Firewire 800 is slow compared to what modern disks can do, especially SSDs. Here are the approximate sustained speeds I typically get using various interfaces to transfer data to one of my hard drives, a 1TB Samsung F3:
USB2: 33MB/sec
FW800: 77MB/sec
eSATA: 130MB/sec

eSATA is almost 70% faster than FW800 and almost four times as fast as USB2, and I'm still not even using its full bandwidth. Newer SSDs can max out SATA2 at around 250MB/sec, which is why SATA3 was created.

USB2 came out in 2001. Firewire 800 was standardized in 2002. 9 years later, progress should have been made. There's no reason we should have to settle for "fast enough". You might say I don't *need* faster connections to my hard drives, but then I must not *need* anything faster than dial-up and a Pentium 4.

In other words, you could say they ran out of imaginary power.

I can here the difference on good headphones and certain songs. I've done listening tests on 3 headphones. Using Sennheiser CX300's ($30), I could barely tell the difference between FLAC and V0 MP3. In a blind test, I might not be able to tell them apart at all. Using Sennheiser IE6's (~$120) it is easier to tell the difference, and I can tell the difference on certain songs. Using my friend's Audio Technica ATH-M50's (~$120), the difference is obvious on many songs. All of this is listening coming straight out of a PC sound card. With the ATH-M50's I will sometimes use a headphone amp because my sound card can't drive them loud enough to hear every detail.

When I say certain songs, I like to pick songs that the V0 encoder had trouble with, or in other words V0 encoded songs with the highest average bitrate. When there are many instruments and voices at the same time, there is more information that has to be represented, or more than may be lost in compression.

The difference is most noticeable in the high end, particularly in the percussion. I can hear up to 19.5KHz. If you can't hear as high, you will have more trouble distinguishing FLAC vs MP3, bu it isn't impossible. Percussion, especially cymbals, sound clearer and sharper in FLAC, but clearness or sharpness alone aren't enough for me to distinguish the difference in back to back listening. I always listen for flaws in the sound of cymbals-- instead of sounding like a real instrument, they will sound digital, shimmery, or wrong. It's hard to describe without making up what sounds like audiophile BS, but the difference is there.

I agree for casual listening FLAC is unnecessary. If there is even the slightest noise coming from the environment (in the car, air conditioning running at home, etc) it becomes hard to distinguish the difference, and if I am not devoting my full attention to the music, I don't hear anything wrong MP3 encoded music.

10G or more can be done on multimode fiber;,that's that 10G Ethernet uses, and I believe up to 25G has been demonstrated over multimode. Some people are also working on 10G or more over plastic fiber.

I did a blind test, and with ATH-M50 headphones, both my friend and I can tell the difference between V0 MP3 and FLAC. I've done the same with my Sennheiser IE6 earbuds, and I can still tell the difference. With my Sennheiser CX-300 earbuds ($30) I can tell the difference if it's not a blind test (though with the right song, a blind test would probably work on those too; I haven't tried it). For casual listening, though, I agree that the differences are too subtle to ever notice or be worth caring about.

One thing that helps is to find a song with a lot of stuff going on all at once (not sure what the technical term for that is). Most of my music s encoded as V0 MP3, and my music program lets me sort by the average bitrate. I have plenty of songs where the average bitrate is 290-310Kbps, which means the V0 encoder needed to use high bitrate in more of the song, and probably hit the bitrate limit (320Kbps) a few times. In other words, these are songs that the encoder has the most trouble with, and thus ones that are easiest to tell apart from FLAC versions. If, on the other hand, you have a song that does not have much going on, like synthesized electronic music with only a few tones, it is easy for the encoder to perfectly represent that in fewer bits.

How much of that silicon is ultra pure semiconductor grade? Probably none, so both materials need to go through a refining process. If there are areas with high moly concentrations, it doesn't matter how much the rest of the world has, as long as those mines are enough to meet demand (and can continue to do so for a while).

I have Clearwire, which is different from Clear. Clearwire is a pre-wimax service sometimes referred to as 3.5G, and our choices for speed are 1.5Mbps or 2Mbps if I remember right. Clear is true Wimax (whether or not you want to call it 4G). Sprint bought Clearwire a while back, and it is unclear what the difference between Clear and Clearwire is. To quote Wikipedia,

I am technically outside their service area in Nevada, but I have a direct line of sight to the tower and I get 5/5 bars of signal on my modem. I normally get about 1.5Mbps down despite being on the 2mbps plan. Apparently my area is oversold. Over Christmas, I started having problems with the internet becoming extremely slow during peak times. It would go from everything being just fine to <80kbps speed and 2-3 second ping times at worst. Once everyone went to bed, it would be fast again. The transition from fast to overloaded would happen suddenly with little warning. Normal ping times to the tower for me are ~60ms. If load increases, ping times may each 200ms but it is still fast enough in terms of download speed to be usable. As load increases, in under a minute it will go from working alright to 1 second+ ping times and super slow download speeds (and stay that way for hours).

Unfortunately Clearwire is really my only option. The neighborhood doesn't have cable, and we are too far from anything to get DSL. There was talk about a company bringing in one or the other (I forgot which), but they would need some large fraction of families in the neighborhood to sign up to make it cost effective for them. The next best option is probably Verizon 3G, but I can only get ~300Kbps down which simply isn't enough (interestingly I get ~700Kbps up though).

They don't have to use refusal as probable cause. There are plenty of signs the officers can look for to see if someone may be drunk- bad driving, glazed eyes, inability to walk in a straight line, smell of alcohol, etc. These methods are often used in addition to a breathalyzer test because the test by itself may not be enough to convict someone (there is some chance the machine was malfuncitoning, for example), but the test combined with conventional signs of drunkenness can prove that someone is drunk beyond reasonable doubt. The same signs of drunkenness can be used as probable cause to get a warrant. If the officer doesn't think you are drunk, he/she will probably just let you go and not ask you to take a test at all.

In many places some kind of test is mandatory. You can refuse the breathalyzer, but instead you have to take a blood test. Probable cause is not involved- it is written into the state laws that if you have a license and drive you consent to either of these tests if asked by the police.

Where I live, there's no DSL or cable, only Clearwire (an early wimax technology inferior to Clear's service. I can't remember if Clear and Clearwire are the same company or not), satellite, or cellular 3G. None of these are particularly good options, but I have Clearwire. It's been OK until recently during peak load times I start getting 1000-2000 ms ping times (around 100 is average) and extremely slow download speeds.

Why is it just "newbies" that purchase small high value items from Microcenter? A while back I got a new, retail Q9550 processor for about $170. It was probably selling for ~$250 on Newegg or anywhere legit at the time, and today it sells for $275 at Newegg.

http://www.overclockers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=610809

A USB CD drive and support to boot from it solves all of those problems. I'd gladly pay $50 for one and not have to carry it around in my laptop all the time. In fact, I put a SSD in my laptop and put the old hard drive in the optical bay, and it's great! I get all the speed of a SSD and all the capacity of a HDD on the cheap. On the rare occasion I need to use a CD (like when the SSD died and I had to restore the OS on a new one), I plug in my massive external DVD burner from 2004, and it boots off it just fine. If I need to burn a DVD, I use that or my desktop computer.

I think they are using crypt(). There is a table out there sorted by email address (I can't remember where though). If you just commented without creating an account they probably only asked for your email address, which was used for verification. Apparently I had given them two of my email addresses based on the emails I got from them, and now I'm worried about excessive spam and I'll probably change my emails. They were semi-throwaway anyways.

This is more like bombing their parking lot, or dumping large amounts of garbage in front of their building (gigabytes of garbage every second). Marching in front of a store is relatively harmless, but a DOS attack, or vandalism I mentioned above, causes real damage and costs the company money (bandwidth costs, downtime, paying more sysadmins to deal with it, etc).

Wouldn't everyone sending out sonar chirps be just as bad?