Why is it just "newbies" that purchase small high value items from Microcenter? A while back I got a new, retail Q9550 processor for about $170. It was probably selling for ~$250 on Newegg or anywhere legit at the time, and today it sells for $275 at Newegg.
A USB CD drive and support to boot from it solves all of those problems. I'd gladly pay $50 for one and not have to carry it around in my laptop all the time. In fact, I put a SSD in my laptop and put the old hard drive in the optical bay, and it's great! I get all the speed of a SSD and all the capacity of a HDD on the cheap. On the rare occasion I need to use a CD (like when the SSD died and I had to restore the OS on a new one), I plug in my massive external DVD burner from 2004, and it boots off it just fine. If I need to burn a DVD, I use that or my desktop computer.
I think they are using crypt(). There is a table out there sorted by email address (I can't remember where though). If you just commented without creating an account they probably only asked for your email address, which was used for verification. Apparently I had given them two of my email addresses based on the emails I got from them, and now I'm worried about excessive spam and I'll probably change my emails. They were semi-throwaway anyways.
This is more like bombing their parking lot, or dumping large amounts of garbage in front of their building (gigabytes of garbage every second). Marching in front of a store is relatively harmless, but a DOS attack, or vandalism I mentioned above, causes real damage and costs the company money (bandwidth costs, downtime, paying more sysadmins to deal with it, etc).
There is no need to require something as complicated and expensive as a camera. I have driven a Toyota 4Runner, and it has two convex mirrors, one on each rear pillar, near where the rear hatch hinges are. These two mirrors allowed me to see essentially everything up to the bumper when backing up. If there's anything on the ground behind the car, no matter how short or close to the back of the car, it's visible. This is much better than the alternative of not being able to see anything shorter than 3-4 feet since the rear window is so high.
I have an 08 MBP and the audio quality sucks. The noise level is very high, like -64dB order of order of magnitude (if that makes any sense). In 16 bit mode there is extreme quantization noise at low volume levels. If a song fades out, you will here weird digital artifacts. I set the volume to the lowest level, played some music and recorded it with a loopback cable, and it was actually an interesting effect, but not something I would want to listen to. Setting it for 24 bit mode fixes the quantization noise, but the noise floor is still high enough to be almost distracting for at most reasonable volume levels.
I don't know much about the new MBPs- I'm sure they are better, but I think they are still not great. They most likely aren't going to beat the integrated card in this article. Luckily some of them have optical out, which is nice since you can use an external dac if needed.
The ads have some value even if on one clicks them. Just seeing them has some value, like billboards. If someone reads the ads but then decides not to click them, I bet they would still be more likely to click an organic link for something that was advertised because it they have already seen it once on the page, and it may be somewhat more familiar. Also ads may increase the legitimacy of advertiser's sites, whether the user clicks the ad or the organic link, since some people may perceive an ad as a sort of endorsement by Google (even if it's not).
The majority of the population isn't educated enough to make decisions on issues like this (or most issues for that matter), which is why we have elected representatives. Unfortunately the system doesn't work very well, and our representatives are not much better than us, especially on very technical issues. They can't be experts on everything, which is why they have staff and advisers.
Why is it astounding to be able to watch 1080p video while the system is working in the background? Isn't that how priority is supposed to work? 1080p video is interactive and realtime, so it should get a high priority, and the background tasks should get a low priority. It doesn't matter how much CPU time the video takes; the background task should just use the rest. There's no reason a pegged CPU should ever slow down something with a higher priority.
I haven't had a situation where I "can't do anything on other pages", but when I have tons (hundreds) of tabs open, Firefox regularly consumes 30% of my CPU time doing nothing. I have flash blocked and animations set to not loop, so you can't blame those.
And don't tell me I should have fewer tabs open. I should be able to use the browser however I want. Sure hundreds of tabs is not the normal use case, but I know there are others out there that do the same thing. Provide a better bookmark system and maybe I won't need so may tabs.
Just today, Firefox "forgot" all my bookmarks, so I had to delete my places.sqlite file to get them back. When I went to delete it, it was 124MB! No wonder the awesome bar was always so laggy. It is much faster now, but all my history is gone (not that I ever really use it, but I like to keep it). At least I got my bookmarks back.
I stick with Firefox, though, because I like it, I like the extensions, and nothing else I've tried has been a good enough replacement. Google Chrome can't handle the number of bookmarks I have, or the number of tabs I like to keep open (at least on my mac, I haven't tried the Windows version). Opera lacks extensions (though it's getting them in version 11) and is still a niche browser. Maybe it's time to try Safari again now that version 5 has extensions, but I still don't like that it is somewhat limited, like most Apple products*.
*Yes, I use a Mac, but that's because their OS is really solid and works well. It doesn't have audio dropouts like my Windows 7 PC, for example, and it doesn't have most of the hardware problems I've had with Linux (mostly video driver problems) and more commercial software works on Mac than Linux. I don't like the direction Apple seems to be going, making everything more closed, but I will stick with it until something better comes along or until I'm forced to switch.
I can adjust my speed just fine. It's the idiots in front of me that can't. It's frustrating that every time I get on the highway, the person in front of me gets up to about 45mph-50mph, when traffic is flowing at 55-70mph. This is the worst when the on ramp has to immediately merge with highway traffic, and is a source of traffic jams when traffic is heavy. Some guy merges onto the highway going really slow, so the cars on the highway have to slam on their brakes, and everything comes to a stop. A good portion of the people on the road shouldn't be allowed to drive at all in my opinion.
I can think of one time I was in a situation where more power would have been necessary for safety. I was getting back on the interstate after stopping for gas in west Texas, where the speed limit is 80mph, and the idiot in front of me decides to go 25mph. This is obviously an unsafe situation with traffic coming up behind me at 80mph, and only one other lane for them to move into. If someone wasn't fully paying attention or expecting something unusual, they might not have reacted until it was too late, and it's easy to loose focus when you are driving on an absolutely straight, flat road all day.
So I only had a few choices. I could keep following this guy, which would not be smart, or I could pull off into the emergency lane, which wouldn't put me in any better of a position later (I wouldn't want to accelerate in the emergency lane- too much debris), or I could pass this guy. Luckily traffic was light enough that I could pass safely, even in my economy car. It took a while, but I eventually hit 80mph. Had there been more traffic, I would have been stuck, at least for a while.
That is the only situation I can think of that I've really Needed more power, but there are plenty of less extreme situations where it's nice to have. On my regular commute to work, for example, there's a road that comes to an intersection with a highway, but doesn't have a ramp- it's just a regular intersection with a stop sign only for the side road. The speed limit is 70, and traffic can be heavy at times. I can either pull out quickly or wait many minutes for a big enough opening, while the people behind me get impatient.
Now I'm not saying we all need to drive muscle cars, and even my Honda Civic is not that bad (clearly I'm still here), but a car with only the minimum horsepower it takes to get to highway speed would not be good enough.
Why should everyone be locked into texting plans? Say one message costs $0.15, and I send a little over 100 texts/month. If I get the 1000 text for $15 plan, I save money, but I'm still paying just under $.15/text, and if I use less for one month, I'm paying even more. Per-message prices should be fair and comparable to the price of a message on a plan. About 2-5 cents per message would be fair if 1000 messages costs $15/month.
There's no way these phones would cost $500-$800 if we let the free market decide the price. They would very likely fall just above the $200 price point everyone is already paying (I'm guessing a fair price would be $200-300). Think about it- an iPod Touch costs $230, but an iPhone with 90% identical hardware costs $600 off contract.
Because the carriers "subsidize" everything down to a price people are willing to pay, they can put extreme markup on the off-contract phones, thus forcing everyone into contracts. This should be illegal as it is an abuse of monopoly/oligopoly power that is directly harming consumers. The FCC needs to do something about the wireless carrier situation in the US, or we need more regulation.
I always forget about tab completion. I don't use the command line enough to get into the habit of using it.
$program --help only works if you remember the name of the program you are trying to get help with. The common one are second-nature for people who use the CLI regularly, but a new user isn't likely to know the name of the program they are trying to use, since the binary name is not usually the same as the plain language name.
But which one is easier to remember? The graphical ones. If I want to follow this procedure again in a year, what are the chances I'm going to remember those two lines exactly? Even a single character off could have bad results, ore more likely not work at all. Sure, most of us on/. have memorized simple commands like rm, ln, and their common parameters, but the average user is NOT going to memorize that, nor should they have to. The graphical procedure is visual and self-correcting. You need to make a link, so even if you don't remember exactly what kind of link, or how to do it, you see a simple "make link" option when you right-click on a folder.
If I have to look up the command line syntax every time I want to make a link, it's a lot slower than just using the GUI method. I have to figure out what to type in the search engine, and sort through for something that tells me how to do exactly what I want to do.
Another problem is long paths to directories. Sure, typing ~/Pictures is easy enough, but what if it's ~/Desktop/android-sdk-mac_86/tools (random example), or something worse. It is hard to accurately remember and type long paths in the command line, but with the GUI there is no chance for mistakes assuming you don't have multiple files with very similar names.
Of course it's great that the CLI is there, but usability is a lot better if a GUI option is available too.
I don't think carriers are running out of bandwidth yet. A better analogy would be that you are a farmer on an island that can grow a fixed amount of beans. Demand for beans has historically been low, but there were business customers willing to pay a lot for beans, so you grow them. They wanted to be able to get beans anywhere, and there is an extremely short shelf life, so you grow beans everywhere. This leaves you with a surplus of beans, so you want to find ways to get rid of them. In a free market, this would lead to a very low price for beans, but since you are in an oligopoly and have secret meetings with the other bean farmers on the island, you decide that you should push everyone to pay $30/month for "unlimited" bean subscriptions to feed the growing droid population on the island. But the supply of beans isn't really unlimited. When demand is low enough the supply is virtually unlimited, but as demand increases, the supply does become limited and you can't easily grow more beans. Instead of capping everyone's bean use, or charging per bean, you just do things to try to limit beans, such as not allowing droids to eat too many beans at once. This works for now, but as the droid population continues to grow, you will run out of beans, or at least fertilizer and water, and you will have to start imposing caps. To keep up with future demand, you are working on engineering "4G" beans that provide more energy. There are some initial costs to start growing them (buying seeds, changing equipment), but once you are growing them, they don't really cost you much more than 3G beans. Yet when you start to roll out 4G beans, you charge people more for them (and still sell "unlimited" amounts).
If you do try to cap bean use, you want to set a high cap to compete with the other farmers that have "unlimited" bean plans. You choose 5 gigaBeans per month, which is more than most people will reasonable use, but hopefully enough to keep extreme users from depleting your bean supply. You know that if everyone takes 5 GB per month, you won't have enough beans, and you are afraid of what might happen when you look at the trend growth of the droid population. Maybe you will change your pricing scheme to something with lower caps and a slightly lower price, but you will still end up making more money as bean users buying from other farmers who don't exceed your smaller caps switch to your farm. But this switching doesn't happen quickly because back in the early days of bean farming, the bean farmers all decided, in a secret meeting, to lock everyone into two year bean contracts.
I could go on, but you get the point. Cell phone carriers are not in a great position themselves, yet they still try to extract as much money from people as possible (and do a good job of it). I think the carrier industry's business model in the US has deep flaws that affect both the consumers and the carriers, but as long as the carriers are making money, this isn't likely to change soon.
Not true, unless you get to the point where all accidents above X speed result in death. Energy increases as the square of speed. There is a good chance of surviving a 50MPH collision in a modern car, but at 90mph, the chances are much much lower. There is very little data for what happens above that speed, but there was one episode of Mythbusters where they crashed a car at a very high speed (around 80-90, I think), and the car was shortened to 1/2 its original length, while at the lower speed, the accident would have been survivable.
I think government crash tests should be conducted at the highest speed you might find on an interstate, so 80+mph. Currently frontal offset crash tests are conducted at 40mph in the US.
There's an Easy Privacy list for Adblock Plus that works well in addition to Easylist for ads. I also added facebook.com^$third-party and fbcdn.net^$third-party (with appropriate exceptions so facebook still works). In addition, I blocked a lot of other web 2.0 stuff that was making the internet load slow over my slow connection.
The moon isn't nearly as bright as city lights. The apartment I live in in college has terrible light fixtures that shine almost as much light in my fourth story window as they do on the ground. It is not too hard to read by the light coming in the window sometimes (fog or low clouds makes it brighter by reflecting light from all around the city). Even with blinds and curtains, some light still leaks in.
At home (basically in the country), the moon is easily blocked out by the blinds, and most of the month I can leave one of the windows open without the light being a problem.
City noises are much louder than noises out in the country. Out here there are birds, cows, crickets, strong wind, and the occasional coyotes, but I usually fall back asleep quickly if anything wakes me up.
At my apartment, they empty the dumpsters at least 3 times a week, and they spend 5-10 minutes banging them, backing up, and banging the next one. The dumpsters are in a line, so the garbage truck has to empty the first one, move it out of the way, then empty the second one, move it, then empty the third one, then put them all back. This usually happens 30 minutes to an hour and a half before I have to wake up, depending on when they decide to get there. The noise is excessively loud in my room, because even though I don't have a direct view of the dumpsters, most of the noise echos off the solid brick buildings across the street. Even in the bathroom (which has no exterior walls) with the door closed, the noise would be loud enough to wake me up. The dumpsters are the worst, but there's also the sirens, helicopters, cars, lawn mowers, people yelling, and people playing loud music, all of which happen regularly. Not being in college would (hopefully) reduce the yelling and loud music, but not the rest of them. Last year a helicopter decided to hover outside for about an hour when I was trying to sleep, and it was particularly obnoxious.
I plan on building something to block out most of the light and noise while still allowing fresh air and possible simulating a sunrise to help me wake up. If I block out all the light, it is hard for me to wake up when I need to, and I tend to be more tired throughout the day. Even with the amount of light that gets in now, if is is raining it is much harder for me to wake up, so an artificial sunrise should help with that.
My last cable box had (in addition to the usual HD video outputs) firewire, USB, eSATA, and ethernet. Only firewire worked with an obscure driver, but the Mpeg TS output was hard to do anything with. eSATA would have been nice to expand the capacity of the DVR, and ethernet would have been nice to stream content to computers or other boxes around the house. It's sad that that's possible but not allowed just because Comcast would have made less money. I don't remember what our Direct Tv satellite box has, but I know it has optical audio out, which I can use to rip unlimited music from the XM channels with my laptop (though it saves it in a continuous stream and there is no good way of splitting and tagging individual songs).
I only need to keep track of a few passwords. The rest of them are stored in Firefox or PasswordSafe. I put everything in PasswordSafe, and I also let Firefox remember the less important ones. All I have to remember is my logon password, my Firefox master password, and my PasswordSafe password.
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Why is it just "newbies" that purchase small high value items from Microcenter? A while back I got a new, retail Q9550 processor for about $170. It was probably selling for ~$250 on Newegg or anywhere legit at the time, and today it sells for $275 at Newegg.
http://www.overclockers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=610809
A USB CD drive and support to boot from it solves all of those problems. I'd gladly pay $50 for one and not have to carry it around in my laptop all the time. In fact, I put a SSD in my laptop and put the old hard drive in the optical bay, and it's great! I get all the speed of a SSD and all the capacity of a HDD on the cheap. On the rare occasion I need to use a CD (like when the SSD died and I had to restore the OS on a new one), I plug in my massive external DVD burner from 2004, and it boots off it just fine. If I need to burn a DVD, I use that or my desktop computer.
I think they are using crypt(). There is a table out there sorted by email address (I can't remember where though). If you just commented without creating an account they probably only asked for your email address, which was used for verification. Apparently I had given them two of my email addresses based on the emails I got from them, and now I'm worried about excessive spam and I'll probably change my emails. They were semi-throwaway anyways.
This is more like bombing their parking lot, or dumping large amounts of garbage in front of their building (gigabytes of garbage every second). Marching in front of a store is relatively harmless, but a DOS attack, or vandalism I mentioned above, causes real damage and costs the company money (bandwidth costs, downtime, paying more sysadmins to deal with it, etc).
Wouldn't everyone sending out sonar chirps be just as bad?
There is no need to require something as complicated and expensive as a camera. I have driven a Toyota 4Runner, and it has two convex mirrors, one on each rear pillar, near where the rear hatch hinges are. These two mirrors allowed me to see essentially everything up to the bumper when backing up. If there's anything on the ground behind the car, no matter how short or close to the back of the car, it's visible. This is much better than the alternative of not being able to see anything shorter than 3-4 feet since the rear window is so high.
I have an 08 MBP and the audio quality sucks. The noise level is very high, like -64dB order of order of magnitude (if that makes any sense). In 16 bit mode there is extreme quantization noise at low volume levels. If a song fades out, you will here weird digital artifacts. I set the volume to the lowest level, played some music and recorded it with a loopback cable, and it was actually an interesting effect, but not something I would want to listen to. Setting it for 24 bit mode fixes the quantization noise, but the noise floor is still high enough to be almost distracting for at most reasonable volume levels.
I don't know much about the new MBPs- I'm sure they are better, but I think they are still not great. They most likely aren't going to beat the integrated card in this article. Luckily some of them have optical out, which is nice since you can use an external dac if needed.
The ads have some value even if on one clicks them. Just seeing them has some value, like billboards. If someone reads the ads but then decides not to click them, I bet they would still be more likely to click an organic link for something that was advertised because it they have already seen it once on the page, and it may be somewhat more familiar. Also ads may increase the legitimacy of advertiser's sites, whether the user clicks the ad or the organic link, since some people may perceive an ad as a sort of endorsement by Google (even if it's not).
The majority of the population isn't educated enough to make decisions on issues like this (or most issues for that matter), which is why we have elected representatives. Unfortunately the system doesn't work very well, and our representatives are not much better than us, especially on very technical issues. They can't be experts on everything, which is why they have staff and advisers.
Plus most of those servers are run by competent admins who would likely notice if botnet traffic started showing up.
Why is it astounding to be able to watch 1080p video while the system is working in the background? Isn't that how priority is supposed to work? 1080p video is interactive and realtime, so it should get a high priority, and the background tasks should get a low priority. It doesn't matter how much CPU time the video takes; the background task should just use the rest. There's no reason a pegged CPU should ever slow down something with a higher priority.
I haven't had a situation where I "can't do anything on other pages", but when I have tons (hundreds) of tabs open, Firefox regularly consumes 30% of my CPU time doing nothing. I have flash blocked and animations set to not loop, so you can't blame those.
And don't tell me I should have fewer tabs open. I should be able to use the browser however I want. Sure hundreds of tabs is not the normal use case, but I know there are others out there that do the same thing. Provide a better bookmark system and maybe I won't need so may tabs.
Just today, Firefox "forgot" all my bookmarks, so I had to delete my places.sqlite file to get them back. When I went to delete it, it was 124MB! No wonder the awesome bar was always so laggy. It is much faster now, but all my history is gone (not that I ever really use it, but I like to keep it). At least I got my bookmarks back.
I stick with Firefox, though, because I like it, I like the extensions, and nothing else I've tried has been a good enough replacement. Google Chrome can't handle the number of bookmarks I have, or the number of tabs I like to keep open (at least on my mac, I haven't tried the Windows version). Opera lacks extensions (though it's getting them in version 11) and is still a niche browser. Maybe it's time to try Safari again now that version 5 has extensions, but I still don't like that it is somewhat limited, like most Apple products*.
*Yes, I use a Mac, but that's because their OS is really solid and works well. It doesn't have audio dropouts like my Windows 7 PC, for example, and it doesn't have most of the hardware problems I've had with Linux (mostly video driver problems) and more commercial software works on Mac than Linux. I don't like the direction Apple seems to be going, making everything more closed, but I will stick with it until something better comes along or until I'm forced to switch.
I can adjust my speed just fine. It's the idiots in front of me that can't. It's frustrating that every time I get on the highway, the person in front of me gets up to about 45mph-50mph, when traffic is flowing at 55-70mph. This is the worst when the on ramp has to immediately merge with highway traffic, and is a source of traffic jams when traffic is heavy. Some guy merges onto the highway going really slow, so the cars on the highway have to slam on their brakes, and everything comes to a stop. A good portion of the people on the road shouldn't be allowed to drive at all in my opinion.
I can think of one time I was in a situation where more power would have been necessary for safety. I was getting back on the interstate after stopping for gas in west Texas, where the speed limit is 80mph, and the idiot in front of me decides to go 25mph. This is obviously an unsafe situation with traffic coming up behind me at 80mph, and only one other lane for them to move into. If someone wasn't fully paying attention or expecting something unusual, they might not have reacted until it was too late, and it's easy to loose focus when you are driving on an absolutely straight, flat road all day.
So I only had a few choices. I could keep following this guy, which would not be smart, or I could pull off into the emergency lane, which wouldn't put me in any better of a position later (I wouldn't want to accelerate in the emergency lane- too much debris), or I could pass this guy. Luckily traffic was light enough that I could pass safely, even in my economy car. It took a while, but I eventually hit 80mph. Had there been more traffic, I would have been stuck, at least for a while.
That is the only situation I can think of that I've really Needed more power, but there are plenty of less extreme situations where it's nice to have. On my regular commute to work, for example, there's a road that comes to an intersection with a highway, but doesn't have a ramp- it's just a regular intersection with a stop sign only for the side road. The speed limit is 70, and traffic can be heavy at times. I can either pull out quickly or wait many minutes for a big enough opening, while the people behind me get impatient.
Now I'm not saying we all need to drive muscle cars, and even my Honda Civic is not that bad (clearly I'm still here), but a car with only the minimum horsepower it takes to get to highway speed would not be good enough.
Why should everyone be locked into texting plans? Say one message costs $0.15, and I send a little over 100 texts/month. If I get the 1000 text for $15 plan, I save money, but I'm still paying just under $.15/text, and if I use less for one month, I'm paying even more. Per-message prices should be fair and comparable to the price of a message on a plan. About 2-5 cents per message would be fair if 1000 messages costs $15/month.
There's no way these phones would cost $500-$800 if we let the free market decide the price. They would very likely fall just above the $200 price point everyone is already paying (I'm guessing a fair price would be $200-300). Think about it- an iPod Touch costs $230, but an iPhone with 90% identical hardware costs $600 off contract.
Because the carriers "subsidize" everything down to a price people are willing to pay, they can put extreme markup on the off-contract phones, thus forcing everyone into contracts. This should be illegal as it is an abuse of monopoly/oligopoly power that is directly harming consumers. The FCC needs to do something about the wireless carrier situation in the US, or we need more regulation.
I always forget about tab completion. I don't use the command line enough to get into the habit of using it. $program --help only works if you remember the name of the program you are trying to get help with. The common one are second-nature for people who use the CLI regularly, but a new user isn't likely to know the name of the program they are trying to use, since the binary name is not usually the same as the plain language name.
But which one is easier to remember? The graphical ones. If I want to follow this procedure again in a year, what are the chances I'm going to remember those two lines exactly? Even a single character off could have bad results, ore more likely not work at all. Sure, most of us on /. have memorized simple commands like rm, ln, and their common parameters, but the average user is NOT going to memorize that, nor should they have to. The graphical procedure is visual and self-correcting. You need to make a link, so even if you don't remember exactly what kind of link, or how to do it, you see a simple "make link" option when you right-click on a folder.
If I have to look up the command line syntax every time I want to make a link, it's a lot slower than just using the GUI method. I have to figure out what to type in the search engine, and sort through for something that tells me how to do exactly what I want to do.
Another problem is long paths to directories. Sure, typing ~/Pictures is easy enough, but what if it's ~/Desktop/android-sdk-mac_86/tools (random example), or something worse. It is hard to accurately remember and type long paths in the command line, but with the GUI there is no chance for mistakes assuming you don't have multiple files with very similar names.
Of course it's great that the CLI is there, but usability is a lot better if a GUI option is available too.
I don't think carriers are running out of bandwidth yet. A better analogy would be that you are a farmer on an island that can grow a fixed amount of beans. Demand for beans has historically been low, but there were business customers willing to pay a lot for beans, so you grow them. They wanted to be able to get beans anywhere, and there is an extremely short shelf life, so you grow beans everywhere. This leaves you with a surplus of beans, so you want to find ways to get rid of them. In a free market, this would lead to a very low price for beans, but since you are in an oligopoly and have secret meetings with the other bean farmers on the island, you decide that you should push everyone to pay $30/month for "unlimited" bean subscriptions to feed the growing droid population on the island. But the supply of beans isn't really unlimited. When demand is low enough the supply is virtually unlimited, but as demand increases, the supply does become limited and you can't easily grow more beans. Instead of capping everyone's bean use, or charging per bean, you just do things to try to limit beans, such as not allowing droids to eat too many beans at once. This works for now, but as the droid population continues to grow, you will run out of beans, or at least fertilizer and water, and you will have to start imposing caps. To keep up with future demand, you are working on engineering "4G" beans that provide more energy. There are some initial costs to start growing them (buying seeds, changing equipment), but once you are growing them, they don't really cost you much more than 3G beans. Yet when you start to roll out 4G beans, you charge people more for them (and still sell "unlimited" amounts).
If you do try to cap bean use, you want to set a high cap to compete with the other farmers that have "unlimited" bean plans. You choose 5 gigaBeans per month, which is more than most people will reasonable use, but hopefully enough to keep extreme users from depleting your bean supply. You know that if everyone takes 5 GB per month, you won't have enough beans, and you are afraid of what might happen when you look at the trend growth of the droid population. Maybe you will change your pricing scheme to something with lower caps and a slightly lower price, but you will still end up making more money as bean users buying from other farmers who don't exceed your smaller caps switch to your farm. But this switching doesn't happen quickly because back in the early days of bean farming, the bean farmers all decided, in a secret meeting, to lock everyone into two year bean contracts.
I could go on, but you get the point. Cell phone carriers are not in a great position themselves, yet they still try to extract as much money from people as possible (and do a good job of it). I think the carrier industry's business model in the US has deep flaws that affect both the consumers and the carriers, but as long as the carriers are making money, this isn't likely to change soon.
Not true, unless you get to the point where all accidents above X speed result in death. Energy increases as the square of speed. There is a good chance of surviving a 50MPH collision in a modern car, but at 90mph, the chances are much much lower. There is very little data for what happens above that speed, but there was one episode of Mythbusters where they crashed a car at a very high speed (around 80-90, I think), and the car was shortened to 1/2 its original length, while at the lower speed, the accident would have been survivable.
I think government crash tests should be conducted at the highest speed you might find on an interstate, so 80+mph. Currently frontal offset crash tests are conducted at 40mph in the US.
There's an Easy Privacy list for Adblock Plus that works well in addition to Easylist for ads. I also added facebook.com^$third-party and fbcdn.net^$third-party (with appropriate exceptions so facebook still works). In addition, I blocked a lot of other web 2.0 stuff that was making the internet load slow over my slow connection.
The moon isn't nearly as bright as city lights. The apartment I live in in college has terrible light fixtures that shine almost as much light in my fourth story window as they do on the ground. It is not too hard to read by the light coming in the window sometimes (fog or low clouds makes it brighter by reflecting light from all around the city). Even with blinds and curtains, some light still leaks in.
At home (basically in the country), the moon is easily blocked out by the blinds, and most of the month I can leave one of the windows open without the light being a problem.
City noises are much louder than noises out in the country. Out here there are birds, cows, crickets, strong wind, and the occasional coyotes, but I usually fall back asleep quickly if anything wakes me up.
At my apartment, they empty the dumpsters at least 3 times a week, and they spend 5-10 minutes banging them, backing up, and banging the next one. The dumpsters are in a line, so the garbage truck has to empty the first one, move it out of the way, then empty the second one, move it, then empty the third one, then put them all back. This usually happens 30 minutes to an hour and a half before I have to wake up, depending on when they decide to get there. The noise is excessively loud in my room, because even though I don't have a direct view of the dumpsters, most of the noise echos off the solid brick buildings across the street. Even in the bathroom (which has no exterior walls) with the door closed, the noise would be loud enough to wake me up. The dumpsters are the worst, but there's also the sirens, helicopters, cars, lawn mowers, people yelling, and people playing loud music, all of which happen regularly. Not being in college would (hopefully) reduce the yelling and loud music, but not the rest of them. Last year a helicopter decided to hover outside for about an hour when I was trying to sleep, and it was particularly obnoxious.
I plan on building something to block out most of the light and noise while still allowing fresh air and possible simulating a sunrise to help me wake up. If I block out all the light, it is hard for me to wake up when I need to, and I tend to be more tired throughout the day. Even with the amount of light that gets in now, if is is raining it is much harder for me to wake up, so an artificial sunrise should help with that.
My last cable box had (in addition to the usual HD video outputs) firewire, USB, eSATA, and ethernet. Only firewire worked with an obscure driver, but the Mpeg TS output was hard to do anything with. eSATA would have been nice to expand the capacity of the DVR, and ethernet would have been nice to stream content to computers or other boxes around the house. It's sad that that's possible but not allowed just because Comcast would have made less money. I don't remember what our Direct Tv satellite box has, but I know it has optical audio out, which I can use to rip unlimited music from the XM channels with my laptop (though it saves it in a continuous stream and there is no good way of splitting and tagging individual songs).
That's compressed size. Uncompressed HD video is gigabits per second, and most displays take in uncompressed video.
I only need to keep track of a few passwords. The rest of them are stored in Firefox or PasswordSafe. I put everything in PasswordSafe, and I also let Firefox remember the less important ones. All I have to remember is my logon password, my Firefox master password, and my PasswordSafe password.