I'd be very surprised if all the cable companies shut off their analog cable systems when that's a chance to pick up customers who don't want to go digital yet.
If the converter boxes are really going to come down in price to the $50 range, basic cable would become more expensive in only two to three months time. Even if you have two or three TV's that need boxes that is still less than a year. Heck, if you have to pay for installation that is like one box right there.
But isn't there some effect caused by the shape of the ears that means they can actually hear in slightly better than stereo?
Absolutely, that is why you are able to differentiate between sounds that are ahead/behind and above/below you. I think I remember reading about some company working on sound drivers to mimic this effect with just a pair speakers or headphones.
Why would the bank e-mail you at all? E-mail is a notoriously unreliable method of communication. You don't know that it got to the right person, or anybody at all.
Almost all the financial accounts I have now offers "paperless" statements. It is not that far-fetched that they would also email "reminders" to perform "account maintenance"?
Why the terrible phraseology? You'd think the bank would employ someone fluent in the languages in which they communicate.
Not all of them are poorly written. I have seen quite a few convincing ones.
And when you get to the form, why aren't your details pre-filled-in, ready for you to edit? If they have genuinely lost your details, then how come they remembered your e-mail address?
They don't always claim that they lost your info, they may just want you to confirm something or other. They then take you to a fake replica of your banks login screen. You aren't giving your PIN to anyone over email you are just logging into your account at the trusty, old bank website (or so it would appear). Just having your username/password may be sufficient for the phisher to do damage without any additional info.
The real killer, however, is the fact that you received an e-mail purportedly from a bank where you don't even have an account. If that doesn't set alarm bells ringing, what will?
Well, duh. I don't think money being phished from non-existant accounts is a big problem though.
How can you call it real competition when the thing is being pushed, I mean, given for free? Doesn't this sound a bit like IE and every other market segment Microsoft crushes by baiting with free stuff?
The free beta version "expires" October 1, 2005. Someone may figure a way around that, but it suggests that MS probably does not intend to give away the release version.
While I don't mind cutting out the middleman, I think this stinks for the artist. Let the artists set up their own websites and accept a payment equivalent to their royalty.
If only that would work. I think that most downloaders are not as philosophically motivated as some of the crowd here claim to be, but rather just want free music. Why pay anything for something that you can get for free?
Let's break up the whole cartel, the RIAA, the radio stations and anything else that stands in the way of the freedom of musical expression, which ought to be covered in the 1st amendment.
Nobody is having their 1st amendment rights violated. If Joe Sixpack wants write a song and sing it on the street corner he is free to do it. He can even build his own club to perform in and buy his own radio station to play his songs 24/7. The existing radio stations, studios, and record labels are under no constitutional obligation to help him do so.
Too bad this new didn't come out sooner. With all the end of year frat parties that have probably been going on we could have nipped this kudzu problem in bud.
Or get a job in government. My father got a job with the state a few years back following retiring from the military after 25 years of service. He takes pleasure in the fact that now that his probationary period is over he can do just about whatever he wants, short of neglecting his duties, to annoy his boss and get away with it. He has groomed his old coot office persona to perfection.
Oddly he seems to get sent on a lot more overnight trips around the state than his coworkers. He pities his younger coworkers who are trying to start careers and thus have to kiss ass for promotions.
I'm not disagreeing with your statement. I'm just wondering out loud. Why does this stuff always have to come down to money?
Well for one thing, there is this little something that you may have heard of called greed. Besides that, everyone has to make a living somehow. Writing software for others is no more noble a pursuit than growing food for others, making clothes for others, cleaning public toilets for others, fixing other peoples cars, etc, and no one expects these services to be performed for free. Neglecting the whole IP issue, it is not unreasonable for someone to try to make a living off of writing software. It is kind of funny to think about how all those freely given man-hours of development help boost some CEO's multimillion dollar pay when he saves his company a bundle by switching to Linux.
My question is "What the hell happened?" Isn't technology supposed to move forward as time goes on?
It has, the problem is that consumers want bigger cars with more powerful engines. For example since we are talking Hondas, the Accord LX picked up 320lbs and 35hp between the 1990 and 2004 model years while going from an EPA mileage of 24/30 to 26/34. The Civic LX picked up 185lbs and 23hp while going from an EPA mileage of 33/37 to 32/38. Without technological improvements those mileage numbers would likey have gone down significantly with the extra weight.
Until gas prices go a little higher there are still going to be plenty of people who value "zoom-zoom" over saving a few bucks at the gas station and hence will choose the V6 over the four-banger. Also, with so many behemoths on the road I for one wouldn't feel very comfortable driving anything smaller than my Civic.
That's the force, but the thing you really want to know if you're talking about mileage is the power (energy per unit time), which goes as V^3.
But mileage is measured in miles per gallon, not hours per gallon. You need to divide your power measurement by the velocity to get this and thus you are back to V^2.
There must be about 25-50,000 juice bars in the U.S.
I think you have mistakenly extrapolated some small part of California to the rest of the country because there is no way there are even close to 25,000 juice bars in the U.S. Even the ubiquitous McDonalds only has about 13,000 restaurants nationwide.
That said even if there were only a few thousand juice bars to be sold to there still could be a profit to be made. A beefier, commercial version of the juicer would need to be produced and could probably sell for quite a bit more. Realistically you would probably want to sell/license the juicer to someone that specializes in manufacturing and marketing restaurant equipment.
I totally agree. There are tons of brands and products out there that are based on the idea that some people have more money than common sense. My mother-in-law's part of the family are firm believers in "you get what you pay for" to the extreme, regardless of any evidence that the no-name bargain brand is just as good as the more expensive product. These are the people that Monster Cables, Sharper Image, Niemann Marcus, Abercrombie and Fitch, etc. make there money off of.
Other than reading tons of reviews and hoping they are honest and uncensored, how can one judge the quality of items like computer memory?
Don't expect Dell to sell sub-$300 machines in the next decade unless they're absurdly cheap diskless thin clients.
Right now you can get a no-frills, bottom-of-the-line Dimension 2400 for $298 with 17" monitor and free printer. Without the monitor it's just $258. Granted it's during a "special" sale but when don't they have some kind of sale going on?
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I thought this was even more frightening:
NASA says it will draw on modern day satellites and global positioning systems to track the flying vehicles -- to prevent them from bumping into each other.
Bumping? I know marketing people like to downplay possible problems, but calling aircraft-to-aircraft collision "bumping" is both hilarious and scary.
Indeed, that bumping might result in an "unanticipated landing event" along with "corporeal dispersion".
Unfortunately these bumping events will be unavoidable as millions of slashdotters will have wrapped their flying cars in tinfoil to avoid government tracking.
A lunar eclipse is veiwed from the earth when the moon gets between the sun and the earth. From the moon, there are no lunar eclipses. I'm sure they've got "earth eclipses" (terra eclipses?), but they don't have lunar eclipses.
No, a lunar eclipse is when the shadow of the earth falls on the moon. A solar eclipse is when the shadow of the moon falls on the earth. So, what is viewed from the earth as a lunar eclipse would be seen from the moon as a solar eclipse, i.e. their view of the sun is obscured.
I don't think that is true most of the time. Maybe this would be possible in CS where you could ask the submitter for his code, derivations, etc. in order to confirm that everything works the way they claim. In many other fields though it would be prohibitively expensive and time consuming for a reviewer to actually go and reproduce another researchers work.
Most articles are simply read critically with an eye towards questions like: is this feasible, is the methodology sound, what if they tried this? After the paper is published other researchers will undoubtedly try to reproduce the results if the paper is of sufficient interest.
Now you have to approach each one with, "is this the real deal, or some bs-generated thing?"
If you were refereeing a paper and not at least asking that question you would have no business being a referee to begin with.
The paper in question was accepted as "non-reviewed" so obviously the reviewers did not look at it very closely. I would encourage the students to go through with their plan of giving a random talk though. I bet any future employers, postdoc supervisors, etc., who might be there will be thoroughly amused when these students make complete asses out of themselves.
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If the converter boxes are really going to come down in price to the $50 range, basic cable would become more expensive in only two to three months time. Even if you have two or three TV's that need boxes that is still less than a year. Heck, if you have to pay for installation that is like one box right there.
Absolutely, that is why you are able to differentiate between sounds that are ahead/behind and above/below you. I think I remember reading about some company working on sound drivers to mimic this effect with just a pair speakers or headphones.
But how many footballs fields is that?
And what does 1082 books equal measured in Libraries of Congress?
It's also fun to stuff some of your other junk mail in there as well.
Almost all the financial accounts I have now offers "paperless" statements. It is not that far-fetched that they would also email "reminders" to perform "account maintenance"?
Why the terrible phraseology? You'd think the bank would employ someone fluent in the languages in which they communicate.
Not all of them are poorly written. I have seen quite a few convincing ones.
And when you get to the form, why aren't your details pre-filled-in, ready for you to edit? If they have genuinely lost your details, then how come they remembered your e-mail address?
They don't always claim that they lost your info, they may just want you to confirm something or other. They then take you to a fake replica of your banks login screen. You aren't giving your PIN to anyone over email you are just logging into your account at the trusty, old bank website (or so it would appear). Just having your username/password may be sufficient for the phisher to do damage without any additional info.
The real killer, however, is the fact that you received an e-mail purportedly from a bank where you don't even have an account. If that doesn't set alarm bells ringing, what will?
Well, duh. I don't think money being phished from non-existant accounts is a big problem though.
The free beta version "expires" October 1, 2005. Someone may figure a way around that, but it suggests that MS probably does not intend to give away the release version.
If only that would work. I think that most downloaders are not as philosophically motivated as some of the crowd here claim to be, but rather just want free music. Why pay anything for something that you can get for free?
Let's break up the whole cartel, the RIAA, the radio stations and anything else that stands in the way of the freedom of musical expression, which ought to be covered in the 1st amendment.
Nobody is having their 1st amendment rights violated. If Joe Sixpack wants write a song and sing it on the street corner he is free to do it. He can even build his own club to perform in and buy his own radio station to play his songs 24/7. The existing radio stations, studios, and record labels are under no constitutional obligation to help him do so.
Sure just click on the link http://www.paypa1.com/ provided by the virus writer and enter your account information and password.
Too bad this new didn't come out sooner. With all the end of year frat parties that have probably been going on we could have nipped this kudzu problem in bud.
Oddly he seems to get sent on a lot more overnight trips around the state than his coworkers. He pities his younger coworkers who are trying to start careers and thus have to kiss ass for promotions.
I did that and got 2 more FPS playing counterstrike - WOOT!
Well for one thing, there is this little something that you may have heard of called greed. Besides that, everyone has to make a living somehow. Writing software for others is no more noble a pursuit than growing food for others, making clothes for others, cleaning public toilets for others, fixing other peoples cars, etc, and no one expects these services to be performed for free. Neglecting the whole IP issue, it is not unreasonable for someone to try to make a living off of writing software. It is kind of funny to think about how all those freely given man-hours of development help boost some CEO's multimillion dollar pay when he saves his company a bundle by switching to Linux.
It has, the problem is that consumers want bigger cars with more powerful engines. For example since we are talking Hondas, the Accord LX picked up 320lbs and 35hp between the 1990 and 2004 model years while going from an EPA mileage of 24/30 to 26/34. The Civic LX picked up 185lbs and 23hp while going from an EPA mileage of 33/37 to 32/38. Without technological improvements those mileage numbers would likey have gone down significantly with the extra weight.
Until gas prices go a little higher there are still going to be plenty of people who value "zoom-zoom" over saving a few bucks at the gas station and hence will choose the V6 over the four-banger. Also, with so many behemoths on the road I for one wouldn't feel very comfortable driving anything smaller than my Civic.
But mileage is measured in miles per gallon, not hours per gallon. You need to divide your power measurement by the velocity to get this and thus you are back to V^2.
On slashdot rejected ads are recycled as articles!
Oh, the irony...
I think you have mistakenly extrapolated some small part of California to the rest of the country because there is no way there are even close to 25,000 juice bars in the U.S. Even the ubiquitous McDonalds only has about 13,000 restaurants nationwide.
That said even if there were only a few thousand juice bars to be sold to there still could be a profit to be made. A beefier, commercial version of the juicer would need to be produced and could probably sell for quite a bit more. Realistically you would probably want to sell/license the juicer to someone that specializes in manufacturing and marketing restaurant equipment.
Other than reading tons of reviews and hoping they are honest and uncensored, how can one judge the quality of items like computer memory?
Right now you can get a no-frills, bottom-of-the-line Dimension 2400 for $298 with 17" monitor and free printer. Without the monitor it's just $258. Granted it's during a "special" sale but when don't they have some kind of sale going on?
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Indeed, that bumping might result in an "unanticipated landing event" along with "corporeal dispersion".
Unfortunately these bumping events will be unavoidable as millions of slashdotters will have wrapped their flying cars in tinfoil to avoid government tracking.
Where does the airspeed of an unladen swallow fit in there? Please include both African and European.
No, a lunar eclipse is when the shadow of the earth falls on the moon. A solar eclipse is when the shadow of the moon falls on the earth. So, what is viewed from the earth as a lunar eclipse would be seen from the moon as a solar eclipse, i.e. their view of the sun is obscured.
Most articles are simply read critically with an eye towards questions like: is this feasible, is the methodology sound, what if they tried this? After the paper is published other researchers will undoubtedly try to reproduce the results if the paper is of sufficient interest.
If you were refereeing a paper and not at least asking that question you would have no business being a referee to begin with.
The paper in question was accepted as "non-reviewed" so obviously the reviewers did not look at it very closely. I would encourage the students to go through with their plan of giving a random talk though. I bet any future employers, postdoc supervisors, etc., who might be there will be thoroughly amused when these students make complete asses out of themselves.