The win or lose situation has nothing to do with US self-bias. If CDMA had won, it would of course prove that fact, but losing does not prove that US is not maybe the most self-biased country on this ball of people.
Look, people.
The reconstruction, like most of the war, is being paid for primarily out of the pockets of the US taxpayers. That's mostly coming from US workers.
Now while the EQUIMPENT goes to Iraq, where should the JOBS go?
Should the US buy the equipment locally - so SOME of the money goes back into payrolls for US workers (and about half of that into their pockets after taxes and the like)?
Or should it "Not be Self-Biased" and put it up for international bid?
So while the equipment goes to Iraq the money can go somewhere else?
On a more serious note, don't you think that the "naming" of these legislators means they think they're actually doing a good thing, and aren't afraid of being ridiculed as idiots...?
Yes, but so what?
Legislators are noted for cluelessness about what their constituents really want - until their constituents TELL them - not just by letters (which are counted-by-major-point and then ignored) - but by active campaigns. They are isolated in DC, among others of their kind and people trying to bias their viewpoints, and get essentially all of their information from exactly those media empires with an axe to grind on this issue.
And THAT's who the media propaganda on ALL issues is aimed at. The media could largely care less about what the great mass of drooling tube-watchers think. They mostly either don't vote or vote straight-party for whomever they always voted for come hell or high water. But by creating a virtual reality for LEGISLATORS (and to a lesser extent for judges, presidents, and presidential staffers at judge-appointment time) they make a lasting impact on political institutions.
The way to counter this is to start a mass attack at the politicians' actual chances of reelection. This they often DO see - despite bogus polls used by the media operators to support their agendas. If they see it they may change their position (by dropping their programs and letting the other side go ahead). Or they may fight back, or just miss it (in which case you keep it up until they're replaced).
[...] three members [of] the House of Reps has formed a caucus that aims to [kill open source software and fair use in the name of "stopping piracy"]
Hurrah!
Up to now the RIAA/MPAA/Microsoft/etc.-corrupted congresscritters have been pretty much anonymous. When they weren't actually introducing a bill you couldn't tell them from the general crowd of congressional dupes.
Now we will have an explicit way to track the congressional ringleaders and target them for defeat - in primaries and general elections.
Hot DAMN!
(Ask anybody who helped take out Roberti, Roos, or Foley how a grass-roots movement works.)
Simple. Properly designed hotswap hardware should have current limiting circuitry built in. [or at least a fuse.]
Yes, properly designed equipment should have these things. And that should have been true for SCSI-I also.
SCSI-1 had a 50-pair cable, with (in general) one side of the connector carrying signal/power, the other ground. And is was supposed to be set up so:
* The power was supplied on the middle conductor of the signal/power side.
* The middle conductor of the ground side was left unconnected (in case it somehow got connected upsied-down).
* The specified cable connectors had alignment pins so it could only be plugged in one way.
* The power supply was to be current-limited to 1A.
Well, SOME drive manufacturers forgot to leave the center-pin on the ground side unconnected. And some SCSI-adapter manufacturers skipped the current limiting circuit or fuse to save money. And some people who made cables would occasionally put the connector on upside-down, or use a connector that DIDN'T have the alignment pins.
When you got all three in one box, happened to plug the cable in upside down on one end, and turned on power, the center wire would glow red hot and melt the plastic, splitting the cable into two halves. Lots of smoke and sometimes the plastic would catch fire. Oops!
Is this going to work with cheap installations which are already using the extra pairs in Cat5? RS sell a splitter / combiner which (as a last resort) lets you use the "spare" pairs in an existing 10/100 base-T run to run a parallel 10/100 base-T connection.
It MAY work - or at least not fry it. And it will probably continue to work if you don't want to use the power. But you'll need another device to inject/extract power on the "second line" if you want to use it for both power and signals. And the device will need to be the "series transformer pass-the-signal" type, rather than the cheaper "tie the wires together and run 'em to a power supply" type.
I HAVEN't read the $67-member-price draft (that nobody seems to have summarized to Slashdot yet - thanks guys...). But judging by the allegedly-conforming implementations that HAVE been linked, the standard seems to involve:
* a -48 volt supply and its return
* each power supply wire using BOTH conductors of a pair.
* (It's not clear whether the standard only talks about using the "spair pairs" or explicitly addresses phantoming onto working signal pairs.)
Some of the equipment is set up to use the two "spair" pair as the power wires, just tying them together. Other equipmet has a pair of transformers to use a pair-of-pair for BOTH signaling and power, via center-tap "phantoming".
So the cheap connector that just brings out the second pair-of-pair for a separate ethernet run will
I can smell burning...
On any device that didn't properly DC-isolate both the signal and "spair" pair for >50 volts, combined with a power injector that doesn't current limit, quite possibly. Ditto if somebody wires a jack wrong and, say, swaps a conductor from a pair supplying the -48v with one from a pair supplying the 48v return path.
Now it seems to be incompatable with GigE over copper since that uses all 8 wires.
The power supply seems to use BOTH halves of each pair for ONE power wire - the "common mode" - allowing you to also use the differential mode for the signal.
You need a center-tapped transformer to inject or extract the power if you're using the pair for both signal and power. Capacitors are adequate if you only want the signal. (Note that transformers inserted into a GigE run to inject/extract 20ish miliamps will have to be something pretty special, or they'll shorten your range or just kill the link.)
If your device is already transformer- or capacitor-isolated (and doesn't have the common mode tied anywhere - except maybe by a LARGE resistor) - you shouldn't see any smoke if you plug a legacy device into a powered link. But there's been a LOT of devices built, and they may not all have been designed well enough to handle one of the pair hanging 50ish volts from both the other signal pair(s) and protective ground.
By the way - using the common mode of two balanced pair to provide a third balance pair - for power and/or signaling - has been around for a long time. It's called "phantoming". The phone company used it back when phone lines were strung with individual wires. (Miles of wire installed and maintained outdoors have ALWAYS been more expenisve than transformers.) You can also phantom on a pair of phantoms. So with N = 2^M wires you can get N-1 effective balanced pair rather than the N/2 actual pair - nearly doubling the number of available circuits. (Of course it causes trouble for a LOT of signals if ONE wire goes bad...)
ARGH! Bit by HTML again. Here's the full example
on
Making Change
·
· Score: 0, Redundant
Oops. I forgot that slashdot would think the amounts in angle-brackets were HTML tags, rather than straight text. Let's try that example again.
Example: $1.33 sale from $20
one thirty three.
(penny) [one] thirty four
(penny) [one] thirty five
(nickel) [one] forty
(dime) [one] fifty
(quarter) [one] seventy five
(quarter) two dollars
(dollar bill) and three
(dollar bill) and four
(dollar bill) and five
(five dollar bill) and five makes ten
(ten dollar bill) and ten makes twenty
You should do this (keep the money on the counter until the end of the transaction) reguardless of the method you use to count change.
I agree completely.
My point is that the reciept says exactly how much change the customer should get back. That way, when he walks out the door, and he re-counts his change, he can verify that the computer says he deserves this amount, and everything is cool.
Agree here, too.
If he has no documentation on how much change he should get back, unless he is good at counting backwards (which you can't assume, as most people can barely add up coins) he won't know how much he deserves back, just like the cashier.
And here I agree with the thrust of your argument. But you misunderstand the counting of the change in the non-computer-aided environment.
The way to count the change is to start from the amount of the SALE, and count up to the amount of the MONEY TENDERED, starting with small coins working toward the next clean breakpoint, then going to larger coins, then small bills, etc. As you go you speak the TOTAL.
Example: $1.33 sale from $20
one thirty three.
[one] thirty four
[one] thirty five
[one] forty
[one] fifty
[one] seventy five
two dollars
and three
and four
and five
and five makes ten
and ten makes twenty
This way the last thing you speak is the amount of money tendered for which you made change. So you both have that in the top of your head when you go to put the money away in the drawer - and if it doesn't match either the money on the counter or the amount he thought he gave you it's another opportunity for EITHER of you to catch the error.
The point of typing in the dollar amount you recieved from the customer is so the reciept says exactly what the customer handed you, and the resultant change back. Later on he can't come back and say... "hey, didn't I hand you a 20$ bill insted of a 10$ bill?"
That's also what the little bill-sized counter just above and behind the cash drawer on many registers is for:
1) Put the money you're given on the little counter.
2) Count out the change. (Count from smallest to largest as you double-check it into his hand, so the final number is what he gave you.)
3) Take the money off the counter and put it in the drawer. Don't be too speedy about this step.
If he thinks he handed you a different bill size he'll tell you about it at the end of step 2).
By the way: This is why certain flat surfaces are called "counters". B-)
You are absolutely right about the reaching corners part. But apparently, they had done tests with people vacuuming and found that most people miss patches here and there. Thus while the robot does miss corners, it has slightly higher covering percentage overall.
That's right up there with "What's the probability that software bug will be hit in the field?" (Answer: One. And if you hit it even once in testing it will KILL you when a few million people are using the product several hours per day.)
If the robot vacuum cleaner doesn't get corners it doesn't get corners EVERY SINGLE TIME. So cruft accumulates in the corners, where it's very visible and very annoying.
Why can't they build one of these puppies with either a square corner on the 'bot or a crack-and-crevice tool that pokes out to get the places the 'bot can't? (And I don't mean a brush, either. Use a vacuum pipe.)
Try making it look more like a flatworm head than a trilobite.
That would be the Florida absentee ballots from overseas that were in violation of election laws? (Although some tried to make it a matter of "military", military ballots were handled by the same rules as other absentee ballots.)
There is a special issue with military absentee ballots.
1) Some military post offices, as a matter of policy, do NOT put a dated postmark on mail passing through them.
2) Florida election laws require a postmark date, and mandate discarding the ballot if it is absent.
3) FEDERAL law says that absentee ballots from those in military service must be counted (at least in federal elections).
4) According to the supremacy clause of the US Constitution, federal law supercedes state law (when they are in conflict and the federal law is consititutionally valid, as is the case here).
So the military ballots must be counted even if they are missing the dated postmark required by "the same rules as other absentee ballots".
Polls indicated that the military absentee ballots would be overwhelmingly for Bush (by about 4 to 1). So excluding hundreds of them would have made a significant shift in the results, in Gore's favor.
An important point, though: the Federal government does NOT run any elections, period. Elections are the responsibility of the states. This was done on purpose so that the federal government could not rig elections for itself.
Similarly, ONE of the purposes of the electoral college is to help keep rigged elections in one or two populous states from swinging the presidential election (unless it's close, in which case it isn't as big a deal if it's wrong).
Say candidate Y leads candidate X by N votes in the REAL popular vote. If the president were elected by the popular vote, a rigged election in one big state could produce an N+ error in favor of candidate X, completely swampin the actual difference. With the Electoral College system, no matter how corrupt a state gets it can, at the max, only swing its own electoral votes - which are roughly proportional to its population (with little states having a slight advantage).
(Of course the MAIN purpose of the Electoral College is to keep a couple big states from running roughshod over the little states - as part of the original compromise that convinced the little states to join up. In order to get enough Electoral Votes to win, a presidential candidate has to be acceptable to people in both big and little states - appropriate for a single person charged with administering governmental machinery that affects the interest of all the people in all the states.
Actually, it doesn't use the Windows address book. I know this because I (under firewalled, very controlled conditions) ran it to see how it worked. One thing I noticed is that it was sending e-mails out to addresses I did not know. That computer does not have an address book, nor any outlook express smtp/pop3 server settings (I never configured it).
Your test doesn't prove it DOESN'T use the address book. It only proves that it ALSO has canned addresses or can find or generate some in some other way.
To check whether it ALSO spreads via the address book, configure a few bogus addresses and try again, checking whether it emails to them.
Netscape was better than IE prior to the 3's. Version 3 was pretty equal on both and then IE blew Netscape away when it came to version 4. Netscape 4 was a blight on society with some of the worst standards support of any browser prior and since.
Check me on this: Didn't Microsoft start giving away IE BEFORE Netscape 4? If so:
Don't you think cutting off Netscape's revenue stream might have had something to do with the amount of Quality Assurance they could afford to do to their followon releases? In addition to pressuring them to release it early to try to get a little more cash in house before the dry up and blow away?
Probably not. The suit was brought by a non-profit company, probably with no assets, formed with the specific purpose of initiating this lawsuit.
I was thinking of something along the lines of claiming that the suit itself was harassment - barratry - at which point it ought to be possible to "pierce the veil" of a corporation formed for the purpose and go after the principles' funds.
If this also passes the assembly it will almost certainly be signed into law - because Gray Davis is clueless about anything financial. (Witness his reaction to the "electric deregulation" debacle.)
Republican govenor Pete Wilson refered to the electricity deregulation bill, as he was signing it [...]
Never said that some Republicans didn't have any blame coming for the way the law was written. (Although Pete Wilson wouldn't qualify as a Republican in most states other than CA. B-) )
But note that I was pointing to Davis' rabid flames at the energy companies for doing exactly what any economist would have told you they'd do, given the structure of the so-called deregulation:
- The energy suppliers letting PG&E bid the price up to astronomical levels whenever there was a crunch - and doing their best to encourage crunches. (Why generate another kilowatt and sell it for a penny, when you could generate half a kilowatt and sell it, and all the others you're generating anyway, for a dime?)
- PG&E runing out of power and money, going belly-up, and requiring a bailout in the billions to keep the lights on at all.
Yes, some energy execs "laundered" some price-controlled generated power through adjacent states. But even without that the incentive structure would have produced much the same result.
aluminum CANNOT be used to protect aginst portions of the magnetic (waves) spectrum. ie a [faraday] cage [...] it has to be make out of a ferrous material. ie steel, cast iron. (material can be used as a magnet)
Sorry, wrong.
Conductors are VERY good at stopping both the electrical and magnetic components of electromagnetic radiation.
The magnetic component is stopped because it induces a current in the conductor, which produces a magnetic field that cancels the incoming magnetic field on the far side of the conductor (and adds to it on the near side, causing the magnetic component of the wave to "bounce").
The higher the frequency, or the better the conductor, the shallower the penetration. A perfect conductor (i.e. a superconductor) can exclude even a DC magnetic field.
EMP is a fast pulse, corresponding only to extremely high frequencies, while aluminum is one of the most conductive metals there is.
Wireless microwave works pretty well if you have line-of-sight to the tower, which is not that hard in mostly-flat areas.
Or hilly/mountainous ones - if you put the tower on a high point. Only misses a few local "holes" - at which point you can add a fill-in relay on a local high point.
Where it falls down is places that are both rugged and sparse. Like the Sierras for example. But wired gets 'way expensive there, too.
What REALLY kills it is competition from companies with the infrastructure already in place - like cable and DSL-over-POTS-copper. You gotta get enough customers all at once to be profitable or they'll eat your lunch while you eat your investors' funds and then starve.
It's hard to undercut the guys with infrastructure in place - and impossible to undercut the volunteers who hang an AP on their DSL or cable and leave it open.
Everybody who thinks that powerlines are a great way to run ethernet through your house forget that all of the wire is unshielded thereby creating a large antenna. This typically results in static noise on frequencies up to 80Mhz.
And that's NOTHING compared to the noise generated on the wiring by connected non-communication appliances.
- Motors. (Especially brush-type, such as vacuum cleaners or hair driers.)
- Switching-type light dimmers.
- Arc lights (fluorescent, "neon" gas discharge tubes, vapor-capsule, etc.)
- Welders.
- Switching-regulators in electronic appliances.
- DIODES in power supplies.
- ANY load turning on or off.
Heck: Even an incandescent bulb produces broad-spectrum audio-through-radio interference on the line - though nothing like what a defective bulb produces as it flickers. (And an old carbon-filiment lamp in a closet has been known to knock out radio reception for much of a city block.)
Be prepared for a LOT of packet corruption - meaning a lot of packet loss plus enough that get past all the redundancy checks to corrupt the actual traffic - if you ever attempt to use a power line for network traffic.
"On Thursday, the California state Senate approved a bill that requires businesses with stores in the state to charge their customers sales tax for purchases made over the Internet."
If this goes into effect, what will the effect be? Simple.
California's sales tax is typically over 8%. (It varies by location, because cities and counties are allowed to add on their own small deltas.)
So the result will be that companies which are primarily net retailers will CLOSE ANY STORES THEY HAVE in California. Standalones will move their operations to other states. Even large retail chains with an internet sales outlet may split into subsidiaries.
8ish percent of gross is a LOT in a heavily-competitive market. And the WHOLE POINT of buying something on the Internet is that the price differential must be more of a draw than the lack of a local facility is a repellant. So if a company has to charge an extra 8ish percent if it continues to have a presence in the state, it will, if at all possible, eliminate its presence in the state, rather than watching the bulk of its business switch to its competitors or just go away.
The net effect on California's budget will be negative. It will lose more in taxes, on store sales, employee income taxes, and other taxes on the businesses that fold up and move (or die) than it collects. It will also incur extra costs from the business shutdowns - such as unemployment and/or other social program costs for workers that don't move to follow the business.
==========
If this also passes the assembly it will almost certainly be signed into law - because Gray Davis is clueless about anything financial. (Witness his reaction to the "electric deregulation" debacle.)
IMHO copyright applies if the sample is recognizable and non-trivial. i.e.
- If you use a verse, or even a couple bars, from "Sergant Pepper", pay up - to Michael Jackson. B-) If you use half a track to go "veep-a-veep-a-veep" for your percussion, who cares if it's from Sergant Pepper, A Night at the Opera, or Behtoven's fifth? (But why didn't you just use one that's in the public domain by now anyhow.)
- If you play a couple bars backward, fair use. If you play a track backward, pay up.
- If you get a non-signature (i.e. lots of people do it) drum riff or guitar lick off a record and cut-and-paste it into a new composition, who cares? (Even if the whole composition is pieced together from such samples.) If you take a few bars of a solo, or a bar of something heavily orchestrated, pay up. If it's somebody's signature lick, learn to play it yourself (so it's no longer a signature) or pay up. And if it's more than a few notes, pay up for playing it yourself, too.
Do you think that your ISP is going to sit and watch as you multicast through their network, causing them to send out many times more data than is coming in? Not if they can help it. They will charge for every multicasted bit. Maybe it's more efficient sometimes, but it will still cost lots of money, most likely.
Naw. They get their money from the people the multicast bit is going TO. Replicating it means more people upgrade and pay for bigger inbound hoses.
Think about it: Got broadband? Didn't you pay a premium to get a fat INBOUND pipe? Isn't your OUTBOUND pipe pinched down a bunch? Don't you use it that way? Do you feel cheated because your outbound pipe is narrower than your inbound? Or do you watch your streaming programms and suck down big images on the web with a few characters of URL going the other way?
Now if you could originate video streams and feed a LARGE audience on a DSL that was good for one stream upbound and several down, and a bunch of others could, too, and these indies made enough programming to convince a few hundred thousand users to upgrade to such fat pipes and pay a higher fee, and the ISP only had ONE COPY of this content-feeding-thousands on any given internal pipe rather than several, do you think the ISPs would nix it? Or would they sell it to all comers and laugh all the way to the bank.
It's CONTENT that drives internet expansion. And right now the general user as content provider can't feed enough people to make it worthwhile. So the main thing that's popular in peer-to-peer content provision is so-called piracy - where a CROWD of people each serve a FEW consumers with content mostly cloned off other people's well-advertised productions.
With broadcast origination available to general users, ORIGINAL content can reach enough people to justify the production costs. Without it, you need a major-league expensive infrastructure even for webcasting.
So the ISPs have a fine financial incentive to allow it once their infrastructure is up to it - and make the bucks back from the increased feed for pipes fat enough to originate and view it.
Or at least the ones that are NOT owned by a media conglomerate do. The ones owned by a media conglomerate have an incentive to suppress any broadcast technology where they don't originate the content themselves - because it represents competition for their more lucrative content-production-and-distribution business.
Korea Telecom has it a lot easier than companies in the US. The bulk of the South Korean population (something like 95% of 'em) live in these VERY LARGE apartment buildings. And the buildings have mini-telecom-central-offices in them already. Then the buildings are pretty close together as well.
So rather than stringing wires or fiber all over thousands of miles of continent, a Korean ISP only needs to string fiber to a few buildings and wire the buildings. No "last mile" problem. With low infrastructure cost the cost per subscriber can be tiny and the bandwidth high.
(Then there's the demand for bandwidth - very high thanks to a cultural difference. I hear that the current big thing among Korean high-school students is to go home after school, take off their clothes, and webcam-chat with their friends. Intimate but safe.)
Slashdot Mirror
The win or lose situation has nothing to do with US self-bias. If CDMA had won, it would of course prove that fact, but losing does not prove that US is not maybe the most self-biased country on this ball of people.
Look, people.
The reconstruction, like most of the war, is being paid for primarily out of the pockets of the US taxpayers. That's mostly coming from US workers.
Now while the EQUIMPENT goes to Iraq, where should the JOBS go?
Should the US buy the equipment locally - so SOME of the money goes back into payrolls for US workers (and about half of that into their pockets after taxes and the like)?
Or should it "Not be Self-Biased" and put it up for international bid?
So while the equipment goes to Iraq the money can go somewhere else?
Like maybe to France's Alcatel?
Or Germany's Siemens?
RENT A CLUE!
On a more serious note, don't you think that the "naming" of these legislators means they think they're actually doing a good thing, and aren't afraid of being ridiculed as idiots...?
Yes, but so what?
Legislators are noted for cluelessness about what their constituents really want - until their constituents TELL them - not just by letters (which are counted-by-major-point and then ignored) - but by active campaigns. They are isolated in DC, among others of their kind and people trying to bias their viewpoints, and get essentially all of their information from exactly those media empires with an axe to grind on this issue.
And THAT's who the media propaganda on ALL issues is aimed at. The media could largely care less about what the great mass of drooling tube-watchers think. They mostly either don't vote or vote straight-party for whomever they always voted for come hell or high water. But by creating a virtual reality for LEGISLATORS (and to a lesser extent for judges, presidents, and presidential staffers at judge-appointment time) they make a lasting impact on political institutions.
The way to counter this is to start a mass attack at the politicians' actual chances of reelection. This they often DO see - despite bogus polls used by the media operators to support their agendas. If they see it they may change their position (by dropping their programs and letting the other side go ahead). Or they may fight back, or just miss it (in which case you keep it up until they're replaced).
[...] three members [of] the House of Reps has formed a caucus that aims to [kill open source software and fair use in the name of "stopping piracy"]
Hurrah!
Up to now the RIAA/MPAA/Microsoft/etc.-corrupted congresscritters have been pretty much anonymous. When they weren't actually introducing a bill you couldn't tell them from the general crowd of congressional dupes.
Now we will have an explicit way to track the congressional ringleaders and target them for defeat - in primaries and general elections.
Hot DAMN!
(Ask anybody who helped take out Roberti, Roos, or Foley how a grass-roots movement works.)
Simple. Properly designed hotswap hardware should have current limiting circuitry built in. [or at least a fuse.]
Yes, properly designed equipment should have these things. And that should have been true for SCSI-I also.
SCSI-1 had a 50-pair cable, with (in general) one side of the connector carrying signal/power, the other ground. And is was supposed to be set up so:
* The power was supplied on the middle conductor of the signal/power side.
* The middle conductor of the ground side was left unconnected (in case it somehow got connected upsied-down).
* The specified cable connectors had alignment pins so it could only be plugged in one way.
* The power supply was to be current-limited to 1A.
Well, SOME drive manufacturers forgot to leave the center-pin on the ground side unconnected. And some SCSI-adapter manufacturers skipped the current limiting circuit or fuse to save money. And some people who made cables would occasionally put the connector on upside-down, or use a connector that DIDN'T have the alignment pins.
When you got all three in one box, happened to plug the cable in upside down on one end, and turned on power, the center wire would glow red hot and melt the plastic, splitting the cable into two halves. Lots of smoke and sometimes the plastic would catch fire. Oops!
Is this going to work with cheap installations which are already using the extra pairs in Cat5? RS sell a splitter / combiner which (as a last resort) lets you use the "spare" pairs in an existing 10/100 base-T run to run a parallel 10/100 base-T connection.
It MAY work - or at least not fry it. And it will probably continue to work if you don't want to use the power. But you'll need another device to inject/extract power on the "second line" if you want to use it for both power and signals. And the device will need to be the "series transformer pass-the-signal" type, rather than the cheaper "tie the wires together and run 'em to a power supply" type.
I HAVEN't read the $67-member-price draft (that nobody seems to have summarized to Slashdot yet - thanks guys...). But judging by the allegedly-conforming implementations that HAVE been linked, the standard seems to involve:
* a -48 volt supply and its return
* each power supply wire using BOTH conductors of a pair.
* (It's not clear whether the standard only talks about using the "spair pairs" or explicitly addresses phantoming onto working signal pairs.)
Some of the equipment is set up to use the two "spair" pair as the power wires, just tying them together. Other equipmet has a pair of transformers to use a pair-of-pair for BOTH signaling and power, via center-tap "phantoming".
So the cheap connector that just brings out the second pair-of-pair for a separate ethernet run will
I can smell burning...
On any device that didn't properly DC-isolate both the signal and "spair" pair for >50 volts, combined with a power injector that doesn't current limit, quite possibly. Ditto if somebody wires a jack wrong and, say, swaps a conductor from a pair supplying the -48v with one from a pair supplying the 48v return path.
Now it seems to be incompatable with GigE over copper since that uses all 8 wires.
The power supply seems to use BOTH halves of each pair for ONE power wire - the "common mode" - allowing you to also use the differential mode for the signal.
You need a center-tapped transformer to inject or extract the power if you're using the pair for both signal and power. Capacitors are adequate if you only want the signal. (Note that transformers inserted into a GigE run to inject/extract 20ish miliamps will have to be something pretty special, or they'll shorten your range or just kill the link.)
If your device is already transformer- or capacitor-isolated (and doesn't have the common mode tied anywhere - except maybe by a LARGE resistor) - you shouldn't see any smoke if you plug a legacy device into a powered link. But there's been a LOT of devices built, and they may not all have been designed well enough to handle one of the pair hanging 50ish volts from both the other signal pair(s) and protective ground.
By the way - using the common mode of two balanced pair to provide a third balance pair - for power and/or signaling - has been around for a long time. It's called "phantoming". The phone company used it back when phone lines were strung with individual wires. (Miles of wire installed and maintained outdoors have ALWAYS been more expenisve than transformers.) You can also phantom on a pair of phantoms. So with N = 2^M wires you can get N-1 effective balanced pair rather than the N/2 actual pair - nearly doubling the number of available circuits. (Of course it causes trouble for a LOT of signals if ONE wire goes bad...)
Oops. I forgot that slashdot would think the amounts in angle-brackets were HTML tags, rather than straight text. Let's try that example again.
Example: $1.33 sale from $20
one thirty three.
(penny) [one] thirty four
(penny) [one] thirty five
(nickel) [one] forty
(dime) [one] fifty
(quarter) [one] seventy five
(quarter) two dollars
(dollar bill) and three
(dollar bill) and four
(dollar bill) and five
(five dollar bill) and five makes ten
(ten dollar bill) and ten makes twenty
You should do this (keep the money on the counter until the end of the transaction) reguardless of the method you use to count change.
I agree completely.
My point is that the reciept says exactly how much change the customer should get back. That way, when he walks out the door, and he re-counts his change, he can verify that the computer says he deserves this amount, and everything is cool.
Agree here, too.
If he has no documentation on how much change he should get back, unless he is good at counting backwards (which you can't assume, as most people can barely add up coins) he won't know how much he deserves back, just like the cashier.
And here I agree with the thrust of your argument. But you misunderstand the counting of the change in the non-computer-aided environment.
The way to count the change is to start from the amount of the SALE, and count up to the amount of the MONEY TENDERED, starting with small coins working toward the next clean breakpoint, then going to larger coins, then small bills, etc. As you go you speak the TOTAL.
Example: $1.33 sale from $20
one thirty three.
[one] thirty four
[one] thirty five
[one] forty
[one] fifty
[one] seventy five
two dollars
and three
and four
and five
and five makes ten
and ten makes twenty
This way the last thing you speak is the amount of money tendered for which you made change. So you both have that in the top of your head when you go to put the money away in the drawer - and if it doesn't match either the money on the counter or the amount he thought he gave you it's another opportunity for EITHER of you to catch the error.
The point of typing in the dollar amount you recieved from the customer is so the reciept says exactly what the customer handed you, and the resultant change back. Later on he can't come back and say... "hey, didn't I hand you a 20$ bill insted of a 10$ bill?"
That's also what the little bill-sized counter just above and behind the cash drawer on many registers is for:
1) Put the money you're given on the little counter.
2) Count out the change. (Count from smallest to largest as you double-check it into his hand, so the final number is what he gave you.)
3) Take the money off the counter and put it in the drawer. Don't be too speedy about this step.
If he thinks he handed you a different bill size he'll tell you about it at the end of step 2).
By the way: This is why certain flat surfaces are called "counters". B-)
You are absolutely right about the reaching corners part. But apparently, they had done tests with people vacuuming and found that most people miss patches here and there. Thus while the robot does miss corners, it has slightly higher covering percentage overall.
That's right up there with "What's the probability that software bug will be hit in the field?" (Answer: One. And if you hit it even once in testing it will KILL you when a few million people are using the product several hours per day.)
If the robot vacuum cleaner doesn't get corners it doesn't get corners EVERY SINGLE TIME. So cruft accumulates in the corners, where it's very visible and very annoying.
Why can't they build one of these puppies with either a square corner on the 'bot or a crack-and-crevice tool that pokes out to get the places the 'bot can't? (And I don't mean a brush, either. Use a vacuum pipe.)
Try making it look more like a flatworm head than a trilobite.
That would be the Florida absentee ballots from overseas that were in violation of election laws? (Although some tried to make it a matter of "military", military ballots were handled by the same rules as other absentee ballots.)
There is a special issue with military absentee ballots.
1) Some military post offices, as a matter of policy, do NOT put a dated postmark on mail passing through them.
2) Florida election laws require a postmark date, and mandate discarding the ballot if it is absent.
3) FEDERAL law says that absentee ballots from those in military service must be counted (at least in federal elections).
4) According to the supremacy clause of the US Constitution, federal law supercedes state law (when they are in conflict and the federal law is consititutionally valid, as is the case here).
So the military ballots must be counted even if they are missing the dated postmark required by "the same rules as other absentee ballots".
Polls indicated that the military absentee ballots would be overwhelmingly for Bush (by about 4 to 1). So excluding hundreds of them would have made a significant shift in the results, in Gore's favor.
An important point, though: the Federal government does NOT run any elections, period. Elections are the responsibility of the states. This was done on purpose so that the federal government could not rig elections for itself.
Similarly, ONE of the purposes of the electoral college is to help keep rigged elections in one or two populous states from swinging the presidential election (unless it's close, in which case it isn't as big a deal if it's wrong).
Say candidate Y leads candidate X by N votes in the REAL popular vote. If the president were elected by the popular vote, a rigged election in one big state could produce an N+ error in favor of candidate X, completely swampin the actual difference. With the Electoral College system, no matter how corrupt a state gets it can, at the max, only swing its own electoral votes - which are roughly proportional to its population (with little states having a slight advantage).
(Of course the MAIN purpose of the Electoral College is to keep a couple big states from running roughshod over the little states - as part of the original compromise that convinced the little states to join up. In order to get enough Electoral Votes to win, a presidential candidate has to be acceptable to people in both big and little states - appropriate for a single person charged with administering governmental machinery that affects the interest of all the people in all the states.
Check out www.mypce.com.
Don't you mean "Slashdot www.mypce.com."?
Actually, it doesn't use the Windows address book. I know this because I (under firewalled, very controlled conditions) ran it to see how it worked. One thing I noticed is that it was sending e-mails out to addresses I did not know. That computer does not have an address book, nor any outlook express smtp/pop3 server settings (I never configured it).
Your test doesn't prove it DOESN'T use the address book. It only proves that it ALSO has canned addresses or can find or generate some in some other way.
To check whether it ALSO spreads via the address book, configure a few bogus addresses and try again, checking whether it emails to them.
Netscape was better than IE prior to the 3's. Version 3 was pretty equal on both and then IE blew Netscape away when it came to version 4. Netscape 4 was a blight on society with some of the worst standards support of any browser prior and since.
Check me on this: Didn't Microsoft start giving away IE BEFORE Netscape 4? If so:
Don't you think cutting off Netscape's revenue stream might have had something to do with the amount of Quality Assurance they could afford to do to their followon releases? In addition to pressuring them to release it early to try to get a little more cash in house before the dry up and blow away?
Probably not. The suit was brought by a non-profit company, probably with no assets, formed with the specific purpose of initiating this lawsuit.
I was thinking of something along the lines of claiming that the suit itself was harassment - barratry - at which point it ought to be possible to "pierce the veil" of a corporation formed for the purpose and go after the principles' funds.
But maybe I'm confused.
(Subject line says it all.)
If this also passes the assembly it will almost certainly be signed into law - because Gray Davis is clueless about anything financial. (Witness his reaction to the "electric deregulation" debacle.)
Republican govenor Pete Wilson refered to the electricity deregulation bill, as he was signing it [...]
Never said that some Republicans didn't have any blame coming for the way the law was written. (Although Pete Wilson wouldn't qualify as a Republican in most states other than CA. B-) )
But note that I was pointing to Davis' rabid flames at the energy companies for doing exactly what any economist would have told you they'd do, given the structure of the so-called deregulation:
- The energy suppliers letting PG&E bid the price up to astronomical levels whenever there was a crunch - and doing their best to encourage crunches. (Why generate another kilowatt and sell it for a penny, when you could generate half a kilowatt and sell it, and all the others you're generating anyway, for a dime?)
- PG&E runing out of power and money, going belly-up, and requiring a bailout in the billions to keep the lights on at all.
Yes, some energy execs "laundered" some price-controlled generated power through adjacent states. But even without that the incentive structure would have produced much the same result.
Rearranged for clarity:
aluminum CANNOT be used to protect aginst portions of the magnetic (waves) spectrum. ie a [faraday] cage [...] it has to be make out of a ferrous material. ie steel, cast iron. (material can be used as a magnet)
Sorry, wrong.
Conductors are VERY good at stopping both the electrical and magnetic components of electromagnetic radiation.
The magnetic component is stopped because it induces a current in the conductor, which produces a magnetic field that cancels the incoming magnetic field on the far side of the conductor (and adds to it on the near side, causing the magnetic component of the wave to "bounce").
The higher the frequency, or the better the conductor, the shallower the penetration. A perfect conductor (i.e. a superconductor) can exclude even a DC magnetic field.
EMP is a fast pulse, corresponding only to extremely high frequencies, while aluminum is one of the most conductive metals there is.
Wireless microwave works pretty well if you have line-of-sight to the tower, which is not that hard in mostly-flat areas.
Or hilly/mountainous ones - if you put the tower on a high point. Only misses a few local "holes" - at which point you can add a fill-in relay on a local high point.
Where it falls down is places that are both rugged and sparse. Like the Sierras for example. But wired gets 'way expensive there, too.
What REALLY kills it is competition from companies with the infrastructure already in place - like cable and DSL-over-POTS-copper. You gotta get enough customers all at once to be profitable or they'll eat your lunch while you eat your investors' funds and then starve.
It's hard to undercut the guys with infrastructure in place - and impossible to undercut the volunteers who hang an AP on their DSL or cable and leave it open.
Everybody who thinks that powerlines are a great way to run ethernet through your house forget that all of the wire is unshielded thereby creating a large antenna. This typically results in static noise on frequencies up to 80Mhz.
And that's NOTHING compared to the noise generated on the wiring by connected non-communication appliances.
- Motors. (Especially brush-type, such as vacuum cleaners or hair driers.)
- Switching-type light dimmers.
- Arc lights (fluorescent, "neon" gas discharge tubes, vapor-capsule, etc.)
- Welders.
- Switching-regulators in electronic appliances.
- DIODES in power supplies.
- ANY load turning on or off.
Heck: Even an incandescent bulb produces broad-spectrum audio-through-radio interference on the line - though nothing like what a defective bulb produces as it flickers. (And an old carbon-filiment lamp in a closet has been known to knock out radio reception for much of a city block.)
Be prepared for a LOT of packet corruption - meaning a lot of packet loss plus enough that get past all the redundancy checks to corrupt the actual traffic - if you ever attempt to use a power line for network traffic.
"On Thursday, the California state Senate approved a bill that requires businesses with stores in the state to charge their customers sales tax for purchases made over the Internet."
If this goes into effect, what will the effect be? Simple.
California's sales tax is typically over 8%. (It varies by location, because cities and counties are allowed to add on their own small deltas.)
So the result will be that companies which are primarily net retailers will CLOSE ANY STORES THEY HAVE in California. Standalones will move their operations to other states. Even large retail chains with an internet sales outlet may split into subsidiaries.
8ish percent of gross is a LOT in a heavily-competitive market. And the WHOLE POINT of buying something on the Internet is that the price differential must be more of a draw than the lack of a local facility is a repellant. So if a company has to charge an extra 8ish percent if it continues to have a presence in the state, it will, if at all possible, eliminate its presence in the state, rather than watching the bulk of its business switch to its competitors or just go away.
The net effect on California's budget will be negative. It will lose more in taxes, on store sales, employee income taxes, and other taxes on the businesses that fold up and move (or die) than it collects. It will also incur extra costs from the business shutdowns - such as unemployment and/or other social program costs for workers that don't move to follow the business.
==========
If this also passes the assembly it will almost certainly be signed into law - because Gray Davis is clueless about anything financial. (Witness his reaction to the "electric deregulation" debacle.)
IMHO copyright applies if the sample is recognizable and non-trivial. i.e.
- If you use a verse, or even a couple bars, from "Sergant Pepper", pay up - to Michael Jackson. B-) If you use half a track to go "veep-a-veep-a-veep" for your percussion, who cares if it's from Sergant Pepper, A Night at the Opera, or Behtoven's fifth? (But why didn't you just use one that's in the public domain by now anyhow.)
- If you play a couple bars backward, fair use. If you play a track backward, pay up.
- If you get a non-signature (i.e. lots of people do it) drum riff or guitar lick off a record and cut-and-paste it into a new composition, who cares? (Even if the whole composition is pieced together from such samples.) If you take a few bars of a solo, or a bar of something heavily orchestrated, pay up. If it's somebody's signature lick, learn to play it yourself (so it's no longer a signature) or pay up. And if it's more than a few notes, pay up for playing it yourself, too.
But that's just me.
Do you think that your ISP is going to sit and watch as you multicast through their network, causing them to send out many times more data than is coming in? Not if they can help it. They will charge for every multicasted bit. Maybe it's more efficient sometimes, but it will still cost lots of money, most likely.
Naw. They get their money from the people the multicast bit is going TO. Replicating it means more people upgrade and pay for bigger inbound hoses.
Think about it: Got broadband? Didn't you pay a premium to get a fat INBOUND pipe? Isn't your OUTBOUND pipe pinched down a bunch? Don't you use it that way? Do you feel cheated because your outbound pipe is narrower than your inbound? Or do you watch your streaming programms and suck down big images on the web with a few characters of URL going the other way?
Now if you could originate video streams and feed a LARGE audience on a DSL that was good for one stream upbound and several down, and a bunch of others could, too, and these indies made enough programming to convince a few hundred thousand users to upgrade to such fat pipes and pay a higher fee, and the ISP only had ONE COPY of this content-feeding-thousands on any given internal pipe rather than several, do you think the ISPs would nix it? Or would they sell it to all comers and laugh all the way to the bank.
It's CONTENT that drives internet expansion. And right now the general user as content provider can't feed enough people to make it worthwhile. So the main thing that's popular in peer-to-peer content provision is so-called piracy - where a CROWD of people each serve a FEW consumers with content mostly cloned off other people's well-advertised productions.
With broadcast origination available to general users, ORIGINAL content can reach enough people to justify the production costs. Without it, you need a major-league expensive infrastructure even for webcasting.
So the ISPs have a fine financial incentive to allow it once their infrastructure is up to it - and make the bucks back from the increased feed for pipes fat enough to originate and view it.
Or at least the ones that are NOT owned by a media conglomerate do. The ones owned by a media conglomerate have an incentive to suppress any broadcast technology where they don't originate the content themselves - because it represents competition for their more lucrative content-production-and-distribution business.
Korea Telecom has it a lot easier than companies in the US. The bulk of the South Korean population (something like 95% of 'em) live in these VERY LARGE apartment buildings. And the buildings have mini-telecom-central-offices in them already. Then the buildings are pretty close together as well.
So rather than stringing wires or fiber all over thousands of miles of continent, a Korean ISP only needs to string fiber to a few buildings and wire the buildings. No "last mile" problem. With low infrastructure cost the cost per subscriber can be tiny and the bandwidth high.
(Then there's the demand for bandwidth - very high thanks to a cultural difference. I hear that the current big thing among Korean high-school students is to go home after school, take off their clothes, and webcam-chat with their friends. Intimate but safe.)