So does this mean that they'll change all the signs to the Mojave Airport to the Mojave Spaceport? That would be really cool and I bet those signs 'll disappear every week or so:)
Modes proposal for keeping the signs up:
Make up extras. Sell them at the spaceport office (profits to help fund the spaceport or space exploration in general).
Print notice on the back of the ones on the road that reasonably-priced souvenirs are available at the office or by mail-order at (x) for ($y) and how big the fine is for stealing THIS one. B-)
I got a carterphone direct-connect modem board, designed to be built into a teletype machine. 110 baud (which I later upgraded to 300 by modifying the filters).
This might sound like crud. But this was back in the days when 300 baud was a FAST connection and modems were EXPENSIVE - and mostly supplied by Bell. It is what initially got me online, once I finished my homebrew video terminal around '71 or so.
(Later it also got me onto the UUCP mailnet - back when the complete list of sites fit on three pages.)
Microsoft has arguably deliberate policy of giving their products generic names: Windows, Office, Word, SQL Server, Access, Works and then threaten companies which do not even directly compete with them (wxWindows were renamed to wxWidgets even though wxWindows were miles away from OS market.) thus denying competition possibility even clearly identify their products without running into trademark infringement.
It's not just trademarks, either. They also coopt inconvenient technical terms and redefine them to their advantage.
For example: "Wizard". It meant an person exceptionally good at some aspect of IT, (especially system administration). Someone with perhaps less than the mind-bogglingly total understanding of a subject that would make one a "guru". But nevertheless an expert who one would call for fast and correct solutions to difficult problems.
Typically it would be prefixed with a modifier designating the field of expertese, as in "Unix wizard" or "Sendmail wizard". If you had a problem with installing and/or a bug in configuring Sendmail, for instance, you'd look around for a "Sendmail Wizard" to help you out.
Wizards were well respected. Referring to someone as a wizard at some aspect of Microsoft system/application set administration implied that he had more on the ball than Microsoft's manual writers and helpdesk personnel (even after escalation), perhaps than their developers (since he typically solved difficult problems THEY had created without access to the source).
Then Microsoft coopted it for their (sometimes brain-dead) automated install/configuration menu sets. This became the meaning first encountered by Windows lusers (a somewhat large population). Now referring to a person as a Wizard became confusing - and once sorted out nevertheless carried the implication that he might be an idiot-savant, no more brainful than a lame stack of menus.
I see both of these trends as subsets of Microsoft's "Embrace / Extend (incompatibly) / Extinguish" strategy, polluting the namespace in an effort to trip up all competition and monopolize the IT market.
It IS called X Windows. That's what I've always heard people refer to it as.
It doesn't matter that the trademark and official name is something else in this context.
But when did people start calling it that? It will be a much stronger argument if that usage was common BEFORE Microsoft registered Microsoft Windows (though it can still be argued that even if Microsoft HAD the mark it has now lost it because of the use of Windows as a generic term for comptuer windowing system in this coinage.)
MS isn't my favorite company but I also detest it when people try to play off of someone else's popularity. A perplexing conundrum: I'm not sure who to root for this time.
I've got no problem picking Lindows on this one.
The Lindows distribution is apparently intended to be an open-source workalike of Windows, convenient for former Windows users trying to switch to Linux. The mark they chose clearly says to me that it's NOT windows but it's LIKE it (and has something to do with Linux). "Brand 'L'" Try it and it MAY work well enough for you or it may not. No confusion whatsoever.
However this case will probably be decided on another basis: Whether Microsoft is attempting to privatize a generic mark. And IMHO "Windows" as applied to software windowing interface systems was already in use well before they coined "Microsoft Windows" and then dropped the "Microsoft". If the jury agrees with this, "Windows" becomes a generic once again and coinages like "Lindows" are fair game.
If you're trying to say you have a Linux based Windows system (bearing in mind that "Windows" is NOT a trademark) that is NOT Microsoft Windows but IS a member of the same category and a convenient alternative to the Microsoft product, what ELSE could you mark it to encapsulate that message?
North Korea treats its people every bit as badly as Iraq, they openly declared they were developing nuclear weapons and might use them on the US, and all you get from the White House is a whole lot of cowardice on that front.
Not to keep defending Bush (who has many policies I disagree with). But my understanding is that the US is letting China handle that one for the moment.
Do you WANT the US to start ANOTHER war right now (when we're ALREADY heavily extended in Iraq), against a country that, if it DOES have a nuke, can use missiles we KNOW it has (because it announced them) to drop it in the northwest US or (if the new model works) anywhere on the US except maybe the Florida keys, just so you can perceive Bush as acting consistently?
Why don't you bring that one up again after we're done with Iraq?
(Who knows - it might be settled by then anyhow. Note that Lybia has recently decided to dump ITS WMDs. B-) )
The US administration knew of the abuse in January, and didnt take action until PHOTOS were released that showed the abuse.
The appropriate section of the military was informed in mid-January, and by the NEXT DAY an investigation team headed by a GENERAL was on the job.
This is the appropriate action by the executive branch. If by "The Administration" you mean the bureaucrats in the White House the appropriate action on THEIR part is to KEEP HANDS OFF while the military system DOES IT'S JOB.
That's called "delegation".
Just it's not appropriate for the legislature to pass a new law against the same act every time an existing one is broken, it's not appropriate for the upper levels of the executive branch to issue new orders every time an existing one is disobeyed.
The time for such action is when the EXISTING system FAILS to find and punish the perpetrators and those charged with their supervision and to discourage further disobediance of standing orders.
The US is probably the most hated country in the entire world right now.
Yes, I'd call that loss of respect.
The rest of the world fears you. They do not respect you.
IMHO It's a big improvement from simply being hated. B-)
One of the definitions of "Respect" relates to the emotional state that comes from the combination of fear of what you can (and likely will) do if crossed with the realization that you WON'T do if if NOT crossed and a clear understanding of the line.
If they're going to hate us anyhow, I'd rather thay also feared what might happen if they act on the hate. That provides a firm foundation (and an incentive) to put the hate aside long enough to come, first to a truce, then to cooperation, then to alliance, and finally to friendship.
"Bill Clinton lied under oath in his testimony when charged with sexual harassment, denying the accuser her day in court."
The accuser was not denied her day in court. He lied when he was being asked about having sex with somebody else not the accuser. You should do some basic research before posting.
You should do yours. The questioning was part of the case, to establish whether a pattern of such behavior existed. Clinton's lies weakened the case against him.
Entirely too much to answer in the rest of your post and still get the yard work done before sunset. B-)
"I wish that were true. It would be a MAJOR improvement to the way we've been treated in the past."
Arabs in my town are afraid to go out. One has already been killed. Others have been threatened. Lots of property has been destroyed. How are they doing in your town?
What town do YOU live in? Was there any evidence that the person killed was killed because he/she was an Arab and/or a Muslim?
Well, let's see. The mosques are still standing. Services are still being held - even at the one that was used occasionally by the charities that turned out to be funding terrorists. (They've since been banned from that venue.)
My wife gets dirty looks occasionally when she goes shopping in Hajab, particularly when she does it at the Jewish supermarket (though the owner DID throw out a recent immigrant from Israel who mistook her for a Palestinian and yelled at her when she didn't instantly get out of his way when he wanted to inspect the goods on the shelf SHE was inspecting goods on.)
Nobody's smashed our windows yet, or vandalized our cars. (Of course the NRA stickers on our cars might have something to do with that. B-) ) Haven't had any hate crimes reported by anyone at the Institute - let alone any murders.
Give me a break. The US didn't start to care until it was leaked to the media during an election year.
Come off it. It was reported to the command staff in mid January. The NEXT DAY they had a GENERAL heading an investigation. They relieved and reprimanded the chain of command in the prision above the perpetrators (a carreer-killer if it sticks - and often even if it doesn't) and brought charges against the half-dozen plus that they could prove were involved.
IMHO the main concern was not politics, but preventing the blowing of the investigation.
Frankly, I don't care whether Sanchez/Myers/Rumsfelt know or not. It was their job to know and make sure things like this did not happen, and they failed.
Again bullshit.
It's no more Rumsfelt's job to prevent all criminal activity by low- and mid-ranking soldiers than it is Ashcroft's job to prevent all federal crimes. That is flat-out impossible.
What IS possible is to discourage it, by standing orders, by training, and (when it occurs anyway) by publicly punishing those who do it.
ALL of these things are happening.
Can you name another military in the entire world where a better job is done? Can you name another in the EINTIREY OF WORLD HISTORY where a better job was done?
The film is obviously already produced and [Disney is] ordering a company they bought to not distribute it. Their decision is motivated by political pressure, and they are willing to abandon profit in order to appease their Bush overlords (Jeb and Dubya).
His previous "documentary" - _Bowling for Columbine_ - only GROSSED 21 million, despite the enormous publicity generated by the controversy over it. This one has even more controversey - but it has acquired the reputation of a partisan hit piece on a president who won the closest election in recent history.
I'd bet that Miramax looked at that. Then they looked at how _The Passion of Christ_ is doing. Then they started thinking about how much they'd have to spend to promote this turkey, how little they'd make off it, and maybe how much they'd lose if even a few of the people who paid to watch _The Passion_ decide to boycott even one Miramax film.
Over simplified in that it probably should have more than 2 dimensions.
Actually, 2 is very good. Peoples' opinions tend to cluster. One dimension, no matter how well chosen, smash many distinct opinion clusters together. Two (if well-chosen, and these are) do a VERY good job of separating vitrually all of them.
And the two dimensions chosen also aid greatly in understanding the trends behind the clusters.
My big gripe is that it doesn't explain the style of psychopathy and compensation for it that underlies much of the ideology and political behavior of "Conservative" and "Liberal" mainstream.
About one percent of the population is psychopaths. How a culture handles them - especially, how it socializes them - is a major factor in understanding the culture. (Especially since politics tends to attract them, so they're VASTLY overrepresented in the seats of power.)
"Conservatives" give them a set of rules to replace the missing conscience. This results in compuslive rule-followers - who will treat you like criminal/terrorist/scum if you break THEIR particular rule set. The flavors of Conservativism come from the various rule sets, though the core rules have much commonality - such as a selection from the Ten Commandments.
"Liberals" (probably by accident) encourage their psychopathy within very loose "don't get caught" limits. Thus politics becomes "The art of the possible - LBJ", i.e. anything you can get away with. Lying, lawbreaking, etc. are all fair game even at the top of the ladder.
Libertarians give them a SINGLE overriding rule - don't coerce - defined as stealing or hitting first. All else is fair game. Objectivism (with that as the FIRST rule) is available for those who need more detailed instruction on how to live. (Objectivists often fume at the commie hippie dopers, who don't follow the "obvious correlaries" from Rand's arguments. But their first rule says to let 'em do that if they want to, as long as they're commies only with THEIR OWN stuff, so they put up with it. B-) )
Authoritarians say "Do what your superior tells you." Then it's whatever the higher-up dogs say, and luck of the battle who ends up being the top dog - Hitler, Stalin, etc.
As I posted in another thread for a slightly different reason:
"80% of misinformed Americans get thier information from FOX news"
The three questions used to guage whether the subjects were "misinformed" were all questions where the Liberal rhetoric matches the facts and the Conservative rhetoric does not. Since the mainstream media airs only the Liberal view and Fox News airs both, Conservative viewers mostly watch Fox. So they are likely to be measuring the political views of the audience more than their ignorance.
A similar study with different "misinformed beliefs" (for instance: "Law changes leading to more Concealed Carry permits raise the gun-death rate.") would no doubt find the opposite result.
Turns up numerous pages with examples of Fox bias.
Fox News doesn't CLAIM to be unbiased. Fox News CLAIMS to let "both sides" (read that Conservative and Liberal - there are a LOT more than two sides) get a "Fair and Ballanced" airing.
That means they consciously attempt to have some commentators who are biased toward the Conservative, some biased toward the Liberal, side of each issue.
The showcase of this is the highly-rated _Hannity and Colmes_ (though the top-rated O'Reilly tries to do it in one person, pissing off both sides equally).
Can anyone honestly claim that Alan Colmes is right-wing biased? B-)
Of course the only contrast comes from the mainstream media, which has swung farther to the left than Karl Marx since the gutting of the FCC's Fairness Doctrine and the ascention of the baby-boomer journalism-school grads (who formed their biases during the Draft/Vietnam (un)War protests). So an outlet that lets the Conservative side of any issue get any airing AT ALL looks far-right to some viewers used to that ultra-left bias.
For mainstream Conservative "bias" listen to Rush Limbaugh (who is quite proud of it - billing himself as "I AM 'equal time'.", i.e. he's the Conservative answer to the mainstream media's Liberal viewpoints.)
But to hear true ultra-right bias you must listen to some of the broadcast stations to be heard on short wave radio. Radio Shack has some cheap portable receivers, so give it a try.
Jesus Fucking Christ! Bill Clinton lied about a blowjob,
No.
Bill Clinton lied under oath in his testimony when charged with sexual harassment, denying the accuser her day in court.
The issue was never about whether he had sex with a consenting partner. The issue was always about whether he used his office as governor to engage in a pattern of illegal sexual harassment of NON-consenting partners, OBSTRUCTED JUSTICE by PERJURY when accused of these crimes in order to escape justice, and if so whether a person who does this should be in charge of federal law enforcement.
Bill Clinton's actions have resulted in the gutting of the employee sexual harassment laws by creating the "Clinton Defense": If it's OK for the guy at the top, it's OK all the way down.
The remains of the feminist movement have beet totally discredited by their support of him, and public slandering of his victims (such as their characterizing one as "trailer trash" who should be honored to be noticed by someone like Clinton).
George Fucking W. Bush lied about a cause for a war [...]
Lied? Or believed the reports of the intelligence community that Sadam had NOT destroyed his weapons and was making more, while Sadam was busy doing everything in his power to convince the world he had something to hide from the inspectors? Rememer: It wasn't just GFingWB who thought the Tyrant of Bagdhad was still well armed with CBW devices and close to having nukes.
Now whether that was because he WAS hiding something, was trying to convince his neighbors that he was still to dangerous to attack, was trying to salvage his pride, was trying to avoid further exposure of his mass-torture and mass-murder operations, or was just a loon, doesn't really matter. The point is that he could have avoided this whole thing by NOT letting his people play games with the UN inspectors.
By the way: Now that the remaining anti-western forces in Iraq have ACCIDENTALLY set off a nerve-gas shell randomly drawn from an Iraqui arms cache, thinking it was an explosive shell, do you STILL believe that all the WMDs were really gone?
Not to mention the lost of your respect and good name in the international community
"Loss of respect"?
The world is now on notice that if knock the chip off the shoulder of the USA you just MIGHT find it accepts the challenge and you get pounded into the ground. Seems to me that creates a LOT more respect than whining to the United Petty Dictators for permission to hit back every time the US is punched.
The world is now ALSO on notice that the US does its flat-out damdest to avoid suppressing others religions and culture - even to the point of endangering and losing the lives of its own troops. And that if its troops screw up and start oppressing those under they control, the US will ADMIT it, INVESTIGATE it, REMOVE them from their posts and TRY them for crimes. Many in the Muslum world are now asking each other why they allow their OWN leaders to do less.
[as a result] you visit a foreign country and say you're an American, and you'll be treated with as much respect as an Arab in your own USA.
I wish that were true. It would be a MAJOR improvement to the way we've been treated in the past.
The real fear is that people will make ringtones out of the CDs they already have. That process is nothing more than format shifting, trimming, and then playback when a particular event happens to the phone. Uhm... there's no laws against that process.
If your phone plays the exact cut, you may be right. But if your phone plays a bunch of beeps that are the tune, that is a "derived work". And we're back to the issue of how much is "fair use".
IANAL, but current copyright guidelines seem to permit fair use of "Up to 10% of a body of sound recording, but no more than 30 seconds".
The linked web page says that the North Carolina Department of Public Education believes that is the case IN A PUBLIC SCHOOL SETTING. For instance: As part of a class project in K-12 education.
That does not necessarily mean the same guidelines are applicable when you're doing it to replace purchasing a ringtone for your telephone from the copyright holder. The limits of fair use in that situation may be narrower.
Remember that one of the issues to be weighed in determining whether an act is "fair use" is how much it impacts the potential income of the copyright holder. We have evidence from the existing market that people are willing to pay over a buck for a ringtone. Things get even more interesting if somebody is making a profit by selling the tool, or (worse yet) selling the ringtones themselves.
IANAL either. I would love it if a lawyer or paralegal among our readership could post a pointer to an authoritative guideline or (better yet) a precedent on the boundaries of fair use OUTSIDE the educational context.
The fear [of the RIAA] is that people will make ringtones out of pirated songs, thus compounding the file-sharing problem while robbing the music industry of a new source of revenue.
IMHO that's correct. "Whack-a-mole" enforcement, no doubt preceeded by a strike against the toolmaker based on the claim that the tool is a piracy aid.
So for the reasons above we should be prepared for the courts to agree with the RIAA when the inevitable suit is filed.
2) It will be very difficult to garner any sympathy for these sickos from myself or the/. community. Or any community for that matter.
The government always starts with the most unpopular scum when establishing precedent for a new denial of civil rights.
Once the precedent is established, it applies to applications of the law in question in ALL circumstances, regardless of the scumminess of the accused. But the government will normally work outward from the scumbag community gradually, getting the machinery of repression well-greased before applying it to more ordinary people.
So you need to disconnect your consideration of such laws and procedures from your opinion of the accused. OF COURSE the first few are scum. But that's no reason to give the government a green light when railroading them.
Runaway government is ENORMOUSLY more dangerous than even the worst of the crooks. That's why even obvious murderers must be let off when the police and/or prosecution doesn't follow the rules when going after them. Better a few retail-level murderers on the street than wholesale, institutionalized tyrrany, leading eventually to civil war.
However, woe be unto you if you cross them. As benign as they are, those fuckers hold a serious grudge. And for a very, very long time. They are still pissed about the whole OS/2 Warp debacle and won't use Microsoft products if they can get away with it. That's also a very large reason why they are pumping so much money into Linux. They'd rather the whole OS market be open and free than have Microsoft controlling it.
My wife was an intern at Microsoft during that shenannegan and has a LOT to say about it. We're both glad to hear that IBM hasn't let bygones be bygones on that one.
(She says that one thing that's ironic is that OS/2 was a much better system than Windows. I guess OS/2 got to play Betamax to Windows' VHS.)
An antenna is a transmission line terminated with an open circuit. Actually, an antenna should be viewed as an impedance matching device to free space.
The voltage at the end is quite high.
Say cellphones had a whole watt of tranmitter power. Zo = 377 ohms, the impedance of free space. P=V^2/R, so V=19.4 volts RMS. That's 19.4 volts AT THE DAMNED TRANSMITTER!
The voltage at the end of a narrow-band antenna can easily be well above that at the feedpoint - especially if the antenna is narrow-band. (Broadband antennas try to couple most of the energy to the space-wave on a single pass through the elements, rather than over several, while narrow-band antennas let it "ring" for many passes - which means the voltages and currents build up.) But I will drop it for now.
But when breaking a circuit with current flowing through it you end up with exactly that microscopic gap initially. Once the air is ionized the arc can be sustained by a very low voltage. And with any inductance in the circuit at all (even the stray inductance from the wiring) the voltage will climb to maintain the arc until the current through the inductor is finally brought to a halt by the reverse voltage.
Nonsense. Utter nonsense. You're getting all sorts of concepts confused. If there was a significant inductance, THE "CIRCUIT" WOULD NOT BE RESONATING AT RF FREQUENCIES.
I think you missed it when I hopped from the RF issues at the antenna to the DC issues at the switch contacts. I'll go into that below.
So the arc can be "pulled out" to significant lengths.
This phenomena is caused by air's reduced resistance once you've started the arc.
This is EXACTLY the mechanism that produces the voltage spike in the primary (and thus also in the secondary) of the transformer in a contact-point type auto ignition.
No, it's not. An ignition coil is supplied with a continuous DC (NOT RF!) current flow.
An ignition coil in a point-contact type ignition system is supplied with a DC voltage. Over time the current builds up. It would build without limit if there were no stray resistance (I = 1/L inetgral V dt). But there is resistance, so it makes an exponential approach to I = E/R.
But if the circuit is suddenly opened the current through the inductor is STILL governed by I = 1/L integral V dt. Ignoring resistance for a moment, if the current built up over time T, to stop the current in time T' requires a back voltage of T/T'. If nothing else is done to prevent it the voltage across the gap rises as necessary to keep the current flowing until the energy stored in the magnetic field has been dumped as integral E' * I dT, mostly by heating the air with an arc and the metal at the points where the arc lands, sometimes vaporizing the material of the contacts. E' can be FAR above E.
This is used to advantage in point-contact ignition systems and television flyback transformers. In the ignition system, a small capacitor is placed across the points to allow the current to flow momentarily after the points open, extinguishing the arc. But the current quickly charges the capacitor and the votage rises. If nothing were done the voltage would go to some large multiple of the applied voltage (controled by the ratio of L and C), then the tuned circuit would ring until the energy was lost in the stray resistance. But instead the voltage spike is multiplied further by the primary/secondary turns ratio of the coil and escapes by striking an arc across a sparkplug.
The flyback circuit of a TV monitor works similarly: A current is built up through the flyback transformer primary and the horizontal coil of the yoke, during the horizontal sweep, by applying a voltage across the inductance. This builds up slowly, but then has to be reversed suddenly during the retrace interval. The voltage required to stop the current has the same ration to the voltage used to start it as the sweep interval to the retrace interva
Slashdot already provides people with enough inaccurate Science and Technology information... lets not shoot for Medical as well...
So he should refrain from asking here, and instead ask his random acquaintences? Remember - that's what people DO in such situations.
Or maybe he should get his ideas from the established print outlets of the popular press. (When was the last time you saw THEM get ANYTHING right when you knew what the REAL story was from personal experience?)
At least on slashdot he has access to a very large population of interested people, some of them actually practitioners or reasearchers in the relevant fields. The environment is more conducive to constructing clear answers than a face-to-face conversation. And while it doesn't prevent the propagation of bogosity, it exposes it to critical reply from people who know better - and can support their claims with references to authoritative literature.
The only alternatives I can see that might get him a clearer idea would be to hire SEVERAL professionas for their expert opinions, or start a foundation to research the subject and hire enough experts that he can sort out the bogus ones.
Remember - even professionals propagate bogus theories. Sometimes they become the accepted paradigm for decades or centuries. And Psychology is particularly prone to this.
For instance, you haven't heard much about Freud's theories from anywhere but Hollywood lately, have you? (And even Hollywood has dropped most of the psychobabble.)
It seems that with the increased use of cocaine on the underground drug scene, people in the emergency rooms treating overdoses noticed that their babbling sounded amazingly like Freud's articles. Given that Freud was a known cocaine user, medical personnel began to suspect that his theories may have had less to do with insight into the workings of the mind than the characteristic halucinations of the use of that drug. Combine that with the low success rate of Freudian-theory based treatments of mental illnesses, the school's practioners' worse-than-chance success rate at predicting which released patients would take actions threatening those around him, and the succes of drug-based treatments built on more mechanical-failure models of mental illness, and the school is not in good repute these days.
So, sure, a question here will elicit a lot of crap. But it will also elicit a significant amount of good advice. IMHO, once doing a little sorting he's likely to end up with better answers this way than by anything else he can do (except perhaps enter college and specialize in the field.)
We're talking about electronic voting, something which demands security (and transparency, but never mind the apparent paradox just now) and they're not concerned that someone has broken into their network?
Apparently a judge somewhere has been shown enough information to think that a search of the site is warranted...
Not judge. Grand Jury.
"Just a bunch of citizens" meeting in secret and nosing into anything a prosecurot thinks might be a sign that a crime might have been committed.
Because their proceedings are (allegedly) secret and the details of their deliberations do NOT become either public record or evidence usable at a trial, claims of privilege and immunity to search do not pull much weight.
Cable modems don't hurt analog cable television, and they've been using spare television bandwidth for over 5 years.
Cable systems also use adjacent channels for TV signals without problems.
The issue is that the TV signal is AM, with the carrier near the low end of the 6 MHz channel and the bulk of the lower sideband suppressed. That means a LOWER channel's signal demodulates directly into the passband of the video for the NEXT HIGHER channel. This will cause serious picture degredation unless the interfering signal is filtered out BEFORE it reaches the detector.
The bandpass filter in the receiver's IF stage attempts to do just such filtering. And it is quite adequate if the two signals are about equally strong. But the lower channel signal is very close in frequency to the higher channel signak, so the filter will be far from perfect. If the lower channel's signal is significantly stronger than the higher channel's, the filtering in the set will be insufficient.
On a cable the strengths of the various channels can be tightly controlled, so they are equal or very close to it. This allows an analog cable system to use all the channels with very good results.
But in air broadcasting the strengths of the signals varies enormously, depending on such things as where your receiver is located relative to the transmitters and how your antenna is aimed. So even if the adjacent-channel signals are transmitting with the same power (unless it's also from the same tower, and sometimes even then), some viewers will find the interfering signal much stronger than the victim signal, and will receive degraded video. Thus the FCC normally doesn't assign adjacent channels in the same market, in order to protect the signal integrety for the viewers.
In both cases it doesn't matter whether the interfering signal is a TV image or a spread-spectrum digital signal: If it's about the same strength as the victim channel the TV's filter will attenuate it enough. If it's significantly stronger, it will interfere. So using a "vacant channel" on a cable works just fine. But using it for an over-the-air device will be a disaster for any of your neighbors who are trying to watch the next-higher channel on their TV sets.
So Samsung is using a laser to print them one-by-one, and Seiko Epson is using ink jet printers ditto.
An OLED screen is just a sheet of substrate with various inks on it.
Why don't they just use a rotary printing press?
Think "newspaper".
Print screens as much as, say, 40 feet tall, by as long as you like, with the connectors for the modular electronics occurring periodically.
At, say, 50 MPH. Until that enormous roll of substrate is exhausted - then thread in another.
On their way out of the press just slit them into strips (i.e. five 8-foot strips for wallpaper), chop them into convenient lengths, and stack them up into bales.
Print the LEDs right up to the cut lines so you can tile a large surface if you want. Or leave a margin for making connections to a one-sided screen print job. (You might even be able to fold the edge over to get the connector onto the back and thus get even one-sided screens to butt together for tiling.)
(Of course you'd have to use different masters for some screen sizes, so the cut lines would occur at convenient places.)
Drop a sheet into a "monitor" picture-frame, with the electronics connecting via contact fingers. Or mount driver chips on the back (to the printed power and signal wiring) if you want to paste 'em up on a wall - and apply power and signal under the baseboard.
You should be able to manufacture replacable sheets for a monitor for a couple bucks. The drive electronics is nothing special. Maybe $25 manufacturing cost for a wall-mount high-res HDTV monitor.
Sell it for a hundred or two, and replacement screens for twenty, and I'd buy several (and a stack of spare screens) even if I'd have to replace the screen a couple times a year. B-)
Slashdot Mirror
So does this mean that they'll change all the signs to the Mojave Airport to the Mojave Spaceport? That would be really cool and I bet those signs 'll disappear every week or so:)
Modes proposal for keeping the signs up:
Make up extras. Sell them at the spaceport office (profits to help fund the spaceport or space exploration in general).
Print notice on the back of the ones on the road that reasonably-priced souvenirs are available at the office or by mail-order at (x) for ($y) and how big the fine is for stealing THIS one. B-)
I got a carterphone direct-connect modem board, designed to be built into a teletype machine. 110 baud (which I later upgraded to 300 by modifying the filters).
This might sound like crud. But this was back in the days when 300 baud was a FAST connection and modems were EXPENSIVE - and mostly supplied by Bell. It is what initially got me online, once I finished my homebrew video terminal around '71 or so.
(Later it also got me onto the UUCP mailnet - back when the complete list of sites fit on three pages.)
Microsoft has arguably deliberate policy of giving their products generic names: Windows, Office, Word, SQL Server, Access, Works and then threaten companies which do not even directly compete with them (wxWindows were renamed to wxWidgets even though wxWindows were miles away from OS market.) thus denying competition possibility even clearly identify their products without running into trademark infringement.
It's not just trademarks, either. They also coopt inconvenient technical terms and redefine them to their advantage.
For example: "Wizard". It meant an person exceptionally good at some aspect of IT, (especially system administration). Someone with perhaps less than the mind-bogglingly total understanding of a subject that would make one a "guru". But nevertheless an expert who one would call for fast and correct solutions to difficult problems.
Typically it would be prefixed with a modifier designating the field of expertese, as in "Unix wizard" or "Sendmail wizard". If you had a problem with installing and/or a bug in configuring Sendmail, for instance, you'd look around for a "Sendmail Wizard" to help you out.
Wizards were well respected. Referring to someone as a wizard at some aspect of Microsoft system/application set administration implied that he had more on the ball than Microsoft's manual writers and helpdesk personnel (even after escalation), perhaps than their developers (since he typically solved difficult problems THEY had created without access to the source).
Then Microsoft coopted it for their (sometimes brain-dead) automated install/configuration menu sets. This became the meaning first encountered by Windows lusers (a somewhat large population). Now referring to a person as a Wizard became confusing - and once sorted out nevertheless carried the implication that he might be an idiot-savant, no more brainful than a lame stack of menus.
I see both of these trends as subsets of Microsoft's "Embrace / Extend (incompatibly) / Extinguish" strategy, polluting the namespace in an effort to trip up all competition and monopolize the IT market.
It IS called X Windows. That's what I've always heard people refer to it as.
It doesn't matter that the trademark and official name is something else in this context.
But when did people start calling it that? It will be a much stronger argument if that usage was common BEFORE Microsoft registered Microsoft Windows (though it can still be argued that even if Microsoft HAD the mark it has now lost it because of the use of Windows as a generic term for comptuer windowing system in this coinage.)
MS isn't my favorite company but I also detest it when people try to play off of someone else's popularity. A perplexing conundrum: I'm not sure who to root for this time.
I've got no problem picking Lindows on this one.
The Lindows distribution is apparently intended to be an open-source workalike of Windows, convenient for former Windows users trying to switch to Linux. The mark they chose clearly says to me that it's NOT windows but it's LIKE it (and has something to do with Linux). "Brand 'L'" Try it and it MAY work well enough for you or it may not. No confusion whatsoever.
However this case will probably be decided on another basis: Whether Microsoft is attempting to privatize a generic mark. And IMHO "Windows" as applied to software windowing interface systems was already in use well before they coined "Microsoft Windows" and then dropped the "Microsoft". If the jury agrees with this, "Windows" becomes a generic once again and coinages like "Lindows" are fair game.
If you're trying to say you have a Linux based Windows system (bearing in mind that "Windows" is NOT a trademark) that is NOT Microsoft Windows but IS a member of the same category and a convenient alternative to the Microsoft product, what ELSE could you mark it to encapsulate that message?
You know what's funny? That google has already spidered that page (5/23/04).
Does anyone know how to provoke the Wayback machine into archiving a version for posterity? B-)
North Korea treats its people every bit as badly as Iraq, they openly declared they were developing nuclear weapons and might use them on the US, and all you get from the White House is a whole lot of cowardice on that front.
Not to keep defending Bush (who has many policies I disagree with). But my understanding is that the US is letting China handle that one for the moment.
Do you WANT the US to start ANOTHER war right now (when we're ALREADY heavily extended in Iraq), against a country that, if it DOES have a nuke, can use missiles we KNOW it has (because it announced them) to drop it in the northwest US or (if the new model works) anywhere on the US except maybe the Florida keys, just so you can perceive Bush as acting consistently?
Why don't you bring that one up again after we're done with Iraq?
(Who knows - it might be settled by then anyhow. Note that Lybia has recently decided to dump ITS WMDs. B-) )
The US administration knew of the abuse in January, and didnt take action until PHOTOS were released that showed the abuse.
The appropriate section of the military was informed in mid-January, and by the NEXT DAY an investigation team headed by a GENERAL was on the job.
This is the appropriate action by the executive branch. If by "The Administration" you mean the bureaucrats in the White House the appropriate action on THEIR part is to KEEP HANDS OFF while the military system DOES IT'S JOB.
That's called "delegation".
Just it's not appropriate for the legislature to pass a new law against the same act every time an existing one is broken, it's not appropriate for the upper levels of the executive branch to issue new orders every time an existing one is disobeyed.
The time for such action is when the EXISTING system FAILS to find and punish the perpetrators and those charged with their supervision and to discourage further disobediance of standing orders.
The US is probably the most hated country in the entire world right now.
Yes, I'd call that loss of respect.
The rest of the world fears you. They do not respect you.
IMHO It's a big improvement from simply being hated. B-)
One of the definitions of "Respect" relates to the emotional state that comes from the combination of fear of what you can (and likely will) do if crossed with the realization that you WON'T do if if NOT crossed and a clear understanding of the line.
If they're going to hate us anyhow, I'd rather thay also feared what might happen if they act on the hate. That provides a firm foundation (and an incentive) to put the hate aside long enough to come, first to a truce, then to cooperation, then to alliance, and finally to friendship.
"Bill Clinton lied under oath in his testimony when charged with sexual harassment, denying the accuser her day in court."
The accuser was not denied her day in court. He lied when he was being asked about having sex with somebody else not the accuser. You should do some basic research before posting.
You should do yours. The questioning was part of the case, to establish whether a pattern of such behavior existed. Clinton's lies weakened the case against him.
Entirely too much to answer in the rest of your post and still get the yard work done before sunset. B-)
"I wish that were true. It would be a MAJOR improvement to the way we've been treated in the past."
Arabs in my town are afraid to go out. One has already been killed. Others have been threatened. Lots of property has been destroyed. How are they doing in your town?
What town do YOU live in? Was there any evidence that the person killed was killed because he/she was an Arab and/or a Muslim?
Well, let's see. The mosques are still standing. Services are still being held - even at the one that was used occasionally by the charities that turned out to be funding terrorists. (They've since been banned from that venue.)
My wife gets dirty looks occasionally when she goes shopping in Hajab, particularly when she does it at the Jewish supermarket (though the owner DID throw out a recent immigrant from Israel who mistook her for a Palestinian and yelled at her when she didn't instantly get out of his way when he wanted to inspect the goods on the shelf SHE was inspecting goods on.)
Nobody's smashed our windows yet, or vandalized our cars. (Of course the NRA stickers on our cars might have something to do with that. B-) ) Haven't had any hate crimes reported by anyone at the Institute - let alone any murders.
Maybe you should move out here.
Give me a break. The US didn't start to care until it was leaked to the media during an election year.
Come off it. It was reported to the command staff in mid January. The NEXT DAY they had a GENERAL heading an investigation. They relieved and reprimanded the chain of command in the prision above the perpetrators (a carreer-killer if it sticks - and often even if it doesn't) and brought charges against the half-dozen plus that they could prove were involved.
IMHO the main concern was not politics, but preventing the blowing of the investigation.
Frankly, I don't care whether Sanchez/Myers/Rumsfelt know or not. It was their job to know and make sure things like this did not happen, and they failed.
Again bullshit.
It's no more Rumsfelt's job to prevent all criminal activity by low- and mid-ranking soldiers than it is Ashcroft's job to prevent all federal crimes. That is flat-out impossible.
What IS possible is to discourage it, by standing orders, by training, and (when it occurs anyway) by publicly punishing those who do it.
ALL of these things are happening.
Can you name another military in the entire world where a better job is done? Can you name another in the EINTIREY OF WORLD HISTORY where a better job was done?
War is hell. Get used to it.
The film is obviously already produced and [Disney is] ordering a company they bought to not distribute it. Their decision is motivated by political pressure, and they are willing to abandon profit in order to appease their Bush overlords (Jeb and Dubya).
His previous "documentary" - _Bowling for Columbine_ - only GROSSED 21 million, despite the enormous publicity generated by the controversy over it. This one has even more controversey - but it has acquired the reputation of a partisan hit piece on a president who won the closest election in recent history.
I'd bet that Miramax looked at that. Then they looked at how _The Passion of Christ_ is doing. Then they started thinking about how much they'd have to spend to promote this turkey, how little they'd make off it, and maybe how much they'd lose if even a few of the people who paid to watch _The Passion_ decide to boycott even one Miramax film.
[...]t he "quiz" is overly simplified,[...]
Over simplified in that it probably should have more than 2 dimensions.
Actually, 2 is very good. Peoples' opinions tend to cluster. One dimension, no matter how well chosen, smash many distinct opinion clusters together. Two (if well-chosen, and these are) do a VERY good job of separating vitrually all of them.
And the two dimensions chosen also aid greatly in understanding the trends behind the clusters.
My big gripe is that it doesn't explain the style of psychopathy and compensation for it that underlies much of the ideology and political behavior of "Conservative" and "Liberal" mainstream.
About one percent of the population is psychopaths. How a culture handles them - especially, how it socializes them - is a major factor in understanding the culture. (Especially since politics tends to attract them, so they're VASTLY overrepresented in the seats of power.)
"Conservatives" give them a set of rules to replace the missing conscience. This results in compuslive rule-followers - who will treat you like criminal/terrorist/scum if you break THEIR particular rule set. The flavors of Conservativism come from the various rule sets, though the core rules have much commonality - such as a selection from the Ten Commandments.
"Liberals" (probably by accident) encourage their psychopathy within very loose "don't get caught" limits. Thus politics becomes "The art of the possible - LBJ", i.e. anything you can get away with. Lying, lawbreaking, etc. are all fair game even at the top of the ladder.
Libertarians give them a SINGLE overriding rule - don't coerce - defined as stealing or hitting first. All else is fair game. Objectivism (with that as the FIRST rule) is available for those who need more detailed instruction on how to live. (Objectivists often fume at the commie hippie dopers, who don't follow the "obvious correlaries" from Rand's arguments. But their first rule says to let 'em do that if they want to, as long as they're commies only with THEIR OWN stuff, so they put up with it. B-) )
Authoritarians say "Do what your superior tells you." Then it's whatever the higher-up dogs say, and luck of the battle who ends up being the top dog - Hitler, Stalin, etc.
As I posted in another thread for a slightly different reason:
"80% of misinformed Americans get thier information from FOX news"
The three questions used to guage whether the subjects were "misinformed" were all questions where the Liberal rhetoric matches the facts and the Conservative rhetoric does not. Since the mainstream media airs only the Liberal view and Fox News airs both, Conservative viewers mostly watch Fox. So they are likely to be measuring the political views of the audience more than their ignorance.
A similar study with different "misinformed beliefs" (for instance: "Law changes leading to more Concealed Carry permits raise the gun-death rate.") would no doubt find the opposite result.
google: fox news bias
Turns up numerous pages with examples of Fox bias.
Fox News doesn't CLAIM to be unbiased. Fox News CLAIMS to let "both sides" (read that Conservative and Liberal - there are a LOT more than two sides) get a "Fair and Ballanced" airing.
That means they consciously attempt to have some commentators who are biased toward the Conservative, some biased toward the Liberal, side of each issue.
The showcase of this is the highly-rated _Hannity and Colmes_ (though the top-rated O'Reilly tries to do it in one person, pissing off both sides equally).
Can anyone honestly claim that Alan Colmes is right-wing biased? B-)
Of course the only contrast comes from the mainstream media, which has swung farther to the left than Karl Marx since the gutting of the FCC's Fairness Doctrine and the ascention of the baby-boomer journalism-school grads (who formed their biases during the Draft/Vietnam (un)War protests). So an outlet that lets the Conservative side of any issue get any airing AT ALL looks far-right to some viewers used to that ultra-left bias.
For mainstream Conservative "bias" listen to Rush Limbaugh (who is quite proud of it - billing himself as "I AM 'equal time'.", i.e. he's the Conservative answer to the mainstream media's Liberal viewpoints.)
But to hear true ultra-right bias you must listen to some of the broadcast stations to be heard on short wave radio. Radio Shack has some cheap portable receivers, so give it a try.
Jesus Fucking Christ! Bill Clinton lied about a blowjob,
No.
Bill Clinton lied under oath in his testimony when charged with sexual harassment, denying the accuser her day in court.
The issue was never about whether he had sex with a consenting partner. The issue was always about whether he used his office as governor to engage in a pattern of illegal sexual harassment of NON-consenting partners, OBSTRUCTED JUSTICE by PERJURY when accused of these crimes in order to escape justice, and if so whether a person who does this should be in charge of federal law enforcement.
Bill Clinton's actions have resulted in the gutting of the employee sexual harassment laws by creating the "Clinton Defense": If it's OK for the guy at the top, it's OK all the way down.
The remains of the feminist movement have beet totally discredited by their support of him, and public slandering of his victims (such as their characterizing one as "trailer trash" who should be honored to be noticed by someone like Clinton).
George Fucking W. Bush lied about a cause for a war [...]
Lied? Or believed the reports of the intelligence community that Sadam had NOT destroyed his weapons and was making more, while Sadam was busy doing everything in his power to convince the world he had something to hide from the inspectors? Rememer: It wasn't just GFingWB who thought the Tyrant of Bagdhad was still well armed with CBW devices and close to having nukes.
Now whether that was because he WAS hiding something, was trying to convince his neighbors that he was still to dangerous to attack, was trying to salvage his pride, was trying to avoid further exposure of his mass-torture and mass-murder operations, or was just a loon, doesn't really matter. The point is that he could have avoided this whole thing by NOT letting his people play games with the UN inspectors.
By the way: Now that the remaining anti-western forces in Iraq have ACCIDENTALLY set off a nerve-gas shell randomly drawn from an Iraqui arms cache, thinking it was an explosive shell, do you STILL believe that all the WMDs were really gone?
Not to mention the lost of your respect and good name in the international community
"Loss of respect"?
The world is now on notice that if knock the chip off the shoulder of the USA you just MIGHT find it accepts the challenge and you get pounded into the ground. Seems to me that creates a LOT more respect than whining to the United Petty Dictators for permission to hit back every time the US is punched.
The world is now ALSO on notice that the US does its flat-out damdest to avoid suppressing others religions and culture - even to the point of endangering and losing the lives of its own troops. And that if its troops screw up and start oppressing those under they control, the US will ADMIT it, INVESTIGATE it, REMOVE them from their posts and TRY them for crimes. Many in the Muslum world are now asking each other why they allow their OWN leaders to do less.
[as a result] you visit a foreign country and say you're an American, and you'll be treated with as much respect as an Arab in your own USA.
I wish that were true. It would be a MAJOR improvement to the way we've been treated in the past.
The real fear is that people will make ringtones out of the CDs they already have. That process is nothing more than format shifting, trimming, and then playback when a particular event happens to the phone. Uhm... there's no laws against that process.
If your phone plays the exact cut, you may be right. But if your phone plays a bunch of beeps that are the tune, that is a "derived work". And we're back to the issue of how much is "fair use".
IANAL, but current copyright guidelines seem to permit fair use of "Up to 10% of a body of sound recording, but no more than 30 seconds".
The linked web page says that the North Carolina Department of Public Education believes that is the case IN A PUBLIC SCHOOL SETTING. For instance: As part of a class project in K-12 education.
That does not necessarily mean the same guidelines are applicable when you're doing it to replace purchasing a ringtone for your telephone from the copyright holder. The limits of fair use in that situation may be narrower.
Remember that one of the issues to be weighed in determining whether an act is "fair use" is how much it impacts the potential income of the copyright holder. We have evidence from the existing market that people are willing to pay over a buck for a ringtone. Things get even more interesting if somebody is making a profit by selling the tool, or (worse yet) selling the ringtones themselves.
IANAL either. I would love it if a lawyer or paralegal among our readership could post a pointer to an authoritative guideline or (better yet) a precedent on the boundaries of fair use OUTSIDE the educational context.
The fear [of the RIAA] is that people will make ringtones out of pirated songs, thus compounding the file-sharing problem while robbing the music industry of a new source of revenue.
IMHO that's correct. "Whack-a-mole" enforcement, no doubt preceeded by a strike against the toolmaker based on the claim that the tool is a piracy aid.
So for the reasons above we should be prepared for the courts to agree with the RIAA when the inevitable suit is filed.
2) It will be very difficult to garner any sympathy for these sickos from myself or the /. community. Or any community for that matter.
The government always starts with the most unpopular scum when establishing precedent for a new denial of civil rights.
Once the precedent is established, it applies to applications of the law in question in ALL circumstances, regardless of the scumminess of the accused. But the government will normally work outward from the scumbag community gradually, getting the machinery of repression well-greased before applying it to more ordinary people.
So you need to disconnect your consideration of such laws and procedures from your opinion of the accused. OF COURSE the first few are scum. But that's no reason to give the government a green light when railroading them.
Runaway government is ENORMOUSLY more dangerous than even the worst of the crooks. That's why even obvious murderers must be let off when the police and/or prosecution doesn't follow the rules when going after them. Better a few retail-level murderers on the street than wholesale, institutionalized tyrrany, leading eventually to civil war.
However, woe be unto you if you cross them. As benign as they are, those fuckers hold a serious grudge. And for a very, very long time. They are still pissed about the whole OS/2 Warp debacle and won't use Microsoft products if they can get away with it. That's also a very large reason why they are pumping so much money into Linux. They'd rather the whole OS market be open and free than have Microsoft controlling it.
My wife was an intern at Microsoft during that shenannegan and has a LOT to say about it. We're both glad to hear that IBM hasn't let bygones be bygones on that one.
(She says that one thing that's ironic is that OS/2 was a much better system than Windows. I guess OS/2 got to play Betamax to Windows' VHS.)
An antenna is a transmission line terminated with an open circuit. Actually, an antenna should be viewed as an impedance matching device to free space.
The voltage at the end is quite high.
Say cellphones had a whole watt of tranmitter power. Zo = 377 ohms, the impedance of free space. P=V^2/R, so V=19.4 volts RMS. That's 19.4 volts AT THE DAMNED TRANSMITTER!
The voltage at the end of a narrow-band antenna can easily be well above that at the feedpoint - especially if the antenna is narrow-band. (Broadband antennas try to couple most of the energy to the space-wave on a single pass through the elements, rather than over several, while narrow-band antennas let it "ring" for many passes - which means the voltages and currents build up.) But I will drop it for now.
But when breaking a circuit with current flowing through it you end up with exactly that microscopic gap initially. Once the air is ionized the arc can be sustained by a very low voltage. And with any inductance in the circuit at all (even the stray inductance from the wiring) the voltage will climb to maintain the arc until the current through the inductor is finally brought to a halt by the reverse voltage.
Nonsense. Utter nonsense. You're getting all sorts of concepts confused. If there was a significant inductance, THE "CIRCUIT" WOULD NOT BE RESONATING AT RF FREQUENCIES.
I think you missed it when I hopped from the RF issues at the antenna to the DC issues at the switch contacts. I'll go into that below.
So the arc can be "pulled out" to significant lengths.
This phenomena is caused by air's reduced resistance once you've started the arc.
This is EXACTLY the mechanism that produces the voltage spike in the primary (and thus also in the secondary) of the transformer in a contact-point type auto ignition.
No, it's not. An ignition coil is supplied with a continuous DC (NOT RF!) current flow.
An ignition coil in a point-contact type ignition system is supplied with a DC voltage. Over time the current builds up. It would build without limit if there were no stray resistance (I = 1/L inetgral V dt). But there is resistance, so it makes an exponential approach to I = E/R.
But if the circuit is suddenly opened the current through the inductor is STILL governed by I = 1/L integral V dt. Ignoring resistance for a moment, if the current built up over time T, to stop the current in time T' requires a back voltage of T/T'. If nothing else is done to prevent it the voltage across the gap rises as necessary to keep the current flowing until the energy stored in the magnetic field has been dumped as integral E' * I dT, mostly by heating the air with an arc and the metal at the points where the arc lands, sometimes vaporizing the material of the contacts. E' can be FAR above E.
This is used to advantage in point-contact ignition systems and television flyback transformers. In the ignition system, a small capacitor is placed across the points to allow the current to flow momentarily after the points open, extinguishing the arc. But the current quickly charges the capacitor and the votage rises. If nothing were done the voltage would go to some large multiple of the applied voltage (controled by the ratio of L and C), then the tuned circuit would ring until the energy was lost in the stray resistance. But instead the voltage spike is multiplied further by the primary/secondary turns ratio of the coil and escapes by striking an arc across a sparkplug.
The flyback circuit of a TV monitor works similarly: A current is built up through the flyback transformer primary and the horizontal coil of the yoke, during the horizontal sweep, by applying a voltage across the inductance. This builds up slowly, but then has to be reversed suddenly during the retrace interval. The voltage required to stop the current has the same ration to the voltage used to start it as the sweep interval to the retrace interva
Slashdot already provides people with enough inaccurate Science and Technology information... lets not shoot for Medical as well...
So he should refrain from asking here, and instead ask his random acquaintences? Remember - that's what people DO in such situations.
Or maybe he should get his ideas from the established print outlets of the popular press. (When was the last time you saw THEM get ANYTHING right when you knew what the REAL story was from personal experience?)
At least on slashdot he has access to a very large population of interested people, some of them actually practitioners or reasearchers in the relevant fields. The environment is more conducive to constructing clear answers than a face-to-face conversation. And while it doesn't prevent the propagation of bogosity, it exposes it to critical reply from people who know better - and can support their claims with references to authoritative literature.
The only alternatives I can see that might get him a clearer idea would be to hire SEVERAL professionas for their expert opinions, or start a foundation to research the subject and hire enough experts that he can sort out the bogus ones.
Remember - even professionals propagate bogus theories. Sometimes they become the accepted paradigm for decades or centuries. And Psychology is particularly prone to this.
For instance, you haven't heard much about Freud's theories from anywhere but Hollywood lately, have you? (And even Hollywood has dropped most of the psychobabble.)
It seems that with the increased use of cocaine on the underground drug scene, people in the emergency rooms treating overdoses noticed that their babbling sounded amazingly like Freud's articles. Given that Freud was a known cocaine user, medical personnel began to suspect that his theories may have had less to do with insight into the workings of the mind than the characteristic halucinations of the use of that drug. Combine that with the low success rate of Freudian-theory based treatments of mental illnesses, the school's practioners' worse-than-chance success rate at predicting which released patients would take actions threatening those around him, and the succes of drug-based treatments built on more mechanical-failure models of mental illness, and the school is not in good repute these days.
So, sure, a question here will elicit a lot of crap. But it will also elicit a significant amount of good advice. IMHO, once doing a little sorting he's likely to end up with better answers this way than by anything else he can do (except perhaps enter college and specialize in the field.)
We're talking about electronic voting, something which demands security (and transparency, but never mind the apparent paradox just now) and they're not concerned that someone has broken into their network?
Especially given the recent news about the heap overflow in CVS that is being discussed in the immediately previous slashdot article.
Apparently a judge somewhere has been shown enough information to think that a search of the site is warranted...
Not judge. Grand Jury.
"Just a bunch of citizens" meeting in secret and nosing into anything a prosecurot thinks might be a sign that a crime might have been committed.
Because their proceedings are (allegedly) secret and the details of their deliberations do NOT become either public record or evidence usable at a trial, claims of privilege and immunity to search do not pull much weight.
Cable modems don't hurt analog cable television, and they've been using spare television bandwidth for over 5 years.
Cable systems also use adjacent channels for TV signals without problems.
The issue is that the TV signal is AM, with the carrier near the low end of the 6 MHz channel and the bulk of the lower sideband suppressed. That means a LOWER channel's signal demodulates directly into the passband of the video for the NEXT HIGHER channel. This will cause serious picture degredation unless the interfering signal is filtered out BEFORE it reaches the detector.
The bandpass filter in the receiver's IF stage attempts to do just such filtering. And it is quite adequate if the two signals are about equally strong. But the lower channel signal is very close in frequency to the higher channel signak, so the filter will be far from perfect. If the lower channel's signal is significantly stronger than the higher channel's, the filtering in the set will be insufficient.
On a cable the strengths of the various channels can be tightly controlled, so they are equal or very close to it. This allows an analog cable system to use all the channels with very good results.
But in air broadcasting the strengths of the signals varies enormously, depending on such things as where your receiver is located relative to the transmitters and how your antenna is aimed. So even if the adjacent-channel signals are transmitting with the same power (unless it's also from the same tower, and sometimes even then), some viewers will find the interfering signal much stronger than the victim signal, and will receive degraded video. Thus the FCC normally doesn't assign adjacent channels in the same market, in order to protect the signal integrety for the viewers.
In both cases it doesn't matter whether the interfering signal is a TV image or a spread-spectrum digital signal: If it's about the same strength as the victim channel the TV's filter will attenuate it enough. If it's significantly stronger, it will interfere. So using a "vacant channel" on a cable works just fine. But using it for an over-the-air device will be a disaster for any of your neighbors who are trying to watch the next-higher channel on their TV sets.
So Samsung is using a laser to print them one-by-one, and Seiko Epson is using ink jet printers ditto.
An OLED screen is just a sheet of substrate with various inks on it.
Why don't they just use a rotary printing press?
Think "newspaper".
Print screens as much as, say, 40 feet tall, by as long as you like, with the connectors for the modular electronics occurring periodically.
At, say, 50 MPH. Until that enormous roll of substrate is exhausted - then thread in another.
On their way out of the press just slit them into strips (i.e. five 8-foot strips for wallpaper), chop them into convenient lengths, and stack them up into bales.
Print the LEDs right up to the cut lines so you can tile a large surface if you want. Or leave a margin for making connections to a one-sided screen print job. (You might even be able to fold the edge over to get the connector onto the back and thus get even one-sided screens to butt together for tiling.)
(Of course you'd have to use different masters for some screen sizes, so the cut lines would occur at convenient places.)
Drop a sheet into a "monitor" picture-frame, with the electronics connecting via contact fingers. Or mount driver chips on the back (to the printed power and signal wiring) if you want to paste 'em up on a wall - and apply power and signal under the baseboard.
You should be able to manufacture replacable sheets for a monitor for a couple bucks. The drive electronics is nothing special. Maybe $25 manufacturing cost for a wall-mount high-res HDTV monitor.
Sell it for a hundred or two, and replacement screens for twenty, and I'd buy several (and a stack of spare screens) even if I'd have to replace the screen a couple times a year. B-)