Also, last I checked, abortion is perfectly legal in the United States.
Yeah... for now. What do you think Bush's "culture of life" refers to? Which party supported a ban on a certain rare abortion procedure? Which party supported a bill to give fetuses rights when they're killed in a crime?
I am not really sure how this became the topic, my main point was that people were talking about voting for Bush as un-American and then when the election did not go their way, they are going to "bail" on America!!!
Think of it this way: the goal is to live in a place where certain rights and freedoms are respected, and certain policies are followed. When voting fails to achieve that goal, emigrating will not fail.
Also, I saw the Jon Stewart thing. He chastised two other windbag "entertainers". They call themselves reporters or analysts, but I think even Stewart got to admit they were entertainers. An entertainer standing up to another entertainer really isn't that admirable.
You said it yourself: They call themselves reporters and analysts. Jon Stewart has the balls to call them out on it, when no one else in the mainstream media will, and on their own show no less. He consistently speaks out against laziness and subservience in the news media, not just on Crossfire, but every night on his own show and in interviews on other shows. Doesn't mean he'd make a good politician, though.
The Prisoner's Dilemma isn't supposed to provide insight into ethics. Obviously the ethical thing to do is to tell the truth. The PD is, however, applicable to fields like economics, which is basically the study of greedy human behavior. It's no good for telling us how people should act, but it's great for predicting how people do act in the real world.
If you want to archive stuff off the TiVo, just hack it, put it on your LAN, and extract the video to your PC. It only takes a couple hours to set up, if you own a Torx screwdriver and you know how to burn ISOs and install hard drives. For the price of this Sony unit, you could upgrade your TiVo's hard drive and buy a new DVD burner.
IIRC, the Ninth Circuit is most frequently reviewed and overturned by the Supreme Court because they hear the most cases. It's not because of their judgment or the nature of the cases they hear.
Stern isn't the first big name that has joined with Sirius: Eminem and Shady Records signed a deal with Sirius earlier this year.. I guess they'll be playing a lot of exclusive stuff from the bands on that label. Also, Vincent Pastore (of The Sopranos), Tony Hawk, Bam Margera, and Grandmaster Flash all host shows on Sirius.
The black ink on genuine bills is ferroelectric, sensor reads the magnetic pattern on the bill. So you would have to produce your own ink cartrige filled with ink of similar properties.
Or just buy a MICR cartridge for your laser printer, right?
Seriously. I'd love to have a Tivo-like recorder for *any* audio setup. Just line in and line out. I want a way to pause shows on satellite radio, skip commercials during talk shows, and hear instant replays of parts that I missed.
"MP3 is the ultimate in terms of inter-device compatibility," Yankee Group senior analyst Mike Goodman told TechNewsWorld. "One of the most important things for consumers is portability and transferability and you are lacking in any of those areas with the proprietary formats."
The ideal online music store would sell tracks that users can play on all their digital music players: portables, handheld computers, car head units, cell phones, DVD players, and PCs. That means MP3, or possibly unencrypted WMA.
Same thing happened to me, but I have two video cards (La Geforce del Cheapo and El Radeon del Cheapo) and two CRTs. I was able to eliminate the lag by switching the primary video card in the BIOS.
Doesn't sound like that'd work for the submitter, though, if he's running both monitors off the same card.
The 8-track cartridge was designed for portability over quality. It was intended as a way to listen to recorded music (which was, at the time, only available on LPs) in the car, and there were no home players available until years after its introduction. But, as Wikipedia says, "Despite mediocre audio quality and the problems of fitting a standard vinyl LP album onto a four-program cartridge, the format gained steady popularity due to its convenience and portability."
I've never heard anyone use Lego as a mass noun in the US. Whether it's "officially" different or not, it does seem to be a genuine difference between US and UK English, just like hood vs. bonnet or Microsoft is vs. Microsoft are. "Lego" is singular here, and "Legos" is plural.
Are you talking about duplicating a DVD you get from Netflix (which doesn't involve TiVo at all), or ripping and burning a movie you downloaded onto TiVo with that TiVo/Netflix service that was announced recently? Because I don't think the latter will work, at least not with the TiVo hacks that are around today.
See, normally, TiVo encrypts all the video that you record. You need decrypted video to be able to play it on a PC or burn it to a DVD. But the hacks don't actually decrypt your saved video, they just prevent TiVo from encrypting it in the first place.
The movies you download from Netflix will presumably be encrypted when they're sent over the internet, so you'll need a way to actually break that encryption. It shouldn't be *that* hard, since your TiVo has to know how to decrypt them too, but it's not the same as the hacks that exist today.
But the "pop" ones vary from stream to stream and night to night. Its clear the Sirius guys are always tweaking the compression (as you'd expect), and there are days when I have to turn it off, it sounds that bad to me.
Not just that - the compression is constantly being tweaked automatically. Sirius's "S-Plex" dynamically allocates bandwidth to all the streams depending on how much each stream needs. Every time Mike Malloy takes a breath on Air America, the other streams get a tiny bit more bandwidth (as I understand it).
I have Sirius too, and 99% of the time I don't notice any artifacts in the music. You are talking about the music streams, right? The talk streams use much more noticable compression.
It's still not so great that I'd worry about using a digital audio output, but IMO the sound quality on Sirius beats FM hands-down.
Sirius has better sound quality anyway, plus free online streaming (at reduced quality) and exclusive NFL coverage.
You could even make a similar setup with a standalone Sirius tuner, if you don't mind a little hacking (and I know you don't, Slashdotters...). Just get any Sirius receiver, attach its line out and an IR transmitter to your PC, and change the station with infrared. Cake!
The problem still remains that a metric buttload of heat is produced, and that it comes out of the electricity bill. Sometimes twice: in the summer you also pay for the air conditioning, since that shiny new CPU is heating the room some more.
On the other hand, in the winter, every watt of heat produced by your CPU is a watt of heat you don't have to produce with natural gas, baseboard heaters, etc. So over the course of a year, it may even out.
Maybe this comes as a surprise, but most teachers take their jobs seriously and don't assign tasks to pupils on a whim. If they want you to learn something, there is usually a reason for it.
Teachers aren't the ones who decide which classes will be required. I'm willing to accept that my teachers in high school knew what was required to "know English" better than I did, but not that some suit knew which classes I should take better than I did.
And yeah, there's a reason for requiring so many classes - to segregate kids from the rest of society. That's what mandatory schooling is all about.
As Paul Graham wrote, "Now adults have no immediate use for teenagers. They would be in the way in an office. So they drop them off at school on their way to work, much as they might drop the dog off at a kennel if they were going away for the weekend.
[...]
Teenagers now are useless, except as cheap labor in industries like fast food, which evolved to exploit precisely this fact. In almost any other kind of work, they'd be a net loss. But they're also too young to be left unsupervised. Someone has to watch over them, and the most efficient way to do this is to collect them together in one place. Then a few adults can watch all of them.
If you stop there, what you're describing is literally a prison, albeit a part-time one. The problem is, many schools practically do stop there."
Surprisingly, most of the people couldn't seem to figure out how to get in their cars without the remote (well, at least, of those people they showed). I sometimes wonder how those people manage to put their pants on in the morning.
That's nothing but TV magic. Who knows how many people just used the key when their remote didn't work? They edit those people out before the show airs, because the whole point is to show the people who need help from a fake locksmith.
The same trick is used on TV psychic shows. When John Edward says "I'm seeing someone with a letter J in their name", how many people say "Sorry, I don't know anyone with a J"? When he says "Your grandma is looking down and she loves you", how many respond "No, grandma never liked me"? They edit out anyone who makes the host look bad, and only show the people who he can cold read.
"While that's true, the difference is that in Korea and Japan there were a few large companies that spanned large regions or the whole country. And where the companies were regional, roaming onto other regions was neither difficult nor expensive.
And what do we have in the U.S. today? A few large companies (Verizon, Sprint, Cingular) that span the whole country. Roaming is neither difficult nor expensive in most cases, thanks to intercarrier agreements - if my phone loses its Verizon signal, it automatically picks up a Sprint signal and I don't pay a cent extra to use it.
Also worth noting that for 3G, both Korea and Japan are following the rest of the world this time round and choosing WCDMA.
KDDI in Japan has deployed CDMA2000 1xEV-DO. And look at this (link):
CDMA2000 dominates 3G today, with more than 64.5 million subscribers, or 99 percent of the global 3G market. There are 78 commercial CDMA2000 networks today and 11 will be deployed within in the next six months in Asia, Australia, Africa, Europe and the Americas.
"While in the USA, multiple different companies went off and developed multiple, incompatible systems (which weren't particularly future-proof) [...] the Europeans got together and developed GSM [...] They actually bothered to implement things like inter-network and overseas roaming, and anticipate the need for an upgrade path for future requirements. They also assigned and reserved radio spectrum across Europe, and much of Asia followed suit."
Hmm... upgrade path? You mean like the one from cdmaOne to CDMA2000 1xRTT to 1xEV-DO to 1xEV-DV? The one that lets 2G phones work with 3G towers, and 3G phones work with 2G towers, using the same frequencies?
The free wireless market in the U.S. has not been detrimental to consumers. True, it has taken longer to get to a stable market here than it did in Europe, because Europe mandated a standard at the very beginning. But there's a very strong case to be made that the standards we've arrived upon in the U.S. are superior, and that Europe painted itself into a corner by mandating GSM instead of exploring other options. European 3G networks are now based on the same CDMA technology that GSM advocates scoffed at years ago, but of course GSM equipment isn't compatible with it!
$8.00 an hour, or $7.50 if we were late to work during the week. There was no official minimum performance, but people who were no good didn't stay long - I don't know if they were "asked" to leave, or if they just decided it wasn't for them. There was no minimum stay either.
We sold tickets to concerts that supposedly helped fund a firefighters' lobbying group - not really a charity, but we kinda made it sound like one.
so in reality basically telemarketing isn't really profitable(for most of the persons involved in it), it's just driven through something that is in effect a scam to lure young, inexperienced, desperate stupid people to make phonecalls to people for few weeks without pay.
I was a telemarketer for a few months, and we certainly got paid by the hour!
I don't doubt there are a handful of shady places that work the way you describe, but the fact is, telemarketing works often enough that it's profitable. If you make enough calls, you'll eventually reach someone who's interested in what you're selling.
It doesn't happen very often, which is why telemarketing is so stressful (it's hard to stay composed and confident if you've been turned down, hung up on, or threatened for 30 calls in a row), but it doesn't need to happen very often to turn a profit. With autodialers, you can make thousands of calls every hour, and there's no shortage of people to call.
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Also, last I checked, abortion is perfectly legal in the United States.
Yeah... for now. What do you think Bush's "culture of life" refers to? Which party supported a ban on a certain rare abortion procedure? Which party supported a bill to give fetuses rights when they're killed in a crime?
I am not really sure how this became the topic, my main point was that people were talking about voting for Bush as un-American and then when the election did not go their way, they are going to "bail" on America!!!
Think of it this way: the goal is to live in a place where certain rights and freedoms are respected, and certain policies are followed. When voting fails to achieve that goal, emigrating will not fail.
Also, I saw the Jon Stewart thing. He chastised two other windbag "entertainers". They call themselves reporters or analysts, but I think even Stewart got to admit they were entertainers. An entertainer standing up to another entertainer really isn't that admirable.
You said it yourself: They call themselves reporters and analysts. Jon Stewart has the balls to call them out on it, when no one else in the mainstream media will, and on their own show no less. He consistently speaks out against laziness and subservience in the news media, not just on Crossfire, but every night on his own show and in interviews on other shows. Doesn't mean he'd make a good politician, though.
The Prisoner's Dilemma isn't supposed to provide insight into ethics. Obviously the ethical thing to do is to tell the truth. The PD is, however, applicable to fields like economics, which is basically the study of greedy human behavior. It's no good for telling us how people should act, but it's great for predicting how people do act in the real world.
If you want to archive stuff off the TiVo, just hack it, put it on your LAN, and extract the video to your PC. It only takes a couple hours to set up, if you own a Torx screwdriver and you know how to burn ISOs and install hard drives. For the price of this Sony unit, you could upgrade your TiVo's hard drive and buy a new DVD burner.
I was in a speech class (no, not learning how to speak)
Well, maybe if you spent more time listening to the teacher and less time chatting about TV stations...
IIRC, the Ninth Circuit is most frequently reviewed and overturned by the Supreme Court because they hear the most cases. It's not because of their judgment or the nature of the cases they hear.
Stern isn't the first big name that has joined with Sirius: Eminem and Shady Records signed a deal with Sirius earlier this year.. I guess they'll be playing a lot of exclusive stuff from the bands on that label. Also, Vincent Pastore (of The Sopranos), Tony Hawk, Bam Margera, and Grandmaster Flash all host shows on Sirius.
The black ink on genuine bills is ferroelectric, sensor reads the magnetic pattern on the bill. So you would have to produce your own ink cartrige filled with ink of similar properties.
Or just buy a MICR cartridge for your laser printer, right?
Seriously. I'd love to have a Tivo-like recorder for *any* audio setup. Just line in and line out. I want a way to pause shows on satellite radio, skip commercials during talk shows, and hear instant replays of parts that I missed.
Sony is now supporting MP3 in their players. Not because angry Slashdotters want it, but because the public realizes that MP3 is the lingua franca of digital music:
The ideal online music store would sell tracks that users can play on all their digital music players: portables, handheld computers, car head units, cell phones, DVD players, and PCs. That means MP3, or possibly unencrypted WMA.
Same thing happened to me, but I have two video cards (La Geforce del Cheapo and El Radeon del Cheapo) and two CRTs. I was able to eliminate the lag by switching the primary video card in the BIOS.
Doesn't sound like that'd work for the submitter, though, if he's running both monitors off the same card.
The 8-track cartridge was designed for portability over quality. It was intended as a way to listen to recorded music (which was, at the time, only available on LPs) in the car, and there were no home players available until years after its introduction. But, as Wikipedia says, "Despite mediocre audio quality and the problems of fitting a standard vinyl LP album onto a four-program cartridge, the format gained steady popularity due to its convenience and portability."
I've never heard anyone use Lego as a mass noun in the US. Whether it's "officially" different or not, it does seem to be a genuine difference between US and UK English, just like hood vs. bonnet or Microsoft is vs. Microsoft are. "Lego" is singular here, and "Legos" is plural.
Are you talking about duplicating a DVD you get from Netflix (which doesn't involve TiVo at all), or ripping and burning a movie you downloaded onto TiVo with that TiVo/Netflix service that was announced recently? Because I don't think the latter will work, at least not with the TiVo hacks that are around today.
See, normally, TiVo encrypts all the video that you record. You need decrypted video to be able to play it on a PC or burn it to a DVD. But the hacks don't actually decrypt your saved video, they just prevent TiVo from encrypting it in the first place.
The movies you download from Netflix will presumably be encrypted when they're sent over the internet, so you'll need a way to actually break that encryption. It shouldn't be *that* hard, since your TiVo has to know how to decrypt them too, but it's not the same as the hacks that exist today.
But the "pop" ones vary from stream to stream and night to night. Its clear the Sirius guys are always tweaking the compression (as you'd expect), and there are days when I have to turn it off, it sounds that bad to me.
Not just that - the compression is constantly being tweaked automatically. Sirius's "S-Plex" dynamically allocates bandwidth to all the streams depending on how much each stream needs. Every time Mike Malloy takes a breath on Air America, the other streams get a tiny bit more bandwidth (as I understand it).
I have Sirius too, and 99% of the time I don't notice any artifacts in the music. You are talking about the music streams, right? The talk streams use much more noticable compression.
It's still not so great that I'd worry about using a digital audio output, but IMO the sound quality on Sirius beats FM hands-down.
Sirius has better sound quality anyway, plus free online streaming (at reduced quality) and exclusive NFL coverage.
You could even make a similar setup with a standalone Sirius tuner, if you don't mind a little hacking (and I know you don't, Slashdotters...). Just get any Sirius receiver, attach its line out and an IR transmitter to your PC, and change the station with infrared. Cake!
The problem still remains that a metric buttload of heat is produced, and that it comes out of the electricity bill. Sometimes twice: in the summer you also pay for the air conditioning, since that shiny new CPU is heating the room some more.
On the other hand, in the winter, every watt of heat produced by your CPU is a watt of heat you don't have to produce with natural gas, baseboard heaters, etc. So over the course of a year, it may even out.
Maybe this comes as a surprise, but most teachers take their jobs seriously and don't assign tasks to pupils on a whim. If they want you to learn something, there is usually a reason for it.
Teachers aren't the ones who decide which classes will be required. I'm willing to accept that my teachers in high school knew what was required to "know English" better than I did, but not that some suit knew which classes I should take better than I did.
And yeah, there's a reason for requiring so many classes - to segregate kids from the rest of society. That's what mandatory schooling is all about.
As Paul Graham wrote, "Now adults have no immediate use for teenagers. They would be in the way in an office. So they drop them off at school on their way to work, much as they might drop the dog off at a kennel if they were going away for the weekend. [...] Teenagers now are useless, except as cheap labor in industries like fast food, which evolved to exploit precisely this fact. In almost any other kind of work, they'd be a net loss. But they're also too young to be left unsupervised. Someone has to watch over them, and the most efficient way to do this is to collect them together in one place. Then a few adults can watch all of them. If you stop there, what you're describing is literally a prison, albeit a part-time one. The problem is, many schools practically do stop there."
The FCC doesn't regulate content on cable channels.
I'm getting it too.
Surprisingly, most of the people couldn't seem to figure out how to get in their cars without the remote (well, at least, of those people they showed). I sometimes wonder how those people manage to put their pants on in the morning.
That's nothing but TV magic. Who knows how many people just used the key when their remote didn't work? They edit those people out before the show airs, because the whole point is to show the people who need help from a fake locksmith.
The same trick is used on TV psychic shows. When John Edward says "I'm seeing someone with a letter J in their name", how many people say "Sorry, I don't know anyone with a J"? When he says "Your grandma is looking down and she loves you", how many respond "No, grandma never liked me"? They edit out anyone who makes the host look bad, and only show the people who he can cold read.
"While that's true, the difference is that in Korea and Japan there were a few large companies that spanned large regions or the whole country. And where the companies were regional, roaming onto other regions was neither difficult nor expensive.
And what do we have in the U.S. today? A few large companies (Verizon, Sprint, Cingular) that span the whole country. Roaming is neither difficult nor expensive in most cases, thanks to intercarrier agreements - if my phone loses its Verizon signal, it automatically picks up a Sprint signal and I don't pay a cent extra to use it.
Also worth noting that for 3G, both Korea and Japan are following the rest of the world this time round and choosing WCDMA.
KDDI in Japan has deployed CDMA2000 1xEV-DO. And look at this (link):
"While in the USA, multiple different companies went off and developed multiple, incompatible systems (which weren't particularly future-proof) [...] the Europeans got together and developed GSM [...] They actually bothered to implement things like inter-network and overseas roaming, and anticipate the need for an upgrade path for future requirements. They also assigned and reserved radio spectrum across Europe, and much of Asia followed suit."
Hmm... upgrade path? You mean like the one from cdmaOne to CDMA2000 1xRTT to 1xEV-DO to 1xEV-DV? The one that lets 2G phones work with 3G towers, and 3G phones work with 2G towers, using the same frequencies?
The free wireless market in the U.S. has not been detrimental to consumers. True, it has taken longer to get to a stable market here than it did in Europe, because Europe mandated a standard at the very beginning. But there's a very strong case to be made that the standards we've arrived upon in the U.S. are superior, and that Europe painted itself into a corner by mandating GSM instead of exploring other options. European 3G networks are now based on the same CDMA technology that GSM advocates scoffed at years ago, but of course GSM equipment isn't compatible with it!
$8.00 an hour, or $7.50 if we were late to work during the week. There was no official minimum performance, but people who were no good didn't stay long - I don't know if they were "asked" to leave, or if they just decided it wasn't for them. There was no minimum stay either.
We sold tickets to concerts that supposedly helped fund a firefighters' lobbying group - not really a charity, but we kinda made it sound like one.
I was a telemarketer for a few months, and we certainly got paid by the hour!
I don't doubt there are a handful of shady places that work the way you describe, but the fact is, telemarketing works often enough that it's profitable. If you make enough calls, you'll eventually reach someone who's interested in what you're selling.
It doesn't happen very often, which is why telemarketing is so stressful (it's hard to stay composed and confident if you've been turned down, hung up on, or threatened for 30 calls in a row), but it doesn't need to happen very often to turn a profit. With autodialers, you can make thousands of calls every hour, and there's no shortage of people to call.