I'm no network engineer, but if it's a malicious attack, wouldn't you have to assume that the attacker has at least some level of control over the router in question? And if so, if they're trying to force connections to a certain IP through that router, couldn't they just route those probe packets to themselves and spoof a response? Even if you encode information giving it a new route to go through in order to verify, couldn't the attacker just direct their response through that route as well (while maybe adding a few of their own hops first)?
I guess if you are in middle- or high-school, this could be a nice service for storing your homework and such.
Not really. You probably don't have the right to give GOOG permission to:
"publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content"
Why? I dunno about you, but I never signed any contracts while in middle- or high-school restricting what I can and cannot do with my homework. Maybe you can't distribute the problems themselves, as they're probably copyright (though you could argue fair use for educational purposes and such,) but otherwise there's no reason you couldn't.
Hell, even in college I never signed such an agreement. Was asked to once and I refused, along with around a third of the class. SOP in those situations is to assign a different project that isn't free labor to some corporation. I know students who have sold their college (and, for that matter, highschool) projects with no problem.
Free 4MB storage - up to twice as much as other free email providers!
Around '04 they moved that up to 100 megs to compete with Gmail, then went unlimited some time after that. Are you sure you didn't have a paid 'Yahoo! Mail Plus' account? Those apparently had 25 megs starting in 1999.
My Gmail account is currently using 2.5 GIGS. Before Gmail existed, the largest mailbox capacity that existed (as far as I know) was Fastmail, with 10 megs, with 1-2mb being common (hotmail, yahoo, aol, etc). I would generally overflow those in 6 months to a year. Granted, a lot of my gmail emails I could do without. Others -- hell, I still have attachments of hundreds of kilobytes, sometimes even megabytes, from five years ago that I pull up occasionally. For me at least, Gmail's storage capacity revolutionized email. 'email it to yourself' or even 'email it to me' was not a feasible way to transfer or store files until Gmail (Gmail was also the first, and still one of the few, providers to allow large attachments. Most providers still limit it to 10 megs, while Gmail is 20. Your guess is as good as mine as to what the limit was with a 2 meg inbox.) The search helps a lot too, though that's obviously related -- no need for search it if you can't store it. I'm a lot more likely to remember that I got a PDF of that two semesters ago from Ms. xyz than I am to remember where the hell I stored that file. Plus I've gone through four or five computers since getting Gmail, so files that I can currently just grab out of my email would have otherwise been scattered across six or seven hard drives.
Yes, users don't want a new email address. That's why I love gmail. In the two years before gmail launched the situation with email storage was really getting to be a problem, due to increasing internet speed and file sizes. I think I went through four email accounts in those two years. Some of that was due to storage, some due to spam (When gmail launched there was no comparison with the spam filters. They're still among the best. Went from a dozen or so spams a day to less than one a month) So...I went from changing addresses every six months to having the same address for about eight years now. The desire to keep one constant email address is exactly why Gmail was so popular. Maybe not for people like my father, who's STILL on hotmail, but for people who use email heavily that was certainly a large part of the motivation.
Nope, Desktop, it was a few months old at the time, which was probably around two years ago.
Re:Wine is $200 cheaper
on
Wine 1.4 Released
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
It depends on what you're doing with it. I used to play World of Warcraft, and I actually found I could get better performance under Wine on Linux than under Windows (NOT in a VM.) And something like WoW in a virtual machine? Not gonna happen. For office apps and such, a VM will probably work fine, but for any kind of gaming, I've even found noticable lag on a 2.5GHz quad-core machine with 4 gigs of RAM running a game made for Windows 98. Wine just performs better. Plus with a VM you run into issues with keyboard/mouse capture -- you don't want to accidentally hit the capture key in the middle of a WoW raid. Or if you're using host integration so there is no capture key, sometimes the mouse won't capture right and you'll run it right through the edge of the screen or something...
I haven't used Wine in a while; I'm mostly using VMs because what I need these things for now is testing apps in various environments, which Wine can't really do -- but with all the problems I've had with VMs (mostly VirtualBox, some VMWare), I can't imagine any situation in which I would ever choose to use a VM when Wine would do the job.
I'm assuming that a diesel engine running on vegetable oil, as originally intended, would not have such harmful fumes, right? Swap to bio-diesel and you're good?
(Amusingly, unless current drunk driving laws are revised, it will probably still be illegal to sit in the driver's seat while drunk even if you're not actually driving the vehicle because you are still technically "operating" it.)
...which seems perfectly reasonable, unless you mandate that every car on the road MUST be self-driving, that there cannot be any manual override method for self-driving cars, and self-driving cars must know about and avoid all possible unsafe conditions even in spite of a direct order by the driver (like, say, going into park on a highway, driving onto a lawn [which in some cases you may actually want to do], going off the road, etc) The vehicles would also need to completely fail in the event of sensor failure -- for example, if the car can't tell if the bridge you're about to cross is in one piece, because the front-mounted range sensor is broken, it must completely shut down and be towed to a repair center and fixed before it can possibly be driven under any circumstances.
Personally, I think keeping drunk driving laws on the books is the more reasonable option.
It's not all about the heat. We're pretty close to the speed of light being an issue. Electrical signals travel slightly below light speed, so for a 3GHz chip, your signal could make it approximately 10cm, round trip, in one cycle. Which means we may be able to get to ten or twenty GHz inside chips but when it comes to memory access, that's going to then take tens of clock cycles. And that also assumes a 1cm square chip, all straight paths, and zero latency in the transistors. My guess is that even if you made a diamond substrate, you wouldn't be able to get it too much faster than existing chips.
Don't believe in a creator? That's fine, but understand this country was founded by Religous people and we will always be fighting to govern it, because we know our rights are provided by our Creator.
"Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise."
- James Madison, letter to Wm. Bradford, April 1, 1774
"This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it."
- John Adams
"In every country and every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot... they have perverted the purest religion ever preached to man into mystery and jargon, unintelligible to all mankind, and therefore the safer engine for their purpose."
- Thomas Jefferson, to Horatio Spafford, March 17, 1814
You get the point. They may have been men of FAITH, but certainly not RELIGIOUS. There's a significant difference.
Furthermore, why must liberties be GRANTED? They're quite plainly something that cannot be given; they can only be taken away. The question is not who grants us our rights, but rather who would try to take them away. To which the answer is almost always government. You are correct that others believing rights are granted by government is a very dangerous thing. But believing rights are granted by some deity is equally dangerous. If people believe that our rights come directly from the Christian God, for example, then denying those rights to people who people who get abortions or are athiest or are homosexual seems justified. Believing that rights are granted to you by some entity only makes those rights easier for others to violate.
Why? If I set off a metal detector at an office building they can't hold me, the worst they can do is call the police while I walk away. Hell, I've gone into government buildings with prohibited items (knives and such, accidentally) and set off the metal detector. And when that happens, your options are: show them and have it confiscated if it's prohibited, show them and leave if it's prohibited, or just leave. If you try to enter the White House with a hunting knife, they'll let you just walk away. Why is an airport any different? Hell, the security at government buildings are actual police officers. TSA agents aren't. They have no legal authority to hold you. They can certainly call the police if the scanner clearly shows a gun, or you are in some way acting suspicious, or they just feel like it. But that's all they legally have the authority to do. And that's all they SHOULD have the authority to do.
...except when they aren't. I've heard of people being detained _at gunpoint_ for doing nothing more than refusing a pat-down. Here's one, slightly less extreme, example from _a freakin' pilot_ (if he wanted to bring down the plane, he wouldn't need a bomb to do it...):
Write your code by hand and stick to standards, and it will render well anywhere.
...if your website is rather simple. Otherwise, you still need to code around the remaining IE problems, and the problems in older versions of IE (the publishing firm I work with STILL has clients using IE6...so I still have to code for IE6...) and the non-standard features of different browsers (ever use Javascript event handling? Try to make something follow a mouse cursor? Opacity in CSS?) and let's not even get into if you want to use HTML5...
I had an Archos 5, with Android Market. You had to load it yourself, but again, they gave you the freedom to do that. And while you did have to know you wanted it, that's about all you had to know -- there were instructions on their website, and it consisted of copying a zip file to the device and running it from the onboard file manager. Another two freedoms Apple doesn't give you -- the ability to mount as a mass storage device, and a file manager.
I'll give you that it doesn't have multitouch, but I never needed it. It did have the benefit of being a resistive touch screen as well -- I know, most people would probably consider that another drawback, but you could get a resolution on that far beyond anything an iPod can do. With an iPod touch, you could certainly build a stylus, but in my experience it would need to have the contact area approximately equal to that of a human finger (nearly a square centimeter from what I've found) to actually register. With my archos, I could use the head of a pin if I wanted to. Generally I'd just grab the pencil from my pocket and use that. Made web browsing an infinitely better experience. And I have done plenty of browsing on an iPod touch -- had one for three or four years when they were new. Personally, I found the archos an infinitely more capable device, but I suspect much of that is personal preference. But I suppose I'm getting quite off topic here. The point is, you think they can't compare beceause of the features the iPod has that the Archos lacks -- I think they can't really compare because of the features the Archos has that the iPod lacks. But for most users, I suspect they're pretty much the same device.
You seem to be assuming that user-friendly NECESSITATES techie-hostile; it does not. Compare Archos's Android media players with an iPod touch or iPad. They have nearly identical interfaces as far as the casual user is concerned (there's not a HUGE difference between Android and iOS as far as user-friendliness goes) But the big difference in terms of freedom is that the Archos devices don't have any hardware or software intended to provent you from using them as you wish. In fact, if you go to the Archos website, they'll give you instructions for installing Angstrom Linux on your device. Now I'm certainly not saying every company needs to go to that extreme, but there's no reason they need to actively try to prevent techies from using their devices as they see fit.
The closest theater to my home town that has 3D capabilites is an hour away...and I know plenty of people who drive that extra hour (or even two depending on their preferred theater) just to pay those extra few bucks to see a movie in 3D when it's in 2D at the local theater, not five minutes from their home. Same goes for IMAX. If EVERY theater had it, it probably wouldn't drive too many sales. But the situation being the way it is today, the theaters that have it are probably getting a fair bit of extra sales from it.
Wrong. The US is founded on science. It's founded on the ideals of the Enlightenment. It's only the current religious whackjobs who constaly insist our nation was founded on religion, ignoring all evidence to the contrary, that have made this into a "fact".
I've been using Openbox with bmpanel2 for a long time, but after yesterday's article here I dropped bmpanel2 for Razor-qt. And then I have top and a shell running transparent on my desktop. Everything else I just use the KDE suite for though, I like their apps, I just don't like the bloat of the full desktop.
Still not going to be as efficient as a direct connection. A normal transformer is going to be far more efficient than an inductive charger. It's not going to use air between the coils, it's going to be insulated, etc. All those improve efficiency. A power transformer will likely be more than 98% efficient, while an induction transformer is likely around 86%. And I would imagine this inductive charge system will be less efficient than those currently on the market -- if you're inductive charging a cell phone, the phone battery will be right up against the pad, so your gap between coils will at most be a few centimeters. For a car -- the bottom of your car isn't going to be on the ground. You'll probably have a foot or two air gap in there. Perhaps you could have it lower the coil when charging, but at that point you might as well have them physically connect. Even if you do you'll still probably have a bigger gap since you'll want the coils better insulated. Since it's going to follow the inverse square law, you're going to lose a lot of efficiency with that increased distance.
Grabbed my numbers from wikipedia:
"An ideal transformer would have no energy losses, and would be 100% efficient. In practical transformers, energy is dissipated in the windings, core, and surrounding structures. Larger transformers are generally more efficient, and those rated for electricity distribution usually perform better than 98%" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformer#Energy_losses
Who's the idiot who decided to put 'inductive charging' and 'energy-efficient' in the same paragraph? If you're trying to be efficient, inductive charging is the LAST thing you want to do. If you really are that opposed to having to plug in, come up with some innovative solution using contacts embedded in the garage like cordless phone cradles. Or do something like bumper cars. Though I bet people wouldn't like the thought of having exposed high voltage contacts...but I'm sure they could figure out a way to make it safe. Hell, even a plug on the front of the car that drives into a receptacle. Inductive is just stupid.
Ctrl is used because people are used to using ctrl (at least in the Windows world) for keyboard shortcuts.
Meta isn't used because not everyone HAS a meta key. My current laptop does, but my desktop doesn't. Alt I would be OK with, but they had to pick one and ctrl works just as well. Plus it's easy to find, it's right there in the corner. With alt there's a greater risk of hitting the wrong key if you aren't looking. I just tried it out, could find ctrl no problem, but for alt I ended up starting at the win key, sliding over to the spacebar, and then realizing I overshot and sliding back to find alt.
I have six extensions currently installed -- three disabled because I gave up on keeping them updated. It's getting a bit better now, but it used to be every Firefox update I'd have to manually update any extension I wanted to keep. Now most are automatic and not all need updated, but I still, for example, have had to manually update Firebug pretty much every single time I want to use it. Extensions that I have that now seem to update automatically are Flashblock and MAFIAAFire Redirector. Extensions I gave up on because of the update hell are Modify Headers, Page Speed, and Resurrect Pages. I literally dumped half of my extensions because it was such a pain in the ass to keep them updated. That isn't good.
The threats against us change constantly and our challenge in law enforcement is to balance vigilance and preparedness against the preservation of liberties.
- CYRUS VANCE, JR., MANHATTAN DISTRICT ATTORNEY
The key point there is the term 'balance' -- in other words, it's OK to sacrifice the preservation of liberties sometimes in the name of 'vigilance and preparedness'. By using the term 'balance', he shows that he believes that civil rights aren't, as the Constitution defines them, things that must be preserved and protected above all else; rather, they're something that must occasionally be sacrified in the name of the greater good. And it seems quite probably from that phrasing that he doesn't agree with the quote, already posted below, that it is "better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer."
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I'm no network engineer, but if it's a malicious attack, wouldn't you have to assume that the attacker has at least some level of control over the router in question? And if so, if they're trying to force connections to a certain IP through that router, couldn't they just route those probe packets to themselves and spoof a response? Even if you encode information giving it a new route to go through in order to verify, couldn't the attacker just direct their response through that route as well (while maybe adding a few of their own hops first)?
I guess if you are in middle- or high-school, this could be a nice service for storing your homework and such.
Not really. You probably don't have the right to give GOOG permission to:
"publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content"
Why? I dunno about you, but I never signed any contracts while in middle- or high-school restricting what I can and cannot do with my homework. Maybe you can't distribute the problems themselves, as they're probably copyright (though you could argue fair use for educational purposes and such,) but otherwise there's no reason you couldn't.
Hell, even in college I never signed such an agreement. Was asked to once and I refused, along with around a third of the class. SOP in those situations is to assign a different project that isn't free labor to some corporation. I know students who have sold their college (and, for that matter, highschool) projects with no problem.
http://web.archive.org/web/20021202101745/http://mail.yahoo.com/
December 2002 archive of Yahoo's own site states:
Free 4MB storage - up to twice as much as other free email providers!
Around '04 they moved that up to 100 megs to compete with Gmail, then went unlimited some time after that. Are you sure you didn't have a paid 'Yahoo! Mail Plus' account? Those apparently had 25 megs starting in 1999.
My Gmail account is currently using 2.5 GIGS. Before Gmail existed, the largest mailbox capacity that existed (as far as I know) was Fastmail, with 10 megs, with 1-2mb being common (hotmail, yahoo, aol, etc). I would generally overflow those in 6 months to a year. Granted, a lot of my gmail emails I could do without. Others -- hell, I still have attachments of hundreds of kilobytes, sometimes even megabytes, from five years ago that I pull up occasionally. For me at least, Gmail's storage capacity revolutionized email. 'email it to yourself' or even 'email it to me' was not a feasible way to transfer or store files until Gmail (Gmail was also the first, and still one of the few, providers to allow large attachments. Most providers still limit it to 10 megs, while Gmail is 20. Your guess is as good as mine as to what the limit was with a 2 meg inbox.) The search helps a lot too, though that's obviously related -- no need for search it if you can't store it. I'm a lot more likely to remember that I got a PDF of that two semesters ago from Ms. xyz than I am to remember where the hell I stored that file. Plus I've gone through four or five computers since getting Gmail, so files that I can currently just grab out of my email would have otherwise been scattered across six or seven hard drives.
Yes, users don't want a new email address. That's why I love gmail. In the two years before gmail launched the situation with email storage was really getting to be a problem, due to increasing internet speed and file sizes. I think I went through four email accounts in those two years. Some of that was due to storage, some due to spam (When gmail launched there was no comparison with the spam filters. They're still among the best. Went from a dozen or so spams a day to less than one a month) So...I went from changing addresses every six months to having the same address for about eight years now. The desire to keep one constant email address is exactly why Gmail was so popular. Maybe not for people like my father, who's STILL on hotmail, but for people who use email heavily that was certainly a large part of the motivation.
Nope, Desktop, it was a few months old at the time, which was probably around two years ago.
It depends on what you're doing with it. I used to play World of Warcraft, and I actually found I could get better performance under Wine on Linux than under Windows (NOT in a VM.) And something like WoW in a virtual machine? Not gonna happen. For office apps and such, a VM will probably work fine, but for any kind of gaming, I've even found noticable lag on a 2.5GHz quad-core machine with 4 gigs of RAM running a game made for Windows 98. Wine just performs better. Plus with a VM you run into issues with keyboard/mouse capture -- you don't want to accidentally hit the capture key in the middle of a WoW raid. Or if you're using host integration so there is no capture key, sometimes the mouse won't capture right and you'll run it right through the edge of the screen or something...
I haven't used Wine in a while; I'm mostly using VMs because what I need these things for now is testing apps in various environments, which Wine can't really do -- but with all the problems I've had with VMs (mostly VirtualBox, some VMWare), I can't imagine any situation in which I would ever choose to use a VM when Wine would do the job.
I'm assuming that a diesel engine running on vegetable oil, as originally intended, would not have such harmful fumes, right? Swap to bio-diesel and you're good?
(Amusingly, unless current drunk driving laws are revised, it will probably still be illegal to sit in the driver's seat while drunk even if you're not actually driving the vehicle because you are still technically "operating" it.)
...which seems perfectly reasonable, unless you mandate that every car on the road MUST be self-driving, that there cannot be any manual override method for self-driving cars, and self-driving cars must know about and avoid all possible unsafe conditions even in spite of a direct order by the driver (like, say, going into park on a highway, driving onto a lawn [which in some cases you may actually want to do], going off the road, etc) The vehicles would also need to completely fail in the event of sensor failure -- for example, if the car can't tell if the bridge you're about to cross is in one piece, because the front-mounted range sensor is broken, it must completely shut down and be towed to a repair center and fixed before it can possibly be driven under any circumstances.
Personally, I think keeping drunk driving laws on the books is the more reasonable option.
It's not all about the heat. We're pretty close to the speed of light being an issue. Electrical signals travel slightly below light speed, so for a 3GHz chip, your signal could make it approximately 10cm, round trip, in one cycle. Which means we may be able to get to ten or twenty GHz inside chips but when it comes to memory access, that's going to then take tens of clock cycles. And that also assumes a 1cm square chip, all straight paths, and zero latency in the transistors. My guess is that even if you made a diamond substrate, you wouldn't be able to get it too much faster than existing chips.
Don't believe in a creator? That's fine, but understand this country was founded by Religous people and we will always be fighting to govern it, because we know our rights are provided by our Creator.
"Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise."
- James Madison, letter to Wm. Bradford, April 1, 1774
"This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it."
- John Adams
"In every country and every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot ... they have perverted the purest religion ever preached to man into mystery and jargon, unintelligible to all mankind, and therefore the safer engine for their purpose."
- Thomas Jefferson, to Horatio Spafford, March 17, 1814
You get the point. They may have been men of FAITH, but certainly not RELIGIOUS. There's a significant difference.
Furthermore, why must liberties be GRANTED? They're quite plainly something that cannot be given; they can only be taken away. The question is not who grants us our rights, but rather who would try to take them away. To which the answer is almost always government. You are correct that others believing rights are granted by government is a very dangerous thing. But believing rights are granted by some deity is equally dangerous. If people believe that our rights come directly from the Christian God, for example, then denying those rights to people who people who get abortions or are athiest or are homosexual seems justified. Believing that rights are granted to you by some entity only makes those rights easier for others to violate.
TSA agents are NOT law enforcement agents. Common mistake. So common there's a bill in congress right now to try to correct that:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/nationnow/2011/12/strip-act-targets-tsa.html
Sure, they're federal employees, but so are the Smithsonian janitors...
Why? If I set off a metal detector at an office building they can't hold me, the worst they can do is call the police while I walk away. Hell, I've gone into government buildings with prohibited items (knives and such, accidentally) and set off the metal detector. And when that happens, your options are: show them and have it confiscated if it's prohibited, show them and leave if it's prohibited, or just leave. If you try to enter the White House with a hunting knife, they'll let you just walk away. Why is an airport any different? Hell, the security at government buildings are actual police officers. TSA agents aren't. They have no legal authority to hold you. They can certainly call the police if the scanner clearly shows a gun, or you are in some way acting suspicious, or they just feel like it. But that's all they legally have the authority to do. And that's all they SHOULD have the authority to do.
anyone that refuses a pat-down is free to leave
...except when they aren't. I've heard of people being detained _at gunpoint_ for doing nothing more than refusing a pat-down. Here's one, slightly less extreme, example from _a freakin' pilot_ (if he wanted to bring down the plane, he wouldn't need a bomb to do it...):
http://www.expressjetpilots.com/the-pipe/showthread.php?39523-Well-today-was-the-day
Write your code by hand and stick to standards, and it will render well anywhere.
...if your website is rather simple. Otherwise, you still need to code around the remaining IE problems, and the problems in older versions of IE (the publishing firm I work with STILL has clients using IE6...so I still have to code for IE6...) and the non-standard features of different browsers (ever use Javascript event handling? Try to make something follow a mouse cursor? Opacity in CSS?) and let's not even get into if you want to use HTML5...
I had an Archos 5, with Android Market. You had to load it yourself, but again, they gave you the freedom to do that. And while you did have to know you wanted it, that's about all you had to know -- there were instructions on their website, and it consisted of copying a zip file to the device and running it from the onboard file manager. Another two freedoms Apple doesn't give you -- the ability to mount as a mass storage device, and a file manager.
I'll give you that it doesn't have multitouch, but I never needed it. It did have the benefit of being a resistive touch screen as well -- I know, most people would probably consider that another drawback, but you could get a resolution on that far beyond anything an iPod can do. With an iPod touch, you could certainly build a stylus, but in my experience it would need to have the contact area approximately equal to that of a human finger (nearly a square centimeter from what I've found) to actually register. With my archos, I could use the head of a pin if I wanted to. Generally I'd just grab the pencil from my pocket and use that. Made web browsing an infinitely better experience. And I have done plenty of browsing on an iPod touch -- had one for three or four years when they were new. Personally, I found the archos an infinitely more capable device, but I suspect much of that is personal preference. But I suppose I'm getting quite off topic here. The point is, you think they can't compare beceause of the features the iPod has that the Archos lacks -- I think they can't really compare because of the features the Archos has that the iPod lacks. But for most users, I suspect they're pretty much the same device.
You seem to be assuming that user-friendly NECESSITATES techie-hostile; it does not. Compare Archos's Android media players with an iPod touch or iPad. They have nearly identical interfaces as far as the casual user is concerned (there's not a HUGE difference between Android and iOS as far as user-friendliness goes) But the big difference in terms of freedom is that the Archos devices don't have any hardware or software intended to provent you from using them as you wish. In fact, if you go to the Archos website, they'll give you instructions for installing Angstrom Linux on your device. Now I'm certainly not saying every company needs to go to that extreme, but there's no reason they need to actively try to prevent techies from using their devices as they see fit.
Way to make everyone feel old by insinuating that 2001 is no longer recent enough to be considered "nowadays". :)
The closest theater to my home town that has 3D capabilites is an hour away...and I know plenty of people who drive that extra hour (or even two depending on their preferred theater) just to pay those extra few bucks to see a movie in 3D when it's in 2D at the local theater, not five minutes from their home. Same goes for IMAX. If EVERY theater had it, it probably wouldn't drive too many sales. But the situation being the way it is today, the theaters that have it are probably getting a fair bit of extra sales from it.
Wrong. The US is founded on science. It's founded on the ideals of the Enlightenment. It's only the current religious whackjobs who constaly insist our nation was founded on religion, ignoring all evidence to the contrary, that have made this into a "fact".
I've been using Openbox with bmpanel2 for a long time, but after yesterday's article here I dropped bmpanel2 for Razor-qt. And then I have top and a shell running transparent on my desktop. Everything else I just use the KDE suite for though, I like their apps, I just don't like the bloat of the full desktop.
Still not going to be as efficient as a direct connection. A normal transformer is going to be far more efficient than an inductive charger. It's not going to use air between the coils, it's going to be insulated, etc. All those improve efficiency. A power transformer will likely be more than 98% efficient, while an induction transformer is likely around 86%. And I would imagine this inductive charge system will be less efficient than those currently on the market -- if you're inductive charging a cell phone, the phone battery will be right up against the pad, so your gap between coils will at most be a few centimeters. For a car -- the bottom of your car isn't going to be on the ground. You'll probably have a foot or two air gap in there. Perhaps you could have it lower the coil when charging, but at that point you might as well have them physically connect. Even if you do you'll still probably have a bigger gap since you'll want the coils better insulated. Since it's going to follow the inverse square law, you're going to lose a lot of efficiency with that increased distance.
Grabbed my numbers from wikipedia:
"An ideal transformer would have no energy losses, and would be 100% efficient. In practical transformers, energy is dissipated in the windings, core, and surrounding structures. Larger transformers are generally more efficient, and those rated for electricity distribution usually perform better than 98%"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformer#Energy_losses
"For example, the Magne Charge system employed high-frequency induction to deliver high power at an efficiency of 86%"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inductive_charging#Disadvantages
Who's the idiot who decided to put 'inductive charging' and 'energy-efficient' in the same paragraph? If you're trying to be efficient, inductive charging is the LAST thing you want to do. If you really are that opposed to having to plug in, come up with some innovative solution using contacts embedded in the garage like cordless phone cradles. Or do something like bumper cars. Though I bet people wouldn't like the thought of having exposed high voltage contacts...but I'm sure they could figure out a way to make it safe. Hell, even a plug on the front of the car that drives into a receptacle. Inductive is just stupid.
Ctrl is used because people are used to using ctrl (at least in the Windows world) for keyboard shortcuts.
Meta isn't used because not everyone HAS a meta key. My current laptop does, but my desktop doesn't. Alt I would be OK with, but they had to pick one and ctrl works just as well. Plus it's easy to find, it's right there in the corner. With alt there's a greater risk of hitting the wrong key if you aren't looking. I just tried it out, could find ctrl no problem, but for alt I ended up starting at the win key, sliding over to the spacebar, and then realizing I overshot and sliding back to find alt.
I have six extensions currently installed -- three disabled because I gave up on keeping them updated. It's getting a bit better now, but it used to be every Firefox update I'd have to manually update any extension I wanted to keep. Now most are automatic and not all need updated, but I still, for example, have had to manually update Firebug pretty much every single time I want to use it. Extensions that I have that now seem to update automatically are Flashblock and MAFIAAFire Redirector. Extensions I gave up on because of the update hell are Modify Headers, Page Speed, and Resurrect Pages. I literally dumped half of my extensions because it was such a pain in the ass to keep them updated. That isn't good.
OK, I pulled up the exact quote:
http://edition.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1111/20/cnr.05.html
The threats against us change constantly and our challenge in law enforcement is to balance vigilance and preparedness against the preservation of liberties.
- CYRUS VANCE, JR., MANHATTAN DISTRICT ATTORNEY
The key point there is the term 'balance' -- in other words, it's OK to sacrifice the preservation of liberties sometimes in the name of 'vigilance and preparedness'. By using the term 'balance', he shows that he believes that civil rights aren't, as the Constitution defines them, things that must be preserved and protected above all else; rather, they're something that must occasionally be sacrified in the name of the greater good. And it seems quite probably from that phrasing that he doesn't agree with the quote, already posted below, that it is "better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer."