I bought an old HP LaserJet 4M+ a couple of years ago specifically because this model is built like a tank, performs fairly well even by today's standards, and has a corresponding third-party support market (parts, supplies). This model is an office model, meant to hold up under use, and not a cheap throwaway consumer model meant to last perhaps two years.
You can do this sort of thing with many electronics items, including formerly high-end video cards. If you want to buy and forget, it's worth doing research into what used to be great and expensive and which would serve your needs well enough even today. Also, even with cheaper items, older flaky used electronics have failed already, leaving behind the survivors that were manufactured well.
The major caveat with this sort of scrounging, of course, is driver support for your current operating system and supplies if needed (toner cartridges and such). Always research this first.
If the genetic engineering wizards could find out how to transplant this characteristic to, say, aquatic plants, perhaps they could modify them to attack the destructive zebra mussels that are such a major problem in the Great Lakes, or to control problem plants such as hydrilla verticillata.
It's an fun thought, even if I lack the background to evaluate its feasibility.
It's been pointed out before that while wages may be stagnant in many industries, invisible benefits such as health care (from employer insurance) have been increasing in value. This boom in health care employment is the visible part of that economic fact.
Not to be too off-topic, I ran into a truck on a bicycle some years ago, on a long, straight road in the summer, with the dark brown UPS truck parked partly on the road in the shade, at noon, under a brown-leaved tree with brown vegetation all around in a boring, rather featureless landscape. Were it not for the helmet, I'd have suffered more than just a mild concussion that knocked me unconscious for apparently twenty minutes. Yes, I was a damn fool who should have paid more attention to the road on that day instead of fiddling with a bag I had been carrying from a handlebar, but the lesson holds for all bicyclists under all circumstances.
It is to be hoped that Mr. Levin had been wearing a helmet. In any case, this death was tragic.:(
I guess the point of this post is just to remind you that if you ride a bicycle, please do wear a helmet, no matter how annoying you may find it at first. A decent helmet is not expensive, will allow good air circulation, and becomes second nature after a while. Even if you're struck by a car, the helmet might make the difference between permanent head injury or full recovery.
It's time to unleash AFRAID! (Anti-Fraudster Raider Agents, International Division).
They'll descend from helicopters, hook up to fire hydrants with reservoir-equipped hoses, then blast powerful streams of water and detergent to wash out the mouths, indeed the whole bodies, of these scuttling roaches.
And when you pick a name, buy it immediately, as the registrars are known to watch the queries for domain names, and if they see a good one, they'll grab the domain themselves and then offer to sell for a lot more. So today you find reallygooddomainname.com and it's available, but tomorrow it might not be -- tomorrow they want $1000 for it.
Certain registrars and resellers are notorious for selling "recent inquiry lists" to domain kings. I actually lost a domain name this way a few years back, after checking availability. It was very unlikely that specific domain name, which was meant for a personal site for a family member, could have been picked by accident by someone else with the same two-day period (while I was mulling it over).
After that experience, I became very cautious about where to check domain name availability. OpenSRS used to be good for a simultaneous WHOIS search and check of availability, but now they have this annoying captcha. At NameCheap, an Enom reseller which I've used for years for most of my small collection of domain names, I've never lost a prospective domain name after an inquiry and subsequent mulling, although apparently they did recently decide to keep as a "pay for click" empty parked domain name one that I decided to drop as superceded (for a business idea) by a more relevant term. I've not had problems either with GANDI, but haven't used them for new domain names for years.
There are undoubtedly many decent registrars and resellers, and a few bad ones run by slimebags, just as with any type of business.
By the way, a great place to check information on ownership of a domain name is here. Basic membership is free with a simple registration (use fake information and a throwaway email address if you are more comfortable with that), and they have lots of neat tools even for free memberships. Just make certain you only use it for domain names which you know are already taken, because the people who run it are in the business of reselling domain names, and giving them ideas isn't good.
Why bother interviewing the reporter to find out his anon source? just look up his call records for the last couple of weeks and they can find out for themselves.
There are still public pay telephones about, and inexpensive disposable cell telephones are common.
The problem with these potential yak-fests by seatmates and by nearby or loud passengers is being unable to escape from them. That will be quite stressful for some folks. It's not possible mid-flight to walk out of a plane in disgust. It's easy to foresee a spike in "air rage" incidents. The airlines may be forced to limit talk hours on longer flights (say two hours and up), or to provide "sound hoods" (although it's difficult to see how these could be designed to work well in such cramped quarters).
These first efforts at mass access to in-air telephony will be mildly interesting social experiments.
Doubtless these VoIP conversations will appear on the Letterman show in a "Top Ten" list of the most annoying aspects of airplane travel, along with crying babies and seats designed for underage midgets.
Perhaps this interesting effect could be used somehow to cause light-speed spam to reverse upon itself, causing spammer inboxes to convert to pure energy, which in turn annihilates the spammers.
Apologies if this particular point has already been addressed, but the "frowny face trademark" link so frequently mentioned here in various subthreads, at despair.com, is actually satirical.
It's kind of funny to see how this meme has come to be interpreted so seriously. ^^
Google just needs to tweak a common free OS to be friendly to all their little sub-projects, in a manner similar to but more extensive than how Opera (the browser) now defaults to Google search. Even that will panic the drones at Microsoft, who are paranoid about Google anyway.
Look, it costs a couple cents to transmit a 650MB CD across the internet - half that if it's losslessly compressed.
If wholesale transfer at large network operating centers (for hosting sites or running IRC or whatever on leased servers) costs US$0.50 minimum per gigabyte, then this 650MB CD will cost more than a "couple cents" to transfer on the open Internet. Given other costs, at least US$0.30 seems more like it.
(Would like to know if this has changed recently, if you have insider knowledge of it).
My backup plan is know[n] as the 'kick the fucker's ass plan'. The backup backup plan is known as the 'Twelve guage [sic] shotty to the head plan'...
Use birdshot for indoors. Larger pellets likely will go through walls, endangering other inhabitants of the same house, or apartment building, depending on what's in the inner walls (often empty space or fluffy insulation). At close range, a accurately-placed full load of birdshot should still stop a dangerous attacker quite well.
Also, none of this chancy "head-shot" stuff. The torso is a larger, more reliable target, particularly the heart or pelvis areas. Heads dodge around amazingly. The point is to halt a violent attack and the danger it represents to you or to your family's life and safety, not to try specifically to kill the attacker in Hollywood-style dramatics.
Speaking of truly evil waste, it would be cool to set up neighborhood baby poop and organic diaper depolymerization stations. The purified water left over at the end could be used to prepare baby formula, too.
People have always tended to be hysterical about that which they fear and don't understand. They see this "hacking" (it should be called "cracking" in this context, but that's a lost cause) as a vaguely defined but fearsome threat, regardless of the actual reality of harm, and clamor for the modern equivalent of witch burnings.
You have no choice but to use a credit card if your going to sell something on Ebay. They started forcing people to attach a credit card number to their account as a means of reducing the amount of fraudulent accounts people would set up to scam other Ebay users out of money. You don't have to submit the ole CC to buy something, only to sell.
Older memberships are grandfathered, with no credit card demanded.
(BTW, it's possible at a local bank hereabouts to purchase (Charter One Bank, and for a short time it's free of charge over the face value) a "temporary" MasterCard "FlexCard" debit card with a fixed face value up to $500 (I believe). I purchased one at the "no-fees" promotional price of only face value specifically to use with a site from which I wished to purchase something without risking the debit card for my main checking account).
On April 25, All Things Considered on NPR did a five-minute story on this new Science article. Highly recommended, gives some good background not only on how this theory fits better with some of the current data that we are collecting, but also talks about how difficult it is for a new theory to gain acceptance in the scientific community when it flies in the face of a long-established theory.
Conservatism is fundamentally a survival trait, notwithstanding relative labels such as "liberal". Change may lead to disaster or at least threatening change (approaching starvation or war in older times, these days sudden loss of one's assumed knowledge of the world and therefore emotional security, or of course financial security as one is suddenly presumed an old fogey in need of firing), while staying the same at least seems to suggest that one will stay "alive" more or less as one is at a particular moment. This attitude tends strongly to slop over into even so-called "scientific inquiry", since people are people regardless. Also, as expected, there's the usual snottiness (ego games such as monkey dominance games between the old and the young).
I've been for some time studying this within the context of memetic engineering. The internally detailed insight (from my own thinking, and of course from years of study of useful and sometimes brilliant thinking from other people) suggests possible avenues of thought upon how to describe or push new scientific lines of thought without running into "fear triggers". None are easy, though. There are deep patterns of behavior within society that tend strongly to reinforce each other. It's not quite as simple as figuring out which tools and in what order, to use to build and finish finely a copy of an ornate antique table.
None of this is particularly new, but it's a different way to think about it (which of course is itself potentially obstructed in mainstream study by the exact mental characteristics already described, ho-ho...).
Steve Ballmer comes across as a poor, beat down soul in the video deposition [...].
Geez, I almost feel sorry for the guy. Being the subject of grilling by hostile, powerful lawyers has got to be very stressful.
BTW, the CEO of Lindows is handling fairly well the Microsoft lawsuit against the company for allegedly stealing a common English word, kinda, but not really.
This is actually the technological approach I've been studying carefully for setting up a virtual libertarian society in which instead of being a distant pipe dream, it's an "actual society" (simulated, but society is a state of mind anyway, and this would be a way to see the other state of mind as very possible and desirable).
It's a damned big job, though. I'm hestitant to even try for real without interest from other parties. There's just too many practical details. Everyone else seems to have been studying "variations on the status quo" (meaning massive corporatism, statism, etc.).
If you've been thinking about the same sort of effort, drop me a line at "engineer at-sign meme hyphen engineer dot com".:)
A nice side effect of the "BSD License" is multiple targets for Microsoft as there's more commercial exploitation of WINE, and thus more dissipation of the energies of Microsoft, especially as they draw more fire for trying to suppress their competition, thus a better chance for more open-source projects to thrive in spite of annoying the Evil Empire at Redmond.
Nearly anything that increases commercial participation in Linux is good, especially if it directly attacks the Windows semi-monopoly. Seems good!:)
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I bought an old HP LaserJet 4M+ a couple of years ago specifically because this
model is built like a tank, performs fairly well even by today's standards, and
has a corresponding third-party support market (parts, supplies). This model is
an office model, meant to hold up under use, and not a cheap throwaway consumer
model meant to last perhaps two years.
You can do this sort of thing with many electronics items, including formerly
high-end video cards. If you want to buy and forget, it's worth doing research
into what used to be great and expensive and which would serve your needs well
enough even today. Also, even with cheaper items, older flaky used electronics
have failed already, leaving behind the survivors that were manufactured well.
The major caveat with this sort of scrounging, of course, is driver support for
your current operating system and supplies if needed (toner cartridges and such).
Always research this first.
If the genetic engineering wizards could find out how to transplant this characteristic to, say, aquatic plants, perhaps they could modify them to attack the destructive zebra mussels that are such a major problem in the Great Lakes, or to control problem plants such as hydrilla verticillata.
It's an fun thought, even if I lack the background to evaluate its feasibility.
It's been pointed out before that while wages may be stagnant in many industries, invisible benefits such as health care (from employer insurance) have been increasing in value. This boom in health care employment is the visible part of that economic fact.
Not to be too off-topic, I ran into a truck on a bicycle some years ago, on a long, straight road in the summer, with the dark brown UPS truck parked partly on the road in the shade, at noon, under a brown-leaved tree with brown vegetation all around in a boring, rather featureless landscape. Were it not for the helmet, I'd have suffered more than just a mild concussion that knocked me unconscious for apparently twenty minutes. Yes, I was a damn fool who should have paid more attention to the road on that day instead of fiddling with a bag I had been carrying from a handlebar, but the lesson holds for all bicyclists under all circumstances.
It is to be hoped that Mr. Levin had been wearing a helmet. In any case, this death was tragic. :(
I guess the point of this post is just to remind you that if you ride a bicycle, please do wear a helmet, no matter how annoying you may find it at first. A decent helmet is not expensive, will allow good air circulation, and becomes second nature after a while. Even if you're struck by a car, the helmet might make the difference between permanent head injury or full recovery.
It's time to unleash AFRAID! (Anti-Fraudster Raider Agents, International Division).
They'll descend from helicopters, hook up to fire hydrants with reservoir-equipped hoses, then blast powerful streams of water and detergent to wash out the mouths, indeed the whole bodies, of these scuttling roaches.
And when you pick a name, buy it immediately, as the registrars are known to watch the queries for domain names, and if they see a good one, they'll grab the domain themselves and then offer to sell for a lot more. So today you find reallygooddomainname.com and it's available, but tomorrow it might not be -- tomorrow they want $1000 for it.
Certain registrars and resellers are notorious for selling "recent inquiry lists" to domain kings. I actually lost a domain name this way a few years back, after checking availability. It was very unlikely that specific domain name, which was meant for a personal site for a family member, could have been picked by accident by someone else with the same two-day period (while I was mulling it over).
After that experience, I became very cautious about where to check domain name availability. OpenSRS used to be good for a simultaneous WHOIS search and check of availability, but now they have this annoying captcha. At NameCheap, an Enom reseller which I've used for years for most of my small collection of domain names, I've never lost a prospective domain name after an inquiry and subsequent mulling, although apparently they did recently decide to keep as a "pay for click" empty parked domain name one that I decided to drop as superceded (for a business idea) by a more relevant term. I've not had problems either with GANDI, but haven't used them for new domain names for years.
There are undoubtedly many decent registrars and resellers, and a few bad ones run by slimebags, just as with any type of business.
By the way, a great place to check information on ownership of a domain name is here. Basic membership is free with a simple registration (use fake information and a throwaway email address if you are more comfortable with that), and they have lots of neat tools even for free memberships. Just make certain you only use it for domain names which you know are already taken, because the people who run it are in the business of reselling domain names, and giving them ideas isn't good.
Why bother interviewing the reporter to find out his anon source? just look up his call records for the last couple of weeks and they can find out for themselves.
There are still public pay telephones about, and inexpensive disposable cell telephones are common.
The problem with these potential yak-fests by seatmates and by nearby or loud passengers is being unable to escape from them. That will be quite stressful for some folks. It's not possible mid-flight to walk out of a plane in disgust. It's easy to foresee a spike in "air rage" incidents. The airlines may be forced to limit talk hours on longer flights (say two hours and up), or to provide "sound hoods" (although it's difficult to see how these could be designed to work well in such cramped quarters).
These first efforts at mass access to in-air telephony will be mildly interesting social experiments.
Doubtless these VoIP conversations will appear on the Letterman show in a "Top Ten" list of the most annoying aspects of airplane travel, along with crying babies and seats designed for underage midgets.
Perhaps this interesting effect could be used somehow to cause light-speed spam to reverse upon itself, causing spammer inboxes to convert to pure energy, which in turn annihilates the spammers.
Hey, a fellow can dream, can't he now?
It's kind of funny to see how this meme has come to be interpreted so seriously. ^^
Google just needs to tweak a common free OS to be friendly to all their little sub-projects, in a manner similar to but more extensive than how Opera (the browser) now defaults to Google search. Even that will panic the drones at Microsoft, who are paranoid about Google anyway.
Look, it costs a couple cents to transmit a 650MB CD across the internet - half that if it's losslessly compressed.
If wholesale transfer at large network operating centers (for hosting sites or running IRC or whatever on leased servers) costs US$0.50 minimum per gigabyte, then this 650MB CD will cost more than a "couple cents" to transfer on the open Internet. Given other costs, at least US$0.30 seems more like it.
(Would like to know if this has changed recently, if you have insider knowledge of it).
My backup plan is know[n] as the 'kick the fucker's ass plan'. The backup backup plan is known as the 'Twelve guage [sic] shotty to the head plan'...
Use birdshot for indoors. Larger pellets likely will go through walls, endangering other inhabitants of the same house, or apartment building, depending on what's in the inner walls (often empty space or fluffy insulation). At close range, a accurately-placed full load of birdshot should still stop a dangerous attacker quite well.
Also, none of this chancy "head-shot" stuff. The torso is a larger, more reliable target, particularly the heart or pelvis areas. Heads dodge around amazingly. The point is to halt a violent attack and the danger it represents to you or to your family's life and safety, not to try specifically to kill the attacker in Hollywood-style dramatics.
Speaking of truly evil waste, it would be cool to set up neighborhood baby poop and organic diaper depolymerization stations. The purified water left over at the end could be used to prepare baby formula, too.
People have always tended to be hysterical about that which they fear and don't understand. They see this "hacking" (it should be called "cracking" in this context, but that's a lost cause) as a vaguely defined but fearsome threat, regardless of the actual reality of harm, and clamor for the modern equivalent of witch burnings.
You have no choice but to use a credit card if your going to sell something on Ebay. They started forcing people to attach a credit card number to their account as a means of reducing the amount of fraudulent accounts people would set up to scam other Ebay users out of money.
You don't have to submit the ole CC to buy something, only to sell.
Older memberships are grandfathered, with no credit card demanded.
(BTW, it's possible at a local bank hereabouts to purchase (Charter One Bank, and for a short time it's free of charge over the face value) a "temporary" MasterCard "FlexCard" debit card with a fixed face value up to $500 (I believe). I purchased one at the "no-fees" promotional price of only face value specifically to use with a site from which I wished to purchase something without risking the debit card for my main checking account).
On April 25, All Things Considered on NPR did a five-minute story on this new Science article. Highly recommended, gives some good background not only on how this theory fits better with some of the current data that we are collecting, but also talks about how difficult it is for a new theory to gain acceptance in the scientific community when it flies in the face of a long-established theory.
Conservatism is fundamentally a survival trait, notwithstanding relative labels such as "liberal". Change may lead to disaster or at least threatening change (approaching starvation or war in older times, these days sudden loss of one's assumed knowledge of the world and therefore emotional security, or of course financial security as one is suddenly presumed an old fogey in need of firing), while staying the same at least seems to suggest that one will stay "alive" more or less as one is at a particular moment. This attitude tends strongly to slop over into even so-called "scientific inquiry", since people are people regardless. Also, as expected, there's the usual snottiness (ego games such as monkey dominance games between the old and the young).
I've been for some time studying this within the context of memetic engineering. The internally detailed insight (from my own thinking, and of course from years of study of useful and sometimes brilliant thinking from other people) suggests possible avenues of thought upon how to describe or push new scientific lines of thought without running into "fear triggers". None are easy, though. There are deep patterns of behavior within society that tend strongly to reinforce each other. It's not quite as simple as figuring out which tools and in what order, to use to build and finish finely a copy of an ornate antique table.
None of this is particularly new, but it's a different way to think about it (which of course is itself potentially obstructed in mainstream study by the exact mental characteristics already described, ho-ho ...).
Ah, well. Back to the usual babble, then.
"Just imagine a Lego cluster of these!"
That'll be the new obligatory smart-aleck remark about cluster computing technology. :)
Has anyone here ever tried to butter a cat?...
"No, 'cause then you're toast." I get it, I get it. :)
I'd just as soon be lazy and butter both sides of a slice of toast, for lightweight but much less scratchy power.
Steve Ballmer comes across as a poor, beat down soul in the video deposition [...].
Geez, I almost feel sorry for the guy. Being the subject of grilling by hostile, powerful lawyers has got to be very stressful.
BTW, the CEO of Lindows is handling fairly well the Microsoft lawsuit against the company for allegedly stealing a common English word, kinda, but not really.
This is actually the technological approach I've been studying carefully for setting up a virtual libertarian society in which instead of being a distant pipe dream, it's an "actual society" (simulated, but society is a state of mind anyway, and this would be a way to see the other state of mind as very possible and desirable).
It's a damned big job, though. I'm hestitant to even try for real without interest from other parties. There's just too many practical details. Everyone else seems to have been studying "variations on the status quo" (meaning massive corporatism, statism, etc.).
If you've been thinking about the same sort of effort, drop me a line at "engineer at-sign meme hyphen engineer dot com". :)
This oddly follows a story earlier today about continuing corporate mega-merging.
When the $%#@&! does the mothership return for their regular pickup, anyway?
A nice side effect of the "BSD License" is multiple targets for Microsoft as there's more commercial exploitation of WINE, and thus more dissipation of the energies of Microsoft, especially as they draw more fire for trying to suppress their competition, thus a better chance for more open-source projects to thrive in spite of annoying the Evil Empire at Redmond.
Nearly anything that increases commercial participation in Linux is good, especially if it directly attacks the Windows semi-monopoly. Seems good! :)
And if you did get your hands on the code, what would you do with it?
Give it back to Microsoft, then go wash my hands with lye.