You'll like to hear, then, that there are multiple projects that routinely, in a fully automated fashion, photograph said library-lent ebooks and torrent them. That's my take on what's going on, at least. The so-called analog hole doesn't diminish the quality of the reconstituted digital version in any shape or form, as long as we're talking about text only, or text-with-tables. All you need is a computer-controlled SLR and a couple RC servos to push the buttons on the reader. Books are very different from movies in that respect.
You're completely wrong. The only thing that has changed is the barrier to entry. Nowadays, the satellite systems and PS3 and iPhone simply require hacks to be done by people with knowledge that makes them unwilling to waste time doing all this hacking. They can simply pay for the stuff and not think about it twice.
If it's a Dyson model, then it's a well understood problem, with a trivial solution. A solution that should be apparent to anyone with any sort of engineering background who doesn't mind actually thinking about the problem, rather than, say, just complaining about it without applying any thinking. Just sayin', and it might well not apply in your case.
Background: The canister has two cyclone systems. The outer cyclone is a lower-speed system designed to separate lint and larger contaminants (think wood chips, seeds, grains of sand). The inner cyclone is designed to work with rather fine particulates and performs better than HEPA rating. Both of those systems are "exposed" to the bottom lid of the canister, since you need to dump stuff from both of them.
The seal that separates those systems, and seals against the bottom canister lid, was faulty in a few production runs, and invariably resulted in large particulates entering the HEPA cyclone, promptly clogging it. Since the HEPA cyclone now doesn't work, all of the HEPA filtering is done by the HEPA post-filter, all the while dirty air passes through the motor and wrecks it as well.
If you ever have that problem, you need to inspect the seal that seals the HEPA cyclone cylinder against the bottom dust can lid. The seal and/or the lid may need to be replaced.
Again, it's well understood, and it's a fixable problem. A properly operating Dyson won't ever clog the HEPA filter. If you have a clogging HEPA filter in a Dyson, you're also ruining your motor, and you must fix it or else there's simply no point in operating the machine any further.
Of course lawyers that one should retain in such circumstances know all that. If you have no means to get a lawyer, then most likely the lady's "suing for damages" part doesn't make any sense, because there are no assets to go after. And besides, if the defense lawyer is provided by the insurer, then anyway they know all that and should do due diligence, just like you did, or they are up for firing and possibly disbarment. What you did is really the minimal due diligence that any law student would be aware of, much less a practicing lawyer. Of course kudos for you for having the wherewithal to stay rational and look at the data.
Oh no, you can still do it in Europe, only that digging up all the data is on you. So you can't merely get a phone book, OCR it, and sell a digital version of the same facts. In the U.S. you can, and I agree with that policy. Europe is a bit nuts in this respect IMHO, and you need to have paper trail that shows you did obtain the data independently.
Yet, demonstrably, in spite of all this being "out there", both celebrities and battered women are not really much worse for it. If my wife's experience with stalkers is anything to go by, the best way to deal with a stalker is an offer of having sex right now and right there, and oh by the way did you know I was HIV positive for a while now. Stalkers have tiny balls, apparently.
And what does it matter that someone looked up the details of the poor target online, vs. from a random dart throw on a map? Unless there's a conscious, repeated targeting going on, it won't matter at all.
As far a US is concerned, I've got some news for you, and you must be living an ever sheltered life.
Ever got a traffic ticket? It's public record, usually available online for a free lookup. Ever purchased real estate? Same. Got born or died? Same. And so it goes.
If you live in the U.S., posting the same stuff on social networking sites is frankly said just wasted effort. It is all a matter of public record, and anyone willing can look it up. Heck, there are even companies who regularly get this data from every fucking single public entity in the U.S. and collate them in databases. The access to those is provided as a paid-for service, but the prices are nothing to write home about. $50-$100 will find anyone overtly owning real estate anywhere in the U.S.
No, USPS isn't really in the business of looking people up, lol.
You can look up the county property records online for pretty much every major county in the U.S. All you need is the county and person's name. Perhaps only in the boonies you have to drag your ass to an office to look it up.
You can also look up court records in quite a few counties online, for free.
I'm sorry, but those are still public records in the U.S. There are multiple sources for them:
1. Local newspaper archives. Typically local newspapers publish all recorded births and deaths.
2. Local public record offices. All across U.S., both birth and death certificates are public records and everyone can access them.
3. Local real estate records. Almost everywhere you can look up basic property records for free - the name of the owner, the address, the taxes due. To get details you may need to pay, but that's just administrative fee. In better counties, all of the records are freely available online, including GIS data.
I am in fact in favor of those remaining public no matter what. It prevents certain forms of corruption.
As someone who has had a DC14 for 8 years now, I call bullshit on that. There are no replaceable filters. Well, there are two filters, total. One is a lifetime HEPA filter that I've replaced 4 years ago methinks, simply out of boredom. It didn't have to be replaced. There is a washable foam filter that you're supposed to wash and dry every few weeks or so. No big deal. You don't replace it, you just wash it, dry it, and put it back. So yeah - it's replaceable if by "replace" you mean "put it back where you took it from".
Dumping the canister into a plastic bag, when done properly, produces no big dust clouds. It takes a bit of dexterity and skill to do it that way, but again, it's something you learn if only you care to learn, that is.
This vacuum dumps out air that's cleaner than the air it sucks in, even if you ran it standing on your desk instead of your floor. It's an absolutely brilliant design when it comes to the air path. It has some usability bugs when it comes to the hose and cord retention area, but those are things you can live with. They are secondary to the primary function: that of, you know, vacuuming.
You can't go too far without saturating the magnetic path. Then you decide "oh, to heck with magnetic path, we've got the amp turns, we can have it all in the air". Not soon thereafter you hit the strength limits of whatever nonmagnetic composite structure you use to keep the coils from shredding themselves to pieces, never mind the extreme cyclic loads generated by the rotating magnetic fields on anything ferromagnetic that happens to be nearby.
Practical superconducting motors require changes to pretty much everything else in the machine they are installed in. They only make sense in large, stationary applications like power generation, metal mills, etc. Anywhere you need a huge honkin' motor that can be kept separate from everything else. Other than that, they can be fairly impractical even if room temp superconductors were at hand.
With helium prices on the rise, it won't be long at all until it's perfectly economical to run MRI scanners with water-cooled copper coils. Even if right now you'd swap MRI scanner windings with copper ones, you'd only increase the operating costs 2-3 fold, and decrease the purchase cost of the machine by a similar factor. That's not a big deal. The superconducting MRI magnets are, to me, almost an unnecessary gimmick.
It really doesn't matter. Copper is a pretty good conductor already. Having 100% efficient electric motors doesn't really solve any major engineering challenges. If anything, you may now need to pay extra for heaters.
There is some truth to this, but mind what "dealing with money" may mean. Retailing is all it takes, you don't need to be a financier. Say, for example, the duty free shoppers empire (founded mostly by Chuck Feeney and Robert Warren Miller). In the time before it sold to LVMH in 1997, they seemed able to extract 20 billion USD out of mostly asian customers, with essentially zero investment. It was all high-overhead retailing, nothing less, nothing more. They were very productive in that enterprise.
Just think of this: there were years when Feeney and Miller were extracting over $100 million USD yearly in dividends out of that enterprise. To give you another idea of the scale involved: at one point they were paying the Hawaii airport authority $1 million every 3 days for the concession to operate at the airport. DFS was worth way more than many of the large financial operators you might have heard about, like Bear Stearns or Lehman Brothers. Heck, Miller and Feeney were personally worth IIRC more than Stearns and Lehman and a couple other large investment banks combined, for crying out loud.
Of course Chuck Feeney gave all his money to a charitable foundation he created, and is on his way to be the biggest philanthropist of all time. I think the joke is that he was basically bankrolling Irish higher education for a while.
So where you got the idea that you had more input when paying, I have no idea. It's clearly not true.
I sent them an email or two with suggestions and bug reports and some of that stuff did actually find its way into the product. Seemed like excellent customer service to me, back then. So all I have going for myself is experience.
As for being paid for with google searches: that's adware. That's not a product. You know perfectly well how good adware generally is. Opera is just another example of how bad it is for everyone involved.
Nut allergies were unheard of. It's also very interesting that farmers and dirt poor people in 3d world countries don't get these allergies.
You nailed it, but not for the reasons you think. Those things were, undiagnosed, underreported, and caused people to die without anyone knowing any better. It's like saying that life was all peachy without "nasty chemicals" 500 years ago. Well, guess what, we had a lot of mining and ore processing even back then, and people were exposed to very nasty stuff and died young. Things just either were unnamed, or the names weren't very fancy. Aseptic technique didn't exist, for crying out loud. A few stitches to a large skin cut could well kill you - stuff that today isn't worth a second thought, pretty much.
Back then, the cure for life-threatening allergies was to have a lot of kids. Those with bad allergies simply didn't make it very long. Back then, material things were precious, few and far between, and humans were essentially like the consumer throwaway items of today, whereas today humans are very precious.
Slashdot Mirror
You'll like to hear, then, that there are multiple projects that routinely, in a fully automated fashion, photograph said library-lent ebooks and torrent them. That's my take on what's going on, at least. The so-called analog hole doesn't diminish the quality of the reconstituted digital version in any shape or form, as long as we're talking about text only, or text-with-tables. All you need is a computer-controlled SLR and a couple RC servos to push the buttons on the reader. Books are very different from movies in that respect.
Well, King James Bible is still subject to crown copyright on the other side of the pond, so yeah, having DRM on it is not unthinkable at all.
You're completely wrong. The only thing that has changed is the barrier to entry. Nowadays, the satellite systems and PS3 and iPhone simply require hacks to be done by people with knowledge that makes them unwilling to waste time doing all this hacking. They can simply pay for the stuff and not think about it twice.
If it's a Dyson model, then it's a well understood problem, with a trivial solution. A solution that should be apparent to anyone with any sort of engineering background who doesn't mind actually thinking about the problem, rather than, say, just complaining about it without applying any thinking. Just sayin', and it might well not apply in your case.
Background: The canister has two cyclone systems. The outer cyclone is a lower-speed system designed to separate lint and larger contaminants (think wood chips, seeds, grains of sand). The inner cyclone is designed to work with rather fine particulates and performs better than HEPA rating. Both of those systems are "exposed" to the bottom lid of the canister, since you need to dump stuff from both of them.
The seal that separates those systems, and seals against the bottom canister lid, was faulty in a few production runs, and invariably resulted in large particulates entering the HEPA cyclone, promptly clogging it. Since the HEPA cyclone now doesn't work, all of the HEPA filtering is done by the HEPA post-filter, all the while dirty air passes through the motor and wrecks it as well.
If you ever have that problem, you need to inspect the seal that seals the HEPA cyclone cylinder against the bottom dust can lid. The seal and/or the lid may need to be replaced.
Again, it's well understood, and it's a fixable problem. A properly operating Dyson won't ever clog the HEPA filter. If you have a clogging HEPA filter in a Dyson, you're also ruining your motor, and you must fix it or else there's simply no point in operating the machine any further.
Of course lawyers that one should retain in such circumstances know all that. If you have no means to get a lawyer, then most likely the lady's "suing for damages" part doesn't make any sense, because there are no assets to go after. And besides, if the defense lawyer is provided by the insurer, then anyway they know all that and should do due diligence, just like you did, or they are up for firing and possibly disbarment. What you did is really the minimal due diligence that any law student would be aware of, much less a practicing lawyer. Of course kudos for you for having the wherewithal to stay rational and look at the data.
Oh no, you can still do it in Europe, only that digging up all the data is on you. So you can't merely get a phone book, OCR it, and sell a digital version of the same facts. In the U.S. you can, and I agree with that policy. Europe is a bit nuts in this respect IMHO, and you need to have paper trail that shows you did obtain the data independently.
For $50-$100 you can do it without having to go anywhere. There are companies that aggregate all that data :)
Yet, demonstrably, in spite of all this being "out there", both celebrities and battered women are not really much worse for it. If my wife's experience with stalkers is anything to go by, the best way to deal with a stalker is an offer of having sex right now and right there, and oh by the way did you know I was HIV positive for a while now. Stalkers have tiny balls, apparently.
And what does it matter that someone looked up the details of the poor target online, vs. from a random dart throw on a map? Unless there's a conscious, repeated targeting going on, it won't matter at all.
Nice, didn't know that one.
Privacy leak? Why the fuck would anyone want to hide this stuff?
Sure, but most people live in the houses they own :)
As far a US is concerned, I've got some news for you, and you must be living an ever sheltered life.
Ever got a traffic ticket? It's public record, usually available online for a free lookup. Ever purchased real estate? Same. Got born or died? Same. And so it goes.
If you live in the U.S., posting the same stuff on social networking sites is frankly said just wasted effort. It is all a matter of public record, and anyone willing can look it up. Heck, there are even companies who regularly get this data from every fucking single public entity in the U.S. and collate them in databases. The access to those is provided as a paid-for service, but the prices are nothing to write home about. $50-$100 will find anyone overtly owning real estate anywhere in the U.S.
Bullshit. It should be available in the county land records database, online and for free, for crying out loud. Unless he lives in some real boonies.
Much the contrary, LEOs use non-public databases to stalk/kill ex-lovers, people who cut them off in traffic, etc.
This, for a thousand times this!
No, USPS isn't really in the business of looking people up, lol.
You can look up the county property records online for pretty much every major county in the U.S. All you need is the county and person's name. Perhaps only in the boonies you have to drag your ass to an office to look it up.
You can also look up court records in quite a few counties online, for free.
I'm sorry, but those are still public records in the U.S. There are multiple sources for them:
1. Local newspaper archives. Typically local newspapers publish all recorded births and deaths.
2. Local public record offices. All across U.S., both birth and death certificates are public records and everyone can access them.
3. Local real estate records. Almost everywhere you can look up basic property records for free - the name of the owner, the address, the taxes due. To get details you may need to pay, but that's just administrative fee. In better counties, all of the records are freely available online, including GIS data.
I am in fact in favor of those remaining public no matter what. It prevents certain forms of corruption.
As someone who has had a DC14 for 8 years now, I call bullshit on that. There are no replaceable filters. Well, there are two filters, total. One is a lifetime HEPA filter that I've replaced 4 years ago methinks, simply out of boredom. It didn't have to be replaced. There is a washable foam filter that you're supposed to wash and dry every few weeks or so. No big deal. You don't replace it, you just wash it, dry it, and put it back. So yeah - it's replaceable if by "replace" you mean "put it back where you took it from".
Dumping the canister into a plastic bag, when done properly, produces no big dust clouds. It takes a bit of dexterity and skill to do it that way, but again, it's something you learn if only you care to learn, that is.
This vacuum dumps out air that's cleaner than the air it sucks in, even if you ran it standing on your desk instead of your floor. It's an absolutely brilliant design when it comes to the air path. It has some usability bugs when it comes to the hose and cord retention area, but those are things you can live with. They are secondary to the primary function: that of, you know, vacuuming.
You can't go too far without saturating the magnetic path. Then you decide "oh, to heck with magnetic path, we've got the amp turns, we can have it all in the air". Not soon thereafter you hit the strength limits of whatever nonmagnetic composite structure you use to keep the coils from shredding themselves to pieces, never mind the extreme cyclic loads generated by the rotating magnetic fields on anything ferromagnetic that happens to be nearby.
Practical superconducting motors require changes to pretty much everything else in the machine they are installed in. They only make sense in large, stationary applications like power generation, metal mills, etc. Anywhere you need a huge honkin' motor that can be kept separate from everything else. Other than that, they can be fairly impractical even if room temp superconductors were at hand.
With helium prices on the rise, it won't be long at all until it's perfectly economical to run MRI scanners with water-cooled copper coils. Even if right now you'd swap MRI scanner windings with copper ones, you'd only increase the operating costs 2-3 fold, and decrease the purchase cost of the machine by a similar factor. That's not a big deal. The superconducting MRI magnets are, to me, almost an unnecessary gimmick.
It really doesn't matter. Copper is a pretty good conductor already. Having 100% efficient electric motors doesn't really solve any major engineering challenges. If anything, you may now need to pay extra for heaters.
There is some truth to this, but mind what "dealing with money" may mean. Retailing is all it takes, you don't need to be a financier. Say, for example, the duty free shoppers empire (founded mostly by Chuck Feeney and Robert Warren Miller). In the time before it sold to LVMH in 1997, they seemed able to extract 20 billion USD out of mostly asian customers, with essentially zero investment. It was all high-overhead retailing, nothing less, nothing more. They were very productive in that enterprise.
Just think of this: there were years when Feeney and Miller were extracting over $100 million USD yearly in dividends out of that enterprise. To give you another idea of the scale involved: at one point they were paying the Hawaii airport authority $1 million every 3 days for the concession to operate at the airport. DFS was worth way more than many of the large financial operators you might have heard about, like Bear Stearns or Lehman Brothers. Heck, Miller and Feeney were personally worth IIRC more than Stearns and Lehman and a couple other large investment banks combined, for crying out loud.
Of course Chuck Feeney gave all his money to a charitable foundation he created, and is on his way to be the biggest philanthropist of all time. I think the joke is that he was basically bankrolling Irish higher education for a while.
So where you got the idea that you had more input when paying, I have no idea. It's clearly not true.
I sent them an email or two with suggestions and bug reports and some of that stuff did actually find its way into the product. Seemed like excellent customer service to me, back then. So all I have going for myself is experience.
As for being paid for with google searches: that's adware. That's not a product. You know perfectly well how good adware generally is. Opera is just another example of how bad it is for everyone involved.
Maybe because allergies are really not affected by your brain.
Nut allergies were unheard of. It's also very interesting that farmers and dirt poor people in 3d world countries don't get these allergies.
You nailed it, but not for the reasons you think. Those things were, undiagnosed, underreported, and caused people to die without anyone knowing any better. It's like saying that life was all peachy without "nasty chemicals" 500 years ago. Well, guess what, we had a lot of mining and ore processing even back then, and people were exposed to very nasty stuff and died young. Things just either were unnamed, or the names weren't very fancy. Aseptic technique didn't exist, for crying out loud. A few stitches to a large skin cut could well kill you - stuff that today isn't worth a second thought, pretty much.
Back then, the cure for life-threatening allergies was to have a lot of kids. Those with bad allergies simply didn't make it very long. Back then, material things were precious, few and far between, and humans were essentially like the consumer throwaway items of today, whereas today humans are very precious.