Sorry, but artists just like NICKLEBACK are part of the problem, not part of the solution.
Well, you are assuming that any of the artists currently signed to a RIAA label have a choice in the matter. Aren't most of those contracts long term? I recall reading that Radiohead had wanted to try direct sales for awhile but had to wait until their recording deal expired.
And in any case I don't see how that disproves my statement that not all RIAA music sucks and that avoiding it entirely probably isn't an option for most music lovers.
perhaps it is time for radio to stop playing RIAA's JUNK
Ya know, I hear this theme every single time there is a story related to the recording industry/file sharing/copyright/etc. RIAA music sucks! It's all pop crap! Listen to indie artists!
Not all RIAA music is Justin Timberlake-equese crap. I happen to mostly listen to modern/hard rock. Quite a few of the bands that I like (Nickelback) are signed to RIAA members. In fact I'm hard pressed to think of a genre of music that doesn't have at least one or two prominent bands/artists signed to RIAA members.
Point being that it's kind of stupid to say that all RIAA music sucks just because we find their business practices abhorrent and unethical. I do my best to avoid giving RIAA money (I never buy CDs or directly pay for music) but they doubtless still make some off me (Pandora pays them royalties). I hope that more artists follow a direct to the customer model (Radiohead is giving it a try) and I think that overtime the big labels will become less relevant. In the meantime though I'm not going to avoid music that I like.
In a purchasing condition of 'convienence store' level - IE you're willing to pay more to get the item *NOW*, which would you rather give money to? Overpriced Best Buy, or better priced Walmart?
Seriously. Screw Wally World. Haven't been in there in over three years. Putting aside the issues I have with their business practices and politics, it's just a PITA to go to Wal-Mart. It's packed full of people to the point that you wind up parking out in bum-fuck land over 200 meters from the doors and stand in line waiting to check out for at least 10-15 minutes even if you only have one item.
There's also the quality of people that shop at Wally World. I love seeing the store manager have to come out to explain to a customer why she can't use her WIC card to buy beer..... Or the quality of the employees -- watched a cashier ignore a customer for the better part of two minutes while she yelled at her boyfriend on her cell phone. All true Wally World stories that I've personally seen -- and the reason why I'd never stop there again even if they changed their business practices and politics.
You could find yourself getting an emergency call from the government asking for a circa 1991 VESA video card for a vital computer.
I heard that Jack Bauer needed that video card so that Chloe could use one of the chips to break into the circa 1991 plot devic^W^Wnuclear power station control console and stop the nationwide meltdown of our nuclear power plants!
I bet your glad he held onto that video card now:P
I would have hired out if my heater had been gas; there's a world of difference between flipping a breaker to kill all power to the heater, and having to worry about a possible propane leak. I'm much more familiar with electricity than gas.
I wouldn't have any worries doing a gas appliance install. Ditto for electricity. I re-did all of the wiring for a friend looking to sell (the old stuff was cloth covered!). I've also installed a gas clothes drier.
I probably wouldn't have been brave enough to tackle the hot water heater though. Plumbing is a bitch and it's not something that's easy to learn (in my experience). I would probably have hired that out. Kudos to you for doing it yourself though:)
I guess guys like Best Buy figure there's a handful of lazy people like myself who eventually get tired of digging around in boxes for hours hunting down an old cable you swore you had at one point in time, getting distracted even further as you scrounge up and discover old 5-1/4 floppies and a Hayes baud modem with rubber ear muffles in mystery box number 23. I don't know why I cling on to this crap, but Best Buy knows me better than myself I guess.
This paragraph had me rolling on the floor in my office. You'd get some mod points if I had them and hadn't already posted here.
The last time I went digging though my mystery boxes I found an old USR Courier Modem (those damn things cost $200 in the day!), a bunch of Cisco serial cables, four V.35 cables (WTF am I gonna do with them?), old Kingston 10Mbit hubs with METAL CASES (remember those?) and AUI ports, old ISA NICs with thinnet ports (ya never know, right?), two AT keyboards, about two dozen USB->PS/2 adapters, blah blah blah. By the time I was done looking at all of this I had forgotten what I was looking for;)
So yeah, I guess I understand where you are coming from. But I'm still going to ask you to turn in your Geek card. The true Geek probably would have stolen the required USB cable from work if they couldn't find it in the mystery boxes at home;) After all, there's DOZENS of those things lying around the office.... nobody is going to notice if this one here goes missing...;)
It's not really honest but most of friends in IT (myself included) rarely pay for anything related to computers for themselves. It's amazing what you can build out of second-hand shit at the office that's going away and spare parts lying on benches. Hell, at the end of the day the company probably saves money on disposal costs;) At least that's what I tell myself so I can sleep at night.....:P
Again, how do you invade a country and conquer them if every single citizen is shooting at you? Please explain this to me.
Partisan warfare only works if your enemy is restrained in how he can react for whatever reason (domestic political pressure, international laws, etc). It does not work if he can take the gloves off and do whatever it takes to defeat you. Go read about the Warsaw Uprising. Armed resistance by the population to an invading state like Nazi Germany is not going to work without outside support from friendly nations. It does work against states like the US or Russia, who are constrained in how they can react to any insurgency for whatever reason.
My point being that history doesn't back up your assumption that Germany couldn't have conquered Switzerland. The various resistance movements to Germany did not end the war. It's debatable as to whether or not they even shortened it, but regardless of that, they would NOT have been effective if the Allies stopped fighting Germany.
So it's OK to steal other nation's resources? Is that really what you're saying, because it sure sounds like it.
Oh c'mon! I'm pointing out how the World works based on a study of history. I'm not advocating for or against an interventionist foreign policy. I don't see what the point is in trying to put words in my mouth.
And last time I checked, defenders usually had a big strategic advantage over attackers because they know their own territory much better than any invader.
How well did that work out for France again? No army is going to want to fight a war on it's own territory. The first objective of any nation that shares a land border with hostile states is to remove the fighting from their soil and take it to the enemy. The extreme example of this is the preemptive Israeli attack that started the Six Day War.
I still maintain that a strong economy can be maintained with a strong defensive military, without ever engaging in any foreign wars.
I'm sure it can. But historically speaking that's not how it works. Economic power invariably brings military power which is invariably used to retain the economic power. In fact I'm enough of a cynic to say that the reason we haven't had any major wars over resources since WW2 isn't because of some awakening of humanity -- it's more because of nuclear weapons and mutually assured destruction making war too horrible to contemplate.
I seriously doubt it. I see way too much produce on the supermarket shelves from other countries
And what's your point again? I see a lot on supermarket shelves from other countries. That doesn't mean we aren't self-sufficient in food though. Cut off food imports and we probably won't have as much (any?) fresh produce in the winter months -- but the United States would still produce enough calories to feed it's population. Consider the amount of grain that we export. Consider the various Government programs, that in some extreme cases even encourage farmers not to grow stuff because the large surplus would depress prices and drive family farmers out of business.
I worry about the United States being self-sufficient in many areas but food production is not one of them.
And the US has little to brag about with spaceflight anyway, since it was the Germans that invented and developed it all for us.
It's a huge leap from the V-2 to the Saturn V. Yes, we got quite a few German engineers working for us. But it was American companies that built the spacecraft. And Americans worked on every single project.
I don't see the Italians bragging about how great they were in Caesar's time, so why do Americans persist in bragging abou
Who the hell pays $30 for a USB cable? I've got a drawer full of them that I've gotten free with various pieces of equipment over the years. They should be at most $5 and even that is high. I suppose these are the same morons who pay $60 for an HDMI cable when you can buy it on Amazon for $2.
Who the hell buys ANY cable from a retailer like Best Buy or Circuit City? Want something worse then USB? Consider Cat5. I love seeing a 25 foot patch cord thats going for anywhere from $25-$40. $1/foot to $1.6/foot. WTF is that? I can buy a thousand feet of the shit for around $80 ($0.08/foot). Yeah, they should get some mark-up for them, but that much?
Wanna "make friends" at a place like Best Buy or Circuit City? Wait till you see Grandma about to buy one of those cables and is being pounced on by the salesguy -- then tell her about the twenty other options for getting that cable for next to nothing. It's worth it just to see the look on the sales persons face. Wonder if they get commissions for ripping people of^W^W^Wselling those cables?
There are some things missing... but this is one thing they did right. You no longer have to edit the registry to disable autoplay.
That's a good thing but I still fail to see any advantage to removing the ability to hold down shift to disable it for one time. Maybe I want autoplay enabled most of the time but want an easy way to disable it THIS time without having to go into a control panel to do it.
Did they also remove the ability to hold down shift while deleting a file to bypass the recycling bin and delete it directly? That's another handy shortcut I use fairly often...
I don't know if I buy that as the whole story. It's been commercialized forever, yet it still managed to break the story about Watergate. It still managed to challanage Senator McCarthy. Not anymore it seems....
I'll probably raise a few eyebrows by saying this, but I'm still a fan of the network nightly news programs. They seem to be losing a lot of popularity in the youtube age but I still think there's something to be said for having only half an hour to fill and focusing on a handful of important stories.
I think the "rush to get the story" is magnified to such a degree with the 24 hour news networks that the "herd" tends to run around in circles trying to outdo itself with coverage of fairly mundane stories, i.e: the Paris Hilton/Anna Nicole Smith garbage. If one network makes a big deal out of something (Howard Dean's scream comes to mind) the others are going to make a big deal out of it regardless of it being newsworthy just so they don't "miss the story".
Any fan of the Daily Show has seen the montages of news clips of the talking heads who have no clue of the subject at hand. The vast majority of said clips seem to come from CNN/Fox News/MSNBC and the various morning shows on the networks. Maybe those shows and networks used to stand for something (CNN back in the Ted Turner days) but they don't seem to anymore. Hell, with few exceptions it almost seems like a gentleman's club exists between reporters and Government officials. Hell they even have an annual dinner together.
In any case, I find myself listening a lot to NPR podcasts on my cell (+1-650-523-6819 for a 5 minute clip updated every hour). There is also a full podcast of NBC Nightly News @ +1-415-376-7247, which is usually available within a few hours of the show. That's the best of what the current "mainstream" media offers, IMHO. Past that it comes down to knowing what to find on the web (NPR's site being my favorite) and which foreign news sources are reliable. The Newshour With Jim Lehrer also does a fairly decent summary at the start of their broadcast (if you can catch it or tivo it).
I agree with most everything you said. Except that part where your liberal bias was showing! Cover that up now and then
If 'liberal bias' == 'wants a free and independent press' then guilty as charged. Try as I might, I couldn't locate any examples of prominent conservative media personalities that support the principle of the free press.
I think the whole point of TFA is that the news has a great impact for just about any part of our life. (how's that for vague!)
Hey I'm all about the news. My childhood heroes weren't astronauts or generals. They were journalists. The free press is our first line of defense against everything from abusive Government officials/policies to corporations poisoning our natural resources. I can think of few things more important then ensuring an independent media, beholden to nobody (Government OR Corporate) with a mandate to inform the public.
That said, I've grown extremely weary of the 24 hour news cycle. Anchors that talk to each other so they can make the story they've already run ten times sound fresh. "Experts" with agendas. Shows like Crossfire that boil the most complex of issues down into two extremist points of view and call it "debate".... over here on my left I have "aging hippie liberal douche" while over here on the right I have "pissed off white trash redneck conservative".
All of the above annoys me. But I get downright pissed off when I think of the priorities of the 24 hour news cycle. Like endless coverage of the court battles related to Anna Nicole Smith. Or the fucking aerial coverage of Paris Hilton reporting to jail. They have twenty four hours to fill and waste it on this garbage instead of covering the war? What the fuck is that?
A free and independent press is essential to the health of a functioning democracy. It serves to inform the voting public on matters relevant to its well-being. Why they've stopped doing that is a mystery. I mean, 300 camera crews outside a courthouse to see what Kobe Bryant is wearing when the judge sets his hearing date, while false information used to send our country to war goes unchecked? What the fuck happened? These spineless cowards in the press have finally gone too far. They have violated a trust. "Was the president successful in convincing the country?" Who gives a shit? Why not tell us if what he said was true?
I disagree with you --- you wouldn't need to run business software with the users set up as admin / power user if the damn companies that made the business software had programmers that new what the hell they were doing --- THEY are the ones at fault here
Why do you "disagree" with me? With this one specific issue (software needs admin rights) I did agree that it's a problem and not the fault of MS. I was only pointing out that it's also a problem with XP.
or at the very least your business should move away from their software or fire the admins that choose to implement it
Umm, have you ever worked IT in the business world? Sometimes you can't move away from the software. I worked for an Insurance Agency once upon a time. We were barely able to get our management system (hint: there's only two of them on the market, both with their drawbacks, so changing isn't really an option) working without the users having admin/power user rights.
We were never able to get all of the third-party crap that we needed running without them. Every single insurance company that we worked with would invariably design their own software (rating software, illustration software, proposal software, etc) that we HAD to use. The "choice" was use the software or don't write business with that company. When said company offers the cheapest rates for your customers the IT department's objections are going to be overruled.
Would you rather go Microsoft lock you into hardware and force you to upgrade your ENTIRE system when you decide you want a new feature / better hardware components?
"New feature"? You show me a single new feature in Vista that's justification for the upgrade. Microsoft didn't give two shits about the customer when they designed that piece of shit. If they did then they would have worried more about what the customer wants and less about what's in the best interests of the media companies. Half the new "features" in Vista exist to take control away from the end-user.
Hell, they've removed useful features from the Operating System. My favorite example is the removal of the ability to disable autoplay by holding down shift. WTF was the rationalization for that I wonder? It wouldn't have anything to do with this would it?
They were quite ready for an invasion. Invading the Swiss would have caused huge losses for the Germans
"Quite ready for an invasion" does not translate into being able to stop one. Given that neither Britain nor France (the world superpowers at the time) could stop Germany I find it unlikely that the Swiss could have. They would have inflicted losses, but it's a toss up as to whether or not they'd be "huge" losses. I'd point out that the Germans managed to conquer mainland Greece (another mountainous country) with about 5,000 casualties (out of a force of almost 700,000) in spite of British intervention.
What, you think that somehow because a country is big that it must be involved in world affairs?
Yes, in this day and age it does mean that. No industrialized nation can sever itself from the rest of the World. It needs to trade with other nations and have access to resources. Even large nations like the United States or Russia can't obtain all of their resources internally. The obvious example to make (in the case of the US) is energy.
what need do you have for offensive capability but to invade them? Just stay at home, keep yourself well-armed and prepared to defend yourself
Because it's better to fight a war on the soil of your enemy then it is to fight it on yours. And I would think that any student of history would realize that sitting around and waiting to be attacked is not a viable defense strategy. Ever heard the expression that the best defense is a good offense?
You run around and bully other countries into doing your bidding so you can reap economic benefits (at least your ruling class can) while screwing the other countries' people. It worked for Rome... for a while.
You don't even have to look at Rome. Here is a more recent example. A nation with a strong economy can afford a strong military. A nation with a strong military can use it to maintain the economic status quo, oftentimes without firing a shot (see gunboat diplomacy). One day we might be knocked off our pedestal. But we'll still be around and relevant. The UK didn't disappear after the Empire went away. I'm not too worried about the United States going anywhere or losing our way of life, even if China does become a global superpower.
In any case, that's how the World works. It would be better if it didn't work that way but it does. And some of the people who complain the loudest should look at the histories of their own country before they condemn the United States.
This is absolutely correct. Just like we, as a large country, should be self-sufficient in many other ways (energy, food) though we currently aren't
Umm, the United States isn't self sufficient in food?
we should also be self-sufficient for space launch capability. In fact, it's downright pathetic that we're second-place to Russia, an outright 3rd-world country with a terrible economy and serious political problems, in something as advanced and important as spaceflight, and we're about to become 3rd-place to China, which just a couple decades ago was a 3rd-world agricultural economy
I don't see us as being 3rd-place next to China, and the problem isn't being self-sufficient in launch capability. We already are. The problem is retaining our ability for manned spaceflight. We'll still have launch capability. And 3rd place to China? I don't see that happening anytime soon. They are still using modified Russian technology as I recall.
We Americans aren't just lazy, we're incompetent.
I think you have that reversed. We are lazy. We do like our creature comforts. When confronted with an actual or perceiv
No, I dont see the point since you are retaining your launch capability
We have another vehicle for human space flight besides the shuttle?
when an alternative is already available until NASA
An alternative that relies on the goodwill of a nation with whom we've had disagreements lately. What happens if that relationship sours (for whatever reason)?
It seems like every single time that a story about the shuttle comes around people around here waste no time in trashing it. Yes, the goals of the shuttle program (cheap and reusable) didn't exactly work out as planned. Yes, two disasters out of 120 missions don't exactly fill me with confidence. Yes, the ISS has become a money pit. In spite of all that though I would think that people around here would still support the program.
I don't want them to retire the shuttle fleet until a replacement is ready. I'd like to see them fly it more. Build out all the scientific modules on the ISS. Fly some more science missions like Columbia was on. Fly another mission to Hubble and keep it going past the 2013 retirement date. Are there risks? Sure. Would that stop you from going if you have the chance?
It "works" for Switzerland because they are a landlocked mountainous country with little natural resources surrounded by friendly neighbors. Switzerland came dangerously close to being invaded by Nazi Germany during WW2 and probably would have been (sooner or later) if Barbarossa hadn't turned out so badly.
The Swiss model isn't going to work for nations like Russia or the United States (too big, too much economic clout, too involved in World affairs). It isn't going to work for nations with unfriendly neighbors (Israel, Pakistan, India, Taiwan). It isn't going to work for nations located on natural invasion routes between stronger powers (Poland, the Low Countries, etc).
but keeping a bunch of decrepit shuttles just for the sake of not being all chummy with Russia is sad
It's not about "not being chummy" with Russia. It's about retaining a native space launch capability and not relying on other nations to do it for us. As a random example: Why the hell is Europe deploying Galileo? Shouldn't they just rely on GPS and the United States? Are they trying to "not be chummy" with us?
Poor, cheap, no-nothing 3rd party developers that can't figure out how to write a program that doesn't run as admin / root are the biggest problem with Vista
Uhh, no, that's not the "biggest" problem with Vista. To be fair it is a problem with both Vista AND XP (try running all your users as lusers without at least admin/power user rights on their machines in the business world using Windows -- hint: doesn't usually work if you use any non MS software) but it's not the "biggest" problem with Vista.
How is it the fault of 3rd party developers that Vista isn't stable? How is it the fault of 3rd party developers that Vista uses more system resources when idle then my XP workstation does while running 10-12 apps during a typical workday? Explain to me how KDE's memory usage (at idle) gets lower with each new release yet Windows gets higher and higher.
No, Vista sucks quite well enough without any "help" from 3rd party developers.
I would love if 2.4Ghz devices could simply cooperate together.
In theory they should. Wi-Fi is pretty resistant to other nearby wi-fi networks, even those on the same channel. Typically the most that happens is you lose some throughput, but even at that most people wouldn't notice, because most people aren't running their wi-fi networks at 100% of capacity 24/7. Bluetooth can handle lots of other bluetooth devices nearby because the frequency hopping means that they aren't likely to be on the same channel at the same time.
The problem comes when you have devices using different air interfaces. Bluetooth and wi-fi is the classical example. Bluetooth hops through all of the 2.4 ISM band. Wi-Fi uses a large slice (upwards of 33%) of that band. The Wi-Fi network will likely see bluetooth as background noise and ignore it -- but bluetooth is going to wind up hopping onto channels used by the wi-fi network roughly 1/3 of the time -- and if that wi-fi network is busy you WILL have problems with your bluetooth devices.
FHSS devices co-exist very nicely with each other. Frequency hopping tends to randomize the effects of interference AND make it less likely. DSSS devices deal with interference fairly well and will usually co-exist with each other. They don't co-exist very well with FHSS devices though. The DSSS device is going to see random bursts of interference but probably won't be adversely affected (said interference is only occuring on PART of the DSSS transmission). The FHSS device is another story though -- some of it's hops will find the entire channel being used by the DSSS device.
Ideally the FCC would mandate that you can only use FHSS devices in this band and DSSS devices in that band and maybe even have another unlicensed band set aside for good ole analog devices (baby monitors, cordless phones, etc). In practice they opted not to do this.... so we get to deal with the interference and try to work around it. The bottom line is that in some areas with a heavy concentration of wi-fi networks you'll find your FHSS devices (i.e: bluetooth) to be useless.
I graduated from a small rural high school with about 600 students in the year 2000. We had an entire IT staff. Microwave data links with other schools in the region. A high speed connection to the internet (I seem to recall it being in the 40Mbps range). We had a lab full of SGI and high-end Apple computers. Strangely enough, the PCs, the ones that everyone used, were nothing to phone home about.
As much as I'd love to play with all that hardware it seems like a real waste of money when most of our schools have more pressing concerns (like class size, old textbooks, etc). Then again, I probably shouldn't be too quick to judge, because maybe they had a grant for all that iron? If that came out of general funds though I'd say that they have some priorities mixed up.....
I didn't say that the signal wasn't detectable only that it didn't (at least shouldn't) cause interference that made another RF device inoperable
An idle wi-fi network doesn't make the cordless phone inoperable (though hearing the clicks every time the wi-fi network beacons is annoying), but a network running some decent traffic load will render the phone next to useless.
but such as the life of using an FCC part 15 device in the ISM band...
Indeed. I'd like to see the FCC open up more unlicensed bands but limit each band to a certain type of device -- i.e: this band for DSSS devices, this band for FHSS devices, etc, etc. Most of the interference with 2.4Ghz seems to be related to devices that use different types of air interfaces. For the most part those using the same interface co-exist without issue.
I use an Intel Pro Wireless 802.11g device, and I've never run into these problems, at least on Linux
*shrug*, I've run into those problems all the time at the office, using Linksys WAP54G APs and Windows XP SP2 on the clients. Disabling the power saving "features" works with most of them, but there's a few devices that we have that just refuse to work nicely with 802.11g. They work just fine with 802.11b so that's the solution I've used, since my company is broke and can't replace the devices.
As for the speed of the connection, there are many cable ISPs which promote 9mbps in the US. Plus, lots of people get their internet from their college, which means they could have pretty fat pipes connected to that access point.
Cry me a river cuz I still have no sympathy;) Either live with the "limit" of 5.5mbps on your wireless devices (plugging them directly in if you need to do a big ass download) or buy new APs/access cards until you find a pair that works properly. Given the choice between being limited to 5.5mbps or having to reset my device every five minutes I'll take the limit any day.....
The users at my office didn't even notice when I made the change. And quite a few of them work in real time off our fileserver. That's the real bottleneck for them, since our net connection is only 1.5mbps.
the choke point is the way the bandwidth slowly atrophies and then I have to reconnect every five minutes or so
Try locking your access point to 802.11b-only mode and see what that does.
I've noticed the exact same problem you describe with a lot of 802.11g chipsets (Intel Pro/Wireless being the worst offender in my experience). Watching the devices they seem to switch speed rates constantly up and down for no obvious reason. Every single time a rate change happens the network communications stop for at least a few seconds. Eventually they just stop communicating altogether until the client is reset.
Once locked to 802.11b all of the devices remain connected at 11mbps. This should be a viable solution for you if you only need wi-fi to connect to the internet. 802.11b should provide at least 5.5mbps of usable bandwidth for TCP and upwards of 7mbps for UDP. If your internet connection is faster then that then I don't have a lot of sympathy for you, cuz mine isn't;) If you need faster wireless (i.e: LAN file transfers) then you might need to look at finding different client cards or access points until you get a pair that communicates reliably.
The other thing I've noticed is that some of the Intel Chipsets try to implement a proprietary power saving scheme that causes issues with a lot of APs. You can usually disable this feature, though the specifics of how to do so would depend on which OS and drivers you are using.
That's what I meant when I said "plays nicely". I didn't feel like going into technical detail. Apparently, WiFi and the 360 coexist as well. The article notes it smothers Bluetooth. (I read the article over the weekend, and crossed my memory of it).
Bluetooth is a lot less resistant to interference then people seem to think. Bluetooth takes all of the 2.4Ghz ISM band, divides it up into 79 channels that are 1mhz wide and then changes channels rapidly (upwards of 1,600 times per second) while in operation. From 1.2 onwards it will remove channels that are heavily used by other devices from it's hopping sequence.
In theory this makes it pretty resistant to interference. In practice spread-spectrum devices (i.e: wi-fi access points) take up large slices of the available spectrum. The access point probably won't notice the bluetooth device (at any one time the bluetooth device is only transmitting on a small slice of the frequency used by the AP) but the bluetooth device will almost certainly notice the access point if the WLAN has a decent amount of traffic on it.
In my personal observations I've noticed that there seems to be a lead time before my bluetooth headset will notice the wi-fi network and stop using those channels. Until it does I'll hear random clicks and pops in the audio. I suspect that people using Bluetooth for digital stuff (i.e: game controllers) probably never notice -- but it's very annoying when trying to use bluetooth for audio. At the office (with tons of wi-fi networks on every available channel) it's damn near useless. At home it's only annoying.
It would be nice to see one unlicensed band set aside for devices that use frequency hopping and another set aside for those that use direct sequence spread spectrum. Frequency hopping is a great idea to share unlicensed bands but it doesn't cope very well when anywhere from 1/3 to 100% of the available frequency space is being used by DSSS devices.....
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Well, you are assuming that any of the artists currently signed to a RIAA label have a choice in the matter. Aren't most of those contracts long term? I recall reading that Radiohead had wanted to try direct sales for awhile but had to wait until their recording deal expired.
And in any case I don't see how that disproves my statement that not all RIAA music sucks and that avoiding it entirely probably isn't an option for most music lovers.
Ya know, I hear this theme every single time there is a story related to the recording industry/file sharing/copyright/etc. RIAA music sucks! It's all pop crap! Listen to indie artists!
Not all RIAA music is Justin Timberlake-equese crap. I happen to mostly listen to modern/hard rock. Quite a few of the bands that I like (Nickelback) are signed to RIAA members. In fact I'm hard pressed to think of a genre of music that doesn't have at least one or two prominent bands/artists signed to RIAA members.
Point being that it's kind of stupid to say that all RIAA music sucks just because we find their business practices abhorrent and unethical. I do my best to avoid giving RIAA money (I never buy CDs or directly pay for music) but they doubtless still make some off me (Pandora pays them royalties). I hope that more artists follow a direct to the customer model (Radiohead is giving it a try) and I think that overtime the big labels will become less relevant. In the meantime though I'm not going to avoid music that I like.
I'd go to a local electronics store.
Seriously. Screw Wally World. Haven't been in there in over three years. Putting aside the issues I have with their business practices and politics, it's just a PITA to go to Wal-Mart. It's packed full of people to the point that you wind up parking out in bum-fuck land over 200 meters from the doors and stand in line waiting to check out for at least 10-15 minutes even if you only have one item.
There's also the quality of people that shop at Wally World. I love seeing the store manager have to come out to explain to a customer why she can't use her WIC card to buy beer..... Or the quality of the employees -- watched a cashier ignore a customer for the better part of two minutes while she yelled at her boyfriend on her cell phone. All true Wally World stories that I've personally seen -- and the reason why I'd never stop there again even if they changed their business practices and politics.
I heard that Jack Bauer needed that video card so that Chloe could use one of the chips to break into the circa 1991 plot devic^W^Wnuclear power station control console and stop the nationwide meltdown of our nuclear power plants!
I bet your glad he held onto that video card now :P
I agree. If you define "press" as "wholly owned subsidiary of News Corporation"
O'Reilly is happy to have people on who disagree with himHe's also quite happy to cut their mics if they disagree with him. And he's a lying asshole. Minor points though ;)
I wouldn't have any worries doing a gas appliance install. Ditto for electricity. I re-did all of the wiring for a friend looking to sell (the old stuff was cloth covered!). I've also installed a gas clothes drier.
I probably wouldn't have been brave enough to tackle the hot water heater though. Plumbing is a bitch and it's not something that's easy to learn (in my experience). I would probably have hired that out. Kudos to you for doing it yourself though :)
This paragraph had me rolling on the floor in my office. You'd get some mod points if I had them and hadn't already posted here.
The last time I went digging though my mystery boxes I found an old USR Courier Modem (those damn things cost $200 in the day!), a bunch of Cisco serial cables, four V.35 cables (WTF am I gonna do with them?), old Kingston 10Mbit hubs with METAL CASES (remember those?) and AUI ports, old ISA NICs with thinnet ports (ya never know, right?), two AT keyboards, about two dozen USB->PS/2 adapters, blah blah blah. By the time I was done looking at all of this I had forgotten what I was looking for ;)
So yeah, I guess I understand where you are coming from. But I'm still going to ask you to turn in your Geek card. The true Geek probably would have stolen the required USB cable from work if they couldn't find it in the mystery boxes at home ;) After all, there's DOZENS of those things lying around the office.... nobody is going to notice if this one here goes missing... ;)
It's not really honest but most of friends in IT (myself included) rarely pay for anything related to computers for themselves. It's amazing what you can build out of second-hand shit at the office that's going away and spare parts lying on benches. Hell, at the end of the day the company probably saves money on disposal costs ;) At least that's what I tell myself so I can sleep at night..... :P
Again, how do you invade a country and conquer them if every single citizen is shooting at you? Please explain this to me.
Partisan warfare only works if your enemy is restrained in how he can react for whatever reason (domestic political pressure, international laws, etc). It does not work if he can take the gloves off and do whatever it takes to defeat you. Go read about the Warsaw Uprising. Armed resistance by the population to an invading state like Nazi Germany is not going to work without outside support from friendly nations. It does work against states like the US or Russia, who are constrained in how they can react to any insurgency for whatever reason.
My point being that history doesn't back up your assumption that Germany couldn't have conquered Switzerland. The various resistance movements to Germany did not end the war. It's debatable as to whether or not they even shortened it, but regardless of that, they would NOT have been effective if the Allies stopped fighting Germany.
So it's OK to steal other nation's resources? Is that really what you're saying, because it sure sounds like it.
Oh c'mon! I'm pointing out how the World works based on a study of history. I'm not advocating for or against an interventionist foreign policy. I don't see what the point is in trying to put words in my mouth.
And last time I checked, defenders usually had a big strategic advantage over attackers because they know their own territory much better than any invader.
How well did that work out for France again? No army is going to want to fight a war on it's own territory. The first objective of any nation that shares a land border with hostile states is to remove the fighting from their soil and take it to the enemy. The extreme example of this is the preemptive Israeli attack that started the Six Day War.
I still maintain that a strong economy can be maintained with a strong defensive military, without ever engaging in any foreign wars.
I'm sure it can. But historically speaking that's not how it works. Economic power invariably brings military power which is invariably used to retain the economic power. In fact I'm enough of a cynic to say that the reason we haven't had any major wars over resources since WW2 isn't because of some awakening of humanity -- it's more because of nuclear weapons and mutually assured destruction making war too horrible to contemplate.
I seriously doubt it. I see way too much produce on the supermarket shelves from other countries
And what's your point again? I see a lot on supermarket shelves from other countries. That doesn't mean we aren't self-sufficient in food though. Cut off food imports and we probably won't have as much (any?) fresh produce in the winter months -- but the United States would still produce enough calories to feed it's population. Consider the amount of grain that we export. Consider the various Government programs, that in some extreme cases even encourage farmers not to grow stuff because the large surplus would depress prices and drive family farmers out of business.
I worry about the United States being self-sufficient in many areas but food production is not one of them.
And the US has little to brag about with spaceflight anyway, since it was the Germans that invented and developed it all for us.
It's a huge leap from the V-2 to the Saturn V. Yes, we got quite a few German engineers working for us. But it was American companies that built the spacecraft. And Americans worked on every single project.
I don't see the Italians bragging about how great they were in Caesar's time, so why do Americans persist in bragging abou
Who the hell buys ANY cable from a retailer like Best Buy or Circuit City? Want something worse then USB? Consider Cat5. I love seeing a 25 foot patch cord thats going for anywhere from $25-$40. $1/foot to $1.6/foot. WTF is that? I can buy a thousand feet of the shit for around $80 ($0.08/foot). Yeah, they should get some mark-up for them, but that much?
Wanna "make friends" at a place like Best Buy or Circuit City? Wait till you see Grandma about to buy one of those cables and is being pounced on by the salesguy -- then tell her about the twenty other options for getting that cable for next to nothing. It's worth it just to see the look on the sales persons face. Wonder if they get commissions for ripping people of^W^W^Wselling those cables?
That's a good thing but I still fail to see any advantage to removing the ability to hold down shift to disable it for one time. Maybe I want autoplay enabled most of the time but want an easy way to disable it THIS time without having to go into a control panel to do it.
Did they also remove the ability to hold down shift while deleting a file to bypass the recycling bin and delete it directly? That's another handy shortcut I use fairly often...
I don't know if I buy that as the whole story. It's been commercialized forever, yet it still managed to break the story about Watergate. It still managed to challanage Senator McCarthy. Not anymore it seems....
I'll probably raise a few eyebrows by saying this, but I'm still a fan of the network nightly news programs. They seem to be losing a lot of popularity in the youtube age but I still think there's something to be said for having only half an hour to fill and focusing on a handful of important stories.
I think the "rush to get the story" is magnified to such a degree with the 24 hour news networks that the "herd" tends to run around in circles trying to outdo itself with coverage of fairly mundane stories, i.e: the Paris Hilton/Anna Nicole Smith garbage. If one network makes a big deal out of something (Howard Dean's scream comes to mind) the others are going to make a big deal out of it regardless of it being newsworthy just so they don't "miss the story".
Any fan of the Daily Show has seen the montages of news clips of the talking heads who have no clue of the subject at hand. The vast majority of said clips seem to come from CNN/Fox News/MSNBC and the various morning shows on the networks. Maybe those shows and networks used to stand for something (CNN back in the Ted Turner days) but they don't seem to anymore. Hell, with few exceptions it almost seems like a gentleman's club exists between reporters and Government officials. Hell they even have an annual dinner together.
In any case, I find myself listening a lot to NPR podcasts on my cell (+1-650-523-6819 for a 5 minute clip updated every hour). There is also a full podcast of NBC Nightly News @ +1-415-376-7247, which is usually available within a few hours of the show. That's the best of what the current "mainstream" media offers, IMHO. Past that it comes down to knowing what to find on the web (NPR's site being my favorite) and which foreign news sources are reliable. The Newshour With Jim Lehrer also does a fairly decent summary at the start of their broadcast (if you can catch it or tivo it).
If 'liberal bias' == 'wants a free and independent press' then guilty as charged. Try as I might, I couldn't locate any examples of prominent conservative media personalities that support the principle of the free press.
don't give away everything on the first dateDon't you wish you could find out ;)
Hey I'm all about the news. My childhood heroes weren't astronauts or generals. They were journalists. The free press is our first line of defense against everything from abusive Government officials/policies to corporations poisoning our natural resources. I can think of few things more important then ensuring an independent media, beholden to nobody (Government OR Corporate) with a mandate to inform the public.
That said, I've grown extremely weary of the 24 hour news cycle. Anchors that talk to each other so they can make the story they've already run ten times sound fresh. "Experts" with agendas. Shows like Crossfire that boil the most complex of issues down into two extremist points of view and call it "debate".... over here on my left I have "aging hippie liberal douche" while over here on the right I have "pissed off white trash redneck conservative".
All of the above annoys me. But I get downright pissed off when I think of the priorities of the 24 hour news cycle. Like endless coverage of the court battles related to Anna Nicole Smith. Or the fucking aerial coverage of Paris Hilton reporting to jail. They have twenty four hours to fill and waste it on this garbage instead of covering the war? What the fuck is that?
To quote America (The Book):
A free and independent press is essential to the health of a functioning democracy. It serves to inform the voting public on matters relevant to its well-being. Why they've stopped doing that is a mystery. I mean, 300 camera crews outside a courthouse to see what Kobe Bryant is wearing when the judge sets his hearing date, while false information used to send our country to war goes unchecked? What the fuck happened? These spineless cowards in the press have finally gone too far. They have violated a trust. "Was the president successful in convincing the country?" Who gives a shit? Why not tell us if what he said was true?
Of course the 24 hour news cycle doesn't really have any impact on my chances of scoring that new job I want.......
The only difference is the number of people voting for you and the number of people you will be working for if you get the position.And the amount of damage you can do as an elected official....
Why do you "disagree" with me? With this one specific issue (software needs admin rights) I did agree that it's a problem and not the fault of MS. I was only pointing out that it's also a problem with XP.
or at the very least your business should move away from their software or fire the admins that choose to implement itUmm, have you ever worked IT in the business world? Sometimes you can't move away from the software. I worked for an Insurance Agency once upon a time. We were barely able to get our management system (hint: there's only two of them on the market, both with their drawbacks, so changing isn't really an option) working without the users having admin/power user rights.
We were never able to get all of the third-party crap that we needed running without them. Every single insurance company that we worked with would invariably design their own software (rating software, illustration software, proposal software, etc) that we HAD to use. The "choice" was use the software or don't write business with that company. When said company offers the cheapest rates for your customers the IT department's objections are going to be overruled.
Would you rather go Microsoft lock you into hardware and force you to upgrade your ENTIRE system when you decide you want a new feature / better hardware components?"New feature"? You show me a single new feature in Vista that's justification for the upgrade. Microsoft didn't give two shits about the customer when they designed that piece of shit. If they did then they would have worried more about what the customer wants and less about what's in the best interests of the media companies. Half the new "features" in Vista exist to take control away from the end-user.
Hell, they've removed useful features from the Operating System. My favorite example is the removal of the ability to disable autoplay by holding down shift. WTF was the rationalization for that I wonder? It wouldn't have anything to do with this would it?
They were quite ready for an invasion. Invading the Swiss would have caused huge losses for the Germans
"Quite ready for an invasion" does not translate into being able to stop one. Given that neither Britain nor France (the world superpowers at the time) could stop Germany I find it unlikely that the Swiss could have. They would have inflicted losses, but it's a toss up as to whether or not they'd be "huge" losses. I'd point out that the Germans managed to conquer mainland Greece (another mountainous country) with about 5,000 casualties (out of a force of almost 700,000) in spite of British intervention.
What, you think that somehow because a country is big that it must be involved in world affairs?
Yes, in this day and age it does mean that. No industrialized nation can sever itself from the rest of the World. It needs to trade with other nations and have access to resources. Even large nations like the United States or Russia can't obtain all of their resources internally. The obvious example to make (in the case of the US) is energy.
what need do you have for offensive capability but to invade them? Just stay at home, keep yourself well-armed and prepared to defend yourself
Because it's better to fight a war on the soil of your enemy then it is to fight it on yours. And I would think that any student of history would realize that sitting around and waiting to be attacked is not a viable defense strategy. Ever heard the expression that the best defense is a good offense?
You run around and bully other countries into doing your bidding so you can reap economic benefits (at least your ruling class can) while screwing the other countries' people. It worked for Rome... for a while.
You don't even have to look at Rome. Here is a more recent example. A nation with a strong economy can afford a strong military. A nation with a strong military can use it to maintain the economic status quo, oftentimes without firing a shot (see gunboat diplomacy). One day we might be knocked off our pedestal. But we'll still be around and relevant. The UK didn't disappear after the Empire went away. I'm not too worried about the United States going anywhere or losing our way of life, even if China does become a global superpower.
In any case, that's how the World works. It would be better if it didn't work that way but it does. And some of the people who complain the loudest should look at the histories of their own country before they condemn the United States.
This is absolutely correct. Just like we, as a large country, should be self-sufficient in many other ways (energy, food) though we currently aren't
Umm, the United States isn't self sufficient in food?
we should also be self-sufficient for space launch capability. In fact, it's downright pathetic that we're second-place to Russia, an outright 3rd-world country with a terrible economy and serious political problems, in something as advanced and important as spaceflight, and we're about to become 3rd-place to China, which just a couple decades ago was a 3rd-world agricultural economy
I don't see us as being 3rd-place next to China, and the problem isn't being self-sufficient in launch capability. We already are. The problem is retaining our ability for manned spaceflight. We'll still have launch capability. And 3rd place to China? I don't see that happening anytime soon. They are still using modified Russian technology as I recall.
We Americans aren't just lazy, we're incompetent.
I think you have that reversed. We are lazy. We do like our creature comforts. When confronted with an actual or perceiv
We have another vehicle for human space flight besides the shuttle?
when an alternative is already available until NASAAn alternative that relies on the goodwill of a nation with whom we've had disagreements lately. What happens if that relationship sours (for whatever reason)?
It seems like every single time that a story about the shuttle comes around people around here waste no time in trashing it. Yes, the goals of the shuttle program (cheap and reusable) didn't exactly work out as planned. Yes, two disasters out of 120 missions don't exactly fill me with confidence. Yes, the ISS has become a money pit. In spite of all that though I would think that people around here would still support the program.
I don't want them to retire the shuttle fleet until a replacement is ready. I'd like to see them fly it more. Build out all the scientific modules on the ISS. Fly some more science missions like Columbia was on. Fly another mission to Hubble and keep it going past the 2013 retirement date. Are there risks? Sure. Would that stop you from going if you have the chance?
It "works" for Switzerland because they are a landlocked mountainous country with little natural resources surrounded by friendly neighbors. Switzerland came dangerously close to being invaded by Nazi Germany during WW2 and probably would have been (sooner or later) if Barbarossa hadn't turned out so badly.
The Swiss model isn't going to work for nations like Russia or the United States (too big, too much economic clout, too involved in World affairs). It isn't going to work for nations with unfriendly neighbors (Israel, Pakistan, India, Taiwan). It isn't going to work for nations located on natural invasion routes between stronger powers (Poland, the Low Countries, etc).
but keeping a bunch of decrepit shuttles just for the sake of not being all chummy with Russia is sadIt's not about "not being chummy" with Russia. It's about retaining a native space launch capability and not relying on other nations to do it for us. As a random example: Why the hell is Europe deploying Galileo? Shouldn't they just rely on GPS and the United States? Are they trying to "not be chummy" with us?
See the point?
Uhh, no, that's not the "biggest" problem with Vista. To be fair it is a problem with both Vista AND XP (try running all your users as lusers without at least admin/power user rights on their machines in the business world using Windows -- hint: doesn't usually work if you use any non MS software) but it's not the "biggest" problem with Vista.
How is it the fault of 3rd party developers that Vista isn't stable? How is it the fault of 3rd party developers that Vista uses more system resources when idle then my XP workstation does while running 10-12 apps during a typical workday? Explain to me how KDE's memory usage (at idle) gets lower with each new release yet Windows gets higher and higher.
No, Vista sucks quite well enough without any "help" from 3rd party developers.
In theory they should. Wi-Fi is pretty resistant to other nearby wi-fi networks, even those on the same channel. Typically the most that happens is you lose some throughput, but even at that most people wouldn't notice, because most people aren't running their wi-fi networks at 100% of capacity 24/7. Bluetooth can handle lots of other bluetooth devices nearby because the frequency hopping means that they aren't likely to be on the same channel at the same time.
The problem comes when you have devices using different air interfaces. Bluetooth and wi-fi is the classical example. Bluetooth hops through all of the 2.4 ISM band. Wi-Fi uses a large slice (upwards of 33%) of that band. The Wi-Fi network will likely see bluetooth as background noise and ignore it -- but bluetooth is going to wind up hopping onto channels used by the wi-fi network roughly 1/3 of the time -- and if that wi-fi network is busy you WILL have problems with your bluetooth devices.
FHSS devices co-exist very nicely with each other. Frequency hopping tends to randomize the effects of interference AND make it less likely. DSSS devices deal with interference fairly well and will usually co-exist with each other. They don't co-exist very well with FHSS devices though. The DSSS device is going to see random bursts of interference but probably won't be adversely affected (said interference is only occuring on PART of the DSSS transmission). The FHSS device is another story though -- some of it's hops will find the entire channel being used by the DSSS device.
Ideally the FCC would mandate that you can only use FHSS devices in this band and DSSS devices in that band and maybe even have another unlicensed band set aside for good ole analog devices (baby monitors, cordless phones, etc). In practice they opted not to do this.... so we get to deal with the interference and try to work around it. The bottom line is that in some areas with a heavy concentration of wi-fi networks you'll find your FHSS devices (i.e: bluetooth) to be useless.
As much as I'd love to play with all that hardware it seems like a real waste of money when most of our schools have more pressing concerns (like class size, old textbooks, etc). Then again, I probably shouldn't be too quick to judge, because maybe they had a grant for all that iron? If that came out of general funds though I'd say that they have some priorities mixed up .....
An idle wi-fi network doesn't make the cordless phone inoperable (though hearing the clicks every time the wi-fi network beacons is annoying), but a network running some decent traffic load will render the phone next to useless.
but such as the life of using an FCC part 15 device in the ISM band...Indeed. I'd like to see the FCC open up more unlicensed bands but limit each band to a certain type of device -- i.e: this band for DSSS devices, this band for FHSS devices, etc, etc. Most of the interference with 2.4Ghz seems to be related to devices that use different types of air interfaces. For the most part those using the same interface co-exist without issue.
*shrug*, I've run into those problems all the time at the office, using Linksys WAP54G APs and Windows XP SP2 on the clients. Disabling the power saving "features" works with most of them, but there's a few devices that we have that just refuse to work nicely with 802.11g. They work just fine with 802.11b so that's the solution I've used, since my company is broke and can't replace the devices.
As for the speed of the connection, there are many cable ISPs which promote 9mbps in the US. Plus, lots of people get their internet from their college, which means they could have pretty fat pipes connected to that access point.Cry me a river cuz I still have no sympathy ;) Either live with the "limit" of 5.5mbps on your wireless devices (plugging them directly in if you need to do a big ass download) or buy new APs/access cards until you find a pair that works properly. Given the choice between being limited to 5.5mbps or having to reset my device every five minutes I'll take the limit any day.....
The users at my office didn't even notice when I made the change. And quite a few of them work in real time off our fileserver. That's the real bottleneck for them, since our net connection is only 1.5mbps.
Try locking your access point to 802.11b-only mode and see what that does.
I've noticed the exact same problem you describe with a lot of 802.11g chipsets (Intel Pro/Wireless being the worst offender in my experience). Watching the devices they seem to switch speed rates constantly up and down for no obvious reason. Every single time a rate change happens the network communications stop for at least a few seconds. Eventually they just stop communicating altogether until the client is reset.
Once locked to 802.11b all of the devices remain connected at 11mbps. This should be a viable solution for you if you only need wi-fi to connect to the internet. 802.11b should provide at least 5.5mbps of usable bandwidth for TCP and upwards of 7mbps for UDP. If your internet connection is faster then that then I don't have a lot of sympathy for you, cuz mine isn't ;) If you need faster wireless (i.e: LAN file transfers) then you might need to look at finding different client cards or access points until you get a pair that communicates reliably.
The other thing I've noticed is that some of the Intel Chipsets try to implement a proprietary power saving scheme that causes issues with a lot of APs. You can usually disable this feature, though the specifics of how to do so would depend on which OS and drivers you are using.
Bluetooth is a lot less resistant to interference then people seem to think. Bluetooth takes all of the 2.4Ghz ISM band, divides it up into 79 channels that are 1mhz wide and then changes channels rapidly (upwards of 1,600 times per second) while in operation. From 1.2 onwards it will remove channels that are heavily used by other devices from it's hopping sequence.
In theory this makes it pretty resistant to interference. In practice spread-spectrum devices (i.e: wi-fi access points) take up large slices of the available spectrum. The access point probably won't notice the bluetooth device (at any one time the bluetooth device is only transmitting on a small slice of the frequency used by the AP) but the bluetooth device will almost certainly notice the access point if the WLAN has a decent amount of traffic on it.
In my personal observations I've noticed that there seems to be a lead time before my bluetooth headset will notice the wi-fi network and stop using those channels. Until it does I'll hear random clicks and pops in the audio. I suspect that people using Bluetooth for digital stuff (i.e: game controllers) probably never notice -- but it's very annoying when trying to use bluetooth for audio. At the office (with tons of wi-fi networks on every available channel) it's damn near useless. At home it's only annoying.
It would be nice to see one unlicensed band set aside for devices that use frequency hopping and another set aside for those that use direct sequence spread spectrum. Frequency hopping is a great idea to share unlicensed bands but it doesn't cope very well when anywhere from 1/3 to 100% of the available frequency space is being used by DSSS devices.....