If you completely switched off the hybrid system in a Prius or Honda Civic or (snicker) that hybrid Lexus SUV, guess what- highway gas mileage wouldn't change. The overwhelming factors for highway mileage are aerodynamics and rolling friction (tires, bearings, drivetrain components.) Lowering weight helps too; less energy required to accelerate and go up hills- and hybrids have that working against them because the battery packs, extra electronics+wiring, and traction motor all add weight.
Don't forget that air resistance goes up exponentially with speed. When I drive my 2003 Hybrid Civic at 75 MPH, I get close to 40 MPG. When I drive at 90, I get about 33-35 MPG. Fortunatly, I can still squeek into the EPA limit that allows me to drive in the carpool lane.;)
You describe one of the reasons why the U.S. encourages people to own their own homes and properties; it's a technique to minimize a landowning class.
Unfortunatly, "rent" is starting to creep back in where I live, because many homeowners still need to pay condo and neighborhood fees.
Where I live, it's often cheaper to rent because the landlord takes care of all of the maintenance; it's a valuable service that makes the rent more valuable then a morgage payment.
Now that you've got a decent VCR, you can go splurge on an expensive Analogue-Digital converter. Any decent-quality device won't offer all of the unnecessary "bells and whistles" (such as hardware-based MPEG/WMV encoding) that the parent poster describes. Instead, most pro-grade boxes will take an analogue signal (RCA, S-Vid, or even BNC if you want to go all out), and output a standard FireWire DV signal that any decent video editing software should be able to handle.
O.K, let's assume that the OP can buy a video capture device that will result in a MPEG file being placed on his hard drive.
I might also recommend stepping down from your podium, and considering editing your video with non-free software. I can't help but think that the gap that exists between Cineleera and Final Cut Pro is even bigger than the gap between Photoshop and The Gimp (which is pretty huge). Most professional studios use either Avid or Final Cut (and I'm really not trying to be an apple fanboy here -- Apple and Avid basically jointly own the entire industry). Compared to the rest of the costs of video production, Final Cut is a steal.
I get the impression that the OP isn't really trying to do professional-grade edits. It appears that he just wants to run a few filters and do some cuts & splices. VirtualDubMod, (free & open source,) for Windows, is perfect for such actions. (Download at doom9.net.) It can open MPEG and AVI, transcode to AVI (I use XviD as a codec, it's open & free,) and cut & splice. It might not be as pretty as the professional tools, but it's good enough to allow me to rip DVDs and encode my home movies to XviD.
This service SHOULD have been good for him, but after downloading a few TV shows from iTunes (NOT P2P, notice) and a couple Linux ISOs or whatever, he suddenly got booted. They didn't even give him an option to pay more and stay on the service.
So your friend owes NOTHING to Verizon? One of the things that's holding me back from EVDO is that I have to sign a long contract. Does this mean that if I want out of a Verizon EVDO contract all I have to do is open up a few large BitTorrent downloads?
Oh the irony! I refuse to do business with anything Verizon anyway.
I never understood school schedules. It has been shown that teenagers naturally wake up later in the day, and that elementary school students wake up earlier. Yet it is the elementary schools that start at 8:30 and the high schools that start at 7:30. Why not make school like work, where it runs 9-5, on a schedule more matching that of the parents? Some will counter that high school students have jobs in the evening, so let them start earlier. Why should jobs drive school schedules?
Because school is supposed to turn our children into good conformists. It gives students the illusion that they must painfully conform to an artifical reality in order to succeed in life. "The powers that be" create the artificial reality so that they can enslave the conformists.
BitTorrent's problem is that anyone that can afford to pay them for their services can probably afford to distribute their content over HTTP from a centralized server, and why wouldn't they given the much lower barrier to entry for their users?
Good point, something to consider is that a BitTorrent-like protocol can be used in conjunction with an ISP to keep costs under control and to improve performance.
Let's say that 100 people on a street are watching American Idol. If everyone has to open a unique connection to a centralized server, that means that the street is using 99 times the upstream bandwidth that it needs. If the ISP supports some kind of a BitTorrent-like proxy, it could send the episode of American Idol to the street once. This allows it to keep the upstream open to allow 50 outbound Skype calls from teenage girls to talk about Sanjya's new haircut.
I'd like to see the results of the poll after 5-10 years. Serenity is still new & fresh in people's memories. Granted, Star Wars (just episode 4) was meant to help teenagers think about religon. Serenity answers the question about why bad exists.
I should note that living in a small and largely self-contained municipality of a few thousand is a perfectly acceptable response to the above policies; that's how a great many Europeans actually live, even though we have a lot of big cities too. I'd also like to point out that the US isn't the only place agonizing over these problems; I can remember them being a regular topic of debate here (the UK) at least as far back as my memories of such topics go (late '70s).
I recently spend a week in Ucret, Netherlands. It's important to list some critical differences (compared to Suburbia, US,) that allow people to be less reliant on cars:
The busses come every five minutes, and the trains come every 15-20 minutes. They stop operating at 4AM. This means that you can travel at YOUR schedule when using public transportation!
Almost all roads have a sidewalk, bike lane, and vehicle lane on all sides.
This means that there's very little need for wide roads and parking.
This means that everything can be built closer together.
This makes almost everything either in walking distance, a short bus ride, or a short train ride. Cars are really only needed for occasional trips to the country.
Someday, when driving on a 3-4 lane American Suburbian road, I suggest doing a thought experiment:
Imagine that all of the cars on the road are replaced by their occupants standing in their location.
Imagine how wide the road "really" needs to be if it mainly served pedestrians.
Imagine that there's no more parking lots, all businesses are directly on the street.
Result: The need to make space for cars causes a requirement that you need to drive to a location that normally would be walkable.
You can buy a great image manipulation system for about $30 if you simply look hard enough.
Or you can get GIMP for $0 without looking very hard at all, which is also perfectly capable of doing everything you mention and more.
Or I can spend $30 for software that I can figure out. The time that it takes to learn how to use the GIMP is worth more then $30!
Peek your head into some more traditional "engineering" courses. A shortcoming of the CS field is that it ignores classical engineering lessons, which are needed when you write large programs. For example, I took "Technology of Alpine Skiing" my senior year because I needed it as a credit to graduate. It was the only class that I took that described "requirements based engineering," a concept that any CS major needs to understand, even if (s)he isn't going to work as a corporate drone.
Not just for how much it's costing the government, but for how much it's costing innocent defendants. I think any time the RIAA loses a case or drops a case they should have to pay legal fees for the defendants. I think you'd see a sharp drop in frivolous suits. They may still take a few cases to court, but they'll spend more time making sure the accused are actually guilty.
IANAL, but I've actually sat and read US Copyright law. There's provisions in US Copyright law that allow the wrongly accused to seek compensation. I was quite surprised when I read that section!
On a side note, US Copyright law has a funny section that prohibits radios that can be programmed to change their station by a central source, and it makes playing an entire album on the radio illegal. It seems that someone was afraid that there would be a version of Napster that would work over the airwaves!
The Terms of Service are irrelevant.
Normal use of this service is by the TEACHER, not the writer. The teacher does NOT have the legal authority to assign the copyright to Turnitin.
The college that I graduated from claimed that it owned all IP generated from any academic work generated by its students. Thus, the college owned the copyright to all of my papers.
I think the same will apply to schoolwork; the school, not the student, owns the IP.
Now, if someone comes in, and, by *NOT* following the script to the letter (he did say all the parts that the law requires creditors to say,) sets sales records two months in a row (he got a plastic slinky with the company name on it in thanks,) shouldn't you have the OTHER people follow his lead, rather than fire him?
There are far too many superiors in the work force who are more concerned about having their underlings follow thier orders to the letter. Perhaps your friend's manager felt threatened that your friend would take his job? It happens.
There is obviously no evidence that the mutations which gave rise to speciations were "random" and not in some way directed, naturally or supernaturally, or otherwise forced in some particular direction.
"Obvious" if you ignore pretty much all work in molecular genetics at least since Watson and Crick.
What if God uses a pseudorandom number generator in the laws of physics that make evolution appear random? In that case, both the scientists and the (cough) faithful are right.
For example, let's assume that there is a God who can know everything about the universe it creates. When it "starts" the universe, wouldn't it know the eventual outcome? Would it have the ability to change the starting conditions such that it can change the eventual outcome? Such a God would have the ability to create a universe with random evolution that it can influence.
Remember, Darwin, Einstien, and Hawkings all make references to God.
But that said, decided not to include an HD-DVD drive pratically makes the whole thing a wash. Without the HD-DVD drive, all we have is a more expensive premium console that has a larger hard drive, HDMI hookups, and is black.
Which makes the new XBox a perfect device for HD movie downloads! Bill Gates claims that HD movie downloads will beat both BluRay and HD-DVD.
Your cousin is more likely to get laid at a real university.
Education is so much more then just classes in one's chosen field of study. It's about meeting new people, learning to live independantly, and exposure to different ways of thinking. An online degree can't do that.
If your cousin doesn't value the piece of paper, he can blow off his classes to write games and drop out when he feels like it. I personally chose to get decent grades and graduate early, but I always tell kids that they're better off attending a college and dropping out over never going at all.
Is YouTube cool? I thought it was just a convenient place to post and watch videos.
The NBC/News Corp. site will be a convenient place to watch NBC and FOX television shows. Who cares if it is "cool"?
I really see YouTube as more of a video-based message board; it's not really a replacement for TV.
Hopefully, NBC and FOX provide something that, when paired with a television-based web browser, can actually replace TV.
PEOPLE DON'T SIT AT THE COMPUTER TO WATCH HALF-HOUR SHOWS.
I've been watching internet video on my TV for years. About a year ago, NBC (or ABC?) canceled "The Book of Daniel" and put a few of the remaining episodes on their web site, Ad-free. I plugged my laptop into my TV and enjoyed them from my couch.
It's getting easier: My Nintendo Wii has a web browser that works with YouTube. There's a 50% chance that it'll be reliable once Netflix's Flash-based service comes online!
So, because the single market is dead, new bands have a harder job breaking into the market. In particular if a band has two good tracks and a couple of bad ones, where once they might have produced a single or maybe two, now they have to make it all into an Album and pad it out with a couple of over-length "dance remix" tracks and hope nobody notices. t.A.T.u spring to mind here.
Making matters worse, the demise of the singles chart as an accurate reflection of public tastes has led to a market increasingly controlled by the labels through channels like MTV. So it isn't like there's a lot of confidence in the quality of these albums, either. The only reason anyone is still buying that, rigged or not there's only one game in town.
Enter the internet. Forget Napster and Kazaar, jsut consider ITunes. People can go and by a track if they like it. Not the whole album. Suddenly hte singles market is back, we have an emerging download chart that looks to again be a reasonable indicator of public interest. We even have good new groups releasing songs under Creative Commons licences, free-to-download and legal.
And the record companies are wondering why no one is interested in albums any more...
Don't forget DVD! There are many cases where people are buying music DVDs instead of CDs. For example, given the choice between a CD or a DVD of a concert, I'll always buy the DVD.
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My parents bought a Nintendo and a few games when I was 8.
After that, they gave me an allowance and told me to pay for my own games. I saved every penny to buy a Game Boy when I was 10.
I plan to take the same approach with my kids. If my 9-year-old can figure out how to afford a PS8 with ultra-realistic gore, he deserves it!
Don't forget that air resistance goes up exponentially with speed. When I drive my 2003 Hybrid Civic at 75 MPH, I get close to 40 MPG. When I drive at 90, I get about 33-35 MPG. Fortunatly, I can still squeek into the EPA limit that allows me to drive in the carpool lane. ;)
You describe one of the reasons why the U.S. encourages people to own their own homes and properties; it's a technique to minimize a landowning class.
Unfortunatly, "rent" is starting to creep back in where I live, because many homeowners still need to pay condo and neighborhood fees.
Where I live, it's often cheaper to rent because the landlord takes care of all of the maintenance; it's a valuable service that makes the rent more valuable then a morgage payment.
At least some girl didn't vomit ON you. That's what happened to me at a NiN concert.
O.K, let's assume that the OP can buy a video capture device that will result in a MPEG file being placed on his hard drive.
I get the impression that the OP isn't really trying to do professional-grade edits. It appears that he just wants to run a few filters and do some cuts & splices. VirtualDubMod, (free & open source,) for Windows, is perfect for such actions. (Download at doom9.net.) It can open MPEG and AVI, transcode to AVI (I use XviD as a codec, it's open & free,) and cut & splice. It might not be as pretty as the professional tools, but it's good enough to allow me to rip DVDs and encode my home movies to XviD.
Because more advanced cultures have automatic ass-wipers built into their toilets!
So your friend owes NOTHING to Verizon? One of the things that's holding me back from EVDO is that I have to sign a long contract. Does this mean that if I want out of a Verizon EVDO contract all I have to do is open up a few large BitTorrent downloads?
Oh the irony! I refuse to do business with anything Verizon anyway.
Because school is supposed to turn our children into good conformists. It gives students the illusion that they must painfully conform to an artifical reality in order to succeed in life. "The powers that be" create the artificial reality so that they can enslave the conformists.
Good point, something to consider is that a BitTorrent-like protocol can be used in conjunction with an ISP to keep costs under control and to improve performance.
Let's say that 100 people on a street are watching American Idol. If everyone has to open a unique connection to a centralized server, that means that the street is using 99 times the upstream bandwidth that it needs. If the ISP supports some kind of a BitTorrent-like proxy, it could send the episode of American Idol to the street once. This allows it to keep the upstream open to allow 50 outbound Skype calls from teenage girls to talk about Sanjya's new haircut.
I'd like to see the results of the poll after 5-10 years. Serenity is still new & fresh in people's memories. Granted, Star Wars (just episode 4) was meant to help teenagers think about religon. Serenity answers the question about why bad exists.
I recently spend a week in Ucret, Netherlands. It's important to list some critical differences (compared to Suburbia, US,) that allow people to be less reliant on cars:
Someday, when driving on a 3-4 lane American Suburbian road, I suggest doing a thought experiment:
Or I can spend $30 for software that I can figure out. The time that it takes to learn how to use the GIMP is worth more then $30!
Peek your head into some more traditional "engineering" courses. A shortcoming of the CS field is that it ignores classical engineering lessons, which are needed when you write large programs. For example, I took "Technology of Alpine Skiing" my senior year because I needed it as a credit to graduate. It was the only class that I took that described "requirements based engineering," a concept that any CS major needs to understand, even if (s)he isn't going to work as a corporate drone.
I like taking advantage of bugs in IE so I can install applications without bothering my users. ;)
I find that Windows Media Player is pretty snappy with my 6546 song collection. Assuming you're running an Intel Mac, it'll run great under Paralels.
IANAL, but I've actually sat and read US Copyright law. There's provisions in US Copyright law that allow the wrongly accused to seek compensation. I was quite surprised when I read that section!
On a side note, US Copyright law has a funny section that prohibits radios that can be programmed to change their station by a central source, and it makes playing an entire album on the radio illegal. It seems that someone was afraid that there would be a version of Napster that would work over the airwaves!
Quick! Donate your old Pringles cans and 802.11b cards!
The college that I graduated from claimed that it owned all IP generated from any academic work generated by its students. Thus, the college owned the copyright to all of my papers.
I think the same will apply to schoolwork; the school, not the student, owns the IP.
There are far too many superiors in the work force who are more concerned about having their underlings follow thier orders to the letter. Perhaps your friend's manager felt threatened that your friend would take his job? It happens.
What if God uses a pseudorandom number generator in the laws of physics that make evolution appear random? In that case, both the scientists and the (cough) faithful are right.
For example, let's assume that there is a God who can know everything about the universe it creates. When it "starts" the universe, wouldn't it know the eventual outcome? Would it have the ability to change the starting conditions such that it can change the eventual outcome? Such a God would have the ability to create a universe with random evolution that it can influence.
Remember, Darwin, Einstien, and Hawkings all make references to God.
Which makes the new XBox a perfect device for HD movie downloads! Bill Gates claims that HD movie downloads will beat both BluRay and HD-DVD.
Your cousin is more likely to get laid at a real university.
Education is so much more then just classes in one's chosen field of study. It's about meeting new people, learning to live independantly, and exposure to different ways of thinking. An online degree can't do that.
If your cousin doesn't value the piece of paper, he can blow off his classes to write games and drop out when he feels like it. I personally chose to get decent grades and graduate early, but I always tell kids that they're better off attending a college and dropping out over never going at all.
I really see YouTube as more of a video-based message board; it's not really a replacement for TV.
Hopefully, NBC and FOX provide something that, when paired with a television-based web browser, can actually replace TV.
I've been watching internet video on my TV for years. About a year ago, NBC (or ABC?) canceled "The Book of Daniel" and put a few of the remaining episodes on their web site, Ad-free. I plugged my laptop into my TV and enjoyed them from my couch.
It's getting easier: My Nintendo Wii has a web browser that works with YouTube. There's a 50% chance that it'll be reliable once Netflix's Flash-based service comes online!
Don't forget DVD! There are many cases where people are buying music DVDs instead of CDs. For example, given the choice between a CD or a DVD of a concert, I'll always buy the DVD.