Well, that's the true essence of terrorism. As a terrorist, you would not have to actually DO anything. All you have to do is scare people, i.e. terrorize them into being afraid.
It does not matter the victims are hurt or not so long as they cower in fear all the same.
In the west, we have proven we will happily shed rights and convenience and freedoms in the name of "safety" until we reach stone-age levels of living, because that's the only way to be sure.
Ironically, this is exactly the same result desired by the terrorists themselves. We simply do it for them without the terrorists having to do anything substantial.
Yeah that's a lie. McD's coffee is hot, but perhaps not Tim Horton's hot. Which is just this side of boiling.
Anyway McD's coffee is actually pretty good, cheap, and everywhere. There are no Starbucks near me or on my commute run, but there are two McD's. Coffee and hash browns every day. Two bucks and some change, back on the road in 60 seconds.
This is of course because all the biggest game publishers are now public companies with shareholders who DEMAND profit on a set schedule promised in advance and written in blood at midnight in a graveyard.
Thou SHALL release SOMETHING on release date! Or else the exec board gets axed.
There are marketing campaigns to think about, magazine ad placements, store displays, mass production and packaging, huge trailer loads of the stuff shipped to Walmart alone. All of this stuff is planned out before the game is even done.
Compare to the old days of iD and Apogee and Epic Megagames releasing games "when it's done" -that just doesn't happen any more.
When it's release day, the game gets released. Whether it WORKS or not is another story.
But it's not like EA has just started releasing faulty games. Mercenaries 2 for PC (oddly another Pandemic game wasn't it?) was sent out into the world with all sorts of bugs and patched almost immediately, which still didn't fix all the problems. I've yet to have the courage to even install the thing myself though I did end up playing Mercenaries 1 on the original Xbox platform the other day. Not a bad game.
It's not just that Trek has inverted polarized tachyon beams, it's that they JUST HAPPEN to have come up with it in the very episode where the thing is needed.
Example: (something happens) and the only way to save the day is for Geordi to convince the Captain to use the handy gadget or beam he had invented that day. Wow what timing. Ship goes home.
My favorite was one of the season-ending cliff hangers in which the whole thing was going to hell with the Borg -UNTIL they used some new shielding Geordi had just invented, which turned out to be the exact trick they needed. They never had it before. Never used it after that one episode. It was just the gimmick of the week.
ST:NG got very very bad about and Voyager was headed that way when I quit watching it.
If the SR71 was built TODAY, it would perhaps be faster but it would also be smaller and also uncrewed. A missile with a camera inside it. Add automated midair refueling for fun if the range or loiter isn't there, a digital uplink for real-time pics, and a WORKING self-destruct device for when the odds catch up with it.
Lose one, no sweat. No crew held behind the lines. Just build another. Fly it from Tonopah like the others. Done.
If Apple would drop its price on Macs to more reasonable levels it could overtake Windows.
But Apple doesn't WANT to overtake Windows. They don't WANT to be the big consumer OS. Apple is quite happy being the way they are with tight control over the hardware and software and a fairly high entry price point.
It keeps the Mac exclusive. It keeps it limited to people with a fair amount of money, or passion for the product, or at least some reason they own a Mac.
Compare to Windows which is more or less the generic OS for the masses. It has no exclusivity. People use it because it came with their computer or because that's all they know how to use, or because it's cheap. It's what they use when they don't care enough about it to throw it away and get something else. It's what they use when they don't want to spend anything extra.
Apple is happy to let Microsoft pick off the low-hanging unprofitable customers. They'd never spend $1700 on a laptop anyway.
Apple also needs Microsoft -and vice versa- so they have a target. Neither side would have much motivation to innovate and improve if there wasn't somebody else out there taking away their lunch money.
Well, I was JUST looking at getting the Omnia. It looks sharp, it has all the stuff I need, but then I got to Verizon's plans. To get ANY kind of included data plan, you have to opt for the $59 a month data plan and pay 25 cents a minute for voice, or you can get a voice plan and pay $1.99 a megabyte for any and all data? Or you can get a $149 everything plan.
WTF?
On Sprint, I get unlimited data and plenty of voice minutes on a Centro for about $50 month. I'd like to cut that down even further. One of my main uses for it Gmail via IMAP. It works brilliantly. I also use the web browser and Googlemaps too. Not a lot of data but enough to make me need it.
Where the hell does Verizon get off charging such ridiculous amounts for this stuff? Oh I know, they do it because they can.
I was mainly looking at Verizon because several friends are on that network and the minutes would be free for us to talk. But it would actually be cheaper for me to stay with Sprint with my current phone and plan AND get a whole second Verizon number and cheap phone without data than it would be to do everything on Verizon.
This is crazy.
But now I understand why somebody I know who has a Centro on Verizon does not have a data plan. It would cost him an arm and a leg to get the same level of service that I get on my Sprint Centro.
If this Netgear is like other modern era Netgears, don't worry: it will be in full supply on all the refub channels in about six months, and for probably $29.
Netgear used to make great stuff. The WGR614 is nice and cheap and just plain works, aside from being B/G only and missing some modern stuff. Some of the more advanced Netgear stuff is great out of the box but there is a spectacular failure rate on the hardware after six months or so.
For example, check out the Netgear WNR854T reviews on Amazon or Newegg. Amazon: 169 reviews, 106 give it one star. Newgegg 232 reviews, 68% of them were one or two eggs.
Scary stuff. The local Frys store will happily sell you a refub'd one for very few bucks. It'll work for six months and then die.
After being a Netgear loyalist for years, I got the linux version of the WRT54GL and it at least works. Not a fan of Linksys though.
The physics of a nuclear bomb are pretty simple. I learned how the bombs work when I was in middle school, which was before the WWW existed.
I looked it up in an old PAPER encyclopedia.
Taking that knowledge and making a bomb is harder than just "knowing how" but anyway, this is not exactly unknown knowledge.
Does it surprise anyone that a fairly educated nation like Iran knows how? And yes, they do have a lot of PhDs there and plenty of scientists. And foreign support from Russia and France. So no surprise to me anyway.
The problem with BD discs and these hologram discs and whatever comes next is that they still haven't fixed the problem that one scratch or some dust or who knows, bad water used in the manufacturing process will ruin vast amounts of data at once.
It's not like a bad CD where you'd lose 700MB or so, or a bad DVD where you lose 5 gigs or so. Now it's 50 gigs for BD and a whopping terabyte for this thing?
No matter how careful I am with my burned discs, some of them still go bad because the media itself is unstable or made to the lowest bid spec. Even name brand stuff dies.
Do they honestly expect anyone to trust terabyte media?
I won't, no freaking way. Thankfully hard drives are getting bigger and cheaper all the time. The most effective backup solution for a big drive is... another big drive. It works.
That's sort of like hiding the rubber ball under an infinite number of cups. The problem is the enemy can track every single cup. Humans are terrible about coming up with truly random patterns so eventually some sort of pattern would show up in the tracking and predictive analysis would start to give the enemy an idea of where to look.
It would also be expensive in fuel, wear and tear, and the occasional loss of crew and aircraft to keep a pseudo random lasercomms program running. We don't even patrol for enemy subs like that any more.
This laser thing won't be worth a lot until they can use satellites to transmit the laser. The problem of course is that the Navy never knows for sure exactly where their own subs are (unless the sub is reporting in) so hitting a tiny spot in the ocean with a tiny laser and actually hitting the sub? Good luck.
The 220dB noise thing is ridiculous. This needs to be optical all the way to the sub.
But even then, even if they DO use satellites, in an actual war the satellites will be among the first to go, thus cutting the link. This whole thing sounds fishy to me.
If you wanna really get right down to it, it was "announced" years ago when word got out that a remake was being produced. And then again last year when the news came out that the thing had, in fact, been made.
The ONLY question was really when it would show up on American TV and which channel would be showing it. BBC America (edited for content and time and compressed to fit in more ads), or Syfy (edited for content, compressed for time, featuring awful CG dinosaurs for no reason), or AMC (left alone, with extras).
So if AMC wants to run it, good for them. I think they'd do well showing the original show and Secret Agent too and any of a number of older British or co-prod shows. BBC America won't touch them. Someone should.
Agreed. I have a Centro and have never gotten it to sync with my Mac, at least not natively. It does sync with the Palm Desktop application, or at least it would if I knew what I did with my sync cable.
But the point is, no Apple-native app would sync. I had to use Yahoo or something to import my address book from iCal to the Palm app, and then sync it. It didn't totally work either. Very clumsy.
Taking it out entirely is not a huge issue. Hopefully the Palm desktop will still work, in which case it won't be any worse than now.
This plane has had a long history of show-stopper problems, delays, more problems, and more problems. And it still hasn't flown once.
As an airline passenger, this is not making me feel like this is a plane I can trust or should want to fly on. And yes I can choose to fly airlines that haven't ordered and won't use the 787. Pretty easy since it's not exactly selling like wild anyway.
EADS would have every right to gloat but they're screwed up with 380 problems and internal issues. Both companies look like jokes right now.
The only time in my life I nearly got in a fight with a cop was when I was seriously buzzed up on Jolt cola (All the sugar and twice the caffeine!) and refused to obey a transit cop.
It's not clear from the story if the radio was actually stolen, of if he bought it somewhere and happened to get radio that was configured for the transit system and was dumb enough to try to sell it to them.
I don't know what kind of radio system Chicago uses, but regular non-trunked radios can be had on eBay or real stores and many of them are easily programmable -lawfully and otherwise- for various uses. This guy doesn't sound smart enough to have done that himself, so it's more likely he just bought/found/stole a radio that was preprogrammed by someone else. It happens.
Owning such a radio is not illegal unless it actually was stolen. You can own the radio and listen all you want.
Transmitting with it IS a crime: unauthorized use, unlicensed use, etc. Interfering with the train system is a bigger crime.
People who have really hacked radio systems don't play stupid games with this stuff.
Interestingly enough, the story mentions Kenwood, darling of cities where Motorola has screwed up big time. Chicago is right in Motorola's backyard. If the train system actually uses Kenwood, that would be a HUGE slap in the face for Motorola and they'd want to fix that ASAP. Motorola would probably dearly love to sell Chicago a new APCO25 system or three. Huge homerun for the sales weasels. Big loss for Kenwood.
I would not put it past Motorola staff to come up with a Kenwood that "just happens" to work with the train system and find some dumbo to play games with it. Then Motorola swoops in and says "You know, we have this APCO25 system that would fix all these problems for you!"
Yes, they play that dirty.
On the east coast, a brand of bread is called Arnold. On the west coast, it's Oroweat. Those are but two of about 10 names for the same stuff. Same packaging, same logo, same bread.
Bottled water is the same. Most of the brands are all owned by one company (DSWaters).
I understand the desire to keep all these familiar regional names or whatever but the economies of scale would suggest that one brand name should be the one name to rule them all.
Does this offer a backdoor opton for people who forget or lose their TrueCrypt password?
In my early computing days, I once lost a PGP password -it was really good and of course never written down because that wouldn't be secure- and lost the affected files. That has made me wary of running TC at boot.
Of course a back way in means it's not exactly secure.
Several other things have changed in the last hundred years or so. First, both genders are living longer than ever before with better food and medical care, which gives rise to more offspring. The second is the idea that women are supported after a marriage or relationship ends. And the third is the idea of children born casually.
In the old days and for most of history, when the male side chose a new mate, the old one was done, gone, kicked out or even killed regardless of whether there were offspring involved. The former wife's status depended largely on the whims of the former husband/provider or his family.
In the modern era, those women now get alimony and/or child support fairly commonly. The former husband is expected to support his former wife for life or until she remarries or dies or whatever. (of course there are reverse cases where the wife has to support her former husband but those are pretty rare)
If the husband moves on to a newer, prettier woman, he still has to support the older, perhaps not as pretty one. Thus, two women have support in some fashion and the former wife is free to have casual kids with someone else while the former husband continues to supply support.
This would seem to complicate the idea that only natural selection is involved in choosing which women get to replicate: the former husband is supporting his former wife whether he likes it or not.
There is also the factor of unwed mothers having children and society's desire to support both the mother and child. Those kids are supported because it's the thing society demands when there is no father figure involved. In the old eras, those 'fatherless' children might've been anticipated to perish either through natural causes or in dangerous occupations.
The result of all these changes is that more kids are being born and more of them make it to adulthood, to have more kids.
Wrong. Both sides of the moon have had the same level of impact, and the 'far' side is not facing the asteroids any more than the 'near' side. The earth-moon system rotates in space and the moon rotates around the earth so both faces are in the direction of the asteroids all the time.
The 'near' side of the moon only looks smoother because mare lava flows have smoothed it out somewhat. It's just chance that put those flows on the side we see.
Fun fact: if the earth had no weather, it would look just like the moon in terms of impact craters. The earth is much bigger and has actually been hit more often. But our weather has eroded most of them.
True. I helped in a small way to construct TDK's CD-R manufacturing plant in the US back in early 90s. I worked as a sort of day laborer, not as a TDK employee.
Back then, only 3M had any kind of OEM disc operation and it wasn't cost effective to buy their discs and rebrand them. Plus TDK hated 3M. So TDK retrofitted a Maxell/TDK VHS tape factory to also make CD-Rs. It was a bold move. TDK went that route and spent a lot of money building it because they had to: if you as a company wanted to sell discs, you made them yourself and shipping was expensive so you needed to make them locally. Hence they needed a factory on US soil.
That TDK plant was closed a few years later (huge financial loss for TDK) when the OEM factories in China and Taiwan came online and made it cheaper to import than make the discs here. The VHS side held on for a while but also closed down. No idea what they do there now, if anything.
We got hit with that as well. I just wrote a longer post about it, but basically we saw the same delamination problem. Other Verbatims sort of rotted with visible pits and holes in the cyan layer. All totaled, my friends and I lost probably a 1000 discs that way. There are lots of people who rave about the awesomeness of that brand but I don't see why.
Back in 1994 or 1995, a whole bunch of us got into the PlayStation mod chip scene which naturally included a need to make burned game copies. This was right at the advent of home CD burning and burner drives were hundreds of dollars and ran at 1x or maybe 2x and were usually SCSI. It was FAR from the drop-and-go way we do disc burning now.
Aside from getting it to work at all, another major issue we had was finding affordable blank media. $5-10 a disc was not uncommon, and failed burns were also not uncommon: these were the days of 1mb buffers and Windows 95 and klunky software that barely worked. We didn't have Nero or anything like drives with underrun protection. You could coaster a ton of media easy because the wind was blowing the wrong way, it seemed.
So we were always looking for a way to get media cheap. Sam's Club came to the rescue with 10-packs of Verbatim CD-Rs for $10. A buck a disk. These days, that's a ripoff. In THOSE days, however, this was practically a steal. And the discs mostly burned fine and the PSX liked them. A perfect match.
All the PSX game copy people jumped into Verbatim. I remember one friend who had 5 100-disc binders of copies and those were just the ones he kept. Another guy had bookcases full of discs in jewel boxes. Almost all Verbatim. Dozens of us locally went for that brand like crazy. We thought we had it made.
This went on for a year or so before the problems started. Also, we ran out of good PSX games to trade at the same time. But we still had older good games. But problems happened. Previously known-good discs started going bad. Visually, we saw pits and spots appearing that looked kinda like craters or maybe mold. Sometimes spots, sometimes half a disc at a time. The problem was flaws in the dyes. Other discs delaminated -the cyan data layer actually flaked off the polycarbonate. Mostly we saw the rot and it hit discs stored in binders, in the original jewel boxes or not ever burned. It didn't matter how the discs were stored. It didn't matter how they were recorded or if they were ever played or how long they were played. Eventually nearly 90% of the Verbatim discs failed. The other 10% escaped only because we quit looking out of disgust.
In short, several thousand game copies got wiped out by this failing media.
Now there's the moral argument that what we were doing was wrong and we got punished in a way and that could be kinda acceptable if it was only game copies that died. But we also lost other fully legitimate burns. The product made no distinction. The product was crap. Why, who knows. I do know I won't ever use Verbatim for anything at this point. There's no trust or faith.
I have used other brands of media all along and most of those from the same era are still good to go. TDK, 3M, Memorex, Sony, even some CompUSA-branded media still works fine. Cheap computer flea market media sucked too. Go figure. Mostly, bad media was rare unless you hit a product that was just inherently worse than another.
Lessons were learned from this: don't trust media for permanent storage. A CD-R that dies is 640 or 700MB down the drain. Stings but you go on. A failed DVD is 4.5GB in the trash. Ouch. That hurts a lot more. Worse for DVD DL. That brings us to BluRay. 50GB a disc? I am not trusting THAT ever. And the one beyond BD that offers 500GB? No freaking way. ONE dead disc should not wipe out 50 or 500GB of data. Disc burning is not stable and secure and reliable enough to trust at that level and we as users and consumers should refuse to accept it.
What else can we do? I don't know. But clearly burned media is not the answer.
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Well, that's the true essence of terrorism. As a terrorist, you would not have to actually DO anything. All you have to do is scare people, i.e. terrorize them into being afraid.
It does not matter the victims are hurt or not so long as they cower in fear all the same.
In the west, we have proven we will happily shed rights and convenience and freedoms in the name of "safety" until we reach stone-age levels of living, because that's the only way to be sure.
Ironically, this is exactly the same result desired by the terrorists themselves. We simply do it for them without the terrorists having to do anything substantial.
It's a brilliant scheme.
Yeah that's a lie. McD's coffee is hot, but perhaps not Tim Horton's hot. Which is just this side of boiling.
Anyway McD's coffee is actually pretty good, cheap, and everywhere. There are no Starbucks near me or on my commute run, but there are two McD's. Coffee and hash browns every day. Two bucks and some change, back on the road in 60 seconds.
The McD angus burgers are good, yes. But skip the mayo sauce on the mushroom and swiss. WAY too much sauce.
Krystals has an angus burger that is also pretty good. The new Wendys bacon burger deluxe thing is also good.
It's funny what happens when you bump up the quality of the ingredients. Suddenly stuff is actually better. Shocking!
All of this stuff is bad for you and still too expensive.
This is of course because all the biggest game publishers are now public companies with shareholders who DEMAND profit on a set schedule promised in advance and written in blood at midnight in a graveyard.
Thou SHALL release SOMETHING on release date! Or else the exec board gets axed.
There are marketing campaigns to think about, magazine ad placements, store displays, mass production and packaging, huge trailer loads of the stuff shipped to Walmart alone. All of this stuff is planned out before the game is even done.
Compare to the old days of iD and Apogee and Epic Megagames releasing games "when it's done" -that just doesn't happen any more.
When it's release day, the game gets released. Whether it WORKS or not is another story.
But it's not like EA has just started releasing faulty games. Mercenaries 2 for PC (oddly another Pandemic game wasn't it?) was sent out into the world with all sorts of bugs and patched almost immediately, which still didn't fix all the problems. I've yet to have the courage to even install the thing myself though I did end up playing Mercenaries 1 on the original Xbox platform the other day. Not a bad game.
It's not just that Trek has inverted polarized tachyon beams, it's that they JUST HAPPEN to have come up with it in the very episode where the thing is needed.
Example: (something happens) and the only way to save the day is for Geordi to convince the Captain to use the handy gadget or beam he had invented that day. Wow what timing. Ship goes home.
My favorite was one of the season-ending cliff hangers in which the whole thing was going to hell with the Borg -UNTIL they used some new shielding Geordi had just invented, which turned out to be the exact trick they needed. They never had it before. Never used it after that one episode. It was just the gimmick of the week.
ST:NG got very very bad about and Voyager was headed that way when I quit watching it.
If the SR71 was built TODAY, it would perhaps be faster but it would also be smaller and also uncrewed. A missile with a camera inside it. Add automated midair refueling for fun if the range or loiter isn't there, a digital uplink for real-time pics, and a WORKING self-destruct device for when the odds catch up with it.
Lose one, no sweat. No crew held behind the lines. Just build another. Fly it from Tonopah like the others. Done.
If Apple would drop its price on Macs to more reasonable levels it could overtake Windows.
But Apple doesn't WANT to overtake Windows. They don't WANT to be the big consumer OS. Apple is quite happy being the way they are with tight control over the hardware and software and a fairly high entry price point.
It keeps the Mac exclusive. It keeps it limited to people with a fair amount of money, or passion for the product, or at least some reason they own a Mac.
Compare to Windows which is more or less the generic OS for the masses. It has no exclusivity. People use it because it came with their computer or because that's all they know how to use, or because it's cheap. It's what they use when they don't care enough about it to throw it away and get something else. It's what they use when they don't want to spend anything extra.
Apple is happy to let Microsoft pick off the low-hanging unprofitable customers. They'd never spend $1700 on a laptop anyway.
Apple also needs Microsoft -and vice versa- so they have a target. Neither side would have much motivation to innovate and improve if there wasn't somebody else out there taking away their lunch money.
Well, I was JUST looking at getting the Omnia. It looks sharp, it has all the stuff I need, but then I got to Verizon's plans. To get ANY kind of included data plan, you have to opt for the $59 a month data plan and pay 25 cents a minute for voice, or you can get a voice plan and pay $1.99 a megabyte for any and all data? Or you can get a $149 everything plan.
WTF?
On Sprint, I get unlimited data and plenty of voice minutes on a Centro for about $50 month. I'd like to cut that down even further. One of my main uses for it Gmail via IMAP. It works brilliantly. I also use the web browser and Googlemaps too. Not a lot of data but enough to make me need it.
Where the hell does Verizon get off charging such ridiculous amounts for this stuff? Oh I know, they do it because they can.
I was mainly looking at Verizon because several friends are on that network and the minutes would be free for us to talk. But it would actually be cheaper for me to stay with Sprint with my current phone and plan AND get a whole second Verizon number and cheap phone without data than it would be to do everything on Verizon.
This is crazy.
But now I understand why somebody I know who has a Centro on Verizon does not have a data plan. It would cost him an arm and a leg to get the same level of service that I get on my Sprint Centro.
It's got balloons. Try them.
Geez. Use SOME imagination here?
If this Netgear is like other modern era Netgears, don't worry: it will be in full supply on all the refub channels in about six months, and for probably $29.
Netgear used to make great stuff. The WGR614 is nice and cheap and just plain works, aside from being B/G only and missing some modern stuff. Some of the more advanced Netgear stuff is great out of the box but there is a spectacular failure rate on the hardware after six months or so.
For example, check out the Netgear WNR854T reviews on Amazon or Newegg. Amazon: 169 reviews, 106 give it one star. Newgegg 232 reviews, 68% of them were one or two eggs.
Scary stuff. The local Frys store will happily sell you a refub'd one for very few bucks. It'll work for six months and then die.
After being a Netgear loyalist for years, I got the linux version of the WRT54GL and it at least works. Not a fan of Linksys though.
The physics of a nuclear bomb are pretty simple. I learned how the bombs work when I was in middle school, which was before the WWW existed.
I looked it up in an old PAPER encyclopedia.
Taking that knowledge and making a bomb is harder than just "knowing how" but anyway, this is not exactly unknown knowledge.
Does it surprise anyone that a fairly educated nation like Iran knows how? And yes, they do have a lot of PhDs there and plenty of scientists. And foreign support from Russia and France. So no surprise to me anyway.
The problem with BD discs and these hologram discs and whatever comes next is that they still haven't fixed the problem that one scratch or some dust or who knows, bad water used in the manufacturing process will ruin vast amounts of data at once.
It's not like a bad CD where you'd lose 700MB or so, or a bad DVD where you lose 5 gigs or so. Now it's 50 gigs for BD and a whopping terabyte for this thing?
No matter how careful I am with my burned discs, some of them still go bad because the media itself is unstable or made to the lowest bid spec. Even name brand stuff dies.
Do they honestly expect anyone to trust terabyte media?
I won't, no freaking way. Thankfully hard drives are getting bigger and cheaper all the time. The most effective backup solution for a big drive is ... another big drive. It works.
That's sort of like hiding the rubber ball under an infinite number of cups. The problem is the enemy can track every single cup. Humans are terrible about coming up with truly random patterns so eventually some sort of pattern would show up in the tracking and predictive analysis would start to give the enemy an idea of where to look.
It would also be expensive in fuel, wear and tear, and the occasional loss of crew and aircraft to keep a pseudo random lasercomms program running. We don't even patrol for enemy subs like that any more.
This laser thing won't be worth a lot until they can use satellites to transmit the laser. The problem of course is that the Navy never knows for sure exactly where their own subs are (unless the sub is reporting in) so hitting a tiny spot in the ocean with a tiny laser and actually hitting the sub? Good luck.
The 220dB noise thing is ridiculous. This needs to be optical all the way to the sub.
But even then, even if they DO use satellites, in an actual war the satellites will be among the first to go, thus cutting the link. This whole thing sounds fishy to me.
If you wanna really get right down to it, it was "announced" years ago when word got out that a remake was being produced. And then again last year when the news came out that the thing had, in fact, been made. The ONLY question was really when it would show up on American TV and which channel would be showing it. BBC America (edited for content and time and compressed to fit in more ads), or Syfy (edited for content, compressed for time, featuring awful CG dinosaurs for no reason), or AMC (left alone, with extras). So if AMC wants to run it, good for them. I think they'd do well showing the original show and Secret Agent too and any of a number of older British or co-prod shows. BBC America won't touch them. Someone should.
Agreed. I have a Centro and have never gotten it to sync with my Mac, at least not natively. It does sync with the Palm Desktop application, or at least it would if I knew what I did with my sync cable.
But the point is, no Apple-native app would sync. I had to use Yahoo or something to import my address book from iCal to the Palm app, and then sync it. It didn't totally work either. Very clumsy.
Taking it out entirely is not a huge issue. Hopefully the Palm desktop will still work, in which case it won't be any worse than now.
This plane has had a long history of show-stopper problems, delays, more problems, and more problems. And it still hasn't flown once.
As an airline passenger, this is not making me feel like this is a plane I can trust or should want to fly on. And yes I can choose to fly airlines that haven't ordered and won't use the 787. Pretty easy since it's not exactly selling like wild anyway.
EADS would have every right to gloat but they're screwed up with 380 problems and internal issues. Both companies look like jokes right now.
Well, they'd better come get me then.
The only time in my life I nearly got in a fight with a cop was when I was seriously buzzed up on Jolt cola (All the sugar and twice the caffeine!) and refused to obey a transit cop.
It was NOT a pretty afternoon for me.
Nowadays, I guess they'd just throw be in prison.
It's not clear from the story if the radio was actually stolen, of if he bought it somewhere and happened to get radio that was configured for the transit system and was dumb enough to try to sell it to them. I don't know what kind of radio system Chicago uses, but regular non-trunked radios can be had on eBay or real stores and many of them are easily programmable -lawfully and otherwise- for various uses. This guy doesn't sound smart enough to have done that himself, so it's more likely he just bought/found/stole a radio that was preprogrammed by someone else. It happens. Owning such a radio is not illegal unless it actually was stolen. You can own the radio and listen all you want. Transmitting with it IS a crime: unauthorized use, unlicensed use, etc. Interfering with the train system is a bigger crime. People who have really hacked radio systems don't play stupid games with this stuff. Interestingly enough, the story mentions Kenwood, darling of cities where Motorola has screwed up big time. Chicago is right in Motorola's backyard. If the train system actually uses Kenwood, that would be a HUGE slap in the face for Motorola and they'd want to fix that ASAP. Motorola would probably dearly love to sell Chicago a new APCO25 system or three. Huge homerun for the sales weasels. Big loss for Kenwood. I would not put it past Motorola staff to come up with a Kenwood that "just happens" to work with the train system and find some dumbo to play games with it. Then Motorola swoops in and says "You know, we have this APCO25 system that would fix all these problems for you!" Yes, they play that dirty.
On the east coast, a brand of bread is called Arnold. On the west coast, it's Oroweat. Those are but two of about 10 names for the same stuff. Same packaging, same logo, same bread. Bottled water is the same. Most of the brands are all owned by one company (DSWaters). I understand the desire to keep all these familiar regional names or whatever but the economies of scale would suggest that one brand name should be the one name to rule them all.
Does this offer a backdoor opton for people who forget or lose their TrueCrypt password? In my early computing days, I once lost a PGP password -it was really good and of course never written down because that wouldn't be secure- and lost the affected files. That has made me wary of running TC at boot. Of course a back way in means it's not exactly secure.
Several other things have changed in the last hundred years or so. First, both genders are living longer than ever before with better food and medical care, which gives rise to more offspring. The second is the idea that women are supported after a marriage or relationship ends. And the third is the idea of children born casually.
In the old days and for most of history, when the male side chose a new mate, the old one was done, gone, kicked out or even killed regardless of whether there were offspring involved. The former wife's status depended largely on the whims of the former husband/provider or his family.
In the modern era, those women now get alimony and/or child support fairly commonly. The former husband is expected to support his former wife for life or until she remarries or dies or whatever. (of course there are reverse cases where the wife has to support her former husband but those are pretty rare)
If the husband moves on to a newer, prettier woman, he still has to support the older, perhaps not as pretty one. Thus, two women have support in some fashion and the former wife is free to have casual kids with someone else while the former husband continues to supply support.
This would seem to complicate the idea that only natural selection is involved in choosing which women get to replicate: the former husband is supporting his former wife whether he likes it or not.
There is also the factor of unwed mothers having children and society's desire to support both the mother and child. Those kids are supported because it's the thing society demands when there is no father figure involved. In the old eras, those 'fatherless' children might've been anticipated to perish either through natural causes or in dangerous occupations.
The result of all these changes is that more kids are being born and more of them make it to adulthood, to have more kids.
Wrong. Both sides of the moon have had the same level of impact, and the 'far' side is not facing the asteroids any more than the 'near' side. The earth-moon system rotates in space and the moon rotates around the earth so both faces are in the direction of the asteroids all the time.
The 'near' side of the moon only looks smoother because mare lava flows have smoothed it out somewhat. It's just chance that put those flows on the side we see.
Fun fact: if the earth had no weather, it would look just like the moon in terms of impact craters. The earth is much bigger and has actually been hit more often. But our weather has eroded most of them.
True. I helped in a small way to construct TDK's CD-R manufacturing plant in the US back in early 90s. I worked as a sort of day laborer, not as a TDK employee. Back then, only 3M had any kind of OEM disc operation and it wasn't cost effective to buy their discs and rebrand them. Plus TDK hated 3M. So TDK retrofitted a Maxell/TDK VHS tape factory to also make CD-Rs. It was a bold move. TDK went that route and spent a lot of money building it because they had to: if you as a company wanted to sell discs, you made them yourself and shipping was expensive so you needed to make them locally. Hence they needed a factory on US soil. That TDK plant was closed a few years later (huge financial loss for TDK) when the OEM factories in China and Taiwan came online and made it cheaper to import than make the discs here. The VHS side held on for a while but also closed down. No idea what they do there now, if anything.
We got hit with that as well. I just wrote a longer post about it, but basically we saw the same delamination problem. Other Verbatims sort of rotted with visible pits and holes in the cyan layer. All totaled, my friends and I lost probably a 1000 discs that way. There are lots of people who rave about the awesomeness of that brand but I don't see why.
Back in 1994 or 1995, a whole bunch of us got into the PlayStation mod chip scene which naturally included a need to make burned game copies. This was right at the advent of home CD burning and burner drives were hundreds of dollars and ran at 1x or maybe 2x and were usually SCSI. It was FAR from the drop-and-go way we do disc burning now. Aside from getting it to work at all, another major issue we had was finding affordable blank media. $5-10 a disc was not uncommon, and failed burns were also not uncommon: these were the days of 1mb buffers and Windows 95 and klunky software that barely worked. We didn't have Nero or anything like drives with underrun protection. You could coaster a ton of media easy because the wind was blowing the wrong way, it seemed. So we were always looking for a way to get media cheap. Sam's Club came to the rescue with 10-packs of Verbatim CD-Rs for $10. A buck a disk. These days, that's a ripoff. In THOSE days, however, this was practically a steal. And the discs mostly burned fine and the PSX liked them. A perfect match. All the PSX game copy people jumped into Verbatim. I remember one friend who had 5 100-disc binders of copies and those were just the ones he kept. Another guy had bookcases full of discs in jewel boxes. Almost all Verbatim. Dozens of us locally went for that brand like crazy. We thought we had it made. This went on for a year or so before the problems started. Also, we ran out of good PSX games to trade at the same time. But we still had older good games. But problems happened. Previously known-good discs started going bad. Visually, we saw pits and spots appearing that looked kinda like craters or maybe mold. Sometimes spots, sometimes half a disc at a time. The problem was flaws in the dyes. Other discs delaminated -the cyan data layer actually flaked off the polycarbonate. Mostly we saw the rot and it hit discs stored in binders, in the original jewel boxes or not ever burned. It didn't matter how the discs were stored. It didn't matter how they were recorded or if they were ever played or how long they were played. Eventually nearly 90% of the Verbatim discs failed. The other 10% escaped only because we quit looking out of disgust. In short, several thousand game copies got wiped out by this failing media. Now there's the moral argument that what we were doing was wrong and we got punished in a way and that could be kinda acceptable if it was only game copies that died. But we also lost other fully legitimate burns. The product made no distinction. The product was crap. Why, who knows. I do know I won't ever use Verbatim for anything at this point. There's no trust or faith. I have used other brands of media all along and most of those from the same era are still good to go. TDK, 3M, Memorex, Sony, even some CompUSA-branded media still works fine. Cheap computer flea market media sucked too. Go figure. Mostly, bad media was rare unless you hit a product that was just inherently worse than another. Lessons were learned from this: don't trust media for permanent storage. A CD-R that dies is 640 or 700MB down the drain. Stings but you go on. A failed DVD is 4.5GB in the trash. Ouch. That hurts a lot more. Worse for DVD DL. That brings us to BluRay. 50GB a disc? I am not trusting THAT ever. And the one beyond BD that offers 500GB? No freaking way. ONE dead disc should not wipe out 50 or 500GB of data. Disc burning is not stable and secure and reliable enough to trust at that level and we as users and consumers should refuse to accept it. What else can we do? I don't know. But clearly burned media is not the answer.