The fundamental fallacy to this argument is that there is enough money to be made to cover ANYONE's costs, until the crowd thins significantly. By then, only the deep-pocketed will survive, not necessarily the most worthy. Those companies may or may not actively interfere with outside software, but you sure can't expect them to be helpful.
Personally, if I owned a trucking company (I don't, just work for one), I wouldn't want it to be easy for someone to shut down all the trucks on the road. Bounce a paycheck, and your controller flips a switch and everything stops...
It would be too hard to trust anyone with that kind of control, and it's unworkable to have only one person able to do it if you want it to be available 24/7/365-and-a-quarter. My boss is unavailable 60 to 75% of the time during business hours! Not because he's lazy, but because he's juggling two phones and a radio at all times.
If our fleet had such a system, and our paychecks fail to clear again tomorrow, I'd be very tempted to push that killswitch...
I feel compelled to point out that News Corp. is selling/have sold the Dodgers, and is actively looking to sell their large interests in other teams. They finally realized there are only three ways to profit in professional sports any more:
1. Spend a ton, buy championships at least some of the time, hope you make a shitload of money. (Yankees.) Sometimes you pay millions for personnel that could as easily be replaced by a cardboard cutout. 2. Spend very little, be good enough to keep a fan base, hope you make a smaller shitload of money. (Oakland A's.) Unfortunately this also means your young talent runs off for greener pastures at the first opportunity. 3. Extort cities into giving you stadiums and tax breaks and pocket all you can. (Too many to count.) Don't pay for anything you aren't legally obligated to pay for. Collect that revenue sharing money.
Surprisingly, News Corp. hasn't done nearly as much of option #3 as you'd expect.
> The more laws we pass, the heavier the book becomes and the more brain damage it will do.
This might do something to virus coders, but I don't think severe brain damage would do much to slow down the average spammer. It might even help them type so badly as to get past your filters (once).
I didn't even bring up this point, but I don't think any money should change hands on a unilateral declaration. A 5 cent fine may be minimal, but it is still a fine, and I for one sure won't enter into a contract that says that anyone I try to contact can fine me for the attempt. It's not about spam... it's about due process. Any system that lacks accountability on the part of the complainant, and profit for the same, will be abused. Some people will pick pockets one nickel at a time, just because they can. Since half of everything really IS spam, how are you going to determine who the abusers are without reading their mail?
Are we going to need a "spam court" to hear disputes? Charge someone a nickel and they can ask for a hearing. You lose, and you owe them a nickel, plus $50 in court fees. If this sounds a little excellive, I agree. But where else are you going to take your case? How are you going to prove that the mail you submitted to the court is the same one the defendant sent you? Not so hard with webmail I suppose, but with messages stored locally, how do you verify the mail was not tampered with? Can this be done cheaply enough to keep the system from imploding?
The problem would be opportunists willing to exploit the new system. For example, one could bolster their balance by posting to alt.test, then reporting every response as spam... or sign up for a mailing list and do the same. Or attempt to send mail to nonexistent users just to collect the bounce messages and report them as spam.
The problem is that one can easily attract legitimate but spam-like e-mail to any account at any time. How do you propose to limit this? I, for one, must regard this proposal as unworkable unless and until this issue can be resolved.
There's nothing bad about telling someone how to load a gun.
First, for the knowledge to do them any good, they must possess the gun in question, or one similar enough that the same directions apply. Instructions on loading a.22 rifle with a bolt action are meaningless if you've got a.38 Special revolver.
Second, there's nothing bad about loading a gun. It's kinda necessary if you intend to fire it, unless you hire a lackey to load it for you. I could have used such instruction with the.22 rifle I used last; I was loading single shots, unaware that it holds ten if only you know where to put them. Then I would shoot pieces of metal the size of dinner plates with about 80% accuracy at 200 yards. Not exactly Olympic material, but my shots go where I want them to.
Finally, knowledge of how to use firearms can be used for good (shooting the prairie dogs eating your crops) or ill (robbing the liquor store). This is not the responsibility of the person giving instruction in firearms handling, any more than it is the responsibility of the manufacturer of the firearm. This knowledge can also keep you alive, and as proof I submit the case of the hunter that shot himself trying to load his muzzle-loading rifle. Apparently he was a bit too rough with it, the powder flashed, and he shot himself. Whether the shot itself was lethal, or he just bled out because he was alone, I don't know.
If you're going to have a gun, it is in everyone's best interests (including yours) if you know how to make it do what you ask. This takes practice. You also need to know how to field-strip and clean your gun if you expect reliable service. It's a tool, and anyone whose vocation or avocation depends on that tool must know how to keep it in good working order.
Besides, sitting at the kitchen table with all curtians open, calmly disassembling, cleaning, and reassembling your gun is a nice disincentive to anyone casing your house.
Right now gas prices here in L.A. hover at the $1.89 mark for 87 octane. This is DOWN 20 cents from a month or so ago.
What sucks here isn't the environment. Smog alerts are quite rare now, in both an absolute sense (I can't even remember when we last had one) and a relative sense (they happened once or twice a week 20 years ago).
What sucks is the traffic, especially its unpredictability. A drive that takes 30 minutes one day may take three times that the next day at the same time. This means you can either accept that you may arrive late, or leave early "just in case" and generally arrive way ahead of schedule. Bring a book.
Also, specific places have hideous traffic problems. Just try going to Universal Citywalk the same night as a big show at the Amphitheatre. If you can get from the gate to your parking spot in less than 30 minutes, you're incredibly lucky. Taking the Lankershim entrance helps immensely, as most people crowd the front entrance, but you can still expect to wait about half as long at the back gate.
Living in L.A. really doesn't suck. There are certain parts you probably don't want to live in, but that's true of any large city. If you manage to live and work within 15 or 20 miles of each other, the commutes don't suck that bad either. The unpredictable commute times also become a LOT more stable as the distance decreases and as you learn alternate routes. It is quite possible to learn to live with L.A. traffic on a daily basis.
That said, I still welcome a day we can all roll out large solar mats on our roofs and awnings. It won't do a damn thing about the traffic, but it will decrease the summer brownouts at least.
Michael Jordan has announced that he is unretiring yet again, in a bid to be the only man to play in the NBA in 20 different decades. However, the record is shrouded in controversy, as some argue it is not Jordan himself, but his clone, who has played in the last twelve unretirements.
> When great-grandparents are still physically vigorous, is a descendant who only shares 1/8 genetic material "removed" enough for this to be okay?
Humanity should have the human genome figured out to the point where this question could be answered on a case-by-case basis, before this gets to be an issue. The very research that produces the immortality will probably also solve this line-breeding problem. In fact it might be preferred in those whose positive genetic traits are so strong that they justify the risk of lethal or crippling gene pairs. (Either that or take the failures out back and shoot 'em.)
The first book that comes to my mind would be Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love", and in fact all of the "Future History" books. There, the naturally (though selectively bred) long-lived were forced off the planet as the rest of the world changed the rules to suit their own interests, and ultimately came after the Methuselahs with a "final solution" plan in mind. Hence the Diaspora, which caused the galaxy and beyond to be populated only by naturally long-lived people. Meanwhile, earth itself was left to degenerate, just as it would have had the Methuselahs stayed.
If you've got $1m in usable assets, why would you WANT to carry any significant amount of debt, unless you think your investment returns will beat interest? It seems to me that you'd want to pay for a house directly, rather than at any variable (and therefore unpredictable) rate... of course if you can get the money at 5% because they KNOW you will pay it back, maybe you CAN get more than 5% return on it.
At the very least, you wouldn't be carrying any high-interest debt because it would be so obviously advantageous to just pay them off. Why RENT money when you already OWN it?
If I had a million dollars, I'd set up a business that would not require me to run it after it gets going. That way it doesn't MATTER if I get tired of it, I can just hire someone to take care of it for me, and still get my cut. (Of course, this only works if the business is doing reasonably well.) Just look at all the companies that have outlived their founders, and you'll have plenty of evidence that says a company can survive after its owner doesn't care any more.
Actually some of the best work is done by people who work at one specialty until they solve some problem they're obsessed with, then immediately go on to a new field because they are "burned out" from the intensity of attacking a very narrow field for several years.
After three or four of these field changes, it is not unusual for a person to become truly interdisciplinary, acquiring not just the knowledge but also the skills and thinking methods of each of those disciplines. This can (and does) lead to some interesting cross-fertilization. Imagine the innovation someone could profit from if they had 25 years experience EACH in programming, sculpture, applied medicine, and biology. Think of the FPS that would result!
There comes a point in any field where you aren't learning at the prodigious rate you did at the start, simply because (1) you run out of known things to learn, and (2) acquiring truly NEW knowledge takes a long time (and usually a lot of money).
Sell stuff. Real, physical stuff like shirts, coffee mugs, and books. Books have to be printed and are therefore a risk, but the shirts and mugs can be made to order by various outfits. No inventory to worry about.
This is why, until fairly recently, currency was based on something scarce with intrinsic value, such as gold, silver, or copper. You didn't have to trust, the money itself had value without any government backing. It was just a standardization of the barter system.
Fiat currency didn't come about until considerably later (thousands of years), and in some places it has been a complete disaster (think Argentina) while in others it has been reasonably solid. Still, I wouldn't mind a return to Silver Certificates instead of paper money with no intrinsic value.
First off, it's called "sandpaper" here too. Polishing wood is usually done with a towel and hand lotion.:)
My keyboard is technically enabled with Windows and Right-click keys, but if you press them you'll note that they don't do anything. It's quite trivial to paint some nail palish over the contacts inside if that is the desired effect.
Opening the keyboard is non-trivial? What, you don't do that every year or two for cleaning anyhow? I always find it's time to clean the keyboard when one of these events happens:
1. The key dirt rubs off on your fingers, rather than the other way around 2. Insects begin to attack. 3. A key (or more likely, several keys in a cluster) get sticky due to spilled soda/beer/coffee/other.:) 4. You can't read the keycaps through the grime, even though they haven't worn off a bit. 5. You can SMELL the keyboard.
A simple pop-and-clean operation on each key may be in order, or the less effective but much faster Q-tip with alcohol. But for serious like-new cleaning, there is no substitute for ripping the whole thing completely apart. At THIS point, putting nail polish over undesired contacts is trivial.
It was even an infrared wireless, which I thought at the time would be very cool. The fact of the matter is that IR wireless mice suck big mouse balls (it wasn't optical), having significant range and line-of-sight issues.
Ultimately I got rid of this expensive paperweight for the reasons above, but I was very happy with the two scroll wheels. I had a choice between two models -- one where the side-to-side wheel was mounted horizontally below the vertical wheel (which is what I chose), and one which just had two vertically-mounted scroll wheels, the left one slightly above the right one so that they were on a diagonal. On either setup, you could change which wheel did which function.
Neither wheel was clickable, which I suppose is a shortcoming we'd notice today, but that didn't bother me at all at the time.
Just alter the back of some old SLR to house the CCD instead of the film plane backing, and get shutter timing from the winder attachment contacts. (It also seems trivial to just have it "know" when things aren't black.) One back could fit a bunch of similar models (the Canon AE-1, AE-1 Program, and A-1 come to mind, their rear doors are identical). Ideally the CCD would match the 24x36mm dimensions of 35mm film, but they don't in many all-digital SLRs. This is only really an issue if you shoot at extremely wide angles (24 mm) anyhow.
Keep the storage and battery in a "winder attachment" screwed to the bottom of the camera.
This would be quite a product for those of us with old SLRs and thousands of dollars in lenses. It also would allow a relatively simple conversion back to film (just put the original door back on and take off the storage unit) for those with just one camera body.
I guess I want something like this: http://focuscamera.com/cameras/Canon_EOS_1D S.html ported over to old, mechanical camera bodies... and cheaper than $7999. Much cheaper.
That's where the power amps are in my car and it seems to works fine. I didn't choose them, or their locations, but if a 100W amp can remain adequately cooled under a car seat, surely a 10W C3 can be accommodated as well. This would greatly shorten the necessary cabling, which is much more complex than that needed for stereos (which mostly just need fat cables if they get long). 3 meter cables (if you even need that) are much less expensive than 10 meter cables, because of the greatly reduced demands for shielding and power dissipation.
The vast majority of my W2K crashes (hard lock or BSOD) come right after a warm reboot. Most of these reboots are because I installed something or changed a driver, because the system is stable once it gets past those first few minutes where it may or may not keel over. If I do a full power-off and restart, I don't have this problem.
I know this just HAS to be hardware, but I'm at a loss for what hardware that might be. I'd be a lot less concerned about it if Windows didn't demand a reboot for every patch, driver change, and installation.
The only thing I think is software is that Encore 4.5 now likes to bomb out since I installed SP4. I think I'm going to use this as motivation to move over to something else (Finale and/or Sibelius most likely), 4.5 was and is a kludge to fix the kludges in 4.2 that stopped working when the NT kernel was forced on everyone. (Mind you, I think going to a single kernel was a wise and necessary move on MS's part. It just broke several of my old apps.)
W98 crashed on me all the time, and was NEVER stable for more than 72 hours. Ever. But 2K I generally only reboot because it makes me or I have to change hardware. I'd like to see "you must now restart Windows for these changes to take effect" disappear sooner than OS crashes themselves, it affects me far more than OS crashes. If not for forced reboots, I'd be going months between them. Apps die. Occasionally they remain broken until I reboot (can't be reloaded). Sometimes hardware will disappear (the CD-RW in particular) and not reappear until the next reboot. At least I can choose the time and manner of shutdown and restart.
Then again, as others have noted, not using IE helps. Mozilla dies, but it doesn't take the system with it.
Slashdot Mirror
Vega Las Vegas.
'nuff said.
Mal-2
The fundamental fallacy to this argument is that there is enough money to be made to cover ANYONE's costs, until the crowd thins significantly. By then, only the deep-pocketed will survive, not necessarily the most worthy. Those companies may or may not actively interfere with outside software, but you sure can't expect them to be helpful.
Mal-2
Do I really need to say anything more?
Mal-2
Personally, if I owned a trucking company (I don't, just work for one), I wouldn't want it to be easy for someone to shut down all the trucks on the road. Bounce a paycheck, and your controller flips a switch and everything stops...
It would be too hard to trust anyone with that kind of control, and it's unworkable to have only one person able to do it if you want it to be available 24/7/365-and-a-quarter. My boss is unavailable 60 to 75% of the time during business hours! Not because he's lazy, but because he's juggling two phones and a radio at all times.
If our fleet had such a system, and our paychecks fail to clear again tomorrow, I'd be very tempted to push that killswitch...
Mal-2
I feel compelled to point out that News Corp. is selling/have sold the Dodgers, and is actively looking to sell their large interests in other teams. They finally realized there are only three ways to profit in professional sports any more:
1. Spend a ton, buy championships at least some of the time, hope you make a shitload of money. (Yankees.) Sometimes you pay millions for personnel that could as easily be replaced by a cardboard cutout.
2. Spend very little, be good enough to keep a fan base, hope you make a smaller shitload of money. (Oakland A's.) Unfortunately this also means your young talent runs off for greener pastures at the first opportunity.
3. Extort cities into giving you stadiums and tax breaks and pocket all you can. (Too many to count.) Don't pay for anything you aren't legally obligated to pay for. Collect that revenue sharing money.
Surprisingly, News Corp. hasn't done nearly as much of option #3 as you'd expect.
Mal-2
> The more laws we pass, the heavier the book becomes and the more brain damage it will do.
This might do something to virus coders, but I don't think severe brain damage would do much to slow down the average spammer. It might even help them type so badly as to get past your filters (once).
Mal-2
I didn't even bring up this point, but I don't think any money should change hands on a unilateral declaration. A 5 cent fine may be minimal, but it is still a fine, and I for one sure won't enter into a contract that says that anyone I try to contact can fine me for the attempt. It's not about spam... it's about due process. Any system that lacks accountability on the part of the complainant, and profit for the same, will be abused. Some people will pick pockets one nickel at a time, just because they can. Since half of everything really IS spam, how are you going to determine who the abusers are without reading their mail?
Are we going to need a "spam court" to hear disputes? Charge someone a nickel and they can ask for a hearing. You lose, and you owe them a nickel, plus $50 in court fees. If this sounds a little excellive, I agree. But where else are you going to take your case? How are you going to prove that the mail you submitted to the court is the same one the defendant sent you? Not so hard with webmail I suppose, but with messages stored locally, how do you verify the mail was not tampered with? Can this be done cheaply enough to keep the system from imploding?
Mal-2
The problem would be opportunists willing to exploit the new system. For example, one could bolster their balance by posting to alt.test, then reporting every response as spam... or sign up for a mailing list and do the same. Or attempt to send mail to nonexistent users just to collect the bounce messages and report them as spam.
The problem is that one can easily attract legitimate but spam-like e-mail to any account at any time. How do you propose to limit this? I, for one, must regard this proposal as unworkable unless and until this issue can be resolved.
Mal-2
This is all well and good, but will it be able to make a decent glass of tea?
Mal-2
There's nothing bad about telling someone how to load a gun.
.22 rifle with a bolt action are meaningless if you've got a .38 Special revolver.
.22 rifle I used last; I was loading single shots, unaware that it holds ten if only you know where to put them. Then I would shoot pieces of metal the size of dinner plates with about 80% accuracy at 200 yards. Not exactly Olympic material, but my shots go where I want them to.
First, for the knowledge to do them any good, they must possess the gun in question, or one similar enough that the same directions apply. Instructions on loading a
Second, there's nothing bad about loading a gun. It's kinda necessary if you intend to fire it, unless you hire a lackey to load it for you. I could have used such instruction with the
Finally, knowledge of how to use firearms can be used for good (shooting the prairie dogs eating your crops) or ill (robbing the liquor store). This is not the responsibility of the person giving instruction in firearms handling, any more than it is the responsibility of the manufacturer of the firearm. This knowledge can also keep you alive, and as proof I submit the case of the hunter that shot himself trying to load his muzzle-loading rifle. Apparently he was a bit too rough with it, the powder flashed, and he shot himself. Whether the shot itself was lethal, or he just bled out because he was alone, I don't know.
If you're going to have a gun, it is in everyone's best interests (including yours) if you know how to make it do what you ask. This takes practice. You also need to know how to field-strip and clean your gun if you expect reliable service. It's a tool, and anyone whose vocation or avocation depends on that tool must know how to keep it in good working order.
Besides, sitting at the kitchen table with all curtians open, calmly disassembling, cleaning, and reassembling your gun is a nice disincentive to anyone casing your house.
Mal-2
Right now gas prices here in L.A. hover at the $1.89 mark for 87 octane. This is DOWN 20 cents from a month or so ago.
What sucks here isn't the environment. Smog alerts are quite rare now, in both an absolute sense (I can't even remember when we last had one) and a relative sense (they happened once or twice a week 20 years ago).
What sucks is the traffic, especially its unpredictability. A drive that takes 30 minutes one day may take three times that the next day at the same time. This means you can either accept that you may arrive late, or leave early "just in case" and generally arrive way ahead of schedule. Bring a book.
Also, specific places have hideous traffic problems. Just try going to Universal Citywalk the same night as a big show at the Amphitheatre. If you can get from the gate to your parking spot in less than 30 minutes, you're incredibly lucky. Taking the Lankershim entrance helps immensely, as most people crowd the front entrance, but you can still expect to wait about half as long at the back gate.
Living in L.A. really doesn't suck. There are certain parts you probably don't want to live in, but that's true of any large city. If you manage to live and work within 15 or 20 miles of each other, the commutes don't suck that bad either. The unpredictable commute times also become a LOT more stable as the distance decreases and as you learn alternate routes. It is quite possible to learn to live with L.A. traffic on a daily basis.
That said, I still welcome a day we can all roll out large solar mats on our roofs and awnings. It won't do a damn thing about the traffic, but it will decrease the summer brownouts at least.
Mal-2
Michael Jordan has announced that he is unretiring yet again, in a bid to be the only man to play in the NBA in 20 different decades. However, the record is shrouded in controversy, as some argue it is not Jordan himself, but his clone, who has played in the last twelve unretirements.
> When great-grandparents are still physically vigorous, is a descendant who only shares 1/8 genetic material "removed" enough for this to be okay?
Humanity should have the human genome figured out to the point where this question could be answered on a case-by-case basis, before this gets to be an issue. The very research that produces the immortality will probably also solve this line-breeding problem. In fact it might be preferred in those whose positive genetic traits are so strong that they justify the risk of lethal or crippling gene pairs. (Either that or take the failures out back and shoot 'em.)
Mal-2
The first book that comes to my mind would be Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love", and in fact all of the "Future History" books. There, the naturally (though selectively bred) long-lived were forced off the planet as the rest of the world changed the rules to suit their own interests, and ultimately came after the Methuselahs with a "final solution" plan in mind. Hence the Diaspora, which caused the galaxy and beyond to be populated only by naturally long-lived people. Meanwhile, earth itself was left to degenerate, just as it would have had the Methuselahs stayed.
Mal-2
If you've got $1m in usable assets, why would you WANT to carry any significant amount of debt, unless you think your investment returns will beat interest? It seems to me that you'd want to pay for a house directly, rather than at any variable (and therefore unpredictable) rate... of course if you can get the money at 5% because they KNOW you will pay it back, maybe you CAN get more than 5% return on it.
At the very least, you wouldn't be carrying any high-interest debt because it would be so obviously advantageous to just pay them off. Why RENT money when you already OWN it?
If I had a million dollars, I'd set up a business that would not require me to run it after it gets going. That way it doesn't MATTER if I get tired of it, I can just hire someone to take care of it for me, and still get my cut. (Of course, this only works if the business is doing reasonably well.) Just look at all the companies that have outlived their founders, and you'll have plenty of evidence that says a company can survive after its owner doesn't care any more.
Mal-2
Actually some of the best work is done by people who work at one specialty until they solve some problem they're obsessed with, then immediately go on to a new field because they are "burned out" from the intensity of attacking a very narrow field for several years.
After three or four of these field changes, it is not unusual for a person to become truly interdisciplinary, acquiring not just the knowledge but also the skills and thinking methods of each of those disciplines. This can (and does) lead to some interesting cross-fertilization. Imagine the innovation someone could profit from if they had 25 years experience EACH in programming, sculpture, applied medicine, and biology. Think of the FPS that would result!
There comes a point in any field where you aren't learning at the prodigious rate you did at the start, simply because (1) you run out of known things to learn, and (2) acquiring truly NEW knowledge takes a long time (and usually a lot of money).
Mal-2
Sell stuff. Real, physical stuff like shirts, coffee mugs, and books. Books have to be printed and are therefore a risk, but the shirts and mugs can be made to order by various outfits. No inventory to worry about.
This is why, until fairly recently, currency was based on something scarce with intrinsic value, such as gold, silver, or copper. You didn't have to trust, the money itself had value without any government backing. It was just a standardization of the barter system.
Fiat currency didn't come about until considerably later (thousands of years), and in some places it has been a complete disaster (think Argentina) while in others it has been reasonably solid. Still, I wouldn't mind a return to Silver Certificates instead of paper money with no intrinsic value.
This is why the ideal place to put a side-scroll wheel is under the user's THUMB.
First off, it's called "sandpaper" here too. Polishing wood is usually done with a towel and hand lotion. :)
:)
My keyboard is technically enabled with Windows and Right-click keys, but if you press them you'll note that they don't do anything. It's quite trivial to paint some nail palish over the contacts inside if that is the desired effect.
Opening the keyboard is non-trivial? What, you don't do that every year or two for cleaning anyhow? I always find it's time to clean the keyboard when one of these events happens:
1. The key dirt rubs off on your fingers, rather than the other way around
2. Insects begin to attack.
3. A key (or more likely, several keys in a cluster) get sticky due to spilled soda/beer/coffee/other.
4. You can't read the keycaps through the grime, even though they haven't worn off a bit.
5. You can SMELL the keyboard.
A simple pop-and-clean operation on each key may be in order, or the less effective but much faster Q-tip with alcohol. But for serious like-new cleaning, there is no substitute for ripping the whole thing completely apart. At THIS point, putting nail polish over undesired contacts is trivial.
It was even an infrared wireless, which I thought at the time would be very cool. The fact of the matter is that IR wireless mice suck big mouse balls (it wasn't optical), having significant range and line-of-sight issues.
Ultimately I got rid of this expensive paperweight for the reasons above, but I was very happy with the two scroll wheels. I had a choice between two models -- one where the side-to-side wheel was mounted horizontally below the vertical wheel (which is what I chose), and one which just had two vertically-mounted scroll wheels, the left one slightly above the right one so that they were on a diagonal. On either setup, you could change which wheel did which function.
Neither wheel was clickable, which I suppose is a shortcoming we'd notice today, but that didn't bother me at all at the time.
Just alter the back of some old SLR to house the CCD instead of the film plane backing, and get shutter timing from the winder attachment contacts. (It also seems trivial to just have it "know" when things aren't black.) One back could fit a bunch of similar models (the Canon AE-1, AE-1 Program, and A-1 come to mind, their rear doors are identical). Ideally the CCD would match the 24x36mm dimensions of 35mm film, but they don't in many all-digital SLRs. This is only really an issue if you shoot at extremely wide angles (24 mm) anyhow.
D S.html
Keep the storage and battery in a "winder attachment" screwed to the bottom of the camera.
This would be quite a product for those of us with old SLRs and thousands of dollars in lenses. It also would allow a relatively simple conversion back to film (just put the original door back on and take off the storage unit) for those with just one camera body.
I guess I want something like this:
http://focuscamera.com/cameras/Canon_EOS_1
ported over to old, mechanical camera bodies... and cheaper than $7999. Much cheaper.
Mal-2
Yes, this shot is known widely as the "Cosmic Finger of Friendship".
That's where the power amps are in my car and it seems to works fine. I didn't choose them, or their locations, but if a 100W amp can remain adequately cooled under a car seat, surely a 10W C3 can be accommodated as well. This would greatly shorten the necessary cabling, which is much more complex than that needed for stereos (which mostly just need fat cables if they get long). 3 meter cables (if you even need that) are much less expensive than 10 meter cables, because of the greatly reduced demands for shielding and power dissipation.
The vast majority of my W2K crashes (hard lock or BSOD) come right after a warm reboot. Most of these reboots are because I installed something or changed a driver, because the system is stable once it gets past those first few minutes where it may or may not keel over. If I do a full power-off and restart, I don't have this problem.
I know this just HAS to be hardware, but I'm at a loss for what hardware that might be. I'd be a lot less concerned about it if Windows didn't demand a reboot for every patch, driver change, and installation.
The only thing I think is software is that Encore 4.5 now likes to bomb out since I installed SP4. I think I'm going to use this as motivation to move over to something else (Finale and/or Sibelius most likely), 4.5 was and is a kludge to fix the kludges in 4.2 that stopped working when the NT kernel was forced on everyone. (Mind you, I think going to a single kernel was a wise and necessary move on MS's part. It just broke several of my old apps.)
W98 crashed on me all the time, and was NEVER stable for more than 72 hours. Ever. But 2K I generally only reboot because it makes me or I have to change hardware. I'd like to see "you must now restart Windows for these changes to take effect" disappear sooner than OS crashes themselves, it affects me far more than OS crashes. If not for forced reboots, I'd be going months between them. Apps die. Occasionally they remain broken until I reboot (can't be reloaded). Sometimes hardware will disappear (the CD-RW in particular) and not reappear until the next reboot. At least I can choose the time and manner of shutdown and restart.
Then again, as others have noted, not using IE helps. Mozilla dies, but it doesn't take the system with it.