Get on an excercise bike serious enough to have an electronic load and a power readout, and see how trivial 50 watts really really is.
A bicycle racer makes about 3/4 horsepower (to go 28 MPH).
One horsepower is IMU something like 785 Watts. Translation of this to SI units is left as an excercise for the reader.
I found 300 Watts to be a semi-sustainable pace, four years after buying a car and parking my bikes. It would have been quite easy when I was riding 10-15 miles a day (at around 20 MPH).
The above discussion about massive banks of slaves on generator bikes was ridiculous. Two decently-nourished slaves could easily power a w1K3d game system.
but I guess it doesn't really contribute much to your statement anyway....
Back in the 80's, there was only one supplier of x86 processors into the pc marketplace.
That's just plain wrong.
The neatest of several 8086 chips was the NEC V20/30, which not only was a drop-in replacement for the 8088/86, but had a switch in its flags which, when set, would make it act like an 8085 (or maybe it was a Z80, I forget which). With a little software (called UniDOS) which provided a special CP/M BIOS, this could run practically ALL the legacy CP/M software (which was abundant in 1983) without modifications, on a PC. NEC built a PC clone with a 16-bit data bus which could have used the 8086, but with their V30 this not only ran DoS at about twice the speed of an IBM-PC, it would also blaze through CP/M software at seemingly demonic speed. Jerry Pournelle usta rave about this rig, because it allowed him to keep his favorite CP/M text editor while upgraging to the new PC technology.
I digress. AMD had a technology exchange agreement with Intel (in the late 70's, supposed to last 25 years) to share x86 IP. (Among other exchanges,) AMD got the 8086/88 and Intel got the small masks for the 2732A (that's a 32 Kbit UVEPROM, organized as 4KBytes at 350 & 250 nS) which were half the size of theirs. AMD consistently dieshrank, outyielded, outperformed, and outpriced Intel on the 8085, 8086/88, 80186/88, 80286, and 80386. (I used to have price lists to prove this stuff, before the SO made me reduce the size of my "legacy hardware library".) I remember buying cheap 12MHz 80286 motherboards (at $179 when most were over $200) that came equipped with 10MHz Intel 80286 CPUs and crashed when these overheated. I replaced the CPUs with AMD 80286LP-12s which co$t le$$ than the 10MHz Intel 80286s and ran frosty cool, but at $40 they killed the low price of the deal. AMD sold 40MHz 80386 chips while Intel abandoned it at 32MHz and introduced the 80486, early versions of which (at 25MHz) could not keep up with the 40MHz AMD 80386 (and, of course, co$t much more). Several other pretty recognizable guys like Cyrix, IBM, and TI also built the 80386 & 80486. I remember buying a Cyrix 80387 that was half the price of Intel's and outperformed it, partly because it worked beside an AMD 80386-40.
Intel determined (unilaterally) that the 8086-family technology exchange agreement did not extend to the 80486, and refused to give the masks to AMD, AMD sued and won. With the "Pentium", Intel abandoned the 8086 series part numbers (critical to the court decision) so they did not have to give it to AMD, and it took AMD many moons to reverse engineer it. 120MHz AMD 80486s (Intel never made them past 100MHz) outperformed the original 50MHz Pentuims, but the 100MHz Pentium, coupled with the new WinBloze 95(tm)(r)(C) "Operating System" did away with the 486. When Intel introduced the MMX extensions, they refused to completely document them, and this gave AMD additional RE headaches. Coupled with billion$ in mass media advertizing, Intel became the name-brand CPU, even though AMD's have generally been as good or better, and always cheaper.
Processors were EXPENSIVE by today's standards.
You coulda fooled me. As I mentioned above, I bought AMD 80286-12s for $44, when Intel's sold for about $60 (top speed of the day was 20 MHz at $100). What does a P4 co$t? A motherboard with CPU and without RAM co$t about $200, is that really much more than we're paying now? Enough RAM to run it co$t $50, to really load it up co$t $100-$200, that hasn't changed, though of course the size and speed have done dramatic things. It's the iron that was expen$ive. Hard di$k$ used to co$t $250! Now they're more like $125.
To be sure, AMD does exert considerable price pressure on Intel. Without them, you would see expensive CPUs.
Your statement makes more sense in the context of complete systems.
For a year or two, IBM enjoyed a monopoly on the PC. They got $1
Mapquest and Terraserver et al have been offering up USGS satellite photos for years
They don't anymore. Go check Mapquest. All the aerial photo links are GONE. Maybe this got to co$ting them too much, maybe the USAPATRIOT act forbids them to? Terraserver won't give you any decent resolution unless you buy a ($10/week, $120/year) subscription.
The problem I have with all this surveilence data being gathered is that _I_ can't get at it. This _does_ make it useless to the general citizen, and therefore an intrusion on his privacy. If I could see the pretty pictures, and maybe use them for navigation, I'd feel a lot less ill-used.
Like pen(7191) below, I have spam from President George W. Bush. That's what's in the From: header. Actually I don't believe for a second that Dubya himself sent me a campaign flyer, it was sent. as far as I can tell from study of the headers and links, by the Republican Party (of which he is the nominal leader) on his behalf. I have three or four other spams in the same style (they're quite attractive html work, to be honest, and probably expen$ive) pushing a few different issues, all AFAICT coming from the Party, at both the national and state levels.
I tracked down the ISP used to send the messages, and it turned out to be ECMail, an outfit well-known as a "bullet-proof" spamhaus. So, they were clueless enough to fall for a "pro" spammer's pitch.
Note that this was over a year ago. They were testing the waters of this "Popular New Electronic Marketing Tool(tm)".
Seeing how annoying this was, I replied. One of the spams asked if I thought a Regime Change(tm) was a good idea for Amerika. I replied with a half-page of very polite flamethrower fire which suggested that the Republican Party was badly in need of a Regime Change(tm) in its publicity staff, because spamming is such a negatively-received marketing technique that it would lose the election for them if they persisted in it.
I also made it clear that, after being spammed by them from both the state and national levels, neither the President nor any other Republican candidate would enjoy my vote in the 2004 election.
Well, that's how we treat spammers, isn't it? Dust off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
This has caused severe political problems within my immediate family, but hey, they don't believe me about the Evil Software Monopolist, either.
To be fair, I found solid evidence of Democrat Party spamming as well, on news.admin.net-abuse.email and news.admin.net-abuse.sightings.
Fsck them, too. They can all burn in hell.
So both parties were clueless enough to _try_ spam, and quickly found it to be a negative thing, a year and more ago.
Now is the time for the dirty tricks to begin. Apparently they've already toasted Nader, as I have spam from him disavowing and stopping just short of apologizing for the smear pieces sent out in his name. Alas, he's not on the ballot in AZ, so this will spare me the risk of discovery as I would have had to put a bag over my head to vote for him.
You've just stepped into another dimension. A dimension of sight, and mind. A dimension rooted in imagination, innuendo and lies. You've entered: THE CAMPAIGN SEASON. {Twilight Zone afficionados: feel free to improve my quotation}
Reality and truth have been shut off like a faucet. Nothing you hear or see from now until the first Tuesday of November can be believed.
The fact that it (actually) originates within the Evil Empire means you should probably NOT click it, for _any_ reason.
The quiz "answer", that the MSN email is legitimate, is therefore incorrect. MSN is an illegitimate network, run by a criminal organization. MailFrontier is hardly the last word on what you do or do not want in your computer.
Expect the Empire to play on people's fear. That's all they have left. The whole monopoly is now supported by the Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt that, if you install Linux on your PC, it will either melt down, be impossible to use, or you will be sued by sco.
OK, as a guy who's made his living for 20+ years designing car audio hardware, I have a question for you:
I remember in the 70's [vaguely, don't ask me for specific dates] when headphones became popular as an alternative to the high co$t of the huge $peaker$ required to reproduce LOUD music (for ex, the WHO). The use of these was promptly outlawed in autos on the theory that they would inhibit the user's ability to hear the sirens of right-of-way vehicles such as ambulances, and of course the police cruiser trying to stop them.
Shouldn't the same theory be applicable to a 2000 Watt, 120(?) dB sound system in a car? I mean if a gangsta's stereo is SO LOUD that I, sitting next to him at a light, with all my windows up, cannot hear _my_ stereo inside _my_ car, what hope would this rappa have of hearing the siren of a fire truck bearing down upon him on the cross street? Isn't | shouldn't there be SOME maximum allowable street-legal volume, say maybe 3dB below the standard level of these right-of-way sirens, beyond which we _shouldn't_allow_ car stereos to go?
'Cuz I don't see it. Are they going to complete their World Domination(tm) plan in a month?
They're not getting Longhorn out in a month. It ain't gonna happen.
They're not fixing the "security" problem in a month, either. "Trustworthy" Computing(tm) has been two years and more now, and the situation (whether or not actually worse) is _perceived_ as worse, not better. Since "security" is a PR problem (NOT a software problem) for the Emire, this one's moving in the wrong direction!
The guy who got sentenced to jail today for spamming had sent something like 800 million pieces of spam. If we figure that each of those took someone one second to delete, then he's effectively _stolen_ those 800 million seconds from those "recipients".
This amounts to:
8e8 / 86,400 seconds/day = 9259.25 days.
9259.25 days / 365.25 days/year = 25.35 Years
OK so maybe a minor spammer's life isn't _completely_ forfeit. The last time I did this (with numbers from another spammer) it worked out to 112 years.
_How_ much spam was Richter responsible for, again?
No seriously. If the Chinese government ever half understands how trashed its email reputation is, it will _never_ let these people touch a keyoard again. There are other careers, several of them, in the PRC.
But really the problem is international spammers exploiting unsecured relays, and I would suppose that with official cooperation Mr. Linford oughta be able to track those down pretty easily.
Whether the Chinese netspace can ever be redeemed is another matter. I for one know no one in China and see no reason to quit filtering anything from or relayed through there. Maybe in about five years, if we hear about the situation being "amazingly well cleaned up", perhaps.
So that means that any unamped antenna with a gain higher than 1dBi is directional in some sense, because the total radiated power is still the same.
No, +1dB gain is still gain. I'm pretty certain that 0dB == unity gain. It's a logarithmic scale, with negative dBs for attenuation situations. log(1) = 0
The only x86 chip you would want to think about in an alarm box would be imbedded _3_86 flavors.
That said, they'll still consume _way_ too much power. Yer alarm system has to run on batteries during power outages, or when intruders are smart enough to shut off the power before entering.
You _definately_ want to look at 8-bit CMOS microcontrollers, or something else in that range. I'm rather fond of 80C31/51 types myself. No, these won't run Linux, but plenty of F/OSS tools are available. Do you want to do image and sound recognition, or do you just want to watch switches and sensors?
Imagine that you sold furniture, and I went to all of your wood suppliers and told them that you were operating illegally and they should stop providing you with wood,...
No, that's not it at all. It's more like if you built torture racks for Iraqui despots, and I went to all your wood suppliers and simply told them the truth about what you were doing, because they _all_ have strict policies prohibiting the use of their wood to build instruments of torture for export to terrorist nations.
What if you were a mugger and, after a couple of tries at just giving you my wallet in the hope you will go away, I get sick of you and track you down and give your address to the police. They find my two stolen wallets in your posession and arrest you and convict you of felony assault. Now, as a convicted felon, it will be _much_ tougher (or at least much more expen$ive) for you to procure the guns and ammo you need to pursue your "career".
Could you then sue _me_? For defamation of your reputation? Interfering with your career?
This is what SpamCop is doing to Richter (among others). They've gotten zero relief from direct complaints (do NOT believe that they haven't tried _that_), and they're going to their suppliers and persuading them into enforcing their existing AUP policies prohibiting spammer scum. Of course the spammers hate this.
What if you had a pawnshop and I bought some stuff from you and then quickly found out that it was stolen. What if I went back to you about it and was flatly told "all sales are final". What if I then ran an ad for you publicizing you as a good "fence"? You'd see an initial surge of business, but this would include narcs, and you would soon be out of business.
Could you then sue _me_ for interfering with your "business"? I think you would be on shaky ground if I could bring stolen property into court and testify that I had bought it at yer pawnshop.
We _all_ have spam from Snotty Scotty, _all_ of it claiming we 'opted-in'. He can rot in hell.
The stainless-steel body was an important component of the time travel system. With a plastic & mild steel body, an EV1 or even a Ford Escape isn't going to do any time travel.
Though the off-road ground clearance would be essential for trips into the past.
which was about the summit of the Reagan-era cocaine glut.
I can remember gradually losing each and every one of my friends and co-workers to that coke shit. It was like pot wasn't expen$ive enough to be cool anymore, and everybody was into that coke shit, which I didn't care for and couldn't afford (while working _and_ going to school) so I wasn't cool. Coupled with Nancy Reagan's "War Against [some] Drugs" which institutionalized pre-employment drug screening (which detects pot usage for weeks while cocaine is gone in about 36 hours) and the popular myth that that coke shit was _safer_ than pot and somehow not addictive, it became actually tougher to get pot than that coke shit, and more expen$ive too! By about '88 all of my old friends (and some new ones) were all screwed up (either medically, legally, or financially) from doing that coke shit. It's safe all right. </rant>
Throughout those times allegations of coke usage simply required no proof. A sniffly nose was enough. The guys who were into it the deepest had the greatest funding at their disposal with which to beat any rap (this was before RICO).
The coke-trafficking charges against JDL were quickly and easily shaken off, which meant no thing to his (largely coke-using themselves) potential customers, most of whom had seen their own dealers navigate similar difficulties. Today people's memories (what they have left) include John being busted and his use of that coke shit being understood implicitly to be the reason for DMC failing (_many_ businesses failed due to cocaine-influenced management). The withdrawal of funding by the Qween never got the press that the arrest did.
As it stands now, when someone makes an appointment for a meeting and schedules it in Outrage Calendar(tm), the message _I_ get from the Exchange "server" (in NetScrape on my Sun workstation) says "ERROR: Cannot find NLS Data Directory".
This deal means that I will (eventually) be able to see these meeting appointments with SMI's (proprietary) mail tools.
If it comes around within about a year, this could save me my job. I'm presently under considerable pressure, because of this issue, to use Outrage(tm) to handle my email, which I of course refuse to do.
So Scott selling his soul to BillGatus of Borg may save _me_ from having to follow my employer in doing so. Or at least buy me some time.
and see if SMI's internal Linux camp weren't among the 3000 shown the door. Note that the settlement included Imperial certification for SMI's x86 machinery. See if we ever hear anything more from Sun about Linux. This deal was all about sharing _proprietary_ technologies, all will be under NDA and NONE will ever filter out into FOSS.
Too bad my state won't let me carry the shorty:( What's the best defensive weapon to use when you can't carry a gun?
The consensus is that the best defensive weapon is _still_ a gun, but preference of type changes to small, easily-concealable models. "I'd rather be tried by twelve than carried by six", etc.
Especially the ones that have any property left. They all have massive taxe$ to pay to the QWeen, and, being members of the idle rich, little income. It can be pretty tough to make ends meet.
So spam is okay, as long as it 'honestly' identifies itself as such? Should robbery be okay if the robber wears a sign identifying himself when he breaks into your house?
That isn't a very good analogy, as someone breaking into your house is a relatively rare occurrance compared to the hundreds of guys a day stuffing your inbox. That burglar breaking your window is easy to identify as a criminal (how many of your friends don't simply knock) and their numbers are so small that you can afford to expend several shells of even the most expensive ammunition (12 ga. 00 buckshot @ ~$.50 each) in dealing with them. You can't handle spam that extravagently. It's even further out of the question to send appropriate special agents (Guido and Tony) to deal with a hundred spammers a day. You need something cheap and efficient.
"ADV" in the Subject: header works for this. It still isn't free, and is therefore an imperfect solution, but it could let me look at my inbox without having to spend the rest of the day on rageful hunting expeditions.
at least the first time. The second time, the villagers were a little more skeptical, and I'd bet fewer turned out. The third time, the kid was in deep doo-doo. The fourth time.... Wait, the fourth time was when the wolf actually showed up, wasn't it? That did not go well... for the boy.
So I figure we'll hear this same speech again next year, met with even deeper cynicism and skepticism. In 2005 we'll hear it _again_, but by then its credibility will be zero.
And the wolf showing up the fourth time was random chance. There won't actually be any more truth to the Imperial "security" PR the fourth time around.
Slashdot Mirror
Get on an excercise bike serious enough to have an electronic load and a power readout, and see how trivial 50 watts really really is.
A bicycle racer makes about 3/4 horsepower (to go 28 MPH).
One horsepower is IMU something like 785 Watts. Translation of this to SI units is left as an excercise for the reader.
I found 300 Watts to be a semi-sustainable pace, four years after buying a car and parking my bikes. It would have been quite easy when I was riding 10-15 miles a day (at around 20 MPH).
The above discussion about massive banks of slaves on generator bikes was ridiculous. Two decently-nourished slaves could easily power a w1K3d game system.
but I guess it doesn't really contribute much to your statement anyway....
Back in the 80's, there was only one supplier of x86 processors into the pc marketplace.
That's just plain wrong.
The neatest of several 8086 chips was the NEC V20/30, which not only was a drop-in replacement for the 8088/86, but had a switch in its flags which, when set, would make it act like an 8085 (or maybe it was a Z80, I forget which). With a little software (called UniDOS) which provided a special CP/M BIOS, this could run practically ALL the legacy CP/M software (which was abundant in 1983) without modifications, on a PC. NEC built a PC clone with a 16-bit data bus which could have used the 8086, but with their V30 this not only ran DoS at about twice the speed of an IBM-PC, it would also blaze through CP/M software at seemingly demonic speed. Jerry Pournelle usta rave about this rig, because it allowed him to keep his favorite CP/M text editor while upgraging to the new PC technology.
I digress. AMD had a technology exchange agreement with Intel (in the late 70's, supposed to last 25 years) to share x86 IP. (Among other exchanges,) AMD got the 8086/88 and Intel got the small masks for the 2732A (that's a 32 Kbit UVEPROM, organized as 4KBytes at 350 & 250 nS) which were half the size of theirs. AMD consistently dieshrank, outyielded, outperformed, and outpriced Intel on the 8085, 8086/88, 80186/88, 80286, and 80386. (I used to have price lists to prove this stuff, before the SO made me reduce the size of my "legacy hardware library".) I remember buying cheap 12MHz 80286 motherboards (at $179 when most were over $200) that came equipped with 10MHz Intel 80286 CPUs and crashed when these overheated. I replaced the CPUs with AMD 80286LP-12s which co$t le$$ than the 10MHz Intel 80286s and ran frosty cool, but at $40 they killed the low price of the deal. AMD sold 40MHz 80386 chips while Intel abandoned it at 32MHz and introduced the 80486, early versions of which (at 25MHz) could not keep up with the 40MHz AMD 80386 (and, of course, co$t much more). Several other pretty recognizable guys like Cyrix, IBM, and TI also built the 80386 & 80486. I remember buying a Cyrix 80387 that was half the price of Intel's and outperformed it, partly because it worked beside an AMD 80386-40.
Intel determined (unilaterally) that the 8086-family technology exchange agreement did not extend to the 80486, and refused to give the masks to AMD, AMD sued and won. With the "Pentium", Intel abandoned the 8086 series part numbers (critical to the court decision) so they did not have to give it to AMD, and it took AMD many moons to reverse engineer it. 120MHz AMD 80486s (Intel never made them past 100MHz) outperformed the original 50MHz Pentuims, but the 100MHz Pentium, coupled with the new WinBloze 95(tm)(r)(C) "Operating System" did away with the 486. When Intel introduced the MMX extensions, they refused to completely document them, and this gave AMD additional RE headaches. Coupled with billion$ in mass media advertizing, Intel became the name-brand CPU, even though AMD's have generally been as good or better, and always cheaper.
Processors were EXPENSIVE by today's standards.
You coulda fooled me. As I mentioned above, I bought AMD 80286-12s for $44, when Intel's sold for about $60 (top speed of the day was 20 MHz at $100). What does a P4 co$t? A motherboard with CPU and without RAM co$t about $200, is that really much more than we're paying now? Enough RAM to run it co$t $50, to really load it up co$t $100-$200, that hasn't changed, though of course the size and speed have done dramatic things. It's the iron that was expen$ive. Hard di$k$ used to co$t $250! Now they're more like $125.
To be sure, AMD does exert considerable price pressure on Intel. Without them, you would see expensive CPUs.
Your statement makes more sense in the context of complete systems.
For a year or two, IBM enjoyed a monopoly on the PC. They got $1
They'd rather watch people eat bugs and animal entrails on "'Fear Factor".
Mapquest and Terraserver et al have been offering up USGS satellite photos for years
They don't anymore. Go check Mapquest. All the aerial photo links are GONE. Maybe this got to co$ting them too much, maybe the USAPATRIOT act forbids them to? Terraserver won't give you any decent resolution unless you buy a ($10/week, $120/year) subscription.
The problem I have with all this surveilence data being gathered is that _I_ can't get at it. This _does_ make it useless to the general citizen, and therefore an intrusion on his privacy. If I could see the pretty pictures, and maybe use them for navigation, I'd feel a lot less ill-used.
OK here's what I can report:
Like pen(7191) below, I have spam from President George W. Bush. That's what's in the From: header. Actually I don't believe for a second that Dubya himself sent me a campaign flyer, it was sent. as far as I can tell from study of the headers and links, by the Republican Party (of which he is the nominal leader) on his behalf. I have three or four other spams in the same style (they're quite attractive html work, to be honest, and probably expen$ive) pushing a few different issues, all AFAICT coming from the Party, at both the national and state levels.
I tracked down the ISP used to send the messages, and it turned out to be ECMail, an outfit well-known as a "bullet-proof" spamhaus.
So, they were clueless enough to fall for a "pro" spammer's pitch.
Note that this was over a year ago. They were testing the waters of this "Popular New Electronic Marketing Tool(tm)".
Seeing how annoying this was, I replied. One of the spams asked if I thought a Regime Change(tm) was a good idea for Amerika. I replied with a half-page of very polite flamethrower fire which suggested that the Republican Party was badly in need of a Regime Change(tm) in its publicity staff, because spamming is such a negatively-received marketing technique that it would lose the election for them if they persisted in it.
I also made it clear that, after being spammed by them from both the state and national levels, neither the President nor any other Republican candidate would enjoy my vote in the 2004 election.
Well, that's how we treat spammers, isn't it?
Dust off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
This has caused severe political problems within my immediate family, but hey, they don't believe me about the Evil Software Monopolist, either.
To be fair, I found solid evidence of Democrat Party spamming as well, on news.admin.net-abuse.email and news.admin.net-abuse.sightings.
Fsck them, too. They can all burn in hell.
So both parties were clueless enough to _try_ spam, and quickly found it to be a negative thing, a year and more ago.
Now is the time for the dirty tricks to begin. Apparently they've already toasted Nader, as I have spam from him disavowing and stopping just short of apologizing for the smear pieces sent out in his name. Alas, he's not on the ballot in AZ, so this will spare me the risk of discovery as I would have had to put a bag over my head to vote for him.
You've just stepped into another dimension. A dimension of sight, and mind. A dimension rooted in imagination, innuendo and lies. You've entered: THE CAMPAIGN SEASON.
{Twilight Zone afficionados: feel free to improve my quotation}
Reality and truth have been shut off like a faucet. Nothing you hear or see from now until the first Tuesday of November can be believed.
The fact that it (actually) originates within the Evil Empire means you should probably NOT click it, for _any_ reason.
The quiz "answer", that the MSN email is legitimate, is therefore incorrect. MSN is an illegitimate network, run by a criminal organization. MailFrontier is hardly the last word on what you do or do not want in your computer.
Expect the Empire to play on people's fear. That's all they have left. The whole monopoly is now supported by the Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt that, if you install Linux on your PC, it will either melt down, be impossible to use, or you will be sued by sco.
I "missed" that question, too.
OK, as a guy who's made his living for 20+ years designing car audio hardware, I have a question for you:
I remember in the 70's [vaguely, don't ask me for specific dates] when headphones became popular as an alternative to the high co$t of the huge $peaker$ required to reproduce LOUD music (for ex, the WHO). The use of these was promptly outlawed in autos on the theory that they would inhibit the user's ability to hear the sirens of right-of-way vehicles such as ambulances, and of course the police cruiser trying to stop them.
Shouldn't the same theory be applicable to a 2000 Watt, 120(?) dB sound system in a car? I mean if a gangsta's stereo is SO LOUD that I, sitting next to him at a light, with all my windows up, cannot hear _my_ stereo inside _my_ car, what hope would this rappa have of hearing the siren of a fire truck bearing down upon him on the cross street? Isn't | shouldn't there be SOME maximum allowable street-legal volume, say maybe 3dB below the standard level of these right-of-way sirens, beyond which we _shouldn't_allow_ car stereos to go?
Really? How?
'Cuz I don't see it. Are they going to complete their World Domination(tm) plan in a month?
They're not getting Longhorn out in a month. It ain't gonna happen.
They're not fixing the "security" problem in a month, either. "Trustworthy" Computing(tm) has been two years and more now, and the situation (whether or not actually worse) is _perceived_ as worse, not better. Since "security" is a PR problem (NOT a software problem) for the Emire, this one's moving in the wrong direction!
That's "Hurd of GNUs", you moron.
The guy who got sentenced to jail today for spamming had sent something like 800 million pieces of spam. If we figure that each of those took someone one second to delete, then he's effectively _stolen_ those 800 million seconds from those "recipients".
This amounts to:
8e8 / 86,400 seconds/day = 9259.25 days.
9259.25 days / 365.25 days/year = 25.35 Years
OK so maybe a minor spammer's life isn't _completely_ forfeit. The last time I did this (with numbers from another spammer) it worked out to 112 years.
_How_ much spam was Richter responsible for, again?
They'll simply disappear.
No seriously. If the Chinese government ever half understands how trashed its email reputation is, it will _never_ let these people touch a keyoard again. There are other careers, several of them, in the PRC.
But really the problem is international spammers exploiting unsecured relays, and I would suppose that with official cooperation Mr. Linford oughta be able to track those down pretty easily.
Whether the Chinese netspace can ever be redeemed is another matter. I for one know no one in China and see no reason to quit filtering anything from or relayed through there. Maybe in about five years, if we hear about the situation being "amazingly well cleaned up", perhaps.
So that means that any unamped antenna with a gain higher than 1dBi is directional in some sense, because the total radiated power is still the same.
No, +1dB gain is still gain.
I'm pretty certain that 0dB == unity gain.
It's a logarithmic scale, with negative dBs for attenuation situations. log(1) = 0
The only x86 chip you would want to think about in an alarm box would be imbedded _3_86 flavors.
That said, they'll still consume _way_ too much power. Yer alarm system has to run on batteries during power outages, or when intruders are smart enough to shut off the power before entering.
You _definately_ want to look at 8-bit CMOS microcontrollers, or something else in that range. I'm rather fond of 80C31/51 types myself. No, these won't run Linux, but plenty of F/OSS tools are available. Do you want to do image and sound recognition, or do you just want to watch switches and sensors?
Imagine that you sold furniture, and I went to all of your wood suppliers and told them that you were operating illegally and they should stop providing you with wood,...
No, that's not it at all. It's more like if you built torture racks for Iraqui despots, and I went to all your wood suppliers and simply told them the truth about what you were doing, because they _all_ have strict policies prohibiting the use of their wood to build instruments of torture for export to terrorist nations.
What if you were a mugger and, after a couple of tries at just giving you my wallet in the hope you will go away, I get sick of you and track you down and give your address to the police. They find my two stolen wallets in your posession and arrest you and convict you of felony assault. Now, as a convicted felon, it will be _much_ tougher (or at least much more expen$ive) for you to procure the guns and ammo you need to pursue your "career".
Could you then sue _me_? For defamation of your reputation? Interfering with your career?
This is what SpamCop is doing to Richter (among others). They've gotten zero relief from direct complaints (do NOT believe that they haven't tried _that_), and they're going to their suppliers and persuading them into enforcing their existing AUP policies prohibiting spammer scum. Of course the spammers hate this.
What if you had a pawnshop and I bought some stuff from you and then quickly found out that it was stolen. What if I went back to you about it and was flatly told "all sales are final". What if I then ran an ad for you publicizing you as a good "fence"? You'd see an initial surge of business, but this would include narcs, and you would soon be out of business.
Could you then sue _me_ for interfering with your "business"? I think you would be on shaky ground if I could bring stolen property into court and testify that I had bought it at yer pawnshop.
We _all_ have spam from Snotty Scotty, _all_ of it claiming we 'opted-in'. He can rot in hell.
The stainless-steel body was an important component of the time travel system.
With a plastic & mild steel body, an EV1 or even a Ford Escape isn't going to do any time travel.
Though the off-road ground clearance would be essential for trips into the past.
which was about the summit of the Reagan-era cocaine glut.
I can remember gradually losing each and every one of my friends and co-workers to that coke shit. It was like pot wasn't expen$ive enough to be cool anymore, and everybody was into that coke shit, which I didn't care for and couldn't afford (while working _and_ going to school) so I wasn't cool. Coupled with Nancy Reagan's "War Against [some] Drugs" which institutionalized pre-employment drug screening (which detects pot usage for weeks while cocaine is gone in about 36 hours) and the popular myth that that coke shit was _safer_ than pot and somehow not addictive, it became actually tougher to get pot than that coke shit, and more expen$ive too! By about '88 all of my old friends (and some new ones) were all screwed up (either medically, legally, or financially) from doing that coke shit. It's safe all right.
</rant>
Throughout those times allegations of coke usage simply required no proof. A sniffly nose was enough. The guys who were into it the deepest had the greatest funding at their disposal with which to beat any rap (this was before RICO).
The coke-trafficking charges against JDL were quickly and easily shaken off, which meant no thing to his (largely coke-using themselves) potential customers, most of whom had seen their own dealers navigate similar difficulties. Today people's memories (what they have left) include John being busted and his use of that coke shit being understood implicitly to be the reason for DMC failing (_many_ businesses failed due to cocaine-influenced management). The withdrawal of funding by the Qween never got the press that the arrest did.
Didn't this same guy do the (Lincoln-Mercury) Pantera?
ANY website he mentions on the air disappears instantly.
It's almost magical.
I guess that would be called "Sterning"?
in Sun's DtMail.
As it stands now, when someone makes an appointment for a meeting and schedules it in Outrage Calendar(tm), the message _I_ get from the Exchange "server" (in NetScrape on my Sun workstation) says "ERROR: Cannot find NLS Data Directory".
This deal means that I will (eventually) be able to see these meeting appointments with SMI's (proprietary) mail tools.
If it comes around within about a year, this could save me my job.
I'm presently under considerable pressure, because of this issue, to use Outrage(tm) to handle my email, which I of course refuse to do.
So Scott selling his soul to BillGatus of Borg may save _me_ from having to follow my employer in doing so. Or at least buy me some time.
and see if SMI's internal Linux camp weren't among the 3000 shown the door. Note that the settlement included Imperial certification for SMI's x86 machinery. See if we ever hear anything more from Sun about Linux. This deal was all about sharing _proprietary_ technologies, all will be under NDA and NONE will ever filter out into FOSS.
Too bad my state won't let me carry the shorty :(
What's the best defensive weapon to use when you can't carry a gun?
The consensus is that the best defensive weapon is _still_ a gun,
but preference of type changes to small, easily-concealable models.
"I'd rather be tried by twelve than carried by six", etc.
No, keelhaul 'em, under powered speedboats, not sailboats.
A small boat, with a fast propeller, would chop them up - into, uh, spam.
British Lords can be _rented_.
Especially the ones that have any property left.
They all have massive taxe$ to pay to the QWeen,
and, being members of the idle rich, little income.
It can be pretty tough to make ends meet.
So spam is okay, as long as it 'honestly' identifies itself as such? Should robbery be okay if the robber wears a sign identifying himself when he breaks into your house?
That isn't a very good analogy, as someone breaking into your house is a relatively rare occurrance compared to the hundreds of guys a day stuffing your inbox. That burglar breaking your window is easy to identify as a criminal (how many of your friends don't simply knock) and their numbers are so small that you can afford to expend several shells of even the most expensive ammunition (12 ga. 00 buckshot @ ~$.50 each) in dealing with them. You can't handle spam that extravagently. It's even further out of the question to send appropriate special agents (Guido and Tony) to deal with a hundred spammers a day. You need something cheap and efficient.
"ADV" in the Subject: header works for this. It still isn't free, and is therefore an imperfect solution, but it could let me look at my inbox without having to spend the rest of the day on rageful hunting expeditions.
at least the first time. The second time, the villagers were a little more skeptical, and I'd bet fewer turned out. The third time, the kid was in deep doo-doo. The fourth time.... Wait, the fourth time was when the wolf actually showed up, wasn't it? That did not go well... for the boy.
So I figure we'll hear this same speech again next year, met with even deeper cynicism and skepticism. In 2005 we'll hear it _again_, but by then its credibility will be zero.
And the wolf showing up the fourth time was random chance. There won't actually be any more truth to the Imperial "security" PR the fourth time around.