But see, this is all based on the assumption that he actually wants to rip all 1000 dvd's. Realistically, why go to the trouble of ripping a movie if you know it's either going to suck or you're never going to watch it?
Even if you're conservative and figure that each DVD is an hour and a half, that's 1500 hours- one hell of a lot of time...
But the thing about trains is that it's probably pretty hard to hijack them and run them into buildings, like you could do with a plane. Airborne terrorism can destroy not only the plane (and kill passengers), but ground targets as well.
And with electric (or Maglev) trains, if the thing got into any serious danger, it could always be remotely disabled for safety reasons. Sure, it'll have inertia, but it's not a loose cannon in the same way that an airplane in the sky is.
Nope, your currency conversion's backwards. Canadian dollars are worth less than American ones... should be $US 4.93, according to the Universal Currency Converter. That said, I don't know what the going rate for electricity here in this part (Texas) of the US is, so perhaps this conversion won't be so helpful.
Is this what you're after? I remember seeing something else on Slashdot not long ago about a specific type encrypted cell phone- mainly marketed to US law enforcement and government agencies.
Apparently, this relies on a GSM data stream, but it's the right idea.
YES. Ask any classical music student... I'm a violin student at the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University, and I'd say maybe a third to a half of the people in my class own portable Minidisc recorders. If you spend all day in a practice room, you can lose an objective angle on how you actually sound pretty easily. Recording yourself is an extremely effective practice technique, since [generally speaking], recordings don't lie.
Coupled with a small cheap mic, they come in very handy for recording lessons and performances-- sound quality isn't great, but considering how little you pay, they're a fantastic deal.
Most people I know get by with just a handful of discs- since they are easily re-recordable and erasable, every week you can just record over a previous lesson. And with media costs around $2/disc, you're not dropping much money to buy new discs should you ever need them.
Since I'm surrounded by music all day as a violin student, I don't spend much time listening to pre-recorded music on my MD player/recorder- I use it almost exclusively for its audio recording functions.
Minidiscs are also widely used in the field of linguistics, according to a professor last semester. Not only because they are random-access, but the sound quality is far better than a tape.
I think the greatest thing about minidiscs is that they have been adopted for so many highly specialized purposes. If you're interested, the Minidisc Community page has a list of creative
uses for the minidisc.
You're right on with this- say somebody is building a new million-dollar home, so to them, what's another $15k or $30k? I could almost see this Pluto thing being successful, mostly if it were marketed as an upgrade on a new home. People already drop enough money this way on shiny appliances when they build houses...
This would be much better than selling it only as a massive upgrade to one's mansion, which would require replacement of existing high-end security, phone, etc. systems, and a LOT of time spent by these busy executive-types to re-learn everything with Pluto.
Others have already pointed out that people did design the towers to withstand a plane impact--- but, aside from the sizes of aircraft getting bigger of the years, fuel capacity has increased as well. It seems like the speculation has been that most of the significant structural failure of the WTC towers actually resulted from the intense heat of the fuel fires, not impact.
I think the accuracy issues for civilian GPS systems (on the order of feet) wouldn't really affect a plane going at hundreds of miles per hour.
The random error that gets put into civilian GPS signals does not seem to be that big a deal for general (on foot) use. Yesterday, my dad and I went for a walk out in the woods, and it was off by 20-something feet when we returned. Maybe that's not acceptable for surveyers, but for most purposes (probably even car or air navigation) it's fine.
I, too, am worried about the increasing reliance of so many systems on the GPS network. But in the long term, aren't there multiple (non-American) replacements in the works? I would not be surprised if Airbus were to use the new European GPS replacement that's under development. Surely, manufacturers could incorporate several different [incompatible] navigation systems for redundancy purposes...
If I were a conspiracy theorist, I'd see a lack of evidence of any alien life forms landing on earth (in something like the Roswell incident) as simply more conclusive proof of a government cover-up...
To many people, anything's still a possibility until it's disproven, and even then, it's still possible, just masked by a conspiracy.
If my memory serves correctly here, 650 acres is just over a one square mile area. (640 acres is one section = square mile). That should give some frame of reference here- pretty impressive amount of coverage. (maybe they say this in the movie- BitTorrent is still doing its thing right now, so I can't tell just yet...)
I visited the Experian website to try to find out how to do this for my credit report, and it looks like they only do this if you actually have been a victim of identity fraud. But I (like many people!) would rather do this as a way of preventing fraud.
My best guess is that they're trying to limit the availability of this service, which is obviously a good idea, because it would cost them a huge amount of money for the extra labor required to make a phone call or two to verify somebody's identity every time a credit check is made.
Has any non-victim had any luck with setting up fraud alerts? I'd like to know if this is possible. Do the credit reporting agencies ask for "proof of fraud" before they will flag any further credit checks with SSN?
Regarding the PR stuff- they seem desparate to me- AT&T seems more serious than ever about attracting new customers right now (perhaps even more serious than the other carriers). I opened up today's New York Times this morning, and every major wireless carrier has purchased a full-page [color] ad-- interestingly enough, AT&T bought a full two-page spread. They are clearly concerned about their customer base evaporating so quickly...
This giant ad was only a few pages away from a big article discussing the FCC's dissatisfaction with their 60% number release failure rate...
Well shoot, I was hoping this was going to be some sophisticated butt-scanning technology to prevent terrorism. Going way beyong retina scans, thumbprints, and even this this that watches how you walk, airline passengers will now have their ass-prints stored in a new FAA database.
It seems to me that a serious impediment to having larger-sized bills would be the massive amount of required mechanical upgrades... any machine that deals with paper money, from ATM's to Coke machines (not to mention all cash-sorting devices), is built to deal with currency of a certain size.
Maybe I'm just being closed-minded about this, but it would take an awfully long time to retrofit all the infrastructure to deal... so you would have to have a very long transition time as people and machines adjust to the different-sized money, during which time both the old and new styles of bills are legal. It would take so long that any of the benefits of upgrading to more secure money could be sidestepped by simply making more fakes of old money.
Bills do have a very limited lifespan, particularly here in the USA, where they're built cheapy, so there is a naturally short turnover rate... but I still see a lot of the old twenties floating around, and they stopped printing those a good few years ago. Unless every old-style $20 or $100 bill I've seen/handled lately has been fake!
...can't they just upgrade their equipment when 11g gets stable instead of having to use up other parts of the spectrum?
From what I've read, 802.11g becomes significantly less reliable than the b variety at the same ranges. In other words, range here might be a more critical concern than throughput. Just a guess...
Have you guys watched Spinal Tap lately? There's that scene where the guys are playing a gig at a military base, and Nigel Tufnel's (a.k.a. Christopher Guest) wireless RF guitar system starts picking up the military base's radio broadcasts...
Evidently he's finished high school, since this page is a link to his IB extended essay project, which is done during one's senior year of high school. Unless something went horribly wrong with the project and he never graduated...:)
"they aren't like NPR or PBS, government-funded."
I think that's a tiny bit misleading... If I've got my facts straight here, NPR receives less than 2% of its annual revenue from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Of course, various NPR programs recieve NEA grants, but over the last few years, NEA funding has been sharply cut.
So yes, they are government-funded in the strictest definition of the term, but what about the many corporations receiving various tax incentives? Surely those would approach the 2% annually that NPR gets from the government- does that make them government-funded, too?
I think the goal in this legislation is one of cultural diversity, with ClearChannel's business tactics of secondary importance. It's a lot like people protesting the arrival of a Wal-Mart Supercenter in every small town across America (and now Europe)- destroying local identity.
Well, that's possible, but the efficiency and competitiveness argument doesn't seem all that logical to me- recently, the successful players have been Pixar et al., who are small, dynamic, and adaptable. Also, is their ultimate goal really efficiency, or is it to create the best product? (or greatest profit...) "Efficient" production of movies/games/whatever could probably lead to less inventiveness and ingenuity on a personal level. This seems like the kind of move that could lower worker morale enough to result in lesser products...Just my thoughts.
right... technical issues aside, can you imagine how annoying it would be if twenty people around you on a flight were all yakking away on their cell phones? I think the airlines would piss off a lot of passengers if they allowed the ambient noise level to rise this much.
It's kind of like the initiatives that started a few years ago to ban cell phones on trains.
Like here:
this
and this.
Slashdot Mirror
Not quite enough power for time travel, unfortunately! You've only got about half of the necessary 1.21 "jiga-watts"...
But see, this is all based on the assumption that he actually wants to rip all 1000 dvd's. Realistically, why go to the trouble of ripping a movie if you know it's either going to suck or you're never going to watch it?
Even if you're conservative and figure that each DVD is an hour and a half, that's 1500 hours- one hell of a lot of time...
But the thing about trains is that it's probably pretty hard to hijack them and run them into buildings, like you could do with a plane. Airborne terrorism can destroy not only the plane (and kill passengers), but ground targets as well.
And with electric (or Maglev) trains, if the thing got into any serious danger, it could always be remotely disabled for safety reasons. Sure, it'll have inertia, but it's not a loose cannon in the same way that an airplane in the sky is.
Nope, your currency conversion's backwards. Canadian dollars are worth less than American ones... should be $US 4.93, according to the Universal Currency Converter. That said, I don't know what the going rate for electricity here in this part (Texas) of the US is, so perhaps this conversion won't be so helpful.
Is this what you're after? I remember seeing something else on Slashdot not long ago about a specific type encrypted cell phone- mainly marketed to US law enforcement and government agencies.
Apparently, this relies on a GSM data stream, but it's the right idea.
YES. Ask any classical music student... I'm a violin student at the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University, and I'd say maybe a third to a half of the people in my class own portable Minidisc recorders. If you spend all day in a practice room, you can lose an objective angle on how you actually sound pretty easily. Recording yourself is an extremely effective practice technique, since [generally speaking], recordings don't lie.
Coupled with a small cheap mic, they come in very handy for recording lessons and performances-- sound quality isn't great, but considering how little you pay, they're a fantastic deal.
Most people I know get by with just a handful of discs- since they are easily re-recordable and erasable, every week you can just record over a previous lesson. And with media costs around $2/disc, you're not dropping much money to buy new discs should you ever need them.
Since I'm surrounded by music all day as a violin student, I don't spend much time listening to pre-recorded music on my MD player/recorder- I use it almost exclusively for its audio recording functions.
Minidiscs are also widely used in the field of linguistics, according to a professor last semester. Not only because they are random-access, but the sound quality is far better than a tape.
I think the greatest thing about minidiscs is that they have been adopted for so many highly specialized purposes. If you're interested, the Minidisc Community page has a list of creative uses for the minidisc.
You're right on with this- say somebody is building a new million-dollar home, so to them, what's another $15k or $30k? I could almost see this Pluto thing being successful, mostly if it were marketed as an upgrade on a new home. People already drop enough money this way on shiny appliances when they build houses...
This would be much better than selling it only as a massive upgrade to one's mansion, which would require replacement of existing high-end security, phone, etc. systems, and a LOT of time spent by these busy executive-types to re-learn everything with Pluto.
Others have already pointed out that people did design the towers to withstand a plane impact--- but, aside from the sizes of aircraft getting bigger of the years, fuel capacity has increased as well. It seems like the speculation has been that most of the significant structural failure of the WTC towers actually resulted from the intense heat of the fuel fires, not impact.
I think the accuracy issues for civilian GPS systems (on the order of feet) wouldn't really affect a plane going at hundreds of miles per hour.
The random error that gets put into civilian GPS signals does not seem to be that big a deal for general (on foot) use. Yesterday, my dad and I went for a walk out in the woods, and it was off by 20-something feet when we returned. Maybe that's not acceptable for surveyers, but for most purposes (probably even car or air navigation) it's fine.
I, too, am worried about the increasing reliance of so many systems on the GPS network. But in the long term, aren't there multiple (non-American) replacements in the works? I would not be surprised if Airbus were to use the new European GPS replacement that's under development. Surely, manufacturers could incorporate several different [incompatible] navigation systems for redundancy purposes...
If I were a conspiracy theorist, I'd see a lack of evidence of any alien life forms landing on earth (in something like the Roswell incident) as simply more conclusive proof of a government cover-up...
To many people, anything's still a possibility until it's disproven, and even then, it's still possible, just masked by a conspiracy.
nevermind- I'm an idiot- please ignore my previous post.
If my memory serves correctly here, 650 acres is just over a one square mile area. (640 acres is one section = square mile). That should give some frame of reference here- pretty impressive amount of coverage. (maybe they say this in the movie- BitTorrent is still doing its thing right now, so I can't tell just yet...)
I visited the Experian website to try to find out how to do this for my credit report, and it looks like they only do this if you actually have been a victim of identity fraud. But I (like many people!) would rather do this as a way of preventing fraud.
My best guess is that they're trying to limit the availability of this service, which is obviously a good idea, because it would cost them a huge amount of money for the extra labor required to make a phone call or two to verify somebody's identity every time a credit check is made.
Has any non-victim had any luck with setting up fraud alerts? I'd like to know if this is possible. Do the credit reporting agencies ask for "proof of fraud" before they will flag any further credit checks with SSN?
Doesn't the Internet Connection Sharing thing take care of NAT? It's not the prettiest way to do it, but hey, it's there.
Regarding the PR stuff- they seem desparate to me- AT&T seems more serious than ever about attracting new customers right now (perhaps even more serious than the other carriers). I opened up today's New York Times this morning, and every major wireless carrier has purchased a full-page [color] ad-- interestingly enough, AT&T bought a full two-page spread. They are clearly concerned about their customer base evaporating so quickly...
This giant ad was only a few pages away from a big article discussing the FCC's dissatisfaction with their 60% number release failure rate...
Well shoot, I was hoping this was going to be some sophisticated butt-scanning technology to prevent terrorism. Going way beyong retina scans, thumbprints, and even this this that watches how you walk, airline passengers will now have their ass-prints stored in a new FAA database.
It seems to me that a serious impediment to having larger-sized bills would be the massive amount of required mechanical upgrades... any machine that deals with paper money, from ATM's to Coke machines (not to mention all cash-sorting devices), is built to deal with currency of a certain size.
Maybe I'm just being closed-minded about this, but it would take an awfully long time to retrofit all the infrastructure to deal... so you would have to have a very long transition time as people and machines adjust to the different-sized money, during which time both the old and new styles of bills are legal. It would take so long that any of the benefits of upgrading to more secure money could be sidestepped by simply making more fakes of old money.
Bills do have a very limited lifespan, particularly here in the USA, where they're built cheapy, so there is a naturally short turnover rate... but I still see a lot of the old twenties floating around, and they stopped printing those a good few years ago. Unless every old-style $20 or $100 bill I've seen/handled lately has been fake!
From what I've read, 802.11g becomes significantly less reliable than the b variety at the same ranges. In other words, range here might be a more critical concern than throughput. Just a guess...
From the article....
Combined with the bad weather of winter and the short days, the images from home were dark and short...
This is great- it doesn't work if the weather's rotten! how useful for a weather-watching satellite receiver....
I like this part (from NYT- my school, Rice University, gives us the NYT at breakfast every morning!)...
Dr. Crick published an article on the nature of consciousness just this month.
Dude, what a beast this guy is! Still going! Has anybody found this article new article of his? It would be neat to read...
Have you guys watched Spinal Tap lately? There's that scene where the guys are playing a gig at a military base, and Nigel Tufnel's (a.k.a. Christopher Guest) wireless RF guitar system starts picking up the military base's radio broadcasts...
Evidently he's finished high school, since this page is a link to his IB extended essay project, which is done during one's senior year of high school. Unless something went horribly wrong with the project and he never graduated... :)
"they aren't like NPR or PBS, government-funded." I think that's a tiny bit misleading... If I've got my facts straight here, NPR receives less than 2% of its annual revenue from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Of course, various NPR programs recieve NEA grants, but over the last few years, NEA funding has been sharply cut. So yes, they are government-funded in the strictest definition of the term, but what about the many corporations receiving various tax incentives? Surely those would approach the 2% annually that NPR gets from the government- does that make them government-funded, too? I think the goal in this legislation is one of cultural diversity, with ClearChannel's business tactics of secondary importance. It's a lot like people protesting the arrival of a Wal-Mart Supercenter in every small town across America (and now Europe)- destroying local identity.
Well, that's possible, but the efficiency and competitiveness argument doesn't seem all that logical to me- recently, the successful players have been Pixar et al., who are small, dynamic, and adaptable. Also, is their ultimate goal really efficiency, or is it to create the best product? (or greatest profit...) "Efficient" production of movies/games/whatever could probably lead to less inventiveness and ingenuity on a personal level. This seems like the kind of move that could lower worker morale enough to result in lesser products...Just my thoughts.
right... technical issues aside, can you imagine how annoying it would be if twenty people around you on a flight were all yakking away on their cell phones? I think the airlines would piss off a lot of passengers if they allowed the ambient noise level to rise this much. It's kind of like the initiatives that started a few years ago to ban cell phones on trains. Like here: this
and this.