Not an air raid siren, for sure, but you'd be surprised at how loud that little speaker could be driven full bore rail-to-rail with a square wave at resonance with the case. Even when in an enclosed office on the fourth floor it could be heard inside offices in the adjacent office building.

There is a story (I've heard it from several sources over the years but I won't vouch for its veracity) about an early translation program that the US military commissioned, sometime in the sixties I think, that illustrates some of the problems. This program was meant to translate English to Russian and vice versa. At the demo all the higher-ups were there, typically not having a clue about the complexity or pitfalls of the task. One of them suggested that the phrase "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" be entered, translated into Russian, and the resulting phrase translated back to English. The technician did what he was told and I have visions of cabinet-sized tape drives spinning furiously for awhile until the processing was complete. Finally, the printer spat out the result. I hear the technician dropped the paper and ran away. When someone picked up the printout it said "The vodka is strong but the meat is rotten!"

Reminds me of something I wrote back around 1981. Working with the early IBM PC at the machine code level several flaws surfaced and for fun I packaged them all together in the boot sector of a 5 1/4" floppy which we put in a "break glass" box and put on the wall (There were no hard drives yet, the XT wasn't out yet). If you placed the floppy in the boot drive it would destroy the hardware in a few seconds. First, there was a bit on the original IBM display adapter (mono text only) which would lock the horizontal sweep on the standard IBM monitor forcing the horizontal output power transistor to overheat and burn out. You would see the display image collapse while the monitor would squeal while smoke (literally!) would come out the sides and back, and die with a $200 repair to fix it. Second, there were no stops on the head movement on those original floppy drives - with the right loop they would step out until the heads fell off inside the case with a pair of clunks if you had a 2 drive system. (Not a difficult repair, but you had to know what your were doing and get into the floppy drives themselves to fix it.) Finally, the speaker ran off of a shift register which could be loaded with a really nasty PWM sound and set to free run. With interrupts disabled and the CPU halted, the machine sat there smoking with a very loud nerve-rattling siren, completely dead and unable to boot. It would require major physical repairs to get it working again. The monitor would stink for weeks afterwards.

or knowing you really did get a good price on plenum cable and not some cheap pvc knockoff. Agree 100% with your assessment that despite many limitations, it will have an abundance of cheap, useful applications. Considering some of the 3rd world uses smart phones are playing in the medical field, this could only enhance the usefulness of doctors without borders.

Not perhaps by weight. I am sure sitting 12+ hours a day has or will eventually lead to other 'sitting disease' disorders. Throwing a DVT into your heart or lungs one day is just one example.

you make it sound like its hard to maintain. Not to belittle a 30lb loss in 9mos, but after 9mos of my lifestyle change (including a shift to paleo nutrition) I had lost ALL of my excess body fat. That turned out to be about 100lb from my heaviest. But, had I been heavier, I have no doubt I still would have shed every bit of excess weight, whatever that number has been. I often encourage people to take up the paleo diet because its fairly simple to maintain (avoid grains, starchy foods, legumes, and the oils derived from them for the most part) and, due to the nature of protein having a high satiation effect, effectively also reduces your consumption of food in general. If someone wants to burn fat they first have to train their body to actually USE fat. That's never going to happen if you continue to eat a lot of carbs. Carbs are the low hanging fruit of fuel for your body. As long as there is plenty of that sort of fuel laying around your body is going to use it and never use fat. In an absence of glycogen, your body will begin converting a 9cal fat gram into a 7cal ketone; which, once converted, cannot be re-absorbed as fat. You either use it or piss it away. So before you've made any other lifestyle change, you're already getting a 25% bonus to your BMR out of basic inefficiencies.

  Compound this by training your muscles to burn more fat for fuel instead of carbs and you accelerate the weight loss significantly. White, fast-twitch, muscle fibers burn glucose and cannot oxidize during use, resulting in tired sore muscles after a short stent of activity. Whereas red muscle fibers of both fast and slow twitch burn fat directly and can self-oxidize during use. The calves of an Olympic sprinter are majority white muscle fibers, whereas a Olympic marathon runner re quite the opposite where 80% of the muscles in their calves are red fibers. This can be achieved by structuring your workouts to focus more on endurance and increasing workout times than trying to first increase resistance. Enough resistance to keep your HR within the cardio/peak ranges, but once there, focus on endurance building.

isnt the One Laptop Per Child device also equipped with a hand crank to charge a li-ion battery?

patents are actually helpful in this situation. A patent has with it, exact information as to exactly how something works. Unless the MPAA bastards manage to keep patents alive longer than their current expiration dates, there wouldn't be a concern over patent rights in 100yrs.

Its my understanding that Laserdisc, the once fringe format that was usurped by DVD, differed in that, instead of a codec that recorded deviations from the previous frame, stored each and every video frame on the disc. I would think this might make for the best method to retrieve the information. To be sure, you could include the entire patent library for the laserdisc technology to ensure accurate reproduction in 100yrs time.

they were never laws, they were 'opinions' as to what meets the requirements. Just like 1998 was simply an opinion, at the time. Just like the FCC regulating VoIP, only in the last 6yrs. But never fear, once the FCC explains to the Tax-and-Spend-like-the-worlds-gonna-end members of congress how much tax revenue can be had by this new 'opinion'. It will become law just as easily. As a small business ISP who has been screwed over and over again by the major carriers, I see less down side to this than up. I literally was on a conference call with the ILEC (windstream) over slow speeds of a new customer I was turning up. Windstream had 3 or 4 execs along with engineers on the call, all claiming they did not have any idea why its slow. At one point the engineer thought he had muted myself and my client and stated, to one of their executives, that , per standing order, ALL 3rd party traffic was to run across a separate DS3 (45Mbps shared among all the other ISPs) instead of their GIGABIT fiber connections. So they got caught red handed admitting to deliberately screwing over the other ISPs, whom have no access to last-mile physical layers to the customers.

Up in verizon country they undermined the actual 1996 Telecom act that said they had to allow competing LECs access to their physical layer. They sued the FCC to ammend that it didnt apply to 'newer technologies'. So along comes FIOS service. Not only do they not allow competing carriers to order services on it, but once they install it they rip out every last inch of legacy copper to the facility, ensuring that the customer can NEVER switch to a competing LEC regardless of how badly verizon treats them.

yes they are. As a resident of this state I can assure you that my tax money is/was part of that $18million grant. I have no choice but to pay taxes, therefore I am being compelled to contribute to the erection of the place.

There are those who are actively working at making sure those skills are NOT taught: "We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills ... critical thinking skills and similar programs [which] have the purpose of challenging the student's fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority." --2012 STATE [Texas] REPUBLICAN PARTY PLATFORM. Unfortunately, these same people also control the largest school system in the country which determines the course materials used by many other school systems.

I am as shocked as you probably were.. the government rarely, if ever, lowers taxes even if they were to reduce their expenses by 50%. They would just find more shit to waste money on :-) Think about all that non-working security equipment that turned out to be vaporware for airport security. That was billions wasted for what they thought was an 'easy button'. I'm sorry but I kinda expect my government to at least be old enough and wise enough to have learned a loooong time ago that nothing in life worth having ever comes easy.

a couple hundred. btw PRI is 23 channels.. one channel is the D-channel signalling. This is how he is oversubscribing. I understand the idea of oversubscription, I run an ISP and ITSP. However, I am not taking taxpayer dollars. I am providing a service and use over subscription rations to balance the actual demand with costs. If the demand increases I am forced to increase my costs without an increase in revenue, this is the nature of the strategy. To get a CLEC license and then simply buy a PRI and oversubscribe to these rooms seems a lot shadier of a method when you are telling the FCC that you are providing more than you actually are in this situation.

its interesting that I have to charge my customers 15% of 64% yet when I look at other carrier bills like Nuvox (now Windstream) their $600/mo bill for various phone lines and phone packages; I only see a few dollars charged for USF. They are definitely cheating the system, perhaps through legal loopholes, perhaps not. Remember Adelphia? Just because the company is full of harvard business and harvard law graduates doesn't imply that they are using legal and extralegal loopholes. Sometimes they just cheat.

as far as the analogy that ATT is paying the 15%, thats not entirely accurate. Yes there might be a USF fee on my bill of $15, but I wouldnt go as far as to say if it were to go away that my ATT core charges would go up as a result. Its not coming out of their profits, they simply pass those costs on to the consumer. Ever see a Vonage bill? They lost a lawsuit to Verizon over a patent issued 20 yrs after the invention of DNS. Instead of that coming out of their profits, they charge the consumer an extra $5. However their website wont add this $5 to the price of their service when shopping around and comparing prices. I have seen first hand the way these carriers quote services. Its _amazing_ how a $400/mo PRI quote suddenly becomes $575 when you get your actual bill due to all the fees and taxes added. None of those were ever disclosed in a quote even thought they really could calculate a lot of this, at least to a rough estimate level. As long as Norlight or Paetec run around quoting $400 PRI, it will be unlikely that ATT raises their core pricing even at the demise of some of the taxes. There is still a race to present the smallest quoted price and then nickel and dime the shit out of people through hidden charges. I just dont see a big concern by them to eliminate the USF.

BTW those Federal Subscribe Line fee's go directly into their pockets and none of that is ever quoted in the price either.
http://www.fcc.gov/encyclopedi...