Oh no, to get the equivalent of their high end stuff, lamp cord won't do. You have to buy 12v outdoor lighting cable (12ga 2-cdr stranded) at 49 cents a foot!

DVD resolution is purely a function of the technology available. DVDs hard a hard capacity limit, which when combined with being stuck with MPEG2 as the best compression available, limited them to what they used. It's not like they decided 1/4 the resolution of film was "good enough". That was the best they could do.

1) It was Ayds
2) it was an appetite suppressant, not a laxative

Ugh. I used to love Radio Shack. Need an opto-isolator and a 100K linear taper pot? Bam! hey had 'em.

Now, it's "you got questions, we got cellphones!"

Hughes doesn't do anything anymore. Hughes no longer exists. My father worked for Hughes Aircraft from college graduation to retirement. The decline of Hughes Aircraft Co. had little to do with Howard going nuts. Hughes was still going full bore in the defense industry when HH died in '76. They continued to succeed until 1985, when the seeds of their destruction were sown. That's when the Feds ruled that Hughes Medical Institute, a non-profit research foundation which was essentially the "heir" to the HH fortune and owned Hughes Aircraft, had to divest themselves of the hugely profitable subsidiary to keep its non-profit status. That's when General Motors bought them and merged them with Delco Electronics to form the GM-Hughes Electronics division. At this point, Hughes was making everything from radar systems, to missiles, to satellites, to communications systems.

At any rate, GM being run by a bunch of fools and clowns, it was inevitable that the party would end. The collapse of the Soviet Union hit the defense industry pretty hard, and GM acquired General Dynamics' missile division and rolled it into Hughes. The inevitable decline was delayed by the fact that Hughes launched a profitable commercial business in '94, a satellite television business called "DirecTV"--- perhaps you've heard of it. None of this helped in the long run, though. GM was no better at operating a business sensibly then than it is now. Eventually the realized they were out of their league, and sold off the Hughes Aircraft portion of Hughes Electronics to Raytheo. The DirecTV division was sold to Rupert Murdoch. The Hughes Space and Communications division was sold to Boeing.

My father worked the last 3 years of his career as a Raytheon employee because of this. Raytheon is a company run by shitbag assholes. For decades Hughes was forced by the DoD to "second source" critical components from Raytheon. My father had years worth of stories about how the shit they'd manufacture was sloppy and not made to specs, and how it caused them interminable problems with Raytheon parts failing. When they acquired Hughes, they basically turned it into "more Raytheon". Employees were treated like shit, benefits cut to nothing, and retirees who were previously allowed to buy health insurance as part of the Hughes group plan were told to "suck it". Perhaps the world was no longer a place where a company like Hughes could exist. Perhaps only "McRaytheon" type companies can make money nowadays. All I know is that Raytheon tolerates a lot more incompetence than Hughes did, and as a result of them buying Hughes, they are now the only manufacturer of missiles in the US, and it's all done to "Raytheon qwality". Just as well, I guess. Not much air combat anymore.

So no, it really was GM that put Hughes on the chopping block, and Raytheon that finally swung the axe. The problem may have started with HH not having a will, but a bunch of Oldsmobile salesmen in $200 suits are what really killed them.

I would be embarrassed too.. but I think what we're seeing is money grubbing heirs and "content owners" crying about copyright terms, not the original creators.

Yes, because every book you'd ever want to read, no matter how obscure, is going to be available at every library.

Thank you captain obvious. Now, can you tell me how long the backup power will last at the CO? Didn't think so. Because if you could, you wouldn't have bothered to make the comment. Backup power at the CO is measured in days. They have generators on site, and contingency plans for refueling during extended power outages that exceed the unattended backup time. It's not a little 7Ah lead-acid gel cell like you get in the FiOS terminal in your basement, which has a usage measured in hours.... unless it's over 2 years old, in which case it's minutes.

Your rationale ignores the reality that tuning a radio is nothing compared to changing modulation methods. It's not as big a deal to have a single GSM module that can be tuned to whichever frequencies are necessary, as the demodulation and processing further down the pipe is identical. Working with CDMA2000 or whatever requires completely different handling beyond the receiver--- basically, you can't do it without shoehorning in a different radio, and monkeying with the OS to get it to work with a different system.

....to put your entire damned thought into the post body, where it belongs?

How do you map the last few branches of the tree, when tax rates do not map to anything less complicated than the lat/lon coordinates corresponding to the delivery address? Are counties/cities going to provide that insane GIS data set?

Smugly focusing on the data structure rather than the real problem, which is the selection process shows how poorly you understand the problem.

It's literary convention to italicize words in a foreign language, so as to avoid confusion. "Au contraire" is obviously French, but other phrases can parse oddly.

Linguistically, no. If you're American you say "the BBC is". If you're British you say "the BBC are". The usage has everything to do with the local dialect and nothing at all to do with the subject matter being discussed. Americans speak American English, Brits speak British English. That's the entirety of it.

Yeesh. Sounds like my job, only without the profit sharing OR the strippers.

Seriously, kdawson, WTF is the above supposed to mean? WiFi is a wireless connection system. How the FUCK is the driver going to be distracted by a 2400mHz radio signal? This isn't like a TV on the dashboard, or a GPS full of fiddly touch screens, it's a bloody network standard. Even assuming that WiFi to the driver is somehow distracting (maybe a netbook balanced on the steering wheel) how the hell do you suggest they "[black it] out for the driver"? Magic radio curtains? A WEP key that randomly scrambles when you put the car in gear and appears somewhere the driver can't see it?

Give up the attempts at clever editorializing. You don't have the gray matter for it.