the dangers of installing programes (e.g. spyware) on their pcs from the web!
For most software distributers, zip is an easy choice. It's not perfect, but it works. But it's a right pain in the ass when your vendor has a zip file of an 8-meg network driver. Hello, chicken and egg problem, make your network drivers 1.4 Meg or make them spannable!
I see what you are getting at. However, I think in his case he has just remembered the sequence. I don't think he calculates it himself.
pi is an interesting constant. I don't know if you've studied mathematics at all, I did with an electronics bias, but pi is a fundamental number. It crops up all over the place and it's key in a large number of theories. It's one of the things that makes the universe tick the way it does. Going on this guys love of numbers, you can see why he thought it significant enough to learn.
To him, pi isn't an abstract set of digits; it's a visual story, a film projected in front of his eyes. He learnt the number forwards and backwards and, last year, spent five hours recalling it
How does one memorize Pi backwards? And if he is arbitrarily starting at a very very precise value with tens of thousands of digits, how has he arrived at it? What "color, texture, or sound" does it make?
I saw a show a while back about people that can remember whole decks of cards. I think the guy had the world record with seven decks in one sitting, but don't quote me on that number.
Anyway, he did it by visualising the deck as a jouney, with the cards represention people/places/items that he was familar with.
I reckon that the brain is a whole lot better at remembering sequences like this rather than raw numbers. We do this every day, there is a sequence to making a bowl of cereal that most of us follow every day. This is made us of lots of different smaller sequences, such as smelling the milk, finding a spoon. None of these require any thought to do; we don't think of the process as a list of numbered steps. If you do, there's a great career for you designing robots.
Another familar example might be phone numbers. Back before mobiles and their phone books robbed everyone of the ability to remember numbers, I used to remember them by the shapes they made on the keypad. I still do this with my bank pin.
Back to your question; if you remember things based on a route, reversing that route might not be all that difficult for you.
Can you put it in another room and run a cable, maybe even install a dedicated wall plug? You could even put in a two-socket wall plug, put a blanking plate on the second and mount a serial port on it to hook up to the UPS. If you wanted to go nuts that is!
and a general sense of body location (so you can touch your nose with your eyes closed)
That particular one might not be a sense, I'd say more of a habit. Consider how children and teenagers are often seen as clumsy. When the body grows rapidly, you aren't used to it's size and tend to bump into things a lot. As you stop growing, you get accustomed to your size and stop knocking things on the carpet.
Decoding an mp3 file is not a heavy task, even a 486 CPU would manage that. And Winamp hasn't skipped on my computer either, regardless of load.
I've used Winamp as the centre-piece of my home auto for 5 or 6 years now, so I've got a bit of experience in this.
I used to run it on a K6 188 box with 16 meg of RAM running Win98. It played fine most of the time, but as soon as there were any extra loads on the PC, then things started to go wrong. And that's the problem; a real PC has other loads. Especially if the owner isn't spyware aware and has a dozen apps in the sys tray.
I did find a sure fire way of getting 100% skip free protection. I use a AWE 64 Gold sound card, which has a largish soundbank memory area on it. Normally this is used for audio samples to replace the chip sounds, some youngsters home won't remember them! I found a Winamp plugin called AWEamp that instead of writing to the usual sample decoder, wrote the audio to this buffer. Basically, all my music buffering takes place on the soundcard. The PC can completely hang for 5-10 seconds without affecting the music.
For me, the system in question is the only 24/7 windows box I have, and it runs all maner of BT/p2p apps, has random flatmates using Messenger and browsing, over 200 gig of video shares, controls Winamp via HTTP from any room (all interlinked) and it NEVER skips. Granted it's a PII 450 now with 196 Meg of memory running XP, but I'm still getting a lot of useful cycles out of old hardware.
You can actually drag the map with your mouse to move the part that's being displayed.
Yawn. You've obviously not seen map24 then? Java based applet for online vector maps. Pisses all over Mapquest and Googles latest. They won the 2004 Webby for Technological Achievement. Very impressive site. My favourite feature is the rocket button, a zoom-out feature to give you perspective of what you are zoomed-in on. Plus, any map that starts with a continental view and animates into the search address gets my vote. Like the start of the Burb's, but to your own house...
Plus, is Google maps USA only? Not even Canada? Sheesh!
"Fair and square"? So conquering is OK now? Does that mean it's OK if the USA conquers the rest of the middle east, whether they like it or not?
No, it's not OK now. The world is a patchwork of territories, with every one of the major players having claims all over. When the western world became "civilized" (debatable), the territories were left as-is. The Brits have the Falkland Islands, the US has Pear Harbour and Guantanamo Bay (another wierd one) and so on.
Democracy in it's current incarnation is a farce. Do you really believe that if the residents of a country wanted independance they'd get it? Bear in mind I'm sitting in Scotland here, where a large percentage of the population wants it, but there ain't gonna be a vote on it. Over the water from me, Northern Ireland has been contested over by terrorist groups (funded from the US ironically) for decades, and it's not worked for them. On the other hand, we have Yugoslavia, where a bloody civil war got nations their independance.
The only peacefull change that springs to mind was the UK's hand-over to China recently. The whole independance giving (which China ain't!) thing isn't all that popular.
Tibet has been a part of China for hundreds, if not thousands of years. It's status only came into question in the last fifty, thanks to the involvement of the CIA, during the cold war. Remember that? Lot's other places were contested over.
The fact is that I don't have a clue about whether the Tibetans want independance. But I'm not going to blindly believe the usual anti-communist crap that the US has been spilling for years.
You could download hi-def TV shows and movies faster than you could watch them. You could do real-time P2P Internet video broadcasts, and have it actually work. Anybody could be their own TV station.
Yup. I first read about 10 meg connections being installed in new housing developments some time ago. I've thought for several years that what we call the internet just now is a shadow of it's future self. Not many people seem to realise this though.
We aren't all that far away from the "epoch" of this new internet. My cable company just started offering TV on-demand with pause, ff and rewind capabilities, using a TCP streaming setup. Bittorrent has been crossed with RSS, allowing automated content delivery, from anyone to anyone. You'd be able to access the content instantly, with it streaming the rest to your HD. It's unlikely that p2p applications will be banned outright no matter what happens in the courts, at the very least I'm sure you'd be allowed to run a server providing your own legal content without getting busted. So, the possibility is there for pretty much anything. TV is going to be completely revolutionized by the iternet. Games are going to take a massive leap forward, imaging having high-speed access to an infinite amount of game data. Maps could exist for cities that any game could plug into. We haven't even thought of half the things that could be done.
Also consider mobile devices. There are 3G phones and many devices with Wi-Fi, essentially giving you access to all your data at broadband+ speed from almost anywhere.
The 21 century is going to bring as much change to the communication/media industry as did the 20th century, when we finally improved over the centuries-old method of sending paper/parchment around the world. It's going to be a surprise to those who think that (internet = www + hotmail) !!
It's a fucking briliant time to be alive. This free access to information is the one saviour I'm hoping for to defeating those who would manipulate us for their own political gain. It's also a big raspberry to the folks who have endevoured to own and control vast quantities of the media delivery industry.
yes, that is correct. the FBI keeps files on everyone who whines and bitches about how bad the government is on slashdot.
Well, actually they do. It's called Slashdot; the articles stay up for ever. Have you seen the guidelines for forensic analysis of suspect PCs? The authorities aren't stupid. They know about cookies. They know about caches. They even know about dead-man-switches and NEVER boot your harddrive, they always slave it. They'll find your online accounts and check them. PCs offer a never-before-seen level of information on a subject.
So yes, things you say online can and may come back to haunt you. Hell, I've got some newsgroup postings from long ago with my real full name that I would not want (e.g.) potential employers to see. Doesn't require a warrant or access to my computer.
Anoniminity IS important online. You government may be benign at the moment, but that means nothing for the future. Imagine the Communist/Iraqi purges had the internet existed. It wouldn't have just been the most outspoken that would be targeted; anyone leaning that way opens themselves up to trouble. Most governments cannot be accused of becoming more trustworthy these days!
So I got the impression that traffic lights didn't have any kind of digital circuitry in them, or if they did, nothing as sophisticated as a computer. Surely nothing as sophisticated as a general-purpose computer.
Not all lights are created equal. Some cities have complex systems managing traffic flow. The lights are interlinked, and it's great when it works well. If you drive at the speed limit, lights will "miraculusly" change just before you get to them. These systems work differently at different times of the day (and week), so it's conceivable that they have date implecations.
Which doesn't mean that they wouldn't be Y2K compliant out-the-box, most of these are new systems and created when saving two bytes of memory to store the year. Most systems use an long variable anyway for time now. However, these systems would have requried testing. The cost of rectifying a problem in advance is always preferable to letting things go tits up and fix up the mess. A couple of test engineers for a few months would be cheaper than the cost to the city police department, as they would have to use their manpower to redirect traffic. And traffic has a direct relationship to city revenue; I've seen massive estimates on what regular grid-lock can cost a city.
Fiber-to-the-home is now replacing cable... how can the telecom industry expect that their old, for the most part outdated copper wiring is capable of distributing this type of media?
The thing is, I've receiving my TV service over IP for four years already. In the UK, NTL's digital service is done this way and always has been. The set-top-boxes all have ethernet ports, however only some are used for providing broadband. Instead, most folk have a coax splitter sharing the same line between their TV and cable modem.
So, is this all that new? It's just moving the same technology from cable to dsl. And as the parent post suggests, the dsl infrastructure is not up to the task in many areas.
Why not hold up some text you have written next to your head when using the machine, a poem or such-like. The text is copyrightable and in theory they will be infringing on copying it when they upload it.
You could even claim that the booth was functioning as a p2p network in order to do this! Don't fight the system, use it!
Alas, Georgie has been lying to you on that one. The F word is the single biggest propaganda tool that the US government has had in years. Most of the initiatives put forward to "protect our freedom" were in planning prior to 2001, and they have been trying to do them for ages. 9/11 made it easy.
So, who is the one going around inciting fear and dispair? I'd W was the real terrorist here. He is using terror to acheive his goals.
Foreign aid is a black hole. The only reason we still bother with it is because...well, even if it produces no tangible benefits for us, it's still the right thing to do.
BULLSHIT. The US gives out bugger all in foreign aid. It gives out a lot in foreign LOANS which it calls aid. And these loans go to the corrupt leaders that are doing what they are told, meanwhile the population have to pay them off for the rest of their lives. They turn the country practically into a hostage of the "donor" country.
Google for "third world debt". Loaning a country money instead of aid is anti-aid. It is the complete opposite of aid, and most first-world countries have stopped doing it; in fact many are now writing off these ill conceived loans. However, not only does the US continue to do it; it has the population feeling all warm and fuzzy about how generous their country is compared to everyone else. In reality, you only just make it into the top twenty of aid givers. Which is pretty embarassing considering you have the largest economy in the world by a long shot.
Of course, when it comes to arms spending, you are easily in the top five per capita; but if you look at raw spending, you are way way way out in front at $276.7 billion (1999). The next person in the list is China at $55.91 billion (2002). Yes, that's right, China only spends 20% of what the US spends on making war.
Yup, a nation of peace lovers and peace makers indeed. So you can forgive us when we question your motivies for whatever country is on the business plan next.
The reason I mention this is that a couple of my friends are audio engineer types and keeping an eye open for an iPod-like (loosely speaking) that has lots of storage, can record full quality audio at line level, and perhaps compress to lossy format as well
Why bother? I can pretty much guarantee that the onboard ADC will be cheap and nasty. What's the point in making a lossless recording passed through headphone quality interconnects and audio-stages? Ever tried recoding line-level in your average soundcard and burning to CD? Yuck!
Now, one with a digital input...that's a different matter altogether!
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, they see it as:
Two ways to end the war: (1) Kill all imperialist agressors. (2) Convert to Christianity. Unfortunately, diplomacy is not a part of either
But you are in the right of course. After all, you are American, and any bad things in your history don't get taught, and so by extending that it is IMPOSSIBLE for the USA to do any wrong. Yes Sirrie! Don't forget, we are talking about a document that states "all men are created equal", written by a bunch of guys who had SLAVES. So, in America, all white men are created equal. Then along came the religious fundamentalists, and now it's all Christian White Men are created equal.
Tho I do agree with you on the armed milita bit in some cases. 9-11 would not have happened if everyone on the plane had an airline-issue baseball bat.
The whole thing reeks. And the response of those in charge on the day is inconstistent with every standard operating proceedure in place.
Sounds way too much like Operation Northwinds to me, where the US intended justify an unprovoked war against Cuba, in order to "protect itself from terrorism".
Nah, it's just me, but I'm sure I'm not the first to express that sentiment!!
That's deliberate. As is the ignorance surrounding the middle east. It's much easier to hate if you don't realise that the people over there are just like you.
Tonights homework is Duck and Cover : An effective safety zone for your children during global nuclear warfare, or a tool for instilling fear and hate at a young age?
No matter where you are from, your country will have a pro bias to some countries, and an anti against others. The US seems to be anti almost everyone except a few select nations, and even then all they can do is make (badly informed) jokes about our teeth. ;-)
I know, I've been following it. It just got shot down again this week. There seems to be a lot more support against it than elsewhere, thankfully. It may happen someday. :-(
As far as the latest gadget is concerned I'd say the iPod is pretty darn recent. You also cite the Segway, which is not exactly ancient technology.
I hate the iPod personally. They aren't the first mp3 player, and they are debatably one of the worst in terms of features, restrictions and that feeling that the owners of iTune have a proverbial boot stamping on your face. The iPod is a marvel of marketing and visual design. That's about it. But, yeah, it is a US product and it is a global phenomenum. However, mp3 players have been around for at least 5 years, hard-drive based ones for about 2 or 3 years. The litigation I speak of did actually hold back the technology, and the resultant compramise is iTunes.
I can't speak for RSS, but BitTorrent was invented by a guy living in Washington state. The US is certainly not lagging behind the rest of the world when it comes to either of these technologies.
It's not commercially viable though. It' not a product that's going to create jobs and feed families. Big business is trying to compete with free software, and the most likely outcome is that the free software will be banned to make the marketplace safer for the commercial interest.
Last I checked the war(s) are putting our economy deeper into debt, so I'm not sure this rationale stands up well.
Nah, war is good for the economy, always has been. What is being spent is being recycled through the arms industry, and it is creating jobs etc. Gives it a really good kickstart. Not morally agreeable, but that's the way it is.
I also haven't heard of any serious boycotts of US goods, as you imply.
There aren't any big campains or anything like that. The number of people visiting the US is hitting all time lows. People have a sour taste in their mouth about American products. It's not a boycot as such, just a general loss of sales. Voting with your wallet, as the saying goes.
I'd say that the only kneejerking is in the reporting of it, especially with the "not happy with" bit, which was quoted from the opening in the article. If you read the original editorial, you'll see that all he's done is come up with a French equivalent plan. The original article, in French (mangled a little by ), starts off commending Google for their status, the goes into how significant a thing this digitizing of print is. Quote:
Then he goes on to say that he doesn't want to see everything in the net being English, and that the French should do the same thing. He also mentions that English has dominated the movie world, backing up his thoughts that his own culture might disappear in the noise. Which is fair enough and he's correct.
What's the problem?
Nah, your economy will melt down before that happens, mass unemployement, food shortages etc. I'd say a civil war would be the most likely outcome.
Speak for yourself mate. This is a US only problem, it's not affecting the rest of us. What's happening is US inovation is speeding up on it's continual decline. Been that way for about 10 years I'd say, and the legal aspect has been a huge part of it. Come up with something new that replaces X? Get sued by the makers of X. When was the last time you heard of the latest gadget coming from the US? Or the take up of some new technology? Broadband was the last big US-led inovation I can think of, other than the segway. In terms of mobile phones, the US is about 3 years behind the UK, and we tail Japan by another year. Television; we'll we've had digital widescreen for about five years, with interactive programming for 3 of them and now recently video on demand (real, with pause controls etc). Over on your side of the pond you are still debating broadcast-flags and the like! You can't do that to innovation, it's not innovative. Someone WILL come along and beat you to it. For example, BitTorrent and RSS is so much more elegant than over-the-air broadcasting, and it threatens to replace TV altogether. Where will the broadcast flag be then? And all the wavelengths auctioned off at high prices? Some one needs to pull their head out the sand quicktime!
The US is going to feel the pain from this for a long time. It's in the finacial shitter and it's digging a deeper hole for itself with each new corporate bought law. A lot of finacial experts believe that this is a large influnce on the "nation building" as they call it. While the war is a cost on the tax payer, it's incredibly good business and the spoils will filter down the economy and give it a kick start. But the world has gotten more complex, with more communication between everyone. You can't just go around starting wars everytime the moneys tight anymore. People start to boycot your products; they refuse to go to your country and you do lose out. It's a PR nightmare.
But that's thing nowadays. Countries mean squat. No one wants to be king or president. You get far more power and pay in business and it's far more obtainable. What the US government doesn't realise is that corporations can only be depended on to do one thing; whatever is in their own best interests. There will come a time when those businesses decide to move elsewhere, as that will be in their best interest. They hold no loyalty to the state. And when those rats leave the ship, there isn't going to be much left.
Some folk are afraid of installing programs. Especially with all the warnings we give them about the dangers of installing programes (e.g. spyware) on their pcs from the web!
For most software distributers, zip is an easy choice. It's not perfect, but it works. But it's a right pain in the ass when your vendor has a zip file of an 8-meg network driver. Hello, chicken and egg problem, make your network drivers 1.4 Meg or make them spannable!
pi is an interesting constant. I don't know if you've studied mathematics at all, I did with an electronics bias, but pi is a fundamental number. It crops up all over the place and it's key in a large number of theories. It's one of the things that makes the universe tick the way it does. Going on this guys love of numbers, you can see why he thought it significant enough to learn.
I saw a show a while back about people that can remember whole decks of cards. I think the guy had the world record with seven decks in one sitting, but don't quote me on that number.
Anyway, he did it by visualising the deck as a jouney, with the cards represention people/places/items that he was familar with.
I reckon that the brain is a whole lot better at remembering sequences like this rather than raw numbers. We do this every day, there is a sequence to making a bowl of cereal that most of us follow every day. This is made us of lots of different smaller sequences, such as smelling the milk, finding a spoon. None of these require any thought to do; we don't think of the process as a list of numbered steps. If you do, there's a great career for you designing robots.
Another familar example might be phone numbers. Back before mobiles and their phone books robbed everyone of the ability to remember numbers, I used to remember them by the shapes they made on the keypad. I still do this with my bank pin. Back to your question; if you remember things based on a route, reversing that route might not be all that difficult for you.
Can you put it in another room and run a cable, maybe even install a dedicated wall plug? You could even put in a two-socket wall plug, put a blanking plate on the second and mount a serial port on it to hook up to the UPS. If you wanted to go nuts that is!
That particular one might not be a sense, I'd say more of a habit. Consider how children and teenagers are often seen as clumsy. When the body grows rapidly, you aren't used to it's size and tend to bump into things a lot. As you stop growing, you get accustomed to your size and stop knocking things on the carpet.
I've used Winamp as the centre-piece of my home auto for 5 or 6 years now, so I've got a bit of experience in this.
I used to run it on a K6 188 box with 16 meg of RAM running Win98. It played fine most of the time, but as soon as there were any extra loads on the PC, then things started to go wrong. And that's the problem; a real PC has other loads. Especially if the owner isn't spyware aware and has a dozen apps in the sys tray.
I did find a sure fire way of getting 100% skip free protection. I use a AWE 64 Gold sound card, which has a largish soundbank memory area on it. Normally this is used for audio samples to replace the chip sounds, some youngsters home won't remember them! I found a Winamp plugin called AWEamp that instead of writing to the usual sample decoder, wrote the audio to this buffer. Basically, all my music buffering takes place on the soundcard. The PC can completely hang for 5-10 seconds without affecting the music.
For me, the system in question is the only 24/7 windows box I have, and it runs all maner of BT/p2p apps, has random flatmates using Messenger and browsing, over 200 gig of video shares, controls Winamp via HTTP from any room (all interlinked) and it NEVER skips. Granted it's a PII 450 now with 196 Meg of memory running XP, but I'm still getting a lot of useful cycles out of old hardware.
Yawn. You've obviously not seen map24 then? Java based applet for online vector maps. Pisses all over Mapquest and Googles latest. They won the 2004 Webby for Technological Achievement. Very impressive site. My favourite feature is the rocket button, a zoom-out feature to give you perspective of what you are zoomed-in on. Plus, any map that starts with a continental view and animates into the search address gets my vote. Like the start of the Burb's, but to your own house...
Plus, is Google maps USA only? Not even Canada? Sheesh!
No, it's not OK now. The world is a patchwork of territories, with every one of the major players having claims all over. When the western world became "civilized" (debatable), the territories were left as-is. The Brits have the Falkland Islands, the US has Pear Harbour and Guantanamo Bay (another wierd one) and so on.
Democracy in it's current incarnation is a farce. Do you really believe that if the residents of a country wanted independance they'd get it? Bear in mind I'm sitting in Scotland here, where a large percentage of the population wants it, but there ain't gonna be a vote on it. Over the water from me, Northern Ireland has been contested over by terrorist groups (funded from the US ironically) for decades, and it's not worked for them. On the other hand, we have Yugoslavia, where a bloody civil war got nations their independance.
The only peacefull change that springs to mind was the UK's hand-over to China recently. The whole independance giving (which China ain't!) thing isn't all that popular.
Tibet has been a part of China for hundreds, if not thousands of years. It's status only came into question in the last fifty, thanks to the involvement of the CIA, during the cold war. Remember that? Lot's other places were contested over.
The fact is that I don't have a clue about whether the Tibetans want independance. But I'm not going to blindly believe the usual anti-communist crap that the US has been spilling for years.
Yup. I first read about 10 meg connections being installed in new housing developments some time ago. I've thought for several years that what we call the internet just now is a shadow of it's future self. Not many people seem to realise this though.
We aren't all that far away from the "epoch" of this new internet. My cable company just started offering TV on-demand with pause, ff and rewind capabilities, using a TCP streaming setup. Bittorrent has been crossed with RSS, allowing automated content delivery, from anyone to anyone. You'd be able to access the content instantly, with it streaming the rest to your HD. It's unlikely that p2p applications will be banned outright no matter what happens in the courts, at the very least I'm sure you'd be allowed to run a server providing your own legal content without getting busted. So, the possibility is there for pretty much anything. TV is going to be completely revolutionized by the iternet. Games are going to take a massive leap forward, imaging having high-speed access to an infinite amount of game data. Maps could exist for cities that any game could plug into. We haven't even thought of half the things that could be done.
Also consider mobile devices. There are 3G phones and many devices with Wi-Fi, essentially giving you access to all your data at broadband+ speed from almost anywhere.
The 21 century is going to bring as much change to the communication/media industry as did the 20th century, when we finally improved over the centuries-old method of sending paper/parchment around the world. It's going to be a surprise to those who think that (internet = www + hotmail) !!
It's a fucking briliant time to be alive. This free access to information is the one saviour I'm hoping for to defeating those who would manipulate us for their own political gain. It's also a big raspberry to the folks who have endevoured to own and control vast quantities of the media delivery industry.
Well, actually they do. It's called Slashdot; the articles stay up for ever. Have you seen the guidelines for forensic analysis of suspect PCs? The authorities aren't stupid. They know about cookies. They know about caches. They even know about dead-man-switches and NEVER boot your harddrive, they always slave it. They'll find your online accounts and check them. PCs offer a never-before-seen level of information on a subject.
So yes, things you say online can and may come back to haunt you. Hell, I've got some newsgroup postings from long ago with my real full name that I would not want (e.g.) potential employers to see. Doesn't require a warrant or access to my computer.
Anoniminity IS important online. You government may be benign at the moment, but that means nothing for the future. Imagine the Communist/Iraqi purges had the internet existed. It wouldn't have just been the most outspoken that would be targeted; anyone leaning that way opens themselves up to trouble. Most governments cannot be accused of becoming more trustworthy these days!
Not all lights are created equal. Some cities have complex systems managing traffic flow. The lights are interlinked, and it's great when it works well. If you drive at the speed limit, lights will "miraculusly" change just before you get to them. These systems work differently at different times of the day (and week), so it's conceivable that they have date implecations.
Which doesn't mean that they wouldn't be Y2K compliant out-the-box, most of these are new systems and created when saving two bytes of memory to store the year. Most systems use an long variable anyway for time now. However, these systems would have requried testing. The cost of rectifying a problem in advance is always preferable to letting things go tits up and fix up the mess. A couple of test engineers for a few months would be cheaper than the cost to the city police department, as they would have to use their manpower to redirect traffic. And traffic has a direct relationship to city revenue; I've seen massive estimates on what regular grid-lock can cost a city.
The thing is, I've receiving my TV service over IP for four years already. In the UK, NTL's digital service is done this way and always has been. The set-top-boxes all have ethernet ports, however only some are used for providing broadband. Instead, most folk have a coax splitter sharing the same line between their TV and cable modem.
So, is this all that new? It's just moving the same technology from cable to dsl. And as the parent post suggests, the dsl infrastructure is not up to the task in many areas.
You could even claim that the booth was functioning as a p2p network in order to do this! Don't fight the system, use it!
Alas, Georgie has been lying to you on that one. The F word is the single biggest propaganda tool that the US government has had in years. Most of the initiatives put forward to "protect our freedom" were in planning prior to 2001, and they have been trying to do them for ages. 9/11 made it easy.
So, who is the one going around inciting fear and dispair? I'd W was the real terrorist here. He is using terror to acheive his goals.
Yes you will. I'd bet money on it, but Americans are not allowed to gamble. ;-)
BULLSHIT. The US gives out bugger all in foreign aid. It gives out a lot in foreign LOANS which it calls aid. And these loans go to the corrupt leaders that are doing what they are told, meanwhile the population have to pay them off for the rest of their lives. They turn the country practically into a hostage of the "donor" country.
Google for "third world debt". Loaning a country money instead of aid is anti-aid. It is the complete opposite of aid, and most first-world countries have stopped doing it; in fact many are now writing off these ill conceived loans. However, not only does the US continue to do it; it has the population feeling all warm and fuzzy about how generous their country is compared to everyone else. In reality, you only just make it into the top twenty of aid givers. Which is pretty embarassing considering you have the largest economy in the world by a long shot.
Of course, when it comes to arms spending, you are easily in the top five per capita; but if you look at raw spending, you are way way way out in front at $276.7 billion (1999). The next person in the list is China at $55.91 billion (2002). Yes, that's right, China only spends 20% of what the US spends on making war.
Yup, a nation of peace lovers and peace makers indeed. So you can forgive us when we question your motivies for whatever country is on the business plan next.
Why bother? I can pretty much guarantee that the onboard ADC will be cheap and nasty. What's the point in making a lossless recording passed through headphone quality interconnects and audio-stages? Ever tried recoding line-level in your average soundcard and burning to CD? Yuck!
Now, one with a digital input...that's a different matter altogether!