Very Wile E Coyote level of awareness of his surroundings. Almost expected a roadrunner in a fireman’s hat to peek in at the end.

That would have instantly turned me into a roadrunner.

Digging through the YouTube comments followed by a little further searching, yeah, apparently the basic idea is he's sorting the cards face-up/face down underneath as he fans them out near the end. A description which probably doesn't do justice to the amount of dexterity & concentration required while also keeping up the patter.

Inevitably you can also buy the technique video from the guy's website: http://kostyakimlat.com/roadrunner-cull.html

Growing up, my favorite cartoons were Tom and Jerry and the Roadrunner vs. Coyote, simply for the fact that everything was conveyed through their actions and the music. No dialog. Great commercial.

>> ^chilaxe:

Prosperity is a big part of human welfare, and if we take $10 from one person so another person can think it costs them $.50 to send a letter, many citizens will feel justified in reducing any further altruism on their part toward society.


But that's the thing, we're not "taking $10 from one person so another can person think it costs them $.50 to send a letter." We're telling everyone it costs 50 cents to send a letter, regardless of whether the actual cost is 1/10th of a cent or $10, and making sure we set the flat rate so it covers the actual costs.

Which is to day, people don't think they're engaged in altruism when they're sending a letter, they think they're buying a service with a flat rate. Just like when I get RoadRunner from Time Warner and pay a flat rate for bandwidth, I'm buying a service, I'm not engaging in altruism towards other people on the service who might use more GB of bandwidth per month than me...

More generally, I think that people should understand that paying taxes is paying for services they've been rendered while living & working here (most of which resemble insurance), not engaging in "altruism," especially if they're in denial about the services they're benefiting from.

>> ^chilaxe:
Sending books by mail was probably important in the time of the founding fathers, but nowadays people have access to the sum total of human knowledge from their homes, or they can drive or bike to somewhere that does have internet. I'd imagine most of the mailed media that now takes advantage of the reduced media rates isn't very impressive.


Ah, but does everyone have that access? For example, do rural communities all have easy, free access to internet?

I'm definitely in agreement that mail delivery is no longer filling the role the founding fathers had in mind when they put it into the Constitution. The question is, what's the right change to make to the USPS? Dismantle it and abandon its objectives, or reinvent it so it uses modern technology like the Internet to achieve its original mission?

I say the latter makes more sense than the former.

Well my question to this is, is the bandwidth actually as advertised at all hours of the day and do they guarantee it will be available at that rate at all times in the future under the terms of the agreement?

For instance, Time Warner in my area was consistently fast at all hours of the day when I first got it....much better than the DSL I had prior. And it slowly got a little slower...a few more outages a year...more "massive outages"... plus other problems unrelated to speed like them cutting off my net connection because they can't read a street address properly so they killed my net access when they installed my neighbors "business class"...that took me 2 days of calling to straighten out and total of 5 days to fix.

So the conclusion I can draw there is, his business class plus the other subscribers signing up in my loop drastically affected my bandwidth. Yet they claim higher bandwidth offerings with "Roadrunner Boost"...and I've got that...it's almost as fast as my connection was back when I first got it maybe a little better late at night.

So their claim of higher speeds is technically true, only because they've gotten slower. And the minimum speed they offer is pretty appalling although I don't remember it off the top of my head...I think it was like 125 or 250 kbps down.

Killing off non-digital television was supposed to give more bandwidth on the line for better internet speeds and better digital programming, except you have to pay for both...and the internet speeds aren't guaranteed until you step into business class. And for them to guarantee those speeds on a loop they would have to throttle residential users on the same loop.


I am not aware of DSL being improved upon. I know they offer the Fios and what not offerings through some of the phone companies, but they are not offering in this area. And you have to research them to see if they have hidden download caps or other nasty little things in the works to stick on their network to create artificial speed bumps to their own offerings.

Beyond that you'll have to direct to me to the information you speak of.

As for cell phones, I don't use data plans on them, but my parents have a property that has cell towers located on them...and I've been able to catch a couple of the guys and ask them some questions. Even without asking them...there's a screwed up little story related to these towers.

About 10 years back they got hot and heavy about putting in towers, for 3-5 years they were renting lots of land off people and installing these towers. My dad did some work for them paving the roadways, got to know one of the head guys in charge of the project. And while my information is not going to be perfect I know a few things affected their installation and their coverage.

Many of the cities and burbs wouldn't allow them to install towers that would be consider eyesores, in some cases they decorated the towers or put something on them to mask them being a tower...maybe the city name or some kind of design. Many of the "perfect" spots for towers people would not rent the land, so they had to pick imperfect places as close as they could get. So this led to problems with the coverage areas and causes some towers to bear more burden than they should, which Im taking a stab here and saying this really affects big cities network speeds. Within the last 3 years they upgraded the tower on my parents property by installing fiber landlines to the towers, presumably to speed up their network and alleviate some of the congestion.....however....the tower on the property has 2 "boxes" (equipment rooms with racks of network gear and the like) it feeds signals into...and I believe each ring or triangle of receivers transmitters is another cell phone companies signal range...so it services at least 3 networks. Meaning all 3 of those networks shares that one fiber line they installed to the tower unless they have multiple lines in the cable to be split, not very familiar with fiber cable.

Now the weird thing here is...Verizon did the majority of the tower installs I'm familiar with..as soon as they finished all of the towers were taken over by a company called "American Tower". They service the towers, you call them when you see a problem... I called them once about their air conditioner unit running all the time (it has 2 and one was running morning noon and night every time I got close enough to hear it). Two or three months later I thought I'd check to see if they fixed it, I could hear it running as I approached it...and when I got to where I could see it..it was frozen solid. This was in the Fall a year or two back, like 50 degrees or so outside with Winter coming. So they obviously don't pay very close attention to their equipment. AC failing in the summer means their shit cooks, and engineer said stuff in there is easily 100 grand worth of equipment.

So what I gather is, Verizon sold the towers, and rents from them....and now the other carriers rent from them. American Tower is in charge of maintaining the property and the building, but probably not the equipment since I see the various company engineers show up from time to time. They also provide power generators, there's a diesel powered unit that sits near these buildings and turns on from time to time.

I was also told the height of a tower limits it's usefulness. The tall towers can host more companies various signals versus the short towers. So For some reason they put in a bunch of short towers but they have limited utility and are just as ugly as the tall ones...so I dunno why in the hell they did that.


But for them to offer less congestion and higher speeds in high population areas they need more towers so they can break the area up in smaller coverage areas to limit the number of devices hitting any one tower. I have not see them put in a new tower since American Tower took over. I have seen them remove tower locations, probably due to cost of operation/replacement being high due to people hitting them with vehicles or breaking in.

In my opinion, cell phone pricing is a little better than it was but I am not happy with how Verizon handles their plans. For instance, if you want just a voice plan..no data no text. Your phone selection is terrible, I mean basic basic phones...most generally being flip phones with poor external screens and OK internal screens. If you want a better phone, you have to buy a text or data plan. Because if you buy specific types of phones, Verizon assumes you will be using that phone for what they specify that phone is. Take the EnV line of phones, I hate texting, but I like having the keyboard for typing in contacts and just general moderate to heavy usage it's easier to use than a flip phone keying in alternative. If I wanted that phone, I need a texting plan. If you get into smart phones you need a data plan...you can't activate one on your account without the plan. I don't know if the phones need the data plan to even function or not, but texting phones don't need texting plans to function...that's Verizon's plan offerings to maximize their earnings.

And texting in general is cheaper to the phone company than any voice call will ever be. Except texting is almost universally in ADDITION to voice packages....yet texting costs them very little in transfer costs compared to transmitting voice.

I hope some company out there is actually trying to implement new technologies and improve transfer speeds and push down prices. But if they are, they are taking their sweet time doing so...because if it was a big push...the other companies would have to react to that. Right now the only thing I see them all doing is trying to push through contract changes, shutting down government implement ISPs, and influencing laws that help keep us in the stone age.


>> ^deathcow:

> Everything except their networks seems to increase in size and capability, which is an odd thing.
All the ISP's I'm aware of have RADICALLY increased bandwidth and package offerings. It's called survival.

It is working on three PCs at work right now. I hope it works at home too. So weird! What ISPs do you guys used? I used RoadRunner with OpenDNS, my friend's Verizon FIOS (don't know what DNS he uses), and my employer's DNS.

The appeal of the Wiley Coyote shorts is the desire to actually see him NAIL that smarmy little blue git. If he actually ever accomplished this objective, the appeal would rapidly dissappate. So the whole Wiley/Roadrunner dynamic is one gigantic $%&@tease, essentially. We watch hoping he will succeed, yet knowing that he never will.

This was a short short, but one of the few worthy Loony Toon entries in the last 20+ years. "Space Jam" sucked so hard that it created a singularity. "Back in Action" was only slightly less sucky. It's long overdue for the Toons to get back to their roots, and this nails it.

Note to the WB. Stop trying to make feature-length & 30 minute shows out of characters & concepts that are built for 4-10 minute comedy blitzes. It doesn't work. It never will.

Loved the Coyote, didn't like the roadrunner as much. Not too shabby overall, though.

Can Coco do RoadRunner Internet service too?

6 more comments have been lost in the ether at this killed duplicate.

5 more comments have been lost in the ether at this killed duplicate.

Wow that API is pretty slick. With like 20 seconds of regex text editting I was able to grab the last 100 pages accessed. I could even grep for /search/ or whatever.

http://videosift.com/video/Zero-Punctuation-MadWorld [7]
http://videosift.com/video/Playing-With-Nitroglycerin [4]
http://videosift.com/video/Crazy-Foosball-Skills [4]
http://videosift.com/video/We-Didn-t-Start-the-Flame-War [3]
http://videosift.com/video/Mike-Tyson-Being-Mike-Tyson-His-Ridiculous-Quotes [3]
http://videosift.com/video/Porn-Star-Blows-State-Trooper [3]
http://videosift.com/video/The-God-Who-Wasnt-There-2005-documentary-film [3]
http://videosift.com/video/2-British-police-officers-get-pwned-by-cameraman [2]
http://videosift.com/video/Elevated-Procedural-realtime-terrain-demo [2]
http://videosift.com/video/Fastest-Computer-in-the-World-Project-Roadrunner [2]
http://videosift.com/video/Short-Documentary-on-the-Creation-Museum [2]
http://videosift.com/video/SiCKO-Full-Documentary [2]
http://videosift.com/video/Billy-Joels-video-for-We-Didnt-Start-the-Fire [2]
http://videosift.com/video/If-only-I-had-a-gun [2]
http://videosift.com/video/Star-Wars-The-TV-Series-Intro [2]
http://videosift.com/video/Susan-Boyle-Singer-Britains-Got-Talent-2009 [2]
http://videosift.com/video/Top-Gear-Communist-Cars [2]
http://videosift.com/video/You-Wouldnt-Invade-Poland-So-Why-Is-It-OK-To-Download [2]
http://videosift.com/video/Doctors-Find-Small-Fir-Tree-Growing-in-Man-s-Lung [2]
http://videosift.com/video/Unintentionally-disturbing-and-hilarious-ad-Mr-Bucket [2]
http://videosift.com/video/Zero-Punctuation-Grand-Theft-Auto-Chinatown-Wars [2]
http://videosift.com/video/Google-SketchUp-7-adds-dynamic-components [1]
http://videosift.com/video/Elderly-Chinese-Couple-and-Their-Unwanted-Orphans [1]
http://videosift.com/video/BillO-is-Pissed-at-Spain [1]
http://videosift.com/video/The-Ascent-of-Man-5-Music-of-the-Spheres [1]
http://videosift.com/video/Wal-Mart-The-High-cost-of-low-price [1]
http://videosift.com/video/Cat-Found-Prank [1]
http://videosift.com/video/Skydiving-instructor-shows-how-it-s-done-in-a-wind-tunnel [1]
http://videosift.com/video/Fuck-The-Annotated-Documentary [1]
http://videosift.com/video/PG-Porn-Squeel-Happy-Whores [1]
http://videosift.com/video/Meet-Egypts-Strongest-Man [1]
http://videosift.com/video/Locals-crossing-the-Mekong-River-in-Yunnan-by-cable [1]
http://videosift.com/video/Whos-Nailin-Paylin-The-Hustlers-Palin-porn-flick [1]
http://videosift.com/video/Weird-Sea-Creature-Caught-in-Algeria-1 [1]
http://videosift.com/video/Ursula-Martinez-nothing-up-her-sleeve [1]
http://videosift.com/video/Jimmy-Stewart-Reads-Beau-A-Poem-About-A-Dog [1]
http://videosift.com/video/Nitro-Circus-Getting-Launched-Off-The-Blob [1]
http://videosift.com/video/Horizon-Supermassive-Black-Holes-2000-space-documentary [1]
http://videosift.com/video/Will-Ferrell-SNL-Harry-Carry [1]
http://videosift.com/video/How-to-respond-when-a-girl-says-she-has-a-boyfriend-1 [1]
http://videosift.com/video/Domino-s-employees-fired-over-YouTube-videos [1]
http://videosift.com/video/Christopher-Hitchens-Hells-Angel-Mother-Teresa [1]
http://videosift.com/video/Laptop-Hunters-Homeless-Frank [1]
http://videosift.com/video/Who-s-that-Pokemon-IT-S-GIRUGAMESH [1]
http://videosift.com/video/Obama-is-a-Fascist-Why [1]
http://videosift.com/video/Hunter-S-Thompson-Aspen-Sheriff-Election-1970 [1]
http://videosift.com/video/Great-white-sharks-feeding-on-seals-1 [1]
http://videosift.com/video/Lick-My-Baby-Back-Behind [1]
http://videosift.com/video/The-Life-of-Buddha-BBC-Documentary-50-min [1]
http://videosift.com/video/Never-Eat-At-Domino-s-Again-Disgusting [1]
http://videosift.com/video/Felix-s-Machines [1]
http://videosift.com/video/Smelcome-to-You-Announcer-Fail [1]
http://videosift.com/video/The-Girl-In-The-Window-Horrific-Discovery-Of-Feral-Girl [1]

>> ^Drachen_Jager:
No, sail boats and Ice 'sailors' can go faster than the wind but not DOWNWIND.


"not downwind" -> if you mean:
1. "icesailors can not go dead downwind in a STRAIGHT LINE faster than the wind": than I fully agree with you
2. "ice-sailor can not go faster than the wind downwind VMG-wise" (i.e. they can NOT catch up with the wind downwind or with a balloon just drifting with the wind by zigzagging downwind), than you should reconsider or ask some of those guys. That's a fact!

Let me know what your position is on point (2).

If you don't agree on point (2), than I'm not going to bother you any further. ;-)
But if you agree on point (2), than that should be a good basis to believe that the trolley concept could work.

BTW, I don't think I need to specify how many physics classes I went through, not sure if it is relevant at all here, but I can safely say it's more than what you currently think. No worry! ;-)
Let me know if all your physics courses allow you to see where this guy might have gone wrong: http://home.roadrunner.com/~tadhurst/DWFTTW.htm