Most people greatly overestimate how well they can hear these differences, but the never actually try it in ABX testing. I tried it years ago and I can't hear a difference between most codecs at reasonable bitrates and unencoded originals.

Here is an old classic from the Hydrogenaudio forums, from someone would bought expensive head phones and set up ABX testing. He was very shocked when he couldn't even tell the difference between FLAC and Vorbis at 64kb/s.

ABX Just Destroyed My Ego, My perception of my bitrate needs was greatly inflated.

You're right on. If the author of the article would have watched any of the Caltrans news conferences, they would have answered some of his theories.

The weld that he claims failed was clearly described as only being tacked, not structurally welded. That weld wasn't supposed to hold the structure together, the tie rods were, which failed. One of the improvements they are making now is to replace the tacking with a structural weld, so that even if something broke, these pieces won't come apart. The other improvements center around reducing vibration, especially in the tie rods

Who wrote that article anyway? Some guy on the internet who looks at some pictures of the repair and thinks he knows what a bunch of engineers working on the problem didn't know?

Very good point. Also, addiction. Basically, you'd erase the 'memory' of the urge to consume the particular substance your addicted to.

There was a story in the news six months ago about some research that would make it possible to do this in humans. PTSD and addiction were two examples they explicitly mentioned.

Thats because we don't have real competition in the US, so why should they give you more for less?

Compare this to Germany for example, were you can get 16 Mbps for as little as 15 euros/month, 50 Mbps is available and Kabel Deutschland just announced that they are going to start selling 100 Mbps starting next year . Amazing what competition will do.

Brilliant Idea. Cause if we want to levy more taxes on the people that drive more, we need to track every car and build an extensive system of RFID scanners that covers the nation.

Of course every car already has a mileage based tracker build in. Its called the gas tank. You simply raise the gas tax, and you're done. In the process you also reward people with fuel efficient cars, and you make it easier for alternative fuels and electric cars to be competitive.

I suppose higher gas taxes have no lobby, while the RFID industry obviously has one. /sigh

So chkdsk is an 'arcane' process now? I've gotten used to the mainstream press always trying to dumb down anything even remotely technical, but shouldn't cnet be a little bit better? Guess not.

I like this site: n2yo. You can see the current position of the ISS, or get the 5 day flyover predictions with details If you click on 'draw' it will show you a graph for each pass, with blue where the station is in the shadow and yellow where it is in the light.

According to the article its called Message Center Plus. Here's uninstall instructions from the linked thread:

And here, also from the thread, instructions to disable it without uninstalling:

Yes. Thats why the Canadians haven't been able to do it either. Or the Irish. Not Australia and New Zealand either. Or India.

Oh wait, they *have* all done it. So how come they can, but for the US it's just too hard?

You're not new here, I can tell by the fact that you didn't read the article. Or the summary ;)

This feature actually works like you want it to: It *does* load on demand. And that's the problem here. If it always loaded it this exploit wouldn't work. Its based on only being loaded on demand.

I knew light was quantized, but I had seriously never heard of Phonons, or that sound can be quantized as well.

Well, apparently it can: Phonon