Sip

You're a racist man ... you're a racist

On the contrary ... I wish I knew 1/10 of some of the stuff he knows. The ass kicking I am due to administer to him (if you hear references to that) is out of pure respect. It all started as a means for proving that he "exists". Then it just went downhill from there.

Yes but this was a surface mount connector with one of those tiny ribbon cables going to it. Water had gone in there while the laptop was on (rain) and "arced" a couple of the wires causing the ribbon to burn and melt. I had to attach a wire on to the connector to bypass the ribbon.

Yes please. Now where did I put the ketchup

Believe it or not, I have soldered a connector that was burnt (water damage) inside a T-series sony laptop. It is by faaaaaaaaar the most difficult thing I have ever done (electronics wise) and I had to do it using a huge magnifying glass. The tip on my soldering iron was at least 5x larger than the connector pin. I somehow manged to get the wire to stick by heating the tip and touching it to the board. Then I had to pour glue on top of it to keep it there until I could boot up and copy the files I needed. The laptop hasn't worked since (but I got the files) But ya, a USB connector should be managable with enough care. Anything smaller and I'd say fooooooget about it.

I would vote for planet of the apes.

That's a block of cheese (cheese hat) and the shirt says "Favre" as in Brett Favre the Quarterback of the Green Bay packers ... he is a God here in Wisconsin and someone made that picture of me telling me I had officially become a "cheese head" (a nickname for Wisconsinites) after I moved here. Yes, cheesehead IS an actual race for you non believers.

Try this if you use winamp. It's free

Hmmmm ... probably not ... I thought it was a plastic holder that was broken and wouldn't hold the metal connector so that's why I suggested jb weld or some sort of epoxy ... to reinforce the plastic. When with what you describe, I'd say soldering it back seems like the best option ... it's hard to believe there is no way to open it up but I'm sure you're right. I don't know ... it's tough to say without seeing it. But if you go to any store that has glue, they usually have those "dual" glues ... that come in 2 separate containers that you mix together. They are usually very tough stuff. You can try jb weld but try not to get it on the connector. Tough call.

Fill the area around it with super glue? Or some JB Weld. That's if all the connections are ok and all that's damaged is the casing. If you are good with soldering, then you can open it up and resolder any broken connectors. Then cover it with super glue or JB Weld or any of those "2 container" type glues that you mix together to make an epoxy glue.

Ok it had been a while since I had laughed this hard but that just did it.

"Googoori Magoori" ? ... why does that sound like a made-up name?

Well, you're a MAC guy aren't you? So maybe you can try retroplayer out and see how you like it

Vava, by "open minded" I think he meant for everyone to be open minded to agree with him.

Who's twisting things around now?

That is scrool! It's scary and cool at the same time.

Vava, sniffing wireless packets in an open network is TRIVIAL. Heck Ethereal will even break down the packets for you and let you see everything from mac address and source/dest IP to protocol info and data! So not only do you get to see what websites someone is surfing, you can also see what it is they are actually looking at without much effort. Now granted someone who has trouble using Ms Word won't figure this out ... but it is part of homework #1 in my intro to networking class The other caveat is sometimes ethereal has problems in windows and some NICs so being a linux user also helps in making it easier. I'd say an above average teen with enough free time and an internet connection (duh!) could easily figure all this out on her own. But I agree with you that sniffing wired traffic from wireless is not that easy. Also, although WEP can be broken, it is definitely better than nothing. But for that, you can take a look at airsnort.

Yes but you can't compare those bit rates directly as it's like comparing apples to oranges. On a CD, the data is stored in raw form. MP3s compress the data like crazy and throw away a lot of stuff. So a 320 Kbps mp3 can potentially store a LOT more useful audio information than just a raw data stream. As an example, take DVDs for example (mpeg-2). The dolby digital surround sound (5.1) data stream is something like 448 Kbps which is much less than a raw CD data rate. But I doubt anyone would argue that CDs sound better than DVDs (well, except for Mr Proud).

At UCLA, especially in computer science, that would typically split a 30 person class into groups of 1, 1, 1, and 27 Now if he said: Chinese/Taiwanese, Indian/Pakistani, Vietnamese/Philipino, and the rest, then there might be a more even split.

That's why I asked for your exact definition of "quality" as I had a feeling that was what was making you uncomfortable. Once we have that in place, now we can come to an agreement. So yah, given that definition, and given that the CD audio is the source (I think you have been making that assumption), I agree with you.

I just looked up the table of contents here. I've got tons of books on combinatorial problems and sets and relations etc. But I don't have that specific book. Have you had an algorithms course before? If so, chapter 1 should be fairly trivial. If not, then I would definitely recommend reading up on "matching" and the "Kanpsack" examples they put in there. As far as chapter 2, ANY book with an intro on sets and set relations should do the trick ... so just go to either the library or the book store and look at any discrete math book if you can't get your hands on this specific book.

Well, considering people break top notch security measures and firewalls, ANYTHING is possible when it comes to things like this. However, most routers typically block access into their internals if they are set up properly. They also typically don't broadcast things going on the "wires" over the wireless. So that's why it's not a trivial thing to just sit there on the wireless and evesdrop on the wired communication in the router. Now it MAY be possible for an attacker eavesdropping on the wireless to get to learn the password of the router and go in there and change settings around (if the user logs into the router wirelessly to change settings, thereby broadcasting the password). But it's not as easy as just sitting there and looking at the wireless communication that ANYONE can do without much advanced knowledge of security and breaking into things. The information about what sites you are surfing are literally out there in the open for anyone to see when using an open wireless network.

Yyyyyyyyyyup But only if they are using wireless also. If they have a PC wired to the router, then it's not often that easy to spy on them. But if they are surfing wirelessly on open net like that, then you can get to see all the sites they visit Of course the other way it works too ... they can get to see everything you do in their network. They could even intercept and record ALL your transmissions. You shouldn't worry too much if you are surfing on an encrypted website though (like doing online banking). But things like instant messages and emails are typically NOT encrypted so they can get to see ALL of that.

By the way, compressing to mp3 might act as sort of a low pass filter ... since you lose a lot of the high frequency stuff, it is entirely possible in my opinion to encode an audio source to mp3 and end up with something "higher quality" than the source. But before we go down this path of arguing over quality, we first have to agree on what "quality" means... is it the information content, the subjective "feel" of the audio, the closeness of the signal to the original source, etc etc etc.

ONCE AGAIN ... WHERE did I say that regarding MP3s? Read what I have said carefully (both times above). I said mp3 files can have higher quality than CD given a high enough bit rate. Do you understand my point now? I did not say a 256Kbps mp3 compression of an audio cd original will make it sound better