I think you underestimate american engineers. It would be almost impossible for environmental legislation supported by almost any politician (even many of the extreme environmentalists) to do much damage to the auto industry. Every time the government makes a new environmental, safety, or reliability regulation, the industry bitches and moans about how complying is impossible, impractical, or way to expensive. But when the laws get passed, the automakers do some research, find out a way to cost effectively comply, and do so. As a result, we now have safer, cleaner, more efficient, and more reliable cars than ever before, and without a huge cost premium.
I have no reason to think that the auto industry cannot acheive nearly any goal we put in front of them. I used this example because you mentioned it, but I think the same applies to many others.
This isn't to say that we should go nuts with absurd goals or short deadlines, but we should consider both certain and potential injury to the environment, and look for the most effective ways to reduce our risks. And one of the best ways to do it is to use the tool of capitalism, by forcing (through taxation or other measures) companies to bear the expected cost of their actions, while allowing them to decide the technological avenues to explore in order to acheive the desired outcome.
It is illlegal because it damages public property. The don't own the beach, and even if they did, they don't own the section of beach a mile down the line whose erosion will be increased by this.
Helecopters, and especially planes are not nearly as inefficient as people seem to think. Someone posted here that the helecopter he is flying gets about 13 mpg. It isn't going to break any records, but not a terrible fuel hog. But more to the point, there aren't much in the way of better options for a helecopter, while electric and hybrid cars are much better than conventional cars, and biomass powered mass transit is better still.
If you are a sensible environmentalist (which many are not) the right thing to do is start with the cheapest things that give the biggest gain. Auto emissions are a much bigger problem than helecopter emissions, and one that it is a much better use of time and research funds to improve.
Sure the public owns the beaches, but don't the property owners have some rights too? They have paid millions of dollars for thar land next to the beach, don't they deserve to keep it for a while before the ocean reclaims it?
In a word, no. If you paid millions of dollars for land you know is eroding, you are dumb. That does not give you the right to vandalize public property.
If your house was next to a park, and the lake in the park flooded every year wouldn't you want some protection?
No. If you build your house in a flood plane, you do not have the right to build a wall that diverts water into a nearby park, just because it is public property, and not owned by a billionare. In fact, you usually can't even build such a wall on your own land, much less on the park.
One thing America needs to learn badly is that just because you paid millions of dollars for something doesn't give you any special rights.
It doesn't look like he is claiming anyone in particuar is doing anything illegal. He is taking photographs of publically visible shoreline, which can be used by people who suspect someone has an illegal seawall. Presumably the person who sues the landowner will first verify that they don't have a permit.
Also, this could be used to showcase the prevelence of such seawalls for the purposes of crafting new legislation, if you believe they are being detrimental to marine life and/or other beachfront property owners.
It is really not that easy to put in line filters at 635, 650, 670 (need that one, too), and 532 without really losing a high fraction of the desired signal. And that impairs the ability of the cameras to work in low light, which is a big deal for survalence. While a given laser has a very narrow linewidth, cheaply manufactured laser pointers have wild variations in the actual laser frequency, and cooling or heating the diode can shift that even more. Bare diodes are available relatively cheaply at probably 20 different wavelengths between 600 and 800nm.
If someone seriously wants to block out all handheld laser pointers, they are going to have to throw out everything over 600nm, as well as 532 in the green. That is hard to do with high enough extinction that the laser doesn't overwhelm the CCD while maintainting high sensitivity.
This is based on benchmarks, my limited experience actually using PPCs, and experiences of others who have used both, as well as my knowledge of the archetecture and expected IPC, not just some vauge notion that more MHz is mo' betta. And the Athlon MP 2000 runs at 1.67 GHz, not 1.5, so it is more like 20% vs 67%. I do think that a 1 GHz G4 can (probably) outperform an equivelently clocked Athlon, which in turn can outperform a similarly clocked P4, but I haven't seen anything to indicate it can overcome a 40% clock speed deficit. The benchmarks I have seen show that even in most "content creation" benchmarks (photoshop and the like) -- the bread and butter of Apple, a Dual Athlon runs circles around the dual G4, and for day-to-day responsivness ("feel") the Athlon beats out the G4 as well.
No, I am thinking of the "pill shaped" mice (for lack of a better term) where the button is the mouse.
They are approximately the right shape, though they don't feel particularly comfortable to me, but the fact that I can't rest my hand on it without clicking sucks.
I suppose many people probably wouldn't have a problem with them, but I am particulary picky about input devices, if I had a choice I wouldn't use anything other than the Logitech optical MouseMan wheel. Unfortunately, they don't make it any more, and I don't particularly care for the new model.
The Atlhon MP 2000 is the same as the Athlon XP 2000. My impression, based on talking to several Mac users, and some small experience using them myself was that the Athlon was definately faster than the G4 (in real world use, if not in photoshop benchmarks), but not enough that it would be a big problem. I have also heard (though not used any dual G4s) that the bus is a shared SDR bus, rather than a point-to-point DDR bus, which makes the G4 really bandwidth starved in a dual processor configuration. I don't know if that applies to the new G4s that use DDR memory or not.
The price I quoted for the PC included a monitor, which is why I added that on to the Apple price. The mouse definately needs to be replaced, the whole design pisses me off, not just the lack of buttons 2 and 3. The keyboard I could live with, but it isn't really ideal.
Still, the G4 is way out of the price range I would consider acceptable competition for a PC. Now, if I were using it for work, where the Mac had a substantial advantage over a PC for me, I wouldn't hesitate to pay the extra $1200, but as a home user, it costs way too much.
Yes, but for a home "computer enthusiatst" who has a PC, and thinks this new OSX thing looks pretty cool, the prices apple charges are outlandish. I just put together a sweet Athlon MP based system for about $1600. I looked at what a G4 that I would consider and "acceptable substitute" would be and it costs about $2700, plus about $300 to get a nice monitor and replace the keyboard and mouse. Plus, that is with me being very generous about an equivelent machine. There is no way that a 1GHz G4 competes with an Athlon MP 2000, and most of the other components are comparable.
Now, I primarily got the machine to play Windows only games, so Apple wasn't even in the running, but if it had been a general purpose computer upgrade, I might have considered the Mac, if it only had a $100-$200 price premium. But $1400 is way too much.
So this would be interesting to me, except that it turned out to be "scavenge parts to make an older generation Mac for cheap" rather than making a machine equivelent to what Apple sells now, just with a price comprable to a home-built PC, or even a Dell.
Aside from the fact that not everything has to be for the masses, there are lots of sandboxing applications that the masses could use -- not just a layer of crash-protection (which shouldn't be needed if the regular kernel does its job), but as a way of protecting agains malicious/trojan software. For instance, worried that the latest version of windows media player is going to send information about your computer to MS? Run it in a user-mode sandbox that can't access any of your files, and can only use the network to grab your MPEGs. Someone send you a cool program that might have a virus or trojan? Your mail client could just run it in a UML sandbox. No more telling people "don't click on.exe files!
Of course, the options above are much more useful in Windows than Linux, since Linux doesn't have much in the way of viruses, trojans, or spyware, but if it becomes more popular on the desktop, all those nasty things will come in full force, and we will be ready.
Another sandboxing application that Joe User might be interested in is for servers. Lots of people like to set up personal web servers for one reason or another, and this is frequently a big security risk. But if he can install it in UML (or preferably download a pre-made UML image with the web server installed) the rest of his computer will be pretty safe.
Another security possibility is for a personal firewall. If you ran your whole system in UML, and ran nothing but a firewall on the "real" machine, you could get many of the advantages of a firewall without a second computer. This is probably not particularly attractive, since you don't really need the firewall to be seperate from the workstation, but it is a possibility.
I personally would love to see UML ported to Windows as a way to run Linux apps under Windows.
Legally it is probably within the infringed upon owner's rights to prosecute. However, there is no law that says that a free software developer must be as big of dick as commercial software vendors frequently are.
Unless someone gives me reason to believe otherwise, I am going to assume Epson made an honest mistake and is working in good faith to remedy that. Were it my choice, I would not try to punish them.
If you treat people with decency, they have much more positive feelings about supporting software for free OSs, and may decide it is easier and better to release some of their own code under the GPL rather than reinvent the wheel to aviod it. Sharing! What a brilliant idea!
If you actions don't lead to making the world a better place, perhaps you should rethink them.
It bugs me the most when people write "that way" on purpose. It is hard to read, and hard to understand. I assume his point was not only good, but well voiced, but I wouldn't know. I got a couple of sentences in and stopped reading because the "interesting" manner of writing was too distracting.
If he likes to be all style and no substance, then writing however he pleases is fine. But I get the impression that he actually cares about communicating to people, in which case he has to learn not to let the frame get in the way of the picture.
The other factor that weighs in here is that the only thing more annoying (grammer wise, at least) than people who deliberatly write like that because the like it are those who write like that because they think it makes them cool and/or different. I don't know (and don't really care) whether Prince falls into this category or not, but the possibility lowers how seriously I would take what he had to say had I been able to read the whole thing.
What I have heard is that they used a custom PIII/Celeron with a 100 MHz FSB, 128K cache, and a different cache associativity (higher) than either the PIII or the PIII Celeron.
I don't remember the exact deal with the cache, but the configuration is not identical to any desktop or mobile PIII Intel sold.
Maybe not Windows, but I bet 10:1 odds that within 2 weeks of the hardware being readily available, the linux kernel will boot on it and you will be able to install debian with custom boot floppies. Probably sooner, given that it already runs on a bunch of "custom" x86 machines as well as the very PPC systems Apple would be porting from.
However, if I were Apple, and wanted to do this, I would contract with a PC motherboard maker or two to make an OEM version of one of their motherboard series that had an Apple written BIOS, but was otherwise identical to the PC version. Pop that in a custom Apple designed box and put in Apple approved hardware, and you are ready to go.
If they wanted to run PPC code for Carbon/OS9 classic apps, do that on a PCI based coprocessor card, rather that a motherboard integrated system.
As a bonus, the MacOSX/Intel version of photoshop could be modified to use the PPC in parallel with the x86 CPU for an extra performance gain that Jobs could brag about.
Not only does a "professional" DAT drive not honor this flag as mentioned in the above posts, but for a couple of bucks you can make a small chip that strips off the copy prevention bits on the DAT output, allowing a consumer DAT to read them fine. Also, some PC sound cards with SPDIF will record copies just fine, as general purpose PCs are (at least they were pre-DMCA) excempt from the bill that mandates the copy managment.
However, as long as you are willing to live with a slight loss of quality and/or a slight increase in file size, it should be nowhere near as bad as for analog files. If you do mp3->wav, the wave file should already be quantized in such a way that it is easily compressable by another program. In principle, for instance, you should be able to re MP3 encode with no further loss of quality (whether actual MP3 encoders do this is another question). Ogg uses a different algorithm, so there will be a slight degredation, but it shouldn't be that bad if the encoder is designed to handle low entropy input well.
Whether this happens in reality, I don't know, but I am sure some smart people could figure out a way to do it.
I believe the only way to get NWN for Linux is to buy the Windows version of the game and download linux binary. It is way, way cheaper for them to do that rather than make a linux boxed version, and a lot more convenient for most of their customers.
Obviously it is a different story when they license the porting rights to another company (eg Loki) who then needs to sell it if they want to make any money.
But I look forward to the day when most games come out of the box on a CD (or DVD) with Windows, Linux, and Mac installers all on the same disk. Or when Windows and Mac OS are consigned to irrelevancy because free systems turn out to be better:)
It would be nice if there were a free market, but that doesn't change the fact that the government is supposed to be "of the people, by the people, and for the people". The free market is a means to an end, which should never be confused with the end.
A friend of mine recently got married. He got her a diamond engagment ring, but they couldn't afford to take a honeymoon.
True, the diamond will be around for 70 years, but I will would rather have the honeymoon.
Plus, the ethics of the diamond industry aside, I can't stand the implication that bying an expensive rock is the only, the best, or even a good way to show love. I cringe every time I see a DeBeers commemrcial.
For all of these reasons, I don't think I could actually bring myself to purchase a diamond. I hope that if I am ever looking to propose to someone, she will understand that.
Latency may be slightly less on IDE than similar SCSI drives, but 1) you can get 15000 RPM scsi drives and only 7200 RPM IDE, and 2) the effective latency on SCSI can be much less if you have a drive that effectively reorders requests to minimise seeking. The OS can do some of this, but it doesn't necessarily know the best way to access a particular drive.
This guy shows a substantial amount of evidence that most of the supposed benefits of drinking "lots" of water are either unsupported by research or shown to be achieved with substantially less water intake than the 64oz recommendation. He also has some anecdotal evidence that caffinated beverages and to some extent beer not being particluarly dehydrating.
But the most important thing to note (I think) is that under normal circumstances the body's thirst mechanism is entirely sufficient to prevent dehydration.
fully automatic weapons and sawed off shotguns are illegal in their own right. Firearms, while legal, are regulated. Playstations are not, and are not illegal. The same argument applies to making illegal drugs, or perscription drugs without a license, or bombs. The final product is illegal. But unless it would be illegal for Sony to sell multi-region PS2s, it shouldn't be illegal for me to make one. Now, if I use that to steal games, that is another story entirely.
Watch out... I was looking into modchips and the plug in ones do not seem to let you play imported games, only backups. So, unless you have a DVD-R handy to make backups of your imported games (which it seems you can then play)
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I think you underestimate american engineers. It would be almost impossible for environmental legislation supported by almost any politician (even many of the extreme environmentalists) to do much damage to the auto industry. Every time the government makes a new environmental, safety, or reliability regulation, the industry bitches and moans about how complying is impossible, impractical, or way to expensive. But when the laws get passed, the automakers do some research, find out a way to cost effectively comply, and do so. As a result, we now have safer, cleaner, more efficient, and more reliable cars than ever before, and without a huge cost premium.
I have no reason to think that the auto industry cannot acheive nearly any goal we put in front of them. I used this example because you mentioned it, but I think the same applies to many others.
This isn't to say that we should go nuts with absurd goals or short deadlines, but we should consider both certain and potential injury to the environment, and look for the most effective ways to reduce our risks. And one of the best ways to do it is to use the tool of capitalism, by forcing (through taxation or other measures) companies to bear the expected cost of their actions, while allowing them to decide the technological avenues to explore in order to acheive the desired outcome.
It is illlegal because it damages public property. The don't own the beach, and even if they did, they don't own the section of beach a mile down the line whose erosion will be increased by this.
Helecopters, and especially planes are not nearly as inefficient as people seem to think. Someone posted here that the helecopter he is flying gets about 13 mpg. It isn't going to break any records, but not a terrible fuel hog. But more to the point, there aren't much in the way of better options for a helecopter, while electric and hybrid cars are much better than conventional cars, and biomass powered mass transit is better still.
If you are a sensible environmentalist (which many are not) the right thing to do is start with the cheapest things that give the biggest gain. Auto emissions are a much bigger problem than helecopter emissions, and one that it is a much better use of time and research funds to improve.
In a word, no. If you paid millions of dollars for land you know is eroding, you are dumb. That does not give you the right to vandalize public property.
No. If you build your house in a flood plane, you do not have the right to build a wall that diverts water into a nearby park, just because it is public property, and not owned by a billionare. In fact, you usually can't even build such a wall on your own land, much less on the park.
One thing America needs to learn badly is that just because you paid millions of dollars for something doesn't give you any special rights.
It doesn't look like he is claiming anyone in particuar is doing anything illegal. He is taking photographs of publically visible shoreline, which can be used by people who suspect someone has an illegal seawall. Presumably the person who sues the landowner will first verify that they don't have a permit.
Also, this could be used to showcase the prevelence of such seawalls for the purposes of crafting new legislation, if you believe they are being detrimental to marine life and/or other beachfront property owners.
It is really not that easy to put in line filters at 635, 650, 670 (need that one, too), and 532 without really losing a high fraction of the desired signal. And that impairs the ability of the cameras to work in low light, which is a big deal for survalence. While a given laser has a very narrow linewidth, cheaply manufactured laser pointers have wild variations in the actual laser frequency, and cooling or heating the diode can shift that even more. Bare diodes are available relatively cheaply at probably 20 different wavelengths between 600 and 800nm.
If someone seriously wants to block out all handheld laser pointers, they are going to have to throw out everything over 600nm, as well as 532 in the green. That is hard to do with high enough extinction that the laser doesn't overwhelm the CCD while maintainting high sensitivity.
This is based on benchmarks, my limited experience actually using PPCs, and experiences of others who have used both, as well as my knowledge of the archetecture and expected IPC, not just some vauge notion that more MHz is mo' betta. And the Athlon MP 2000 runs at 1.67 GHz, not 1.5, so it is more like 20% vs 67%. I do think that a 1 GHz G4 can (probably) outperform an equivelently clocked Athlon, which in turn can outperform a similarly clocked P4, but I haven't seen anything to indicate it can overcome a 40% clock speed deficit. The benchmarks I have seen show that even in most "content creation" benchmarks (photoshop and the like) -- the bread and butter of Apple, a Dual Athlon runs circles around the dual G4, and for day-to-day responsivness ("feel") the Athlon beats out the G4 as well.
No, I am thinking of the "pill shaped" mice (for lack of a better term) where the button is the mouse.
They are approximately the right shape, though they don't feel particularly comfortable to me, but the fact that I can't rest my hand on it without clicking sucks.
I suppose many people probably wouldn't have a problem with them, but I am particulary picky about input devices, if I had a choice I wouldn't use anything other than the Logitech optical MouseMan wheel. Unfortunately, they don't make it any more, and I don't particularly care for the new model.
The Atlhon MP 2000 is the same as the Athlon XP 2000. My impression, based on talking to several Mac users, and some small experience using them myself was that the Athlon was definately faster than the G4 (in real world use, if not in photoshop benchmarks), but not enough that it would be a big problem. I have also heard (though not used any dual G4s) that the bus is a shared SDR bus, rather than a point-to-point DDR bus, which makes the G4 really bandwidth starved in a dual processor configuration. I don't know if that applies to the new G4s that use DDR memory or not.
The price I quoted for the PC included a monitor, which is why I added that on to the Apple price. The mouse definately needs to be replaced, the whole design pisses me off, not just the lack of buttons 2 and 3. The keyboard I could live with, but it isn't really ideal.
Still, the G4 is way out of the price range I would consider acceptable competition for a PC. Now, if I were using it for work, where the Mac had a substantial advantage over a PC for me, I wouldn't hesitate to pay the extra $1200, but as a home user, it costs way too much.
Yes, but for a home "computer enthusiatst" who has a PC, and thinks this new OSX thing looks pretty cool, the prices apple charges are outlandish. I just put together a sweet Athlon MP based system for about $1600. I looked at what a G4 that I would consider and "acceptable substitute" would be and it costs about $2700, plus about $300 to get a nice monitor and replace the keyboard and mouse. Plus, that is with me being very generous about an equivelent machine. There is no way that a 1GHz G4 competes with an Athlon MP 2000, and most of the other components are comparable.
Now, I primarily got the machine to play Windows only games, so Apple wasn't even in the running, but if it had been a general purpose computer upgrade, I might have considered the Mac, if it only had a $100-$200 price premium. But $1400 is way too much.
So this would be interesting to me, except that it turned out to be "scavenge parts to make an older generation Mac for cheap" rather than making a machine equivelent to what Apple sells now, just with a price comprable to a home-built PC, or even a Dell.
Aside from the fact that not everything has to be for the masses, there are lots of sandboxing applications that the masses could use -- not just a layer of crash-protection (which shouldn't be needed if the regular kernel does its job), but as a way of protecting agains malicious/trojan software. For instance, worried that the latest version of windows media player is going to send information about your computer to MS? Run it in a user-mode sandbox that can't access any of your files, and can only use the network to grab your MPEGs. Someone send you a cool program that might have a virus or trojan? Your mail client could just run it in a UML sandbox. No more telling people "don't click on .exe files!
Of course, the options above are much more useful in Windows than Linux, since Linux doesn't have much in the way of viruses, trojans, or spyware, but if it becomes more popular on the desktop, all those nasty things will come in full force, and we will be ready.
Another sandboxing application that Joe User might be interested in is for servers. Lots of people like to set up personal web servers for one reason or another, and this is frequently a big security risk. But if he can install it in UML (or preferably download a pre-made UML image with the web server installed) the rest of his computer will be pretty safe.
Another security possibility is for a personal firewall. If you ran your whole system in UML, and ran nothing but a firewall on the "real" machine, you could get many of the advantages of a firewall without a second computer. This is probably not particularly attractive, since you don't really need the firewall to be seperate from the workstation, but it is a possibility.
I personally would love to see UML ported to Windows as a way to run Linux apps under Windows.
Legally it is probably within the infringed upon owner's rights to prosecute. However, there is no law that says that a free software developer must be as big of dick as commercial software vendors frequently are.
Unless someone gives me reason to believe otherwise, I am going to assume Epson made an honest mistake and is working in good faith to remedy that. Were it my choice, I would not try to punish them.
If you treat people with decency, they have much more positive feelings about supporting software for free OSs, and may decide it is easier and better to release some of their own code under the GPL rather than reinvent the wheel to aviod it. Sharing! What a brilliant idea!
If you actions don't lead to making the world a better place, perhaps you should rethink them.
It bugs me the most when people write "that way" on purpose. It is hard to read, and hard to understand. I assume his point was not only good, but well voiced, but I wouldn't know. I got a couple of sentences in and stopped reading because the "interesting" manner of writing was too distracting.
If he likes to be all style and no substance, then writing however he pleases is fine. But I get the impression that he actually cares about communicating to people, in which case he has to learn not to let the frame get in the way of the picture.
The other factor that weighs in here is that the only thing more annoying (grammer wise, at least) than people who deliberatly write like that because the like it are those who write like that because they think it makes them cool and/or different. I don't know (and don't really care) whether Prince falls into this category or not, but the possibility lowers how seriously I would take what he had to say had I been able to read the whole thing.
What I have heard is that they used a custom PIII/Celeron with a 100 MHz FSB, 128K cache, and a different cache associativity (higher) than either the PIII or the PIII Celeron.
I don't remember the exact deal with the cache, but the configuration is not identical to any desktop or mobile PIII Intel sold.
Maybe not Windows, but I bet 10:1 odds that within 2 weeks of the hardware being readily available, the linux kernel will boot on it and you will be able to install debian with custom boot floppies. Probably sooner, given that it already runs on a bunch of "custom" x86 machines as well as the very PPC systems Apple would be porting from.
However, if I were Apple, and wanted to do this, I would contract with a PC motherboard maker or two to make an OEM version of one of their motherboard series that had an Apple written BIOS, but was otherwise identical to the PC version. Pop that in a custom Apple designed box and put in Apple approved hardware, and you are ready to go.
If they wanted to run PPC code for Carbon/OS9 classic apps, do that on a PCI based coprocessor card, rather that a motherboard integrated system.
As a bonus, the MacOSX/Intel version of photoshop could be modified to use the PPC in parallel with the x86 CPU for an extra performance gain that Jobs could brag about.
Except that glucose would be made by photosynthesis, which is a C02 consuming process. So this would not release any "fixed" CO2.
Not only does a "professional" DAT drive not honor this flag as mentioned in the above posts, but for a couple of bucks you can make a small chip that strips off the copy prevention bits on the DAT output, allowing a consumer DAT to read them fine. Also, some PC sound cards with SPDIF will record copies just fine, as general purpose PCs are (at least they were pre-DMCA) excempt from the bill that mandates the copy managment.
However, as long as you are willing to live with a slight loss of quality and/or a slight increase in file size, it should be nowhere near as bad as for analog files. If you do mp3->wav, the wave file should already be quantized in such a way that it is easily compressable by another program. In principle, for instance, you should be able to re MP3 encode with no further loss of quality (whether actual MP3 encoders do this is another question). Ogg uses a different algorithm, so there will be a slight degredation, but it shouldn't be that bad if the encoder is designed to handle low entropy input well.
Whether this happens in reality, I don't know, but I am sure some smart people could figure out a way to do it.
I believe the only way to get NWN for Linux is to buy the Windows version of the game and download linux binary. It is way, way cheaper for them to do that rather than make a linux boxed version, and a lot more convenient for most of their customers.
:)
Obviously it is a different story when they license the porting rights to another company (eg Loki) who then needs to sell it if they want to make any money.
But I look forward to the day when most games come out of the box on a CD (or DVD) with Windows, Linux, and Mac installers all on the same disk. Or when Windows and Mac OS are consigned to irrelevancy because free systems turn out to be better
It would be nice if there were a free market, but that doesn't change the fact that the government is supposed to be "of the people, by the people, and for the people". The free market is a means to an end, which should never be confused with the end.
A friend of mine recently got married. He got her a diamond engagment ring, but they couldn't afford to take a honeymoon.
True, the diamond will be around for 70 years, but I will would rather have the honeymoon.
Plus, the ethics of the diamond industry aside, I can't stand the implication that bying an expensive rock is the only, the best, or even a good way to show love. I cringe every time I see a DeBeers commemrcial.
For all of these reasons, I don't think I could actually bring myself to purchase a diamond. I hope that if I am ever looking to propose to someone, she will understand that.
Latency may be slightly less on IDE than similar SCSI drives, but 1) you can get 15000 RPM scsi drives and only 7200 RPM IDE, and 2) the effective latency on SCSI can be much less if you have a drive that effectively reorders requests to minimise seeking. The OS can do some of this, but it doesn't necessarily know the best way to access a particular drive.
This guy shows a substantial amount of evidence that most of the supposed benefits of drinking "lots" of water are either unsupported by research or shown to be achieved with substantially less water intake than the 64oz recommendation. He also has some anecdotal evidence that caffinated beverages and to some extent beer not being particluarly dehydrating.
But the most important thing to note (I think) is that under normal circumstances the body's thirst mechanism is entirely sufficient to prevent dehydration.
fully automatic weapons and sawed off shotguns are illegal in their own right. Firearms, while legal, are regulated. Playstations are not, and are not illegal. The same argument applies to making illegal drugs, or perscription drugs without a license, or bombs. The final product is illegal. But unless it would be illegal for Sony to sell multi-region PS2s, it shouldn't be illegal for me to make one. Now, if I use that to steal games, that is another story entirely.
Watch out... I was looking into modchips and the plug in ones do not seem to let you play imported games, only backups. So, unless you have a DVD-R handy to make backups of your imported games (which it seems you can then play)