In the spirit of Mini-ITX custom case modding, I went out in search of some novel object to turn into a case for my PVR computer (mini-ITX motherboard, PCI tv tuner/pvr card, dual hard drive storage). Alas, I was not able to find anything that I liked the looks of and was of the appropriate size (the PCI card and dual-hard drives added just a bit too much to the space requirements), so I ended up building my own. Crude wooden frame to mount everything on, whiteboard side panels, and a clear hinged side panel/access door. Final box ended up being something like 12x9x5 inches. It's not a beast, but it does what it's intended to do, and looks better than when it was setting in an opened box on my desktop. I'll try to put some pics of it online somewhere when I get home.
The version setting is generally stored in the firmware of the drive itself, irrelevant to whatever operating system is in use. The count on the number of changes is stored there as well, so in theory he could set the region code under the default Windows install on the laptop, reformat it and install Linux/BTS/whatever_else and it would keep the same region encoding. Though at that point he would not easily be able to change the region again without the windows drivers/utility to access it, not to mention the lack of legal DVD player programs on non-windows/non-mac computers.
Block ads/annoying sites from Mozilla? How anti-retro. I use a customized hosts file to redirect any queries for sites I don't like to 127.0.0.0 and that gets rid of most of the annoying ads. And the good thing about it? It works for any web browser that I want! I'm quite happy using IE under Windows ME to do this. Much shorter learning curve than any *nix OS or alternate web browser. If you can edit a text file, you can do this. I know there's many other security risks to using Winblah blah blah, I know all the slander about M$, I just don't care. I'm lazy about such things. When I feel like dinking around with things I have no clue about and less than no time to learn properly, I boot into my FreeBSD partition. When I just feel like surfing the web, I'm gonna use what came with the OS that makes all the toys on my computer work the way I want them to.
I can't see myself using some monstrosity pda thing on my wrist. I switched from wearing ugly-looking wristwatches to pocketwatches in college, but after graduation and being given a pager at work, I stopped wearing a watch altogether whenever I had my pager on me. A couple months ago I found a decent looking slender wristwatch buried in my closet, and now wear that when I go somewhere that appearance matters. Nothing too expensive, just simple, elegant and functional. Throughout high school and college, I was notoriously hard on my watches -- very few non-digital ones would last even a full year before dieing permanently for no obvious reason. And digital ones just aren't as stylish in my opinion. (I still have an older digital watch from 8-9 years ago that works quite well that I wear when working out, but that's about the only time I'll wear it -- I don't like the extra weight on my wrist when I do a lot of typing all day long)
trenchcoat...check sword...check long hair (to complete the look)...check delusions of living in a fantasy world where I can get away with carrying around such a weapon and saying things like that without getting tossed in an asylum somewhere...sorry, fresh out.
When they start spamming me (I'm not holding off on hopes of an if in the case of determined overzealous political campaigns) I'll treat them the same way I do to all other spammers I get: forward as attachment to uce@ftc.gov and delete, and let the government deal with their own mess. Provided any of them get past my email's spam filters in the first place. Who says being patriotic requires letting people harass you with undesired advertising?
The only disagreement I have with what you said is with the last line:
But how can you possibly tell me that spending an extra $20 on a *slow* memory card is superior?
When I visit family/friends out of state, I'd rather bring along a 1" x 2" x 0.25" memory card so I can play on my brother's GCN or friend's PS2 than a big honking hard drive-based console.
For me (and I may be in the minority on this), portability of this nature alone is worth $20 for something I can fit in my shirt pocket. There may not be other advantages to it, but that doesn't matter to me, I don't need anything else.
That would require me to install something else to browse the web with, and as I mentioned previously, I'm too lazy to do that.
I'm well aware of what "the competition" claims to offer, and in fact I think it's a good idea. I'm just too lazy to use it.
I prefer simplicity, and that means not having excess programs running on my computer. And since IE is already there (and can't be done away with without serious effort that I'm not about to start looking into), it's the default winner until it pisses me off.
I'm more than willing to allow Google to see where I go so they can keep their search engine at peak effectiveness if it lets me not see annoying popup ads. Not all data tracking is evil. Feel free to remove your tinfoil hat and join the rest of us.
What's the problem?
I've always used IE. With the Google-addon, no pop-ups. No need to get revolutionary and install some ultra 'leet 3rd-party Gatesfree-bullshitbrowser for this minor disturbance.
Same here. Google toolbar + customized hosts file. If something somehow makes it past those, I find it's site name and add it to the hosts file. Magic, I tells ya.
Only annoyance is with flash ads, and one of these days when I stop slacking so much I'll figure that one out too, to can the adds but keep Strongbad, all while STILL RUNNING IE.
Why? For no other purpose than to annoy the Mozilla zealots. That and I'm too lazy to install excess programs and switch my collection of many hundreds of bookmarks over.
Oh, about a week to back this drive up at USB 1.1 speeds. Heh... so much for your vacation plans.
Are you kidding? That's the perfect time to take a vacation. Start the backup and take off.
"Sorry, can't use the computer for a week, it's backing up. Guess I'll just have to get outside and do something else....I wonder what the weather is like in the Bahamas this time of the year..."
Lastly, despite the fact that the tea has caffiene in it, does it really mean that you can't drink it anymore? I've cut all caffiene from my life, but I still enjoy the tea at the restaurant with no ill effect.
If kept in small, infrequent doses, tea, like other caffeinated products can be occasionally enjoyed by us current and former caffeine addicts without ill effect.
I'd never been much of a coffee person, but was a heavy caffeinated soda drinker when I was younger. I quit drinking soft drinks entirely for a couple years cold-turkey back in high school (about 10 years ago) in an effort to cut down on excessive sugar intake to control my weight, and recall suffering through some nasty headaches around the same time (retrospectively I can only assume they were caffeine-withdrawal, though at that time I had no clue and just dealt with it)
Over the years since then I'd developed a taste for tea, green tea in particular, but a couple years back after getting into a rather regular habit of drinking green tea during work for a couple weeks, I went through a few nasty withdrawal headaches again when I stopped.
So even now, years after having eliminated caffeine from my regular diet, the withdrawal headaches can be triggered if I (unwittingly or intentionally) drink too much of something containing the drug, and I prefer to make an effort to watch what I consume to keep the drug out of my system than run the risk of future complications/discomfort that would result from withdrawal.
After all, if you tell them you want American-style coffee they add a large amount of water.
On a recent trip to San Diego, I noticed at the airport baggage claim area a coffee stand that offered something along the lines of "cafe americaine" (ie: watered-down espresso, or some such), so it's not necessary to go all the way to Spain to find stores that mock the American idea of coffee-flavored coffee.
As a longtime sufferer of caffeine withdrawl, I have not drank coffee in years, and never did have a habit of it, so I just laugh at people on both sides of the coffee-flavoring arguement and am glad I don't have to spend $4/cup just to get a fix at the local starbucks.
Though I do miss tea quite a bit. sigh.
On caffiene addictions or physical dependancy, quite a bit of it is psychological.
There is a fair amount of physical dependency related to caffeine addiction. I have actively avoided caffeine whenever possible for most of the past 1.5-2 years, and whenever I overconsume (sometimes it cannot be easily avoided -- poor labeling on brands of root beer are what catch me most often) I still encounter the nasty headaches even if I was not aware that I had consumed something caffeinated at the time. However, in small quantities (a single recommended serving size [ie: 8oz.] every week or so) I do not encounter problems, but having never really noticed any benefit from caffeine, I find it best to avoid it if at all possible.
Contrary to popular belief, caffeine does not raise everybody's energy level. I have almost never encountered that, and I used to drink a LOT of caffeinated soda. If I remember correctly, caffeine works chemically to block the receptors in the brain that sleep-inducing chemicals usually bond to (I was a CS major, not biology/chemistry, so disregard any bad terminology) and thus prevents the user from becoming tired, as opposed to increasing their energy level. Having a fairly robust metabolism, I generally have a good amount of energy from the time I wake up until I go to sleep (usually about 17-19 hours later), and therefore probably wouldn't notice the affects of something that prevented me from getting tired when my energy level went down (having a fairly high sugar-intake probably contributes to this, too, not to mention my waste-line, but that's what new-years resolutions are for. At least until Feb.). There are times I wish I could be on the Mars probe program for NASA just to get the extra 40 minutes per day to do stuff.
For one thing, caffiene should be leading *to* an increase in headaches since it constricts blood vessels.
I'm not sure if blood vessel constriction causes headaches, or the ensuing expansion and inrush of more blood than had previously been there as the caffeine wears off. As I figure it (see above, this is not my area of study), the parts of the brain that become blood-starved due to blood vessel constriction become accustomed to a lower quantity of blood, and as the drug wears off, the affected portions of the brain are suddenly flooded with more blood than they are used to, and have to adjust to the increased pressure, which could be what causes the headaches that some of us have known all too well.
They make up for it by having those beg-a-thons several times a year. Then you get commercials that go on for hours without any music.
At which point you can throw then a few bucks and futilely attempt to search for content on other stations only to appreciate how well you have it by having public radio available as an option to you during the non beg-a-thon times.
This is true, I have noticed slight audio quality deficiencies with my install (the Sirius Kenwood portable unit), but when travelling at 70+mph down the expressway, I don't notice the sound quality difference anyway due to the rather high amounts of road/wind noise in my car. Unfortunately I had mine installed in a somewhat unorthodox manner (stuffed into a 1-din storage compartment in the center console under my regular stereo) where I cannot reach the switch to change the FM frequency to which it transmits and have encountered reception/interference issues with local stations on the route I travel. Fortunately for me, I can manually lower my car radio antenna to the point where it won't pick up the local broadcast radio stations and it only picks up the FM modulator (my car antenna is on the driver's side A pillar so I can just roll down my window and pull down the antenna all while driving at 70mph on the interstate -- at least I'm not drinking McDonald's coffee and talking on my cell phone when I do that)
If you don't like paying on a monthly basis, Sirius is currently offering lifetime subscriptions for a set fee.
You just have to gamble that they'll still be around for the next 2 1/2 years to make it pay off vs. a recurring monthly bill. I went for this, mainly since I really don't like recurring monthly charges to my credit cards. I just hope I'm right.
I think you missed the point. Even if you can't remember what you put on a CD, you still made that CD at one time, and you've heard the songs on it before. With radio, you have the chance of hearing something that you've NEVER heard before. New artists, new songs, and things that you don't have in your MP3 collection, not just stuff from your collection that you forgot about.
Exactly. That's one of the main reasons I recently bought one. Plus finding/making mp3's of anything/everything in one's collection and burning it onto CD's takes time and effort, and some of us just don't get around to doing that all too often. (not all of us went hogwild with the original Napster et al. and don't have gigs of pirated mp3's lying around on some hard drive or another.)
Satelitte isn't just used by radio aficionados. Real folks like you and I sometimes need it.
I recently bought a Sirius subscription because, though I am not a radio afficianado, I do like to hear music/news/actual programming when I turn on the radio. As it was, I found I had recently been listening to about 3 or 4 of the dozens of local stations in my area, one in particular because it averages only 5 minutes of commercials per hour, and the other couple stations for those few minutes. (the main is a listener-supported classical music station, and the only non-Sirius station I still listen to).
I gave up on the 20 minutes of hourly ads and the continuous rotation of the same dozen songs on all the other stations 6 months to a year ago.
Although I do have a CD player in my car, I like to hear new things that I haven't heard before, and it gets expensive buying new CD's all the time, even the generally more economical classical ones that make up the majority of my collection.
So after weighing my options, and with plenty of holiday travel in my immediate future, I decided in the long term it would be nice to go with satellite radio, as it would be cheaper than laying out the $20-30 per month I have been for new CD's. Plus I can have the opportunity to see what some of the 'music' out there sounds like that I wouldn't pay for under other circumstances. And the being able to listen through their website wherever I happen to have a live internet connection is a nice plus. Now if only the people who sell the stuff at Circuit City/Best Buy had a clue about it and could have told me that due to the poor placement of windows in my apartment it would be virtually impossible for me to get a direct satellite signal at home. But that's what rebates are for, to cover such costs of experimentation.
Sirius has recently been running a couple deals to get more people to buy their service: If you have a Sirius-compatible stereo already in your car or are buying one, you can get the Sirius tuner free with purchase of the antenna and new subscription. Or if you favor the portable systems, buy the tuner and 2 docking stations (home and car) and get a rebate for one of the docking kits. (see ads in your local CC/BB for this information -- that's where I've seen it advertised, and it's on Siris's website too)
After making the dog and horse "talk," the farmer becomes nervous of what the sheep might say, possibly revealing some indecent behaviour on the farmer's part toward certain animals, so the farmer attempts to discredit anything the sheep might say before it has the chance, by calling it a liar. What are the odds, a farm joke on/. about FUD?
Agreed. That and it's constant requests to "correct" the fact that I did not let it be the default program for most media types are the reason I removed it from my system a couple years back and have refused to allow it on since. (I only gave it.rm and.ram files, since those are the only ones I can't play with something else. And since that time, I've hardly missed anything useful by not viewing.rm or.ram files)
I wonder if the people living in Santa Claus, Indiana would be able to counter-sue Santa Claus Operations, since they had the name first.
Or would Kris Kringle (formerly named Darl McBride) attempt to use that town's existance as proof in such a case?
If you watch True Lies carefully enough, you will note that the evil villains use OS/2. The same thing happens in one of the older (mid 90's era) Bond movies.
I recall seeing something a year or so back on the Mac tv/movie conspiracy, in which it was stated that the good-guys always seem to use Macs, and the bad-guys always use some other operating system (Windows, OS/2, etc.). The article used the reference of the tv show 24 (I think that's the right show -- I don't watch it) where one of the "good-guys" was really a spy and had just recently traded in their Apple powerbook for a Dell. (cue the ominous music)
In fact, one of the very few counter-examples I can quote for this off the top of my head is the movie 'Unbreakable' in which the main villain uses Macs. But then again you don't know he's the main villain until a plot twist at the very end, so the Macs could be part of the disguise.
This is correct. Having grown bored with the regular cube someone left in the lab at work, I started taking it apart and putting it back together randomly to solve. If one corner is rotated or edge flipped from where it should be, that piece will remain in the incorrect rotation when the rest of the cube is solved and it has to be forcibly flipped/rotated (which with a well-used and loose cube isn't too difficult in most cases). Edges and corners (at least when it comes to the final side of the cube) are done in pairs, so if you think you're being doubly clever by flipping 2 edges or 2 corners, don't be surprised if it doesn't scare the person solving the cube.
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In the spirit of Mini-ITX custom case modding, I went out in search of some novel object to turn into a case for my PVR computer (mini-ITX motherboard, PCI tv tuner/pvr card, dual hard drive storage). Alas, I was not able to find anything that I liked the looks of and was of the appropriate size (the PCI card and dual-hard drives added just a bit too much to the space requirements), so I ended up building my own.
Crude wooden frame to mount everything on, whiteboard side panels, and a clear hinged side panel/access door. Final box ended up being something like 12x9x5 inches. It's not a beast, but it does what it's intended to do, and looks better than when it was setting in an opened box on my desktop.
I'll try to put some pics of it online somewhere when I get home.
The version setting is generally stored in the firmware of the drive itself, irrelevant to whatever operating system is in use. The count on the number of changes is stored there as well, so in theory he could set the region code under the default Windows install on the laptop, reformat it and install Linux/BTS/whatever_else and it would keep the same region encoding.
Though at that point he would not easily be able to change the region again without the windows drivers/utility to access it, not to mention the lack of legal DVD player programs on non-windows/non-mac computers.
Block ads/annoying sites from Mozilla? How anti-retro. I use a customized hosts file to redirect any queries for sites I don't like to 127.0.0.0 and that gets rid of most of the annoying ads.
And the good thing about it? It works for any web browser that I want! I'm quite happy using IE under Windows ME to do this. Much shorter learning curve than any *nix OS or alternate web browser. If you can edit a text file, you can do this.
I know there's many other security risks to using Winblah blah blah, I know all the slander about M$, I just don't care. I'm lazy about such things. When I feel like dinking around with things I have no clue about and less than no time to learn properly, I boot into my FreeBSD partition. When I just feel like surfing the web, I'm gonna use what came with the OS that makes all the toys on my computer work the way I want them to.
I can't see myself using some monstrosity pda thing on my wrist.
I switched from wearing ugly-looking wristwatches to pocketwatches in college, but after graduation and being given a pager at work, I stopped wearing a watch altogether whenever I had my pager on me.
A couple months ago I found a decent looking slender wristwatch buried in my closet, and now wear that when I go somewhere that appearance matters. Nothing too expensive, just simple, elegant and functional.
Throughout high school and college, I was notoriously hard on my watches -- very few non-digital ones would last even a full year before dieing permanently for no obvious reason. And digital ones just aren't as stylish in my opinion. (I still have an older digital watch from 8-9 years ago that works quite well that I wear when working out, but that's about the only time I'll wear it -- I don't like the extra weight on my wrist when I do a lot of typing all day long)
trenchcoat...check
sword...check
long hair (to complete the look)...check
delusions of living in a fantasy world where I can get away with carrying around such a weapon and saying things like that without getting tossed in an asylum somewhere...sorry, fresh out.
When they start spamming me (I'm not holding off on hopes of an if in the case of determined overzealous political campaigns) I'll treat them the same way I do to all other spammers I get: forward as attachment to uce@ftc.gov and delete, and let the government deal with their own mess.
Provided any of them get past my email's spam filters in the first place. Who says being patriotic requires letting people harass you with undesired advertising?
The only disagreement I have with what you said is with the last line:
But how can you possibly tell me that spending an extra $20 on a *slow* memory card is superior?
When I visit family/friends out of state, I'd rather bring along a 1" x 2" x 0.25" memory card so I can play on my brother's GCN or friend's PS2 than a big honking hard drive-based console.
For me (and I may be in the minority on this), portability of this nature alone is worth $20 for something I can fit in my shirt pocket. There may not be other advantages to it, but that doesn't matter to me, I don't need anything else.
Nobody suspects the butterfly. Muhuwahahahahaha.
That would require me to install something else to browse the web with, and as I mentioned previously, I'm too lazy to do that.
I'm well aware of what "the competition" claims to offer, and in fact I think it's a good idea. I'm just too lazy to use it.
I prefer simplicity, and that means not having excess programs running on my computer. And since IE is already there (and can't be done away with without serious effort that I'm not about to start looking into), it's the default winner until it pisses me off.
I'm more than willing to allow Google to see where I go so they can keep their search engine at peak effectiveness if it lets me not see annoying popup ads.
Not all data tracking is evil. Feel free to remove your tinfoil hat and join the rest of us.
What's the problem? I've always used IE. With the Google-addon, no pop-ups. No need to get revolutionary and install some ultra 'leet 3rd-party Gatesfree-bullshitbrowser for this minor disturbance.
Same here. Google toolbar + customized hosts file. If something somehow makes it past those, I find it's site name and add it to the hosts file. Magic, I tells ya.
Only annoyance is with flash ads, and one of these days when I stop slacking so much I'll figure that one out too, to can the adds but keep Strongbad, all while STILL RUNNING IE.
Why? For no other purpose than to annoy the Mozilla zealots. That and I'm too lazy to install excess programs and switch my collection of many hundreds of bookmarks over.
Oh, about a week to back this drive up at USB 1.1 speeds. Heh... so much for your vacation plans.
Are you kidding? That's the perfect time to take a vacation. Start the backup and take off.
"Sorry, can't use the computer for a week, it's backing up. Guess I'll just have to get outside and do something else....I wonder what the weather is like in the Bahamas this time of the year..."
Lastly, despite the fact that the tea has caffiene in it, does it really mean that you can't drink it anymore? I've cut all caffiene from my life, but I still enjoy the tea at the restaurant with no ill effect.
If kept in small, infrequent doses, tea, like other caffeinated products can be occasionally enjoyed by us current and former caffeine addicts without ill effect.
I'd never been much of a coffee person, but was a heavy caffeinated soda drinker when I was younger. I quit drinking soft drinks entirely for a couple years cold-turkey back in high school (about 10 years ago) in an effort to cut down on excessive sugar intake to control my weight, and recall suffering through some nasty headaches around the same time (retrospectively I can only assume they were caffeine-withdrawal, though at that time I had no clue and just dealt with it)
Over the years since then I'd developed a taste for tea, green tea in particular, but a couple years back after getting into a rather regular habit of drinking green tea during work for a couple weeks, I went through a few nasty withdrawal headaches again when I stopped.
So even now, years after having eliminated caffeine from my regular diet, the withdrawal headaches can be triggered if I (unwittingly or intentionally) drink too much of something containing the drug, and I prefer to make an effort to watch what I consume to keep the drug out of my system than run the risk of future complications/discomfort that would result from withdrawal.
Though I do miss green tea. sigh.
After all, if you tell them you want American-style coffee they add a large amount of water.
On a recent trip to San Diego, I noticed at the airport baggage claim area a coffee stand that offered something along the lines of "cafe americaine" (ie: watered-down espresso, or some such), so it's not necessary to go all the way to Spain to find stores that mock the American idea of coffee-flavored coffee.
As a longtime sufferer of caffeine withdrawl, I have not drank coffee in years, and never did have a habit of it, so I just laugh at people on both sides of the coffee-flavoring arguement and am glad I don't have to spend $4/cup just to get a fix at the local starbucks.
Though I do miss tea quite a bit. sigh.
On caffiene addictions or physical dependancy, quite a bit of it is psychological.
There is a fair amount of physical dependency related to caffeine addiction. I have actively avoided caffeine whenever possible for most of the past 1.5-2 years, and whenever I overconsume (sometimes it cannot be easily avoided -- poor labeling on brands of root beer are what catch me most often) I still encounter the nasty headaches even if I was not aware that I had consumed something caffeinated at the time. However, in small quantities (a single recommended serving size [ie: 8oz.] every week or so) I do not encounter problems, but having never really noticed any benefit from caffeine, I find it best to avoid it if at all possible.
Contrary to popular belief, caffeine does not raise everybody's energy level. I have almost never encountered that, and I used to drink a LOT of caffeinated soda. If I remember correctly, caffeine works chemically to block the receptors in the brain that sleep-inducing chemicals usually bond to (I was a CS major, not biology/chemistry, so disregard any bad terminology) and thus prevents the user from becoming tired, as opposed to increasing their energy level. Having a fairly robust metabolism, I generally have a good amount of energy from the time I wake up until I go to sleep (usually about 17-19 hours later), and therefore probably wouldn't notice the affects of something that prevented me from getting tired when my energy level went down (having a fairly high sugar-intake probably contributes to this, too, not to mention my waste-line, but that's what new-years resolutions are for. At least until Feb.). There are times I wish I could be on the Mars probe program for NASA just to get the extra 40 minutes per day to do stuff.
For one thing, caffiene should be leading *to* an increase in headaches since it constricts blood vessels.
I'm not sure if blood vessel constriction causes headaches, or the ensuing expansion and inrush of more blood than had previously been there as the caffeine wears off. As I figure it (see above, this is not my area of study), the parts of the brain that become blood-starved due to blood vessel constriction become accustomed to a lower quantity of blood, and as the drug wears off, the affected portions of the brain are suddenly flooded with more blood than they are used to, and have to adjust to the increased pressure, which could be what causes the headaches that some of us have known all too well.
They make up for it by having those beg-a-thons several times a year. Then you get commercials that go on for hours without any music.
At which point you can throw then a few bucks and futilely attempt to search for content on other stations only to appreciate how well you have it by having public radio available as an option to you during the non beg-a-thon times.
This is true, I have noticed slight audio quality deficiencies with my install (the Sirius Kenwood portable unit), but when travelling at 70+mph down the expressway, I don't notice the sound quality difference anyway due to the rather high amounts of road/wind noise in my car.
Unfortunately I had mine installed in a somewhat unorthodox manner (stuffed into a 1-din storage compartment in the center console under my regular stereo) where I cannot reach the switch to change the FM frequency to which it transmits and have encountered reception/interference issues with local stations on the route I travel.
Fortunately for me, I can manually lower my car radio antenna to the point where it won't pick up the local broadcast radio stations and it only picks up the FM modulator (my car antenna is on the driver's side A pillar so I can just roll down my window and pull down the antenna all while driving at 70mph on the interstate -- at least I'm not drinking McDonald's coffee and talking on my cell phone when I do that)
If you don't like paying on a monthly basis, Sirius is currently offering lifetime subscriptions for a set fee.
You just have to gamble that they'll still be around for the next 2 1/2 years to make it pay off vs. a recurring monthly bill. I went for this, mainly since I really don't like recurring monthly charges to my credit cards. I just hope I'm right.
I think you missed the point. Even if you can't remember what you put on a CD, you still made that CD at one time, and you've heard the songs on it before. With radio, you have the chance of hearing something that you've NEVER heard before. New artists, new songs, and things that you don't have in your MP3 collection, not just stuff from your collection that you forgot about.
Exactly. That's one of the main reasons I recently bought one.
Plus finding/making mp3's of anything/everything in one's collection and burning it onto CD's takes time and effort, and some of us just don't get around to doing that all too often. (not all of us went hogwild with the original Napster et al. and don't have gigs of pirated mp3's lying around on some hard drive or another.)
Satelitte isn't just used by radio aficionados. Real folks like you and I sometimes need it.
I recently bought a Sirius subscription because, though I am not a radio afficianado, I do like to hear music/news/actual programming when I turn on the radio. As it was, I found I had recently been listening to about 3 or 4 of the dozens of local stations in my area, one in particular because it averages only 5 minutes of commercials per hour, and the other couple stations for those few minutes. (the main is a listener-supported classical music station, and the only non-Sirius station I still listen to).
I gave up on the 20 minutes of hourly ads and the continuous rotation of the same dozen songs on all the other stations 6 months to a year ago.
Although I do have a CD player in my car, I like to hear new things that I haven't heard before, and it gets expensive buying new CD's all the time, even the generally more economical classical ones that make up the majority of my collection.
So after weighing my options, and with plenty of holiday travel in my immediate future, I decided in the long term it would be nice to go with satellite radio, as it would be cheaper than laying out the $20-30 per month I have been for new CD's. Plus I can have the opportunity to see what some of the 'music' out there sounds like that I wouldn't pay for under other circumstances. And the being able to listen through their website wherever I happen to have a live internet connection is a nice plus. Now if only the people who sell the stuff at Circuit City/Best Buy had a clue about it and could have told me that due to the poor placement of windows in my apartment it would be virtually impossible for me to get a direct satellite signal at home. But that's what rebates are for, to cover such costs of experimentation.
Sirius has recently been running a couple deals to get more people to buy their service: If you have a Sirius-compatible stereo already in your car or are buying one, you can get the Sirius tuner free with purchase of the antenna and new subscription.
Or if you favor the portable systems, buy the tuner and 2 docking stations (home and car) and get a rebate for one of the docking kits.
(see ads in your local CC/BB for this information -- that's where I've seen it advertised, and it's on Siris's website too)
After making the dog and horse "talk," the farmer becomes nervous of what the sheep might say, possibly revealing some indecent behaviour on the farmer's part toward certain animals, so the farmer attempts to discredit anything the sheep might say before it has the chance, by calling it a liar. /. about FUD?
What are the odds, a farm joke on
Agreed. That and it's constant requests to "correct" the fact that I did not let it be the default program for most media types are the reason I removed it from my system a couple years back and have refused to allow it on since. (I only gave it .rm and .ram files, since those are the only ones I can't play with something else. And since that time, I've hardly missed anything useful by not viewing .rm or .ram files)
I wonder if the people living in Santa Claus, Indiana would be able to counter-sue Santa Claus Operations, since they had the name first.
Or would Kris Kringle (formerly named Darl McBride) attempt to use that town's existance as proof in such a case?
If you watch True Lies carefully enough, you will note that the evil villains use OS/2. The same thing happens in one of the older (mid 90's era) Bond movies.
I recall seeing something a year or so back on the Mac tv/movie conspiracy, in which it was stated that the good-guys always seem to use Macs, and the bad-guys always use some other operating system (Windows, OS/2, etc.). The article used the reference of the tv show 24 (I think that's the right show -- I don't watch it) where one of the "good-guys" was really a spy and had just recently traded in their Apple powerbook for a Dell. (cue the ominous music)
In fact, one of the very few counter-examples I can quote for this off the top of my head is the movie 'Unbreakable' in which the main villain uses Macs. But then again you don't know he's the main villain until a plot twist at the very end, so the Macs could be part of the disguise.
This is correct. Having grown bored with the regular cube someone left in the lab at work, I started taking it apart and putting it back together randomly to solve. If one corner is rotated or edge flipped from where it should be, that piece will remain in the incorrect rotation when the rest of the cube is solved and it has to be forcibly flipped/rotated (which with a well-used and loose cube isn't too difficult in most cases). Edges and corners (at least when it comes to the final side of the cube) are done in pairs, so if you think you're being doubly clever by flipping 2 edges or 2 corners, don't be surprised if it doesn't scare the person solving the cube.