Here's the text of the DMCA (a.k.a. 17 USC 1201). Read down to (c)(1).
(c) Other rights, etc., not affected.-- (1) Nothing in this section shall affect rights, remedies, limitations, or defenses to copyright infringement, including fair use, under this title [17 U.S.C.A. S 1 et seq.].
35 (not 25) square miles ((5280x35)^2 feet = 34,151,040,000 sq. ft.) x 200 ft (depth) = 6,830,208,000,000 cubic feet.
I found this page which states that 1600 lbs. of garbage is about (3x3x6=)54 cubic feet. Using that as a linear ratio, a ton (2000 lbs.) of garbage is 67.5 cubic feet.
Doing the math for this, we get (6830208000000 / 67.5 = ) 101,188,266,667 tons of trash that could fit into that space.
The population of the NYC metro area is 18.7 million. The population of the earth is 6.5 billion. That's approximately 350 times the population of NYC (347.6, but we'll round up to account for growth).
Now, you stated that NYC produces 12,000 tons of garbage per day. 12,000 tons x 350 NYC's of population on earth = 4,200,000 tons of trash per day.
So that 101,188,266,667 ton-capable space could store (101,188,266,667 / 4,200,000 = ) 24,092 days = 66 years worth of trash for the entire earth, if the entire earth were as wasteful as New York City. I'll leave it to you to calculate how long that area will last if you cut out of the equation the 6.2 billion people that don't live in the USA. It's simple math. You should try it sometime.
It's pretty clear that the GP was right. There is no landfill shortage. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a strip mine to buy.
My analog TV's get 7 channels: Fox CBS NBC PBS CW (was WB) ABC Local crap (was UPN)
My digital TV gets 13 channels Fox CBS-HD CBS NBC-HD NBC-Weather PBS-HD PBS-Kids PBS PBS-DIY (a rebroadcast of the "Create" channel) CW The Tube (on CW affiliate's subchannel) ABC Local crap
Every few months, I rescan the channels and find some new ones. It won't take long for them to find more content. Heck, the local PBS station has 4 subchannels. And I highly recommend The Tube to anybody that can get it. Very few commercials (1 or 2 per hour at the most), lots of music videos. (Until a month ago, there were no commercials.)
HDTV over the air is a cleaner, sharper picture than the same HD channel received via cable
Umm... no.
HDTV is almost universally piggybacked onto digital TV (it takes more than one channel's spectrum to broadcast analog HDTV). Unless they're screwing with the signal (which would raise some legal issues, I would assume), it's the exact same stream of bits flowing through the cable or through the air.
If anything, cable at least gives you decent reception. For some reason, the FCC mandated that digital TV has to use less power than analog, which means that every car that drives past my house makes my signal all choppy and jittery. To the FCC and broadcasters, I say: AMP THAT BITCH, DAMMIT.
Those same stores carry Cat5 cables that cost as much as $7/foot. We all know that RJ-45 connectors in small quantities cost $0.10 (bulk is even cheaper) and Cat5 is under $2/foot (plenum rated at that! PVC should be about $1/ft.). It takes another $10 for a crimp tool and 5 minutes to learn wire order for standard patch cables (1,2,3,5,6,4,7,8), and another 5 minutes to get a good technique for crimping a connector onto a cable. A single 3 foot cable (the shortest most stores will stock) is cheaper if you buy the parts and make it yourself, even if you count the time spent at $40/hr. After that, you don't need to spend 10 minutes learning how to make one, nor do you need to spend $10 on a crimp tool, and the price goes WAY down.
The point is, those cables are 100% gravy to the retailers. They charge you $100 for that HDMI cable because they can. It has fancy molded plugs and comes on a blister-packed card with some pretty printing on it. Other than that, it's identical to the ones you could make yourself for far less money than they charge. Most people are too lazy or clueless to know this, and retailers make a living gouging the stupid. And they've found that if you spraypaint the connector gold, you can charge double. The solution? Well, now you know about the scam, so don't buy it. Make your own, or barring that, find a cheaper retailer who isn't willing to anally violate their customers in the cable aisle.
"ATY Mach64U Pro" is a Rage Pro, usually with 2MB of VRAM. Unless you specifically got the upgrade to 6MB, that is. My beige G3 tower has the same (with the upgrade). So does my old "Lombard" Powerbook G3 (1999/bronze keyboard), though it has the "LT" version (laptop? light? lame trash?) with 8MB VRAM built in.
There was a Mac OS X driver included with 10.1 (I think) for the Rage Pro, but it was unsupported and had to be installed manually, and that was a massive PITA. I'm not talking about a manual install where there's an installer script... you had to copy the file to the/Library/somethingorother folder, then register it with the kernel by messing with config files in a text editor, messing with the NetInfo database (no idea why), and rebooting. That's some info from 2002 that I didn't think I'd ever need again... eek.
Upgrade to 10.3 on those machines if you can. It runs much faster.
The UI isn't all that terrible. Joel Spolsky is making a mountain out of a molehill. Look at the screenshot he gives in his article. Here's what I notice:
1) There's a power button. That shuts things down fully. ("I am going away from my computer now, but I'd like the power to be really off.") 2) There's a lock button. That leave it running, but keeps others out of your stuff. ("I am going away from my computer now.") 3) There's a menu of choices if you care to look at it, and the button is much smaller than the other two and has a nondescript arrow icon on it which makes it much less attractive to non-techie users.
Yes, his suggestions for combining lock with switch user and sleep with hibernate are good, but I don't think what they actually implemented is all that difficult to understand. His problem is that he's "one of us" and went looking for all the extra options. Most people will never click that arrow to make that menu appear. Ever. It's kind of unfair, even to Microsoft, to rag on something for being unfriendly to non-techies when non-techies are never going to even see it. Usually Joel Spolsky's observations are spot-on, but this time I'm going to have to give him an F for eFfort.
But wait, there's more! If you want to shut down the machine, you just press... THE POWER BUTTON! Imagine that!
Every PC I've ever seen requires you to use the shut-down menu item, or, in case of a lock-up, hold the power button for 4 seconds to initiate the ATX PSU cutout.
1) Turn the brightness down. Many projectors have a half-brightness mode, usually named after one of the other benefits of not running full-blast (long-life, whisper-quiet, etc.). Use that mode and you'll have no problem seeing the picture during the daytime.
2) Don't use a white wall. Get a screen. White walls reflect all sorts of light (depending on the paint finish). Screens (even cheap ones) diffuse light just the right amount to give a good black level while allowing the non-black parts to be clearly visible. They also tend to diffuse ambient light evenly, making it much less of a problem.
3) You're supposed to buy a projector with a spread angle right for the size of your room. If I put my projector on the opposite wall of my living room, it fills the wall completely (8 feet tall, 20 feet long) and the pixels are about 1/8 of an inch square (800x600 resolution). Mine sits on the coffee table, the wires are run across the floor in a rubber "speed-bump" wire tray, and it's no more than 8 feet away from the screen. All of the other gear is right where you'd expect it to be (under the screen). Only the coffee table obstructs the remotes (and it would do that anyway).
My projector (Viewsonic PJ501, el-cheapo) has a lamp rated for 2000 hours of lamp life in "normal" mode or 4000 hours in "whisper" mode (it runs the lamp at half brightness and slows the fan down). 4 hours a night is not going to burn that bulb out for 2.74 years (2 years, 270 days). And you get the benefit of being able to see the front-projected image in any light (because it's at half brightness, rather than the overpowering "normal" brightness that makes everything look like glare). I'm watching it right now, and there's a window open with light shining in about 8 feet (2 meters and a little more) to the right of the screen.
I've had my projector for 18 months and the current "lamp time" is 731 hours. I've run it in whisper mode for all but about the first 10 hours. And I watch TV on it all the time (it's my primary TV). By the time the bulb burns out on it, it'll be time to upgrade it anyway. It's 800x600 resolution natively, though it can "fake it" for 1024x768. When the lamp burns out in another 3-4 years, I'll buy a new projector with higher resolution for the same price (or less) than this one cost me.
The downside to a projector is that you constantly have to step over wires laying across the floor or ceiling-mount the thing and have wires running across your ceiling. I just went to an office supply store and bought one of those rubber "speed-bump" wire traps. Problem solved.
Part of the problem with Goldeneye was that people used the default (1.1/1.3) stick=walk/turn instead of the 1.2/1.4 stick=look control scheme. If you compare it to a PC keyboard/mouse, the 1.2 and 1.4 control schemes were just right. C-buttons were "walk" (WASD on a keyboard), analog stick was "look" (mouselook). The other control schemes were just stupid and wrong. It's worth noting that Turok got it right as well, and many months before Goldeneye was released.
I configured mine on 11 because I knew 6 (default) would be slow due to overuse. It worked fine for YEARS. Then some asshat down the street configured his AP to use 11. Mine started going nuts, dropping connections and generally not working. So I switched it to 1. Now, occasionally, the guy on 11 drowns out EVERYTHING, including 6 and 1, and there's no apparent reason for it. So I have to put up with some asshole that has out-of-spec equipment that kicks me off my own connection.
I've used KisMac to track the bastard down, and I've toyed with the idea of cracking his network password and ratcheting his transmission power down or changing his channel.
Don't bother with Madden '07 unless they've fixed the bug that plagues the Gamecube version where you can't play more than 45 minutes without the system locking up. (And, yes, I've tried multiple copies of the game and multiple systems. It's a real bug.) I'd advise you to rent that one first, play a full 15-minute-quarter game (making sure to utterly destroy the AI in the process... I usually had around 200 points by the time it locked up), and see if the game finishes properly or if it freezes. If it has no problems, then obviously, go ahead and buy it.
"Have any of you nerds actually SEEN a vagina? If you had a police line-up with a vagina, a donut, and a mop, would you be able to pick the vagina out of the line-up? Cause the minute you can, you're gonna throw that Stormtrooper cookie jar right out the window!"
Nah. Just put up a wire grid above the roadway and give each car a pole with some wires sticking out of the top of it. It's already like bumper cars on the interstate as it is, we might as well go all the way.
Not even they want her third in line for the Oval office.
House majority leader isn't third in line for the presidency. President pro tem is. The PPT is usually the longest-standing senator of the majority party. That's currently Ted "Tubes to nowhere" Stevens. Live in fear.
It's an American problem at all levels of society. We're overextended. We're in debt. We can't afford our houses if anything unexpected breaks the budget. We can't afford to do business if an otherwise-qualified job candidate needs training. We need everything handed to us in prepared, processed, usable form, or it's too costly to even bother.
Now for the tricky question: Why? Because we've quarterly-growthed ourselves into a corner. If we miss profit estimates, making a little less profit than we expected, we lose tons of money because investors are fickle and stupid. That leads to lay-offs. That leads to missed house payments. That leads to homeless people and more companies missing profit estimates. Which starts the next wave of collapse.
It's a sign of a system that needs to break and cause huge destruction and poverty before it can heal. Brace yourselves. The rabbit hole is deep.
Yep. N64 was released on September 29, 1996. I got mine that day, as I had it preordered for months prior. That was back in the days when a "preorder" meant that they'd actually set one aside for you and tell people they were sold out if they just walked in. These days, it's just a list for people who want to give the retailer a loan and get notified when the shipment arrives so they can get there before their "reserved" item is handed out to the next walk-in customer.
That was the first time I preordered anything. It will also be the last. As for the Wii, I'll wait until they have more colors. The red one they showed off a year ago looked snazzy. Black or silver would also be acceptable. But white is just too boring.
Slashdot Mirror
35 (not 25) square miles ((5280x35)^2 feet = 34,151,040,000 sq. ft.) x 200 ft (depth) = 6,830,208,000,000 cubic feet.
I found this page which states that 1600 lbs. of garbage is about (3x3x6=)54 cubic feet. Using that as a linear ratio, a ton (2000 lbs.) of garbage is 67.5 cubic feet.
Doing the math for this, we get (6830208000000 / 67.5 = ) 101,188,266,667 tons of trash that could fit into that space.
The population of the NYC metro area is 18.7 million. The population of the earth is 6.5 billion. That's approximately 350 times the population of NYC (347.6, but we'll round up to account for growth).
Now, you stated that NYC produces 12,000 tons of garbage per day. 12,000 tons x 350 NYC's of population on earth = 4,200,000 tons of trash per day.
So that 101,188,266,667 ton-capable space could store (101,188,266,667 / 4,200,000 = ) 24,092 days = 66 years worth of trash for the entire earth, if the entire earth were as wasteful as New York City . I'll leave it to you to calculate how long that area will last if you cut out of the equation the 6.2 billion people that don't live in the USA. It's simple math. You should try it sometime.
It's pretty clear that the GP was right. There is no landfill shortage. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a strip mine to buy.
My analog TV's get 7 channels:
Fox
CBS
NBC
PBS
CW (was WB)
ABC
Local crap (was UPN)
My digital TV gets 13 channels
Fox
CBS-HD
CBS
NBC-HD
NBC-Weather
PBS-HD
PBS-Kids
PBS
PBS-DIY (a rebroadcast of the "Create" channel)
CW
The Tube (on CW affiliate's subchannel)
ABC
Local crap
Every few months, I rescan the channels and find some new ones. It won't take long for them to find more content. Heck, the local PBS station has 4 subchannels. And I highly recommend The Tube to anybody that can get it. Very few commercials (1 or 2 per hour at the most), lots of music videos. (Until a month ago, there were no commercials.)
Charter can piss off.
HDTV over the air is a cleaner, sharper picture than the same HD channel received via cable
Umm... no.
HDTV is almost universally piggybacked onto digital TV (it takes more than one channel's spectrum to broadcast analog HDTV). Unless they're screwing with the signal (which would raise some legal issues, I would assume), it's the exact same stream of bits flowing through the cable or through the air.
If anything, cable at least gives you decent reception. For some reason, the FCC mandated that digital TV has to use less power than analog, which means that every car that drives past my house makes my signal all choppy and jittery. To the FCC and broadcasters, I say: AMP THAT BITCH, DAMMIT.
Those same stores carry Cat5 cables that cost as much as $7/foot. We all know that RJ-45 connectors in small quantities cost $0.10 (bulk is even cheaper) and Cat5 is under $2/foot (plenum rated at that! PVC should be about $1/ft.). It takes another $10 for a crimp tool and 5 minutes to learn wire order for standard patch cables (1,2,3,5,6,4,7,8), and another 5 minutes to get a good technique for crimping a connector onto a cable. A single 3 foot cable (the shortest most stores will stock) is cheaper if you buy the parts and make it yourself, even if you count the time spent at $40/hr. After that, you don't need to spend 10 minutes learning how to make one, nor do you need to spend $10 on a crimp tool, and the price goes WAY down.
The point is, those cables are 100% gravy to the retailers. They charge you $100 for that HDMI cable because they can. It has fancy molded plugs and comes on a blister-packed card with some pretty printing on it. Other than that, it's identical to the ones you could make yourself for far less money than they charge. Most people are too lazy or clueless to know this, and retailers make a living gouging the stupid. And they've found that if you spraypaint the connector gold, you can charge double. The solution? Well, now you know about the scam, so don't buy it. Make your own, or barring that, find a cheaper retailer who isn't willing to anally violate their customers in the cable aisle.
Can I slap your ass now, Jessica?
"ATY Mach64U Pro" is a Rage Pro, usually with 2MB of VRAM. Unless you specifically got the upgrade to 6MB, that is. My beige G3 tower has the same (with the upgrade). So does my old "Lombard" Powerbook G3 (1999/bronze keyboard), though it has the "LT" version (laptop? light? lame trash?) with 8MB VRAM built in.
/Library/somethingorother folder, then register it with the kernel by messing with config files in a text editor, messing with the NetInfo database (no idea why), and rebooting. That's some info from 2002 that I didn't think I'd ever need again... eek.
There was a Mac OS X driver included with 10.1 (I think) for the Rage Pro, but it was unsupported and had to be installed manually, and that was a massive PITA. I'm not talking about a manual install where there's an installer script... you had to copy the file to the
Upgrade to 10.3 on those machines if you can. It runs much faster.
You're okay as long as they don't give you giant crabs for massive damage.
The UI isn't all that terrible. Joel Spolsky is making a mountain out of a molehill. Look at the screenshot he gives in his article. Here's what I notice:
1) There's a power button. That shuts things down fully. ("I am going away from my computer now, but I'd like the power to be really off.")
2) There's a lock button. That leave it running, but keeps others out of your stuff. ("I am going away from my computer now.")
3) There's a menu of choices if you care to look at it, and the button is much smaller than the other two and has a nondescript arrow icon on it which makes it much less attractive to non-techie users.
Yes, his suggestions for combining lock with switch user and sleep with hibernate are good, but I don't think what they actually implemented is all that difficult to understand. His problem is that he's "one of us" and went looking for all the extra options. Most people will never click that arrow to make that menu appear. Ever. It's kind of unfair, even to Microsoft, to rag on something for being unfriendly to non-techies when non-techies are never going to even see it. Usually Joel Spolsky's observations are spot-on, but this time I'm going to have to give him an F for eFfort.
But wait, there's more! If you want to shut down the machine, you just press... THE POWER BUTTON! Imagine that!
Every PC I've ever seen requires you to use the shut-down menu item, or, in case of a lock-up, hold the power button for 4 seconds to initiate the ATX PSU cutout.
Not true. You just aren't doing it right.
1) Turn the brightness down. Many projectors have a half-brightness mode, usually named after one of the other benefits of not running full-blast (long-life, whisper-quiet, etc.). Use that mode and you'll have no problem seeing the picture during the daytime.
2) Don't use a white wall. Get a screen. White walls reflect all sorts of light (depending on the paint finish). Screens (even cheap ones) diffuse light just the right amount to give a good black level while allowing the non-black parts to be clearly visible. They also tend to diffuse ambient light evenly, making it much less of a problem.
3) You're supposed to buy a projector with a spread angle right for the size of your room. If I put my projector on the opposite wall of my living room, it fills the wall completely (8 feet tall, 20 feet long) and the pixels are about 1/8 of an inch square (800x600 resolution). Mine sits on the coffee table, the wires are run across the floor in a rubber "speed-bump" wire tray, and it's no more than 8 feet away from the screen. All of the other gear is right where you'd expect it to be (under the screen). Only the coffee table obstructs the remotes (and it would do that anyway).
My projector (Viewsonic PJ501, el-cheapo) has a lamp rated for 2000 hours of lamp life in "normal" mode or 4000 hours in "whisper" mode (it runs the lamp at half brightness and slows the fan down). 4 hours a night is not going to burn that bulb out for 2.74 years (2 years, 270 days). And you get the benefit of being able to see the front-projected image in any light (because it's at half brightness, rather than the overpowering "normal" brightness that makes everything look like glare). I'm watching it right now, and there's a window open with light shining in about 8 feet (2 meters and a little more) to the right of the screen.
I've had my projector for 18 months and the current "lamp time" is 731 hours. I've run it in whisper mode for all but about the first 10 hours. And I watch TV on it all the time (it's my primary TV). By the time the bulb burns out on it, it'll be time to upgrade it anyway. It's 800x600 resolution natively, though it can "fake it" for 1024x768. When the lamp burns out in another 3-4 years, I'll buy a new projector with higher resolution for the same price (or less) than this one cost me.
The downside to a projector is that you constantly have to step over wires laying across the floor or ceiling-mount the thing and have wires running across your ceiling. I just went to an office supply store and bought one of those rubber "speed-bump" wire traps. Problem solved.
Why use a fake ID? Just re-encode the mag-stripe on the back of your blatantly-labelled "MINOR" ID to tell the bartender you're over 21.
Then send in an anonymous tip that he's selling to minors. He'll quit collecting mag-stripe data, I bet.
I thought he was ragging on the National Endowment for the Arts.
Part of the problem with Goldeneye was that people used the default (1.1/1.3) stick=walk/turn instead of the 1.2/1.4 stick=look control scheme. If you compare it to a PC keyboard/mouse, the 1.2 and 1.4 control schemes were just right. C-buttons were "walk" (WASD on a keyboard), analog stick was "look" (mouselook). The other control schemes were just stupid and wrong. It's worth noting that Turok got it right as well, and many months before Goldeneye was released.
Wireless channels are a bitch.
I configured mine on 11 because I knew 6 (default) would be slow due to overuse. It worked fine for YEARS. Then some asshat down the street configured his AP to use 11. Mine started going nuts, dropping connections and generally not working. So I switched it to 1. Now, occasionally, the guy on 11 drowns out EVERYTHING, including 6 and 1, and there's no apparent reason for it. So I have to put up with some asshole that has out-of-spec equipment that kicks me off my own connection.
I've used KisMac to track the bastard down, and I've toyed with the idea of cracking his network password and ratcheting his transmission power down or changing his channel.
Don't bother with Madden '07 unless they've fixed the bug that plagues the Gamecube version where you can't play more than 45 minutes without the system locking up. (And, yes, I've tried multiple copies of the game and multiple systems. It's a real bug.) I'd advise you to rent that one first, play a full 15-minute-quarter game (making sure to utterly destroy the AI in the process... I usually had around 200 points by the time it locked up), and see if the game finishes properly or if it freezes. If it has no problems, then obviously, go ahead and buy it.
Run along and play, Comma. These animals have never even heard of you.
It seemed on-topic to me.
Crikey!
Nah. Just put up a wire grid above the roadway and give each car a pole with some wires sticking out of the top of it. It's already like bumper cars on the interstate as it is, we might as well go all the way.
Not even they want her third in line for the Oval office.
House majority leader isn't third in line for the presidency. President pro tem is. The PPT is usually the longest-standing senator of the majority party. That's currently Ted "Tubes to nowhere" Stevens. Live in fear.
It's an American problem at all levels of society. We're overextended. We're in debt. We can't afford our houses if anything unexpected breaks the budget. We can't afford to do business if an otherwise-qualified job candidate needs training. We need everything handed to us in prepared, processed, usable form, or it's too costly to even bother.
Now for the tricky question: Why? Because we've quarterly-growthed ourselves into a corner. If we miss profit estimates, making a little less profit than we expected, we lose tons of money because investors are fickle and stupid. That leads to lay-offs. That leads to missed house payments. That leads to homeless people and more companies missing profit estimates. Which starts the next wave of collapse.
It's a sign of a system that needs to break and cause huge destruction and poverty before it can heal. Brace yourselves. The rabbit hole is deep.
Yes. With a machete if you didn't vote for Saddam.
Yep. N64 was released on September 29, 1996. I got mine that day, as I had it preordered for months prior. That was back in the days when a "preorder" meant that they'd actually set one aside for you and tell people they were sold out if they just walked in. These days, it's just a list for people who want to give the retailer a loan and get notified when the shipment arrives so they can get there before their "reserved" item is handed out to the next walk-in customer.
That was the first time I preordered anything. It will also be the last. As for the Wii, I'll wait until they have more colors. The red one they showed off a year ago looked snazzy. Black or silver would also be acceptable. But white is just too boring.