Yeup. My RCN Motorola box with the POS SW on it is the worst way to watch TV. Locks up 2x a week. FF/RW are not smooth or easy to use. No real feedback as to how much room you have left for recordings. Menu is clunky, searching is worse HD is jittery, and it's soooooo slow as to be mind numbing. I'm actually using TV guide online to look at the listings now and just entering the channel I want. However, RCN doesn't have the option to let me use Tivo with HD right now, so I'm somewhat stuck. Vendor lock in blows and should be against the law. If they have the option of providing me something to enable a service, it should be open in such a way that anyone else can provide that same service. I think this is what Cable card does for me, but I don't think I can get one from RCN. Everyone should just quit cable and use OTA in protest. I'm sure I could organize that sort of walkout. Everyone is with me, right?
I got to avoid the PDA, but good story similar to mine. I went in for an online special, was told by one guy that it was an online only price and not good in the stores. Another guy overheard that, walked over and just gave me the online price. Not sure why, but he did mention they had two versions of the website, one for in store usage, and then the outside public. He hated the intranet because it just confused people and the college kids working there didn't understand it very well. So he always went with the customers word and just marked it down as a competing offer. I'm not head over heels for best buy, they never come off bright and capable and generally overcharge to an extreme degree. But it isn't the worst store in the world, and makes it very easy to pick up stuff I don't feel like waiting days or weeks for from an online source. The BB in Arlington Heights IL isn't a bad place if you practice buyer awareness.
Good to see my Alma Mater get a little into the public eye. Sometimes people ask if I'm just joking around when I say I went to school there. They did have some good computer labs (supported by me for a while too), which were fairly useful. They also then gave up RB labs on the second floor for network gaming on Friday's and Saturday evenings back in the mid to late 90's (think Quake CTF over a 10mbit lan).
And I supported the new football stadium with a bit of a gift. And I go back down there every now and then and support the community and the school by being a consumer. Not that anyone really watched the game while in the football stadium. Usually, we weren't sober enough.
I lost a lot of email while using Yahoo as my webhost/email server when for brief periods all mail delivered would be dropped. It was really annoying. Made me switch to a diff webhost after a while.
I actually dropped Yahoo as my webhost provider for this very reason. Too many bounced emails at random times. The outages were usually short, probably less than a couple of minutes, but would happen more than weekly. Ironically, it seemed that ETrade always was on the bounce side for some reason. Anyway, I asked them that if I was paying $20 a month for what other companies where charging $5 a month, then why was the service flaky. They asked me to tell them exact times and dates, and would investigate and get back to me. And just like that, I was a member of Avahost.
BTW, in an interesting side note. Yahoo registered my domain name for me, but curiously, lost the details on the name and info they did the registration with. It took me 2 days on the phone between network solutions and Yahoo to get a hold of my domain name. And they wanted to know why I wanted to leave?
Problem with Ethanol at least is the net energy to manufacture it is greater than the energy you get out, but like 25% or somesuch. Can't find the link now, but that's a big reason Ethanol isn't catching on as quickly. If there becomes a way to even that out, or even invert it so that it takes less energy to manufacture, Ethanol is a pretty good idea. I think Biodiesel here in America will take time for the same reason everything else isn't catching on, inertia. Our entire economy is built around gasoline and dirty diesel, and the cost of this isn't great enough to warrant a complete switch yet. I'd be all over alt fuel cars if they were feasible (mostly for ease of refuelling really), but for now, I stick with my 21 mpg car. Someday, that will change.
Oh please, it doesn't take a genius to know that the/. submission process has been/.'d for years. I have submitted several stories that turned up a day later obviously submitted by someone else earlier than I did. So my news is a day late, I'm still a little geekier for having seen it here!
I'm not sure that's true, it's more a point of what you want to do. In the current scheme where the majority of mpeg decoding is done in SW (say Myth or mplayer), the stream is setup in the app, and the sent in an X friendly format to the card (let X do the work of talking to the card essentially). The HW then does much more work internally, using local resources to the video card. It can do this because the image is going right out the VGA or HDMI connector and not back to disk or anywhere else (so it doesn't need much system RAM and can use the AGP cards local resources). Since the original decoding is done by the capture card, it's in native mpeg2 format already. This is fairly easy because Myth or mplayer can specifically use X API's (xv or XvMC for example) and there is a lot less work for more performance. In the case of your hardware, the API's need to be in the player, which increases complexity, and if you're developing mplayer, and don't have this hardware specifically, you're going to have issues. You can build and test XvMC with a number of different video cards that support it (driver support anyway).
One of the Via chips in the announcement actually has an mpeg2 HW decoder built in (not sure if it's the CLE266 or not), but without FOSS drivers, it didn't work so well under Linux (Myth users have had some success given it's the perfect fit for a PVR sitting next to your TV). Now with FOSS drivers, the likelihood that the decoder can be made to work well under X is very high. These chips are usually embedded in SFF PC's that are quiet and low maintenance, meaning they are perfect for PVR work, since what you need is quiet, reliable, and capable. That's why this is very good news. There is potentially one more video chip that will support high quality video playback and it does it in a very affordable and useful form.
You're exactly correct about the cards you refer to, but the lack of builtin X api's, and the lack of good driver support for Linux will keep them from being a viable solution for situations like this.
I think you're crossing points. The big drawback to HD on Myth (or any other system) is that it requires quite a bit of CPU. The Via chip has an mpeg decoder which with open drivers and libraries hopefully can then take a raw mpeg2 stream and decode without using much CPU at all, just sending it straight to the TV or monitor. The PVR gig is what the Via decoder is probably going to be best at, decoding HD and SD video for the next generation of PVR's. I think that's why this is so exciting. Besides, it's the applications you mention are all FOSS, so if you need a particular decoding paradigm supported, you can build it.
Which is fine. The point is to be able to capture the recordings and either play them back or store them to DVD. So, the hardware decoder built into the Via chip, which now includes open source specs, means that the seperate HW decoder is now available for Myth (or ffmpeg or Xine or mplayer) to use to handle the decoding. That's what is so exciting about this announcement. For the first time, there is a true, and pretty good, HW decoder with an open spec.
I was talking about HD which is mpeg2 and will likely stay that way. Digital cable can switch to mpeg4, but there aren't any capture cards that support digital cable with mpeg2 yet, so that switch is mostly irrelevant. Generically, you get an analog capture card and just grab the analog signal out of the cable box, using some remote IR stuff to change the channels (or serial if you're really lucky). Or you can still get analog cable if you want which is supported by most TV cards.
But this sort of stuff is exactly what you want if HD decoder cards and firewire ports aren't wiped out because of the broadcast flag here in the US. If no flag, then you can always record OTA HD and play it back using the Via mpeg decoder. Also, many of the non premium HD channels (Discovery and ESPN for example) are not encrypted, so it's easy enough to grab those as well from most cable and sat boxes (with a firewire port most often). The broadcast flag will kill that, but I've got my pcHDTV3K and I'll buy at least one more before July 1 so that I'm not out of luck later.
I dunno. For the first year or two of Nvidia and ATI linux drivers, they pretty much sucked beyond belief. But in the last 8 to 10 months, Nvidia has release some 4 or 5 revisions, each one getting much stronger in terms of support. ATI just recently got off the snide as well, and make an effort to improve by supporting xorg, amd64, and a few nice features. Still laggin Nvidia, but they are making the effort. Couple more big name Linux games that run on Fedora or Mandriva (the big user friendly versions) and more joe gamers might use Linux as their game platform. Then the money starts to talk.
The Via and XGI announcements mean that the moderate amount of money that Nvidia and ATI were enjoying might start to dissipate. Who knows, things might be much better for this. Or much worse, can't see that far in the future.
What everyone seems to either forget or to not have ever known is that Nvidia and ATI don't own all the tech in their cards, and so the drivers have to stay proprietary for monetary reasons. And, unless opensourcing the driver makes them enough money to offset having to pay the IP costs to open up the code, it's not likely to happen.
That said, ATI still seems to be missing the boat in that the drivers don't do much and the stuff they do isn't all that great. Good, not great. Nvidia is better. With hardware mpeg decoding sort of working, and the driver supporting OpenGL very well, along with the TV out portions of the card, saying I won't buy Nvidia because the drivers are not open would be silly. Open drivers would be nice, but if it doesn't happen, I'll still buy Nvidia because the current software is pretty good, and they are doing a bang up job straddling the fence IMHO. Could be better, but Linux still doesn't sell enough hardware like this to justify the costs. I don't blame them.
This is the big news for anyone building a strong PVR running Linux. Currently, the biggest headache is decoding and processing HD content to display, which takes a 3K+ processor to handel adequately (without doing anything else). But with opensource drivers that can do MPEG decoding on the graphics chip (which XvMC tries to do, but not terribly well yet) one can use a smaller proc and less memory (quiet) or a faster proc and handle other jobs (transcode or burn a DVD at the same time). Anyway you look at it, with MythTV growing up so fast, and with all the fun hardware advances making doing this sort of stuff easy, this makes buying a Via board a real win instead of just a lower cost option.
Actually, I think the current fixation on FPS isn't all that exciting. Amazingly enough, there are other game types out there. I can spend 10 to 15 hours a weekend flying planes. Put PPU assisted realistic flight dynamics and scenery to make the plane's environment interactions even more real, and I'll likely cry just waiting for the next version of FlightGear or Flightsim that will work with this. Or baseball, by being able to add realistic movement based on current wind conditions. Golf, simulating every blade of grass the ball hits... There are other examples I suspect.
Also, I think the Cell processor might be the first attempt at a single chip encompassing multiple processing units. Maybe they didn't think along these lines exactly, but from all the blurbs, I don't see why it's not possible.
Overall, cool idea really. If it a $200+ addition, I won't buy it. If there isn't an open implementation, I will probably ask why we can't do an open hardware implementation in an FPGA or somesuch. It's going to follow market forces, especially in the game industry where the only thing that mattes is how cool is the next big game and how important is this PPU to making the next big game as cool as it could be.
You're right, there are too many reasons why this would never be workable. If you want to stop someone from snapping a pic of you, then you have to have some sort of transmitter handy to do so. And you have to activate it. And you have to deactivate it when you don't want it on. I have trouble remembering my wallet in the morning some days, so I would always forget this thing, and then my christmas photos would come out blurry. No one will ever use this. Governments will never mandate it. It's a defensive patent because they thought of it, but don't have a use yet. Patent and just let it sit in the event the idea becomes useful in 10 years.
More succintly, when has there been "A" show on a big network worth recording (well, the Simpson's)? So, until the Simpsons's is affected by this or one of the cable networks decides to go nuts and piss off the world trying to protect it's (valueless if no one watches it) video property, I just don't care.
The big problem here is that any cure that is discovered will have to fight through several different interested groups with deep pockets. Insurance will have an angle, pharm's will have an angle, edcuation will have an angle, and probably some others I've forgotten. Most notably absent here is the public, the only benefactor of a cure. The hope is that common sense and a sense of public good would prevail somewhere causing the new cure to be doled out, but I have my concerns.
Irregardless of the potential cost of the cure, it will not be free or cheap initially and will likely be of limited availability. Otherwise, you would simply wipe out some billions of dollars annually from a very small number of companies. In fact, there are several corps whose only means of income is Type 1 and 2 diabetes, and removing that money would submarine them. I still argue that my life is worth that sacrifice, but the ones who would lose their jobs probably don't agree with me. There is no simple answer for a cure to a disease of such impact to society.
Congress would never be able to agree that there is a force called gravity, and as such, no bill could be passed because it would stall in committee. Expect that this would be very partisan.
Even if they did pass a bill as such, it's very likely that the majority of the US population would break the law and generally stay on the ground. Then someone would invent a graity cop detector and when it went off, you would float up slowly until the cop is past and return you to the ground after. Oh man, think of the marketing campaign.
Congress never took away the guns. Even with the assault weapon ban running it course, it was little more than feel good legislation. Sure, you weren't allowed to own them, but that never stopped those would use them in a negative fashion anyway. And by negative, I mean hunting the less dangerous ducks further north. Using them to hunt the blood thirsty Merganser's further south is well within accepted principles.
Seriously, what poli in his/her right mind would take on gun control legislation either for or against just before an election?
The reason this would be big is because the wave, as it approaches the coast, would expand upward as the depth decreases. The energy dissipation follows wave form rules, but as in any system, the energy involved doesn't go away. So, as the water gets shallow, the wave would grow up. Interesting to note that there would be no 300 foot wave in deep water, but the wave form itself would still exist and be travelling at a high rate of speed despite being essentially invisible.
As a side note, Dr. No, GoldFinger, and Dr. Evil all investigated this and decided it wasn't grand enough for a take over the world plot. Not reproducible, like a laser or nuclear weapon, and possibly defensible (blow up the rock before it slides?).
No, this is a marketing ploy. They say they increase the speed, then give you the run around when you subscribe so you never actually get the service, and SBC essentially becomes a bank. They keep your money for a while, take the interest, and then eventually give it back when they can't deliver or stall anymore. Not a bad deal if you ask me. They are guarunteed not go out of business for doing this, and they can probably turn millions on the interest payments alone. Nice racket if you can swing it.
That said, my list of complaints with SBC and the laundry list of issues I've had with them have nothing to do with this post. The couple of months that I had DSL service (well, sorta, I think it worked on alternate thursdays between 9am and 2pm) was the best SBC service I've ever had. And yeah, I still use them for my phone (My roomate's fault). Nothing beats customer service reps giving an audible "Wow" every time they pull up my records.
Slashdot Mirror
Shhhh, the republicans will hear you and turn off the internet.
As a side note, my wasted time at work is my missing vacation time.
Yeup. My RCN Motorola box with the POS SW on it is the worst way to watch TV. Locks up 2x a week. FF/RW are not smooth or easy to use. No real feedback as to how much room you have left for recordings. Menu is clunky, searching is worse HD is jittery, and it's soooooo slow as to be mind numbing. I'm actually using TV guide online to look at the listings now and just entering the channel I want. However, RCN doesn't have the option to let me use Tivo with HD right now, so I'm somewhat stuck. Vendor lock in blows and should be against the law. If they have the option of providing me something to enable a service, it should be open in such a way that anyone else can provide that same service. I think this is what Cable card does for me, but I don't think I can get one from RCN. Everyone should just quit cable and use OTA in protest. I'm sure I could organize that sort of walkout. Everyone is with me, right?
I got to avoid the PDA, but good story similar to mine. I went in for an online special, was told by one guy that it was an online only price and not good in the stores. Another guy overheard that, walked over and just gave me the online price. Not sure why, but he did mention they had two versions of the website, one for in store usage, and then the outside public. He hated the intranet because it just confused people and the college kids working there didn't understand it very well. So he always went with the customers word and just marked it down as a competing offer. I'm not head over heels for best buy, they never come off bright and capable and generally overcharge to an extreme degree. But it isn't the worst store in the world, and makes it very easy to pick up stuff I don't feel like waiting days or weeks for from an online source. The BB in Arlington Heights IL isn't a bad place if you practice buyer awareness.
Good to see my Alma Mater get a little into the public eye. Sometimes people ask if I'm just joking around when I say I went to school there. They did have some good computer labs (supported by me for a while too), which were fairly useful. They also then gave up RB labs on the second floor for network gaming on Friday's and Saturday evenings back in the mid to late 90's (think Quake CTF over a 10mbit lan).
And I supported the new football stadium with a bit of a gift. And I go back down there every now and then and support the community and the school by being a consumer. Not that anyone really watched the game while in the football stadium. Usually, we weren't sober enough.
I lost a lot of email while using Yahoo as my webhost/email server when for brief periods all mail delivered would be dropped. It was really annoying. Made me switch to a diff webhost after a while.
I actually dropped Yahoo as my webhost provider for this very reason. Too many bounced emails at random times. The outages were usually short, probably less than a couple of minutes, but would happen more than weekly. Ironically, it seemed that ETrade always was on the bounce side for some reason. Anyway, I asked them that if I was paying $20 a month for what other companies where charging $5 a month, then why was the service flaky. They asked me to tell them exact times and dates, and would investigate and get back to me. And just like that, I was a member of Avahost.
BTW, in an interesting side note. Yahoo registered my domain name for me, but curiously, lost the details on the name and info they did the registration with. It took me 2 days on the phone between network solutions and Yahoo to get a hold of my domain name. And they wanted to know why I wanted to leave?
1. Make iPod nano scratch by contact with air.
2. ?
3. Profit!
Problem with Ethanol at least is the net energy to manufacture it is greater than the energy you get out, but like 25% or somesuch. Can't find the link now, but that's a big reason Ethanol isn't catching on as quickly. If there becomes a way to even that out, or even invert it so that it takes less energy to manufacture, Ethanol is a pretty good idea. I think Biodiesel here in America will take time for the same reason everything else isn't catching on, inertia. Our entire economy is built around gasoline and dirty diesel, and the cost of this isn't great enough to warrant a complete switch yet. I'd be all over alt fuel cars if they were feasible (mostly for ease of refuelling really), but for now, I stick with my 21 mpg car. Someday, that will change.
Oh please, it doesn't take a genius to know that the /. submission process has been /.'d for years. I have submitted several stories that turned up a day later obviously submitted by someone else earlier than I did. So my news is a day late, I'm still a little geekier for having seen it here!
I'm not sure that's true, it's more a point of what you want to do. In the current scheme where the majority of mpeg decoding is done in SW (say Myth or mplayer), the stream is setup in the app, and the sent in an X friendly format to the card (let X do the work of talking to the card essentially). The HW then does much more work internally, using local resources to the video card. It can do this because the image is going right out the VGA or HDMI connector and not back to disk or anywhere else (so it doesn't need much system RAM and can use the AGP cards local resources). Since the original decoding is done by the capture card, it's in native mpeg2 format already. This is fairly easy because Myth or mplayer can specifically use X API's (xv or XvMC for example) and there is a lot less work for more performance. In the case of your hardware, the API's need to be in the player, which increases complexity, and if you're developing mplayer, and don't have this hardware specifically, you're going to have issues. You can build and test XvMC with a number of different video cards that support it (driver support anyway).
One of the Via chips in the announcement actually has an mpeg2 HW decoder built in (not sure if it's the CLE266 or not), but without FOSS drivers, it didn't work so well under Linux (Myth users have had some success given it's the perfect fit for a PVR sitting next to your TV). Now with FOSS drivers, the likelihood that the decoder can be made to work well under X is very high. These chips are usually embedded in SFF PC's that are quiet and low maintenance, meaning they are perfect for PVR work, since what you need is quiet, reliable, and capable. That's why this is very good news. There is potentially one more video chip that will support high quality video playback and it does it in a very affordable and useful form.
You're exactly correct about the cards you refer to, but the lack of builtin X api's, and the lack of good driver support for Linux will keep them from being a viable solution for situations like this.
I think you're crossing points. The big drawback to HD on Myth (or any other system) is that it requires quite a bit of CPU. The Via chip has an mpeg decoder which with open drivers and libraries hopefully can then take a raw mpeg2 stream and decode without using much CPU at all, just sending it straight to the TV or monitor. The PVR gig is what the Via decoder is probably going to be best at, decoding HD and SD video for the next generation of PVR's. I think that's why this is so exciting. Besides, it's the applications you mention are all FOSS, so if you need a particular decoding paradigm supported, you can build it.
Which is fine. The point is to be able to capture the recordings and either play them back or store them to DVD. So, the hardware decoder built into the Via chip, which now includes open source specs, means that the seperate HW decoder is now available for Myth (or ffmpeg or Xine or mplayer) to use to handle the decoding. That's what is so exciting about this announcement. For the first time, there is a true, and pretty good, HW decoder with an open spec.
I was talking about HD which is mpeg2 and will likely stay that way. Digital cable can switch to mpeg4, but there aren't any capture cards that support digital cable with mpeg2 yet, so that switch is mostly irrelevant. Generically, you get an analog capture card and just grab the analog signal out of the cable box, using some remote IR stuff to change the channels (or serial if you're really lucky). Or you can still get analog cable if you want which is supported by most TV cards.
But this sort of stuff is exactly what you want if HD decoder cards and firewire ports aren't wiped out because of the broadcast flag here in the US. If no flag, then you can always record OTA HD and play it back using the Via mpeg decoder. Also, many of the non premium HD channels (Discovery and ESPN for example) are not encrypted, so it's easy enough to grab those as well from most cable and sat boxes (with a firewire port most often). The broadcast flag will kill that, but I've got my pcHDTV3K and I'll buy at least one more before July 1 so that I'm not out of luck later.
I dunno. For the first year or two of Nvidia and ATI linux drivers, they pretty much sucked beyond belief. But in the last 8 to 10 months, Nvidia has release some 4 or 5 revisions, each one getting much stronger in terms of support. ATI just recently got off the snide as well, and make an effort to improve by supporting xorg, amd64, and a few nice features. Still laggin Nvidia, but they are making the effort. Couple more big name Linux games that run on Fedora or Mandriva (the big user friendly versions) and more joe gamers might use Linux as their game platform. Then the money starts to talk.
The Via and XGI announcements mean that the moderate amount of money that Nvidia and ATI were enjoying might start to dissipate. Who knows, things might be much better for this. Or much worse, can't see that far in the future.
What everyone seems to either forget or to not have ever known is that Nvidia and ATI don't own all the tech in their cards, and so the drivers have to stay proprietary for monetary reasons. And, unless opensourcing the driver makes them enough money to offset having to pay the IP costs to open up the code, it's not likely to happen.
That said, ATI still seems to be missing the boat in that the drivers don't do much and the stuff they do isn't all that great. Good, not great. Nvidia is better. With hardware mpeg decoding sort of working, and the driver supporting OpenGL very well, along with the TV out portions of the card, saying I won't buy Nvidia because the drivers are not open would be silly. Open drivers would be nice, but if it doesn't happen, I'll still buy Nvidia because the current software is pretty good, and they are doing a bang up job straddling the fence IMHO. Could be better, but Linux still doesn't sell enough hardware like this to justify the costs. I don't blame them.
This is the big news for anyone building a strong PVR running Linux. Currently, the biggest headache is decoding and processing HD content to display, which takes a 3K+ processor to handel adequately (without doing anything else). But with opensource drivers that can do MPEG decoding on the graphics chip (which XvMC tries to do, but not terribly well yet) one can use a smaller proc and less memory (quiet) or a faster proc and handle other jobs (transcode or burn a DVD at the same time). Anyway you look at it, with MythTV growing up so fast, and with all the fun hardware advances making doing this sort of stuff easy, this makes buying a Via board a real win instead of just a lower cost option.
Actually, I think the current fixation on FPS isn't all that exciting. Amazingly enough, there are other game types out there. I can spend 10 to 15 hours a weekend flying planes. Put PPU assisted realistic flight dynamics and scenery to make the plane's environment interactions even more real, and I'll likely cry just waiting for the next version of FlightGear or Flightsim that will work with this. Or baseball, by being able to add realistic movement based on current wind conditions. Golf, simulating every blade of grass the ball hits... There are other examples I suspect.
Also, I think the Cell processor might be the first attempt at a single chip encompassing multiple processing units. Maybe they didn't think along these lines exactly, but from all the blurbs, I don't see why it's not possible.
Overall, cool idea really. If it a $200+ addition, I won't buy it. If there isn't an open implementation, I will probably ask why we can't do an open hardware implementation in an FPGA or somesuch. It's going to follow market forces, especially in the game industry where the only thing that mattes is how cool is the next big game and how important is this PPU to making the next big game as cool as it could be.
You're right, there are too many reasons why this would never be workable. If you want to stop someone from snapping a pic of you, then you have to have some sort of transmitter handy to do so. And you have to activate it. And you have to deactivate it when you don't want it on. I have trouble remembering my wallet in the morning some days, so I would always forget this thing, and then my christmas photos would come out blurry. No one will ever use this. Governments will never mandate it. It's a defensive patent because they thought of it, but don't have a use yet. Patent and just let it sit in the event the idea becomes useful in 10 years.
Kudos, this is the first time I've lauged out loud at a post, and not even read more than the headline. Thanks.
More succintly, when has there been "A" show on a big network worth recording (well, the Simpson's)? So, until the Simpsons's is affected by this or one of the cable networks decides to go nuts and piss off the world trying to protect it's (valueless if no one watches it) video property, I just don't care.
The big problem here is that any cure that is discovered will have to fight through several different interested groups with deep pockets. Insurance will have an angle, pharm's will have an angle, edcuation will have an angle, and probably some others I've forgotten. Most notably absent here is the public, the only benefactor of a cure. The hope is that common sense and a sense of public good would prevail somewhere causing the new cure to be doled out, but I have my concerns.
Irregardless of the potential cost of the cure, it will not be free or cheap initially and will likely be of limited availability. Otherwise, you would simply wipe out some billions of dollars annually from a very small number of companies. In fact, there are several corps whose only means of income is Type 1 and 2 diabetes, and removing that money would submarine them. I still argue that my life is worth that sacrifice, but the ones who would lose their jobs probably don't agree with me. There is no simple answer for a cure to a disease of such impact to society.
Can someone with autism truly manage to be an overlord? So, wouldn't it be more like the following?
Now some quick bits to be fair.
Seriously, what poli in his/her right mind would take on gun control legislation either for or against just before an election?
The reason this would be big is because the wave, as it approaches the coast, would expand upward as the depth decreases. The energy dissipation follows wave form rules, but as in any system, the energy involved doesn't go away. So, as the water gets shallow, the wave would grow up. Interesting to note that there would be no 300 foot wave in deep water, but the wave form itself would still exist and be travelling at a high rate of speed despite being essentially invisible.
As a side note, Dr. No, GoldFinger, and Dr. Evil all investigated this and decided it wasn't grand enough for a take over the world plot. Not reproducible, like a laser or nuclear weapon, and possibly defensible (blow up the rock before it slides?).
No, this is a marketing ploy. They say they increase the speed, then give you the run around when you subscribe so you never actually get the service, and SBC essentially becomes a bank. They keep your money for a while, take the interest, and then eventually give it back when they can't deliver or stall anymore. Not a bad deal if you ask me. They are guarunteed not go out of business for doing this, and they can probably turn millions on the interest payments alone. Nice racket if you can swing it.
That said, my list of complaints with SBC and the laundry list of issues I've had with them have nothing to do with this post. The couple of months that I had DSL service (well, sorta, I think it worked on alternate thursdays between 9am and 2pm) was the best SBC service I've ever had. And yeah, I still use them for my phone (My roomate's fault). Nothing beats customer service reps giving an audible "Wow" every time they pull up my records.