It's really so that the advertisers can still advertise to you when you're asleep. You think that the TV is switched off, but really it's waiting for you to drift off into REM sleep, when they will play their subliminal adverts to you.
I have a CRT television set (with a standby button), a VHS recorder (with a standby button), a DVD player (with a standby button), and a digital satellite set-top box (with a standby button). Only one has a real mechanical, circuit-breaking, power switch easily available (the TV).
In order to even turn all the devices into standby, I need to fumble for four different remote controls, else they all end up heating the living room when nobody is in there. Typically, the TV is the only thing that gets put into standby.
Given that the VHS has auto-set up and can recover from a power outage (save for timer recording, which many people don't use), I guess it might make some sense to hook them up to one of those master-slave power bars, whereby you set it up so that when the TV stops drawing full current, the other sockets are switched OFF.
The digital satellite set-top box has a few issues with losing power (it loses EPG reminders, and defaults to some silly promotional channel, which I guess is mostly due to design by BSkyB).
Here's another thought. Duplicate circuitry. All of those devices have DC transformers. The digital satellite set-top box has MPEG2 decoders, as does the DVD player, yet they are never used at the same time, but the circuitry is probably receiving their full power budget at all times. Likewise, the TV set and DVD player both have audio amplifiers, yet I've never used the speaker outputs on the DVD player.
If I had one well-designed appliance that had the screen, a DVD transport, a VHS transport (yes, they are still used), and an integral digital satellite decoder, it could use far less power overall. The problem there is obsolecence. In order to get that, I need to either sell, give away, or recycle the existing equipment, which uses energy. It also means that if I decide that High Definition television is going to be good, I'd have to discard the lot of it and replace it, but with something with a HD-DVD, or blue ray mechanism? turns into diminishing returns.
If all such equipment responded to a standard "enter standby" remote control code, then I bet more equipment would be going into standby rather than remaining on full-power. If they could all go into a mode where they use less than a watt in standby, all the better.
Actually, I think Bellsouth was attempting to charge for higher QOS based on the IP packet's source IP address, so it wasn't trying to extort money in return for not throttling traffic TO a host, but in return for not throttling traffic FROM a host.
Indeed, my experience of getting rid of crap that I can't think anyone wants is that it gets snapped up.. By the same person. A woman, in her 50s, who must be a complete kleptomaniac with a house full of complete junk.
Someone I know, now in her 60s is addicted to freecycle, but she seems to collect more than she gives away, leaving her garage full of stuff she doesn't NEED, and is unlikely to use. Yes, it's a shame to see decent stuff going to landfill, but it's also a shame to see it gathering dust in a garage never to be used.
In 1979, I had a Hitachi radio cassette tape recorder. It could record radio programmes onto a local storage media so I could listen to them later.
How, precisely, is this any different? Both are not lossless. Digital radio gets encoded with a lossy algorithm before transmission. FM radio transmission is lossy because of the radio noise and bandwidth limits. Cassette tape recording is lossy because of bandwidth limits and tape distortion.
The issue is that the people who really enjoy listening to music will want a copy that some DJ hasn't talked over the first and last 30 seconds of the track, or faded into another song. These days, if I record from any form of broadcast radio audio, I still get this on most stations. It must be a method the radio stations agree with the rights owners, and I don't see why they can't keep to that. The real geeks who aren't going to spend money will probably record multiple copies and try to mix them to remove the DJ chatter, but they are going to be a tiny minority, and they aren't going to spend money anyway, so they are a lost cause.
Tidal power, Wave power, Hydroelectric power. All nice clean sources of power with reasonably good efficiency, ideal for coastal nations. Hydroelectric dams are ideal for mountainous nations with high precipitation.
Supplement that with wind, and nuclear to fill your power budget and you've reduced your reliance on the politics of oil-producing nations.
As for transportation, imagine the above power sources pumping electricity into a transport system where the vehicles pick up energy from the infrastructure. You've just imagined electric railways. Get lots of rail infrastructure, get the bulk of the freight onto rail, get more passengers on the railways.
Now all we need is someone to produce some sort of industrial complex that *produces* natural gas in a clean and efficient way, and we'll all be mostly happy when the oil and gas runs out.
Great. Can the police please keep an eye out for my stolen car? It's been gone for years, reported stolen, and never been found.
(actually, a very sensible cross-check would be to compare the general colour of the vehicle with the registered colour of the vehicle that is supposed to have that registration).
I've got a feeling that, as with their experience with the in-car ANPR cameras, they pick up far more discrepancies that need investigating than the traffic cops have time to investigate.
Think: The space shuttle was designed in the 70's. That was before most of the USA knew much about SI/metric units.
(NASA had to go metric partly when doing the Apollo-Soyuz project, when actually meeting the requirements of a standard androgynous docking module meant meeting metric measurements)
The whole docking interface on the Shuttle was an afterthought, developed for the Shuttle-Mir project.
The US-designed aircraft that I've flown (designed in the 1950s/1960s are designed in feet and inches). I guess that new designs are more likely to be dimensioned in millimetres, even if the publicity/marketing departments might translate the wingspan etc to a near feet and inches for American publicity).
(or for UK tabloid publicity, they probably get translated into tabloid units - 8 times as long as a double decker bus)
You'll probably find that such networking extends outside most residential properties, and will reach any other property on the same phase from the neighbourhood transformer.
That said, the homeplug specs state that it supports encrypted data anyway, so it shouldn't privacy be much of a problem. That said, it's only 56 bit, and most equipment ships with a manufacturer's default encryption key of "HomePlug".
Because such a plate would easily be detected at the annual MoT (roadworthiness) tests, and the vehicle would fail. Any vehicle with such a fail recorded against it, without a subsequent pass, seen moving on the public highway is an offence for the driver, resulting in, at least, penalty points on the drivers licence and a fine.
Nowadays in the UK, this happens for people who attempt to re-arrange the characters on the plate to attempt to make a word instead of an unpronounceable sequence of numbers and letters. If it derives from the norm, and is likely to cause problems for ANPR, it'll fail.
Patrol cars are fitted with ANPR, and the police officers may, at their discresion, use any mismatch of ANPR information to perform a random stop-and-search of the vehicle. Typically, they will be able to uncover many other offences at the same time (uninsured driver, unlicenced driver, illegal immigrant, bald tyres, not wearing seat belts, driver holding mobile phone).
Most ANPR systems are capable of reading "foreign" plates. For tracking a known car from a known place, it doesn't really matter WHAT letters and numbers are on the plate, just that the ANPR cameras can reliably read the same sequence and match that, and not get confused with all the other cars on the roads, possibly using geographic proximity to avoid near-simultaneous false-positives from the other side of the country.
They may have problems with plates from primarily arabic speaking countries, with solely arabic lettering but we don't get many of those in the UK.
There are explicitly signs that state that road signs in mainland UK are in mph, and give appropriate conversions to km/h for drivers of cars using international standard units. They can be found outside most ferry terminals.
I have never seen any road signs in the UK explicitly stating that the default distance measurements for road signs are in statute miles. In fact, many motorway signs give the letter "m" after a number, which according to international convention, means metres, and it should read "mi" as an abbreviation to mean miles.
I have seen, on British territory, speed limit road signs on public roads which explicitly state that the speed limit is in km/h. ( British Sovreign Base area, Akrotiri, Cyprus - outside the British controlled territory, there is no explicit signs stating that the speed limits are still in km/h there as well)
It was fun in Ireland whilst they were changing to metric road signs, a project which took over 10 years. First, all new distance signs were labelled in km, and once the majority of distance signs were in km, there was a big bang changeover of speed limit signs. During the changeover, there were no obvious signs at ferry terminals stating what units were in use for speed or distance, so it was easy to assume "oh, that distance sign says km, so speed limits must be too", and then drive far too slowly.
The politicians and other high-ranking Party members get their own lanes on the road.
To be perfectly honest, why the hell would the life of a politician be any more worthwhile protecting than the life of a lawyer? Hell, if Tony Blair is worth protecting from an invasion of his privacy, so am I, and so is every man, woman, child and their dog in the country.
the Microsoft VRML viewer plug-in for Internet Explorer, back in 1995-1996 (can't remember precisely) supported gzip compression, and I distinctly remember seeing a GPL relating to the gzip code on the click-through installer.
With NASA making plans to phase out the STS, and it's need for landing on an immense runway at ridiculous touchdown speeds, it's hardly suprising that they'll want to find another use for the landing strip.
I reckon that NASA's new stuff are going to be traditional vertical launch, parachute landing jobs, and won't need the big long strip.
My 2001 Honda Civic (1.6 litre VTEC petrol engine) does about 38mpg overall (the 40 litre tank takes me about 350 miles on average) The same 2001 Honda Civic would do about 33.119mpg would it be in the USA.
Reason: Nothing to do with US driving conditions, it's just that the US gallon is defined differently than anywhere else. Not that anywhere outside of the US really use gallons any more.
(in metric units, the car gets just over 7l/100km) this is not the same as SI units, but SI units are based on metric units - SI units would be in metres and litres.
Then they'll only complain about the "optical" hole in their defenses, which is where you point an HDTV camcorder at a HDTV LCD panel (LCD panels are pretty good at not having refresh flicker), sample the speaker outputs. Kind of like all those cinema pirates, but without people throwing popcorn, and they can do it in the comfort of their own home.
An interesting aside: To upgrade Gnome on the official FreeBSD builds, the only recommended way is to have an upgrade that builds the entire of gnome, and all of it's dependencies from source. This takes about a day on my machine, during which time you cannot use Gnome.
UK Postcodes CAN be validated - without an address lookup database.
There is a limited character set : Not all letters are valid in all positions (C, I, K, M, O, V, are not valid in the last two characters), the last three characters are ALWAYS in the form digit letter letter, a UK postcode ALWAYS begins with at least one letter, and ALWAYS contains at least two digits. The recommended layout is to put a space before the last three characters.
[A-Z]{1,2}\d[A-Z\d]? \d[ABD-HJLNP-UW-Z]{2}
Within the UK, most sensible address forms will ask for a postcode and a building number or name, and look up on a database sold by Royal Mail (known as PAF, or Postal Address File).
The Netherlands postcode scheme is really much more clever. It includes check digit algorithms that will tell you if the building number should be odd, even, neither, either)
But Mr Gagarin is generally acknowledged as the first to circumnavigate the globe solo in a flying machine. Okay, so it was projectile flight, the flying machine wasn't really very useable at the end of the flight, and he had a hell of a lot of backup on the ground, and very little pilot control.
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It's really so that the advertisers can still advertise to you when you're asleep. You think that the TV is switched off, but really it's waiting for you to drift off into REM sleep, when they will play their subliminal adverts to you.
I have a CRT television set (with a standby button), a VHS recorder (with a standby button), a DVD player (with a standby button), and a digital satellite set-top box (with a standby button). Only one has a real mechanical, circuit-breaking, power switch easily available (the TV).
In order to even turn all the devices into standby, I need to fumble for four different remote controls, else they all end up heating the living room when nobody is in there. Typically, the TV is the only thing that gets put into standby.
Given that the VHS has auto-set up and can recover from a power outage (save for timer recording, which many people don't use), I guess it might make some sense to hook them up to one of those master-slave power bars, whereby you set it up so that when the TV stops drawing full current, the other sockets are switched OFF.
The digital satellite set-top box has a few issues with losing power (it loses EPG reminders, and defaults to some silly promotional channel, which I guess is mostly due to design by BSkyB).
Here's another thought. Duplicate circuitry. All of those devices have DC transformers. The digital satellite set-top box has MPEG2 decoders, as does the DVD player, yet they are never used at the same time, but the circuitry is probably receiving their full power budget at all times. Likewise, the TV set and DVD player both have audio amplifiers, yet I've never used the speaker outputs on the DVD player.
If I had one well-designed appliance that had the screen, a DVD transport, a VHS transport (yes, they are still used), and an integral digital satellite decoder, it could use far less power overall. The problem there is obsolecence. In order to get that, I need to either sell, give away, or recycle the existing equipment, which uses energy. It also means that if I decide that High Definition television is going to be good, I'd have to discard the lot of it and replace it, but with something with a HD-DVD, or blue ray mechanism? turns into diminishing returns.
If all such equipment responded to a standard "enter standby" remote control code, then I bet more equipment would be going into standby rather than remaining on full-power. If they could all go into a mode where they use less than a watt in standby, all the better.
Actually, I think Bellsouth was attempting to charge for higher QOS based on the IP packet's source IP address, so it wasn't trying to extort money in return for not throttling traffic TO a host, but in return for not throttling traffic FROM a host.
Indeed, my experience of getting rid of crap that I can't think anyone wants is that it gets snapped up.. By the same person. A woman, in her 50s, who must be a complete kleptomaniac with a house full of complete junk.
Someone I know, now in her 60s is addicted to freecycle, but she seems to collect more than she gives away, leaving her garage full of stuff she doesn't NEED, and is unlikely to use. Yes, it's a shame to see decent stuff going to landfill, but it's also a shame to see it gathering dust in a garage never to be used.
In 1979, I had a Hitachi radio cassette tape recorder. It could record radio programmes onto a local storage media so I could listen to them later.
How, precisely, is this any different? Both are not lossless. Digital radio gets encoded with a lossy algorithm before transmission. FM radio transmission is lossy because of the radio noise and bandwidth limits. Cassette tape recording is lossy because of bandwidth limits and tape distortion.
The issue is that the people who really enjoy listening to music will want a copy that some DJ hasn't talked over the first and last 30 seconds of the track, or faded into another song. These days, if I record from any form of broadcast radio audio, I still get this on most stations. It must be a method the radio stations agree with the rights owners, and I don't see why they can't keep to that. The real geeks who aren't going to spend money will probably record multiple copies and try to mix them to remove the DJ chatter, but they are going to be a tiny minority, and they aren't going to spend money anyway, so they are a lost cause.
required listening: "C30 C60 C90" by Bow Wow Wow.
Tidal power, Wave power, Hydroelectric power. All nice clean sources of power with reasonably good efficiency, ideal for coastal nations. Hydroelectric dams are ideal for mountainous nations with high precipitation.
Supplement that with wind, and nuclear to fill your power budget and you've reduced your reliance on the politics of oil-producing nations.
As for transportation, imagine the above power sources pumping electricity into a transport system where the vehicles pick up energy from the infrastructure. You've just imagined electric railways. Get lots of rail infrastructure, get the bulk of the freight onto rail, get more passengers on the railways.
Now all we need is someone to produce some sort of industrial complex that *produces* natural gas in a clean and efficient way, and we'll all be mostly happy when the oil and gas runs out.
Boy Racers like milk floats: http://www.speedace.info/milk_float_record.htm
Great. Can the police please keep an eye out for my stolen car? It's been gone for years, reported stolen, and never been found.
(actually, a very sensible cross-check would be to compare the general colour of the vehicle with the registered colour of the vehicle that is supposed to have that registration).
I've got a feeling that, as with their experience with the in-car ANPR cameras, they pick up far more discrepancies that need investigating than the traffic cops have time to investigate.
Think: The space shuttle was designed in the 70's. That was before most of the USA knew much about SI/metric units.
(NASA had to go metric partly when doing the Apollo-Soyuz project, when actually meeting the requirements of a standard androgynous docking module meant meeting metric measurements)
The whole docking interface on the Shuttle was an afterthought, developed for the Shuttle-Mir project.
The US-designed aircraft that I've flown (designed in the 1950s/1960s are designed in feet and inches). I guess that new designs are more likely to be dimensioned in millimetres, even if the publicity/marketing departments might translate the wingspan etc to a near feet and inches for American publicity).
(or for UK tabloid publicity, they probably get translated into tabloid units - 8 times as long as a double decker bus)
4 x 9 ? I bet it's 1 deep.
Strangely, that's exactly the same relative dimensions as the Tycho monolith.
You'll probably find that such networking extends outside most residential properties, and will reach any other property on the same phase from the neighbourhood transformer.
That said, the homeplug specs state that it supports encrypted data anyway, so it shouldn't privacy be much of a problem. That said, it's only 56 bit, and most equipment ships with a manufacturer's default encryption key of "HomePlug".
how about the term "inclusive" ? It's so rarely used by marketing people producing English language adverts, and can be such a useful word.
"Buy a car, get a free road tax and tank of fuel"
"okay, I'll have the free road tax and tank of fuel, and leave the car"
as opposed to
"Buy a car, get inclusive road tax and tank of fuel".
no confusion possible.
Because such a plate would easily be detected at the annual MoT (roadworthiness) tests, and the vehicle would fail. Any vehicle with such a fail recorded against it, without a subsequent pass, seen moving on the public highway is an offence for the driver, resulting in, at least, penalty points on the drivers licence and a fine.
Nowadays in the UK, this happens for people who attempt to re-arrange the characters on the plate to attempt to make a word instead of an unpronounceable sequence of numbers and letters. If it derives from the norm, and is likely to cause problems for ANPR, it'll fail.
Patrol cars are fitted with ANPR, and the police officers may, at their discresion, use any mismatch of ANPR information to perform a random stop-and-search of the vehicle. Typically, they will be able to uncover many other offences at the same time (uninsured driver, unlicenced driver, illegal immigrant, bald tyres, not wearing seat belts, driver holding mobile phone).
They may have problems with plates from primarily arabic speaking countries, with solely arabic lettering but we don't get many of those in the UK.
There are explicitly signs that state that road signs in mainland UK are in mph, and give appropriate conversions to km/h for drivers of cars using international standard units. They can be found outside most ferry terminals. I have never seen any road signs in the UK explicitly stating that the default distance measurements for road signs are in statute miles. In fact, many motorway signs give the letter "m" after a number, which according to international convention, means metres, and it should read "mi" as an abbreviation to mean miles. I have seen, on British territory, speed limit road signs on public roads which explicitly state that the speed limit is in km/h. ( British Sovreign Base area, Akrotiri, Cyprus - outside the British controlled territory, there is no explicit signs stating that the speed limits are still in km/h there as well) It was fun in Ireland whilst they were changing to metric road signs, a project which took over 10 years. First, all new distance signs were labelled in km, and once the majority of distance signs were in km, there was a big bang changeover of speed limit signs. During the changeover, there were no obvious signs at ferry terminals stating what units were in use for speed or distance, so it was easy to assume "oh, that distance sign says km, so speed limits must be too", and then drive far too slowly.
The number plates watch you.
The politicians and other high-ranking Party members get their own lanes on the road.
To be perfectly honest, why the hell would the life of a politician be any more worthwhile protecting than the life of a lawyer? Hell, if Tony Blair is worth protecting from an invasion of his privacy, so am I, and so is every man, woman, child and their dog in the country.
the Microsoft VRML viewer plug-in for Internet Explorer, back in 1995-1996 (can't remember precisely) supported gzip compression, and I distinctly remember seeing a GPL relating to the gzip code on the click-through installer.
I said I wanted remote controlled sharks with frickin' laser beams, not eye surgery robots.
With NASA making plans to phase out the STS, and it's need for landing on an immense runway at ridiculous touchdown speeds, it's hardly suprising that they'll want to find another use for the landing strip. I reckon that NASA's new stuff are going to be traditional vertical launch, parachute landing jobs, and won't need the big long strip.
My 2001 Honda Civic (1.6 litre VTEC petrol engine) does about 38mpg overall (the 40 litre tank takes me about 350 miles on average)
The same 2001 Honda Civic would do about 33.119mpg would it be in the USA.
Reason: Nothing to do with US driving conditions, it's just that the US gallon is defined differently than anywhere else. Not that anywhere outside of the US really use gallons any more.
(in metric units, the car gets just over 7l/100km)
this is not the same as SI units, but SI units are based on metric units - SI units would be in metres and litres.
Actually the BBC Tertiary Phase was available in Dolby 5.1 (if you wanted to download it from their website), not just stereo.
Then they'll only complain about the "optical" hole in their defenses, which is where you point an HDTV camcorder at a HDTV LCD panel (LCD panels are pretty good at not having refresh flicker), sample the speaker outputs. Kind of like all those cinema pirates, but without people throwing popcorn, and they can do it in the comfort of their own home.
An interesting aside: To upgrade Gnome on the official FreeBSD builds, the only recommended way is to have an upgrade that builds the entire of gnome, and all of it's dependencies from source. This takes about a day on my machine, during which time you cannot use Gnome.
There is a limited character set : Not all letters are valid in all positions (C, I, K, M, O, V, are not valid in the last two characters), the last three characters are ALWAYS in the form digit letter letter, a UK postcode ALWAYS begins with at least one letter, and ALWAYS contains at least two digits. The recommended layout is to put a space before the last three characters.
[A-Z]{1,2}\d[A-Z\d]? \d[ABD-HJLNP-UW-Z]{2}
Within the UK, most sensible address forms will ask for a postcode and a building number or name, and look up on a database sold by Royal Mail (known as PAF, or Postal Address File).
The Netherlands postcode scheme is really much more clever. It includes check digit algorithms that will tell you if the building number should be odd, even, neither, either)
But Mr Gagarin is generally acknowledged as the first to circumnavigate the globe solo in a flying machine. Okay, so it was projectile flight, the flying machine wasn't really very useable at the end of the flight, and he had a hell of a lot of backup on the ground, and very little pilot control.