Actually, you could NOT encode a 22049 Hz signal on a CD, unless the signal lasts for more than 1 second.
When you chop a signal (turn it on and off), you are modulating it. Turning a signal ON, waiting a second, and turning it OFF are equivilent to modulating the signal with a 1 second long square wave. In the frequency domain, that corrisponds to convolving the signal with a sine(f)/f function, which has infinite bandwidth (though only the first lobe of the signal has appreciable energy) - as a result the modulated signal has a wider bandwidth (for a 1 second on/off cycle, most of the energy will be within 1 Hz of the center of the signal). Since the signal will have a +/- 1 Hz bandwidth, it will extend across the Nyquist limit.
Practically, even at 4X oversample, you will have problems reconstructing the signal. Consider a sine wave at 20kHz being sampled at 80 kHz. If you sample the signal at 0, 90, 180, and 270 degrees, will get a full amplitude sine wave after reconstruction. Sample it at 45, 135, 225, and 315 degrees, and you will get a square-ish looking signal at sqrt(2)/2 the amplitude.
Sample a 19.995 kHz signal at 80 kHz, and you will get a pulsation of the signal, since the sampling phase will slowly drift.
That's why oscilloscopes usually sample at 10x or more of what the scope's rated bandwidth is - a 100 MHz bw scope will usually sample at 1Gsample/sec.
(Yes, there are ways a scope can have a 1GHz bandwidth and sample at 1Gsample/sec, but they use tricks that only work on a repetative signal - don't try to capture transients with it).
This could be used to watermark audio, in order to try to track pirates. Granted, if they are actually using psychoacustics, then psychoacustic compression systems like MP3 or Vorbis would strip the extra data, but this would be good for basic audio.
However, I doubt this is "inaudiable" - rather I suspect it is "unobtrusive" - you would hear it, and if you know what to listen for would identify it, but you wouldn't find it objectionable in most cases.
That was the sound of a joke whizzing over your head.
You see, during Prohibition, Kansas City was a hotbed of Mafia activity.
The Mafia are well known by many for paying individuals to kill other individuals - these were euphemistically known as "contracts". The individuals who carried out the killings were often known as "enforcers".
These actions were quite illegal then, and still are.
Therefor, the humor in this matter is the likening of the private enforcement of contracts by arbitration to the Mafia tactic of killing anybody you had a business disagreement with.
You see, it is what we who live in a place called "the real world" call "humor".
In case anybody else doesn't know what this wonderful little bit of Marketriod is:
MMS:= MultiMedia Messaging Service.
Folks, if you are going to use any abbreviations, acronyms, or technical terms that may not be in common use to the audience for which you are writing, it is considered good form to define them when they are first used.
I had to add to the workload on the poor Nokia server to discover the meaning of that particular abbreviation.
It would be one thing were this EULA on, say, www.irs.gov and that were the ONLY way to file your taxes, but...
This is on AAvantage, one of many ways to book airline flights online.
If you DON'T like the EULA, screw'em! Go elsewhere. Find one of the 1E100 other travel agents online, and use them.
Also, send a polite but firm letter (NOT EMAIL - real dead trees and toner!) to American Airlines, telling them WHY you are taking your purchase to Marges_travel.com.
IF AA sees that this EULA costs them more than it saves them, THEN (they will change it OR they will go out of business).
However, I find this somewhat surprising. Most police band radios operate in the 800MHz trunking band, which is reserved just for that purpose.
I didn't think the FCC was allowing digital TV anywhere near those frequencies - in fact that is why UHF TV channels 68 and up (IIRC) were taken out of service - to make room for the public service trunking band.
I would guess that what probably happened was that the station in question was mixing with another signal, and spattering into the police band.
In all probability, the cops didn't hear what the station was transmitting - Jersey is using Motorola Astro trunking, perhaps even digital mode, so the cops' radios would simply have said "this isn't the signal I was looking for. Move along."
A CRT based screen "paints" the image by scanning an electron beam over the display surface. The graphics chip that generates the display knows where the beam is at any time (it has to, since it has to know what pixels to be sending out.)
The light pen (or gun) is a lens that focuses the display down to a point on a fast image sensor (typically a phototransistor). So, when the electron beam paints the part of the screen that the pen/gun is focuses on, the photosensor fires.
This signal is tied back to the graphics controller, which says "AHA! the electron beam is at 234x421 when the sensor fires. I'll record that into these registers".
After that, it is simplicity itself to set up a cursor.
Now, that technique won't work for a liquid crystal display, since they aren't "scanned" in the conventional sense - there is no pulse of light as the system writes the data to the LCD. Therefor, there is no way a light pen or light gun could work on an LCD display like a modern projector.
Now, in theory you could use a camera to sense a laser pointer's spot, and then move the pointer there. But then you would need a fairly high resolution camera, plus a calibration proceedure so the system would know what points on the camera corrisponded to what points on the display. You would also need a fairly narrow band filter to allow the camera (once calibrated) to see only the laser pointer spot - otherwise it might respond to other objects on the display.
This guy had better be very careful in the next few years, no matter what happens in court - the sort of folks who are involved in gambling are not known for taking such matters lying down.
He may very well wake up one morning with a horse's head in his bed.
Or more probably, wake up to that particular clammy feeling one gets from freshly mixed cement around one's body....
You missed my point - the ID would be unique not just to the contents of the work unit, but to the actual send of the work unit.
In other words, if you send me work unit #123, containing a set of data, you sign it with a random number, say 426931. You ALSO hash the data in such a fashion that I cannot forge it.
Now, if you send George the same work unit #123, you sign it with a different random number and hash.
Now, when I return the unit, I return the work unit ID (123), the random number (426931), and hash. You check it, and if they don't match you can bounce me.
If I musketeer my 99% done work unit to Paul, Ringo, and Steve, when they return it you see a match not only on the work unit number (123) but on the random number and hash. Bounce, Bounce, Bounce.
If it is not worth the time to catch cheaters, then it is not worth the time to BITCH about cheaters.
There is a fairly simple solution to this - don't let incumbants run for re-election.
More specifically, do not allow a person who holds a government office (either elected, appointed or simply cashing a goverment paycheck) to run for office for any government position until they have been out of government office for at least one full term of the position they are running for.
Let me give an example to make that clear: Maynard is currently a Senator. He wishes to run for Senate again. Under my rules, if he serves out his current term (let's say he was elected in 2000), then he's out in 2006, and one full term of the Senate would be six more years, so he cannot run until 2012. If he decides to settle for Representative, then that would be 2008. If he resigns TODAY, he can run for Representative in 2004, president in 2008.
Mary is currently Attorney General, an appointed position. Mary wants to run for President. Mary cannot run 2004. The best she can do is hold office until 2004, resign, then run in 2008.
Now, this is different than term limits - you can be Senator however many times you can get elected, just not consecutive terms. AND since you cannot hold ANY goverment position, you cannot be Senator for 6 years, hold appointed office for 6 years, be Senator for 6 years, etc. - you HAVE to get out into the private sector (at least as far as being a lobbyist) (but note well the extant restrictions on lobbying after holding office!).
As a result, an incumbant cannot use their position for their own relection. They won't spend the last two years of office campaining. You won't have the dynastic legacies of a Ted Kennedy or Bob Dole.
Yes, the banks run a great deal of modeling, but does the government? Remember, the banks have something to lose, and something to gain, but the goverment doesn't.
As for removing the liquidity of real estate, stock, options, and commodities - is that such a bad thing? If you want liquid, invest in liquid items like certificates of deposit. Besides, a stock would only be not liquid for five years (assuming you refuse to take the 50% hit) - if you are planning for your retirement, you would just start liquidating your older stocks first.
Much of the management behaviors decried in Cringley's article are due to the way the Stock Market works today.
The original idea behind stock was as a way for the company to get money to grow. The stock buyer was counting on getting an annuity - the dividends of the stock. As a result, the upper bound on the current value of the stock was set by the interest rate and the dividends the company paid out - if the interest rate was 10%, and the stock paid $1 in dividends per year, then if the stock cost less than $10/share it was undervalued. If the stock cost more than $10/share, you would do better to invest your money in a bank.
Thus, stock holders were looking at the long term - what is the company doing to increase the dividends?
But then people noticed that if they could make a short-term change in the expected return on the stock, the current value would move. Thus, they began to change the short-term operations of the company, to change the estimated dividends (and thus the current price of the stock), then SELL and move on.
Thus stocks became trading cards, and the current era began. Buy into a company, manipulate the stock price, sell, repeat. (OK, PROFIT! there, I said it, you don't have to.)
Now, consider this - What if the capital gains tax worked like this: If the gain is realized in less than 6 months, then the gain is taxed at 90%. If the gain is realized in 6 months to 1 year, then the gain is taxed at 75%. If the gain is realized in 1 year to 5 years, then the gain is taxed at 50%. If the gain is realized in more than 5 years, then the gain is taxed at 0% (i.e. not taxed).
Now, consider these scenarios: You buy into an IPO, sell when the stock peaks a month later, sell. You get nailed for 90%. Since that is the case, there would be MUCH less demand for the stock, and it wouldn't shoot up so much.
You buy into a company, manipulate the stock price by gutting it, and pop that golden parachute a year and a day later. You get nailed to the tune of 50%. You are STILL discouraged from these games.
You buy a house. Five years later, you move from Silly-con Valley to Wyoming, and from a $500,000 house to a $250,000 ranch. You pocket the $250,000, since it isn't taxed.
I was watching a show several years ago on PBS, wherein a representative of the Federal Reserve was debating a person who's position was "The Fed should just leave the damn interest rates alone and let the market correct itself." The Fed guy said "But we have all this information, and it would be wrong for us not to provide feedback to the system".
When he said "feedback to the system" I had an epiphany - I am an electrial engineer, control systems are something I've studied at length. Unlike an economist, engineers are trained in mathematical tools to examine systems for stability. One of the things that will make a system unstable is too much lag from stimulus to feedback response - it's called "phase margin". The economy has a very LARGE phase lag - making a change to interest rates today will not take effect tomorrow. Also, there is "gain margin" or frequency response - the higher the frequency response the faster the system will react, but too much will cause oscillation. Systems with a large phase lag need to have a very low bandwidth, or they will oscillate. What my proposed cap gains tax would do is reduce the bandwidth of the system by reducing the gain at high frequencies.
Now, you can apply a simple check to my proposal - who will it piss off? The Republicans won't like it, since it prevents the very sort of short-term market manipulation that makes money for fatcats. The Democrats won't like it, because it allows middle-class folks to make money long term (so they can retire without relying on the government for assistance).
And I assert that anything that pisses off both the Republicans and Democrats cannot be a bad thing.
What is it with the.com.com domains (check the link in the story)? zdnet.com.com? news.com.com?
Is this just some office-of-redunant-redundancy-office stuff, or is there something more going on here?
com.com seems to be owned by CNET - does CNET really beleive users are so stupid that they append.com to any.com domain?
Or did CNET just get tired of paying for all those second level domains, and move everything to.com.com to save money?
And what is with this CRAP of forcing the width of the page? Does no-one at CNET run more than 800x600? If my browser window is 1400 pixels wide, it is that wide FOR A REASON - USE IT!
I've heard from one webmasterbater that "Users don't want to read really long lines of text" - then tell them to RESIZE THEIR BROWSER WINDOW!
Last but not least - the device listed in the review DOES NOT HAVE A SCREEN TO VIEW DVDS! Many of the comments on this story are of the form "Cool! Now I can use this to watch my (porn|movies) and play my music". RTFA - to watch DVDs you need an external monitor. While this would be great for use in motel rooms, presentations, or other environments where a TV is at hand, it would be useless for watching movies on a (train|plane|bus|boat) since you have no way to display the video (last I'd seen, while some planes may have a screen on the seat in front of you, there is no provision for you to feed arbitrary video into it.)
I remember the first Wired I saw - it had an ad for one of the first cordless mice, featuring two babies - one in a diaper, on without. The first baby is smiling - under it is the caption "Feels good". The other baby is smiling, and we can see why - he is also urinating. He gets the caption "Feels better". The jist of the ad being that being unbound was better.
But over time that attitude degenerated into "Ohh look at us - we are so tragicly hip we cannot see over our pelvis".
So I let my subscription lapse - a fact that to this day Wired seems unwilling to let me forget ("Come on! Resubscribe! Please?")
So, to sum it up:
Tired: Wired. Wired:/. (well, it used to be, anyway.)
The idea was to create a high-Q resonant circuit, then drive the oscilation with a beta emitting isotope, and pull power out of the system via inductive coupling.
The inventor claimed to be able to pull about 100 watts out of a soup-can sized power system.
Was this later proven to be BS, or did it just die because it had the "n" word in it's name?
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, you could NOT encode a 22049 Hz signal on a CD, unless the signal lasts for more than 1 second.
When you chop a signal (turn it on and off), you are modulating it. Turning a signal ON, waiting a second, and turning it OFF are equivilent to modulating the signal with a 1 second long square wave. In the frequency domain, that corrisponds to convolving the signal with a sine(f)/f function, which has infinite bandwidth (though only the first lobe of the signal has appreciable energy) - as a result the modulated signal has a wider bandwidth (for a 1 second on/off cycle, most of the energy will be within 1 Hz of the center of the signal). Since the signal will have a +/- 1 Hz bandwidth, it will extend across the Nyquist limit.
Practically, even at 4X oversample, you will have problems reconstructing the signal. Consider a sine wave at 20kHz being sampled at 80 kHz. If you sample the signal at 0, 90, 180, and 270 degrees, will get a full amplitude sine wave after reconstruction. Sample it at 45, 135, 225, and 315 degrees, and you will get a square-ish looking signal at sqrt(2)/2 the amplitude.
Sample a 19.995 kHz signal at 80 kHz, and you will get a pulsation of the signal, since the sampling phase will slowly drift.
That's why oscilloscopes usually sample at 10x or more of what the scope's rated bandwidth is - a 100 MHz bw scope will usually sample at 1Gsample/sec.
(Yes, there are ways a scope can have a 1GHz bandwidth and sample at 1Gsample/sec, but they use tricks that only work on a repetative signal - don't try to capture transients with it).
This could be used to watermark audio, in order to try to track pirates. Granted, if they are actually using psychoacustics, then psychoacustic compression systems like MP3 or Vorbis would strip the extra data, but this would be good for basic audio.
However, I doubt this is "inaudiable" - rather I suspect it is "unobtrusive" - you would hear it, and if you know what to listen for would identify it, but you wouldn't find it objectionable in most cases.
But keep it the hell off my CDs!
That was the sound of a joke whizzing over your head.
You see, during Prohibition, Kansas City was a hotbed of Mafia activity.
The Mafia are well known by many for paying individuals to kill other individuals - these were euphemistically known as "contracts". The individuals who carried out the killings were often known as "enforcers".
These actions were quite illegal then, and still are.
Therefor, the humor in this matter is the likening of the private enforcement of contracts by arbitration to the Mafia tactic of killing anybody you had a business disagreement with.
You see, it is what we who live in a place called "the real world" call "humor".
Perhaps you can visit someday.
This really isn't Mozilla's fault - it is the fault of the plugin blocking on opening /dev/dsp, rather than moving on.
And it it "Voila" - literally "look at that", not wolla.
In case anybody else doesn't know what this wonderful little bit of Marketriod is:
:= MultiMedia Messaging Service.
MMS
Folks, if you are going to use any abbreviations, acronyms, or technical terms that may not be in common use to the audience for which you are writing, it is considered good form to define them when they are first used.
I had to add to the workload on the poor Nokia server to discover the meaning of that particular abbreviation.
The private enforcement of contracts has been around for quite some time.
It was especially popular in Kansas City, during Prohibition.
However, I was not aware that the legality of this means of enforcement had been accepted.
If it has, then I must see a man about some spammer's patellas, and the forceful restructuring thereof...
It would be one thing were this EULA on, say, www.irs.gov and that were the ONLY way to file your taxes, but...
This is on AAvantage, one of many ways to book airline flights online.
If you DON'T like the EULA, screw'em! Go elsewhere. Find one of the 1E100 other travel agents online, and use them.
Also, send a polite but firm letter (NOT EMAIL - real dead trees and toner!) to American Airlines, telling them WHY you are taking your purchase to Marges_travel.com.
IF AA sees that this EULA costs them more than it saves them, THEN (they will change it OR they will go out of business).
I would RTFA, but the link is broken.
However, I find this somewhat surprising. Most police band radios operate in the 800MHz trunking band, which is reserved just for that purpose.
I didn't think the FCC was allowing digital TV anywhere near those frequencies - in fact that is why UHF TV channels 68 and up (IIRC) were taken out of service - to make room for the public service trunking band.
I would guess that what probably happened was that the station in question was mixing with another signal, and spattering into the police band.
In all probability, the cops didn't hear what the station was transmitting - Jersey is using Motorola Astro trunking, perhaps even digital mode, so the cops' radios would simply have said "this isn't the signal I was looking for. Move along."
Does anyone have a link to a cache?
The zapper worked exactly like a light pen works.
Oh, you don't know how a lightpen works.
A CRT based screen "paints" the image by scanning an electron beam over the display surface. The graphics chip that generates the display knows where the beam is at any time (it has to, since it has to know what pixels to be sending out.)
The light pen (or gun) is a lens that focuses the display down to a point on a fast image sensor (typically a phototransistor). So, when the electron beam paints the part of the screen that the pen/gun is focuses on, the photosensor fires.
This signal is tied back to the graphics controller, which says "AHA! the electron beam is at 234x421 when the sensor fires. I'll record that into these registers".
After that, it is simplicity itself to set up a cursor.
Now, that technique won't work for a liquid crystal display, since they aren't "scanned" in the conventional sense - there is no pulse of light as the system writes the data to the LCD. Therefor, there is no way a light pen or light gun could work on an LCD display like a modern projector.
Now, in theory you could use a camera to sense a laser pointer's spot, and then move the pointer there. But then you would need a fairly high resolution camera, plus a calibration proceedure so the system would know what points on the camera corrisponded to what points on the display. You would also need a fairly narrow band filter to allow the camera (once calibrated) to see only the laser pointer spot - otherwise it might respond to other objects on the display.
This guy had better be very careful in the next few years, no matter what happens in court - the sort of folks who are involved in gambling are not known for taking such matters lying down.
He may very well wake up one morning with a horse's head in his bed.
Or more probably, wake up to that particular clammy feeling one gets from freshly mixed cement around one's body....
You missed my point - the ID would be unique not just to the contents of the work unit, but to the actual send of the work unit.
In other words, if you send me work unit #123, containing a set of data, you sign it with a random number, say 426931. You ALSO hash the data in such a fashion that I cannot forge it.
Now, if you send George the same work unit #123, you sign it with a different random number and hash.
Now, when I return the unit, I return the work unit ID (123), the random number (426931), and hash. You check it, and if they don't match you can bounce me.
If I musketeer my 99% done work unit to Paul, Ringo, and Steve, when they return it you see a match not only on the work unit number (123) but on the random number and hash. Bounce, Bounce, Bounce.
If it is not worth the time to catch cheaters, then it is not worth the time to BITCH about cheaters.
No, they wouldn't - that's why the hash is there.
Only Seti can create the hash.
When the hand out the work unit, put a unit ID number on it, and sign it with a hash.
If they see the same ID being submitted by more than one system, zero the work unit totals for both machines.
BOOM! Cheating now carries a very high price.
There is a fairly simple solution to this - don't let incumbants run for re-election.
More specifically, do not allow a person who holds a government office (either elected, appointed or simply cashing a goverment paycheck) to run for office for any government position until they have been out of government office for at least one full term of the position they are running for.
Let me give an example to make that clear: Maynard is currently a Senator. He wishes to run for Senate again. Under my rules, if he serves out his current term (let's say he was elected in 2000), then he's out in 2006, and one full term of the Senate would be six more years, so he cannot run until 2012. If he decides to settle for Representative, then that would be 2008. If he resigns TODAY, he can run for Representative in 2004, president in 2008.
Mary is currently Attorney General, an appointed position. Mary wants to run for President. Mary cannot run 2004. The best she can do is hold office until 2004, resign, then run in 2008.
Now, this is different than term limits - you can be Senator however many times you can get elected, just not consecutive terms. AND since you cannot hold ANY goverment position, you cannot be Senator for 6 years, hold appointed office for 6 years, be Senator for 6 years, etc. - you HAVE to get out into the private sector (at least as far as being a lobbyist) (but note well the extant restrictions on lobbying after holding office!).
As a result, an incumbant cannot use their position for their own relection. They won't spend the last two years of office campaining. You won't have the dynastic legacies of a Ted Kennedy or Bob Dole.
I'd gone there, but as I said, if you cannot/will not run Flash there's very little to tell you what this is.
So, I assume this is a flash-based web cartoon, and that one of the main characters name is Fhqwhgads.
Yes, the banks run a great deal of modeling, but does the government? Remember, the banks have something to lose, and something to gain, but the goverment doesn't.
As for removing the liquidity of real estate, stock, options, and commodities - is that such a bad thing? If you want liquid, invest in liquid items like certificates of deposit. Besides, a stock would only be not liquid for five years (assuming you refuse to take the 50% hit) - if you are planning for your retirement, you would just start liquidating your older stocks first.
I launch a meme onto the 'net
and hope my point people will get....
Much of the management behaviors decried in Cringley's article are due to the way the Stock Market works today.
The original idea behind stock was as a way for the company to get money to grow. The stock buyer was counting on getting an annuity - the dividends of the stock. As a result, the upper bound on the current value of the stock was set by the interest rate and the dividends the company paid out - if the interest rate was 10%, and the stock paid $1 in dividends per year, then if the stock cost less than $10/share it was undervalued. If the stock cost more than $10/share, you would do better to invest your money in a bank.
Thus, stock holders were looking at the long term - what is the company doing to increase the dividends?
But then people noticed that if they could make a short-term change in the expected return on the stock, the current value would move. Thus, they began to change the short-term operations of the company, to change the estimated dividends (and thus the current price of the stock), then SELL and move on.
Thus stocks became trading cards, and the current era began. Buy into a company, manipulate the stock price, sell, repeat. (OK, PROFIT! there, I said it, you don't have to.)
Now, consider this - What if the capital gains tax worked like this:
If the gain is realized in less than 6 months, then the gain is taxed at 90%.
If the gain is realized in 6 months to 1 year, then the gain is taxed at 75%.
If the gain is realized in 1 year to 5 years, then the gain is taxed at 50%.
If the gain is realized in more than 5 years, then the gain is taxed at 0% (i.e. not taxed).
Now, consider these scenarios:
You buy into an IPO, sell when the stock peaks a month later, sell. You get nailed for 90%. Since that is the case, there would be MUCH less demand for the stock, and it wouldn't shoot up so much.
You buy into a company, manipulate the stock price by gutting it, and pop that golden parachute a year and a day later. You get nailed to the tune of 50%. You are STILL discouraged from these games.
You buy a house. Five years later, you move from Silly-con Valley to Wyoming, and from a $500,000 house to a $250,000 ranch. You pocket the $250,000, since it isn't taxed.
I was watching a show several years ago on PBS, wherein a representative of the Federal Reserve was debating a person who's position was "The Fed should just leave the damn interest rates alone and let the market correct itself." The Fed guy said "But we have all this information, and it would be wrong for us not to provide feedback to the system".
When he said "feedback to the system" I had an epiphany - I am an electrial engineer, control systems are something I've studied at length. Unlike an economist, engineers are trained in mathematical tools to examine systems for stability. One of the things that will make a system unstable is too much lag from stimulus to feedback response - it's called "phase margin". The economy has a very LARGE phase lag - making a change to interest rates today will not take effect tomorrow. Also, there is "gain margin" or frequency response - the higher the frequency response the faster the system will react, but too much will cause oscillation. Systems with a large phase lag need to have a very low bandwidth, or they will oscillate. What my proposed cap gains tax would do is reduce the bandwidth of the system by reducing the gain at high frequencies.
Now, you can apply a simple check to my proposal - who will it piss off? The Republicans won't like it, since it prevents the very sort of short-term market manipulation that makes money for fatcats. The Democrats won't like it, because it allows middle-class folks to make money long term (so they can retire without relying on the government for assistance).
And I assert that anything that pisses off both the Republicans and Democrats cannot be a bad thing.
OK, for those of us who either don't run Flash or don't care to, what is this in reference to?
What is it with the .com.com domains (check the link in the story)? zdnet.com.com? news.com.com?
.com to any .com domain?
.com.com to save money?
Is this just some office-of-redunant-redundancy-office stuff, or is there something more going on here?
com.com seems to be owned by CNET - does CNET really beleive users are so stupid that they append
Or did CNET just get tired of paying for all those second level domains, and move everything to
And what is with this CRAP of forcing the width of the page? Does no-one at CNET run more than 800x600? If my browser window is 1400 pixels wide, it is that wide FOR A REASON - USE IT!
I've heard from one webmasterbater that "Users don't want to read really long lines of text" - then tell them to RESIZE THEIR BROWSER WINDOW!
Last but not least - the device listed in the review DOES NOT HAVE A SCREEN TO VIEW DVDS! Many of the comments on this story are of the form "Cool! Now I can use this to watch my (porn|movies) and play my music". RTFA - to watch DVDs you need an external monitor. While this would be great for use in motel rooms, presentations, or other environments where a TV is at hand, it would be useless for watching movies on a (train|plane|bus|boat) since you have no way to display the video (last I'd seen, while some planes may have a screen on the seat in front of you, there is no provision for you to feed arbitrary video into it.)
I remember the first Wired I saw - it had an ad for one of the first cordless mice, featuring two babies - one in a diaper, on without. The first baby is smiling - under it is the caption "Feels good". The other baby is smiling, and we can see why - he is also urinating. He gets the caption "Feels better". The jist of the ad being that being unbound was better.
/. (well, it used to be, anyway.)
But over time that attitude degenerated into "Ohh look at us - we are so tragicly hip we cannot see over our pelvis".
So I let my subscription lapse - a fact that to this day Wired seems unwilling to let me forget ("Come on! Resubscribe! Please?")
So, to sum it up:
Tired: Wired.
Wired:
the Nuclear Resonant Battery
The idea was to create a high-Q resonant circuit, then drive the oscilation with a beta emitting isotope, and pull power out of the system via inductive coupling.
The inventor claimed to be able to pull about 100 watts out of a soup-can sized power system.
Was this later proven to be BS, or did it just die because it had the "n" word in it's name?
But if you visit Mangas, NM you might want to bring some air freshener.
Doesn't "Mangas" sound like something Crow, Tom Servo and Mike might have enjoyed?
Crow: Mike, have you ever had Mangas?
or Blueball, MD
Obviously, the town they should target is Freedom, OK
And it is right near Protection, KS.
Which just goes to show, you can have either Freedom or Protection, but not both.