I still want a Three Strikes and You're a Serial Tyrant law. If you introduced, voted in favor of, and/or signed into law a total of three bills that are each later overturned by the Supreme Court on the grounds of being unconstitutional, you are guilty of depriving the populous of their rights, and are guilty of being a tyrant. 10 years in federal prison, no statute of limitations, no executive pardons.
Congress (or Parliament for those of you up in Canuckistan) would consist of a bunch of guys who would be a whole lot more concerned about the crap laws they pass. The MPAA lobbyists would never even see their bought-and-paid-for congressmen: they'd basically be turned away at the door by flunkies. Harper's bill would die by unanimous disapproval.
I have a buddy I used to go riding through the Black Hills with back in the 1980s. He had a Gold Wing that he added every chrome-plated light fixture to that he could find on the aftermarket. It had these chromed spikey posts in the back, with glowing red jeweled tips, lights running along the bags top and bottom, around the crash bars, on the fenders, everywhere. I'm not sure what look he was going for, but we all gave him sh!t for it.
Anyway, we were driving along, and he honked his horn for some reason, and his bike slowed down! So we pulled over to the side of the road to take a look at it, and his battery was completely flat - honking the horn drew enough extra current that it was screwing up the electrical system to the point where it impacted ignition. And of course there was nowhere near enough current to turn the crank over. Turns out his alternator had nowhere near the capacity required to run all the stupid lights AND charge the battery. He disconnected all his pretty lights, and we had to push-start it so we could continue our journey.
I often will use a Dremel to grind straight slots in uncooperative screw heads so I can use a regular flat blade screwdriver to remove them. This generally works well for stripped Philips head screws, too. And I've made specialty screwdrivers (triangles, two-pronged, etc.) by grinding the needed custom tips onto small pieces of barstock, but the soft metal generally isn't as durable as I need it to be. I have a few cases where I made those tools using a sacrificial screwdriver as the starting blank, but grinding the case-hardened tips usually results in a weak tool anyway.
I never thought about using epoxy to get at an otherwise inaccessible screw! And using a tube to contain the epoxy, preventing damage to the product itself, well, that's just amazingly clever! Thank you so much!
Complementary to your comment, we have a lot of tech that was created so long ago that it's terribly inefficient and should best be retired. Consider an old machine with an Athlon 1200 CPU, drawing 330 watts of power while an Intel i5-2400 based machine draws only 75 watts. Consider an old hard drive that draws 30 watts to spin at idle, compared to a modern drive that uses 8 watts to do the same, or a SSDD that draws 0.14 watts. Or consider a CRT monitor drawing 120W compared to a newer LCD that draws 22W.
Yes, I get that obviously there are things that people can't afford to replace today, and when repairing them for free is an option, it'll happen. But these old devices still cost them tremendously on their electric bills. I believe the Dutch pay somewhere around $0.40/kWh, meaning that an old PC there would cost over $4 per day to run, compared to a new efficient machine that would cost less than $1 per day. And that new machine would certainly have better performance, more capabilities, and likely better security (not that I want to get into a big debate about it, but running Windows 7 and IE 9 instead of XP and IE 6 would be a big improvement for most home user's security.)
Google analytics is all about gathering and selling marketing data. Providing usability data is useful when it comes time to convince site owners that they should use it, but that doesn't pay the bills in Mountain View.
Google wants to know every user habit related to on line sales. They know what ads you've seen. They know what keywords you searched on prior to making a purchase. They know which sites you visited prior to the purchase. And if you use Google Checkout or Google Wallet, they even know what you paid for it, and from whom you bought it.
If I'm an advertiser of similar products, that's the stream I want to hitch a ride on. And Google will happily sell me that info.
As a consumer, this SUCKS. Any legitimate searching or research I do is being subtly manipulated by self-interested advertisers. Any original research I do is being recorded, and countermeasures are being deployed to ensure I won't get fair results tomorrow.
Good points all. I would not personally choose a wall mounted rack unless there were space or other constraints. And I was assuming a wood frame as most residential housing in America is still constructed that way. But you can still distribute a heavier load on metal studs using a plywood backer board, though. It just takes a lot of screws.
If you've done the right thing, and mounted a sheet of 3/4" plywood on the wall before hanging the rack, you should never have this kind of problem. Even if you mount it directly on a drywall surface, you should be using appropriately sized lag screws driven directly into the studs, which would not cause a problem. (Unless your wall is of completely sub-standard construction, of course.) If space constraints are a problem and the studs don't line up with the desired location of your rack, you need to use sturdy reinforcing braces (or the aforementioned sheet of plywood) so that the weight is still carried by the wood to the studs, never by the drywall.
Drywall does many things very well: it deadens sound, blocks light, resists fire, hides infrastructure, creates a flat paintable space for decorating, etc. One of the things it does not do well is support weight loads under tension. Hanging anything from drywall anchors (other than lightweight decorative objects) is not part of a professional installation.
Even so, I have this vision of children feeding round slices of luncheon meat to the big friendly robot by pushing the button and laying them in the circular depression shape on its tongue. Probably still not a good mix.
On the other hand, I remember playing ring-toss with the write-enable rings on some Saturdays at my dad's work. He had no problem letting a five year old larval stage geek play in the company's computer room. But I knew I wasn't allowed to touch the tape drives, or press any buttons. Except for the keypunch machine. I could push buttons and type on all the punch cards I wanted. That was awesomely cool.
What makes you think that Skype wants or needs to preserve anonymity? Consider that you are contacting Skype yourself and saying "This is Joe Sixpack. Please connect me to J. Random Hacker at +1-123-456-7890. And yes, I understand my information is on file so you can bill me for this call." You're already not anonymous.
That's correct. However, encryption is an excellent way of randomizing the data in a way that it would be immune to basic (or even advanced) statistical attacks.
Actually, encrypted data stands out in these kinds of analyses prcisely because it's too well distributed.
Steganography is often done by replacing the least significant parts of the original information with the secret message. For example, in a simple BMP bitmap, that might be the 0-bit of each byte used to describe color. But real world images don't have statistically perfect distribution of the 0-bits of color. (They also don't have LSBs with standard Unicode distributions of Arabic text, either.) Real photographic data is non random, all the way down to the 0-bits.
Several years ago, when steganography was a hotly researched topic, some guy came up with a steganographic detector called OutGuess. It performed these kinds of analysis and would identify the kinds of steganography embedded in files, or if a file was clean. It had impressive results. So I know detection is a solved problem. Decryption is still the real issue, of course. But while hiding stuff in a video may baffle the amateurs, I would bet serious coin that the pros are analyzing a lot of images on a regular basis.
Well, that sounds fine, but totally unrealistic. You have in an industrial plant thousands of these control devices. Maintaining a password list for all these is just not going to work.
The devices don't need individual passwords, they need individual keys. Passwords are not keys. And deriving secure unique keys from a master key is a solved problem. You can use master key injection systems (like DUKPT). Or you can have the devices automatically create them when they are introduced to the network (like Z-Wave).
So builder Bob will have a default password and Joe the mechanic has one. And you the operator have to know who installed this piece of hardware.
Role based authority is also a way to ensure that the right people have the necessary access. You never give them the raw keys, you give them an access mechanism that uses the keys internally. Even that can be increased in security by using a smarter device capable of session level encryption, or even public key cryptography. Again, passwords are not keys.
In an industrial plant not every button or any pressure valve control needs a password. In fact I say the must not have one.
You're right. But they all need keys, or you have little integrity and no security.
There's more than one utility function. For example, if wrote an app I would not expect to profit, it would be for fun. Thus I'd give it away for free or a dollar. Someone else might be hoping to make a living at it. too bad.
This simulation was built to identify profit models, not to maximize developer happiness. But the two are related, and profit will be an element everyone can measure.
Consider if the app you created turned out to be really fun and truly innovative, and it went viral and sold five hundred thousand copies at $0.99.
If nothing else, you'd learn that half a million users can be awfully demanding. You might find yourself mired in support requests, and have to decide whether or not you can support it yourself or if you want to sell it to a game company so they can manage it. If nothing else, you might be surprised when you discover you have to pay taxes on a whole lot more income than you thought. The point is that at some financial threshold, you will probably have to take it seriously. My threshold might be higher or lower than yours, but in this simulation, it doesn't really matter. It would change your personal view of profiting from your work.
Perhaps they can simulate how to make slashdot summaries make sense next?
Seriously, if you can't understand this one, go play on facebook or whatever the kids are doing these days. Your life is wasted here, as is a fraction of ours for reading your inane drivel.
Actually, luminous efficacy depends on the specific usage. We keep a large collection of exotic orchids in our house, because the outdoor climate isn't suitable. They require a lot of light. For many years I used to run a High Pressure Sodium (HPS) grow light, which is probably the most efficient light source of all the technologies I've looked at, yielding 55,000 lumens from a 400W bulb. The problem for growing is that the characteristic golden light it gives off is mostly in the red, green and yellow bands, less in the blue. Leaves are green because they reflect the part of the spectrum the plants do not use in photosynthesis. Plants use mostly only the red and blue light, which it turns out is not as much of the total output of an HPS as we see.
So three years ago I bought a 145W LED floodlight to replace the 400W HPS floodlight. Its output is only 9,000 lumens, but the color is in a much broader, flatter spectrum (it's optimistically sold as "True White".) The plants get about half the total amount of usable energy, but I'm only pumping in one third of the electricity. That also reduced my cooling bills in the summer, and greatly reduced the risk of fire (that 400W light generated a lot of heat.) It's also more pleasing to the humans enjoying the flowers.
Then we increased our collection size by a lot, so now we have two LED floodlights, and I'm back up to 300W/hr.:-( Still better than 800W/hr, though.
But if you analyze the cost, the ROI isn't there for LED floodlights yet. I'm spending $243/year on each LED floodlight vs $312/year for the HPS, but with less light output. At today's electric rates my breakeven point isn't for 6 years, which is close to the estimated life of the LED elements. However, if I were paying $0.40/kWh, which is what they're paying in Europe today, that really expensive LED floodlight would pay for itself in one year. I predict electric costs won't rise nearly that far or fast here, so for me the LED floodlights are only good from a safety/aesthetic perspective, and not yet economical. If I lived in Europe, though, the LED would be a bargain.
As with so many things in life, one size does not fit all.
Lighting costs depend on a lot of things. Where you live, what you pay for electricity, and how you use the light. I get very cheap electrons from a local co-op, $0.11544/kWh during the summer. But I know others around the country and globe pay $0.40/kWh or more! That's $0.04 cents per hour to run the bulb. If you use the bulb as an outside security light, running it from dusk to dawn year round, that averages to 12 hours per day, or $0.48 per day, or $14.40 per month. It's also 4,380 hours of usage per year, which is a higher lifetime than most incandescent bulbs are rated for. And you shouldn't ignore one of the hidden costs, which is that of replacement. If the bulb is inconveniently located at the top of a pole, it requires a ladder to change. Ladders carry a significant risk of injury: if you climb one ladder every 20 years instead of climbing it three times every year, you dramatically reduce your exposure to a potentially costly accident. If the light's in a ceiling fixture, the chances are the average homeowner will stand on a chair to change it, sometimes a swivel chair, and there's another likely candidate for a slip and fall.
If you're seeing 10 years of life from a rerated bulb (running a 130V bulb at 120VAC), then you're probably using it about one hour a day, and you're probably not switching it on and off very frequently, which excludes your bulb from the set of prime targets for saving energy. And no, an LED wouldn't be your best choice. When it finally burns out and comes time to replace it, a CFL would probably work just as well for you, and at $4.00 instead of $60.00, it would be your wisest investment. It'll cost you a total of $1.10 per year and you won't have to change it for over 27 years. (You probably haven't considered the additional inefficiency of running the bulb at a lower voltage, at it reduces the light output. The CFL would be brighter.)
100w bulb uses one cent/hr. The miracle bulb uses.1 cent/hr. 100w bulb on for a month costs 7.2 dollars, the miracle bulb 72 cents. It is going to take awhile to break even.
If you're using them one hour a day, and pay $0.10/kWh, it would take 20 years to break even, which I totally agree wouldn't be worth it. But if you're burning them 4 hours per day, those 100W incandescents will cost you $16/year and require changing every 8 months, while the LEDs will cost $4.38 per year, with a 20 year lifetime. Your ROI happens in under 4 years. And if your electric rates are $0.40/kWh, as they are in the UK, the ROI comes in at one year. An Englishman will pay $59.68/year for 4 hour daily usage of a 100W incandescent, $15.77 for a CFL, and $8.76 for the LED.
Funny thing, though. 26W CFL lamps have almost exactly the same cost structure as 10W LED lamps. They're slightly worse, in that the shorter service lifetimes require higher costs due to the more frequent bulb changes, and they perform poorer in cold weather, making them sometimes unsuitable outdoors in cold climates. At $0.10/kWh, operationally the annual cost to run them is virtually identical to the LED. But raise the price of electricity to European rates, and the LEDs are much more economical.
The problem is in power generation. New electric plants are a huge investment. No matter what technology you use, an electric plant will affect the environment: hydro plants require damming rivers, nuclear plants generate waste that nobody wants, and coal plants spew out mercury and other nasty toxins. Even wind turbines make noise and kill birds. So electric companies don't want to build them, because they're a giant PITA, which makes them really, really expensive. And as a customer, if your power company has to add a generator, guess who will pay for it? Existing customers are not exempt from rate hikes, so they are generally opposed to this construction, too.
Electric companies have another pressure: increased demand in the form of new customers. People add kids, buy big TV sets, and electric cars. Factories add machines. Contractors build new neighborhoods. They all need the electric company to provide additional power. But if the electric plants are already at capacity, how do we add more users?
Turn to the economics of supply and demand. If we can't add any more to the supply, we can raise prices in order to cut demand.
If an incandescent bulb costs you $1.00 to buy, but $10.00 per month to operate, and lasts only one year, and an LED bulb that costs $60 to buy, $1.67 per month to operate, and lasts 20 years, which would you buy? Most people are actually really stupid, and continue to buy the $1 bulbs because they're "cheaper", not realizing the real difference is $121 per year vs. $23 per year. I'm suspecting that you'd be smart enough to eventually decide "the light from this $1 bulb isn't worth the extra $98 per year."
Instead of raising all the rates, we can use a curious property of electricity generation: generators have a "peak" capacity, but rarely have the demand to consume it all. If you could shift some of the peak load to off-peak times, you could add more clients without having more generators. This is where the Smart Grid comes into play. If I'm operating a smart grid, I'll sell you off-peak electricity for $0.10/kWh. But if you want to burn electrons on the hottest day of the summer, it'll cost you $5.00/kWh, because I have to fire up the really expensive peak-time natural gas generators. So my smart grid can tell your appliances that electric rates are going up to $5.00 for a few hours. You can set those smart appliances to "don't run the dishwasher or electric dryer unless the cost is less than $0.25/kWh."
Another way to cut demand is to increase efficiency. We know incandescent bulbs are highly inefficient. And incandescent bulbs make up a large percentage of electric use in this country. If we can replace all the incandescent bulbs, the nation as a whole would save as much as 25% of today's electricity demand (yes, lighting is a huge part of today's demand.) That defers a lot of new plant construction, perhaps giving more efficient or less polluting technologies (such as solar, geothermal, or tidal) time to evolve. And it doesn't raise electric rates for everyone today.
Overall you're participating a shared national system, which is exactly why the nation has the right to try to optimize it. And I don't want my electric rates to go up in price because you imagine you have some "right" to cheap bulbs. (I still don't remember the line in the Bill of Rights where Madison wrote "The right of the public to use inefficient devices on the national electrical grid shall not be infringed.")
If it bothers you that much, take the real libertarian way out of this problem. Run off the grid. Buy your own generator and make your own juice. Nobody's going to tell you how efficient you have to be, you can figure that out on your own. You get all the benefits: make as much or little power as you want. And you get all the drawbacks. You get the generator noise. You get to exhaust the pollutants into your own back yard. You get to pay the fuel truck to deliver a tankful of gas every month. You get to pay for the generator and its maintenance. But it's all your solution.
I know it's hard, and vague. The idea certainly is to make new legislation extremely difficult to pass, because if you look at laws passed in the last 50 years or so, I'd say most are horrible; and only a few were well-intentioned. They're the brainchildren of profiteers and religious extremists, and not representative of the people as a whole. So a "three strikes" law would essentially give an elected official the chance to safely vote on two meaningful things. Can you get 51 Senators and the President to agree that one of the two things they'll vote on in their life is your slightly shady bill? As a country, we probably really don't need that bit of legislation in the first place. This would just ensure it.
But yeah, it probably would make some things worse. My biggest problem with most of the legislation is with these midnight one-paragraph riders that we see hidden in the middle of the most critical bills. I want them stopped cold. Line Item vetoes didn't work, so let's try a different approach. Accountability.
Require a change control system be used to maintain a history of the text being written into each law. Then, let's say the Hospital Administrator Union's lobbyist writes the text of a law establishing their right to repossess organs from transplant clients who don't pay their bills. As a bought-and-paid-for congressman, you can copy and paste their full text into page 862 of the next omnibus budget bill. But as the change control law would require, anyone who wants can look at the history of the document and see that it was actually you who inserted that particular paragraph. You're not allowed anonymity behind a crowd of authors. You stand alone as the guy who wrote the most cruel legislation ever. You get to go home and explain to your district why you wrote that it's OK to let a repo man hunt down your grandpa and cut out his liver.
The congressmen can still have closed door meetings, and we don't have to know who originally proposed it, or who the hospital representative was that whispered in someone else's ear. But at the end of the meeting, someone will have to fess up to be the specific author of that legislative turd-in-the-punchbowl.
No, a tax on idiotic laws. Every time someone proposes a law that will be nixed by the supreme/constitutional court because it violates other laws, tax the idiot who wasted valuable parliament time to get a moment in the limelight.
Hell with that. I want a "three strikes and you're a despot" law. If you voted "Aye" to violate my constitutional rights with some stupid law, and the supreme court overturns that legislation, and you've done this three times, you are guilty of being a serial tyrant and should be sentenced to not less than 10 years in a federal prison. That applies to everyone who voted for the law, not just the guy who signs it (although it could certainly start with him, as he took an oath to defend the Constitution when he entered office.)
No statute of limitations, either. You could be sleeping in your bed 10 years after leaving office, and if the Supreme Court overturns your 15-year-old crappy law, the ninjas bash down your door, haul you out of the arms of your mistress, and drag your butt to jail. None of these last minute help-my-buddy-in-the-industry-laws like pardons happening on the last days of office.
Congressional sessions would be over pretty damn quick, don't you think? Some idiot puts up a law written by lobbyists for the industry, and every other person in congress would immediately say "Um, I vote NO, right now. Who wants to go get a drink with me?"
In olden times, I was able to get a "not spinning" drive working by holding the drive between thumb and forefinger right on the axis of the internal disk, applying power, then striking the long edge of the disk. My idea was to rotate the enclosure around the platter using inertia. It actually worked quite well, and I recovered several stuck drives this way.
But back then, the main problem lurking inside hard disks was faulty lubrication. The oils they used would separate and turn to varnish over time, essentially gluing the shaft in place. And disk drive motors have relatively little torque, so even a modest bit of friction could cause them to seize up. The lubricants used in modern drives generally don't have this same problem. So you might have a faulty motor after all, in which case you are still completely screwed.
You mean "tech" as in printing and publishing? That's been a problem for years. And it makes me wonder if these things will be stymied by a shot from Big Theological Print Houses. They're obviously worried about the copyrights on the material they publish, and ensuring their revenue streams remain flowing.
Years ago, I was surprised to see advances in steganographic watermarking taking place in printed music. The spacing of notes and symbols, using dotted lines instead of thin solid lines for bars, all these were used to give the publishers a way to identify people or churches who bought only one hymnal and passed out photocopies of the day's music. I understood then that the King James translation has been adopted by many people as the canonical text simply because newer translations cost too much, kind of like some of the very first open source projects.
The printers are treating the Bible almost like a college textbook. Release a new edition every few years, and convince the churches to buy all new copies.
So I wonder if Big Theological Printers will try to convince people that these are really important advances. "Oh, those old translations were really poor and mistranslated a lot of important concepts, and these new community-supported translations are pretty much heretical. For God's Own True Words, you really should stick with our Official Blessed and Approved translation, Bible 2012, 34th edition. Available now, wherever fine bibles are sold. Look for the 'Deity Approved' holographic stickers!"
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I still want a Three Strikes and You're a Serial Tyrant law. If you introduced, voted in favor of, and/or signed into law a total of three bills that are each later overturned by the Supreme Court on the grounds of being unconstitutional, you are guilty of depriving the populous of their rights, and are guilty of being a tyrant. 10 years in federal prison, no statute of limitations, no executive pardons.
Congress (or Parliament for those of you up in Canuckistan) would consist of a bunch of guys who would be a whole lot more concerned about the crap laws they pass. The MPAA lobbyists would never even see their bought-and-paid-for congressmen: they'd basically be turned away at the door by flunkies. Harper's bill would die by unanimous disapproval.
I have a buddy I used to go riding through the Black Hills with back in the 1980s. He had a Gold Wing that he added every chrome-plated light fixture to that he could find on the aftermarket. It had these chromed spikey posts in the back, with glowing red jeweled tips, lights running along the bags top and bottom, around the crash bars, on the fenders, everywhere. I'm not sure what look he was going for, but we all gave him sh!t for it.
Anyway, we were driving along, and he honked his horn for some reason, and his bike slowed down! So we pulled over to the side of the road to take a look at it, and his battery was completely flat - honking the horn drew enough extra current that it was screwing up the electrical system to the point where it impacted ignition. And of course there was nowhere near enough current to turn the crank over. Turns out his alternator had nowhere near the capacity required to run all the stupid lights AND charge the battery. He disconnected all his pretty lights, and we had to push-start it so we could continue our journey.
I often will use a Dremel to grind straight slots in uncooperative screw heads so I can use a regular flat blade screwdriver to remove them. This generally works well for stripped Philips head screws, too. And I've made specialty screwdrivers (triangles, two-pronged, etc.) by grinding the needed custom tips onto small pieces of barstock, but the soft metal generally isn't as durable as I need it to be. I have a few cases where I made those tools using a sacrificial screwdriver as the starting blank, but grinding the case-hardened tips usually results in a weak tool anyway.
I never thought about using epoxy to get at an otherwise inaccessible screw! And using a tube to contain the epoxy, preventing damage to the product itself, well, that's just amazingly clever! Thank you so much!
Good. I'm glad you have a solution that works for you, so it definitely makes sense for you to keep it up. There is nothing wrong with that approach.
Complementary to your comment, we have a lot of tech that was created so long ago that it's terribly inefficient and should best be retired. Consider an old machine with an Athlon 1200 CPU, drawing 330 watts of power while an Intel i5-2400 based machine draws only 75 watts. Consider an old hard drive that draws 30 watts to spin at idle, compared to a modern drive that uses 8 watts to do the same, or a SSDD that draws 0.14 watts. Or consider a CRT monitor drawing 120W compared to a newer LCD that draws 22W.
Yes, I get that obviously there are things that people can't afford to replace today, and when repairing them for free is an option, it'll happen. But these old devices still cost them tremendously on their electric bills. I believe the Dutch pay somewhere around $0.40/kWh, meaning that an old PC there would cost over $4 per day to run, compared to a new efficient machine that would cost less than $1 per day. And that new machine would certainly have better performance, more capabilities, and likely better security (not that I want to get into a big debate about it, but running Windows 7 and IE 9 instead of XP and IE 6 would be a big improvement for most home user's security.)
Some working things should be retired.
Google analytics is all about gathering and selling marketing data. Providing usability data is useful when it comes time to convince site owners that they should use it, but that doesn't pay the bills in Mountain View.
Google wants to know every user habit related to on line sales. They know what ads you've seen. They know what keywords you searched on prior to making a purchase. They know which sites you visited prior to the purchase. And if you use Google Checkout or Google Wallet, they even know what you paid for it, and from whom you bought it.
If I'm an advertiser of similar products, that's the stream I want to hitch a ride on. And Google will happily sell me that info.
As a consumer, this SUCKS. Any legitimate searching or research I do is being subtly manipulated by self-interested advertisers. Any original research I do is being recorded, and countermeasures are being deployed to ensure I won't get fair results tomorrow.
Because if Emmanuel Goldstein hadn't existed, it would have been necessary to invent him.
(Apologies to Orwell and Voltaire.)
Good points all. I would not personally choose a wall mounted rack unless there were space or other constraints. And I was assuming a wood frame as most residential housing in America is still constructed that way. But you can still distribute a heavier load on metal studs using a plywood backer board, though. It just takes a lot of screws.
If you've done the right thing, and mounted a sheet of 3/4" plywood on the wall before hanging the rack, you should never have this kind of problem. Even if you mount it directly on a drywall surface, you should be using appropriately sized lag screws driven directly into the studs, which would not cause a problem. (Unless your wall is of completely sub-standard construction, of course.) If space constraints are a problem and the studs don't line up with the desired location of your rack, you need to use sturdy reinforcing braces (or the aforementioned sheet of plywood) so that the weight is still carried by the wood to the studs, never by the drywall.
Drywall does many things very well: it deadens sound, blocks light, resists fire, hides infrastructure, creates a flat paintable space for decorating, etc. One of the things it does not do well is support weight loads under tension. Hanging anything from drywall anchors (other than lightweight decorative objects) is not part of a professional installation.
small babies and racks of IT equipment don't mix well.
Thus the invention of the Molly guard.
Even so, I have this vision of children feeding round slices of luncheon meat to the big friendly robot by pushing the button and laying them in the circular depression shape on its tongue. Probably still not a good mix.
On the other hand, I remember playing ring-toss with the write-enable rings on some Saturdays at my dad's work. He had no problem letting a five year old larval stage geek play in the company's computer room. But I knew I wasn't allowed to touch the tape drives, or press any buttons. Except for the keypunch machine. I could push buttons and type on all the punch cards I wanted. That was awesomely cool.
What makes you think that Skype wants or needs to preserve anonymity? Consider that you are contacting Skype yourself and saying "This is Joe Sixpack. Please connect me to J. Random Hacker at +1-123-456-7890. And yes, I understand my information is on file so you can bill me for this call." You're already not anonymous.
Why? Anonymity is not a property they promise to deliver.
Steno doesn't require encryption.
That's correct. However, encryption is an excellent way of randomizing the data in a way that it would be immune to basic (or even advanced) statistical attacks.
Actually, encrypted data stands out in these kinds of analyses prcisely because it's too well distributed.
Steganography is often done by replacing the least significant parts of the original information with the secret message. For example, in a simple BMP bitmap, that might be the 0-bit of each byte used to describe color. But real world images don't have statistically perfect distribution of the 0-bits of color. (They also don't have LSBs with standard Unicode distributions of Arabic text, either.) Real photographic data is non random, all the way down to the 0-bits.
Several years ago, when steganography was a hotly researched topic, some guy came up with a steganographic detector called OutGuess. It performed these kinds of analysis and would identify the kinds of steganography embedded in files, or if a file was clean. It had impressive results. So I know detection is a solved problem. Decryption is still the real issue, of course. But while hiding stuff in a video may baffle the amateurs, I would bet serious coin that the pros are analyzing a lot of images on a regular basis.
Well, that sounds fine, but totally unrealistic. You have in an industrial plant thousands of these control devices. Maintaining a password list for all these is just not going to work.
The devices don't need individual passwords, they need individual keys. Passwords are not keys. And deriving secure unique keys from a master key is a solved problem. You can use master key injection systems (like DUKPT). Or you can have the devices automatically create them when they are introduced to the network (like Z-Wave).
So builder Bob will have a default password and Joe the mechanic has one. And you the operator have to know who installed this piece of hardware.
Role based authority is also a way to ensure that the right people have the necessary access. You never give them the raw keys, you give them an access mechanism that uses the keys internally. Even that can be increased in security by using a smarter device capable of session level encryption, or even public key cryptography. Again, passwords are not keys.
In an industrial plant not every button or any pressure valve control needs a password. In fact I say the must not have one.
You're right. But they all need keys, or you have little integrity and no security.
There's more than one utility function. For example, if wrote an app I would not expect to profit, it would be for fun. Thus I'd give it away for free or a dollar. Someone else might be hoping to make a living at it. too bad.
This simulation was built to identify profit models, not to maximize developer happiness. But the two are related, and profit will be an element everyone can measure.
Consider if the app you created turned out to be really fun and truly innovative, and it went viral and sold five hundred thousand copies at $0.99.
If nothing else, you'd learn that half a million users can be awfully demanding. You might find yourself mired in support requests, and have to decide whether or not you can support it yourself or if you want to sell it to a game company so they can manage it. If nothing else, you might be surprised when you discover you have to pay taxes on a whole lot more income than you thought. The point is that at some financial threshold, you will probably have to take it seriously. My threshold might be higher or lower than yours, but in this simulation, it doesn't really matter. It would change your personal view of profiting from your work.
Perhaps they can simulate how to make slashdot summaries make sense next?
Seriously, if you can't understand this one, go play on facebook or whatever the kids are doing these days. Your life is wasted here, as is a fraction of ours for reading your inane drivel.
Actually, luminous efficacy depends on the specific usage. We keep a large collection of exotic orchids in our house, because the outdoor climate isn't suitable. They require a lot of light. For many years I used to run a High Pressure Sodium (HPS) grow light, which is probably the most efficient light source of all the technologies I've looked at, yielding 55,000 lumens from a 400W bulb. The problem for growing is that the characteristic golden light it gives off is mostly in the red, green and yellow bands, less in the blue. Leaves are green because they reflect the part of the spectrum the plants do not use in photosynthesis. Plants use mostly only the red and blue light, which it turns out is not as much of the total output of an HPS as we see.
So three years ago I bought a 145W LED floodlight to replace the 400W HPS floodlight. Its output is only 9,000 lumens, but the color is in a much broader, flatter spectrum (it's optimistically sold as "True White".) The plants get about half the total amount of usable energy, but I'm only pumping in one third of the electricity. That also reduced my cooling bills in the summer, and greatly reduced the risk of fire (that 400W light generated a lot of heat.) It's also more pleasing to the humans enjoying the flowers.
Then we increased our collection size by a lot, so now we have two LED floodlights, and I'm back up to 300W/hr. :-( Still better than 800W/hr, though.
But if you analyze the cost, the ROI isn't there for LED floodlights yet. I'm spending $243/year on each LED floodlight vs $312/year for the HPS, but with less light output. At today's electric rates my breakeven point isn't for 6 years, which is close to the estimated life of the LED elements. However, if I were paying $0.40/kWh, which is what they're paying in Europe today, that really expensive LED floodlight would pay for itself in one year. I predict electric costs won't rise nearly that far or fast here, so for me the LED floodlights are only good from a safety/aesthetic perspective, and not yet economical. If I lived in Europe, though, the LED would be a bargain.
As with so many things in life, one size does not fit all.
Lighting costs depend on a lot of things. Where you live, what you pay for electricity, and how you use the light. I get very cheap electrons from a local co-op, $0.11544/kWh during the summer. But I know others around the country and globe pay $0.40/kWh or more! That's $0.04 cents per hour to run the bulb. If you use the bulb as an outside security light, running it from dusk to dawn year round, that averages to 12 hours per day, or $0.48 per day, or $14.40 per month. It's also 4,380 hours of usage per year, which is a higher lifetime than most incandescent bulbs are rated for. And you shouldn't ignore one of the hidden costs, which is that of replacement. If the bulb is inconveniently located at the top of a pole, it requires a ladder to change. Ladders carry a significant risk of injury: if you climb one ladder every 20 years instead of climbing it three times every year, you dramatically reduce your exposure to a potentially costly accident. If the light's in a ceiling fixture, the chances are the average homeowner will stand on a chair to change it, sometimes a swivel chair, and there's another likely candidate for a slip and fall.
If you're seeing 10 years of life from a rerated bulb (running a 130V bulb at 120VAC), then you're probably using it about one hour a day, and you're probably not switching it on and off very frequently, which excludes your bulb from the set of prime targets for saving energy. And no, an LED wouldn't be your best choice. When it finally burns out and comes time to replace it, a CFL would probably work just as well for you, and at $4.00 instead of $60.00, it would be your wisest investment. It'll cost you a total of $1.10 per year and you won't have to change it for over 27 years. (You probably haven't considered the additional inefficiency of running the bulb at a lower voltage, at it reduces the light output. The CFL would be brighter.)
100w bulb uses one cent/hr. The miracle bulb uses .1 cent/hr. 100w bulb on for a month costs 7.2 dollars, the miracle bulb 72 cents. It is going to take awhile to break even.
If you're using them one hour a day, and pay $0.10/kWh, it would take 20 years to break even, which I totally agree wouldn't be worth it. But if you're burning them 4 hours per day, those 100W incandescents will cost you $16/year and require changing every 8 months, while the LEDs will cost $4.38 per year, with a 20 year lifetime. Your ROI happens in under 4 years. And if your electric rates are $0.40/kWh, as they are in the UK, the ROI comes in at one year. An Englishman will pay $59.68/year for 4 hour daily usage of a 100W incandescent, $15.77 for a CFL, and $8.76 for the LED.
Funny thing, though. 26W CFL lamps have almost exactly the same cost structure as 10W LED lamps. They're slightly worse, in that the shorter service lifetimes require higher costs due to the more frequent bulb changes, and they perform poorer in cold weather, making them sometimes unsuitable outdoors in cold climates. At $0.10/kWh, operationally the annual cost to run them is virtually identical to the LED. But raise the price of electricity to European rates, and the LEDs are much more economical.
The keyboard to an old IBM 5150 can be used to bludgeon someone to death.
Pics or it didn't happen!
The problem is in power generation. New electric plants are a huge investment. No matter what technology you use, an electric plant will affect the environment: hydro plants require damming rivers, nuclear plants generate waste that nobody wants, and coal plants spew out mercury and other nasty toxins. Even wind turbines make noise and kill birds. So electric companies don't want to build them, because they're a giant PITA, which makes them really, really expensive. And as a customer, if your power company has to add a generator, guess who will pay for it? Existing customers are not exempt from rate hikes, so they are generally opposed to this construction, too.
Electric companies have another pressure: increased demand in the form of new customers. People add kids, buy big TV sets, and electric cars. Factories add machines. Contractors build new neighborhoods. They all need the electric company to provide additional power. But if the electric plants are already at capacity, how do we add more users?
Turn to the economics of supply and demand. If we can't add any more to the supply, we can raise prices in order to cut demand.
If an incandescent bulb costs you $1.00 to buy, but $10.00 per month to operate, and lasts only one year, and an LED bulb that costs $60 to buy, $1.67 per month to operate, and lasts 20 years, which would you buy? Most people are actually really stupid, and continue to buy the $1 bulbs because they're "cheaper", not realizing the real difference is $121 per year vs. $23 per year. I'm suspecting that you'd be smart enough to eventually decide "the light from this $1 bulb isn't worth the extra $98 per year."
Instead of raising all the rates, we can use a curious property of electricity generation: generators have a "peak" capacity, but rarely have the demand to consume it all. If you could shift some of the peak load to off-peak times, you could add more clients without having more generators. This is where the Smart Grid comes into play. If I'm operating a smart grid, I'll sell you off-peak electricity for $0.10/kWh. But if you want to burn electrons on the hottest day of the summer, it'll cost you $5.00/kWh, because I have to fire up the really expensive peak-time natural gas generators. So my smart grid can tell your appliances that electric rates are going up to $5.00 for a few hours. You can set those smart appliances to "don't run the dishwasher or electric dryer unless the cost is less than $0.25/kWh."
Another way to cut demand is to increase efficiency. We know incandescent bulbs are highly inefficient. And incandescent bulbs make up a large percentage of electric use in this country. If we can replace all the incandescent bulbs, the nation as a whole would save as much as 25% of today's electricity demand (yes, lighting is a huge part of today's demand.) That defers a lot of new plant construction, perhaps giving more efficient or less polluting technologies (such as solar, geothermal, or tidal) time to evolve. And it doesn't raise electric rates for everyone today.
Overall you're participating a shared national system, which is exactly why the nation has the right to try to optimize it. And I don't want my electric rates to go up in price because you imagine you have some "right" to cheap bulbs. (I still don't remember the line in the Bill of Rights where Madison wrote "The right of the public to use inefficient devices on the national electrical grid shall not be infringed.")
If it bothers you that much, take the real libertarian way out of this problem. Run off the grid. Buy your own generator and make your own juice. Nobody's going to tell you how efficient you have to be, you can figure that out on your own. You get all the benefits: make as much or little power as you want. And you get all the drawbacks. You get the generator noise. You get to exhaust the pollutants into your own back yard. You get to pay the fuel truck to deliver a tankful of gas every month. You get to pay for the generator and its maintenance. But it's all your solution.
Citation really needed.
I know it's hard, and vague. The idea certainly is to make new legislation extremely difficult to pass, because if you look at laws passed in the last 50 years or so, I'd say most are horrible; and only a few were well-intentioned. They're the brainchildren of profiteers and religious extremists, and not representative of the people as a whole. So a "three strikes" law would essentially give an elected official the chance to safely vote on two meaningful things. Can you get 51 Senators and the President to agree that one of the two things they'll vote on in their life is your slightly shady bill? As a country, we probably really don't need that bit of legislation in the first place. This would just ensure it.
But yeah, it probably would make some things worse. My biggest problem with most of the legislation is with these midnight one-paragraph riders that we see hidden in the middle of the most critical bills. I want them stopped cold. Line Item vetoes didn't work, so let's try a different approach. Accountability.
Require a change control system be used to maintain a history of the text being written into each law. Then, let's say the Hospital Administrator Union's lobbyist writes the text of a law establishing their right to repossess organs from transplant clients who don't pay their bills. As a bought-and-paid-for congressman, you can copy and paste their full text into page 862 of the next omnibus budget bill. But as the change control law would require, anyone who wants can look at the history of the document and see that it was actually you who inserted that particular paragraph. You're not allowed anonymity behind a crowd of authors. You stand alone as the guy who wrote the most cruel legislation ever. You get to go home and explain to your district why you wrote that it's OK to let a repo man hunt down your grandpa and cut out his liver.
The congressmen can still have closed door meetings, and we don't have to know who originally proposed it, or who the hospital representative was that whispered in someone else's ear. But at the end of the meeting, someone will have to fess up to be the specific author of that legislative turd-in-the-punchbowl.
No, a tax on idiotic laws. Every time someone proposes a law that will be nixed by the supreme/constitutional court because it violates other laws, tax the idiot who wasted valuable parliament time to get a moment in the limelight.
Hell with that. I want a "three strikes and you're a despot" law. If you voted "Aye" to violate my constitutional rights with some stupid law, and the supreme court overturns that legislation, and you've done this three times, you are guilty of being a serial tyrant and should be sentenced to not less than 10 years in a federal prison. That applies to everyone who voted for the law, not just the guy who signs it (although it could certainly start with him, as he took an oath to defend the Constitution when he entered office.)
No statute of limitations, either. You could be sleeping in your bed 10 years after leaving office, and if the Supreme Court overturns your 15-year-old crappy law, the ninjas bash down your door, haul you out of the arms of your mistress, and drag your butt to jail. None of these last minute help-my-buddy-in-the-industry-laws like pardons happening on the last days of office.
Congressional sessions would be over pretty damn quick, don't you think? Some idiot puts up a law written by lobbyists for the industry, and every other person in congress would immediately say "Um, I vote NO, right now. Who wants to go get a drink with me?"
In olden times, I was able to get a "not spinning" drive working by holding the drive between thumb and forefinger right on the axis of the internal disk, applying power, then striking the long edge of the disk. My idea was to rotate the enclosure around the platter using inertia. It actually worked quite well, and I recovered several stuck drives this way.
But back then, the main problem lurking inside hard disks was faulty lubrication. The oils they used would separate and turn to varnish over time, essentially gluing the shaft in place. And disk drive motors have relatively little torque, so even a modest bit of friction could cause them to seize up. The lubricants used in modern drives generally don't have this same problem. So you might have a faulty motor after all, in which case you are still completely screwed.
You mean "tech" as in printing and publishing? That's been a problem for years. And it makes me wonder if these things will be stymied by a shot from Big Theological Print Houses. They're obviously worried about the copyrights on the material they publish, and ensuring their revenue streams remain flowing.
Years ago, I was surprised to see advances in steganographic watermarking taking place in printed music. The spacing of notes and symbols, using dotted lines instead of thin solid lines for bars, all these were used to give the publishers a way to identify people or churches who bought only one hymnal and passed out photocopies of the day's music. I understood then that the King James translation has been adopted by many people as the canonical text simply because newer translations cost too much, kind of like some of the very first open source projects.
The printers are treating the Bible almost like a college textbook. Release a new edition every few years, and convince the churches to buy all new copies.
So I wonder if Big Theological Printers will try to convince people that these are really important advances. "Oh, those old translations were really poor and mistranslated a lot of important concepts, and these new community-supported translations are pretty much heretical. For God's Own True Words, you really should stick with our Official Blessed and Approved translation, Bible 2012, 34th edition. Available now, wherever fine bibles are sold. Look for the 'Deity Approved' holographic stickers!"