TiVo: 2 hacked/networked DirecTV TiVos (plus another Series 1 unhacked and an unhacked HDTV TiVo)
Firewall: Soekris 5-port hardware, with 8MB flash running M0n0wall
For my main switch I'm using a Cisco something-24 (3724? I forget). Will replace that with a cheap-o Gigabit switch sometime soon.
(I've also got all kinds of old PCs, mostly from relatives, that I should either do something with or throw away, plus an old 133 MHz Toshiba laptop that was crap even when I bought it, and of course the laptop from work that I never use. Also a 1.8G Athlon that will eventually become a dual-screen linux workstation a hacked iOpener that never could keep its ethernet running, and, oh yeah, two NeXT computers: A turbo color slab and a 68030 cube).
A few years back, I decided I wanted a "nice" watch...even though I'm surrounded by clocks, I still wanted something nice for my wrist. (it's about the only jewelry I wear, aside from my wedding ring).
As I looked, I was astounded at what was out there in the watch world. Unfortunatly, it's difficult to get really good information on all watches (manufacturers' sites are full of flash, and any Google search generally turns up thousands of fly-by-night outfits). I quickly decided I wanted something elegant, analog, and with a few key features (perpetual calendar, especially, 'cause I'm sick of resetting the date every month).
Some watches I looked at:
* The Yes Watch - Very cool concept, especially with the solar focus, the moon phase, and the day/night display. I decided against it because I didn't like the look of the LCD. If they'd used a pair of overlapping black wedges or something instead of individual LCD bars for the day/night display, and maybe a small analog dial instead of the digital time readout, then I'd probably have bought one. (again, I was focusing on mechanical (or at least semi-mechanical like a quartz).
* The Epos Emotion is especially nice. Very simple and elegant (that is, not gaudy like some seem to get), with a nice triple-date feature and a moon dial. This is my current favorite, but the nearest dealer is in New York, IIRC, and I'm not about to drop a kilobuck on something I haven't at least held in my hands, and definitely not from the grey-market resellers on the web.
* I briefly looked at Breitling, and while some of those are very nice and interestingly complex, most of them were too busy-looking for my tastes. (the same goes for some of the Citizen models...cool stuff, but I really don't need an aircraft fuel consumption slide rule on my wrist.) (now, if they had a regular slide rule, that'd be cool).
* While browsing through a very high-end watch store in Tysons Corner, VA, I picked up a free "magazine" that turned out to be a promotional rag for the International Watch Company. It had a great article about their Grand Complication, which sells for a cool quarter-million a piece. A sidebar article by their customer support team had some great stories, about people who own them complaining abut it stopping working after an ocean swim (he'd damaged the crystal beforehand), and another person complaining that the the chimes were inconsistent on his two watches (yes, he owned *two* of these...presumably one gold, and one platinum, and he was annoyed that the tones were a bit off).
* And I don't remember how I found this one, but the granddaddy (as far as I've seen) for complications and cost is the dual-faced Patek Phillipe Sky Moon Tourbillon. I seem to remember they go for multiple millions of dollars a piece.
* I ended up buying a Tissot New Titanium. It's not an automatic, but it's got some good features I like. Perpetual calendar (though on an LCD display), alarm, chrono, sapphire crystal, and a titanium band / case. Unfortunatly, this was never available in the US and I had to order from a company in Switzerland (who sent along a box of chocolate with it:) ). I think it may be discontinued, too... (I can't even find it on their webpage anymore, which highlights my previous comment about the difficulty of finding good information online).
What I'd really like to know is how one can get into collecting such expensive timepieces. Somehow, I imagine that you'd have t
I thought only the President had the legal authority to unilateraly declassify something without going through channels.
Actually, "channels" means anyone with Original Classification Authority, which includes the President, Vice-President, Director of Central Intelligence, and other intelligence community leaders (I believe DIRNSA, and presumably also the new DNI).
I believe that each individual is responsible for certain kinds of information. For example, the Director of NSA would obviously have some authority over information regarding crypto, so he wouldn't be authorized to declassify information about human spies. Higher-level authorities like DCI, DNI, and obviously VPOTUS and POTUS, would be able to declassify more and more.
So, yes, I would expect that VP Cheney would have the authority to declassify certain information, including, most likely, whatever it is "Scooter" is up the creek over (I honestly have forgotten). But I'm equally certain that such a declassification would have to have a paper trail, and anyone who simply "takes [someone]'s word for it," even the Vice-President's word, that something is now open for release, well, they're not doing *their* job to protect classified information.
I can't remember which Executive Order it is that covers all this...I think 12958 or something along those lines. Okay, I just checked, and OMG, I *did* remember the order. Check it out here: Executive Order 12958 - Classified National Security Information, as Amended . It's actually fairly interesting reading....
[[oh, crap, my formatting got screwed up. here's a second attempt at replying.]]
[first, a reply to another comment in this thread...to consolidate the conversation...]
OP: You enter this pin into your token, and get a result back that is actually something like: Sign(time+pin+random, your_key)
AC: OK, that will prove to the bank that it's really you, but will also expose your PIN to anyone who can intercept the message and has your public key.
The "PIN" was probably a bad word choice. That's not your personal PIN, but something the bank gives you specific to the current transaction. Though I'm not sure what the "random" bit was. Basically, it'd be a way to avoid replays from another site with the same timestamp, by making the signature unique to the current login session. Think of it as the bank saying: Here, sign this string: "12345", and you do so, and return the signature.
[now, to the other comment] With RSA, the signatures are the same size as the key.
Is that really the case? I thought that the ciphertext was just as long as the plaintext (and isn't a signature really just ciphertext?) I think part of what makes a signature long is that you include additional relevant information, like a key ID, as part of the signature. I'd imagine sending the key-id as a separate data point with the signed data, something like this:
plain: 2005-02-09 12345-3 38.45 [date, order #, and cost]
key id: 246-01-0006 19 [SSN and key #]
cipher: 9857 13 87 14238-0 33 12
Doing this over the phone, the droid would give you the first line, you'd type it in, then enter your personal PIN, and then read back the cipher and your key ID. Heck, the thing could even have a display showing all three lines at once for verification. For paper-based systems, you'd fill all three lines into blocks on the form or something. For a web login, they'd presumably already know your key id, so it would just give you a 5 digit code, you'd sign that, and punch in the 5-digit response.
Anyway, that's way more than I wanted to respond with. The real question that I haven't been able to verify is whether the ciphertext is significantly longer than plaintext, or if it'd be of similar length (say, within 2 or 3 digits for a 20-character string to be signed). Again, that's presuming we avoid whatever overhead GPG-like systems might add to the signature. I did find that "very small plaintexts" need to be padded, but I got the impression that was only for 0-3 character long plaintexts, so it might not be as big a risk here.
Unfortunately, this whole thread is moderated pretty low, so I doubt anyone else will be chipping in to answer the question.
[first, a reply to another comment in this thread...to consolidate the conversation...]
OP: You enter this pin into your token, and get a result back that is actually something like: Sign(time+pin+random, your_key)
AC: OK, that will prove to the bank that it's really you, but will also expose your PIN to anyone who can intercept the message and has your public key.
The "PIN" was probably a bad word choice. That's not your personal PIN, but something the bank gives you specific to the current transaction. Though I'm not sure what the "random" bit was. Basically, it'd be a way to avoid replays from another site with the same timestamp, by making the signature unique to the current login session.
Think of it as the bank saying: Here, sign this string: "12345", and you do so, and return the signature.
[now, to the other comment]
With RSA, the signatures are the same size as the key.
Is that really the case? I thought that the ciphertext was just as long as the plaintext (and isn't a signature really just ciphertext?) I think part of what makes a signature long is that you include additional relevant information, like a key ID, as part of the signature. I'd imagine sending the key-id as a separate data point with the signed data, something like this:
plain: 2005-02-09 12345-3 38.45 [date, order #, and cost] key id: 246-01-0006 19 [SSN and key #] cipher: 9857 13 87 14238-0 33 12
Doing this over the phone, the droid would give you the first line, you'd type it in, then enter your personal PIN, and then read back the cipher and your key ID. Heck, the thing could even have a display showing all three lines at once for verification. For paper-based systems, you'd fill all three lines into blocks on the form or something. For a web login, they'd presumably already know your key id, so it would just give you a 5 digit code, you'd sign that, and punch in the 5-digit response.
Anyway, that's way more than I wanted to respond with. The real question that I haven't been able to verify is whether the ciphertext is significantly longer than plaintext, or if it'd be of similar length (say, within 2 or 3 digits for a 20-character string to be signed). Again, that's presuming we avoid whatever overhead GPG-like systems might add to the signature. I did find that "very small plaintexts" need to be padded, but I got the impression that was only for 0-3 character long plaintexts, so it might not be as big a risk here.
Unfortunately, this whole thread is moderated pretty low, so I doubt anyone else will be chipping in to answer the question.
I've been saying for ages that something like that would be ideal. I hate to suggest that it be maintained by the government, but, really, that's the best place for it. At least the government has to respond to FOIA requests, while Verisign doesn't.
But I'd go even further. Provide a way to key in information specific to a transaction (order number, total cost, and today's date) and you have a way to sign any transaction anywhere, like a phone order or a credit card application.
[blockquoth me]"For large documents, obviously, you're not performing a signature operation on all the text. But, maybe at the bottom of the page, you put your unique public key ID (which is then used to find your public key in a big database), then another line with, say, date, cost, and PO #, then the calculated result. If you lose your little card, you simply go down to the post office (or somesuch), get a new one, and they invalidate the old one for any new use after date X."
The only vulnerability here (aside from someone stealing your card & beating you for the key) is if the service you're signing for doesn't use some transation-unique ID. As long as each transaction has a unique ID, this won't be vulnerable to a replay, no matter who finds a copy of your order.
I also suggested in that post that we find a way to share proximity card information, to reduce all the various speedpasses, gym cards, grocery store cards, etc., to a single thing I can swipe anywhere.
The "nice" thing about all this is that we'll probably finally start to see some motion on this real soon, 'cause isn't there a requirement for US banks to start using some kind of two-factor authentication for websites soon?
Reducing The Force to a symbiotic critter in your bloodstream is just plain wrong.
I never understand why people are so upset about this. Isn't this actually consistent with what Obi Wan told Luke? "The Force is what gives a Jedi his power. It's an energy field, created by all living things." Well, if it's created by living things, then how exactly is it created? Turns out that all living things have these midichlorians in them, and that's where it comes from.
There never was (IMHO) any intent to imply that The Force was totally unknown, magical, and "Just There." We've known for nearly 30 years that living beings themselves somehow create The Force. What remains mystical is how people can control it and that ability, more than anything, is probably what makes Jedi Jedi.
Whenever I have done any interior work that involves exposing the frame I have insulated that bit, but it's very patchy.
Here in the states, we have "blown-in" insulation. They simply drill a small hole (maybe 3/4" or so) in your wall, and blow little flecks of insulation into it. Actally, I think they drill two holes, one low and one high, and when they see the insulation pasing the top hole they know the cavity has been filled. Because there are studs every 16" or so, they have to do this many times across the wall, but that's not that big a deal.
They also sometimes use expanding foam insulation instead of flecks/pellets, but the approach is the same.
At any rate, this is a fairly easy way to insulate old homes without tearing apart all the walls...might work for you.
(and, btw, as much as the US [seems to be] better than Australia as far as longer use of good insulation codes, I'm still amazed at how incredibly well German homes are built. Ours are all wood and siding, the German homes are all like brick and concrete. Crazy, considering we've got a whole lot more tornadoes and hurricanes and earthquakes than Europe has...)
I've always thought this would be a great way to reduce scalping. When you sell someone a ticket, don't print the actual seat information on the ticket, but instead print a hash of some sort (I thought of this like 20 years ago, so I didn't really think of barcodes). If you want to verify the seat, you can take it to any ticketmaster outlet and scan it, which will tell you what seat it's for, but won't give you any kind of official-looking printout.
So if you want to scalp the ticket, you have to actually bring it to a ticket counter with your buyer so they can verify it's what you're selling it as.
Also, obviously, eliminates counterfeiting, duplicate tickets, etc. (presuming you can't simply accidentally stumble on the right hash for a ticket, in which case you then have to be sure you get there before the real ticket holder).
Naturally, though, this won't work as well today. Hell, I'm not even sure where the nearest ticketmaster is anymore.
(yes, I got sick of camping out all night at the student union only to have the first 5 people buy 10 tickets each, to scalp, such that by the time it got to me, at #6, all the floor seats were taken).
The NSA is not legally forbidden to spy on americans. The CIA is.
The NSA was used a number of times in DEA cases because they could tap public telephones and not worry about the warrant problems.
And it was this, I believe, that led to the current prohibitions against domestic use of any spy agencies, including the NSA (in both federal code and executive order, I'm pretty sure).
Check up on the Church hearings, I believe, from the mid 70's...
What'd really be nice is a volume control in an easily-accessed space on the browser, so you could, if you want, leave the browser sounds enabled, but at a mix level you're comfortable with.
Not a single one of the special magic searches works from my box at work. Stock searches, weather, movies, music, UPS tracking -- none of these return what's expected.
Works just fine from home, but here at work, no go. Same behavior both with and without my 'personalized' google login, and from firefox and IE.
This use of RFID tags will destroy my privacy! You just watch...overnight, we'll have a terrible Orwellian police state where we're all branded with the RFID tag of the beast on our foreheads!
Anyone who purchases a hybrid without doing at least a really basic cost analysis is an idiot.
We purchased a Prius back in June. We knew that unless gas stays at like $3 or $4 a gallon, it wouldn't really pay off (and then Katrina hits, and we actually paid $3 a gallon for a few weeks).
It's not a cheap car, but fully loaded, it really wasn't that big a difference for us compared to, say, and Accord. And it gets better mileage. You can run the A/C in stop-and-go traffic with virtually no gas consumption (the gas engine cycles on for 30 seconds every five minutes or so).
Plus, it's incredibly geeky. What's not to love? We've even been able to fit a lot of stuff in it for weekend trips (suitcase, assorted other bags, cameras, etc., plus a stroller, pack-and-play, and, of course, the baby), even leaving the back seat pretty much free of extra boxes or bags. You'd never think there was so much space to look at it from the outside.
Bottom line: Don't buy it to save money. Buy it for the clean air impact, and especially to support the longer-term development of hybrid technology. Imagine if this were in *every* Toyota car -- their CAFE numbers would probably be up in the 30s or 40s (it's probably in the 20s right now).
[it's also displaced our Explorer as our primary errand-running car, which is certaily helping *our* bottom line somewhat...]
Back in school, our Pascal compiler often would dump files in the current directory with garbage filenames, with lots of special characters in 'em so you couldn't type them at the shell (or use shell expansion, either). Someone showed me a trick that I still use to this day:
ls -i find . -inum inode -exec rm -i {} \;
The ls -i gives you the inodes for all the files in the current directory. Find the inode for the file you can't delete, then use that in the find command to actually select it and delete it with the -exec call (or rename it or whatever else you want to do with it).
I don't need it as much lately, but it's still occasionally useful. Files with a leading "-" often give me fits, for example...
I was lucky enough to see "Dial M for Murder" as a double feature with "House of Wax," both in 3-D. Also, "Kiss Me, Kate" was filmed in 3-D, but by the time it was released, they decided to show the flat print, as 3-D had got too much of a schlock reputation (and deservedly so).
I *know* I wrote a good comment once on various 3-D display technologies, but I can't for the life of me find it right now. Anyway, 3-D displays can be lumped into two categories: Auto-stereoscopic and those requiring glasses.
The glasses are what we're most familar with, and they all use different approaches to sending the correct image to the appropriate eye. Colors, angular polarization, circular polarization (which lets you tilt your head while watching), or LCD shutters are what's typically used. Each has its drawbacks.
Auto-stereo needs no glasses, and is generally confined to lenticular displays (those "changy" movie posters and ads are built with lenticular screens). Other variants are similar in basic mechanism to a lenticular screen. The problem with these is generally viewing angle and distance -- I'm pretty sure they won't work for a theatre.
Finally, the biggest problem I've seen with 3-D projections, even with good glasses, is vertical misalignment of the images. Your eyes can tilt up/down just a little (relative to each other) without you thinking about it, to make up for such a misalignment, but it really adds to the fatigue quickly.
So, between less-than-optimal mechanisms (glasses) and less-than-helpful projectionists, especially combined with directors who think that 3-D is all about throwing things at the audience and not about realistic depth, well, I'm not holding my breath for any decent 3-D stuff anytime soon.
Though some of the IMAX movies are pretty well shot...
Slashdot Mirror
For my main switch I'm using a Cisco something-24 (3724? I forget). Will replace that with a cheap-o Gigabit switch sometime soon.
(I've also got all kinds of old PCs, mostly from relatives, that I should either do something with or throw away, plus an old 133 MHz Toshiba laptop that was crap even when I bought it, and of course the laptop from work that I never use. Also a 1.8G Athlon that will eventually become a dual-screen linux workstation a hacked iOpener that never could keep its ethernet running, and, oh yeah, two NeXT computers: A turbo color slab and a 68030 cube).
A few years back, I decided I wanted a "nice" watch...even though I'm surrounded by clocks, I still wanted something nice for my wrist. (it's about the only jewelry I wear, aside from my wedding ring).
:) ). I think it may be discontinued, too... (I can't even find it on their webpage anymore, which highlights my previous comment about the difficulty of finding good information online).
As I looked, I was astounded at what was out there in the watch world. Unfortunatly, it's difficult to get really good information on all watches (manufacturers' sites are full of flash, and any Google search generally turns up thousands of fly-by-night outfits). I quickly decided I wanted something elegant, analog, and with a few key features (perpetual calendar, especially, 'cause I'm sick of resetting the date every month).
Some watches I looked at:
* The Yes Watch - Very cool concept, especially with the solar focus, the moon phase, and the day/night display. I decided against it because I didn't like the look of the LCD. If they'd used a pair of overlapping black wedges or something instead of individual LCD bars for the day/night display, and maybe a small analog dial instead of the digital time readout, then I'd probably have bought one. (again, I was focusing on mechanical (or at least semi-mechanical like a quartz).
* The Epos Emotion is especially nice. Very simple and elegant (that is, not gaudy like some seem to get), with a nice triple-date feature and a moon dial. This is my current favorite, but the nearest dealer is in New York, IIRC, and I'm not about to drop a kilobuck on something I haven't at least held in my hands, and definitely not from the grey-market resellers on the web.
* I briefly looked at Breitling, and while some of those are very nice and interestingly complex, most of them were too busy-looking for my tastes. (the same goes for some of the Citizen models...cool stuff, but I really don't need an aircraft fuel consumption slide rule on my wrist.) (now, if they had a regular slide rule, that'd be cool).
* While browsing through a very high-end watch store in Tysons Corner, VA, I picked up a free "magazine" that turned out to be a promotional rag for the International Watch Company. It had a great article about their Grand Complication, which sells for a cool quarter-million a piece. A sidebar article by their customer support team had some great stories, about people who own them complaining abut it stopping working after an ocean swim (he'd damaged the crystal beforehand), and another person complaining that the the chimes were inconsistent on his two watches (yes, he owned *two* of these...presumably one gold, and one platinum, and he was annoyed that the tones were a bit off).
* And I don't remember how I found this one, but the granddaddy (as far as I've seen) for complications and cost is the dual-faced Patek Phillipe Sky Moon Tourbillon. I seem to remember they go for multiple millions of dollars a piece.
* I ended up buying a Tissot New Titanium. It's not an automatic, but it's got some good features I like. Perpetual calendar (though on an LCD display), alarm, chrono, sapphire crystal, and a titanium band / case. Unfortunatly, this was never available in the US and I had to order from a company in Switzerland (who sent along a box of chocolate with it
What I'd really like to know is how one can get into collecting such expensive timepieces. Somehow, I imagine that you'd have t
I thought only the President had the legal authority to unilateraly declassify something without going through channels.
Actually, "channels" means anyone with Original Classification Authority, which includes the President, Vice-President, Director of Central Intelligence, and other intelligence community leaders (I believe DIRNSA, and presumably also the new DNI).
I believe that each individual is responsible for certain kinds of information. For example, the Director of NSA would obviously have some authority over information regarding crypto, so he wouldn't be authorized to declassify information about human spies. Higher-level authorities like DCI, DNI, and obviously VPOTUS and POTUS, would be able to declassify more and more.
So, yes, I would expect that VP Cheney would have the authority to declassify certain information, including, most likely, whatever it is "Scooter" is up the creek over (I honestly have forgotten). But I'm equally certain that such a declassification would have to have a paper trail, and anyone who simply "takes [someone]'s word for it," even the Vice-President's word, that something is now open for release, well, they're not doing *their* job to protect classified information.
I can't remember which Executive Order it is that covers all this...I think 12958 or something along those lines. Okay, I just checked, and OMG, I *did* remember the order. Check it out here: Executive Order 12958 - Classified National Security Information, as Amended . It's actually fairly interesting reading....
[[oh, crap, my formatting got screwed up. here's a second attempt at replying.]]
[first, a reply to another comment in this thread...to consolidate the conversation...]
OP: You enter this pin into your token, and get a result back that is actually something like: Sign(time+pin+random, your_key)
AC: OK, that will prove to the bank that it's really you, but will also expose your PIN to anyone who can intercept the message and has your public key.
The "PIN" was probably a bad word choice. That's not your personal PIN, but something the bank gives you specific to the current transaction. Though I'm not sure what the "random" bit was. Basically, it'd be a way to avoid replays from another site with the same timestamp, by making the signature unique to the current login session. Think of it as the bank saying: Here, sign this string: "12345", and you do so, and return the signature.
[now, to the other comment]
With RSA, the signatures are the same size as the key.
Is that really the case? I thought that the ciphertext was just as long as the plaintext (and isn't a signature really just ciphertext?) I think part of what makes a signature long is that you include additional relevant information, like a key ID, as part of the signature. I'd imagine sending the key-id as a separate data point with the signed data, something like this:
plain: 2005-02-09 12345-3 38.45 [date, order #, and cost]
key id: 246-01-0006 19 [SSN and key #]
cipher: 9857 13 87 14238-0 33 12
Doing this over the phone, the droid would give you the first line, you'd type it in, then enter your personal PIN, and then read back the cipher and your key ID. Heck, the thing could even have a display showing all three lines at once for verification. For paper-based systems, you'd fill all three lines into blocks on the form or something. For a web login, they'd presumably already know your key id, so it would just give you a 5 digit code, you'd sign that, and punch in the 5-digit response.
Anyway, that's way more than I wanted to respond with. The real question that I haven't been able to verify is whether the ciphertext is significantly longer than plaintext, or if it'd be of similar length (say, within 2 or 3 digits for a 20-character string to be signed). Again, that's presuming we avoid whatever overhead GPG-like systems might add to the signature. I did find that "very small plaintexts" need to be padded, but I got the impression that was only for 0-3 character long plaintexts, so it might not be as big a risk here.
Unfortunately, this whole thread is moderated pretty low, so I doubt anyone else will be chipping in to answer the question.
I've been saying for ages that something like that would be ideal. I hate to suggest that it be maintained by the government, but, really, that's the best place for it. At least the government has to respond to FOIA requests, while Verisign doesn't.
But I'd go even further. Provide a way to key in information specific to a transaction (order number, total cost, and today's date) and you have a way to sign any transaction anywhere, like a phone order or a credit card application.
I managed to find my posting on ths from, OMG, 5 years ago: that goes into a bit more detail.
[blockquoth me]"For large documents, obviously, you're not performing a signature operation on all the text. But, maybe at the bottom of the page, you put your unique public key ID (which is then used to find your public key in a big database), then another line with, say, date, cost, and PO #, then the calculated result. If you lose your little card, you simply go down to the post office (or somesuch), get a new one, and they invalidate the old one for any new use after date X."
The only vulnerability here (aside from someone stealing your card & beating you for the key) is if the service you're signing for doesn't use some transation-unique ID. As long as each transaction has a unique ID, this won't be vulnerable to a replay, no matter who finds a copy of your order.
I also suggested in that post that we find a way to share proximity card information, to reduce all the various speedpasses, gym cards, grocery store cards, etc., to a single thing I can swipe anywhere.
The "nice" thing about all this is that we'll probably finally start to see some motion on this real soon, 'cause isn't there a requirement for US banks to start using some kind of two-factor authentication for websites soon?
Reducing The Force to a symbiotic critter in your bloodstream is just plain wrong.
I never understand why people are so upset about this. Isn't this actually consistent with what Obi Wan told Luke? "The Force is what gives a Jedi his power. It's an energy field, created by all living things." Well, if it's created by living things, then how exactly is it created? Turns out that all living things have these midichlorians in them, and that's where it comes from.
There never was (IMHO) any intent to imply that The Force was totally unknown, magical, and "Just There." We've known for nearly 30 years that living beings themselves somehow create The Force. What remains mystical is how people can control it and that ability, more than anything, is probably what makes Jedi Jedi.
Whenever I have done any interior work that involves exposing the frame I have insulated that bit, but it's very patchy.
Here in the states, we have "blown-in" insulation. They simply drill a small hole (maybe 3/4" or so) in your wall, and blow little flecks of insulation into it. Actally, I think they drill two holes, one low and one high, and when they see the insulation pasing the top hole they know the cavity has been filled. Because there are studs every 16" or so, they have to do this many times across the wall, but that's not that big a deal.
They also sometimes use expanding foam insulation instead of flecks/pellets, but the approach is the same.
At any rate, this is a fairly easy way to insulate old homes without tearing apart all the walls...might work for you.
(and, btw, as much as the US [seems to be] better than Australia as far as longer use of good insulation codes, I'm still amazed at how incredibly well German homes are built. Ours are all wood and siding, the German homes are all like brick and concrete. Crazy, considering we've got a whole lot more tornadoes and hurricanes and earthquakes than Europe has...)
I've always thought this would be a great way to reduce scalping. When you sell someone a ticket, don't print the actual seat information on the ticket, but instead print a hash of some sort (I thought of this like 20 years ago, so I didn't really think of barcodes). If you want to verify the seat, you can take it to any ticketmaster outlet and scan it, which will tell you what seat it's for, but won't give you any kind of official-looking printout.
So if you want to scalp the ticket, you have to actually bring it to a ticket counter with your buyer so they can verify it's what you're selling it as.
Also, obviously, eliminates counterfeiting, duplicate tickets, etc. (presuming you can't simply accidentally stumble on the right hash for a ticket, in which case you then have to be sure you get there before the real ticket holder).
Naturally, though, this won't work as well today. Hell, I'm not even sure where the nearest ticketmaster is anymore.
(yes, I got sick of camping out all night at the student union only to have the first 5 people buy 10 tickets each, to scalp, such that by the time it got to me, at #6, all the floor seats were taken).
oh, yeah, I forgot about that. Try this one (not sure if it'll work, but it's worth a shot): Bug 24418, via TinyUrl.
(interestingly, it worked in the preview).
The NSA is not legally forbidden to spy on americans. The CIA is.
The NSA was used a number of times in DEA cases because they could tap public telephones and not worry about the warrant problems.
And it was this, I believe, that led to the current prohibitions against domestic use of any spy agencies, including the NSA (in both federal code and executive order, I'm pretty sure).
Check up on the Church hearings, I believe, from the mid 70's...
and, OMB
Geez, even *with* preview, I substituted Office of Management and Budget for Oh, My God. My mind's still at the con, I guess.
Most of these sounds come from Flash objects. You can block Flash with FlashBlock. It puts a play button where the Flash object is.
Of course, then, you either get no flash, or when you explicitly play the flash, you still get blasted away.
I asked about this ages (I think maybe even two years ago) for Mozilla. There's even a bug filed for it [and, OMB, it was filed almost exactly six years ago ]. It's got 53 votes, maybe it needs more: Bug 24418 - Allow user to turn on and off rendering of video/audio (disable sound).
What'd really be nice is a volume control in an easily-accessed space on the browser, so you could, if you want, leave the browser sounds enabled, but at a mix level you're comfortable with.
You may want to try talking with your Network Admin... sounds like they're blocking cookies for you...
Actually, I am serious, and cookies seem to work just fine for me.
Not a single one of the special magic searches works from my box at work. Stock searches, weather, movies, music, UPS tracking -- none of these return what's expected.
Works just fine from home, but here at work, no go. Same behavior both with and without my 'personalized' google login, and from firefox and IE.
any ideas?
This use of RFID tags will destroy my privacy! You just watch...overnight, we'll have a terrible Orwellian police state where we're all branded with the RFID tag of the beast on our foreheads!
Apparently all of the females your new car won't be able to attract.
:)
Two comments:
a) you obviously missed the "baby" part of my post, and
b) you're obviously not meeting the right females.
[when we searched for our new house, one of the criteria my wife suggested was space in the basement for a server room.]
Anyone who purchases a hybrid without doing at least a really basic cost analysis is an idiot.
We purchased a Prius back in June. We knew that unless gas stays at like $3 or $4 a gallon, it wouldn't really pay off (and then Katrina hits, and we actually paid $3 a gallon for a few weeks).
It's not a cheap car, but fully loaded, it really wasn't that big a difference for us compared to, say, and Accord. And it gets better mileage. You can run the A/C in stop-and-go traffic with virtually no gas consumption (the gas engine cycles on for 30 seconds every five minutes or so).
Plus, it's incredibly geeky. What's not to love? We've even been able to fit a lot of stuff in it for weekend trips (suitcase, assorted other bags, cameras, etc., plus a stroller, pack-and-play, and, of course, the baby), even leaving the back seat pretty much free of extra boxes or bags. You'd never think there was so much space to look at it from the outside.
Bottom line: Don't buy it to save money. Buy it for the clean air impact, and especially to support the longer-term development of hybrid technology. Imagine if this were in *every* Toyota car -- their CAFE numbers would probably be up in the 30s or 40s (it's probably in the 20s right now).
[it's also displaced our Explorer as our primary errand-running car, which is certaily helping *our* bottom line somewhat...]
...and I'm glad there's now data to back me up.
"Tin foil hats in no way affect the government's ability to read your mind."
Think about it.
It just looks like a bunch of randomly-placed blue balls on an otherwordly landscape.
:)
Definitely worth the trouble.
//Tin foil hat on
True statement: Tin foil hats in no way impede the government's ability to read your thoughts.
In the common expression "dark side of the moon"
"There is no dark side of the moon, really...as a matter of fact it's all dark."
(from Pink Floyd, natch.)
Back in school, our Pascal compiler often would dump files in the current directory with garbage filenames, with lots of special characters in 'em so you couldn't type them at the shell (or use shell expansion, either). Someone showed me a trick that I still use to this day:
ls -i
find . -inum inode -exec rm -i {} \;
The ls -i gives you the inodes for all the files in the current directory. Find the inode for the file you can't delete, then use that in the find command to actually select it and delete it with the -exec call (or rename it or whatever else you want to do with it).
I don't need it as much lately, but it's still occasionally useful. Files with a leading "-" often give me fits, for example...
Yeah, but you cut the time in half if you go 130.
"Remember. Traffic lights set for 35 are also timed perfectly for 70."
I was lucky enough to see "Dial M for Murder" as a double feature with "House of Wax," both in 3-D. Also, "Kiss Me, Kate" was filmed in 3-D, but by the time it was released, they decided to show the flat print, as 3-D had got too much of a schlock reputation (and deservedly so).
I *know* I wrote a good comment once on various 3-D display technologies, but I can't for the life of me find it right now. Anyway, 3-D displays can be lumped into two categories: Auto-stereoscopic and those requiring glasses.
The glasses are what we're most familar with, and they all use different approaches to sending the correct image to the appropriate eye. Colors, angular polarization, circular polarization (which lets you tilt your head while watching), or LCD shutters are what's typically used. Each has its drawbacks.
Auto-stereo needs no glasses, and is generally confined to lenticular displays (those "changy" movie posters and ads are built with lenticular screens). Other variants are similar in basic mechanism to a lenticular screen. The problem with these is generally viewing angle and distance -- I'm pretty sure they won't work for a theatre.
Finally, the biggest problem I've seen with 3-D projections, even with good glasses, is vertical misalignment of the images. Your eyes can tilt up/down just a little (relative to each other) without you thinking about it, to make up for such a misalignment, but it really adds to the fatigue quickly.
So, between less-than-optimal mechanisms (glasses) and less-than-helpful projectionists, especially combined with directors who think that 3-D is all about throwing things at the audience and not about realistic depth, well, I'm not holding my breath for any decent 3-D stuff anytime soon.
Though some of the IMAX movies are pretty well shot...