Yes. PDF on any small device sucks. Not enough horsepower in dedicated devices and on PDA's, the readers are VERY bad. PDF also is setup for showing in one format (8.5 by 11 inch paper usually). To put this on a small device makes you have to scroll all over the place. Ebook software usually reformats the book to fit the screen. Sure, you have to scroll or press a button to turn "pages" but everythign is readable versus having to scroll this way and that to read a whole paragraph.
Yep. I would also pay a dollar to see some of these things that they call movies. Then I won't feel taken when I fall asleep watching the boring "plot"!
Also, I wait. If you check your Walmart, you can obtain DVD's for around 5.88. Some ain't real old, but others are. I found, some older and sometimes cheesier movies in there, but I also found a few double DVD copies full of older TV shows. There are some decent movies in that bin if your willing to dig! This is how I obtained some of the VHS tapes I have. These are also NOT previously viewed either.
All I can say is....it's a matter of time. I read that in China, (granted this is a VIDEO game, and not a DVD...) you can pick up for the whopping price of 8 cents the WHOLE Age of Empires series on one CD. They achived it by recoding the game. The compressed all of the sound files and replaced them with MP3's and replaced all of the texture makes with jpgs. All of that to sell it for 8 cents. The quote from Vronay (the microsoft guy in this article) was "It doesn't matter what you do, if they'll go to all this trouble for 8 cents." And he's right. I have a brother in law who has chipped his Playstation (and his PS2 and XBox) and has never bought a game. To me the time and resources spent burning and copying these things is too much to bear and besides I am not against the developers making money. On the other hand, why do I have to have the fricking CD in the drive when I want to play a game that after loading, it never hits the CD drive? I understood this when games used mixed mode discs (part data part music). Mechwarrior 2 was like this. All of the music was on it's CD. Not a single game I own uses this technique any more. WHY WHY WHY! Dammit! Sorry, that pisses me off to no end because I can't find the disc to one of my games now....
Music is the same way. I have a Nomad. I want to listen and put all of my music on it. I have also done what some on here have done and ripped as soon as I bought it and never played the disk again. In fact, I am more apt to plug my computers speakers (one at work) into my MP3 player rather than copy them to the work machine's disk. It saves my CPU for work related things!;) I also listen to it on the bus, in the car and on airplanes. You mean I have to buy it for every device I want it on? No problem as long as you give me 2-3. This way I can get my wife her own MP3 player! Also, make it easy to transfer it. Say you get rid of an old computer. Let me remove the license, delete the file and re download it for nothing (as long as I am within my 2-3 device rule. Make it SIMPLE to do it too. Otherwise, no thank you. BTW, if MP3's become clogged with DRM, expect OGG to make a big jump!;)
Yep. Those watches had a 8 bit Epson processor in them and were SLOW AS MO-LASS-ASS and did not have enough memory to dump a whole PPC worth of Data into it. I'll have to check it out. Also, these were made out of plastic versus metal. Fossil doesn't really make great watches in my opinion. They are a bit better than timex and a little sillier(girlie colors and cartoon characters).
Try 8.99. Found a Broadcast Band shortwave radio at the local Big Lots for 8.99. Sure, it was a Coby (cheap assed radio) but it was capable of picking up shortwave.
Some folks call the Regatta a mainframe. When you see it, youc an understand this. There's a TON of hardware in one rack.
Re:Changing Voltage CHanges nothing
on
42-Volt Autos
·
· Score: 1
Yep! You got it! Ground losses (both components combined) account for most of our issues with mobile setups. I personally am not holding my breath.
They said we'd all be watching HDTV by now but I ain't and I don't see it happening by 2006 either. Heck AM stations were never supposed to be here as long either but look what has happened! Stuff has a tendency to stick around as long as some folks want to use it. Case in point, Amatuer Radio itself!;)
Re:Many existing vehicles have parallel 12v batter
on
42-Volt Autos
·
· Score: 1
Yep! And the extra weight could be saved by switching from the current heating systems to an electrical one. So, this seems like a better idea to me. Although my guess is that to us drivers this won't matter much. They'll step down the voltage at the ciggy lighter and for the stereo. This will be first generation. I bet both will be available in places, but 12 will be used more commonly because it is what everyone has.
Re:Changing Voltage CHanges nothing
on
42-Volt Autos
·
· Score: 1
Yes you lose some in the resistance of the antenna system, but you lose more in your antenna tuner because the ground makes it difficult to get a feed point impedance around 50 Ohms. IE your feedpoint impedance will go up because you have a insufficient ground. So, in effect, your right, but a good ground will take care of this for you. Cars do not have this. Good grounds help EVERYTHING. The help supress spurious emissions, help your antenna system to be closer to 50 Ohms, and help you get more power out. The also improve safety of your system at HF levels. Ever get an RF burn whrn running a long wire? This is one reason I never run a long wire....safety is terrible with them. Same as running with no ground. You must have forgotten the FCC question(the question was about the limitations of a mobile setup....the ground system is the answer). OH wait, if your not a General, then you would not have seen this! Study for your general license!:) Your on the right track though. Those losses occur because the ground is not ground so to speak (it's potential is higher than 0 volts). VHF is not as sensative to these losses. Most repeaters in town I can hit with less then one watt (even down town). At HF levels,all losses (resistance, bad swr and the like ) are your enemy.
I see where the weight savings are coming from. Instead of having a heater core and a more extensive water cooling system, they have a electric heating element and a fan. They would no longer pull heat off of the engine to provide heat in the car. Of course this is if they choose this. They could choose a heat pump (would not be sufficient for northern climates) and use it for both heating and cooling (reverse direction). Personally, this would be a waste of a good source of heat(to me). BUT this could ALSO be a bigger push to get most of the systems in a car converted to 42 volt so that when Electric motors become more efficient, they won't have to do anything but redesign the drive system (no more ICE Engine). Everything else would be driven off of the elctrical system by this point so the engine could also.
Personally, I don't see the idiots who have bass thumper and loudspeakers going in a car. They don't really care about music reproduction. They just want to "feel" the music. Most current car audio systems are fine for me! I just don't need all of that "steal me" gear in my car!:)
Changing Voltage CHanges nothing
on
42-Volt Autos
·
· Score: 4, Informative
What is really needed more is a 12 volt battery that can provide current for longer periods of time. I would rather see a parallel system. 2 12 volt batteries with either 2 alternantors (one for car and all of it's internal acessories and one for the external plugin ones. Also, the second battery could also be charged off of regenerative brakes and or solar cells as well as a alternator.
I don't see how changing voltage will make cleaner sound. The biggest problem with mobile electronics is lack of a good ground. The ground on a modern vehicle sucks. When I run a HF radio in the car, most of the losses are because of the ground system in the car. It's near impossible to fix that properly. The antenna systems in the car are almost always verticals and normaly you'd either burial radials or have a decent ground plane built. With a car, it's impossible to change the width of your ground plane because it's mobile. Mobile installations almost always require an antenna tuner because of this and this is just to make sure your SWR stays radio safe. You may have a radio capable of 100 Watts, but I have never seen one produce it. Plus the alternator produces alot of hash that needs to be blanked out or filtered out. RF chokes on the power cords and other things to get rid of this noise. When you run off of just batteries, that noise is not there anymore and you don't need those filters.:)
With the hypertransport and some of the other stuff it just seems that it's too much of a jump. I think we will see a G5 based on the IBM chip, we will see USB 2.0 and we may even see Firwire 800 (faster then the original firewire). The rest of the stuff my require too many changes to OSX to be brought out in this time frame. Or, quite possibly, Motorola may have been working on something totally new and unknown to us due to NDA's with Apple. IE, don't hold your breath and if you want a Mac, don't hold off. Buy the Mac you want now. It will work.
In some cases yes. Although we used a 8085 chip (did not build our own). This would be more like a senior project in undergrad. One I had never seen donw was a 8086 trainer. Mostl;y it was cost on this one. Back wehn I was there, if you had a 8086 chip, it was in a IBM PC.
I just have a few problems with this kind of thinking. First, when hungry, a animal, human, person or whatever is going to find food. Period. Granted, there are some lazy animals just like there are lazy humans. Some animals would die. Some animals die everyday, unfortunately. So do humans. Humans are a part of Earth and thus are a part of nature(no matter what the greenies say). The kind of behavior modification your talking about can take years to develop and sometimes lifetimes. We have a squirrel at work who when is fed, will hide food sometimes. She's not going to starve in the winter. As far as she cares, the huumans are weird looking trees that sometimes have nuts and berries. Granted, the agression part I have seen. I have never fed it, but it will confront you sometimes. Luckily, it's a squirrel and all you have to do is just move your shoe in her direction and she scampers off.
I do not ever fully believe park rangers or nature type folks. Mother nature is a bit stronger than we as just plain humans are. Humans muck everything up when we try to fix things. Saving animals is one thing, but trying to fix bug infestations by bringing in other bugs and fixing plant things by planting kudzu in the south just kind of messes thigns up. When we have a oil spill, sure, we should clean it up but should we really help the birds? I can go either way on this. Something tells me though that if we just left them to die, we'd feel guilty, but somehow, the bird population would rebound. Mother nature is like that.
Same thing goes with global warming. Could it happen? Yeah it could. Is it happening? Only time will tell. Can we fix it? I doubt it.
We know of so many species that are labled endagered. I saw a near endangerment sign on a Timberwolf pen at the zoo and I thought, are you kidding? How many farmers have shot wolves and would continue to? Yet Wolves are not extinct. Something just says, to me, that if something is going to go extinct, maybe God wants it that way. Case in point, have we ever been able to truely bring back a species really and truely on the brink of extinction? Somethimg tells me no. Oh I have heard the stories about how some species have been brought back, but something tells me that human intervention had little to do with it. How many species died off just because....despite what we did? I am down the middle. I don't know whether to believe these types of folks or not sometimes because at times, their information just seems flawed. In any case, I have yet to see how geocaching can threaten nature. I have also yet to see concrete evidence that we, as a part of nature, can kill the planet so much that it is then laid waste. Noone has ever proven that polution and sch would truely cause irreversable damage. Mother nature works at a snails pace. We would be nieve to think that we as a aprt of it can truly kill it all off.
Thank you!:) You see! Geocaching is fun. Told my wife about it today and she doesn't see what it is all about. Hopefully if I eveer find a neat cache she's with me.
Why does it need to be put to another use? Let me remind ya'll that not everyone has cable yet. Some can't get it at all. Leave it alone. It's WAY to early to try to refarm the TV band. Lots of people still use it.I do every day. It will be at least 50 years until it happens.
All it's going to take is a Geocacher getting a job as a park ranger. Then things may change. Heck why not have park sponsered classes on responsible geocaching (free or minimal charge)? Even park sponsered caches (they can put them where they want and move them when things are getting out of hand). They could even put printouts or cards of trees in the area, a keychain or something in the cache that advertises the park. Park rangers should work with the folks who want to use the park.
Man I wish I had the points to mod you up. Does anyone read Geocaching.com? These parks folks do have a point about paths being worn to the caches. Moving them once a year would probably help prevent this. Also, putting them near a path or almost on a path would be good too. Also, photo caches are nice too (just take a pic of yourself and of the GPS at the cache.....) and up load it to the web. Geocaching reminds me a bit of ham radio. Everyone searching for a contact(the cache). Sometimes they are hard to find (rare DX). Sometimes not (chatting on a repeater...). If there are ANY Geocacher's that leave trash and mess up the area, I would be surprised. Geocaching has a ethos like camping. Campers regularly leave their stuff on the table and stuff at the site and almost noone steals there stuff (in 20+ years of camping, I have never had anything stolen in a campground). Campers also usually leave the area as good as or better then it was when they got there. Now same as with Camping, there are BAD apples. Just deal with it and let us use the park. Noone else does!
I doubt it's this high. There may be a fair amount of it, but not 60%. Charging a use charge is difficult because what happens if someone (a grandma usually) accidently clicks on a spammng e-mail virus tha spews lots of MB of mail....If I were the ISP, I would do more things like filtering these things out at the mail server. Spam and these virii have to use more bandwidth than p2p. Expecially since 90 percent of what I get is spam.
Not to bash you, but personally, I don't like the cost of Mac's either even if I do know they are superior (they are AWESOME.....). Also, I know you have an iPod (I can tell), but have you or any other iPod fan's ever touched or used a Zen? Sure, the iPod is awfully nice....hardware and software (if you use a Mac.....to use an iPod on Windows, your probably stuck with Musicmatch...UGH!). But the Zen ain't bad either. It had ALWAYS had on the fly playlists. The Zen always had file storage also (although I wish it was more integrated into File Explorer). Also, Creative and Apple aren't the only ones (thank god!). Philps is releasing a 15 GB device that looks like it might be thinner than a iPod. There are a few others, but Apple, Creative and Philips looks like the 3 major's especially since Sonic Blue is in the crapper (the Rio hard drive based plyer was expensive, slow and....well HUGE!). So, yes I will agree, not all MP3 players are the same. Some even sound better then a iPod (the Zen). Some have a similar interface (new Philips device). For one who just wants to play MP3's anywhere, they all work just fine. The cheaper one with more abilities will end up winning unless they develop a Palm V of MP3 players (ultra thin, and at least 5 GB of storage....YUM!).
The USB 2.0 only version of the Zen does charge off of the USB. Just make sure it's off when it's plugged into the port. If it acts weird (won't turn on) when you unplug it, just use a paper clip in the reset hole. No problems!:) I do wish they'd fix that bug, but it's one I can live with. I know, the iPod doesnot need a reset hole.....whatever, I still love my Zen and I am only doomed to use Playcenter since I do not want to pay for Notmad. PLaycenter is not that bad....if you only use it to manage your Zen. I never play music in it.
I like all the features, but I would rather use a StrongARM based box that uses less power. I already have a few machines running non stop. I don't need to use MORE power just because I am too lazy to get up and hit the switch!
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Yes. PDF on any small device sucks. Not enough horsepower in dedicated devices and on PDA's, the readers are VERY bad. PDF also is setup for showing in one format (8.5 by 11 inch paper usually). To put this on a small device makes you have to scroll all over the place. Ebook software usually reformats the book to fit the screen. Sure, you have to scroll or press a button to turn "pages" but everythign is readable versus having to scroll this way and that to read a whole paragraph.
Yep. I would also pay a dollar to see some of these things that they call movies. Then I won't feel taken when I fall asleep watching the boring "plot"!
;) I also listen to it on the bus, in the car and on airplanes. You mean I have to buy it for every device I want it on? No problem as long as you give me 2-3. This way I can get my wife her own MP3 player! Also, make it easy to transfer it. Say you get rid of an old computer. Let me remove the license, delete the file and re download it for nothing (as long as I am within my 2-3 device rule. Make it SIMPLE to do it too. Otherwise, no thank you. BTW, if MP3's become clogged with DRM, expect OGG to make a big jump! ;)
Also, I wait. If you check your Walmart, you can obtain DVD's for around 5.88. Some ain't real old, but others are. I found, some older and sometimes cheesier movies in there, but I also found a few double DVD copies full of older TV shows. There are some decent movies in that bin if your willing to dig! This is how I obtained some of the VHS tapes I have. These are also NOT previously viewed either.
All I can say is....it's a matter of time. I read that in China, (granted this is a VIDEO game, and not a DVD...) you can pick up for the whopping price of 8 cents the WHOLE Age of Empires series on one CD. They achived it by recoding the game. The compressed all of the sound files and replaced them with MP3's and replaced all of the texture makes with jpgs. All of that to sell it for 8 cents. The quote from Vronay (the microsoft guy in this article) was "It doesn't matter what you do, if they'll go to all this trouble for 8 cents." And he's right. I have a brother in law who has chipped his Playstation (and his PS2 and XBox) and has never bought a game. To me the time and resources spent burning and copying these things is too much to bear and besides I am not against the developers making money. On the other hand, why do I have to have the fricking CD in the drive when I want to play a game that after loading, it never hits the CD drive? I understood this when games used mixed mode discs (part data part music). Mechwarrior 2 was like this. All of the music was on it's CD. Not a single game I own uses this technique any more. WHY WHY WHY! Dammit! Sorry, that pisses me off to no end because I can't find the disc to one of my games now....
Music is the same way. I have a Nomad. I want to listen and put all of my music on it. I have also done what some on here have done and ripped as soon as I bought it and never played the disk again. In fact, I am more apt to plug my computers speakers (one at work) into my MP3 player rather than copy them to the work machine's disk. It saves my CPU for work related things!
Yep. Those watches had a 8 bit Epson processor in them and were SLOW AS MO-LASS-ASS and did not have enough memory to dump a whole PPC worth of Data into it. I'll have to check it out. Also, these were made out of plastic versus metal. Fossil doesn't really make great watches in my opinion. They are a bit better than timex and a little sillier(girlie colors and cartoon characters).
Try 8.99. Found a Broadcast Band shortwave radio at the local Big Lots for 8.99. Sure, it was a Coby (cheap assed radio) but it was capable of picking up shortwave.
Some folks call the Regatta a mainframe. When you see it, youc an understand this. There's a TON of hardware in one rack.
Yep! You got it! Ground losses (both components combined) account for most of our issues with mobile setups. I personally am not holding my breath.
;)
They said we'd all be watching HDTV by now but I ain't and I don't see it happening by 2006 either. Heck AM stations were never supposed to be here as long either but look what has happened! Stuff has a tendency to stick around as long as some folks want to use it. Case in point, Amatuer Radio itself!
Yep! And the extra weight could be saved by switching from the current heating systems to an electrical one. So, this seems like a better idea to me. Although my guess is that to us drivers this won't matter much. They'll step down the voltage at the ciggy lighter and for the stereo. This will be first generation. I bet both will be available in places, but 12 will be used more commonly because it is what everyone has.
Yes you lose some in the resistance of the antenna system, but you lose more in your antenna tuner because the ground makes it difficult to get a feed point impedance around 50 Ohms. IE your feedpoint impedance will go up because you have a insufficient ground. So, in effect, your right, but a good ground will take care of this for you. Cars do not have this. Good grounds help EVERYTHING. The help supress spurious emissions, help your antenna system to be closer to 50 Ohms, and help you get more power out. The also improve safety of your system at HF levels. Ever get an RF burn whrn running a long wire? This is one reason I never run a long wire....safety is terrible with them. Same as running with no ground. You must have forgotten the FCC question(the question was about the limitations of a mobile setup....the ground system is the answer). OH wait, if your not a General, then you would not have seen this! Study for your general license! :) Your on the right track though. Those losses occur because the ground is not ground so to speak (it's potential is higher than 0 volts). VHF is not as sensative to these losses. Most repeaters in town I can hit with less then one watt (even down town). At HF levels,all losses (resistance, bad swr and the like ) are your enemy.
I see where the weight savings are coming from. Instead of having a heater core and a more extensive water cooling system, they have a electric heating element and a fan. They would no longer pull heat off of the engine to provide heat in the car. Of course this is if they choose this. They could choose a heat pump (would not be sufficient for northern climates) and use it for both heating and cooling (reverse direction). Personally, this would be a waste of a good source of heat(to me). BUT this could ALSO be a bigger push to get most of the systems in a car converted to 42 volt so that when Electric motors become more efficient, they won't have to do anything but redesign the drive system (no more ICE Engine). Everything else would be driven off of the elctrical system by this point so the engine could also.
:)
Personally, I don't see the idiots who have bass thumper and loudspeakers going in a car. They don't really care about music reproduction. They just want to "feel" the music. Most current car audio systems are fine for me! I just don't need all of that "steal me" gear in my car!
What is really needed more is a 12 volt battery that can provide current for longer periods of time. I would rather see a parallel system. 2 12 volt batteries with either 2 alternantors (one for car and all of it's internal acessories and one for the external plugin ones. Also, the second battery could also be charged off of regenerative brakes and or solar cells as well as a alternator.
:)
I don't see how changing voltage will make cleaner sound. The biggest problem with mobile electronics is lack of a good ground. The ground on a modern vehicle sucks. When I run a HF radio in the car, most of the losses are because of the ground system in the car. It's near impossible to fix that properly. The antenna systems in the car are almost always verticals and normaly you'd either burial radials or have a decent ground plane built. With a car, it's impossible to change the width of your ground plane because it's mobile. Mobile installations almost always require an antenna tuner because of this and this is just to make sure your SWR stays radio safe. You may have a radio capable of 100 Watts, but I have never seen one produce it. Plus the alternator produces alot of hash that needs to be blanked out or filtered out. RF chokes on the power cords and other things to get rid of this noise. When you run off of just batteries, that noise is not there anymore and you don't need those filters.
IN the US, providers have a way to send SMS's from the provider's web page. All you need is the number and anyone worldwide can sms you on your phone.
IBM buys SCO for 1.2 billion. When reached for comment, SCO's legal team says that since IBM own's then then they are dropping the suit! ;)
With the hypertransport and some of the other stuff it just seems that it's too much of a jump. I think we will see a G5 based on the IBM chip, we will see USB 2.0 and we may even see Firwire 800 (faster then the original firewire). The rest of the stuff my require too many changes to OSX to be brought out in this time frame. Or, quite possibly, Motorola may have been working on something totally new and unknown to us due to NDA's with Apple. IE, don't hold your breath and if you want a Mac, don't hold off. Buy the Mac you want now. It will work.
In some cases yes. Although we used a 8085 chip (did not build our own). This would be more like a senior project in undergrad. One I had never seen donw was a 8086 trainer. Mostl;y it was cost on this one. Back wehn I was there, if you had a 8086 chip, it was in a IBM PC.
I just have a few problems with this kind of thinking. First, when hungry, a animal, human, person or whatever is going to find food. Period. Granted, there are some lazy animals just like there are lazy humans. Some animals would die. Some animals die everyday, unfortunately. So do humans. Humans are a part of Earth and thus are a part of nature(no matter what the greenies say). The kind of behavior modification your talking about can take years to develop and sometimes lifetimes. We have a squirrel at work who when is fed, will hide food sometimes. She's not going to starve in the winter. As far as she cares, the huumans are weird looking trees that sometimes have nuts and berries. Granted, the agression part I have seen. I have never fed it, but it will confront you sometimes. Luckily, it's a squirrel and all you have to do is just move your shoe in her direction and she scampers off.
I do not ever fully believe park rangers or nature type folks. Mother nature is a bit stronger than we as just plain humans are. Humans muck everything up when we try to fix things. Saving animals is one thing, but trying to fix bug infestations by bringing in other bugs and fixing plant things by planting kudzu in the south just kind of messes thigns up. When we have a oil spill, sure, we should clean it up but should we really help the birds? I can go either way on this. Something tells me though that if we just left them to die, we'd feel guilty, but somehow, the bird population would rebound. Mother nature is like that.
Same thing goes with global warming. Could it happen? Yeah it could. Is it happening? Only time will tell. Can we fix it? I doubt it.
We know of so many species that are labled endagered. I saw a near endangerment sign on a Timberwolf pen at the zoo and I thought, are you kidding? How many farmers have shot wolves and would continue to? Yet Wolves are not extinct. Something just says, to me, that if something is going to go extinct, maybe God wants it that way. Case in point, have we ever been able to truely bring back a species really and truely on the brink of extinction? Somethimg tells me no. Oh I have heard the stories about how some species have been brought back, but something tells me that human intervention had little to do with it. How many species died off just because....despite what we did? I am down the middle. I don't know whether to believe these types of folks or not sometimes because at times, their information just seems flawed. In any case, I have yet to see how geocaching can threaten nature. I have also yet to see concrete evidence that we, as a part of nature, can kill the planet so much that it is then laid waste. Noone has ever proven that polution and sch would truely cause irreversable damage. Mother nature works at a snails pace. We would be nieve to think that we as a aprt of it can truly kill it all off.
Thank you! :) You see! Geocaching is fun. Told my wife about it today and she doesn't see what it is all about. Hopefully if I eveer find a neat cache she's with me.
Why does it need to be put to another use? Let me remind ya'll that not everyone has cable yet. Some can't get it at all. Leave it alone. It's WAY to early to try to refarm the TV band. Lots of people still use it.I do every day. It will be at least 50 years until it happens.
All it's going to take is a Geocacher getting a job as a park ranger. Then things may change. Heck why not have park sponsered classes on responsible geocaching (free or minimal charge)? Even park sponsered caches (they can put them where they want and move them when things are getting out of hand). They could even put printouts or cards of trees in the area, a keychain or something in the cache that advertises the park. Park rangers should work with the folks who want to use the park.
Man I wish I had the points to mod you up. Does anyone read Geocaching.com? These parks folks do have a point about paths being worn to the caches. Moving them once a year would probably help prevent this. Also, putting them near a path or almost on a path would be good too. Also, photo caches are nice too (just take a pic of yourself and of the GPS at the cache.....) and up load it to the web. Geocaching reminds me a bit of ham radio. Everyone searching for a contact(the cache). Sometimes they are hard to find (rare DX). Sometimes not (chatting on a repeater...). If there are ANY Geocacher's that leave trash and mess up the area, I would be surprised. Geocaching has a ethos like camping. Campers regularly leave their stuff on the table and stuff at the site and almost noone steals there stuff (in 20+ years of camping, I have never had anything stolen in a campground). Campers also usually leave the area as good as or better then it was when they got there. Now same as with Camping, there are BAD apples. Just deal with it and let us use the park. Noone else does!
I doubt it's this high. There may be a fair amount of it, but not 60%. Charging a use charge is difficult because what happens if someone (a grandma usually) accidently clicks on a spammng e-mail virus tha spews lots of MB of mail....If I were the ISP, I would do more things like filtering these things out at the mail server. Spam and these virii have to use more bandwidth than p2p. Expecially since 90 percent of what I get is spam.
IBM still does this on some things. Mainframes were delivered this way sometimes.
Not to bash you, but personally, I don't like the cost of Mac's either even if I do know they are superior (they are AWESOME.....). Also, I know you have an iPod (I can tell), but have you or any other iPod fan's ever touched or used a Zen? Sure, the iPod is awfully nice....hardware and software (if you use a Mac.....to use an iPod on Windows, your probably stuck with Musicmatch...UGH!). But the Zen ain't bad either. It had ALWAYS had on the fly playlists. The Zen always had file storage also (although I wish it was more integrated into File Explorer). Also, Creative and Apple aren't the only ones (thank god!). Philps is releasing a 15 GB device that looks like it might be thinner than a iPod. There are a few others, but Apple, Creative and Philips looks like the 3 major's especially since Sonic Blue is in the crapper (the Rio hard drive based plyer was expensive, slow and ....well HUGE!). So, yes I will agree, not all MP3 players are the same. Some even sound better then a iPod (the Zen). Some have a similar interface (new Philips device). For one who just wants to play MP3's anywhere, they all work just fine. The cheaper one with more abilities will end up winning unless they develop a Palm V of MP3 players (ultra thin, and at least 5 GB of storage....YUM!).
The USB 2.0 only version of the Zen does charge off of the USB. Just make sure it's off when it's plugged into the port. If it acts weird (won't turn on) when you unplug it, just use a paper clip in the reset hole. No problems! :) I do wish they'd fix that bug, but it's one I can live with. I know, the iPod doesnot need a reset hole.....whatever, I still love my Zen and I am only doomed to use Playcenter since I do not want to pay for Notmad. PLaycenter is not that bad....if you only use it to manage your Zen. I never play music in it.
It was Disney. The house's Hologram was played by Katey Sagal AKA Peg Bundy. The movie was Smart House.
I like all the features, but I would rather use a StrongARM based box that uses less power. I already have a few machines running non stop. I don't need to use MORE power just because I am too lazy to get up and hit the switch!