You might also mention that in addition to some people simply not having access to pages using Flash, some others have it disabled intentionally to reduce battery drain or avoid some security risks.
Let's not forget that Yahoo (or AT&T / Yahoo if AT&T happens to be your ISP) uses web-bugs, those invisible 1 pixel graphics, to stalk it's users. Of course they came up with their own cutsie name for them, "web beacons".
You might be able to control the box, but right now there is no way to easily record the HD content off of the box. The amount of data is just too great.
If the data is for just one channel and is still compressed it shouldn't be a problem. Perhaps you're using some pretty old hardware? From what I've seen, decoding usually taxes a system more heavily than simply moving the data. If external USB 2 and Firewire tuners are easy to use for broadcast ATSC 1080i, why would data from a cable box be any more difficult to take? I've seen both types of tuners work fine on an early-release MacBook laptop (2 years old). Typical off-air 1080i shows I've seen eat up about 6 GB an hour. IIRC recent large/cheap SATA drives in a desktop can move roughly that much in a minute, so the disk system is very lightly taxed. Even over USB 2, copying 1 GB a minute seems typical. Recording two 1080i shows while playing back a third is very doable.
For most people, CPU performance when decoding is more of an issue. Needs depend on the codecs used. The MPEG2 of broadcast ATSC is less demanding than something like x.264 720p. Those GB.mkv tv episodes on the torrent sites generally do make older hardware choke.
Moving uncompressed digital video would be much more of a chore but there is no need to do that! ATSC 1080i HD broadcasts are getting around 100:1 compression. Most cable programs are likely to be compressed even more than broadcast digital. (raw 1080 at 8 bit per color RGB at 30 frames per second would take 180 megabytes per second)
Anyone familiar with MythTV knows that it can use multiple front ends. A port to Windows or Mac sounds good because the monopoly makes some hardware difficult to use. It's not such a great idea if you want control of your media [slashdot.org].
The link you provided indicated that NBC had enabled the broadcast flag on certain shows at the end of last season, and that it affected Windows Media Center. I did not see mention of Apple. One of the shows listed is one that I regularly recorded with Eye-TV, the OS X based tuner/PVR solution. I did not encounter any problem making or playing the recording on a Mac. There certainly is DRM on video from Apple sources such as iTunes, but I have seen no indication of anything inhibiting ATSC PVR recording on the Mac.
Although I like Eye-TV, I'll also be trying the Mac MythTV front end once I have suitable hardware for the Linux MythTV backend. The ability to support more internal SATA storage and eSATA external drives at low cost is appealing. Hopefully the scheduler supports some fancier things too, such as automatic control of antenna change relays for getting some channels in different directions.
Calling MythTV practical and relevant may be overly optimistic. Sure, you may be just a computer, a tuner, and a few clicks away from a Myth box, but to my 70-year-old in-laws, it's as unreachable as the moon.
If Myth-TV and Linux are a bit much for them to handle, they might consider Eye-TV on OS X. I know someone over 85 using it with no problems. (except maybe being addicted to it) There are USB-connected tuners available that support ATSC, NTSC and Clear-QAM all in one unit. That's the U.S. version, there are European versions also. Setup is a trivial task. Use it with a 24" iMac and you'll have a display that'll handle the full 1920*1080 detail of 1080i.
While true, that's actually bad advice. Opting out shouldn't be considered viable for much of anything on the web because it generally depends on adding or setting an opt-out cookie. So the opt-out cookies are gone when your browser clears all cookies on quitting (it SHOULD be set that way to help cope with other cookies) or you clear all cookies manually. So opting out is pretty much useless. If they were serious about doing something to help, the default (no cookie) behavior would be opted-out, and you'd have to set a cookie if you wanted to opt-in.
Setting privacy settings in Firefox to clear everything on quit is generally a good idea.
Also remember that additional steps are needed if one wants some protection from stalking in scripts, in JAVA, in Flash, and with web bugs (or "web beacons" as AT&T / Yahoo call them). Even with no cookies, data may also be passed in a URL generated for you when you click on a link.
Although monitoring is important, it seems like it might be more cost effective to release code that spreads and patches vulnerable/infected machines. If the number of those could be cut way down, maybe DDoS attacks wouldn't be such a threat.
There's already malware that removes other malware to increase the available resources. If malware can do that, why not something friendly doing it?
While antivirus products do help people, I can see why some would question their value. If a home or auto security product handled everything but one door, or one window, it wouldn't be worth very much.
It seems like vendors whose products are full of holes should be picking up some of the maintenance costs and liability for damages associated with the flaws.
Perhaps systems running problematic OS releases, and users with a history of prior viral traffic, should see a separate routing path through ISPs allowing ISPs to cut them off, or provide heavy filtering to some services, in the event of an outbreak.
One thing that works well to get homes for old but working fridges is to list them on the Craigslist free area under a title like "Kegerator". If students don't like they way the outside looks they can always spray paint it or cover it with stickers.. Listing it in another area first at a low price may work too, but the free area has many regulars checking it frequently, so things there tend to go fast.
In the description just mention that it works, but isn't beautiful or whatever... and would be an ideal fridge to modify with a keg of beer inside and a tap on the front. Students in larger houses and apartment complexes are good candidates to snatch it up...
Quite a bit of good free stuff shows up in college towns when people move, especially around graduation time. Students often can't or don't want to deal with moving much, and often think less about what things are worth when it was their parents that footed the bill... It's also amazing how many people (usually not students) try to get way too much money for old laptops, desktops, projection televisions...
There was no emphasis on IR mentioned, they just said something to the effect that the photons hitting the surface turned out to be an important variable affecting evaporation rates. I too was kinda shocked to hear that.
"In the 1990s, Graham Farquhar and Michael Roderick of the Australian National University were puzzling over an apparently illogical set of results: the rate at which water evaporated all around the world had declined over the last 30 years despite the warmer climate.
Farquhar and Roderick were measuring something called the Pan Evaporation Rate. What's that? Well, as Farquhar puts it with commendable Aussie directness: "It's called the Pan Evaporation Rate because it's the evaporation rate from a pan. But there's an apparent paradox here - the evaporation rate is going down, but the temperature is going up."
Surely, higher temperatures should evaporate water faster, like turning up the heat on a stove? Not so, says Roderick: "It turns out that the dominant force in evaporation is the energy of sunlight itself - photons hitting the surface of the water and tearing away water molecules, not the air temperature."
A recent episode of Nova Science Now on PBS covered studies done while there was no US air traffic immediately after the 9/11 attack. As it turns out, the vapor trails from planes do contribute significantly enough to cloud cover to cause a reduction in sunlight hitting the ground. There also were some studies relating to the evaporation of water. As it turns out, evaporation rates are not only affected by such things as ambient temperature and wind, but also by photons hitting the water surface. At some point they concluded that pollution is reducing the energy hitting the surface by about 10%. Because day to day and year over year temperatures often vary considerably, the measurements after 9/11 were looking at the difference between high and low temperatures instead of the daily highs. The spread increased.
I didn't have time to find citations for all this, but I believe podcasts of the program are available from the PBS website and through iTunes.
I think the overall conclusion is that the models used for global warming have been in error on the conservative side. The actual effect of greenhouse gases is apparently even greater than we've been believing, but it has been partly masked by fine-particle pollution causing reduced sunlight at the ground. These things are also behind weather shifts with the fine-particles having a cloud-seeding effect boosting precipitation in some areas, while the reduced evaporation (from reduced sunlight) is contributing to drought in other areas. It's not a pretty picture.
I tend to agree with orzetto -- it was entertainment and art, from beginning to end. The slippery slope argument in this case is, I'm afraid, a fallacy.
Yes, it's practical and just the way things are these days. It was far safer and cheaper to produce it all in a studio on the moon than to actually engineer a way to land through the corrosive atmosphere in Beijing. There are still a few visible flaws though. If you look closely at the flags, they lack the burns that would be present in the actual atmosphere.
are really only switched between different speed segments. I.e., they might bridge (switch) between a 10 mb segment and a 100 mb segment, but they're only repeaters (hubs) on each.
I think there's a good chance those guys know about ARP poisoning.
If these machines affected the outcome of the election, perhaps it is the American people (and the people of Iraq) who should be seeking punitive damages from Diebold.
Are (financial) punitive damages enough? Compromising the integrity of our elections process ought to qualify as treason.
An indentured servant is a form of debt bondage worker
It seems a better case could be made to say that many of us are slaves to some other things.
The national debt comes to mind, and many suffer directly or indirectly from usury.
The wikipedia link shows some pretty strong prohibitions against usury in other cultures. Considering the current hardships many are experiencing, this might be a good time to take another look at the laws in areas (like the U.S.) where laws don't seem to offer much protection. This seems a reminder that a better understanding of other cultures can be of some value in spite of aspects of them that we may not agree with.
As demanding as working for a fast-paced innovative company with attention to quality and many deadlines may be, I suspect that many of us would be glad to be in those positions. I hope that all do get properly rewarded. If it is any consequence, some of us end users are grateful for that hard work and the sacrifices of family members who sometimes don't see as much of some people.
This discs are expensive, the players are play-only and expensive, the players force use of a DRM'd display...
Wake me up when I can stick a raw drive in my computer (running any display on the computer or anything it streams to around the house) for $100 or less, it can also burn discs (data only discs it won't play is fine), and the blank media is $1 a disc or less. I also expect playback with the OS/software of my choosing. If VLC won't work with it, it isn't what I'd hope for.
Knowing how the industry is with DRM, I doubt I'll get what I want. I'll probably eventually settle for a read/write drive that takes affordable media and can be used for tv shows I've recorded or whatever else comes along. Looks like it'll be years before I get even that...
I've noted that support for large HD displays is poor, life isn't that great, they're expensive and the money will only make the trade imbalance worse. So for the shorter term, a medium (24"?) display on the computer will be fine. I've heard that retailers like Best Buy have reported low than expected sales of HDTVs. Close to 20 minutes of ads an hour on over-the-air tv, and few shows that appeal to me. I wonder how many of the people struggling with debt have stopped to figure out what the total cost of a large screen HDTV with paid programs is over say a 5 year life? For 8 hours a day use, figure close to $10 a month just for electricity to start with....
I've heard that rubbing toothpaste on the shiny side and rinsing with water can be effective.
I've had good results using standard toothpaste. What follows pertains to only problems with the read-side surface of discs. Foil-side damage is another problem evident as bright holes/scratches when examining a disc with strong light behind it.
First make sure the disc is clean and free of things like pizza sauce, bean-dip, baby food, ice cream, sex-lubricant, etc. Rinsing in warm water alternated with gently rubbing the (read-side) surface with a finger that has a drop of liquid dish soap works well. Rinse completely, wipe (from center outwards) with a soft lint free cloth to dry. Minimize rubbing the top (foil side) of recordable discs. If there are any spots with slight damage to the foil you'd risk having it tear or peel up.
Visually inspect the read-side of the disk for damage. Nasty scuffed spots have been the most frequent culprit on discs I've seen. I polish just the areas where the scuffs are with some standard toothpaste on a cotton swab or a fingertip. A swab seems to work better for applying more pressure in a small area. Wash and dry well. The polished areas will look a bit cloudy. That usually doesn't seem to be a problem. Some discs still giving errors seem to do better polished with a little furniture polish afterward.
In normal use, I encourage people to treat CDs just like vinyl records should be treated. Pretend the groove or readable surface areas are deadly to the touch. Handle disks only with clean hands, and then on by the outer edge (and I mean edge, not fingers on both sides of the disc near the edge), and the center. Keep discs in clean cases away from direct sun and high temperatures. Do not allow people to smoke in the same area as your discs or optical disc units. Do not leave discs sitting out on a car seat, desk, floor, pet, friends body etc. Disc wallets/books are handy but tend to promote scratching, so avoid them if possible or use only for discs that aren't handled much. Do not crush, grind or eat your discs. Do not put them in a microwave or toaster. If you have a try-loading optical drive, periodically clean the try with a slightly damp lint-free cloth. (turntable mats should be removed and hand washed)
If you are having trouble reading older recordable discs that look clean and undamaged, try reading them in several different drives. The read sensitivity and wavelength of laser output may differ between drives causing some media-dependent variations in performance. A drive that works well with one brand of disc may not be the best with another. If discs are used for backups, consider having more than one backup and using more than one brand of media. It is wise to keep the backups in different places in case of fire, theft etc.
I'd feel sufficiently menaced by villains flying in on those things as to call them "practical" in the super-villainy market.
Suicide bombers with explosives are enough of a problem, I'd hate to see someone evil turned loose with a flying Vegomatic. At least the annoying noise would provide some warning they're coming. It's a safe bet these things crank out the greenhouse gases too...
Thinking about the terrorist angle and the Olympics coming up it occurred to me that an element of the ancient games might be used to combat terrorism: Nudity!
If people in some areas/activities in Iraq were required to be in the nude or very close to it, it'd be very difficult for any among them to be wearing explosives. The weather there is probably warm enough for it. It is a pretty radical idea for a society where some believe that even some faces should be hidden, but the low-tech approach is otherwise simple and cheap. Where is a good place to start? How about nude-voting? Hopefully nude voting releases less greenhouse gas than jetpacking...
The down side is that the cinema I went to watch this movie at let the movie slip out of focus and completely ruined the whole thing for me.
When something like that happens go ask for either a refund or tickets to a later showing. They do want repeat business and more than likely will attempt to make you happy.
If a driver is speeding, a pink box frames an approaching speed limit sign to draw the driver's attention.
I can just see it now, highlighting some billboards and signs, maybe throwing in a few text ads too.
But windshield displays could have some strange uses too.
A way to add subtitles at the drive-in theater?
Maybe the windshield would make a good big screen HDTV. With the high price of gas and the current mortgage crisis, this seems like a good time for a remake of the 1979 movie Americanthon, where people were living their (parked) cars. A video windield whould make them feel so much more like home...
Maybe they should do some research targeted at younger drivers too?
If a younger driver crashes into the car in front of them while checking out the babe in a car to the side, side windows that substituted someone old and overweight might reduce accidents.
No doubt that feature would be a major dud on the showroom floor though...
It is exactly as I had foreseen. The music/video industry is pairing with ISPs to suppress content and freedom of speech.
This is another reason to push for changes in appointments/policy at the F.C.C. We should, we must, let whoever we support for the next administration know how we feel.
The F.C.C. could being doing things to ensure healthy competition/diversity among ISPs giving consumers more ability to influence ISP behavior through feedback and voting with their wallets. There's more than better rates at stake.
It is essential to the proper functioning of Democracy to have open and diverse media from the local communities to the national level. Doing away with the current excessive consolidation of media ownership is another area for change if we want competition/diversity.
If current trends are not reversed, we may end up with our own Information Ministry.
It appears all they're doing is not hosting in their local NNTP cache the listed newsgroups.
Is it just the specific kiddie-nasty groups or all of alt.* or alt.binaries.*? Perhaps this is getting pushed by some with an agenda to suppress some other (video/music) content?
Slashdot Mirror
...that's 1600lbs that could have been used to lift more fun stuff in to space.
Or ten lawyers?
You might also mention that in addition to some people simply not having access to pages using Flash, some others have it disabled intentionally to reduce battery drain or avoid some security risks.
Let's not forget that Yahoo (or AT&T / Yahoo if AT&T happens to be your ISP) uses web-bugs, those invisible 1 pixel graphics, to stalk it's users. Of course they came up with their own cutsie name for them, "web beacons".
You might be able to control the box, but right now there is no way to easily record the HD content off of the box. The amount of data is just too great.
If the data is for just one channel and is still compressed it shouldn't be a problem.
Perhaps you're using some pretty old hardware? From what I've seen, decoding usually taxes a system more heavily than simply moving the data. If external USB 2 and Firewire tuners are easy to use for broadcast ATSC 1080i, why would data from a cable box be any more difficult to take?
I've seen both types of tuners work fine on an early-release MacBook laptop (2 years old).
Typical off-air 1080i shows I've seen eat up about 6 GB an hour. IIRC recent large/cheap SATA drives in a desktop can move roughly that much in a minute, so the disk system is very lightly taxed. Even over USB 2, copying 1 GB a minute seems typical.
Recording two 1080i shows while playing back a third is very doable.
For most people, CPU performance when decoding is more of an issue. Needs depend on the codecs used. The MPEG2 of broadcast ATSC is less demanding than something like x.264 720p. Those GB .mkv tv episodes on the torrent sites generally do make older hardware choke.
Moving uncompressed digital video would be much more of a chore but there is no need to do that! ATSC 1080i HD broadcasts are getting around 100:1 compression. Most cable programs are likely to be compressed even more than broadcast digital.
(raw 1080 at 8 bit per color RGB at 30 frames per second would take 180 megabytes per second)
Anyone familiar with MythTV knows that it can use multiple front ends. A port to Windows or Mac sounds good because the monopoly makes some hardware difficult to use. It's not such a great idea if you want control of your media [slashdot.org].
The link you provided indicated that NBC had enabled the broadcast flag on certain shows at the end of last season, and that it affected Windows Media Center. I did not see mention of Apple. One of the shows listed is one that I regularly recorded with Eye-TV, the OS X based tuner/PVR solution. I did not encounter any problem making or playing the recording on a Mac. There certainly is DRM on video from Apple sources such as iTunes, but I have seen no indication of anything inhibiting ATSC PVR recording on the Mac.
Although I like Eye-TV, I'll also be trying the Mac MythTV front end once I have suitable hardware for the Linux MythTV backend. The ability to support more internal SATA storage and eSATA external drives at low cost is appealing. Hopefully the scheduler supports some fancier things too, such as automatic control of antenna change relays for getting some channels in different directions.
Calling MythTV practical and relevant may be overly optimistic. Sure, you may be just a computer, a tuner, and a few clicks away from a Myth box, but to my 70-year-old in-laws, it's as unreachable as the moon.
If Myth-TV and Linux are a bit much for them to handle, they might consider Eye-TV on OS X. I know someone over 85 using it with no problems. (except maybe being addicted to it)
There are USB-connected tuners available that support ATSC, NTSC and Clear-QAM all in one unit. That's the U.S. version, there are European versions also. Setup is a trivial task.
Use it with a 24" iMac and you'll have a display that'll handle the full 1920*1080 detail of 1080i.
So we need to expect a cyborg rat invasion now?
Or perhaps some other kind branching from earlier experiments?
While true, that's actually bad advice. Opting out shouldn't be considered viable for much of anything on the web because it generally depends on adding or setting an opt-out cookie.
So the opt-out cookies are gone when your browser clears all cookies on quitting (it SHOULD be set that way to help cope with other cookies) or you clear all cookies manually. So opting out is pretty much useless. If they were serious about doing something to help, the default (no cookie) behavior would be opted-out, and you'd have to set a cookie if you wanted to opt-in.
Setting privacy settings in Firefox to clear everything on quit is generally a good idea.
Also remember that additional steps are needed if one wants some protection from stalking in scripts, in JAVA, in Flash, and with web bugs (or "web beacons" as AT&T / Yahoo call them).
Even with no cookies, data may also be passed in a URL generated for you when you click on a link.
Although monitoring is important, it seems like it might be more cost effective to release code that spreads and patches vulnerable/infected machines. If the number of those could be cut way down, maybe DDoS attacks wouldn't be such a threat.
There's already malware that removes other malware to increase the available resources. If malware can do that, why not something friendly doing it?
While antivirus products do help people, I can see why some would question their value.
If a home or auto security product handled everything but one door, or one window, it wouldn't be worth very much.
It seems like vendors whose products are full of holes should be picking up some of the maintenance costs and liability for damages associated with the flaws.
Perhaps systems running problematic OS releases, and users with a history of prior viral traffic, should see a separate routing path through ISPs allowing ISPs to cut them off, or provide heavy filtering to some services, in the event of an outbreak.
One thing that works well to get homes for old but working fridges is to list them on the Craigslist free area under a title like "Kegerator". If students don't like they way the outside looks they can always spray paint it or cover it with stickers..
Listing it in another area first at a low price may work too, but the free area has many regulars checking it frequently, so things there tend to go fast.
In the description just mention that it works, but isn't beautiful or whatever... and would be an ideal fridge to modify with a keg of beer inside and a tap on the front. Students in larger houses and apartment complexes are good candidates to snatch it up...
Quite a bit of good free stuff shows up in college towns when people move, especially around graduation time. Students often can't or don't want to deal with moving much, and often think less about what things are worth when it was their parents that footed the bill...
It's also amazing how many people (usually not students) try to get way too much money for old laptops, desktops, projection televisions...
There was no emphasis on IR mentioned, they just said something to the effect that the photons hitting the surface turned out to be an important variable affecting evaporation rates. I too was kinda shocked to hear that.
A quick search found an article on global dimming with a similar statement:
"In the 1990s, Graham Farquhar and Michael Roderick of the Australian National University were puzzling over an apparently illogical set of results: the rate at which water evaporated all around the world had declined over the last 30 years despite the warmer climate.
Farquhar and Roderick were measuring something called the Pan Evaporation Rate. What's that? Well, as Farquhar puts it with commendable Aussie directness: "It's called the Pan Evaporation Rate because it's the evaporation rate from a pan. But there's an apparent paradox here - the evaporation rate is going down, but the temperature is going up."
Surely, higher temperatures should evaporate water faster, like turning up the heat on a stove? Not so, says Roderick: "It turns out that the dominant force in evaporation is the energy of sunlight itself - photons hitting the surface of the water and tearing away water molecules, not the air temperature."
A recent episode of Nova Science Now on PBS covered studies done while there was no US air traffic immediately after the 9/11 attack. As it turns out, the vapor trails from planes do contribute significantly enough to cloud cover to cause a reduction in sunlight hitting the ground.
There also were some studies relating to the evaporation of water. As it turns out, evaporation rates are not only affected by such things as ambient temperature and wind, but also by photons hitting the water surface. At some point they concluded that pollution is reducing the energy hitting the surface by about 10%. Because day to day and year over year temperatures often vary considerably, the measurements after 9/11 were looking at the difference between high and low temperatures instead of the daily highs. The spread increased.
I didn't have time to find citations for all this, but I believe podcasts of the program are available from the PBS website and through iTunes.
I think the overall conclusion is that the models used for global warming have been in error on the conservative side. The actual effect of greenhouse gases is apparently even greater than we've been believing, but it has been partly masked by fine-particle pollution causing reduced sunlight at the ground. These things are also behind weather shifts with the fine-particles having a cloud-seeding effect boosting precipitation in some areas, while the reduced evaporation (from reduced sunlight) is contributing to drought in other areas. It's not a pretty picture.
I tend to agree with orzetto -- it was entertainment and art, from beginning to end. The slippery slope argument in this case is, I'm afraid, a fallacy.
Yes, it's practical and just the way things are these days. It was far safer and cheaper to produce it all in a studio on the moon than to actually engineer a way to land through the corrosive atmosphere in Beijing. There are still a few visible flaws though. If you look closely at the flags, they lack the burns that would be present in the actual atmosphere.
are really only switched between different speed segments. I.e., they might bridge (switch) between a 10 mb segment and a 100 mb segment, but they're only repeaters (hubs) on each.
I think there's a good chance those guys know about ARP poisoning.
To be completely fair, some have achieved minimalism with Windows too.
If these machines affected the outcome of the election, perhaps it is the American people (and the people of Iraq) who should be seeking punitive damages from Diebold.
Are (financial) punitive damages enough?
Compromising the integrity of our elections process ought to qualify as treason.
An indentured servant is a form of debt bondage worker
It seems a better case could be made to say that many of us are slaves to some other things.
The national debt comes to mind, and many suffer directly or indirectly from usury.
The wikipedia link shows some pretty strong prohibitions against usury in other cultures.
Considering the current hardships many are experiencing, this might be a good time to take another look at the laws in areas (like the U.S.) where laws don't seem to offer much protection.
This seems a reminder that a better understanding of other cultures can be of some value in spite of aspects of them that we may not agree with.
As demanding as working for a fast-paced innovative company with attention to quality and many deadlines may be, I suspect that many of us would be glad to be in those positions.
I hope that all do get properly rewarded. If it is any consequence, some of us end users are grateful for that hard work and the sacrifices of family members who sometimes don't see as much of some people.
This discs are expensive, the players are play-only and expensive, the players force use of a DRM'd display...
Wake me up when I can stick a raw drive in my computer (running any display on the computer or anything it streams to around the house) for $100 or less, it can also burn discs (data only discs it won't play is fine), and the blank media is $1 a disc or less.
I also expect playback with the OS/software of my choosing. If VLC won't work with it, it isn't what I'd hope for.
Knowing how the industry is with DRM, I doubt I'll get what I want. I'll probably eventually settle for a read/write drive that takes affordable media and can be used for tv shows I've recorded or whatever else comes along. Looks like it'll be years before I get even that...
I've noted that support for large HD displays is poor, life isn't that great, they're expensive and the money will only make the trade imbalance worse. So for the shorter term, a medium (24"?) display on the computer will be fine. I've heard that retailers like Best Buy have reported low than expected sales of HDTVs. Close to 20 minutes of ads an hour on over-the-air tv, and few shows that appeal to me. I wonder how many of the people struggling with debt have stopped to figure out what the total cost of a large screen HDTV with paid programs is over say a 5 year life?
For 8 hours a day use, figure close to $10 a month just for electricity to start with....
I've heard that rubbing toothpaste on the shiny side and rinsing with water can be effective.
I've had good results using standard toothpaste. What follows pertains to only problems with the read-side surface of discs. Foil-side damage is another problem evident as bright holes/scratches when examining a disc with strong light behind it.
First make sure the disc is clean and free of things like pizza sauce, bean-dip, baby food, ice cream, sex-lubricant, etc. Rinsing in warm water alternated with gently rubbing the (read-side) surface with a finger that has a drop of liquid dish soap works well. Rinse completely, wipe (from center outwards) with a soft lint free cloth to dry. Minimize rubbing the top (foil side) of recordable discs. If there are any spots with slight damage to the foil you'd risk having it tear or peel up.
Visually inspect the read-side of the disk for damage. Nasty scuffed spots have been the most frequent culprit on discs I've seen. I polish just the areas where the scuffs are with some standard toothpaste on a cotton swab or a fingertip. A swab seems to work better for applying more pressure in a small area. Wash and dry well. The polished areas will look a bit cloudy. That usually doesn't seem to be a problem. Some discs still giving errors seem to do better polished with a little furniture polish afterward.
In normal use, I encourage people to treat CDs just like vinyl records should be treated. Pretend the groove or readable surface areas are deadly to the touch. Handle disks only with clean hands, and then on by the outer edge (and I mean edge, not fingers on both sides of the disc near the edge), and the center. Keep discs in clean cases away from direct sun and high temperatures. Do not allow people to smoke in the same area as your discs or optical disc units. Do not leave discs sitting out on a car seat, desk, floor, pet, friends body etc. Disc wallets/books are handy but tend to promote scratching, so avoid them if possible or use only for discs that aren't handled much. Do not crush, grind or eat your discs. Do not put them in a microwave or toaster. If you have a try-loading optical drive, periodically clean the try with a slightly damp lint-free cloth. (turntable mats should be removed and hand washed)
If you are having trouble reading older recordable discs that look clean and undamaged, try reading them in several different drives. The read sensitivity and wavelength of laser output may differ between drives causing some media-dependent variations in performance. A drive that works well with one brand of disc may not be the best with another.
If discs are used for backups, consider having more than one backup and using more than one brand of media. It is wise to keep the backups in different places in case of fire, theft etc.
I'd feel sufficiently menaced by villains flying in on those things as to call them "practical" in the super-villainy market.
Suicide bombers with explosives are enough of a problem, I'd hate to see someone evil turned loose with a flying Vegomatic. At least the annoying noise would provide some warning they're coming.
It's a safe bet these things crank out the greenhouse gases too...
Thinking about the terrorist angle and the Olympics coming up it occurred to me that an element of the ancient games might be used to combat terrorism: Nudity!
If people in some areas/activities in Iraq were required to be in the nude or very close to it, it'd be very difficult for any among them to be wearing explosives. The weather there is probably warm enough for it. It is a pretty radical idea for a society where some believe that even some faces should be hidden, but the low-tech approach is otherwise simple and cheap.
Where is a good place to start? How about nude-voting?
Hopefully nude voting releases less greenhouse gas than jetpacking...
The down side is that the cinema I went to watch this movie at let the movie slip out of focus and completely ruined the whole thing for me.
When something like that happens go ask for either a refund or tickets to a later showing.
They do want repeat business and more than likely will attempt to make you happy.
If a driver is speeding, a pink box frames an approaching speed limit sign to draw the driver's attention.
I can just see it now, highlighting some billboards and signs, maybe throwing in a few text ads too.
But windshield displays could have some strange uses too.
A way to add subtitles at the drive-in theater?
Maybe the windshield would make a good big screen HDTV. With the high price of gas and the current mortgage crisis, this seems like a good time for a remake of the 1979 movie Americanthon, where people were living their (parked) cars.
A video windield whould make them feel so much more like home...
Maybe they should do some research targeted at younger drivers too?
If a younger driver crashes into the car in front of them while checking out the babe in a car to the side,
side windows that substituted someone old and overweight might reduce accidents.
No doubt that feature would be a major dud on the showroom floor though...
It is exactly as I had foreseen. The music/video industry is pairing with ISPs to suppress content and freedom of speech.
This is another reason to push for changes in appointments/policy at the F.C.C.
We should, we must, let whoever we support for the next administration know how we feel.
The F.C.C. could being doing things to ensure healthy competition/diversity among ISPs giving consumers more ability to influence ISP behavior through feedback and voting with their wallets. There's more than better rates at stake.
It is essential to the proper functioning of Democracy to have open and diverse media from the local communities to the national level. Doing away with the current excessive consolidation of media ownership is another area for change if we want competition/diversity.
If current trends are not reversed, we may end up with our own Information Ministry.
It appears all they're doing is not hosting in their local NNTP cache the listed newsgroups.
Is it just the specific kiddie-nasty groups or all of alt.* or alt.binaries.*?
Perhaps this is getting pushed by some with an agenda to suppress some other (video/music) content?