If some radio company were smart, they'd build a combined receiver that could do either or both. There's the beauty of the free market for ya.
Personally, I'm happy with just Sirius. They provide more than enough content to keep me interested on even the longest trip. And as for having to choose a car based on sat radio, that's just silly. You can adapt either system to most factory units with the appropriate adapters. Of course all of my Hondas have their stock sound ripped out and replaced anyway, so it doesn't matter so much to me.
I've fried up a couple from ESD in my seven years of carrying one. Then again, I live in Colorado, where seeing humidities in the 6-7% range during the winter is not uncommon. ESD is brutal on everything out here.
I get so fed up with the duality of American society where, on the one hand you are so exceptionally uptight when it comes to nudity, tolerance of other peoples sexuality etc - and on the other hand you are the worlds largest producer & market for pornography. Actually, the two are related. I'd be willing to bet that the porn industry is thrilled that this sort of repression goes on - it's what makes their product popular. Just as prohibition did for drinking, sexual repression only makes porn more popular because it's "naughty".
Seriously, I dated this girl my freshman year of college. Her dad was a Southern Baptist minister and her mom was some other sort of uber-Bible thumper. Grew up in backwoods Kentucky. She'd never been allowed to even date until she turned 18. Once off to college, well, that repression got refocused into seriously kinky. I think one of her most endearing lines was, "People call me a slut like it's a bad thing."
No need to lower it. I'd be willing to bet that nearly all of us break a half dozen laws or more each day. Just thinking about it, I can come up with about 10 infractions for me today, and those are of laws I know about. Most are of crap no sane law enforcement officer would ever do anything about, but the point is they're still on the books and they could, at any moment, decide to enforce them.
That's one of the problems with the US today (and I'd bet many other nations) - we pass *fuckloads* of laws that are then never revisited, never repealed, but sitting out there awaiting enforcement if they can't pin anything else on you. There's no way that the citizenry could possibly know all of the laws and be sure they're abiding by them all, thus we need to streamline and simplify.
I'd suggest starting with all laws having a 10 year sunset clause and a constitutional provision against omnibus renewals. That'd be a good start. If it's not important enough that it can be revisited every 10 years, then we should really question if it needs to be a law.
Does the acronym MILF come to mind? Seriously, in high school, one of my friends got a new step-mom - a seriously smokin' hot redhead in her early 40s. I definitely would have hit that if I had the chance back then, as would most of my friends. Too bad we never did.
Yeah, it happens. There's just something very sexy about an attractive, intelligent, stable woman who has her act together when all you're surrounded by high school girls with personalities a millimeter thick.
"OMG little Johnny saw a boobie! Armageddon is upon us!"
We crazy-ass Americans have such bizarre hangups about sex... Jesus, folks, get over it. We all think about it, most of us do it fairly often (/.ers excepted, especially those of us old married/.ers like myself), and it's just stupid to be so repressed about the whole deal.
The liquor laws piss me off enough (whaddaya mean it's a dry county?), but all the puritanical sexually-repressive moral crap that's in law has just got to go.
Sure, talking does work... sometimes. However, it seems perfectly reasonable that if you do something in public, then there's no problem with presenting the evidence publicly. It's called escalation, and you have to figure out what the appropriate level of response is considering the act and the generic psyche of the perp.
2) The kid still has to learn the problem domain. I do not understand the mind set where a person says "I don't need to know the busness, just let me code it". With out the background knowledge you never know if what you are doing is right, reasonable, solves a domain problem or if it over laps another part of the problem domain so that code can be shared. In fact, learning the problem you are solving is the hardest part. Damn straight, and I'm glad somebody said it. There are hard programming problems out there, but for a large number of us who work for companies whose primary products are not software, usually getting your mind around the problem is worse than the software itself. The actual code is relatively easy. The problem the code needs to address is big, ugly, and complex like a fractal (every time you look at what you think is a solid edge - aka business rule - you find a zillion little exceptions). Why? Because this software has to model business realities that have evolved over decades.
I work at a large transportation and logistics company. I'm an electrical engineer by degree and programmer by job, but my first responsibility is as a business analyst - understanding the problem, figuring out how to model it, and then figuring out how to use that model to make money for the company. I spend probably 60% of my time working on a clear understanding of the problem du jour, 30% trying to communicate it to others, and 10% actually writing code. Much of the stuff I work with is still backended with COBOL programs running on some IBM big iron. Why? Because there's 20 years of business logic wrapped up in there. It's organic, it's grown, and God help us if we have to replace it lock, stock, and barrel. Do we understand it? Yes, to 99% certainty. There's documentation, but understanding the solution means understanding all the problems and all the non-ideal things associated with moving trucks and planes out there in the world. There are a lot of things in there that look like blatant bugs unless you understand the nuances of the problem. However, I wouldn't even consider rewriting it, because it works, is maintainable, and the risks of omitting one of those esoteric rules are simply too high.
COBOL, while I'm loathe to work in it, is a business reality for those of us with big legacy systems. Much like Fortran and good ol' ANSI C (still the most portable language in the world, as far as I'm concerned), it's not going anywhere any time soon.
As has been said, make sure you're looking at the color temp rating on the bulbs. My entire house is lit with the things, and aside from a couple "daylight" bulbs I bought by accident, they're pretty darn close to an incandescent.
In any sort of short duty cycle application, such as closet lights, CFLs likely don't make sense. Starting is what kills fluorescent bulbs, and the shortening of life by the quick on/off cycles will likely negate any energy savings you'd realize. That said, many of the newer bulbs are up to full power within a few seconds.
Yes, there also are dimmable CFLs. They're relatively new, but I have four in the dining room and they work very well. They're a bit hard to find, but search around the net and you'll find a few sources. (As a note, don't try dimming the regular ones. I tried one time just to see what happened, and the results were a nasty burning smell followed by complete failure.)
Not even close to as bad as gas. Gas 2 cycles have nasty problems due to the lube oil being in the gas (doesn't burn well, otherwise it wouldn't lubricate) and the intake/exhaust ports being open at the same time (and hence you get unburned crap blowing right through). All of this is for simplicity, and it does work. A 2 cycle gas engine is an exceedingly simple contraption, and will almost run in spite of anything you do to it.
2 cycle engines are very common once you start moving up into the larger diesels. They're very different creatures, though they operate on similar principles. Diesel 2 cycles have separate lube oil in the crankcase, similar to 4-cyc gas engines. Thus, no continuous cloud of semi-burned lube oil coming out. Also, they're all (at least all that I've ever seen) direct injected, meaning fuel is delivered directly to the cylinder once the intake/exhaust ports are closed, thus no unburned fuel flows through.
Since diesel cylinder always get a full air charge, 2 cycle makes since - it's simple, and since you're only flowing air, you don't have the wasted fuel as in a gas 2cyc. As a by-product, you also get twice as much power from the same space as the equivalent 4 cycle at equal rpms. They do have more particulate problems, but these have been resolved well enough in the last few years to meet the new EPA Tier II diesel exhaust requirements.
Different creatures, these and winmodems. These are drivers that load firmware to chips on the cards that actually *do* something. A winmodem was really just a lousy sound card integrated with a DAA and thus could be plugged into a phone line. Nearly *all* of the signal processing was done by the host processor. No firmware was downloaded to winmodems, because nothing (or very little) was being done on the card itself.
With these, the cards actually still do processing for themselves, but the manufacturer decided to spare themselves the cost of the EEPROM/flash to store the firmware image, so they make the host download it to them.
Either solution is craptastic if you ask me, but winmodems were a different critter. At least with a winmodem, it would be possible to write your own drivers (in theory), since all you need is a good solid background in signal processing theory, some reasonably cool telco test gear, and all of the modem modulation specs. The hardware was relatively simple to figure out. With these, the hardware is a black box, likely riddled with bugs and gotchas, that would be almost impossible to reverse engineer without spending a good deal of time/money (possibly down to reverse-engineering the silicon itself).
I like your plan. I'd only add one thing - all laws have a 10 year sunset at most. They must be explicitly renewed (no omnibus renewal bills) by a full vote of the Congress and a signature by the Prez. Not sure how you make that "explicitly renewed" clause work, since often any given bill includes hundreds of provisions, but... If you can't take the time to discuss something once a decade, it probably isn't that important and deserves to be stricken from the books.
The internet has become a utility these days - like electrical power, phone, natural gas, tv, water, or garbage pickup. You could use the same logic to argue I'm addicted to all of the above. I can't imagine going more than a week without any of them except maybe tv. The loss of any of the others would start to make my life suck more. (On the other hand, I have a DVR, so it's watching, even if I'm not.)
I agree - greylisting does work. I've used it on my own box, and spam went to virtually nothing overnight. However, when you depend on the timely delivery of email, it quickly becomes a pain to start whitelisting everyone who might need to get through in a hurry to two dozen users. I know, I know, email shouldn't be relied upon for instant communications, but it's a heck of a lot easier to send a "heads up" to a mailing list. Typically, it works just fine.
I've finally just settled on Spamhaus blacklisting at the MTA level, followed by a healthy heapin' of SpamAssassin lovin' on the backend, including things like FuzzyOCR, a bunch of the rulesets from SARE, pretty much every blacklist turned on and adding points, and one special rule that adds two points if mail goes through my backup MX (which I disable if the primary is down for some reason). I still get 500-600 pieces of spam daily, but usually only 1-2 get through with very, very few false positives (less than 1/month average).
Haven't spent much time in construction, have we? Through college, I spent a couple summers framing houses. The days were long, and you'd come home exhausted, but you had to absolutely work your butt off if you wanted to come in on budget and actually make a buck after paying labor. Of course, I was one of the labor, but it was a small, family company I was working for, so I got an idea of how the business side actually worked. Screws are *slow* to install, compared with a guy and a nail gun. When every extra minute is eating into the bottom line, the extra time it would have taken to use screws would have "screwed" us.
Non-removable nails don't sound that bad to me - once you knew what the hell you were doing, you didn't screw up much, particularly with a nail gun that drove nails in so deep you couldn't easily get them out anyway. If you missed by a small amount, you generally just threw in another nail and left the first one (bent over, of course, if it was sticking out). If they hold better and fit in the ol' nail gun, bring them on!
I'm with ya - if they don't want technology that works in their own language, than f@#$ 'em. Let them remain in the dark ages. Any that are smart enough will learn a more useful language that they'll need to interoperate with the modern world anyway. MS should just pull the language localization and walk away.
I switched to FF2 in the release candidate cycle, and overall have been pretty happy with it. The spell check bit is quite nice, particularly when posting on/. (not like anybody else cares about grammar or spelling around here, but I at least like to make an effort)
Still, my biggest annoyance is that - despite having "New pages should be opened in:" set to "new window", some crap keeps popping up in new tabs. I don't want it in a tab, I've clearly indicated that, and it worked with FF1.5. What happened?
Otherwise, seems fine, and I want to extend my congratulations to the FF team on getting this far. 2 is not really a big change from 1.5, but that's okay - it *works*. Please don't kill us with feature creep.
I've been getting about two of these suckers a day on my answering machine. I never actually listen, but just delete. Now that I know it's a potential profit center, they might be worth listening all the way through to see if they qualify for further action. Thanks for the info on how to finally discourage these bastards.
>Has most of the US populous been pegged as a terrorist because of something they did and been interrogated
Try being a photographer in Fortress America these days - particularly one with an interest in transportation and industrial settings. Trust me, it sucks. Most of us are pretty much resigned to the inevitable visit from a three-letter agency.
Yup, them young whippersnappers are starting to confuse and enrage me again... Get off my lawn! (Or at least mow it and I'll give you a quarter and some fresh cookies.) Okay, so I'm only 29, but I'm starting to feel ancient.
I play a little WoW from time to time (10-15 hours a month, tops), but I just don't see the appeal of any MMOxx without the gaming part.
Ouch, that's the last thing I actually want. I hate Outlook for just this reason (among many). I don't need an electronic calendar, I don't want an electronic calendar, I don't use Outlook's godforsaken integrated features. I don't even use the address book. Somehow, though, it's still there, and it still reminds me about meetings that I either don't care about or don't plan to attend. Call me a luddite, but I still use the dead tree variety or notes scribbled on my whiteboard.
All I want a fast, efficient mail client. It should not have other crap in it, or at least I should be able to disable that crap and make it go away entirely. This is why I've stuck with Eudora all these years. I used a combination of pine and Eudora at work, until they forced me to convert by switching to Exchange servers that didn't talk POP or IMAP.
Slashdot Mirror
If some radio company were smart, they'd build a combined receiver that could do either or both. There's the beauty of the free market for ya.
Personally, I'm happy with just Sirius. They provide more than enough content to keep me interested on even the longest trip. And as for having to choose a car based on sat radio, that's just silly. You can adapt either system to most factory units with the appropriate adapters. Of course all of my Hondas have their stock sound ripped out and replaced anyway, so it doesn't matter so much to me.
I've fried up a couple from ESD in my seven years of carrying one. Then again, I live in Colorado, where seeing humidities in the 6-7% range during the winter is not uncommon. ESD is brutal on everything out here.
Seriously, I dated this girl my freshman year of college. Her dad was a Southern Baptist minister and her mom was some other sort of uber-Bible thumper. Grew up in backwoods Kentucky. She'd never been allowed to even date until she turned 18. Once off to college, well, that repression got refocused into seriously kinky. I think one of her most endearing lines was, "People call me a slut like it's a bad thing."
No need to lower it. I'd be willing to bet that nearly all of us break a half dozen laws or more each day. Just thinking about it, I can come up with about 10 infractions for me today, and those are of laws I know about. Most are of crap no sane law enforcement officer would ever do anything about, but the point is they're still on the books and they could, at any moment, decide to enforce them.
That's one of the problems with the US today (and I'd bet many other nations) - we pass *fuckloads* of laws that are then never revisited, never repealed, but sitting out there awaiting enforcement if they can't pin anything else on you. There's no way that the citizenry could possibly know all of the laws and be sure they're abiding by them all, thus we need to streamline and simplify.
I'd suggest starting with all laws having a 10 year sunset clause and a constitutional provision against omnibus renewals. That'd be a good start. If it's not important enough that it can be revisited every 10 years, then we should really question if it needs to be a law.
>But couldn't one equate fighting porn with ruining lives?
:)
Would certainly ruin my life. I'm married - porn is the only lovin' I get.
Does the acronym MILF come to mind? Seriously, in high school, one of my friends got a new step-mom - a seriously smokin' hot redhead in her early 40s. I definitely would have hit that if I had the chance back then, as would most of my friends. Too bad we never did.
Yeah, it happens. There's just something very sexy about an attractive, intelligent, stable woman who has her act together when all you're surrounded by high school girls with personalities a millimeter thick.
"OMG little Johnny saw a boobie! Armageddon is upon us!"
/.ers like myself), and it's just stupid to be so repressed about the whole deal.
We crazy-ass Americans have such bizarre hangups about sex... Jesus, folks, get over it. We all think about it, most of us do it fairly often (/.ers excepted, especially those of us old married
The liquor laws piss me off enough (whaddaya mean it's a dry county?), but all the puritanical sexually-repressive moral crap that's in law has just got to go.
Sure, talking does work... sometimes. However, it seems perfectly reasonable that if you do something in public, then there's no problem with presenting the evidence publicly. It's called escalation, and you have to figure out what the appropriate level of response is considering the act and the generic psyche of the perp.
I work at a large transportation and logistics company. I'm an electrical engineer by degree and programmer by job, but my first responsibility is as a business analyst - understanding the problem, figuring out how to model it, and then figuring out how to use that model to make money for the company. I spend probably 60% of my time working on a clear understanding of the problem du jour, 30% trying to communicate it to others, and 10% actually writing code. Much of the stuff I work with is still backended with COBOL programs running on some IBM big iron. Why? Because there's 20 years of business logic wrapped up in there. It's organic, it's grown, and God help us if we have to replace it lock, stock, and barrel. Do we understand it? Yes, to 99% certainty. There's documentation, but understanding the solution means understanding all the problems and all the non-ideal things associated with moving trucks and planes out there in the world. There are a lot of things in there that look like blatant bugs unless you understand the nuances of the problem. However, I wouldn't even consider rewriting it, because it works, is maintainable, and the risks of omitting one of those esoteric rules are simply too high.
COBOL, while I'm loathe to work in it, is a business reality for those of us with big legacy systems. Much like Fortran and good ol' ANSI C (still the most portable language in the world, as far as I'm concerned), it's not going anywhere any time soon.
As has been said, make sure you're looking at the color temp rating on the bulbs. My entire house is lit with the things, and aside from a couple "daylight" bulbs I bought by accident, they're pretty darn close to an incandescent.
In any sort of short duty cycle application, such as closet lights, CFLs likely don't make sense. Starting is what kills fluorescent bulbs, and the shortening of life by the quick on/off cycles will likely negate any energy savings you'd realize. That said, many of the newer bulbs are up to full power within a few seconds.
Yes, there also are dimmable CFLs. They're relatively new, but I have four in the dining room and they work very well. They're a bit hard to find, but search around the net and you'll find a few sources. (As a note, don't try dimming the regular ones. I tried one time just to see what happened, and the results were a nasty burning smell followed by complete failure.)
Not even close to as bad as gas. Gas 2 cycles have nasty problems due to the lube oil being in the gas (doesn't burn well, otherwise it wouldn't lubricate) and the intake/exhaust ports being open at the same time (and hence you get unburned crap blowing right through). All of this is for simplicity, and it does work. A 2 cycle gas engine is an exceedingly simple contraption, and will almost run in spite of anything you do to it.
2 cycle engines are very common once you start moving up into the larger diesels. They're very different creatures, though they operate on similar principles. Diesel 2 cycles have separate lube oil in the crankcase, similar to 4-cyc gas engines. Thus, no continuous cloud of semi-burned lube oil coming out. Also, they're all (at least all that I've ever seen) direct injected, meaning fuel is delivered directly to the cylinder once the intake/exhaust ports are closed, thus no unburned fuel flows through.
Since diesel cylinder always get a full air charge, 2 cycle makes since - it's simple, and since you're only flowing air, you don't have the wasted fuel as in a gas 2cyc. As a by-product, you also get twice as much power from the same space as the equivalent 4 cycle at equal rpms. They do have more particulate problems, but these have been resolved well enough in the last few years to meet the new EPA Tier II diesel exhaust requirements.
vary the power output based on amount
Different creatures, these and winmodems. These are drivers that load firmware to chips on the cards that actually *do* something. A winmodem was really just a lousy sound card integrated with a DAA and thus could be plugged into a phone line. Nearly *all* of the signal processing was done by the host processor. No firmware was downloaded to winmodems, because nothing (or very little) was being done on the card itself.
With these, the cards actually still do processing for themselves, but the manufacturer decided to spare themselves the cost of the EEPROM/flash to store the firmware image, so they make the host download it to them.
Either solution is craptastic if you ask me, but winmodems were a different critter. At least with a winmodem, it would be possible to write your own drivers (in theory), since all you need is a good solid background in signal processing theory, some reasonably cool telco test gear, and all of the modem modulation specs. The hardware was relatively simple to figure out. With these, the hardware is a black box, likely riddled with bugs and gotchas, that would be almost impossible to reverse engineer without spending a good deal of time/money (possibly down to reverse-engineering the silicon itself).
I like your plan. I'd only add one thing - all laws have a 10 year sunset at most. They must be explicitly renewed (no omnibus renewal bills) by a full vote of the Congress and a signature by the Prez. Not sure how you make that "explicitly renewed" clause work, since often any given bill includes hundreds of provisions, but... If you can't take the time to discuss something once a decade, it probably isn't that important and deserves to be stricken from the books.
The internet has become a utility these days - like electrical power, phone, natural gas, tv, water, or garbage pickup. You could use the same logic to argue I'm addicted to all of the above. I can't imagine going more than a week without any of them except maybe tv. The loss of any of the others would start to make my life suck more. (On the other hand, I have a DVR, so it's watching, even if I'm not.)
I agree - greylisting does work. I've used it on my own box, and spam went to virtually nothing overnight. However, when you depend on the timely delivery of email, it quickly becomes a pain to start whitelisting everyone who might need to get through in a hurry to two dozen users. I know, I know, email shouldn't be relied upon for instant communications, but it's a heck of a lot easier to send a "heads up" to a mailing list. Typically, it works just fine.
I've finally just settled on Spamhaus blacklisting at the MTA level, followed by a healthy heapin' of SpamAssassin lovin' on the backend, including things like FuzzyOCR, a bunch of the rulesets from SARE, pretty much every blacklist turned on and adding points, and one special rule that adds two points if mail goes through my backup MX (which I disable if the primary is down for some reason). I still get 500-600 pieces of spam daily, but usually only 1-2 get through with very, very few false positives (less than 1/month average).
Haven't spent much time in construction, have we? Through college, I spent a couple summers framing houses. The days were long, and you'd come home exhausted, but you had to absolutely work your butt off if you wanted to come in on budget and actually make a buck after paying labor. Of course, I was one of the labor, but it was a small, family company I was working for, so I got an idea of how the business side actually worked. Screws are *slow* to install, compared with a guy and a nail gun. When every extra minute is eating into the bottom line, the extra time it would have taken to use screws would have "screwed" us.
Non-removable nails don't sound that bad to me - once you knew what the hell you were doing, you didn't screw up much, particularly with a nail gun that drove nails in so deep you couldn't easily get them out anyway. If you missed by a small amount, you generally just threw in another nail and left the first one (bent over, of course, if it was sticking out). If they hold better and fit in the ol' nail gun, bring them on!
I'm with ya - if they don't want technology that works in their own language, than f@#$ 'em. Let them remain in the dark ages. Any that are smart enough will learn a more useful language that they'll need to interoperate with the modern world anyway. MS should just pull the language localization and walk away.
Yeah, that opens you up to lawsuits from two groups - the pigs and the latins. :)
I switched to FF2 in the release candidate cycle, and overall have been pretty happy with it. The spell check bit is quite nice, particularly when posting on /. (not like anybody else cares about grammar or spelling around here, but I at least like to make an effort)
Still, my biggest annoyance is that - despite having "New pages should be opened in:" set to "new window", some crap keeps popping up in new tabs. I don't want it in a tab, I've clearly indicated that, and it worked with FF1.5. What happened?
Otherwise, seems fine, and I want to extend my congratulations to the FF team on getting this far. 2 is not really a big change from 1.5, but that's okay - it *works*. Please don't kill us with feature creep.
Pretty sure it's pirates, not ninjas. I hear them downstairs right now.
I've been getting about two of these suckers a day on my answering machine. I never actually listen, but just delete. Now that I know it's a potential profit center, they might be worth listening all the way through to see if they qualify for further action. Thanks for the info on how to finally discourage these bastards.
>Has most of the US populous been pegged as a terrorist because of something they did and been interrogated
Try being a photographer in Fortress America these days - particularly one with an interest in transportation and industrial settings. Trust me, it sucks. Most of us are pretty much resigned to the inevitable visit from a three-letter agency.
Yup, them young whippersnappers are starting to confuse and enrage me again... Get off my lawn! (Or at least mow it and I'll give you a quarter and some fresh cookies.) Okay, so I'm only 29, but I'm starting to feel ancient.
I play a little WoW from time to time (10-15 hours a month, tops), but I just don't see the appeal of any MMOxx without the gaming part.
Ouch, that's the last thing I actually want. I hate Outlook for just this reason (among many). I don't need an electronic calendar, I don't want an electronic calendar, I don't use Outlook's godforsaken integrated features. I don't even use the address book. Somehow, though, it's still there, and it still reminds me about meetings that I either don't care about or don't plan to attend. Call me a luddite, but I still use the dead tree variety or notes scribbled on my whiteboard.
All I want a fast, efficient mail client. It should not have other crap in it, or at least I should be able to disable that crap and make it go away entirely. This is why I've stuck with Eudora all these years. I used a combination of pine and Eudora at work, until they forced me to convert by switching to Exchange servers that didn't talk POP or IMAP.
I was personally thinking GreesyChupacabra, as a follow-up to their pure marketing genius with "IceWeasel"