While this isn't the big change that we are hoping for, it's a step in the right direction. Little by little is the way that our legal system works on social issues like this one and the tide is finally turning.
What was clarified in this decision is that vendors don't have the right to control the downstream licensees of their patents, and the first sale doctrine was reaffirmed.
This will change the way that EULAs are interpreted in the future. Specifically, any restrictions against resale or limiting the uses the product can be used for will no longer be valid.
The stated facts - a professional politician watching over the voting doesn't know how to tell if any fraud is happening - tell the whole tale.
The real issue is that the majority of electronic voting machines have been designed to be as unverifiable as possible. No paper trail, no way to verify the operating system or recorded vote counts. These machines have been cracked in the past and it's virtually certain to happen again - and the people operating the polls won't know what happened unless they're the ones perpetrating the fraud.
Something else that I find illuminating: the election judge asking this question is a Republican. Curious, don't you think?
Are these stock quotes actually real time, or are they delayed 3 hours? There's lots of places to get stock quotes but unless you're getting them directly from a broker or the stock exchange they're delayed.
The whole concept of "intellectual property" was created out of nothing. For many years we've had trademarks, patents, and copyrights; these protected the various creative activities and allowed the creators to reap the profit of their labors and at the same time allow these labors to enter the public domain where they'd enrich society as a whole.
But corporate interests have been hard at work. Many creative artists no longer own what they produce; the new improved laws reduce their products to nothing more than "work for hire" for their corporate masters. The creators don't reap the profit of their labors anymore. And there's also been changes in the laws that extend the protections for these creators long, long beyond what was a fair exchange between the creator's interests and the public interest.
It's not enough that the whole "protect creators, protect the public interest" system has been perverted in the name of corporate profit. To further enrich themselves, they hired marketing and public relations experts. The false concept of "intellectual property" was created and used to justify even more perversions of our legal system. You can only infringe a copyright - but if you can call it property then you can say that someone is stealing your property. Bring on the draconian criminal penalties and secure the corporate interests from having to compete in the modern net-connected world.
Using music as an example: Record companies and their trade associations file lawsuits against their customers by the thousands to protect their copyrights. Those people didn't write or perform any music; where did they get their copyrights from? They say they're doing this to protect the artists - but those artists aren't getting much (if any) of the profits from their creative works. The real creators don't even own what they create; the copyrights were "stolen" by the record companies and the new improved laws mean they won't have to release the music into the public domain for a very, very long time (if ever).
The motion picture studios have been watching and they're starting to play the same games.
Note well: none of this is to protect the artists. It's to protect corporate profits, pure and simple. As long as they can get away with using "intellectual property" to get lawmakers to further protect their profit margins they will. But at the end of the day it's still nothing more than a phrase that means less than nothing. Ideas are not property; never have been, never will.
They're going to distinguish an individual based on images with 256 to 1024 bits of data?
I guess nobody there thought to do the math before making these claims. This story probably shouldn't have made it to the front page; it's less than useful.
Not everyone thinks this is a good idea
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Big Rigs Go High Tech
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· Score: 3, Interesting
As more and more high-tech monitoring equipment gets loaded into "big rigs" the drivers get more and more unhappy. All arguments about efficiency and protecting against hijacking aside, how would you like it if your employer was monitoring every movement, every moment, your position at any time - all day, every day. Even things like missing a gear change; imagine getting a message later asking you why you let your RPM exceed corporate limits.
I worked for a large (LARGE) national trucking corporation for seven years in their IT department. Occasionally, I'd go to the terminals to talk with dispatchers / drivers to see how IT could make their jobs easier or faster. What I heard a lot about was how much they hated the invisible boss watching over their shoulder, monitoring every little detail of their workday and questioning them about anything that wasn't according to the way the corporation wanted it to be. "Why did you stop at the rest area off of 101 for 15 minutes at 12:33 PM on August 3?" "I needed to take a leak" "It shouldn't have taken you 15 minutes to take a leak" - and you can imagine where it goes from there.
Does all this monitoring and control increase efficiency and reduce costs? That's open to debate; while it may cut out some unscheduled downtime, it also cuts out some unscheduled overtime and / or supra-legal speeds. Net effect at the bottom line? Who knows, but it's mighty close to a wash. Where the real difference is - the drivers attitude about their job. They used to be "captain of their ship", piloting their load of valuable cargo to its destination - using the routes and methods that their years of experience had shown to be best. Now they're just cogs in the machine; follow the route you're given, operate the tractor according to corporate policy - and we're going to monitor you carefully to make sure you do - and punish you for every transgression. How can you take pride in your job under those conditions? Very dehumanizing and it just gets worse year after year. Each year the corporate overlords refine their expectations of what it takes to operate a truck at maximum efficiency.
Ultimately, what the corporation is thinking about is how much they pay those drivers - and how they could reduce that expense. Refining the task of "drive a truck" to the point where it's just a matter of following instructions is the first step. Once they've achieved that, there'll be no more need for those highly experienced drivers - someone with a new commercial license could do the same job at about one third the salary. This would cut those labor expenses and allow the corporation to post increased profits.
But how would you feel about no longer being able to assume that those big trucks are being driven by professional drivers. How would you feel to know that 80,000 pounds of freight in the lane next to you is being driven by a dropout that's talking on his cell phone?
This isn't idle speculation - this is the way things have been going for quite a few years now. All that's changed is the price of fuel; as that climbs, the transportation companies are faced with a hard choice - cut expenses to compensate or raise their rates. Raising the rates enough to cover the new improved cost of fuel would chase away a substantial number of customers so the pressure is on to cut labor expenses. After numerous reorganizations and cuts it's now the drivers turn on the hot seat. Next time you see one on the road, give him a smile and a wave. Those guys work long hours for not a lot of money and do all they can to keep everyone around them on the roads safe. Everything you buy - EVERYTHING - got to you in the back of a big rig. Think about the people who have dedicated their lives to making sure your store has an adequate supply of canned beer and what's being done to them in the name of "increased efficiency" and tip your hat; these guys deserve your gratitude.
Microsoft is still working on a way to take Yahoo! over. Carl Icann is working to replace the Yahoo! board of directors as we speak.
So, assuming that the story is true - how, exactly, does Microsoft propose to pay people for searching / purchasing. Is this "pay" going to come in the mail as a check, or is it going to be a discount on purchases - or is it going to be a promise to pay you somehow sometime in the future?
I'm tempted to say something about "trust" and "Microsoft" here, but am wary of the Microsoft lovers out there just waiting to down-mod this post.
Moody's were a part of the substandard financing disaster that's led to the current (arguable) recession. Rather than face the music for their (maybe fraudulent) misrepresentations they decided to blame it on "a coding error".
They're depending on us believing their media stories to escape responsibility; anyone who thinks about this situation would quickly realize that for a company full of financial analysts to not realize that an error of this magnitude was happening - well, it beggars the imagination.
What almost certainly happened is that they played the same game that so many other financial institutions did during the real estate bubble. But when the bills came due, they chose to deny responsibility and pass the blame on to someone else. The real crime here is that they'll be allowed to get away with this...
Rather than spend lots of money on a technical "solution" that's almost certainly doomed to fail, how about structuring your life so that it's hard for things to get lost?
Most effective first step: clean up. Lost items are hard to see when they're mixed in with random clutter. Do whatever is necessary to get everything "put away"; more storage locations, less stuff, pick the stuff up and put it away. Imagine trying to find a pair of pliers in an empty room - now imagine trying to find the same pair of pliers in a child's bedroom.
Organization can help a lot too. Items that travel usually don't just make one hop. The sooner you notice they're gone, the easier it'll be to retrieve them. Things like a pegboard on the wall with the shapes of all the tools painted on it; sure, it might look a bit "anal" but it makes it very easy to glance at the wall and see that the pliers aren't there. You could use various organizational techniques to accomplish the same goal - the "win" here is that you can almost see things leave so you can easily find them - and notice that they're gone and start your search before you actually need the item. Much better to chase that adjustable wrench today rather than in three weeks when the water faucet springs a leak.
And communication is also a great tool - especially if there's children involved. Those "press to talk" cell phones are just about perfect for this. After the kids have been embarrassed by Dad asking about lost tools a few times they'll adjust their behavior.
And finally - put this stuff in its proper perspective. On the scale of big things in life; marriage, children, happiness - well, that lost hammer just isn't very important. Some may suggest that a person who is considering spending thousands of dollars to track his missing tools (that are worth maybe a hundred, tops) may have some "issues". Your mileage may vary...
The PC market has developed some problems over the last few years. These are causing people to look at Apple for better solutions. Some problems:
"Race to the bottom" pricing leads to shoddy PC products. The HP laptop I'm using right now has had two hardware failures in the last year; this kind of experience isn't uncommon these days.
PC operating systems are awkward at best, user hostile at worst. Linux isn't ready to be accepted by the common man; Vista is - well, Vista isn't a very attractive option either.
While this is going on, Apple has introduced a huge number of people to its products via the Ipod and Itunes. They work well, look nice, and operate reliably. That's a good recommendation for Apple as a company - then the Iphone took the world by storm and cemented Apple's image as the "better than anyone else" company.
When this machine craps out for good, it's quite likely to be replaced by a Mac. They're not perfect, but they can't be any worse than this PC / Microsoft junk.
Yes, your cell phone does indeed transmit an identification signal - one that can be positively identified. That's fundamental to the way cell phone networks work - and the cell phone providers can easily link the cell phone's ID to your account details. Various law enforcement agencies have been making use of this for many years already.
What's changed is that now the technology is available for corporations to access your cell phone's broadcasts and use that to determine your movements. It's pretty certain that they can read the ID from your phone - and if they're not linking it to your personal profile already it's just a matter of time until they do. When your cell phone broadcasts ID from the checkout counter as they're running your credit card - gotcha!
Would these corporate watchers reveal what they're doing? Not likely at all; they'd be much more likely to keep it a deep dark secret for as long as they can. It's the perfect pretext for gathering personal data - they've got a business relationship with you and they're just updating their internal records, you know.
The only thing about this whole mess that surprises me is how many people are concerned about how RFID may be used to track them - but they're completely overlooking that cell phone that they carry with them everywhere they go.
Tip for those who don't want to be tracked: Leave the cell phone at home.
Touch screens are nothing new; I was working with this technology back in the 70's. What's changed is the processor power and UI technology that has made touch screens compellingly useful.
There are some applications where they provide the most functional user interface; Apple uses them to great advantage on their iPhone and iPod Touch. It allows rich user interaction on a pocket sized device; no room there for a keyboard or fancy set of buttons. They're not so useful on something like a laptop; there's a keyboard that's much more useful - and the software to make any kind of use of a laptop touch screen is yet to be developed.
Something tells me that history will repeat itself again. Someone will create a workable touch screen interface for general purpose computers, then a major software company will "borrow" the idea and popularize it. The innovators won't get a dime - or any recognition - but the technology will finally break through to the general public.
This is quite the impressive machine they're talking about. But what they don't seem to cover very well are the legitimate uses for such a device. Just because they call "monitoring your communications" deep packet inspection doesn't make it right.
It looks like a disaster in a box to me: not only does it allow anyone with the price of the machine to monitor and inspect each and every packet you exchange, it also is capable of destroying the legal protections that ISPs currently enjoy.
The ISPs are treated like common carriers and are exempt from many liabilities because they carry all traffic equally and don't know or control the content of that traffic. Now that they're insisting that they need to "prioritize" some traffic at the expense of others, monitor and drop traffic because of its content, and are installing machines like these that further refine their ability to monitor and control what traffic you'll be allowed to transmit - well, their "safe harbor" exemptions are based on them not doing any of this.
Just the existence of this machine will be the undoing of many...
This kind of stupid design is why we have so many security problems these days. I'm behind a firewall (aren't you?) and it's configured to deny everything except what is explicitly allowed. So when this program (if I were to buy it) tried to contact its server it'd fail, and when I contacted their support people they'd tell me to disable the firewall.
No, I don't think so. I'm not going to disable the firewall, nor am I going to punch holes in it for every misbegotten piece of software that wants to open a network connection for some non-essential purpose.
For those who don't secure their network - they'll have another non-essential port open and listening for a message from some authorization server somewhere. Systems running these games will be easy to detect and if the developers did their usual "adequate" job there'll be exploits available to take advantage of the flaws.
If nothing else, you can expect some griefer to send "unauthorized" messages to shut down your copy of the game.
So here's what I've decided to do: I'm not going to buy their games. Their price is just too high...
Must be a slow news day for this kind of astroturf to bubble to the top. Notice how carefully they count how many people in each country had their data stolen and stored on this server. Also notice how many of those people these security folks notified of the data breach. Yup, exactly zero.
So they're not trying to help at all. What they're trying to do is sell their services and using this pseudo-news article to do it. Shame on them.
You can find 12 volt versions of "normal" incandescent bulbs at camper / trailer supply houses as well as 12 volt florescent fixtures. There's also a very wide range of automotive lamps and fixtures that run on 12 volts.
Run these on their own completely separate circuit; you can use regular 12 volt batteries as your energy storage and charge the batteries with solar cells or a automotive alternator driven by some kind of alternate energy (steam? water wheel? windmill?) or any combination thereof. If you have multiple generators be sure to electronically isolate their outputs; big diodes are the usual solution.
If no alternate energy is available and you need lights then a common battery charger will take care of your needs. If your house was wired to "standard" then your overhead lighting is probably already on a separate circuit of its own; this makes it even easier.
There you go; by using commonly available items and starting small you can start generating your own power on a budget. A few hundred watts of lights goes a long way...
This isn't a pinhole camera - it's a giant diffraction grating that acts as a lens. What I can't figure out is how they're going to keep the "lens" accurate; very small bumps / wrinkles in the foil would disrupt the operation of the lens, so it'd have to be kept flat (or curved to a specific radius) constantly. That's going to be very difficult to do.
This looks good on the drawing board but making a real-world example is going to require some very fancy engineering. Building larger scale structures in space isn't as easy as many think; there's gravitational gradients, solar wind and more out there. Forces that are tiny - but when these tiny forces are applied (unevenly) to a large structure the total forces can be very impressive (and destructive).
If you're going to add this address space to your firewall or block it at the router - consider that this rogue outfit is likely to be taken down soon, and that address space may then be assigned to a legitimate operation. There's not an unlimited number of addresses left in IPv4 you know.
What's been happening for years now is well-meaning admins blocking various IP addresses / blocks and/or domain names. Their motives are good, but after the address or domain name is blocked they almost never go back and recheck to see if the block is still needed. What this leads to over time are holes in the address space that can't be used, awkward or no routes to some addresses from some other addresses, etc. Especially in this time of zombie machines; blackhole that IP address and you've knocked some individual off line - but you've done nothing to reduce the amount of spam / viruses / worms / etc.
This is what killed ORBS and other services of that type. Easy to add domains / addresses to the blocklist, but difficult to remove them. Eventually the list becomes useless...
Much better solution: make an example out of the people who are squatting on this netblock. Break out the pitchforks and torches...
The winner of a major election will receive large amounts of money and power. Not just the salary for the position; there's a whole gravy train of "perks" that come along with the job. There may be a very few candidates that are actually only interested in making a positive change in our society - but those folks are very, very rare. Politics attracts greed; that's the way it's always been.
So what would these candidates do to secure a place in this lucrative game? Accuse and defame their opponents? Check. Launder money and hide assets? Check. Conceal conflicts of interest? Check. Break the law or violate the constitution? No problem.
I don't think anyone here imagines that these candidates are not interested in each and every vote that they can get. Yet at the same time, these electronic voting machines are not accurate - for whatever reason, they don't count votes accurately. The big question here is - if the machines aren't counting right and the candidates don't seem to care about it - what's really going on?
That's a very troubling problem. Greedy politicians trying to get aboard the gravy train and the vote counting machine which determines if they get elected or not is incapable of accurately counting the votes. I don't see it as a partisan issue; none of the candidates are standing up and pointing a finger at the defective voting machines. Not the Democrats, not the Republicans, not even the Independents. Given the candidate's strong need to get elected, what would it take to get them to ignore the voting machine problem? That's the real story - there's a much larger issue being hidden here.
Lawyers have enough on their plate keeping up on the changes in the law - it's not an easy job. They don't have the time to find, install, configure, jump through hoops, etc.
If it was simple to install and use and guaranteed secure - then they just might consider using it.
The time-honored method of turning sugars into ethanol is to ferment the sugars; the yeast culture will excrete ethanol until they perish in their waste products at about 7% ethanol.
Then you just distill it to concentrate the ethanol. You'd probably have to make two or three passes through the still to get it up to E85 level.
There's a couple of fairly significant problems with this scheme, though. One is the energy that's used to operate the still; where does that come from, how much does it cost? And the other one - and one that'll be very difficult to overcome - is that ethanol is the stuff we drink. Dilute ethanol with distilled water at about 50/50 and you get some so-so vodka. Add this or that flavor and you've got a party.
The BATF isn't going to like this one little bit. Liquor taxes are an important source of revenue; they'll insist that you comply with their bureaucratic regulations if you're going to make any kind of product that contains ethanol.
And if this magic box will produce 170 proof at $2 per gallon - how much of that is going in the car and how much will be going into mixed drinks? Imagine the parties; gallons and gallons of alcohol and more being produced in every neighborhood every day. I suspect the law of unintended consequences is going to kick in on this one...
I worked on pinball machines back in my younger days; some of them were amazing assemblages of all kinds of custom relays. Thousands of relay and switch contacts - and even one bad one would cause weird and amazing malfunctions.
Just keeping them clean inside and fresh rubber on the pegs (much less a set of good light bulbs) took a significant amount of time; the maintenance expense on these games is what killed them. For the same price you could get an electronic game that would run for years without problem.
Beaming power via microwaves has been suggested many times over the years - and it's still not a good idea.
Firstly, it's horribly inefficient. There are significant losses over the signal path that hand waving won't make go away. And then there's the real show-stopper: high power microwave beams would be a hazard to aviation, shipping, or anything or anyone else who got in the way.
There'd be enough scattering of the beam to spread the danger around. Sure, this technology is possible - but there just don't seem to be any practical applications for it. Wire is much more efficient and airmen have a chance to see and avoid it. They'd never know that microwave beam was there until they entered it.
Beaming power in from space is a perennial favorite - but nobody ever seems to be able to get around the atmospheric effects. And I'd prefer to not have any randomly scattered ionizing radiation impinging on my home, thanks.
This plan is custom designed for keeping your citizens under control. Monitor your email, phone calls, and snail mail. All in the name of preventing terrorism, saving the children, preventing crime or whatever.
That's what they say anyway - and it might even be what they really mean. But the uses of this technology will expand and it's just a matter of time until what the monitors are looking for are "undesirable elements" as defined by the administration in power.
Imagine what J. Edgar Hoover would have done with this ability. How about Richard Nixon; breaking into the DNC to gather information got him in trouble - if he could have accomplished the same thing with a wiretap or two do you think he'd have hesitated?
Our Founding Fathers put limits on what government could do, insured the privacy of private spaces and generally did a pretty good job of creating a system that would resist the abuses of a power mad wanna-be dictator. It's sad to see these protections being dismantled; history is being ignored and it's going to repeat itself like it or not.
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What was clarified in this decision is that vendors don't have the right to control the downstream licensees of their patents, and the first sale doctrine was reaffirmed.
This will change the way that EULAs are interpreted in the future. Specifically, any restrictions against resale or limiting the uses the product can be used for will no longer be valid.
The real issue is that the majority of electronic voting machines have been designed to be as unverifiable as possible. No paper trail, no way to verify the operating system or recorded vote counts. These machines have been cracked in the past and it's virtually certain to happen again - and the people operating the polls won't know what happened unless they're the ones perpetrating the fraud.
Something else that I find illuminating: the election judge asking this question is a Republican. Curious, don't you think?
Are these stock quotes actually real time, or are they delayed 3 hours? There's lots of places to get stock quotes but unless you're getting them directly from a broker or the stock exchange they're delayed.
But corporate interests have been hard at work. Many creative artists no longer own what they produce; the new improved laws reduce their products to nothing more than "work for hire" for their corporate masters. The creators don't reap the profit of their labors anymore. And there's also been changes in the laws that extend the protections for these creators long, long beyond what was a fair exchange between the creator's interests and the public interest.
It's not enough that the whole "protect creators, protect the public interest" system has been perverted in the name of corporate profit. To further enrich themselves, they hired marketing and public relations experts. The false concept of "intellectual property" was created and used to justify even more perversions of our legal system. You can only infringe a copyright - but if you can call it property then you can say that someone is stealing your property. Bring on the draconian criminal penalties and secure the corporate interests from having to compete in the modern net-connected world.
Using music as an example: Record companies and their trade associations file lawsuits against their customers by the thousands to protect their copyrights. Those people didn't write or perform any music; where did they get their copyrights from? They say they're doing this to protect the artists - but those artists aren't getting much (if any) of the profits from their creative works. The real creators don't even own what they create; the copyrights were "stolen" by the record companies and the new improved laws mean they won't have to release the music into the public domain for a very, very long time (if ever).
The motion picture studios have been watching and they're starting to play the same games.
Note well: none of this is to protect the artists. It's to protect corporate profits, pure and simple. As long as they can get away with using "intellectual property" to get lawmakers to further protect their profit margins they will. But at the end of the day it's still nothing more than a phrase that means less than nothing. Ideas are not property; never have been, never will.
I guess nobody there thought to do the math before making these claims. This story probably shouldn't have made it to the front page; it's less than useful.
I worked for a large (LARGE) national trucking corporation for seven years in their IT department. Occasionally, I'd go to the terminals to talk with dispatchers / drivers to see how IT could make their jobs easier or faster. What I heard a lot about was how much they hated the invisible boss watching over their shoulder, monitoring every little detail of their workday and questioning them about anything that wasn't according to the way the corporation wanted it to be. "Why did you stop at the rest area off of 101 for 15 minutes at 12:33 PM on August 3?" "I needed to take a leak" "It shouldn't have taken you 15 minutes to take a leak" - and you can imagine where it goes from there.
Does all this monitoring and control increase efficiency and reduce costs? That's open to debate; while it may cut out some unscheduled downtime, it also cuts out some unscheduled overtime and / or supra-legal speeds. Net effect at the bottom line? Who knows, but it's mighty close to a wash. Where the real difference is - the drivers attitude about their job. They used to be "captain of their ship", piloting their load of valuable cargo to its destination - using the routes and methods that their years of experience had shown to be best. Now they're just cogs in the machine; follow the route you're given, operate the tractor according to corporate policy - and we're going to monitor you carefully to make sure you do - and punish you for every transgression. How can you take pride in your job under those conditions? Very dehumanizing and it just gets worse year after year. Each year the corporate overlords refine their expectations of what it takes to operate a truck at maximum efficiency.
Ultimately, what the corporation is thinking about is how much they pay those drivers - and how they could reduce that expense. Refining the task of "drive a truck" to the point where it's just a matter of following instructions is the first step. Once they've achieved that, there'll be no more need for those highly experienced drivers - someone with a new commercial license could do the same job at about one third the salary. This would cut those labor expenses and allow the corporation to post increased profits.
But how would you feel about no longer being able to assume that those big trucks are being driven by professional drivers. How would you feel to know that 80,000 pounds of freight in the lane next to you is being driven by a dropout that's talking on his cell phone?
This isn't idle speculation - this is the way things have been going for quite a few years now. All that's changed is the price of fuel; as that climbs, the transportation companies are faced with a hard choice - cut expenses to compensate or raise their rates. Raising the rates enough to cover the new improved cost of fuel would chase away a substantial number of customers so the pressure is on to cut labor expenses. After numerous reorganizations and cuts it's now the drivers turn on the hot seat. Next time you see one on the road, give him a smile and a wave. Those guys work long hours for not a lot of money and do all they can to keep everyone around them on the roads safe. Everything you buy - EVERYTHING - got to you in the back of a big rig. Think about the people who have dedicated their lives to making sure your store has an adequate supply of canned beer and what's being done to them in the name of "increased efficiency" and tip your hat; these guys deserve your gratitude.
So, assuming that the story is true - how, exactly, does Microsoft propose to pay people for searching / purchasing. Is this "pay" going to come in the mail as a check, or is it going to be a discount on purchases - or is it going to be a promise to pay you somehow sometime in the future?
I'm tempted to say something about "trust" and "Microsoft" here, but am wary of the Microsoft lovers out there just waiting to down-mod this post.
They're depending on us believing their media stories to escape responsibility; anyone who thinks about this situation would quickly realize that for a company full of financial analysts to not realize that an error of this magnitude was happening - well, it beggars the imagination.
What almost certainly happened is that they played the same game that so many other financial institutions did during the real estate bubble. But when the bills came due, they chose to deny responsibility and pass the blame on to someone else. The real crime here is that they'll be allowed to get away with this...
Most effective first step: clean up. Lost items are hard to see when they're mixed in with random clutter. Do whatever is necessary to get everything "put away"; more storage locations, less stuff, pick the stuff up and put it away. Imagine trying to find a pair of pliers in an empty room - now imagine trying to find the same pair of pliers in a child's bedroom.
Organization can help a lot too. Items that travel usually don't just make one hop. The sooner you notice they're gone, the easier it'll be to retrieve them. Things like a pegboard on the wall with the shapes of all the tools painted on it; sure, it might look a bit "anal" but it makes it very easy to glance at the wall and see that the pliers aren't there. You could use various organizational techniques to accomplish the same goal - the "win" here is that you can almost see things leave so you can easily find them - and notice that they're gone and start your search before you actually need the item. Much better to chase that adjustable wrench today rather than in three weeks when the water faucet springs a leak.
And communication is also a great tool - especially if there's children involved. Those "press to talk" cell phones are just about perfect for this. After the kids have been embarrassed by Dad asking about lost tools a few times they'll adjust their behavior.
And finally - put this stuff in its proper perspective. On the scale of big things in life; marriage, children, happiness - well, that lost hammer just isn't very important. Some may suggest that a person who is considering spending thousands of dollars to track his missing tools (that are worth maybe a hundred, tops) may have some "issues". Your mileage may vary...
"Race to the bottom" pricing leads to shoddy PC products. The HP laptop I'm using right now has had two hardware failures in the last year; this kind of experience isn't uncommon these days.
PC operating systems are awkward at best, user hostile at worst. Linux isn't ready to be accepted by the common man; Vista is - well, Vista isn't a very attractive option either.
While this is going on, Apple has introduced a huge number of people to its products via the Ipod and Itunes. They work well, look nice, and operate reliably. That's a good recommendation for Apple as a company - then the Iphone took the world by storm and cemented Apple's image as the "better than anyone else" company.
When this machine craps out for good, it's quite likely to be replaced by a Mac. They're not perfect, but they can't be any worse than this PC / Microsoft junk.
What's changed is that now the technology is available for corporations to access your cell phone's broadcasts and use that to determine your movements. It's pretty certain that they can read the ID from your phone - and if they're not linking it to your personal profile already it's just a matter of time until they do. When your cell phone broadcasts ID from the checkout counter as they're running your credit card - gotcha!
Would these corporate watchers reveal what they're doing? Not likely at all; they'd be much more likely to keep it a deep dark secret for as long as they can. It's the perfect pretext for gathering personal data - they've got a business relationship with you and they're just updating their internal records, you know.
The only thing about this whole mess that surprises me is how many people are concerned about how RFID may be used to track them - but they're completely overlooking that cell phone that they carry with them everywhere they go.
Tip for those who don't want to be tracked: Leave the cell phone at home.
There are some applications where they provide the most functional user interface; Apple uses them to great advantage on their iPhone and iPod Touch. It allows rich user interaction on a pocket sized device; no room there for a keyboard or fancy set of buttons. They're not so useful on something like a laptop; there's a keyboard that's much more useful - and the software to make any kind of use of a laptop touch screen is yet to be developed.
Something tells me that history will repeat itself again. Someone will create a workable touch screen interface for general purpose computers, then a major software company will "borrow" the idea and popularize it. The innovators won't get a dime - or any recognition - but the technology will finally break through to the general public.
It looks like a disaster in a box to me: not only does it allow anyone with the price of the machine to monitor and inspect each and every packet you exchange, it also is capable of destroying the legal protections that ISPs currently enjoy.
The ISPs are treated like common carriers and are exempt from many liabilities because they carry all traffic equally and don't know or control the content of that traffic. Now that they're insisting that they need to "prioritize" some traffic at the expense of others, monitor and drop traffic because of its content, and are installing machines like these that further refine their ability to monitor and control what traffic you'll be allowed to transmit - well, their "safe harbor" exemptions are based on them not doing any of this.
Just the existence of this machine will be the undoing of many...
No, I don't think so. I'm not going to disable the firewall, nor am I going to punch holes in it for every misbegotten piece of software that wants to open a network connection for some non-essential purpose.
For those who don't secure their network - they'll have another non-essential port open and listening for a message from some authorization server somewhere. Systems running these games will be easy to detect and if the developers did their usual "adequate" job there'll be exploits available to take advantage of the flaws.
If nothing else, you can expect some griefer to send "unauthorized" messages to shut down your copy of the game.
So here's what I've decided to do: I'm not going to buy their games. Their price is just too high...
So they're not trying to help at all. What they're trying to do is sell their services and using this pseudo-news article to do it. Shame on them.
Run these on their own completely separate circuit; you can use regular 12 volt batteries as your energy storage and charge the batteries with solar cells or a automotive alternator driven by some kind of alternate energy (steam? water wheel? windmill?) or any combination thereof. If you have multiple generators be sure to electronically isolate their outputs; big diodes are the usual solution.
If no alternate energy is available and you need lights then a common battery charger will take care of your needs. If your house was wired to "standard" then your overhead lighting is probably already on a separate circuit of its own; this makes it even easier.
There you go; by using commonly available items and starting small you can start generating your own power on a budget. A few hundred watts of lights goes a long way...
This looks good on the drawing board but making a real-world example is going to require some very fancy engineering. Building larger scale structures in space isn't as easy as many think; there's gravitational gradients, solar wind and more out there. Forces that are tiny - but when these tiny forces are applied (unevenly) to a large structure the total forces can be very impressive (and destructive).
What's been happening for years now is well-meaning admins blocking various IP addresses / blocks and/or domain names. Their motives are good, but after the address or domain name is blocked they almost never go back and recheck to see if the block is still needed. What this leads to over time are holes in the address space that can't be used, awkward or no routes to some addresses from some other addresses, etc. Especially in this time of zombie machines; blackhole that IP address and you've knocked some individual off line - but you've done nothing to reduce the amount of spam / viruses / worms / etc.
This is what killed ORBS and other services of that type. Easy to add domains / addresses to the blocklist, but difficult to remove them. Eventually the list becomes useless...
Much better solution: make an example out of the people who are squatting on this netblock. Break out the pitchforks and torches...
So what would these candidates do to secure a place in this lucrative game? Accuse and defame their opponents? Check. Launder money and hide assets? Check. Conceal conflicts of interest? Check. Break the law or violate the constitution? No problem.
I don't think anyone here imagines that these candidates are not interested in each and every vote that they can get. Yet at the same time, these electronic voting machines are not accurate - for whatever reason, they don't count votes accurately. The big question here is - if the machines aren't counting right and the candidates don't seem to care about it - what's really going on?
That's a very troubling problem. Greedy politicians trying to get aboard the gravy train and the vote counting machine which determines if they get elected or not is incapable of accurately counting the votes. I don't see it as a partisan issue; none of the candidates are standing up and pointing a finger at the defective voting machines. Not the Democrats, not the Republicans, not even the Independents. Given the candidate's strong need to get elected, what would it take to get them to ignore the voting machine problem? That's the real story - there's a much larger issue being hidden here.
If it was simple to install and use and guaranteed secure - then they just might consider using it.
Then you just distill it to concentrate the ethanol. You'd probably have to make two or three passes through the still to get it up to E85 level.
There's a couple of fairly significant problems with this scheme, though. One is the energy that's used to operate the still; where does that come from, how much does it cost? And the other one - and one that'll be very difficult to overcome - is that ethanol is the stuff we drink. Dilute ethanol with distilled water at about 50/50 and you get some so-so vodka. Add this or that flavor and you've got a party.
The BATF isn't going to like this one little bit. Liquor taxes are an important source of revenue; they'll insist that you comply with their bureaucratic regulations if you're going to make any kind of product that contains ethanol.
And if this magic box will produce 170 proof at $2 per gallon - how much of that is going in the car and how much will be going into mixed drinks? Imagine the parties; gallons and gallons of alcohol and more being produced in every neighborhood every day. I suspect the law of unintended consequences is going to kick in on this one...
Just keeping them clean inside and fresh rubber on the pegs (much less a set of good light bulbs) took a significant amount of time; the maintenance expense on these games is what killed them. For the same price you could get an electronic game that would run for years without problem.
Firstly, it's horribly inefficient. There are significant losses over the signal path that hand waving won't make go away. And then there's the real show-stopper: high power microwave beams would be a hazard to aviation, shipping, or anything or anyone else who got in the way.
There'd be enough scattering of the beam to spread the danger around. Sure, this technology is possible - but there just don't seem to be any practical applications for it. Wire is much more efficient and airmen have a chance to see and avoid it. They'd never know that microwave beam was there until they entered it.
Beaming power in from space is a perennial favorite - but nobody ever seems to be able to get around the atmospheric effects. And I'd prefer to not have any randomly scattered ionizing radiation impinging on my home, thanks.
That's what they say anyway - and it might even be what they really mean. But the uses of this technology will expand and it's just a matter of time until what the monitors are looking for are "undesirable elements" as defined by the administration in power.
Imagine what J. Edgar Hoover would have done with this ability. How about Richard Nixon; breaking into the DNC to gather information got him in trouble - if he could have accomplished the same thing with a wiretap or two do you think he'd have hesitated?
Our Founding Fathers put limits on what government could do, insured the privacy of private spaces and generally did a pretty good job of creating a system that would resist the abuses of a power mad wanna-be dictator. It's sad to see these protections being dismantled; history is being ignored and it's going to repeat itself like it or not.
He's directed some very well realized fantasy movies already - if anyone can make a good movie out of a Tolkien story, he can.