Thank god someone said it. This is slashdot. News for nerds. So why do half the population turn into a ludite over mobile phones.?
If all you are interested in with a mobile phone is phone calls, then don't read the articles about new mobile features!
You don't see people going onto threads about (e.g. mySQL) and complaining that new feature X isn't relevant to them. If it's not relevant to you, STFU.
Cars aren't built to take massive damage from behind because it almost never happens
Are you getting this from somewhere, or just assuming it? Because every single motorway/highway pileup is chock full of rear end collisions, often from cruising speed to rest in a fraction of a second. I'd guess that they are one of the most common impact types.
Being hit from behind is one of the safest possible collisions.
As long as you are wearing your seatbelt and your seat has a headrest that is. Otherwise you are in whiplash city.
Well there is one: it's easy to dial accidentally with a push button phone.
Ironically it was choosen initially because it was hard to dial accidentally! You could activate "112" while cleaning the phone if you hit the hang-up switch once, once, then twice. This is from the old days of pulse dialing.
whatever algorithm Tivo uses to compress the video stream, it has some problems with water, especially at the lower quality settings... Often I could see rectangular divisions in the surface of the pool
Compression works by only storing the changes between frames. Water never compresses well as it is constantly changing.
Another thing to note about compressing live steams; it's only ever a one-pass encoding. When authoring a DVD (etc) from a high quality source, you usually do a two-pass, where the first pass is merely a dry run for the second pass, allowing it to optimize which parts of the video get the most bandwidth. In a one-pass, by the time it's worked that out, you've moved onto the next frame.
if your staying in a crappy motel(for a convention or something) that doesn't have a TV this would be great.
Now that you mention it; I've never been in a hotel/motel room that doesn't have a TV. I think it's a sanity thing, most people feel uneasy in a room without a TV on nowadays. It's even on the list of things that the repo man isn't allowed to take here in the UK, along with fridges/freezers etc.
Would it work on a plane I wonder? You'd constantly have to retune, but it may be possible.
Obviously it isn't but coal fired power plants don't leave huge uninhabitable dead zones like Chernoybl did and have the risk of killing large numbers of people all at once, or make people flee their homes...forever.
According to another poster, coal mining kills 30,000 people annually. Then there is the pollution to consider...
They've taken them and rammed them into walls at 80 MPH on the top of tanker trucks, dropped them on large iron spikes, fired SAM missles at them - all to no avail. Hardly made a dent in them.
Yeah, but what about ten thousand years of metal oxidisation (commonly know as rust when applied to iron)? A great structural design is nothing when the structure rots away.
Realisticly this means there is no gurantee we can successfully pass the information on about where we have buried the stuff for the required length of time.
There has been some interesting research done into this, attempting to come up with a universally acceptible sign that just screamed "DANGER!" to you, regardless of your background, education and language. Quite a challenge. Most of the signs would just increase interest in the site to future explorers.
Cell phone use by passengers saved the White House on September 11th. Passengers were able to learn what happened at the World Trade Center, and correctly deduced that the plane was going to be used as a weapon. This is actually a security measure. Cell phones in the hands of passengers is the best chance that NORAD has of learning that a plane has been hijacked before it can be used to hit anything.
Sorry, the passengers did not bring down that plane. The US government has never actually said that, they just led folk to believe it. A few people in governement have indicated that "the truth will come out on that one one day", or words to that effect. The whole story is suspect, and most people who are familiar with air wreckage patterns say it is clear that that particular flight was shot down. The "let's roll" story was just sugar coating.
Besides, cell phones are irrelevant to this theory now. If you are on a plane that is hijacked, which date will come to mind? It will be easy to get a few folk willing to fight back. No need for a phone call for you to work out the worst-case scenario.
Well, say for example you are going on a business trip and you have a presentation to prepare. You can either do it in your hotel room when you get there, or use the dead time in the plane to get it done. You are already captive on the plane, unable to do your own thing. You might as well get some work done and use the time you pickup doing that to relax when you get where you are going.
On my next trip, I plan on taking a laptop and an IDE and writing some software. Gonna be interesting doing it without access to Google though!
this can also be caused by the mechanical vibrator in the phone when it rings.
Unlikely. A car starter motor does exactly the same thing with a much larger current and therefore larger spark potential (no pun intended!). All the vibrator in a phone consists of is a simple motor with a off-centre weight on the axle. A car starter is a huge powerful beast.
As they mandate that you turn off your engine while fueling (forcing you to activate the starter motor on restart), either these things are not a danger, or we have all been living on the edge for the past fifty years with everyone getting away with it.;-)
I'm sure if they were holding a cell phone at the time (good reason for reaching into your car) the cell phone would be burnt.
And the phone would instantly get the blame because everyone knows cell phones cause fires at gas stations. Snopes denounced a similar incident recently, may even be the same one:
Update: Yes, we know about the 13 May 2004 gas station fire in New Paltz, New York, that news reports claimed was touched off by a cell phone. As our paragraph above notes, erroneous reports of this nature are not uncommon, because reporters (and other officials) base them upon assumptions made at the scene rather than upon later, more thorough investigations (which so far have always found something other than cell phones -- usually static electricity -- to be the igniting agent).
In May 2004, PEI posted on its web site the following assessment of the cause of that fire:
PEI has been in contact with the fire marshall in New Paltz, NY to learn more about this incident. It turns out the initial reports were not accurate. Patrick Koch, the fire chief of New Paltz, NY offered PEI this statement:
"After further investigation of the accident scene and another discussion with the victim of the May 13 gasoline station fire in New Paltz, I have concluded the source of ignition was from some source other than the cell phone the motorist was carrying. Although we will probably never know for sure, the source of ignition was most likely static discharge from the motorist himself to the nozzle dispensing gasoline."
So, if laptops etc could interfere with critical systems, why would they allow them at all? A retro walkman running of two AA batteries and playing an analogue tape produces ZERO interference. Yet they are still banned on take off/landing. This predates any RF concerns. They want you paying attention and able to get off the plane ASAP in an emergency.
The only valid experiment I can recall on the issue that found RF interference problems was with cellphones and the ILS landing system. This is only used on landing under reduced visibility. All other systems were unaffected. I'm sure that if this system was to take off (sorry, bad pun!), then each aeroplane would have to get certified to the equivalent to the interference acceptance/producing FCC requirements you get on all electronic goods.
Besides, there is another reason why cells are banned on planes; it would crash the network, or at least have your phone banned from it:
On the ground, you phone is in range of three, maybe four stations at a time, because of the curvature of the earth and the landscape. In a plane several thousand feet up, you phone is in range of a much larger number of transmitters. Under the analogue system, that would lead to your phone being banned as they would assume that someone has cloned it. The digital system just gets confused and overloaded as your phone does a cell transfer every 10 seconds. You are travelling at several hundred miles per hour remember.
I started doing that, except I kept them on a server running samba and apache. My motives were basically scratched and stolen CD's during parties. My CD's went in the loft at my parents place.
I'm now setting up an off-site backup of the library, mirroring it every night. This safeguards me from fire, theft and hardware failure. So yes, some of us do take backups seriously. Before I had the offsite, I mirrored the drive with an identical drive in the same machine.
70G + of music is hard to replace. I ain't doing all that ripping and downloading again. Some of it you just can't get anywhere else...
Yay, I thought I was the only one that did this. Some of the arguments were amazing, especially if you called two people that did not get on together! This was all before caller-id though, little chance of getting caught!
I'm gonna regret this and lose a lot of karma...BUT...
Weren't we all slagging of Microsoft for implementing the EXACT same feature in Longhorn, i.e. a databased file system, not all that long ago? But now it's in gnome and kde, it's alright?
The classic was the headbutt that was removed from Star Wars Episode 2 in order to get the PG certificate. Can't have the kids seeing headbutts, can we?
Look at my screen name. Probably something to do with it...;-)
And then shown in all its glory in some trailer programme shown on ITV a week after the release. At 3pm on a Saturday, when those same kids are watching.
you'll see it adopted for other reasons- as movies, special editions and other exteras in DVD's become selling points they often span into multiple disks
There have been quite a few releases that could have been put on one disk, but they did two just to say "2 disk special edition". But I get your point...;-)
I think it comes down to the order in which you view them. If you watch Aliens first, all the suspence of Alien is wasted as you know what is going to happen in the canteen and so on. Alien was all about the unknown.
When DVDs first came out, there was a lot of debate over which version of the film to buy, region 1 or region 2. Region 1 often had more extras, be cheaper, but would not be anamorphic and so on. Each disk was different.
After a while, a number of websites cropped up comparing the releases so you could decide which to go for. Often the UK version would be cut, and the cuts were listed on the site.
Cutting to the point; you'd be surprised just how many films were cut in the UK. There was a point where the majority of action films had something missing. Things that spring to mind are butterfly knives (e.g. Face Off), headbutts (The Matrix / The Rock) were regularly cut out. Just about every Bond movie has had the impact sounds of fight scenes toned down.
This wasn't done to get past the censors however. It was a purely financial decission most of the time, as a lower rating would generate more sales. At the time, the UK did not have any "acompaning adult" ratings, so a high rating would destroy the market for the film.
It's all mostly changed now, partly thanks to the internet and people importing movies. I think most of the films in my collection are Region 1.
Basically, the only software I've found to work propertly under a restricted user is Microsoft's own stuff. Anything third-party, especially things predating Win2K is a joke.
Ah, but if you have more than five friends, it could become taxing to do it yourself. Why not be lazy and let a server do it for you?
Because you don't need to? Most phones will let you put multiple people on the To: line for a text message. Hell, mine lets you put e-mail addresses as well.
And most folk here (in the UK) are paying less than 5p per text message (mine is around 2p), it doesn't cost much.
Text messaging has become the defacto standard for meeting up with folk in the UK. This is true for just about everyone under the age of 30. This service old news here, but I guess it stands a better chance of success due the current acceptance of the medium already.
It would be cooler if the phone had an integrated GPS, you sent the coordinate with "the touch of a button," it figured out the location (which bar) and then notified your friends with the place name.
Now that might be useful, but entering messages in T9 predictive text is very easy and quick already. The context-sensitiveness of it would be good, as you point out, as instead of a few ascii characters referencing where you are, you get a reference to the location that can be passed directly to mapping software. My phone has this kind of thing, so something that could take a pre-formatted address and produce a location from it would be useful. I can already do this with contacts home/business addresses.
I once heard that quote attributed to Nelson Mandela.
Ironically Nelson Mandela was referred to and treated as a terrorist for many years by the British Government.
That said, I don't think that your "definition" is even close to appropriate.
To be honest, I don't think there is a single definition. It is constantly changing. That's really my reference to "personal interests", a person considers someone to be a terrorist if they are essentially an enemy. And that status as an enemy can change over time, e.g. Al-Qaida.
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If all you are interested in with a mobile phone is phone calls, then don't read the articles about new mobile features!
You don't see people going onto threads about (e.g. mySQL) and complaining that new feature X isn't relevant to them. If it's not relevant to you, STFU.
Are you getting this from somewhere, or just assuming it? Because every single motorway/highway pileup is chock full of rear end collisions, often from cruising speed to rest in a fraction of a second. I'd guess that they are one of the most common impact types.
Being hit from behind is one of the safest possible collisions.
As long as you are wearing your seatbelt and your seat has a headrest that is. Otherwise you are in whiplash city.
As a home user, you don't get much support from MS anyway. If you got the OS with the computer, MS will redirect you to the manufacturer.
Ironically it was choosen initially because it was hard to dial accidentally! You could activate "112" while cleaning the phone if you hit the hang-up switch once, once, then twice. This is from the old days of pulse dialing.
Compression works by only storing the changes between frames. Water never compresses well as it is constantly changing.
Another thing to note about compressing live steams; it's only ever a one-pass encoding. When authoring a DVD (etc) from a high quality source, you usually do a two-pass, where the first pass is merely a dry run for the second pass, allowing it to optimize which parts of the video get the most bandwidth. In a one-pass, by the time it's worked that out, you've moved onto the next frame.
Now that you mention it; I've never been in a hotel/motel room that doesn't have a TV. I think it's a sanity thing, most people feel uneasy in a room without a TV on nowadays. It's even on the list of things that the repo man isn't allowed to take here in the UK, along with fridges/freezers etc.
Would it work on a plane I wonder? You'd constantly have to retune, but it may be possible.
According to another poster, coal mining kills 30,000 people annually. Then there is the pollution to consider...
Yeah, but what about ten thousand years of metal oxidisation (commonly know as rust when applied to iron)? A great structural design is nothing when the structure rots away.
There has been some interesting research done into this, attempting to come up with a universally acceptible sign that just screamed "DANGER!" to you, regardless of your background, education and language. Quite a challenge. Most of the signs would just increase interest in the site to future explorers.
Sorry, the passengers did not bring down that plane. The US government has never actually said that, they just led folk to believe it. A few people in governement have indicated that "the truth will come out on that one one day", or words to that effect. The whole story is suspect, and most people who are familiar with air wreckage patterns say it is clear that that particular flight was shot down. The "let's roll" story was just sugar coating.
Besides, cell phones are irrelevant to this theory now. If you are on a plane that is hijacked, which date will come to mind? It will be easy to get a few folk willing to fight back. No need for a phone call for you to work out the worst-case scenario.
On my next trip, I plan on taking a laptop and an IDE and writing some software. Gonna be interesting doing it without access to Google though!
Unlikely. A car starter motor does exactly the same thing with a much larger current and therefore larger spark potential (no pun intended!). All the vibrator in a phone consists of is a simple motor with a off-centre weight on the axle. A car starter is a huge powerful beast.
As they mandate that you turn off your engine while fueling (forcing you to activate the starter motor on restart), either these things are not a danger, or we have all been living on the edge for the past fifty years with everyone getting away with it. ;-)
And the phone would instantly get the blame because everyone knows cell phones cause fires at gas stations. Snopes denounced a similar incident recently, may even be the same one:
The only valid experiment I can recall on the issue that found RF interference problems was with cellphones and the ILS landing system. This is only used on landing under reduced visibility. All other systems were unaffected. I'm sure that if this system was to take off (sorry, bad pun!), then each aeroplane would have to get certified to the equivalent to the interference acceptance/producing FCC requirements you get on all electronic goods.
Besides, there is another reason why cells are banned on planes; it would crash the network, or at least have your phone banned from it:
On the ground, you phone is in range of three, maybe four stations at a time, because of the curvature of the earth and the landscape. In a plane several thousand feet up, you phone is in range of a much larger number of transmitters. Under the analogue system, that would lead to your phone being banned as they would assume that someone has cloned it. The digital system just gets confused and overloaded as your phone does a cell transfer every 10 seconds. You are travelling at several hundred miles per hour remember.
I'm now setting up an off-site backup of the library, mirroring it every night. This safeguards me from fire, theft and hardware failure. So yes, some of us do take backups seriously. Before I had the offsite, I mirrored the drive with an identical drive in the same machine.
70G + of music is hard to replace. I ain't doing all that ripping and downloading again. Some of it you just can't get anywhere else...
Yay, I thought I was the only one that did this. Some of the arguments were amazing, especially if you called two people that did not get on together! This was all before caller-id though, little chance of getting caught!
Weren't we all slagging of Microsoft for implementing the EXACT same feature in Longhorn, i.e. a databased file system, not all that long ago? But now it's in gnome and kde, it's alright?
Look at my screen name. Probably something to do with it... ;-)
And then shown in all its glory in some trailer programme shown on ITV a week after the release. At 3pm on a Saturday, when those same kids are watching.
Beautiful. Just beautiful... :-)
There have been quite a few releases that could have been put on one disk, but they did two just to say "2 disk special edition". But I get your point... ;-)
I think it comes down to the order in which you view them. If you watch Aliens first, all the suspence of Alien is wasted as you know what is going to happen in the canteen and so on. Alien was all about the unknown.
After a while, a number of websites cropped up comparing the releases so you could decide which to go for. Often the UK version would be cut, and the cuts were listed on the site.
Cutting to the point; you'd be surprised just how many films were cut in the UK. There was a point where the majority of action films had something missing. Things that spring to mind are butterfly knives (e.g. Face Off), headbutts (The Matrix / The Rock) were regularly cut out. Just about every Bond movie has had the impact sounds of fight scenes toned down.
This wasn't done to get past the censors however. It was a purely financial decission most of the time, as a lower rating would generate more sales. At the time, the UK did not have any "acompaning adult" ratings, so a high rating would destroy the market for the film.
It's all mostly changed now, partly thanks to the internet and people importing movies. I think most of the films in my collection are Region 1.
How many sales did Doom3 lose because of impatient people who downloaded it a week before it was available to buy...?
Basically, the only software I've found to work propertly under a restricted user is Microsoft's own stuff. Anything third-party, especially things predating Win2K is a joke.
Because you don't need to? Most phones will let you put multiple people on the To: line for a text message. Hell, mine lets you put e-mail addresses as well.
And most folk here (in the UK) are paying less than 5p per text message (mine is around 2p), it doesn't cost much.
Text messaging has become the defacto standard for meeting up with folk in the UK. This is true for just about everyone under the age of 30. This service old news here, but I guess it stands a better chance of success due the current acceptance of the medium already.
It would be cooler if the phone had an integrated GPS, you sent the coordinate with "the touch of a button," it figured out the location (which bar) and then notified your friends with the place name.
Now that might be useful, but entering messages in T9 predictive text is very easy and quick already. The context-sensitiveness of it would be good, as you point out, as instead of a few ascii characters referencing where you are, you get a reference to the location that can be passed directly to mapping software. My phone has this kind of thing, so something that could take a pre-formatted address and produce a location from it would be useful. I can already do this with contacts home/business addresses.
Ironically Nelson Mandela was referred to and treated as a terrorist for many years by the British Government.
That said, I don't think that your "definition" is even close to appropriate.
To be honest, I don't think there is a single definition. It is constantly changing. That's really my reference to "personal interests", a person considers someone to be a terrorist if they are essentially an enemy. And that status as an enemy can change over time, e.g. Al-Qaida.