Beer is not for sipping. When you sip a drink, it mainly gets to the taste buds at the front of your mouth, which are the ones that respond to sweet flavours. The taste buds that respond best to beer are at the back of your mouth. This is why beer often tastes better when you're really thirsty -- because when you throw it right back, it gets to the right taste buds.
I'm curious as to why anybody would want to do anything like this. The usual reason why guys set up daft high-tech-toy crap like this is because they are labouring under the misapprehension that chicks find it interesting. But you say you're about to become a father, so you've obviously already got a long way past that point.
As I understand it, you want to use electronics to spy on your babysitter. That basically means you don't trust the babysitter. So while you are out, away from the baby and supposed to be enjoying yourself, you are going to be spending the whole time thinking about whether the baby is OK with the babysitter. This really isn't going to do you any good in the long run -- nor the babysitter, nor even the baby. Probably not even your wife / girlfriend. If the baby is doing something, you will worry about how well the babysitter will deal with it. If the baby isn't doing anything, you will worry about whether it's OK.
Just because you can beam images wirelessly from a webcam to a phone or PDA doesn't mean you should. I mean, you could swallow a tiny wireless camera and use it to check on your digestive system from inside..... it wouldn't do you any good, though. You'd be more likely to give yourself digestive trouble because you were wondering whether you had digestive trouble!
The bottom line is you have to let go sometimes. Human beings, particularly young ones, are remarkably efficient at staying alive -- if we weren't, then we would have been wiped out a long, long, long time ago. Babies grow up whether or not you are watching over them 24/7/52. And you need time when you don't have to worry about your kids. Don't let anyone kid you into thinking this is selfish -- it's not selfish when the alternative is that you will harm your own sanity.
If you can't trust your babysitter, then that is a social problem, not a technological one; and the solutions to social problems do not lie in the technological domain. You need to learn to trust people -- trust your baby to grow up, and your sitter to take care of your baby. Otherwise you will become a nervous wreck, worrying about more things than your brain can reasonably be expected to handle. And though you might try a technological fix for that, it almost certainly won't work in the long run.
Isn't saying that an argument is likely to be untrue because it contains logical fallacies, somewhat akin to an indirect ad hominem attack -- and therefore a logical fallacy -- in itself?
That isn't how it works. The Law of the Land gives you certain rights that are absolutely sacrosanct, and any contract term that tries to abridge them is automatically null and void. Even if you signed the contract in blood, knowing full well that the term was unenforceable. What's more, if the contract does not specifically state that individual clauses are severable, then the entire contract is null and void.
Really, it's no different than if you video-recorded someone asking politely to be beaten up, then getting their request, and you tried to use the recording as your defence in court when you were later arrested for assault. It's still a criminal offence to beat someone up, no matter even if the person asked you to do it. You have a statutory right not to be beaten up and nothing you do can diminish that right.
If that had happened in Britain, the 76yo lady would be vilified as a nonce, and quite likely get paint all over her windows and maybe petrol through her letter box. And if we had such a thing as Sarah's Law {as opposed to Megan's Law}, then anybody else who ever lived in that house for the next hundred years or so would also be vilified as a nonce.
And the kid would have been given trauma counselling, and probably sued somebody for millions.
IMHO, what the world needs is retrospective abortion. And I am hereby challenging any and every pro-life, children-are-sweet-and-innocent types out there to spend a year living in Alvaston and hold onto those opinions.
The UKIP are appealing to the basest kind of moronic nationalistic pride. The UK could never survive independently. We have next to no manufacturing industry -- we import almost everything we consume. British workers, if they are employed at all, are employed in useless service industries as exactly the kind of middlemen it's so great to miss out. The question would simply be whether we would become the 51st state of the USA, or an overseas colony of the Far East. No matter. A greengrocer in the North East refuses to obey a simple law -- that foodstuffs sold in this country must be weighed in the same SI units that are used in every single other country -- and suddenly he's a martyr, and Britain could be great if it wasn't for the Evil Europeans trying to destroy the pound and the ounce that made Britain great. {This despite the fact that nobody under 30 actually knows how many ounces make a pound, much less cares, and anyway it's much harder to scam shoppers with metric scales. 0.475kg at £5.70/kg comes to £2.71. You can check this with any pocket calculator. Would you question 1lb 0.75oz at £2.58/lb coming to £2.74? This sort of thing probably went on for years, a few pence on a transaction here and there anytime it wasn't an obvious multiple of whole ounces}.
But there are bigger issues at stake. If the UK joined the Single European Currency, then it would suddenly make more sense for the countries selling crude oil to price it by the Euro rather than by the Dollar. This would ultimately piss a lot of very powerful people off. {No matter that soon, and probably sooner than you think, there won't be any crude oil to argue over the price of.}
I think the faint glimmer of an idea of a crude oil market dancing to the EU's tune must be about the only thing keeping the EU from booting the UK out.
The UK government is most definitely not anything resembling "left wing". Once upon a time there were the Labour Party, believing in trade union representation, public ownership of essential utilities and cradle-to-grave care {free medical care, council homes for all}; and the Conservative ("Tory") party, believing in low taxes and letting the market sort everything out. There were also the Liberals {a vaguely left-ish party which had not seen power since the Labour Party was formed} and the SDP {originally a group of breakaways from the Labour party who felt Labour was turning its back on its roots}.
During the 18 years of Tory misrule, Labour -- once the party of the Common Man -- gradually and systematically abandoned everything it stood for. The Tories were pulling the wool over the Common Man's eyes, of course, with their slick presentations, their talk of new this and modern that and hey, those Loony Lefties -- they're stuck in a time warp with their old-fashioned ideas about how to let ordinary people make a difference! First they privatised everything in sight, selling shares to small investors -- in effect, selling the people what we already owned. Of course, the small investors eventually got greedy {when you've been used to being skint all your life it's easy} or hard-up, and sold out to big megacorporations who do nothing but buy and sell shares in smaller corporations. Towards the end, John Major was actually slipping left-of-centre with ideas like his "Citizen's Charter" {a very watered-down alternative to a written constitution}. But then the SS Conservative Party ran out of steam, and Tony Blair's Labour Party {though by now they had absolutely no right to use the name} were voted in. Sometime between then and now, the SDP and Liberals merged to form the Liberal Democrats.
Today, Labour still lie just to the right of the Tories, and the Liberal Democrats are the only half-left party worth voting for. The real left is destroying itself with petty in-fighting {cf. Judean People's Front et al in Monty Python's The Life of Brian}.
Problem: The Internet as it stands today is not a safe or suitable place for children.
I think we agree on that. Now, there are two possible solutions to this problem.
Solution 1: Somehow make the Internet -- a nebulous entity beyond the control of any individual or organisation, no respector of imaginary lines and specifically equipped to deal with sabotage -- safe and suitable for children.
Solution 2: Recognise that the Internet is first and foremost an adult phenomenon, and ban children from using it.
Once you get to understanding the relationship dogs have with their pack leader -- whether two- or four-legged -- then it all makes sense. As far as the dog is concerned, that is just The Way The World Works, and it really doesn't know any different. A dog will give you [almost] unconditional love, in return for you never giving it cause to fear for its life. Only then will it mount a leadership challenge -- and as likely as not it won't have any real idea how to do this, so the results are unlikely to be pretty. A dog basically wants its "pack leader" to be happy -- or, if it is the pack leader, it has to keep the whole of the rest of the pack safe, well-fed and gainfully employed. As far as a dog is concerned, being the boss is a responsibility too far. It would rather be another member of the pack; that way, it knows it's likely to get fed, and unlikely to have to keep anybody else out of trouble. For one thing, most dogs aren't leadership material anyway -- which is good from the point of view of keeping the pack stable.
You have to remember that dogs have been living with humans for at least 10000 years, ever since the wolves came down out of the mountains to investigate the strange two-legged creatures that were wandering about on the plains below -- and if they didn't like it, they would have gone back a long time ago. We humans have done a bit of evolving in that time -- we have invented things like civilisation, written languages, agriculture, and had the Industrial and Information Revolutions. Throughout all this, Man's Best Friend has stood loyally by his side -- you can't tell me that the dogs haven't been [mostly] enjoying it.
Actually there are striking similarities between the behaviour of a pack of wolves / dogs, and office politics. Including the way that domesticated dogs and wolves spectacularly don't get on with one another -- and I think we've all met people who are "too like me for me to like"!
Absolutely! The Second Amendment says you are allowed to keep and bear arms, it doesn't say what kind of arms. If they'll ever let me in the USA, I'm buying me some radioactive fragmentation grenades..... for duck hunting, of course.
It only takes ONE strand of DNA to be damaged by ONE alpha particle and you have cancer
Not quite. DNA contains what can only be described as checksums -- it's highly tolerant of errors. Remember, things in the natural world have to be tolerant! One or two wrong atoms here or there are transparently corrected next time the cell reproduces itself. The only way you will get cancer is if the modified variant is viable in its own right {or auto-corrects most readily to a viable form which is not the same as the original} and the cells with the new DNA have a chance to reproduce to a certain critical level before they get stomped by the body's own immune system.
As an aside, this probably is where biodiversity came from in the first place: while the Earth was young and life was beginning to form, there almost certainly would have been much more radioactive material around to mutate DNA.
Ever heard of Prometheus? That myth was almost certainly based on reality: at some moment in prehistory, one of the new hairless upright ape-like beings pulled a burning stick from a lightning-blasted tree, and lived to tell the tale. Can you imagine what would have happened if today's "too dangerous" mentality had been around in those times?
Binary compatibility is a specious argument. To get it to work without breaking everything, you have to add abstraction layers for everything -- including stuff you never even though of at the time. Otherwise you will inevitably miss something and eventually, there will be no alternative except to let it break. Timestamps are a good example; the 32-bit space is running out, and the structure of a timestamp will need to be changed. And that is going to break binary compatibility big-style.
Or, you can actually use a programming language as an abstraction layer in its own right. This gives you source compatibility, which is a lot more sensible: it's what C was originally designed for in the first place. Who cares if the old binary won't run against the new kernel and libs, when it is a trivial matter just to re-compile? CPU time is cheap today; even compiling a kernel isn't a slow process anymore. Software that might have taken a week to compile twenty years ago won't take anything like that long today.
It's like, when it's raining, I walk to work in old clothes and carry my work clothes in a bag. I know I'm going to get wet anyway, and it's much easier to keep clothes dry when I'm not wearing them. Yes, it takes me some time to get dried and changed, but I can allow for that. It still works out being less effort than any way I could imagine of keeping my work clothes dry while wearing them.
Spread openoffice file format by allowing users to open files without forcing them to switch to openoffice. If the strategy works and the format catches on, that could reduce the lock-in factor.
That's exactly why Microsoft haven't introduced an.sxw import filter. {Nothing else is stopping them; it's not as though the licence is too expensive or anything.}
This is why my suggestion was to do the dirty deed using MS Office macros, because VBA is better documented than the import/export filter API and there are no restrictions beyond the limitations of the language as to what you can write in it. {It's quite possible that MS could be imposing some obnoxious licence condition on the API, such as "Thou shalt not create an import/export filter for competing products, neither shalt thou tell anyone else about this condition, lest thine tongue be plucked out from thy mouth and buried upon a beach. So mote it be!" That would explain the lack of a third-party plugin.}
Microsoft have already demonstrated their unwillingness to compete on any terms whatsoever. Microsoft tolerate wide-scale piracy of their software -- they would rather have you running a pirated copy of MS Office than a legit copy of some small-time workalike -- and this forces independents out of the closed-source arena {not that I have any sympathy for them; a hoarding bastard is still a hoarding bastard and just because some other hoarding bastard is shitting on them doesn't make their hoarding any less bastardish. Being a victim does not automatically make you blameless}.
The "re-training" thing is largely a myth anyway. All the typing keys -- letters, numbers and punctuation -- are still going to be in the same place, and the greatest single challenge inherent in creating any document consists of pressing them in the right order.
Well, you can try and reverse-engineer.doc if you like..... Reading a file comes under the heading of mathematical processes, which are inherently non-patentable, and if you hold the copyright on the file's contents, then you aren't breaking any laws. But an "exporter" written in Word macro language -- which is necessarily documented -- would get straight around every single issue I can think of, legal and technical. Unfortunately, I don't have access to a copy of MS Office, nor Windows -- both my home and work PCs are clean.
I wouldn't be surprised if MS were putting stuff into their file formats deliberately to break reverse-engineering attempts. Hell, there's got to be some reason why every new release sees bigger, slower-loading documents..... For all that it sounds like some wacko nut-job conspiracy theory, there is evidence out there to suggest that some people really are that evil.
Oh yeah, forgot to mention: if your satellite receiver is connected to the TV with a fully-wired SCART {in the AV1 socket}, chances are it's an RGB connection and therefore there is NO NTSC-ness or PAL-ness ANYWHERE from the broadcast transmitter right downstream to the cathode ray tube! If it's connected by an SVHS cable {small round 4-pin plug for picture, separate audio plug[s]}, composite video and audio {2 or 3 x standard audio plugs} or {make a religious emblem of your choice now} RF, then there will be a colour encoding standard imposed upon it. But NTSC does actually work fine over short links {like the metre or so from SAT RX to telly}. It's only when transmission line phenomena kick in that it starts to suffer.
I've done some hacking with OpenOffice XML files and I have to say, they're nothing if not logical..... Verbose, naturally, but that's offset by the ZIP compression, and anyway storage is cheap nowadays. What's impressive is the way you can break everything down into separate files {for a neater format} or not {easier to create}, as you think fit, and it all still makes sense. Beautiful.
Migration of existing files from MS Office is still the big stumbling block to OpenOffice adoption, and one that needs to be addressed. It doesn't help that MS Office can't read or write OpenOffice.org files -- well, it wouldn't, would it? Putting in OpenOffice read-only compatibility would mean legitimising OpenOffice. Putting in read-write compatibility would mean suicide. So it seems as though OpenOffice will always be stuck playing catch-up over file formats..... but not necessarily!
It's my understanding that the MS Office macro language can access and modify every feature of a document, and can also read and write text files. Surely, then, it should be possible to write a suite of macros that would allow you, using just a single licenced copy of MS Office, to read any Office document and re-export it in OpenOffice.org XML format?
Of course, in an ideal world, it would be illegal to lock up file specifications. Till then, we just have to run with the idea that if anything at all can read it, something else must be able to read it.
All SUN need to do is approach ISO and create a new international standard for a multi-platform programming language with certain features. Then, trademark the name "Java" and stipulate that it can only be applied to a programming language conforming to international standard MIL-TBD-1111 {or whatever it ends up being called}. Finally, release the Java source under something like the GPL, which would explicitly block the likes of Microsoft from releasing closed-source derivatives {as long as this is aggressively enforced}.
So what would the consequences be? Regular users will be able to download a package for their own distro that Will Just Work, and get on with enjoying the Java experience. Your average "meddling hobbyist" won't care too much about the name, just about the kewlness of their latest mod. Packagers will be able to pass the compatibility tests with confidence {all they'll be doing is picking sensible defaults by the standards of their distribution}. And anybody who wants to create a closed-source Java replacement with the intention gradually to reduce compatibility with the original Java release-by-release, in order to steal SUN's market share, will be f??ked.
NTSC or PAL is nothing to do with 60 or 50Hz -- the signal coming out of a VCR playing the "wrong" sort of tape {e.g. a PAL VCR playing an NTSC tape} is actually at the "wrong" picture rate, just with the "right" colour encoding.
A PAL colour signal is similar to an NTSC colour signal, but the phase is inverted on alternate lines {hence Phase Alternation by Line}. This tends to cancel out any DC offset effects {which basically look as if the colour wheel has been rotated}.
An RGB signal gives the best quality. This uses the red, green and blue on separate cables with a fourth for the timing signals. {This is usually a full composite picture signal; the same pin on the SCART is used for both functions. Some SCART sockets are fully wired and will accept an RGB signal, but even if it is only a partly-wired SCART [composite video and audio only] it will still display a picture.}
An S-VHS signal has two cables: one for the picture {which is a full mono picture with timing; made by multiplying each of the red, green and blue channels by a fiddle factor and adding them together} and one for the colour, which may be NTSC {constant phase} or PAL {alternating phase}. Some equipment can auto-detect which. S-VHS signals can be sent over a SCART cable; in this case the "red" pin is used for the colour signal.
A composite signal is made by modulating the colour signal onto a carrier {different for PAL and NTSC, google for the exact frequencies -- I'm too lazy} and mixing this with the mono video signal. It's possible that dark-light transitions in the picture signal can interfere with the colour carrier and produce unwanted artefacts.
Satellite and cable signals are digital, so there is really NO PAL or NTSC-ness to them -- they're effectively RGB {or, seeing as you're in Canada, RVB:) }. Also, some material broadcast in Canada may originate from digital, or PAL or SECAM analogue, master recordings, hence have better colour rendition in the first place.
We use Asterisk where I work -- about 30 Zultys ZIP 4X4 phones connected to a dual Xeon server with a Digium ISDN adaptor card (4 x E1 spans). One span is used to connect to the outside world (the full 30 lines; was just 12) and another connects to our "old" Siemens HiPath exchange.
We did have a problem with call quality which seemed to be related to recording calls; it turned out that it was due to having far too many files in the recording directory, and once we had that sorted, it was clear as a bell again.
My boss has even set up an Asterisk server at home. I haven't, but I've a spare machine I might use for the job if I can scrounge a spare IP phone. I'm not using a softphone -- we tested every one we could get the source for and one we couldn't, and they were all lousy for one reason or another.
Sounds as though your cable box is putting out RGB. Is the VCR connected
to the TV output of the cable box, rather than the VCR output? If so,
you probably need to select composite video rather than RGB output.
It will be somewhere in the set-top box set-up menu, maybe under
something like 'advanced options' -- but the people on the hotline will
know, if you can actually get through to then.....
In both RGB and composite modes, there is a full picture signal on the
video out/sync out pin {19}, so even on a non-RGB-capable set a picture will
be seen. In composite video mode, pin 8 is energised to indicate to the
TV set that an external signal is present, and the TV switches over to
the picture signal derived from pin 19. In RGB mode, pins 8 and 16 are
both energised, and the TV switches over to display the picture signal
using the red, green and blue components from pins 15, 11 and 7 and
obtaining the timing information from pin 19.
Most VCRs can only handle composite signals, but it's conventional to
wire unused pins through one-for-one between the Satellite and TV
SCARTs. It's possible that the switching signal on pin 16 is confusing
something, and the TV is ending up in some weird mode where it is
using the wrong signals.
If you switch the box to composite mode, there will be no voltage on
pin 16. The picture will only be in composite mode, so there will be
some loss of quality.
Alternatively the cable box should have a VCR scart. This only ever
carries a composite signal. But you'll need 3 scart leads: cable box
VCR SCART to VCR's SAT SCART, cable box TV SCART to TV AV1 SCART, and
VCR TV scart to TV AV2 SCART. {Conventionally, AV1 is RGB-capable and
AV2 is composite-only or composite/SVHS, using pin 15 for colour and
pin 19 for picture}. This method will give you an RGB picture when
watching cable TV by selecting AV1.
If you can't get a picture from your TV's internal tuner, you will
need to cut the wire on pin 8 of the SCART lead between the cable
box and the TV set.
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Beer is not for sipping. When you sip a drink, it mainly gets to the taste buds at the front of your mouth, which are the ones that respond to sweet flavours. The taste buds that respond best to beer are at the back of your mouth. This is why beer often tastes better when you're really thirsty -- because when you throw it right back, it gets to the right taste buds.
I'm curious as to why anybody would want to do anything like this. The usual reason why guys set up daft high-tech-toy crap like this is because they are labouring under the misapprehension that chicks find it interesting. But you say you're about to become a father, so you've obviously already got a long way past that point.
..... it wouldn't do you any good, though. You'd be more likely to give yourself digestive trouble because you were wondering whether you had digestive trouble!
As I understand it, you want to use electronics to spy on your babysitter. That basically means you don't trust the babysitter. So while you are out, away from the baby and supposed to be enjoying yourself, you are going to be spending the whole time thinking about whether the baby is OK with the babysitter. This really isn't going to do you any good in the long run -- nor the babysitter, nor even the baby. Probably not even your wife / girlfriend. If the baby is doing something, you will worry about how well the babysitter will deal with it. If the baby isn't doing anything, you will worry about whether it's OK.
Just because you can beam images wirelessly from a webcam to a phone or PDA doesn't mean you should. I mean, you could swallow a tiny wireless camera and use it to check on your digestive system from inside
The bottom line is you have to let go sometimes. Human beings, particularly young ones, are remarkably efficient at staying alive -- if we weren't, then we would have been wiped out a long, long, long time ago. Babies grow up whether or not you are watching over them 24/7/52. And you need time when you don't have to worry about your kids. Don't let anyone kid you into thinking this is selfish -- it's not selfish when the alternative is that you will harm your own sanity.
If you can't trust your babysitter, then that is a social problem, not a technological one; and the solutions to social problems do not lie in the technological domain. You need to learn to trust people -- trust your baby to grow up, and your sitter to take care of your baby. Otherwise you will become a nervous wreck, worrying about more things than your brain can reasonably be expected to handle. And though you might try a technological fix for that, it almost certainly won't work in the long run.
Isn't saying that an argument is likely to be untrue because it contains logical fallacies, somewhat akin to an indirect ad hominem attack -- and therefore a logical fallacy -- in itself?
That isn't how it works. The Law of the Land gives you certain rights that are absolutely sacrosanct, and any contract term that tries to abridge them is automatically null and void. Even if you signed the contract in blood, knowing full well that the term was unenforceable. What's more, if the contract does not specifically state that individual clauses are severable, then the entire contract is null and void.
Really, it's no different than if you video-recorded someone asking politely to be beaten up, then getting their request, and you tried to use the recording as your defence in court when you were later arrested for assault. It's still a criminal offence to beat someone up, no matter even if the person asked you to do it. You have a statutory right not to be beaten up and nothing you do can diminish that right.
If that had happened in Britain, the 76yo lady would be vilified as a nonce, and quite likely get paint all over her windows and maybe petrol through her letter box. And if we had such a thing as Sarah's Law {as opposed to Megan's Law}, then anybody else who ever lived in that house for the next hundred years or so would also be vilified as a nonce.
And the kid would have been given trauma counselling, and probably sued somebody for millions.
IMHO, what the world needs is retrospective abortion. And I am hereby challenging any and every pro-life, children-are-sweet-and-innocent types out there to spend a year living in Alvaston and hold onto those opinions.
The UKIP are appealing to the basest kind of moronic nationalistic pride. The UK could never survive independently. We have next to no manufacturing industry -- we import almost everything we consume. British workers, if they are employed at all, are employed in useless service industries as exactly the kind of middlemen it's so great to miss out. The question would simply be whether we would become the 51st state of the USA, or an overseas colony of the Far East. No matter. A greengrocer in the North East refuses to obey a simple law -- that foodstuffs sold in this country must be weighed in the same SI units that are used in every single other country -- and suddenly he's a martyr, and Britain could be great if it wasn't for the Evil Europeans trying to destroy the pound and the ounce that made Britain great. {This despite the fact that nobody under 30 actually knows how many ounces make a pound, much less cares, and anyway it's much harder to scam shoppers with metric scales. 0.475kg at £5.70/kg comes to £2.71. You can check this with any pocket calculator. Would you question 1lb 0.75oz at £2.58/lb coming to £2.74? This sort of thing probably went on for years, a few pence on a transaction here and there anytime it wasn't an obvious multiple of whole ounces}.
But there are bigger issues at stake. If the UK joined the Single European Currency, then it would suddenly make more sense for the countries selling crude oil to price it by the Euro rather than by the Dollar. This would ultimately piss a lot of very powerful people off. {No matter that soon, and probably sooner than you think, there won't be any crude oil to argue over the price of.}
I think the faint glimmer of an idea of a crude oil market dancing to the EU's tune must be about the only thing keeping the EU from booting the UK out.
The UK government is most definitely not anything resembling "left wing". Once upon a time there were the Labour Party, believing in trade union representation, public ownership of essential utilities and cradle-to-grave care {free medical care, council homes for all}; and the Conservative ("Tory") party, believing in low taxes and letting the market sort everything out. There were also the Liberals {a vaguely left-ish party which had not seen power since the Labour Party was formed} and the SDP {originally a group of breakaways from the Labour party who felt Labour was turning its back on its roots}.
During the 18 years of Tory misrule, Labour -- once the party of the Common Man -- gradually and systematically abandoned everything it stood for. The Tories were pulling the wool over the Common Man's eyes, of course, with their slick presentations, their talk of new this and modern that and hey, those Loony Lefties -- they're stuck in a time warp with their old-fashioned ideas about how to let ordinary people make a difference! First they privatised everything in sight, selling shares to small investors -- in effect, selling the people what we already owned. Of course, the small investors eventually got greedy {when you've been used to being skint all your life it's easy} or hard-up, and sold out to big megacorporations who do nothing but buy and sell shares in smaller corporations. Towards the end, John Major was actually slipping left-of-centre with ideas like his "Citizen's Charter" {a very watered-down alternative to a written constitution}. But then the SS Conservative Party ran out of steam, and Tony Blair's Labour Party {though by now they had absolutely no right to use the name} were voted in. Sometime between then and now, the SDP and Liberals merged to form the Liberal Democrats.
Today, Labour still lie just to the right of the Tories, and the Liberal Democrats are the only half-left party worth voting for. The real left is destroying itself with petty in-fighting {cf. Judean People's Front et al in Monty Python's The Life of Brian}.
How about this.
Problem: The Internet as it stands today is not a safe or suitable place for children.
I think we agree on that. Now, there are two possible solutions to this problem.
Solution 1: Somehow make the Internet -- a nebulous entity beyond the control of any individual or organisation, no respector of imaginary lines and specifically equipped to deal with sabotage -- safe and suitable for children.
Solution 2: Recognise that the Internet is first and foremost an adult phenomenon, and ban children from using it.
Hint: Bet on the even number.
If you could get a firmware upgrade for an Alsatian, and it was open source, would it come under a GSD licence?
Fair enough. It seems that your demands of a pet are at odds with a dog's capabilities to supply. That's not your fault, nor is it the dog's fault.
Once you get to understanding the relationship dogs have with their pack leader -- whether two- or four-legged -- then it all makes sense. As far as the dog is concerned, that is just The Way The World Works, and it really doesn't know any different. A dog will give you [almost] unconditional love, in return for you never giving it cause to fear for its life. Only then will it mount a leadership challenge -- and as likely as not it won't have any real idea how to do this, so the results are unlikely to be pretty. A dog basically wants its "pack leader" to be happy -- or, if it is the pack leader, it has to keep the whole of the rest of the pack safe, well-fed and gainfully employed. As far as a dog is concerned, being the boss is a responsibility too far. It would rather be another member of the pack; that way, it knows it's likely to get fed, and unlikely to have to keep anybody else out of trouble. For one thing, most dogs aren't leadership material anyway -- which is good from the point of view of keeping the pack stable.
You have to remember that dogs have been living with humans for at least 10000 years, ever since the wolves came down out of the mountains to investigate the strange two-legged creatures that were wandering about on the plains below -- and if they didn't like it, they would have gone back a long time ago. We humans have done a bit of evolving in that time -- we have invented things like civilisation, written languages, agriculture, and had the Industrial and Information Revolutions. Throughout all this, Man's Best Friend has stood loyally by his side -- you can't tell me that the dogs haven't been [mostly] enjoying it.
Actually there are striking similarities between the behaviour of a pack of wolves / dogs, and office politics. Including the way that domesticated dogs and wolves spectacularly don't get on with one another -- and I think we've all met people who are "too like me for me to like"!
Absolutely! The Second Amendment says you are allowed to keep and bear arms, it doesn't say what kind of arms. If they'll ever let me in the USA, I'm buying me some radioactive fragmentation grenades ..... for duck hunting, of course.
As an aside, this probably is where biodiversity came from in the first place: while the Earth was young and life was beginning to form, there almost certainly would have been much more radioactive material around to mutate DNA.
Ever heard of Prometheus? That myth was almost certainly based on reality: at some moment in prehistory, one of the new hairless upright ape-like beings pulled a burning stick from a lightning-blasted tree, and lived to tell the tale. Can you imagine what would have happened if today's "too dangerous" mentality had been around in those times?
Binary compatibility is a specious argument. To get it to work without breaking everything, you have to add abstraction layers for everything -- including stuff you never even though of at the time. Otherwise you will inevitably miss something and eventually, there will be no alternative except to let it break. Timestamps are a good example; the 32-bit space is running out, and the structure of a timestamp will need to be changed. And that is going to break binary compatibility big-style.
Or, you can actually use a programming language as an abstraction layer in its own right. This gives you source compatibility, which is a lot more sensible: it's what C was originally designed for in the first place. Who cares if the old binary won't run against the new kernel and libs, when it is a trivial matter just to re-compile? CPU time is cheap today; even compiling a kernel isn't a slow process anymore. Software that might have taken a week to compile twenty years ago won't take anything like that long today.
It's like, when it's raining, I walk to work in old clothes and carry my work clothes in a bag. I know I'm going to get wet anyway, and it's much easier to keep clothes dry when I'm not wearing them. Yes, it takes me some time to get dried and changed, but I can allow for that. It still works out being less effort than any way I could imagine of keeping my work clothes dry while wearing them.
This is why my suggestion was to do the dirty deed using MS Office macros, because VBA is better documented than the import/export filter API and there are no restrictions beyond the limitations of the language as to what you can write in it. {It's quite possible that MS could be imposing some obnoxious licence condition on the API, such as "Thou shalt not create an import/export filter for competing products, neither shalt thou tell anyone else about this condition, lest thine tongue be plucked out from thy mouth and buried upon a beach. So mote it be!" That would explain the lack of a third-party plugin.}
Microsoft have already demonstrated their unwillingness to compete on any terms whatsoever. Microsoft tolerate wide-scale piracy of their software -- they would rather have you running a pirated copy of MS Office than a legit copy of some small-time workalike -- and this forces independents out of the closed-source arena {not that I have any sympathy for them; a hoarding bastard is still a hoarding bastard and just because some other hoarding bastard is shitting on them doesn't make their hoarding any less bastardish. Being a victim does not automatically make you blameless}.
The "re-training" thing is largely a myth anyway. All the typing keys -- letters, numbers and punctuation -- are still going to be in the same place, and the greatest single challenge inherent in creating any document consists of pressing them in the right order.
Well, you can try and reverse-engineer .doc if you like ..... Reading a file comes under the heading of mathematical processes, which are inherently non-patentable, and if you hold the copyright on the file's contents, then you aren't breaking any laws. But an "exporter" written in Word macro language -- which is necessarily documented -- would get straight around every single issue I can think of, legal and technical. Unfortunately, I don't have access to a copy of MS Office, nor Windows -- both my home and work PCs are clean.
..... For all that it sounds like some wacko nut-job conspiracy theory, there is evidence out there to suggest that some people really are that evil.
I wouldn't be surprised if MS were putting stuff into their file formats deliberately to break reverse-engineering attempts. Hell, there's got to be some reason why every new release sees bigger, slower-loading documents
Oh yeah, forgot to mention: if your satellite receiver is connected to the TV with a fully-wired SCART {in the AV1 socket}, chances are it's an RGB connection and therefore there is NO NTSC-ness or PAL-ness ANYWHERE from the broadcast transmitter right downstream to the cathode ray tube! If it's connected by an SVHS cable {small round 4-pin plug for picture, separate audio plug[s]}, composite video and audio {2 or 3 x standard audio plugs} or {make a religious emblem of your choice now} RF, then there will be a colour encoding standard imposed upon it. But NTSC does actually work fine over short links {like the metre or so from SAT RX to telly}. It's only when transmission line phenomena kick in that it starts to suffer.
I've done some hacking with OpenOffice XML files and I have to say, they're nothing if not logical ..... Verbose, naturally, but that's offset by the ZIP compression, and anyway storage is cheap nowadays. What's impressive is the way you can break everything down into separate files {for a neater format} or not {easier to create}, as you think fit, and it all still makes sense. Beautiful.
..... but not necessarily!
Migration of existing files from MS Office is still the big stumbling block to OpenOffice adoption, and one that needs to be addressed. It doesn't help that MS Office can't read or write OpenOffice.org files -- well, it wouldn't, would it? Putting in OpenOffice read-only compatibility would mean legitimising OpenOffice. Putting in read-write compatibility would mean suicide. So it seems as though OpenOffice will always be stuck playing catch-up over file formats
It's my understanding that the MS Office macro language can access and modify every feature of a document, and can also read and write text files. Surely, then, it should be possible to write a suite of macros that would allow you, using just a single licenced copy of MS Office, to read any Office document and re-export it in OpenOffice.org XML format?
Of course, in an ideal world, it would be illegal to lock up file specifications. Till then, we just have to run with the idea that if anything at all can read it, something else must be able to read it.
All SUN need to do is approach ISO and create a new international standard for a multi-platform programming language with certain features. Then, trademark the name "Java" and stipulate that it can only be applied to a programming language conforming to international standard MIL-TBD-1111 {or whatever it ends up being called}. Finally, release the Java source under something like the GPL, which would explicitly block the likes of Microsoft from releasing closed-source derivatives {as long as this is aggressively enforced}.
So what would the consequences be? Regular users will be able to download a package for their own distro that Will Just Work, and get on with enjoying the Java experience. Your average "meddling hobbyist" won't care too much about the name, just about the kewlness of their latest mod. Packagers will be able to pass the compatibility tests with confidence {all they'll be doing is picking sensible defaults by the standards of their distribution}. And anybody who wants to create a closed-source Java replacement with the intention gradually to reduce compatibility with the original Java release-by-release, in order to steal SUN's market share, will be f??ked.
Sounds like a win all round really!
NTSC or PAL is nothing to do with 60 or 50Hz -- the signal coming out of a VCR playing the "wrong" sort of tape {e.g. a PAL VCR playing an NTSC tape} is actually at the "wrong" picture rate, just with the "right" colour encoding.
A PAL colour signal is similar to an NTSC colour signal, but the phase is inverted on alternate lines {hence Phase Alternation by Line}. This tends to cancel out any DC offset effects {which basically look as if the colour wheel has been rotated}.
An RGB signal gives the best quality. This uses the red, green and blue on separate cables with a fourth for the timing signals. {This is usually a full composite picture signal; the same pin on the SCART is used for both functions. Some SCART sockets are fully wired and will accept an RGB signal, but even if it is only a partly-wired SCART [composite video and audio only] it will still display a picture.}
An S-VHS signal has two cables: one for the picture {which is a full mono picture with timing; made by multiplying each of the red, green and blue channels by a fiddle factor and adding them together} and one for the colour, which may be NTSC {constant phase} or PAL {alternating phase}. Some equipment can auto-detect which. S-VHS signals can be sent over a SCART cable; in this case the "red" pin is used for the colour signal.
A composite signal is made by modulating the colour signal onto a carrier {different for PAL and NTSC, google for the exact frequencies -- I'm too lazy} and mixing this with the mono video signal. It's possible that dark-light transitions in the picture signal can interfere with the colour carrier and produce unwanted artefacts.
Satellite and cable signals are digital, so there is really NO PAL or NTSC-ness to them -- they're effectively RGB {or, seeing as you're in Canada, RVB :) }. Also, some material broadcast in Canada may originate from digital, or PAL or SECAM analogue, master recordings, hence have better colour rendition in the first place.
We use Asterisk where I work -- about 30 Zultys ZIP 4X4 phones connected to a dual Xeon server with a Digium ISDN adaptor card (4 x E1 spans). One span is used to connect to the outside world (the full 30 lines; was just 12) and another connects to our "old" Siemens HiPath exchange.
We did have a problem with call quality which seemed to be related to recording calls; it turned out that it was due to having far too many files in the recording directory, and once we had that sorted, it was clear as a bell again.
My boss has even set up an Asterisk server at home. I haven't, but I've a spare machine I might use for the job if I can scrounge a spare IP phone. I'm not using a softphone -- we tested every one we could get the source for and one we couldn't, and they were all lousy for one reason or another.
OK, I'll give you that one. If you didn't laugh you'd have to cry!
At least now the matter is in the daylight, rather than being hushed-up.
Sounds as though your cable box is putting out RGB. Is the VCR connected to the TV output of the cable box, rather than the VCR output? If so, you probably need to select composite video rather than RGB output. It will be somewhere in the set-top box set-up menu, maybe under something like 'advanced options' -- but the people on the hotline will know, if you can actually get through to then .....
In both RGB and composite modes, there is a full picture signal on the video out/sync out pin {19}, so even on a non-RGB-capable set a picture will be seen. In composite video mode, pin 8 is energised to indicate to the TV set that an external signal is present, and the TV switches over to the picture signal derived from pin 19. In RGB mode, pins 8 and 16 are both energised, and the TV switches over to display the picture signal using the red, green and blue components from pins 15, 11 and 7 and obtaining the timing information from pin 19.
Most VCRs can only handle composite signals, but it's conventional to wire unused pins through one-for-one between the Satellite and TV SCARTs. It's possible that the switching signal on pin 16 is confusing something, and the TV is ending up in some weird mode where it is using the wrong signals.
If you switch the box to composite mode, there will be no voltage on pin 16. The picture will only be in composite mode, so there will be some loss of quality.
Alternatively the cable box should have a VCR scart. This only ever carries a composite signal. But you'll need 3 scart leads: cable box VCR SCART to VCR's SAT SCART, cable box TV SCART to TV AV1 SCART, and VCR TV scart to TV AV2 SCART. {Conventionally, AV1 is RGB-capable and AV2 is composite-only or composite/SVHS, using pin 15 for colour and pin 19 for picture}. This method will give you an RGB picture when watching cable TV by selecting AV1.
If you can't get a picture from your TV's internal tuner, you will need to cut the wire on pin 8 of the SCART lead between the cable box and the TV set.