actually, the rip-off was that the politicians regulated the cost of local calling below the cost. AT&T had to make up the difference with long distance rates being higher. If it wasn't regulated, they would have had higher local rates and lower lang distance rates. AT&T was the best thing to happen to the phone system. We have worse Quality of Service now than we used to. And inovation has gone to hell due to the lower R&D in the telecoms (which AT&T did a hell of a lot of). It's thanks to them that your phone works when the power goes out (assuming your local bell kept those giant UPSs in the system instead of getting rid of them to save money). Even the DOJ didn't want to break them up, they just wanted to seperate them from Bell Labs and the long didstance company. Don't diss a company until you know their full history.
At the place where I work, most employees have an old P1-133 or so with minimal ram running Win2K. On bootup they are automatically terminal serviced into a server with multiple processors along with others. This works fine for most people in the building as they only use it for email, outlook, sufing, word and basic excel. Then there are those of us that need are own computer due to advanced excel, programming, graphics and other things (Or we need a laptop). Bottom line is, a lot of buisnesses are using old computers for this kind of thing and only those of us that need our own computer are getting newer ones. IT where I worked realized I needed my own when they gave me a call for the third week in a row asking why I was using 100% of one of the processors. (Aint programming fun?) Course, the fact that I was generating a lot of compile errors and running a program called A.exe (default program name in gcc) didn't hurt either.
you replace a car every five years? MY GOD MAN! In my family we replace them at most every ten! Except when they are either toataled. Not that there is much difference when we are done with them, the last 3 cars we have replaced had to be TOWED away.
A question I have is when a broadcaster decides to use their spectrum as four SD channels, is that choice somewhat permanent?
They can change it at just about any point in a program. SD and HD can be alternated very quickly and you can go from 1 to many channels just as quickly. It all depends on the program stream. As is, at PBS they routinely broadcast Prime Time in HD (as do most stations) and during non-prime time they broadcast 4 channels simultaneously.
DA Converters Cost $200, and only that much because the companies that make them right now don't see a reason to drop the price. Wait until the mandates deadline looms and it will drop cause other companies will start selling DA converters.
Actually, if you look at how DTV came about. It came from Broadcasters trying to keep the spectrum the have (and keep from getting interference from adjacent frequencies. They started touting HDTV so they could keep the full 6 Mhz of bandwidth they have without giving any of it up. Besides, since the rest of the 1st world is going to HDTV (Europe, Japan) how long do you think it would be before people in this country started saying "How come we don't have that?"
HDTV is defined as having at least twice the number of either Pixels or Lines as SDTV [720x480I] (I forget which). Not by deffinition is it 16:9. I have seen HDTV in 4:3. It still looks great.
In my experience digital TV pictures are actually worse quality than traditional broadcast TV. Because the entire image is MPEG-2 encoded, even a tiny bit of interference can cause the screen to freeze or display brightly coloured artifacts.
That is not a tiny ammount of interference. DTV uses almost 50% of its bandwidth for Forward Error Correction (FEC). It takes a lot to take the signal off the air unless you are near the boundaries or reception, which with analog would get you a pretty poor picture anyway. As for the artifacts? That has to do with the encoder, not the signal. Don't even compare this to VCD, I work around these pictures every day and can see how much higher quality they are than regular TVs.
The delay? They new that would happen from the begining. If you know about Iframes, remember that they have to wait till they recieve one till they can actually start showing a picture. A half second delay at most under the current way of broadcasting. And yes, I do mean a half second AT MOST, unless you have a poor quality decoder.
Upping the bandwidth would not change this. Changing the LongGOP of the MPEG structure would, but that would require more bandwidth to keep the same quality. As for quality? They can set it from 19.4Mbps to 0Mbps for the ammount of bandwidth they use for a signal. 19.4 is way above DVD quality so don't diss it. What was probably happening is that they were reducing the ammount of bandwidth dedicated to the subchannel you were watching to another channel. Most stations will only use 4 sub channels at most under the current scheme of things. 4 channels being the most number of Standard Deffinition [720x480I] that you can fit into 19.4Mbps under most circumstances and maintain quality.
So I don't necessarily have to invest in the stock market. I can invest the money in CD's (Certificates of Deposit) and Bonds and other things. But only talking about the stock market (and only one stock individulaly, much less one sector) is stupid. Over the long run, the Stock market is the best investment you can make, as long as you don't limit yourself to one sector or company, you should do well. just look at how far the S&P has come since it's conception.
Not effect, actual depth. Average depth of all but the Artic ocean is over two miles. The artic is "shallow" with an average depth of 3407' (http://mbgnet.mobot.org/salt/oceans/data.htm). Divers can only go down a few hundred at most, and require special training to do so. Off the continental shelf, the oceans drop to the average depth very quickly. Only special subs can go down that far and possibly nucular subs can survive that depth without getting crushed. But retrieval for anything except small items is almost impossible. The only large item i know of being retrieved was a whole russian sub retrieved using a very special ship the US built for the purpose during the cold war.
"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!"
"What Do You Care What Other People Think?"
Those are the two titles, so you don't have to look them up. They are an interesting read, if somewhat sad in parts due to the death of his first wife.
Well, the material would have to be diluted so it wasn't as pure. The opposite of enrichment. I think this might actually be what we do with the decomissioned nukes. Anyway, probably not very hard.
7 to 10 times the radiation is not that much. You get more rads getting an X-Ray, Mamogram, or walking out into the sun that you would from standing around this thing all day. Hell, the people in the surroundin area have probably picked up more radiation from their thorium smoke detectors and radon clock faces than from the nuke.
There using a real nuke, cause they want to make training as real as possible. They just take the detonator cap out so that the bomb can go nucular. The military has always done training with weapons like this. Even in combat training, they use real missles, they just don't launch them.
I would honestly like to see you try to retrieve some of those ones that are sitting at the bottom of an ocean. Several miles down. It aint easy retrievin anything from that far down. And before anyone says something about subs used to explore the titanic, that could only bring up small samples, not something this large.
The concern is that whoever recovers it now has his hands on well over a ton of weapons-grade uranium
Considering "Fat-Man" used 6.2 kg of plutonium, I highly doubt ANY nuke we have made would have anywhere near a ton of uranium in it. Even one as powerful as a couple megatons.
The Marianas trench would be (just about) deep enough for me not to care
Trust me when I say that most of the ocean floor is deep enough that once you get beyond the continental shelf, it would take a major government to retrieve anything from the ocean floor. Mainly cause that is over a mile down.
I lengthy discussion about the difference in our styles turned up that Indians are taught based on memorization, while Americans are taught based on problem solving.
Richard P. Feynman has two biographies. In one of them he talks about how in his time in Brazil, all but two of the students were essentially taught this way. Of the two that weren't, one was self-taught and the other wasn't taught in that country. So, it's not just India that is like that.
Learn how to Learn and how to Think, not how to memmorize and repeat what you are told.
The telephone has much military value. Hence why the germans had phone lines running to Normandy. They were more secure and reliable than radio during WWII (assuming the line wasn't cut).
An airplane inventer was being funded by the army. The wright brothers just succeded before he did.
As for the others? Navigation: British Nave and "The search for Longitude", GPS: US Military. Range: Bombers that could fly 5,000 miles in WWII and back were developed. Many things were developed with startup funding from the military or were funded to make them practical once it was shown it was possible.
It'd be easier to colonize Mars than set up space platforms. For one thing, we don't have to worry about artificial gravity. The Mars 0.6 (i think) will work well enough. The atmosphere reduces how hard it is to make sealed enclosures (some atmoshphere to help balance pressure is better than a vacuum). The atmosphere also helps some with heat. We can use the resources there to build stuff (once we get hte infrastructure in). The soil will help with planting and several other things. Space enclosures have the problem of if it aint there, you have to import it (out of earths gravity well) or do with out it. At least on Mars you have resources to make it. And before anyone says something about moving an asteroid into earth orbit for resources, think about what it would take. That might be an option at some point (one I would support) but for now Mars is easier.
Slashdot Mirror
actually, the rip-off was that the politicians regulated the cost of local calling below the cost. AT&T had to make up the difference with long distance rates being higher. If it wasn't regulated, they would have had higher local rates and lower lang distance rates. AT&T was the best thing to happen to the phone system. We have worse Quality of Service now than we used to. And inovation has gone to hell due to the lower R&D in the telecoms (which AT&T did a hell of a lot of). It's thanks to them that your phone works when the power goes out (assuming your local bell kept those giant UPSs in the system instead of getting rid of them to save money). Even the DOJ didn't want to break them up, they just wanted to seperate them from Bell Labs and the long didstance company. Don't diss a company until you know their full history.
At the place where I work, most employees have an old P1-133 or so with minimal ram running Win2K. On bootup they are automatically terminal serviced into a server with multiple processors along with others. This works fine for most people in the building as they only use it for email, outlook, sufing, word and basic excel. Then there are those of us that need are own computer due to advanced excel, programming, graphics and other things (Or we need a laptop). Bottom line is, a lot of buisnesses are using old computers for this kind of thing and only those of us that need our own computer are getting newer ones. IT where I worked realized I needed my own when they gave me a call for the third week in a row asking why I was using 100% of one of the processors. (Aint programming fun?) Course, the fact that I was generating a lot of compile errors and running a program called A.exe (default program name in gcc) didn't hurt either.
you replace a car every five years? MY GOD MAN! In my family we replace them at most every ten! Except when they are either toataled. Not that there is much difference when we are done with them, the last 3 cars we have replaced had to be TOWED away.
Actually, 4 SD (720x480I) Digital channels into the space of one analog.
A question I have is when a broadcaster decides to use their spectrum as four SD channels, is that choice somewhat permanent?
They can change it at just about any point in a program. SD and HD can be alternated very quickly and you can go from 1 to many channels just as quickly. It all depends on the program stream. As is, at PBS they routinely broadcast Prime Time in HD (as do most stations) and during non-prime time they broadcast 4 channels simultaneously.
DA Converters Cost $200, and only that much because the companies that make them right now don't see a reason to drop the price. Wait until the mandates deadline looms and it will drop cause other companies will start selling DA converters.
Actually, if you look at how DTV came about. It came from Broadcasters trying to keep the spectrum the have (and keep from getting interference from adjacent frequencies. They started touting HDTV so they could keep the full 6 Mhz of bandwidth they have without giving any of it up. Besides, since the rest of the 1st world is going to HDTV (Europe, Japan) how long do you think it would be before people in this country started saying "How come we don't have that?"
HDTV is defined as having at least twice the number of either Pixels or Lines as SDTV [720x480I] (I forget which). Not by deffinition is it 16:9. I have seen HDTV in 4:3. It still looks great.
In my experience digital TV pictures are actually worse quality than traditional broadcast TV. Because the entire image is MPEG-2 encoded, even a tiny bit of interference can cause the screen to freeze or display brightly coloured artifacts.
That is not a tiny ammount of interference. DTV uses almost 50% of its bandwidth for Forward Error Correction (FEC). It takes a lot to take the signal off the air unless you are near the boundaries or reception, which with analog would get you a pretty poor picture anyway. As for the artifacts? That has to do with the encoder, not the signal. Don't even compare this to VCD, I work around these pictures every day and can see how much higher quality they are than regular TVs.
The delay? They new that would happen from the begining. If you know about Iframes, remember that they have to wait till they recieve one till they can actually start showing a picture. A half second delay at most under the current way of broadcasting. And yes, I do mean a half second AT MOST, unless you have a poor quality decoder.
Upping the bandwidth would not change this. Changing the LongGOP of the MPEG structure would, but that would require more bandwidth to keep the same quality. As for quality? They can set it from 19.4Mbps to 0Mbps for the ammount of bandwidth they use for a signal. 19.4 is way above DVD quality so don't diss it. What was probably happening is that they were reducing the ammount of bandwidth dedicated to the subchannel you were watching to another channel. Most stations will only use 4 sub channels at most under the current scheme of things. 4 channels being the most number of Standard Deffinition [720x480I] that you can fit into 19.4Mbps under most circumstances and maintain quality.
Tyrany of the Masses
Ever hear of something called "The Moral Majority"? you might find it interesting.
So I don't necessarily have to invest in the stock market. I can invest the money in CD's (Certificates of Deposit) and Bonds and other things. But only talking about the stock market (and only one stock individulaly, much less one sector) is stupid. Over the long run, the Stock market is the best investment you can make, as long as you don't limit yourself to one sector or company, you should do well. just look at how far the S&P has come since it's conception.
Not effect, actual depth. Average depth of all but the Artic ocean is over two miles. The artic is "shallow" with an average depth of 3407' (http://mbgnet.mobot.org/salt/oceans/data.htm). Divers can only go down a few hundred at most, and require special training to do so. Off the continental shelf, the oceans drop to the average depth very quickly. Only special subs can go down that far and possibly nucular subs can survive that depth without getting crushed. But retrieval for anything except small items is almost impossible. The only large item i know of being retrieved was a whole russian sub retrieved using a very special ship the US built for the purpose during the cold war.
You're right, I got them mixed up. But radon leaking up from the ground in basements has also added to the radiation count.
"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!"
"What Do You Care What Other People Think?"
Those are the two titles, so you don't have to look them up. They are an interesting read, if somewhat sad in parts due to the death of his first wife.
Well, the material would have to be diluted so it wasn't as pure. The opposite of enrichment. I think this might actually be what we do with the decomissioned nukes. Anyway, probably not very hard.
7 to 10 times the radiation is not that much. You get more rads getting an X-Ray, Mamogram, or walking out into the sun that you would from standing around this thing all day. Hell, the people in the surroundin area have probably picked up more radiation from their thorium smoke detectors and radon clock faces than from the nuke.
There using a real nuke, cause they want to make training as real as possible. They just take the detonator cap out so that the bomb can go nucular. The military has always done training with weapons like this. Even in combat training, they use real missles, they just don't launch them.
Massive flooding, freak waves
Yeah, I'm sure that the bomb cares about this sitting at the BOTTOM of a river under several yards of mud.
that were "lost" and just sitting out there
I would honestly like to see you try to retrieve some of those ones that are sitting at the bottom of an ocean. Several miles down. It aint easy retrievin anything from that far down. And before anyone says something about subs used to explore the titanic, that could only bring up small samples, not something this large.
The concern is that whoever recovers it now has his hands on well over a ton of weapons-grade uranium
Considering "Fat-Man" used 6.2 kg of plutonium, I highly doubt ANY nuke we have made would have anywhere near a ton of uranium in it. Even one as powerful as a couple megatons.
The Marianas trench would be (just about) deep enough for me not to care
Trust me when I say that most of the ocean floor is deep enough that once you get beyond the continental shelf, it would take a major government to retrieve anything from the ocean floor. Mainly cause that is over a mile down.
I lengthy discussion about the difference in our styles turned up that Indians are taught based on memorization, while Americans are taught based on problem solving.
Richard P. Feynman has two biographies. In one of them he talks about how in his time in Brazil, all but two of the students were essentially taught this way. Of the two that weren't, one was self-taught and the other wasn't taught in that country. So, it's not just India that is like that.
Learn how to Learn and how to Think, not how to memmorize and repeat what you are told.
the telephone have neglible military value
The telephone has much military value. Hence why the germans had phone lines running to Normandy. They were more secure and reliable than radio during WWII (assuming the line wasn't cut).
An airplane inventer was being funded by the army. The wright brothers just succeded before he did.
As for the others? Navigation: British Nave and "The search for Longitude", GPS: US Military. Range: Bombers that could fly 5,000 miles in WWII and back were developed. Many things were developed with startup funding from the military or were funded to make them practical once it was shown it was possible.
Actually, penicillin was invented much earlier that WWII. mass production of penicillin didn't trully get under way until WWII.
It'd be easier to colonize Mars than set up space platforms. For one thing, we don't have to worry about artificial gravity. The Mars 0.6 (i think) will work well enough. The atmosphere reduces how hard it is to make sealed enclosures (some atmoshphere to help balance pressure is better than a vacuum). The atmosphere also helps some with heat. We can use the resources there to build stuff (once we get hte infrastructure in). The soil will help with planting and several other things. Space enclosures have the problem of if it aint there, you have to import it (out of earths gravity well) or do with out it. At least on Mars you have resources to make it. And before anyone says something about moving an asteroid into earth orbit for resources, think about what it would take. That might be an option at some point (one I would support) but for now Mars is easier.