One of the big problems with the TSA is that they scare people into taking more dangerous forms of transportation out of a misplaced sense of fear

I don't think my fear of the TSA or the government it serves is misplaced. I'd say it's pretty well-founded.

From what I can tell from the Wikipedia article, Beidou is an active system where the "client" sends data to the satellites in orbit. It makes perfect sense for the Chinese though, because now they can track where their users are -- something not possible with the passive US system since the receivers only receive and can't transmit any data back. In short, Big Brother Beidou always knows where you are.

Seems like an active system has a huge disadvantage, though. You can DOS the satellites by pointing an antenna at each satellite and jamming their uplink frequencies, knocking out the whole system for everyone, everywhere. In the US system, you can only jam local terrestrial reception and anybody over the next hill won't be affected.

They also had special twin balls that were chained together and fired out a single barrel, that would be aimed at sail masts. If the shot was on and luck was good, a ball would go past both sides of the mast, and the chain would slice right through the mast

I'm dubious. Mythbusters should test that myth... oh wait.

ALL of my money becomes worthless and my savings becomes zero.

Hence, the current popularity of gold and silver.

And guns.

It's not a simple "flip a switch" kind of change.

Sounds like poor software design to me. TCP/IP didn't suddenly break when 802.11b came out; things continued to "just work" because of the nice OSI layer system.

Properly designed and implemented, it shouldn't matter one lick to the other layers (like the rendering engine, or the theme engine) where you move the tabs to.

What about overclocking?

CPU is normal-clocked (1.somethingGHz), and the GPU is actually underclocked by about 100MHz to keep it cooler -- my case isn't ventilated very well.

I can turn on ATSC closed captioning without trouble, yes. Just another surface (OpenGL I believe) for the card to render, as you said.

Incidentally, VDPAU also does some very nice deinterlacing.

That's exactly what VDPAU is and does: send the raw encoded 20mbps (that's bits/s) MPEG stream to the card and let the card display it. The entire process is done in the GPU hardware.

This does mean that the VDPAU hardware (or at least firmware) must support your codec, so only a handful of standard formats is supported.

GT520 should run VDPAU acceleration pretty well

Yep, this is exactly what my MythTV HTPC does, only using an older PCI card.

It takes practically zero CPU power to shovel bits

Case in point, my aforementioned HTPC is a Celeron (yes, a humble Celery) and plays all ATSC content (720p, 1080i) just fine.

VDPAU rocks. PCI does the job.

So if you're going to replace the eneloops in your remote once every... can I say, 6 months? And they are good for what, 4-5 years?

Eneloops are designed for 1,000 recharge cycles. Using a good charger that doesn't overcharge them, consumers have reported them lasting well over 500 cycles.

At that rate, your Eneloops would outlast you.

I recently bought a cordless phone and it came with batteries with date code somewhere in 2007. They don't hold any useful charge.

Cheap cordless phones keep their battery on a constant trickle charge. This destroys the cells over time. Dunno if manufacturers do that to save $.02 on charger circuitry, or if it's a conspiracy to sell you a phone every few years. Or both. (Either way, it's not the battery's fault.)

I wouldn't use eneloops in remotes, battery-operated clocks, and probably not on flashlights either

Read up on candlepowerforums.com. Eneloops are THE most popular AAA/AA format cells for the flashaholics there. It's hard to argue with the folks that spend $100-$1,000 on their flashlights.

Slashdot: we're less dumb than everywhere else!

Nothing to be ashamed of. "In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king."

Kind of like the plot to Idiocracy.

Also there is this TED video where a guy tries to build a toaster from raw materials...

I don't think people appreciate the "tech tree" (to use Starcraft parlance) you have to walk down to get to the simplest of modern household items. The toaster is a good example, but now imagine starting from zero -- you can't even start with iron ore, because you don't have any tools to mine it with! So start with banging rocks to get something sharp you can use to cut down a tree, so you can make a handle to make a stone axe. Hopefully this is enough to get some iron ore, but now you also need to make something to smelt your ore in, such as a bloomery. And for that, you need charcoal. And for that...

Basically, the TED guy making his toaster cheated by used modern tools to get his raw materials. And even with cheating, his toaster never toasted any bread.

The tech tree for a dollar store pocket calculator is staggering, let alone a Space Shuttle. I don't think many people are conscious of this when they toss that toaster in the garbage and spend $10 on a new one.

Those look like POTS phones, I don't see how that system can interface with a cell phone?

Get a phone base station that'll pair with your cell, (about $60)

Please post a link where I can buy this $60 device.

the chamber size allowed them to fire both American and Soviet ammo.

What caliber of American ammo can be safely fired in a 7.62x39 AK? Seriously, I've never heard of such a thing.

Now, NATO 9x19 Para ammo can be fired in a Soviet 9x18 Makarov pistol (though this is definitely unsafe). But the Russians didn't design this as a feature -- rather, they designed their 9x18 ammo so that it couldn't fire in a NATO pistol to avoid having their own ammunition being used against them should any of it fall into enemy hands.