This smells a little fishy to me. I'd think that if Adobe had a problem with this group, they wouldn't be asking for a paulty sum like 2500 euros, they'd be saying "Cease and Desist".
I'd be for double-checking the source of the demand: I smell a con artist here.
First, was the final "Yep, this is a duplicate story - naughty Tim!" in the original posting of this story, or was it added later? If it was in the original posting (in other words, if Timothy knew he was posting a dup), then I think it's time somebody talk to him about potential abuse of his editor status at Slashdot: There's having an adgenda, and then there's going too far.
Second, I am reminded of the "Stainless Steel Rat" stories by Harry Harrison. In them, the main character, "Slippery" Jim DiGriz, a master criminal, always perpetrates his crimes wearing a disguise. The disguise is always the same, and is designed not to look like a disguise - the police are intended to believe that Jim DiGriz is a middle-aged, balding, slightly overweight cigarette smoker, when the real DiGriz is a young, trim, cigar smoker with a full head of hair. DiGriz never commits any crimes without his costume, so he can walk about safe from the cameras and checkpoints.
I wonder if it's not time to start doing this: have one personna (e-mail, face, and ID) for one life, and one for another. Of course, it is far more difficult to set up a second ID that will stand up to real scrutiny than most people believe (right, Miss Bush?)
Does he use an floor-mount automatic transmission handle (a.k.a. PRNDL) for his throttle? A car's ignition key to start the rockets? Some old tires for landing gear?
I saw this show when I was a kid. Nothing new here....
I did read the article, and that's why I'm making this point - the article said nothing about the materials the kite was make from. It's one thing to lift 3.5 tons with a kite that weighs in at a quarter ton. Now, if the kite weighs 2.5 tons but has the same lift area, how much rock can you lift?
Also, I'm sure this kite was designed with modern areospace engineering knowledge. Given what the Egyptians knew at the time, could they have made an equivilent kite?
Lastly, even if she makes a kite out of materals known to the Egyptians, with a design known to be available to the Egyptians, that does not prove that it would have occurred to the Egyptians to make such a kite and use it in such a way.
There is a goodly body of archeological evidence supporting the "ramps and ropes" method. There is no evidence of a kite.
With respect to the Japanese: they made their kites out of silk, a very strong and light material. Did the Egyptians have access to the quantitites of silk needed to make a kite like this?
WHat did she make her kites out of? Probably, ripstop nylon or some other modern, lightweight, strong fabric.
Now, if she can make her kites out of materials the ancient Egyptians had, using techniques they had, and perform the same feat, then I'll be impressed. Not before.
No, this was not the nail in the coffin of the arcade. The nail in the coffin was all the games that took $1 or more to play, and were designed to keep sucking quarters out of your pocket, no matter how good you were. Check out today's User Friendly for a very good take on this.
Back in the day, you could play any arcade game for hours on one quarter if you were good enough. Now, no matter how good you are, you will play for 5 minutes, tops. Now, why would I go to an arcade again?
As far as I can see from the article, the primary intent of this is for providers of free e-mail services - they get to make money by advertising to their users.
I am sure that the general reaction here will be one of horror and anger, let us remember that the users of these systems choose to use them and that you get what you pay for. If you are too cheap/broke to pay for a real e-mail account, you have to suffer the consequences of your choice.
However, I think this sort of thing will tank just as all previous advertiser supported systems have. People who want to receive e-mail will get a real account, and the people who are too cheap to do so are a really lousy marketing demographic.
My name (well, my surname) is on Mars. It's also beyond the orbit of Pluto (and Neptune).
My brother worked for NASA (JPL, actually), and his name is on the Voyager spacecraft and the Viking spacecraft.
I remember when Viking landed. I was getting pictures from the mission (still have them - NASA uses GOOD photographic print paper). I even loaned my collection to a local science museum for a while. It was something special to get those pictures back then. Now, anybody with a color printer and a 'Net connection can get them. And this is NOT a bad thing.
It's a crying shame we've allowed NASA to come to this state.
I used x,y,z,t because most people would understand it when it is put that way. However, if you do the math, you can express the solution to a 4 sat problem in terms of x,y,z,t just as well as in terms of polar coords, times of flight, etc. It's just easier in terms of polar coords.
Everybody assumed the connection would be wireless because that's what the article said.
Remember 2 things about aircraft:
1) every kilo is precious. Adding ethernet wireing to every seat is going to add hundreds of kilos to the weight of the aircraft.
2) Aircraft are old, and retofitting them expensive. It's a lot easier to set up a wireless LAN than to go back and rewire the seats.
Not to mention the danger of tripping over the network cables in case of an unplanned rapid aircraft egress due to unforseen circumstances, the fact that only a small fraction of the passengers will want network access at any given time, and the electrical risk if the systems are connected to the plane (can you say FAA regs? I though you could).
Your GPS doesn't altitude from pressure. The reason your altitude was wrong was that you didn't have a good 3D sat. fix.
To get a 3D fix, you need at least 4 sats. (think of it as an algebra problem: you have 4 unknowns (x,y,z, and time) so you need 4 equations (4 birds) to solve for it. If the GPS receiver only gets 3 birds, it fakes it by assuming you are on the Earth's surface, and using that as the 4th equation.
Since you were in a big metal can with only a small hole next to you, you probably only got 3 birds.
However, you were in violation of airline regs using a GPS receiver on an aircraft (unless you had permission from the captain). You just didn't get caught.
The problem is that almost all modern radio receivers, be they GPS, cell phone, or cheap transistor radio watch, are a superheterodyne design: the incoming signal is mixed with a second signal to create a third signal at a fixed frequency. That second signal, called the local oscillator or LO, radiates from the receiver and can interfere with other signals. That's how the police "radar detector detectors" work: they listen for the LO of your radar detector.
You can demonstrate this by taking 2 old AM radios, and placing them next to one another. Tune one radio to 600 kHz, then tune the other to about 1055 kHz. Move the tuning around, and you should hear the first radio start to squawk. That's the second radio's LO being received by the first radio.
First, I greatly oversimplified in my analogy of the mirror - the actual effect of a shield in this case is much more difficult to predict, since the proximity of the shield to the antenna is less than a wavelength of the signal in question. The actual radiation pattern is quite a bit more complex.
Second, the point I was trying to make was that a) you wouldn't be reducing the amount of RF, in the case that the cell site is on the same side of the antenna as your head, and b) now you have the phone making more power, so the schmuck next to you gets cooked a bit more (actually, I'm more concerned about the effects of the phone on other systems around it - listen to children's band channel #19 for a good example of what happens when everybody turns their power up.)(
Third, you assume far too much when you state that poor reception will cause the user to turn. In my experience, poor reception will cause the user to yell more loudly into the phone, on the mistaken assumtion that yelling will somehow improve the situation.
All this is doing is changing the radiation pattern coming out of the phone. Not only will this likely do little to stop any RF heating caused by the phone, it could very well be counter-productive.
Imagine a lamp, minus shade, in an otherwise empty room. The light from the bulb lights the room pretty evenly (save for right under the lamp). This is what is known as an isotropic radiator. It radiates the same amount of light in all directions. An antenna like this is called a 0 dBi (0 decibel isotropic) antenna. It has no "gain".
Now, imagine that you put a mirror on one side of the lamp. Now, one side of the room is dark, and one side is getting twice as much light. This is NOT an isotropic radiator. On the side of the room that is getting twice as much light, you have 3 dBi gain (3 dB is double, and again this is related to an isotropic radiator. dB are ALWAYS a relative measurement.) This is what these alleged "brain shields" are doing.
The problem: what if the cell site is on the dark side of the room? The cell site will tell the phone to increase its output power - in effect, the site is saying "It's dark over here, turn the lamp up!". Now, you have a brighter lamp, so more power available to do "bad things", but your call still sounds like crap.
If you are worried about this sort of thing, don't use a hand-held phone: use a car phone, with the antenna properly mounted on the roof. You will be in the RF shadow (you will be "under the lamp"), and you will still be able to make calls (please, just don't do so while driving.)
Now, this all is largely BS, as modern phones, at maximum power, only put out 100 mW of power - shine a good flashlight on your head and you are getting more radiation, at a higher energy per photon, than your cell phone. We won't even talk about going out under that big fusion reactor in the sky....
Do you go skiing? Do you go into natural caves? Do you fly on planes? Do you live in a brick house? Do you have a basement? Then you are placing yourself at more risk of radiation damage than using your phone.
Plot #1: Fearing for the safety of the universe, the Celestial Intervention Agency sends the Doctor back in time to destroy a menace that threatens to take over the universe. The Doctor refuses to do so, however, citing that "... out of evil, something good must come. Without Bill Gates, Linus would have had no hardware to program for..."
Plot #2: The universe keeps looping back and repeating itself. The Doctor attempts to put this right by adding a search of old stories to the/. back-end "Post Story" function.
Plot #3: A new and more wonderful Doctor replaces the old one. However, many fans are heard to say, "I'm waiting until Doctor 2.5.0...."
Plot #4: The TARDIS crashes, and the Doctor must wait 200 years for it to fsck itself. "I really must move the old girl over to XFS...."
WAV is a rip-off of the IFF format started on the Amiga (only difference is that IFF words are in big-endian order, RIFF a.k.a. WAV words are in little-endian order).
Microsoft didn't come up with XML, they just adopted it.
Normally, I don't respond to ACs, but this was just too much.
Near where I used to live, there was a company that made small buildings. Being as how this was in Wichita, KS, which at the time was home to the corporate headquarters of Pizza Hut, Inc., one of the buildings this small company had build was a small Pizza Hut restaurant intended for use as a temporary site (e.g. for servicing an event like Woodstock).
The building was a prototype, and thus sat on the lot of the company for some time. My friends and I always referred to it as P.H.E.D - Pizza Hut, Emergency Deployable.
Considering that the fast food chains have the art of setting up a building like this down to a science - a friend of mine went to work one day past an empty lot, and that evening the lot contained a nearly fully complete Pizza Hut - I wouldn't be too surprised to see the Big Boys using an idea like this.
Kinda like in Unreal Tournement - You get on the radio and call for a drop, they tell you to get clear, WHUMPH! There's a new Pizza Hut.
Or worse yet, McDonalds (shudder...)
Re:White LEDs have gotten much better lately
on
LED Flashlights
·
· Score: 2
Fluorescence always red-shifts things
Not quite true: there are some modes of fluorescence that involve the adsorption of two photons to yield one higher-energy photon. I have a card in my wallet that adsorbs visible light and IR to give off an orange glow. It's used to detect the output from IR LEDs in things like "electric eye" beams and remote control. It's a lot handier than getting my Starlight gear out.
Just use an LED flasher chip: they will act as a charge pump, allowing higher voltage to the LED from a lower-voltage battery. If you set the flash rate to a couple of kilohertz you won't notice the flashing in normal use (although it makes a cool effect if you move the light around: lots of little spots of light), and the flasher chip plus LED will burn WAY less power than a PIC.
You can even adjust the duty cycle to vary the brightness. Furthur, even DratShack carries LED flasher chips.
But if he was not a subscriber, then why did he use their service to set his unit's clock?
Furthurmore, you have totally missed the point of my post. Let me try again:
I go down to the local DratShack and buy a new phone. The PFY behind the counter tries to sell me a service plan.
Me: No, I do not wish a service plan. I just want a phone.
PFY: But without a service plan, you cannot place nor receive calls.
Me: I'm too cheap to pay for a service plan. I want to be able to call 911, for which the phone does not need to have a service plan. Furthurmore, when I go on trips, I will buy a cheap prepaid phone card so that I may place calls during my trip.
PFY: OK, but you might not be able to get firmware updates without a service plan.
Me: Over-the-air updates don't bother me. Sell me the damn phone!
PFY: OK, but this could bite you.
Now, other than the obvious fact that this account is fictional (the PFY knows far too much to be working at DratShack), this is exactly what this gentleman did: he tried to buy on the cheap, and the Tivo docs quite plainly tell you that without service, your Tivo's functionality is greatly reduced.
Just as an unregistered phone might stop working at any time, an unsubscribe Tivo might stop working at any time. If that is unacceptable to you, then either buy a subscription, don't buy the unit, or accept the consiquences of your actions.
Slashdot Mirror
This smells a little fishy to me. I'd think that if Adobe had a problem with this group, they wouldn't be asking for a paulty sum like 2500 euros, they'd be saying "Cease and Desist".
I'd be for double-checking the source of the demand: I smell a con artist here.
First, was the final "Yep, this is a duplicate story - naughty Tim!" in the original posting of this story, or was it added later? If it was in the original posting (in other words, if Timothy knew he was posting a dup), then I think it's time somebody talk to him about potential abuse of his editor status at Slashdot: There's having an adgenda, and then there's going too far.
Second, I am reminded of the "Stainless Steel Rat" stories by Harry Harrison. In them, the main character, "Slippery" Jim DiGriz, a master criminal, always perpetrates his crimes wearing a disguise. The disguise is always the same, and is designed not to look like a disguise - the police are intended to believe that Jim DiGriz is a middle-aged, balding, slightly overweight cigarette smoker, when the real DiGriz is a young, trim, cigar smoker with a full head of hair. DiGriz never commits any crimes without his costume, so he can walk about safe from the cameras and checkpoints.
I wonder if it's not time to start doing this: have one personna (e-mail, face, and ID) for one life, and one for another. Of course, it is far more difficult to set up a second ID that will stand up to real scrutiny than most people believe (right, Miss Bush?)
Does he use an floor-mount automatic transmission handle (a.k.a. PRNDL) for his throttle? A car's ignition key to start the rockets? Some old tires for landing gear?
I saw this show when I was a kid. Nothing new here....
http://epguides.com/Salvage1/
I did read the article, and that's why I'm making this point - the article said nothing about the materials the kite was make from. It's one thing to lift 3.5 tons with a kite that weighs in at a quarter ton. Now, if the kite weighs 2.5 tons but has the same lift area, how much rock can you lift?
Also, I'm sure this kite was designed with modern areospace engineering knowledge. Given what the Egyptians knew at the time, could they have made an equivilent kite?
Lastly, even if she makes a kite out of materals known to the Egyptians, with a design known to be available to the Egyptians, that does not prove that it would have occurred to the Egyptians to make such a kite and use it in such a way.
There is a goodly body of archeological evidence supporting the "ramps and ropes" method. There is no evidence of a kite.
With respect to the Japanese: they made their kites out of silk, a very strong and light material. Did the Egyptians have access to the quantitites of silk needed to make a kite like this?
WHat did she make her kites out of? Probably, ripstop nylon or some other modern, lightweight, strong fabric.
Now, if she can make her kites out of materials the ancient Egyptians had, using techniques they had, and perform the same feat, then I'll be impressed. Not before.
No, this was not the nail in the coffin of the arcade. The nail in the coffin was all the games that took $1 or more to play, and were designed to keep sucking quarters out of your pocket, no matter how good you were. Check out today's User Friendly for a very good take on this.
Back in the day, you could play any arcade game for hours on one quarter if you were good enough. Now, no matter how good you are, you will play for 5 minutes, tops. Now, why would I go to an arcade again?
As far as I can see from the article, the primary intent of this is for providers of free e-mail services - they get to make money by advertising to their users.
I am sure that the general reaction here will be one of horror and anger, let us remember that the users of these systems choose to use them and that you get what you pay for. If you are too cheap/broke to pay for a real e-mail account, you have to suffer the consequences of your choice.
However, I think this sort of thing will tank just as all previous advertiser supported systems have. People who want to receive e-mail will get a real account, and the people who are too cheap to do so are a really lousy marketing demographic.
I give it three years. Tops.
My name (well, my surname) is on Mars. It's also beyond the orbit of Pluto (and Neptune).
My brother worked for NASA (JPL, actually), and his name is on the Voyager spacecraft and the Viking spacecraft.
I remember when Viking landed. I was getting pictures from the mission (still have them - NASA uses GOOD photographic print paper). I even loaned my collection to a local science museum for a while. It was something special to get those pictures back then. Now, anybody with a color printer and a 'Net connection can get them. And this is NOT a bad thing.
It's a crying shame we've allowed NASA to come to this state.
But not by RackSpace. By VA.
http://cmdrtaco.net/hamster/
Have you wondered what you get if you sequence and play the protein thought to be responisble for Alzheimers?
Brittany Spears, NKOTB, and N'Sync.
The fascinating thing is that everything you've said also applies to /. and its comments.
I used x,y,z,t because most people would understand it when it is put that way. However, if you do the math, you can express the solution to a 4 sat problem in terms of x,y,z,t just as well as in terms of polar coords, times of flight, etc. It's just easier in terms of polar coords.
Everybody assumed the connection would be wireless because that's what the article said.
Remember 2 things about aircraft:
1) every kilo is precious. Adding ethernet wireing to every seat is going to add hundreds of kilos to the weight of the aircraft.
2) Aircraft are old, and retofitting them expensive. It's a lot easier to set up a wireless LAN than to go back and rewire the seats.
Not to mention the danger of tripping over the network cables in case of an unplanned rapid aircraft egress due to unforseen circumstances, the fact that only a small fraction of the passengers will want network access at any given time, and the electrical risk if the systems are connected to the plane (can you say FAA regs? I though you could).
Your GPS doesn't altitude from pressure. The reason your altitude was wrong was that you didn't have a good 3D sat. fix.
To get a 3D fix, you need at least 4 sats. (think of it as an algebra problem: you have 4 unknowns (x,y,z, and time) so you need 4 equations (4 birds) to solve for it. If the GPS receiver only gets 3 birds, it fakes it by assuming you are on the Earth's surface, and using that as the 4th equation.
Since you were in a big metal can with only a small hole next to you, you probably only got 3 birds.
However, you were in violation of airline regs using a GPS receiver on an aircraft (unless you had permission from the captain). You just didn't get caught.
The problem is that almost all modern radio receivers, be they GPS, cell phone, or cheap transistor radio watch, are a superheterodyne design: the incoming signal is mixed with a second signal to create a third signal at a fixed frequency. That second signal, called the local oscillator or LO, radiates from the receiver and can interfere with other signals. That's how the police "radar detector detectors" work: they listen for the LO of your radar detector.
You can demonstrate this by taking 2 old AM radios, and placing them next to one another. Tune one radio to 600 kHz, then tune the other to about 1055 kHz. Move the tuning around, and you should hear the first radio start to squawk. That's the second radio's LO being received by the first radio.
First, I greatly oversimplified in my analogy of the mirror - the actual effect of a shield in this case is much more difficult to predict, since the proximity of the shield to the antenna is less than a wavelength of the signal in question. The actual radiation pattern is quite a bit more complex.
Second, the point I was trying to make was that a) you wouldn't be reducing the amount of RF, in the case that the cell site is on the same side of the antenna as your head, and b) now you have the phone making more power, so the schmuck next to you gets cooked a bit more (actually, I'm more concerned about the effects of the phone on other systems around it - listen to children's band channel #19 for a good example of what happens when everybody turns their power up.)(
Third, you assume far too much when you state that poor reception will cause the user to turn. In my experience, poor reception will cause the user to yell more loudly into the phone, on the mistaken assumtion that yelling will somehow improve the situation.
All this is doing is changing the radiation pattern coming out of the phone. Not only will this likely do little to stop any RF heating caused by the phone, it could very well be counter-productive.
Imagine a lamp, minus shade, in an otherwise empty room. The light from the bulb lights the room pretty evenly (save for right under the lamp). This is what is known as an isotropic radiator. It radiates the same amount of light in all directions. An antenna like this is called a 0 dBi (0 decibel isotropic) antenna. It has no "gain".
Now, imagine that you put a mirror on one side of the lamp. Now, one side of the room is dark, and one side is getting twice as much light. This is NOT an isotropic radiator. On the side of the room that is getting twice as much light, you have 3 dBi gain (3 dB is double, and again this is related to an isotropic radiator. dB are ALWAYS a relative measurement.) This is what these alleged "brain shields" are doing.
The problem: what if the cell site is on the dark side of the room? The cell site will tell the phone to increase its output power - in effect, the site is saying "It's dark over here, turn the lamp up!". Now, you have a brighter lamp, so more power available to do "bad things", but your call still sounds like crap.
If you are worried about this sort of thing, don't use a hand-held phone: use a car phone, with the antenna properly mounted on the roof. You will be in the RF shadow (you will be "under the lamp"), and you will still be able to make calls (please, just don't do so while driving.)
Now, this all is largely BS, as modern phones, at maximum power, only put out 100 mW of power - shine a good flashlight on your head and you are getting more radiation, at a higher energy per photon, than your cell phone. We won't even talk about going out under that big fusion reactor in the sky....
Do you go skiing? Do you go into natural caves? Do you fly on planes? Do you live in a brick house? Do you have a basement? Then you are placing yourself at more risk of radiation damage than using your phone.
Rather funny you should ascribe that quote to Churchil, who was himself half American, and furthur is on record as having great admiration for the US.
Read his bio. Make up your own mind.
That's from the movie House II wherein John Ratzenberger (a.k.a. Cliff Clavin from Cheers) plays an electrician called out to help with the house.
Great silly movie, well worth renting.
As a title, it works well with anything:
Web Monkey/Adventurer
Pricipal Engineer/Adventurer
etc.
Plot #1: Fearing for the safety of the universe, the Celestial Intervention Agency sends the Doctor back in time to destroy a menace that threatens to take over the universe. The Doctor refuses to do so, however, citing that "... out of evil, something good must come. Without Bill Gates, Linus would have had no hardware to program for..."
/. back-end "Post Story" function.
...."
Plot #2: The universe keeps looping back and repeating itself. The Doctor attempts to put this right by adding a search of old stories to the
Plot #3: A new and more wonderful Doctor replaces the old one. However, many fans are heard to say, "I'm waiting until Doctor 2.5.0
Plot #4: The TARDIS crashes, and the Doctor must wait 200 years for it to fsck itself. "I really must move the old girl over to XFS...."
WAV is a rip-off of the IFF format started on the Amiga (only difference is that IFF words are in big-endian order, RIFF a.k.a. WAV words are in little-endian order).
Microsoft didn't come up with XML, they just adopted it.
Normally, I don't respond to ACs, but this was just too much.
Now, go back to smoking your astroturf.
Near where I used to live, there was a company that made small buildings. Being as how this was in Wichita, KS, which at the time was home to the corporate headquarters of Pizza Hut, Inc., one of the buildings this small company had build was a small Pizza Hut restaurant intended for use as a temporary site (e.g. for servicing an event like Woodstock).
The building was a prototype, and thus sat on the lot of the company for some time. My friends and I always referred to it as P.H.E.D - Pizza Hut, Emergency Deployable.
Considering that the fast food chains have the art of setting up a building like this down to a science - a friend of mine went to work one day past an empty lot, and that evening the lot contained a nearly fully complete Pizza Hut - I wouldn't be too surprised to see the Big Boys using an idea like this.
Kinda like in Unreal Tournement - You get on the radio and call for a drop, they tell you to get clear, WHUMPH! There's a new Pizza Hut.
Or worse yet, McDonalds (shudder...)
Not quite true: there are some modes of fluorescence that involve the adsorption of two photons to yield one higher-energy photon. I have a card in my wallet that adsorbs visible light and IR to give off an orange glow. It's used to detect the output from IR LEDs in things like "electric eye" beams and remote control. It's a lot handier than getting my Starlight gear out.
Just use an LED flasher chip: they will act as a charge pump, allowing higher voltage to the LED from a lower-voltage battery. If you set the flash rate to a couple of kilohertz you won't notice the flashing in normal use (although it makes a cool effect if you move the light around: lots of little spots of light), and the flasher chip plus LED will burn WAY less power than a PIC.
You can even adjust the duty cycle to vary the brightness. Furthur, even DratShack carries LED flasher chips.
Was it just me, or did the Windows guy come off as just a bit nasty and petty?
But if he was not a subscriber, then why did he use their service to set his unit's clock?
Furthurmore, you have totally missed the point of my post. Let me try again:
I go down to the local DratShack and buy a new phone. The PFY behind the counter tries to sell me a service plan.
Me: No, I do not wish a service plan. I just want a phone.
PFY: But without a service plan, you cannot place nor receive calls.
Me: I'm too cheap to pay for a service plan. I want to be able to call 911, for which the phone does not need to have a service plan. Furthurmore, when I go on trips, I will buy a cheap prepaid phone card so that I may place calls during my trip.
PFY: OK, but you might not be able to get firmware updates without a service plan.
Me: Over-the-air updates don't bother me. Sell me the damn phone!
PFY: OK, but this could bite you.
Now, other than the obvious fact that this account is fictional (the PFY knows far too much to be working at DratShack), this is exactly what this gentleman did: he tried to buy on the cheap, and the Tivo docs quite plainly tell you that without service, your Tivo's functionality is greatly reduced.
Just as an unregistered phone might stop working at any time, an unsubscribe Tivo might stop working at any time. If that is unacceptable to you, then either buy a subscription, don't buy the unit, or accept the consiquences of your actions.