I'll second that, really when it comes to Computers 'retail world' is not what you want. Certainly not if you know what your looking for. Lets be honest here they are supermarkets with computers in them. They have huge overheads, due to the style of the store. The Employee's are generally pretty ignorant of what they are selling and the customer they want to sell too doesn't read slashdot!
The stores we buy from usually we don't even set foot in, we buy from the website. However usually they do have a trade counter and thats the best place to buy from if you need it fast. My local outlet has an industrial unit on the outskirts of the city (which does hold stock unlike some web based retailers who are just drop shippers). They build systems to order and sell components printers and the usual bits and pieces. They tend to stock tried and tested products with very little customer returns. I doubt they have a single employee who couldn't fix a faulty pc and to top it off they price very competitively at or below 'retail worlds' prices.
The web site is well designed and pretty responsive. I was going to give you the website address but I spotted a few items I fancy buying for myself and I wouldn't want to go round tomorrow and find they are out of stock with a dead web server.
WiFi is relative proof that you can go relatively unregulated in spectrum bandwidth and have things work just fine. Yes, yes, some people in the middle of Manhattan complain about WiFi performance, but my experience at my old office in downtown Chicago showed that things worked just fine -- all the time. I've just got to take issue with this statement, true enough lots of wifi equipment works well with other wifi equipment in the 2.4 ghz band. unfortunately its one band being used for a number of purposes. Try adding a TV sender into the mix. Wifi becomes highly unreliable and the tv transmission is hit badly by the random wifi packets add a cordless phone into the mix and none of it works reliably.
There is no need for more red tape but a few more low power frequencies with type approval for each band allocated. yes please.
Dictionary - Encyclopedia - Textbook: sums up Wikipedia quite well. I see no problem with putting up proofs. I would only ask authors to add mode text that doesn't require specialized knowledge to understand. Many of the science and math entries require a degree to understand. Many Wikipedia surely have though "Hmmm.... this is a cool concept but I want to learn more, I'll look it up on Wikipedia". Only, that when they do look it up, its such a complex, arcane answer, they vow not to look up science or math related material on Wikipedia anymore.
Its happened to me more than a few times. Science and math are getting to be extremely specific fields. I'm sure there's a few articles only a handful of people really understand. This doesn't happen with an Encyclopedia Britannia. Only that people are expecting content just like that.
The people entering Wikipedia articles are doing a wonderful job. I'd just like to see that more content for the 'science and math lay person' is considered as well. Theres a good phrase for that horses for courses.
A traditional encyclopedia has to pitch itself at a particular audience obviously there are children's editions and more adult orientated encyclopedias. Wikipedia doesn't need to pitch all articles at a level, instead it would be far better to present the information at different levels. Generally most subjects can be presented at different levels from overly simplistic to mind blowingly complex. with a number of stages in between. Maybe whats needed is a comprehension rating from users, why can't there be 4 or 5 articles on the same subject but designed to meet the needs of different audiences.
Generally knowledge builds on a foundation and if the reader hasn't got that foundation then it becomes harder and harder to grasp. lets call your really hard article level 10 if there was articles about level 6 or level 8 that you read first you might well then be able to comprehend the level 10 article.
problem is with wikipedia , some editor will come along see, hmm two articles on this subject and delete one of them, the worst editors would delete both.
Although i dislike the idea of googles project, purely on the basis I don't want to be data mined and sold too when I am looking for information. It probably would be less of an ego trip for its editors.
perhaps Wikipedia would be better with a fairly simple approval field for articles. a user could be a child, joe public, knowledgeable in this field. and ratings could be approve,disapprove,acceptable.
In a two-party system, what's the point of voting at all? Well Voting for a third party is almost certainly not going to get the third party candidate elected. However the two main parties tend to be fairly evenly matched and the third party vote going to either of the other two parties could swing it either way. using some random numbers say 45,000 vote for party A and 40,000 vote for party B and 8,000 vote for party C. Party B could win this seat if the Voters for party C would vote for party B instead.
In other words both Party A and Party B have to take into account the views of people voting for party C. The obvious case is green issues are now a part of most party policies.
unfortunately it is a very slow process, third party support needs to be built up over time to become significant to either of the main parties, but it can be an effective way of moderating party excesses - as good as we are going to get.
Obviously a PR system is better at producing a government representing the interests of the people but turkeys don't vote for christmas.
I don't support Gasoline taxes precisely because they harm the poor. Gasoline is highly price inelastic, and so prices have to be hiked enormously in order to decrease demand. This takes away money that consumers could have spent on other things.
If we want to control Global Warming, that is another issue entirely, that can be dealt with by controlling tail-pipe emissions. But with a Gasoline tax, companies don't have any financial incentive to research Carbon reducing technologies, only MPG increasing ones.
Nobody likes high fuel prices simply because it increases the cost per mile that you travel, yes thats obvious what is also obvious is that to minimise the cost per mile you choose a vehicle that uses less / cheaper fuel per mile.
Increasing MPG decreases emissions if i burn half the same fuel you do over the same distance , my engines put out half the emissions yours has, not only that I have saved myself 50% of the fuel costs you had to pay. It's almost certain that I paid less for my car than you did for yours. I probably pay less in running costs, insurance and road tax.
If we earn equivalent salaries i am actually better off than you since I have more free cash than you have. I might even have more free time than you do since my effective income is higher than yours, I don't need the overtime as much.
I could go to extremes and start using a bike or a bus to go to work, a motorbike tends to give high MPG and high performance, and also doesn't suffer from being stuck in a traffic queue. I could maybe half my commute time admittedly there are negatives when the roads are icy and its bitterly cold a motorcycle loses a lot of its appeal.
Perhaps I might even choose to walk. Of course there are times when you need a car, doing the supermarket shop for instance. You can order a Taxi. Ok its more expensive for that journey than if you already had a car, but it stops costing you once you get back home.
Hire Cars can be a good choice if your need for a car is infrequent.
Finally if by companies not having any incentive to research Carbon reducing technologies only MPG reducing ones you mean car companies thats clearly nonsense the biggest disincentive to developing alternative fuels is the existence of cheap carbon burning fuels.
"Gasoline is highly price inelastic" if by that you mean that I will still use pretty much the same quantity of fuel on a day by day basis if the price rises then yes its inelastic, it certainly puts me off from making longer journeys, that I don't need to make. It also helps me choose my next car.
Re:Completely absurd experimentation method
on
Can Time Slow Down?
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· Score: 1
I don't think it is just stress that causes time dilation I think you can put it in simpler terms. If your brain is somewhat like a CPU then the processing speed varies according to the clock rate.
Is the clock rate of the brain variable? almost certainly I would say, we haven't all been in car wrecks and had time move slowly (we just turned up the processing speed) but there are times when the clock rate is low we can't think straight, we are tired and fuzzy. Other times we feel sharp and things are clicking. Youth seems to be a factor in feeling sharp, as does physical fitness, fresh air and perhaps the right diet.
Pretty much we can compare ourselves to internal combustion engines for optimum efficiency you need the correct fuel to air ratio for the best performance. Taking the subjective time speed up in moments of danger your blood starts pumping probably more oxygen is reaching your brain from a steady drip drip of energy into your system it becomes a flood and your brain is firing rapidly.
Perversely it is the opposite effect most of us notice, well barely notice we get drowsy our fuel mix gets out of balance and we perform poorly. On the whole most healthy people will not get too far out of balance, I'm not healthy I am diabetic and my body has poor control over blood sugar levels. a healthy person will have relatively small changes in blood sugar levels as their body regulates it well with insulin. my body produces insulin so generally i just get a glut of sugar which is pretty harmful to me but i don't get a low blood sugar like some diabetics who need insulin injections thats the form of diabetes which can lead to coma.
When I was younger I used to work as a dispatch rider, my morning routine was to have a small bottle of a glucose drink and a mars bar also high in glucose. The thing was this sugar burst got my brain running in high I was alert and ready which is something you need when your in a situation which can turn lethal in an instant. It had its side effects too in that I was taking in too much energy which meant my weight would rise.
Now that seems to make some kind of sense to me seems with some experimentation you should be able to figure out the best food and exercise intake to keep you running at your best.
Congratulations You must have worked pretty hard to create a system where firefox crashes when you try to play a youtube video.
If you genuinely have achieved this then I would suspect that you have a dodgy bank of ram that is starting to fail. or something extremely flawed about the system you are running flash and firefox on.
you don't say what operating system you are running but I suspect its time to upgrade from Windows ME.
There is such a thing as bad or failing hardware. I've seen what on paper should have been a nice Sony tower fall over at random intervals and Compaq systems fail and cheap and nasty E-machine PC's that were never stable.
Most people who can install flash and firefox can do so without issues so it is less an issue about flash but the system you are running it on.
However the fact that flash is closed source pretty much limits your options, If you launch firefox from a command line you might get some useful message sent to the terminal when the error occurs.
with christmas so near perhaps its possible you could get a new computer for christmas (or wait for the january sales).
i'm fairly certain so far you have only found a symptom not the underlying cause
however there are a good few distinctive accents all over the UK and the pronunciation of words and grammar varies widely perhaps rp is the 'official' way of speaking The only person I can think of who speaks like this is Brian Sewel http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3G618-hxgA
Would it be better if power was generated at work perhaps a big wind turbine, you could designate part of the car park to these types of vehicles and use the car park as one big ups. If enough power was generated you could use it at home as well.
Then there are the carbon offsetting taxes since hopefully you would be generating a surplus most days. On days you didn't you would pull it back from the cars. Assuming a 400 mile range and most people would be commuting in less than 10 miles each way you could probably tap into about 75% of the cars capacity and still leave enough to allow the car to be used for the daily commute.
You could save a fair bit by going for the N800, I quite like the N810 but I don't like the micro sd cards, i already have several Gb of sd cards which i use with my phone and PSP (twin sd card adapter from play.com) and PDA
It looks like host usb is going to be a reality on both the N800 and N810, why nokia haven't included it yet I don't know. I think i would be pleased with the N800 but the eee701 has its merits too.
It would make a perfect review comparing the N series nokia's the EEE701 and why not the OLPC laptop and perhaps a modded PSP running homebrew.
Sikhs who wear Turbans need not wear crash helmets when they ride Motor Cycles or Scooters. They have been allowed to wear Turban as their only headgear. In accordance with the Motor-Cycle Crash Helmets (Religious Exemption) Act 1976 passed by the British Parliament in 1976, Section 2A "exempts any follower of the Sikh religion while he is wearing a turban" from having to wear a crash helmet. http://www.sikhiwiki.org/index.php?title=UK_Legislation_connected_with_turban
wmtorrent (trial version) works on my HTC universal and to be quite honest its not that good.
It does work although very slowly. A popular torrent which normally would download in a couple of hours max about 350 meg took 24 hours and the phone needed to be kept on charge. The other major problem was that you need at least twice the size of the torrent as free space. If you tried it on a UK data plan, you would probably be able to do it maybe once in a month to be within your data allowance, unfortunately it's not allowed by my provider. Webpages and email seem to be almost all thats allowable.
T-mobile have (cough) come up with mobile TV, well nearly, sort of. The basic package you can have on a day pass for £1 or £3.50 a month- well doesn't do a lot really. There is one live channel eurosport2 and several canned streams available at certain times of the day. Just like real tv, apart from you can't record it a particular program appears at a designated time and channel, but well its not really a program as such, more a clip followed by an advert for channel4's on demand service.... MTV wasnt much better after a few minutes a message came up on my screen saying the server was asking me to disconnect... The resolution is astounding I've seen higher definition thumb nails, without zooming in the picture was about postage stamp sized at maybe 10 frames per second...
Then there is the connection. 3G is needed 2G doesn't cut it (it might try but its unuseable). Then there comes the real problem the 3G signal near me is good unfortunately the 2G signal is excellent. It is not possible to stop your phone connecting to the strongest signal, which tends to be 2G. This limitation of the connection makes the whole service useless for anything other than gee look what i can do with my phone, erm it'll work in a minute honest.
Spur of the moment video then is not practical, wmtorrent might be enough to grab a few popular mp3's or the odd ebook torrent, you would be better off just grabbing an ebook from amazon or a legal download site that doesnt require specialised software to download (iTunes is out then). Or being prepared and getting mythtv to record your favourite shows and transcode them into Xvid or divX.
Bit torrent isn't practical on a mobile, The average Torrent is bigger and slower than a mobile device can handle. There is a potential market for good quality downloadable content however no service has got it right yet.
78's A bit brittle not the best sound but quite durable, softer LP's got to be so thin warping was a problem. Theres a lot more weight to a sixtys album.
Unfortunately the record Industrys Disc has never matched the Movie industrys in terms of packaging and added value. Biography, inspiration for the tracks, tour photo's, multiple versions of tracks, ie the loudness track and the real dynamic version. The MP3 version to copy to your music player... Maybe create a flip disc one side cd the other DVD with the interesting stuff. As a fan i'll listen to anything you have to say about most anything. How about video of the tracks. filmed on tour, things I will not get from the labels PR machine, and 2 minute sound bites on tv and radio. There is a lot could go on a disc to make it more appealing. how about a 3d stage show and a pair of 3d glasses.
what do we get instead a brittle cd case with an inlay that falls out, drm root kit and a flat normalised sound. cheap nasty trash- are people expected to buy it?
depends entirely on the kit your using. I have seen NTSC DVD display perfectly, in black and white, or in colour with an audio sync issue. (all of these can occur on the same TV DVD combination). Some setups are unable to be set correctly. There is also the region coding problem some DVD players do not have codes to allow region switching.
On the other hand DivX copies seem to be flawless... Hopefully the DVD release will be collectible and well supported by sales.
And if you don't believe me, use Mozilla Firefox as an example. Quite clearly, Firefox is a far superior browser to Internet Explorer (more standards compliancy, more addons, etc.) yet it is still the minority browser. That's because Joe Sixpack simply does not care about better technology - IE does what it needs to for him so it's not even worth his while doing a 5MB download for Firefox.
Joe Sixpack does care about better technology, especially if it comes at a better price especially when that price is free.
The problem Joe Sixpack has is that he is uninformed about the alternatives. Joe Sixpack see's two options for his Software needs buying it or getting a cracked copy of a commercial program.
Just last night I installed Firefox and AVG on someones system for them. What you have to realise is that until yesterday this guy was totally unaware that these packages existed. I should have gone further and installed adaware, and spybot search&destroy as well.
It doesn't help that Retailers push things like Norton Antivirus and it's rare to find any retailer who would even mention a free program, obviously there is no money in free.
It's really up to people like us, to bring the free software to Joe Sixpack but then we don't really want to get in to maintaining other peoples PC's and if your doing it for money you have no incentive to tell Joe how to do it himself for free.
not every household has access to a computer Geek who is prepared to spend his/her time sorting out partially hosed systems.
To be quite frank we are not that interested, ok mum and dads computers we will fix but that still leaves a lot we are not prepared to spend our free time fixing.
To be fair when you consider how free software like firefox comes to be installed firefox has reached a surprisingly high proportion of users.
Your comment reminds me about a comment from another slashdot story about some chinese business men, who kept everything they needed (including the OS) off the laptop or whatever system they were using on a USB Pen Drive. hopefully encrypted.
It might make more sense for more business people to use a similar strategy. While I think Windows has an issue with booting from usb (i think it starts resets the usb bus and then loses its boot partition) Linux can happily run from a usb stick.
Even if thats to much how about an automated backup syncing the usb stick to the laptops data.
It's not the laptops storage space that is small, its more there is too much being stored on it.
then there is the polonium option for when in the uk. followed up by a run for political office.
In putin's russia they deny shooting dissidents.
To be fair though you can be accidently shot in the head five times in the UK If your french you can blow up boats in new zealand and if your mossad you can pretty much do as you please. Of course if your in bhopal then even corporations get to cause bloody mayhem.
Interesting read, however in section 3 it appears microsofts random number generator is used, isn't this the same generator that was found to be flawed in XP and 2000? Should the appraisal still be valid 2 years after it was written and before the discovery of this flaw.
Brute forcing the account password is limited by a time out after which no more attempts can be made for a while. However this is a restriction under control of SKYPE and could be lifted by them. Perhaps they can retrieve it anyway.
The real question can SKYPES protocols and encryption methods be overcome by skype themselves? Could SKYPE be forced under the DMCA or other government paper be forced to allow a "tap" to be put in place? Assuming that isn't the case with the version of the client tested, is there any assurance that a later version will not contain perhaps a government mandated backdoor.
The problem with Skypes security model is that you have to trust Skype and only Skype. If you really want to be comfortably secure then you should be using an encryption before you put your information through someone elses security measures.
We know that traditional telecom providers have to comply with government requests. We also see vonage in big trouble using Sip (and probably open enough for users to bolt on their own security).
Is Skype used by terrorists? we are aware that the USA is tapping regular phone lines and monitoring international traffic, so just why would they not be doing the same with Skype?
I provide no evidence that SKYPE can be insecure, but if it is surely the people charged with protecting national security must be very worried.
I wouldn't trust skype encryption to be secure, after all everyone has the capability of decrypting it with the skype client.
I can't see how it would be that difficult to monitor traffic through an ISP's gateway. Let alone the POTS system if it leaves the net to a standard phone.
If you want secure communications then really you need some kind of plugin for both ends of the conversation, although voip is lossy so your unlikely to be able to do this with a voice call pidgin on the other hand does give you a couple of options for encrypting your conversations using most IM networks independent of the IM network used.
It would be kind of handy if it could go one stage further and allow you to do the same for file transfer, encrypted ascii codes could be a conversation or they could be files. You could go even further and implement a version of P2P between a select group of friends, automating a number of conversations and scrambling things beyond recognition. send a file to peter to pass over to paul peter wouldnt even need to know whats been sent just who to forward it to.
going back to voice messaging perhaps it isn't that difficult to convert audio into ascii text send via im encrypted and and decrypt it at the other end...
For certain it would be very useful to be able to pass sensitive documents over IM systems. Probably safer than an email with an attachment.
It could be as simple as drag and drop for users, bob needs a spreadsheet from john IM to john he drags the file over to pidgeon up pops the file on bobs desktop.
I wouldn't be surprised if there is a plugin to do this already.
Next time, educate yourself about our sworn western enemies before justifying their cause. Bluntly put, I don't give a damn about their cause. These people need to die like the parasites they are on humanity. That is an interesting line, because it could just as easily be said about Americans and Europeans.
We dehumanize these people who are living in poverty supplying the western world with its toys. They see us getting fat from our gluttony, while people are starving and dieing around them.
I don't know what we can do about this, I would hope killing them is only a stop gap, perhaps it isn't, perhaps they think along similar lines about us.
Our governments seem to be readying for a terrorist war on our streets, only a few weeks ago in the uk it was announced that concrete barricades would be going up round the UK's Train Stations and Airports.
It is pretty much impossible to get a grasp on the whole situation, how different aspects interact but the west seems to be in denial we are spending future earnings now building up debt and pretending our credit card bills will take care of themselves.
Education is needed not just about our sworn enemies but about ourselves and the role we play in this situation. we won't be fiddling while rome burns we will be playing on consoles watching realty tv shows just escaping from reality.
I just took a look at the vonage deal in the uk and it's got me interested. Especially the concept of taking my vonage box with me to anywhere with a broadband connection.
Then I had an idea, that must have been explored already. Would it be possible for someone outside my lan to connect to my lan and then use my vonage (other voip) account to make calls? How about routing incoming calls to other IP's perhaps some kind of system that would greet a caller with please select an extension say 1 to 9 and 1 could be local to my lan 2 could link to my sisters IP 3 to a friends IP, 4 to an ip I could specify on the fly so my calls could be rerouted to where ever I was in the world.
I guess Skype kind of achieves some of this already to an extent in that its possible to log into a skype account anywhere.
Maybe it's possible to do something like this with a standard pots line routing into a pc based exchange?
Anyone have any insight into whats available and hopefully legal.
Finally, someone understands that the times when we've got time to watch old TV episodes, we're not likely to have internet access! I've often found myself traveling (train/plane) and it's been a perfect time to watch, but have been thwarted because of streaming-only services. For me I can put films and Tv in divX or Xvid on my HTC universal (pda/phone 640x480) andlisten using bluetooth without the hazzle of headphones with cables in full resolution. Or take the sd card and slip it into a card reader or usb adapter and watch on a PC or a dvd/divX player that supports the card.
My Pda/phone has more than enough battery life to use it for several hours like this.
Off course I am limited to legal recordings made with my Mythtv box, which is set to automatically transcode to xvid.
I could transcode to make my recordings compatible with the PSP, however I would have to setup a lower resolution and psp batteries hold fairly low charges and memory sticks are expensive. The Slimline PSP features a TV-Out so might be an attractive option for others.
Streaming is a possibility since the htc universal is supported by the slingbox but Streaming video is not allowed on my Dataplan. Hotspots might work if I want to sit in starbucks and stream from my lan or youtube. however since the slingbox software doesn't allow recording I couldn't use that to transfer an episode to my pda whilst on the move.
Actually there is an interesting idea would it be possible to down load a file with an intermittent wifi connection. using open wifi sources like la fonera.
Bittorrent also possible but so far only found a paid for client (about $20) http://www.adisasta.com/wmTorrent.html I don't know if it will cope with an intermittent connection thou.
Unfortunately the NBC service is completely useless to mobile users starting with the DRM but as you can see there are a number of alternatives, from the fully legal to the legally dubious. Some of which I'd not considered before this post. Is anyone familiar with a linux based server which supports partial downloads and resumes from varied IP addresses and a mobile client to connect to it? perhaps a private bit torrent.
IDE drives aren't really an issue. For the MB in the article, sure. But that's not the spirit of the article I'd say.
I recently went through having to upgrade, and I have 4 IDE drives I wanted to keep. I found most new AMD based boards only had one IDE channel. Meaning, I get to keep my DVD drive and one HD. You could have used usb and kept 4 IDE drives, if you really didnt want external enclosures you could mount the drives internally and connect using internal USB connectors. Or a PCI IDE card...
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I'll second that, really when it comes to Computers 'retail world' is not what you want. Certainly not if you know what your looking for. Lets be honest here they are supermarkets with computers in them. They have huge overheads, due to the style of the store. The Employee's are generally pretty ignorant of what they are selling and the customer they want to sell too doesn't read slashdot!
The stores we buy from usually we don't even set foot in, we buy from the website. However usually they do have a trade counter and thats the best place to buy from if you need it fast. My local outlet has an industrial unit on the outskirts of the city (which does hold stock unlike some web based retailers who are just drop shippers). They build systems to order and sell components printers and the usual bits and pieces. They tend to stock tried and tested products with very little customer returns. I doubt they have a single employee who couldn't fix a faulty pc and to top it off they price very competitively at or below 'retail worlds' prices.
The web site is well designed and pretty responsive. I was going to give you the website address but I spotted a few items I fancy buying for myself and I wouldn't want to go round tomorrow and find they are out of stock with a dead web server.
There is no need for more red tape but a few more low power frequencies with type approval for each band allocated. yes please.
Its happened to me more than a few times. Science and math are getting to be extremely specific fields. I'm sure there's a few articles only a handful of people really understand. This doesn't happen with an Encyclopedia Britannia. Only that people are expecting content just like that.
The people entering Wikipedia articles are doing a wonderful job. I'd just like to see that more content for the 'science and math lay person' is considered as well. Theres a good phrase for that horses for courses.
A traditional encyclopedia has to pitch itself at a particular audience obviously there are children's editions and more adult orientated encyclopedias. Wikipedia doesn't need to pitch all articles at a level, instead it would be far better to present the information at different levels. Generally most subjects can be presented at different levels from overly simplistic to mind blowingly complex. with a number of stages in between.
Maybe whats needed is a comprehension rating from users, why can't there be 4 or 5 articles on the same subject but designed to meet the needs of different audiences.
Generally knowledge builds on a foundation and if the reader hasn't got that foundation then it becomes harder and harder to grasp. lets call your really hard article level 10 if there was articles about level 6 or level 8 that you read first you might well then be able to comprehend the level 10 article.
problem is with wikipedia , some editor will come along see, hmm two articles on this subject and delete one of them, the worst editors would delete both.
Although i dislike the idea of googles project, purely on the basis I don't want to be data mined and sold too when I am looking for information. It probably would be less of an ego trip for its editors.
perhaps Wikipedia would be better with a fairly simple approval field for articles.
a user could be a child, joe public, knowledgeable in this field. and ratings could be approve
In other words both Party A and Party B have to take into account the views of people voting for party C.
The obvious case is green issues are now a part of most party policies.
unfortunately it is a very slow process, third party support needs to be built up over time to become significant to either of the main parties, but it can be an effective way of moderating party excesses - as good as we are going to get.
Obviously a PR system is better at producing a government representing the interests of the people but turkeys don't vote for christmas.
I wanna pony
I don't support Gasoline taxes precisely because they harm the poor. Gasoline is highly price inelastic, and so prices have to be hiked enormously in order to decrease demand. This takes away money that consumers could have spent on other things.
Nobody likes high fuel prices simply because it increases the cost per mile that you travel, yes thats obviousIf we want to control Global Warming, that is another issue entirely, that can be dealt with by controlling tail-pipe emissions. But with a Gasoline tax, companies don't have any financial incentive to research Carbon reducing technologies, only MPG increasing ones.
what is also obvious is that to minimise the cost per mile you choose a vehicle that uses less / cheaper fuel per mile.
Increasing MPG decreases emissions if i burn half the same fuel you do over the same distance , my engines put out half the emissions yours has, not only that I have saved myself 50% of the fuel costs you had to pay.
It's almost certain that I paid less for my car than you did for yours. I probably pay less in running costs, insurance and road tax.
If we earn equivalent salaries i am actually better off than you since I have more free cash than you have.
I might even have more free time than you do since my effective income is higher than yours, I don't need the overtime as much.
I could go to extremes and start using a bike or a bus to go to work, a motorbike tends to give high MPG and high performance, and also doesn't suffer from being stuck in a traffic queue. I could maybe half my commute time
admittedly there are negatives when the roads are icy and its bitterly cold a motorcycle loses a lot of its appeal.
Perhaps I might even choose to walk.
Of course there are times when you need a car, doing the supermarket shop for instance. You can order a Taxi. Ok its more expensive for that journey than if you already had a car, but it stops costing you once you get back home.
Hire Cars can be a good choice if your need for a car is infrequent.
Finally if by companies not having any incentive to research Carbon reducing technologies only MPG reducing ones you mean car companies thats clearly nonsense the biggest disincentive to developing alternative fuels is the existence of cheap carbon burning fuels.
"Gasoline is highly price inelastic" if by that you mean that I will still use pretty much the same quantity of fuel on a day by day basis if the price rises then yes its inelastic, it certainly puts me off from making longer journeys, that I don't need to make. It also helps me choose my next car.
I don't think it is just stress that causes time dilation I think you can put it in simpler terms.
If your brain is somewhat like a CPU then the processing speed varies according to the clock rate.
Is the clock rate of the brain variable? almost certainly I would say, we haven't all been in car wrecks and had time move slowly (we just turned up the processing speed) but there are times when the clock rate is low we can't think straight, we are tired and fuzzy. Other times we feel sharp and things are clicking. Youth seems to be a factor in feeling sharp, as does physical fitness, fresh air and perhaps the right diet.
Pretty much we can compare ourselves to internal combustion engines for optimum efficiency you need the correct fuel to air ratio for the best performance. Taking the subjective time speed up in moments of danger your blood starts pumping probably more oxygen is reaching your brain from a steady drip drip of energy into your system it becomes a flood and your brain is firing rapidly.
Perversely it is the opposite effect most of us notice, well barely notice we get drowsy our fuel mix gets out of balance and we perform poorly. On the whole most healthy people will not get too far out of balance, I'm not healthy I am diabetic and my body has poor control over blood sugar levels. a healthy person will have relatively small changes in blood sugar levels as their body regulates it well with insulin. my body produces insulin so generally i just get a glut of sugar which is pretty harmful to me but i don't get a low blood sugar like some diabetics who need insulin injections thats the form of diabetes which can lead to coma.
When I was younger I used to work as a dispatch rider, my morning routine was to have a small bottle of a glucose drink and a mars bar also high in glucose. The thing was this sugar burst got my brain running in high I was alert and ready which is something you need when your in a situation which can turn lethal in an instant. It had its side effects too in that I was taking in too much energy which meant my weight would rise.
Now that seems to make some kind of sense to me
seems with some experimentation you should be able to figure out the best food and exercise intake to keep you running at your best.
Congratulations You must have worked pretty hard to create a system where firefox crashes when you try to play a youtube video.
If you genuinely have achieved this then I would suspect that you have a dodgy bank of ram that is starting to fail.
or something extremely flawed about the system you are running flash and firefox on.
you don't say what operating system you are running but I suspect its time to upgrade from Windows ME.
There is such a thing as bad or failing hardware. I've seen what on paper should have been a nice Sony tower fall over at random intervals and Compaq systems fail and cheap and nasty E-machine PC's that were never stable.
Most people who can install flash and firefox can do so without issues so it is less an issue about flash but the system you are running it on.
However the fact that flash is closed source pretty much limits your options, If you launch firefox from a command line you might get some useful message sent to the terminal when the error occurs.
with christmas so near perhaps its possible you could get a new computer for christmas (or wait for the january sales).
i'm fairly certain so far you have only found a symptom not the underlying cause
however there are a good few distinctive accents all over the UK and the pronunciation of words and grammar varies
widely perhaps rp is the 'official' way of speaking
The only person I can think of who speaks like this is Brian Sewel http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3G618-hxgA
Although you might prefer this interpretation http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bauz34toJ1g
and here he is on one of the top uk tv programs
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=sc2jW2dp1g8
Would it be better if power was generated at work perhaps a big wind turbine, you could designate part of the car park to these types of vehicles and use the car park as one big ups. If enough power was generated you could use it at home as well.
Then there are the carbon offsetting taxes since hopefully you would be generating a surplus most days. On days you didn't you would pull it back from the cars. Assuming a 400 mile range and most people would be commuting in less than 10 miles each way you could probably tap into about 75% of the cars capacity and still leave enough to allow the car to be used for the daily commute.
You could save a fair bit by going for the N800, I quite like the N810 but I don't like the micro sd cards, i already have several Gb of sd cards which i use with my phone and PSP (twin sd card adapter from play.com) and PDA
It looks like host usb is going to be a reality on both the N800 and N810, why nokia haven't included it yet I don't know. I think i would be pleased with the N800 but the eee701 has its merits too.
It would make a perfect review comparing the N series nokia's the EEE701 and why not the OLPC laptop and perhaps a modded PSP running homebrew.
Riding Motor Cycles
Sikhs who wear Turbans need not wear crash helmets when they ride Motor Cycles or Scooters. They have been allowed to wear Turban as their only headgear. In accordance with the Motor-Cycle Crash Helmets (Religious Exemption) Act 1976 passed by the British Parliament in 1976, Section 2A "exempts any follower of the Sikh religion while he is wearing a turban" from having to wear a crash helmet.
http://www.sikhiwiki.org/index.php?title=UK_Legislation_connected_with_turban
wmtorrent (trial version) works on my HTC universal and to be quite honest its not that good.
..
It does work although very slowly. A popular torrent which normally would download in a couple of hours max about 350 meg took 24 hours and the phone needed to be kept on charge. The other major problem was that you need at least twice the size of the torrent as free space. If you tried it on a UK data plan, you would probably be able to do it maybe once in a month to be within your data allowance, unfortunately it's not allowed by my provider. Webpages and email seem to be almost all thats allowable.
T-mobile have (cough) come up with mobile TV, well nearly, sort of. The basic package you can have on a day pass for £1 or £3.50 a month- well doesn't do a lot really. There is one live channel eurosport2 and several canned streams available at certain times of the day. Just like real tv, apart from you can't record it a particular program appears at a designated time and channel, but well its not really a program as such, more a clip followed by an advert for channel4's on demand service.... MTV wasnt much better after a few minutes a message came up on my screen saying the server was asking me to disconnect...
The resolution is astounding I've seen higher definition thumb nails, without zooming in the picture was about postage stamp sized at maybe 10 frames per second.
Then there is the connection. 3G is needed 2G doesn't cut it (it might try but its unuseable). Then there comes the real problem the 3G signal near me is good unfortunately the 2G signal is excellent. It is not possible to stop your phone connecting to the strongest signal, which tends to be 2G. This limitation of the connection makes the whole service useless for anything other than gee look what i can do with my phone, erm it'll work in a minute honest.
Spur of the moment video then is not practical, wmtorrent might be enough to grab a few popular mp3's or the odd ebook torrent, you would be better off just grabbing an ebook from amazon or a legal download site that doesnt require specialised software to download (iTunes is out then). Or being prepared and getting mythtv to record your favourite shows and transcode them into Xvid or divX.
Bit torrent isn't practical on a mobile, The average Torrent is bigger and slower than a mobile device can handle. There is a potential market for good quality downloadable content however no service has got it right yet.
78's A bit brittle not the best sound but quite durable, softer LP's got to be so thin warping was a problem. Theres a lot more weight to a sixtys album.
Unfortunately the record Industrys Disc has never matched the Movie industrys in terms of packaging and added value. Biography, inspiration for the tracks, tour photo's, multiple versions of tracks, ie the loudness track and the real dynamic version. The MP3 version to copy to your music player...
Maybe create a flip disc one side cd the other DVD with the interesting stuff. As a fan i'll listen to anything you have to say about most anything. How about video of the tracks. filmed on tour, things I will not get from the labels PR machine, and 2 minute sound bites on tv and radio. There is a lot could go on a disc to make it more appealing. how about a 3d stage show and a pair of 3d glasses.
what do we get instead a brittle cd case with an inlay that falls out, drm root kit and a flat normalised sound.
cheap nasty trash- are people expected to buy it?
depends entirely on the kit your using.
I have seen NTSC DVD display perfectly, in black and white, or in colour with an audio sync issue. (all of these can occur on the same TV DVD combination). Some setups are unable to be set correctly. There is also the region coding problem some DVD players do not have codes to allow region switching.
On the other hand DivX copies seem to be flawless... Hopefully the DVD release will be collectible and well supported by sales.
Joe Sixpack does care about better technology, especially if it comes at a better price especially when that price is free.And if you don't believe me, use Mozilla Firefox as an example. Quite clearly, Firefox is a far superior browser to Internet Explorer (more standards compliancy, more addons, etc.) yet it is still the minority browser. That's because Joe Sixpack simply does not care about better technology - IE does what it needs to for him so it's not even worth his while doing a 5MB download for Firefox.
The problem Joe Sixpack has is that he is uninformed about the alternatives. Joe Sixpack see's two options for his Software needs buying it or getting a cracked copy of a commercial program.
Just last night I installed Firefox and AVG on someones system for them. What you have to realise is that until yesterday this guy was totally unaware that these packages existed. I should have gone further and installed adaware, and spybot search&destroy as well.
It doesn't help that Retailers push things like Norton Antivirus and it's rare to find any retailer who would even mention a free program, obviously there is no money in free.
It's really up to people like us, to bring the free software to Joe Sixpack but then we don't really want to get in to maintaining other peoples PC's and if your doing it for money you have no incentive to tell Joe how to do it himself for free.
not every household has access to a computer Geek who is prepared to spend his/her time sorting out partially hosed systems.
To be quite frank we are not that interested, ok mum and dads computers we will fix but that still leaves a lot we are not prepared to spend our free time fixing.
To be fair when you consider how free software like firefox comes to be installed firefox has reached a surprisingly high proportion of users.
Your comment reminds me about a comment from another slashdot story about some chinese business men, who kept everything they needed (including the OS) off the laptop or whatever system they were using on a USB Pen Drive.
hopefully encrypted.
It might make more sense for more business people to use a similar strategy. While I think Windows has an issue with booting from usb (i think it starts resets the usb bus and then loses its boot partition) Linux can happily run from a usb stick.
Even if thats to much how about an automated backup syncing the usb stick to the laptops data.
It's not the laptops storage space that is small, its more there is too much being stored on it.
then there is the polonium option for when in the uk. followed up by a run for political office.
In putin's russia they deny shooting dissidents.
To be fair though you can be accidently shot in the head five times in the UK If your french you can blow up boats in new zealand and if your mossad you can pretty much do as you please. Of course if your in bhopal then even corporations get to cause bloody mayhem.
depressing isn't it.
Interesting read, however in section 3 it appears microsofts random number generator is used, isn't this the same generator that was found to be flawed in XP and 2000? Should the appraisal still be valid 2 years after it was written and before the discovery of this flaw.
Brute forcing the account password is limited by a time out after which no more attempts can be made for a while.
However this is a restriction under control of SKYPE and could be lifted by them. Perhaps they can retrieve it anyway.
The real question can SKYPES protocols and encryption methods be overcome by skype themselves? Could SKYPE be forced under the DMCA or other government paper be forced to allow a "tap" to be put in place?
Assuming that isn't the case with the version of the client tested, is there any assurance that a later version will not contain perhaps a government mandated backdoor.
The problem with Skypes security model is that you have to trust Skype and only Skype. If you really want to be comfortably secure then you should be using an encryption before you put your information through someone elses security measures.
We know that traditional telecom providers have to comply with government requests. We also see vonage in big trouble using Sip (and probably open enough for users to bolt on their own security).
Is Skype used by terrorists? we are aware that the USA is tapping regular phone lines and monitoring international traffic, so just why would they not be doing the same with Skype?
I provide no evidence that SKYPE can be insecure, but if it is surely the people charged with protecting national security must be very worried.
I wouldn't trust skype encryption to be secure, after all everyone has the capability of decrypting it with the skype client.
I can't see how it would be that difficult to monitor traffic through an ISP's gateway. Let alone the POTS system if it leaves the net to a standard phone.
If you want secure communications then really you need some kind of plugin for both ends of the conversation, although voip is lossy so your unlikely to be able to do this with a voice call pidgin on the other hand does give you a couple of options for encrypting your conversations using most IM networks independent of the IM network used.
It would be kind of handy if it could go one stage further and allow you to do the same for file transfer, encrypted ascii codes could be a conversation or they could be files. You could go even further and implement a version of P2P between a select group of friends, automating a number of conversations and scrambling things beyond recognition. send a file to peter to pass over to paul peter wouldnt even need to know whats been sent just who to forward it to.
going back to voice messaging perhaps it isn't that difficult to convert audio into ascii text send via im encrypted and and decrypt it at the other end...
For certain it would be very useful to be able to pass sensitive documents over IM systems. Probably safer than an email with an attachment.
It could be as simple as drag and drop for users, bob needs a spreadsheet from john IM to john he drags the file over to pidgeon up pops the file on bobs desktop.
I wouldn't be surprised if there is a plugin to do this already.
We dehumanize these people who are living in poverty supplying the western world with its toys.
They see us getting fat from our gluttony, while people are starving and dieing around them.
I don't know what we can do about this, I would hope killing them is only a stop gap, perhaps it isn't, perhaps they think along similar lines about us.
Our governments seem to be readying for a terrorist war on our streets, only a few weeks ago in the uk it was announced that concrete barricades would be going up round the UK's Train Stations and Airports.
It is pretty much impossible to get a grasp on the whole situation, how different aspects interact but the west seems to be in denial we are spending future earnings now building up debt and pretending our credit card bills will take care of themselves.
Education is needed not just about our sworn enemies but about ourselves and the role we play in this situation.
we won't be fiddling while rome burns we will be playing on consoles watching realty tv shows just escaping from reality.
I just took a look at the vonage deal in the uk and it's got me interested. Especially the concept of taking my vonage box with me to anywhere with a broadband connection.
Then I had an idea, that must have been explored already. Would it be possible for someone outside my lan to connect to my lan and then use my vonage (other voip) account to make calls? How about routing incoming calls to other IP's perhaps some kind of system that would greet a caller with please select an extension say 1 to 9 and 1 could be local to my lan 2 could link to my sisters IP 3 to a friends IP, 4 to an ip I could specify on the fly so my calls could be rerouted to where ever I was in the world.
I guess Skype kind of achieves some of this already to an extent in that its possible to log into a skype account anywhere.
Maybe it's possible to do something like this with a standard pots line routing into a pc based exchange?
Anyone have any insight into whats available and hopefully legal.
My Pda/phone has more than enough battery life to use it for several hours like this.
Off course I am limited to legal recordings made with my Mythtv box, which is set to automatically transcode to xvid.
I could transcode to make my recordings compatible with the PSP, however I would have to setup a lower resolution and psp batteries hold fairly low charges and memory sticks are expensive. The Slimline PSP features a TV-Out so might be an attractive option for others.
Streaming is a possibility since the htc universal is supported by the slingbox but Streaming video is not allowed on my Dataplan. Hotspots might work if I want to sit in starbucks and stream from my lan or youtube.
however since the slingbox software doesn't allow recording I couldn't use that to transfer an episode to my pda whilst on the move.
Actually there is an interesting idea would it be possible to down load a file with an intermittent wifi connection. using open wifi sources like la fonera.
Podcasts are a possibility, http://www.podcastingnews.com/topics/Podcast_Software.html , there is software available for most platforms including pda and psp.
Bittorrent also possible but so far only found a paid for client (about $20) http://www.adisasta.com/wmTorrent.html
I don't know if it will cope with an intermittent connection thou.
For Psp there is http://www.pspvideo9.com/pspcasting.html an interesting possibility.
and emule for pda possibly http://www-info3.informatik.uni-wuerzburg.de/staff/mopi/mopiphant.shtml
Unfortunately the NBC service is completely useless to mobile users starting with the DRM but as you can see there are a number of alternatives, from the fully legal to the legally dubious. Some of which I'd not considered before this post. Is anyone familiar with a linux based server which supports partial downloads and resumes from varied IP addresses and a mobile client to connect to it? perhaps a private bit torrent.
The grammar nazi's will love this one
http://www.freerice.com/
Anyone can increase their vocabulary here, at the same time helping to feed some of the worlds poorest people.
so far it's snowballing quite nicely
makes a change from freecell.
one of the comments includes this link
http://www.bbc.co.uk/go/blogs/bbcinternet/2007/11/linux_figures_1.html/ext/_auto/-/http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/linuxbbc/signatures.html
theres about 2600 names added so far, be interesting to see how big the slashdot effect could be:)
it will go via the bbc so they should notice
I recently went through having to upgrade, and I have 4 IDE drives I wanted to keep. I found most new AMD based boards only had one IDE channel. Meaning, I get to keep my DVD drive and one HD. You could have used usb and kept 4 IDE drives, if you really didnt want external enclosures you could mount the drives internally and connect using internal USB connectors. Or a PCI IDE card...