You'll still get a passive response from the antenna even if you take out the batteries. It's a basic-properties-of-RF-radiation thing.
I don't see how this would be useful at any reasonable distance. You'd have to flood the area with enough RF to fry small animals. And it definitely wouldn't be useful for identifying individual phones (unless you have a REALLY good database of imperfections in their antennas, and how many keys each Talibanister carries in his pocket).
Furthermore, the Taliban have requested to have the towers turned off, not to have the batteries removed from each phone by some form of remote magic. So evidently they're already comfortable with remaining trackable, they just don't want to be annoyed by stupid ringtones after dark.
If the phone company towers were turned off and I were the CIA, then promptly at 5:01pm each evening I'd turn on my own promiscuous CIA towers, and all phones in the country would cheerfully tell me where they are.
Basically, it appears the Taliban's grasp of telecommunications is about on par with their grasp of Islam.
The plot thickens. Have a look at this OpenDNS blog entry which explains the rationale for the Google interception. At least it's a plausible justification, though I don't have a Dell and I'd prefer my Googling to go straight to the source without intermediaries, so I'm keeping OpenDNS off.
www.google.com. 30 IN CNAME google.navigation.opendns.com.
Thanks for the heads up. I've just removed OpenDNS from my router's configuration. My ISP's DNS sucks but there are some caching servers at work I can piggyback on.
I wonder if this OpenDNS business explains the error page I've been getting with increasing frequency from Google, something to the effect of my query looking like it came from malware on my computer.
I can assure you that "Muslims" who bomb people they think are repressing them and picket actors'/soldiers' deaths because of whatever sexual orientation they might be- are hardly Muslims at all.
Who gets to decide who is and is not a Muslim? You? The Islamic Council's PR agency? You can't excommunicate them because you don't like the image their actions give the religion.
If they have spoken the shahadah, observe the five pillars, and believe that they have submitted themselves to the will of god, they are a Muslim, no matter how inconvenient you might find it.
You imply that someone who has a religious belief automatically abandons their faculty of reason--a ridiculous claim, especially considering the huge range of religions and beliefs; they're don't all say 'we must do what this holy book says without question', nor do they all say that people shouldn't think for themselves and question things.
Your objection is like saying that some people don't take fatal doses of cyanide and therefore cyanide is not fatal.
To the degree to which a religious person believes what a book tells them without question, he has abandoned his faculty of reason.
It is true that some people are not very religious, but that doesn't change the fact that religion ultimately represents an abandonment of the brains that God gave us.
But we've gone how many decades with undersea cables only rarely taking damage
Not very many decades. Here in east-ish Asia we depend on transpacific cables quite a bit. At least once a year, and sometimes more, some cable will take a hit, causing congestion on the alternate routes and making net access sucky for days or weeks.
But definitely centidecades go by without incident.
Actually, it's most probably not. Game rules are not copyrightable, and if a specific board-layout is needed for the rules to work, that means this layout belongs to the rules.
Exactly. All the Scrabulous people have to do is change the name, change the colours, change the font on the tiles, and they're done. Home free. By now they already have enough name recognition on the '-ulous' part of the name that they can come up with a different prefix that doesn't sound like 'Scrabble', and people will still know what it is.
Go to the manufacturer's web site and upgrade the firmware. These days they generally do support DHCP reservations. I've got a big box'o'routers and I think the SMC Barricade is the only one of the bunch that doesn't have it.
All of us self-respecting geeks realized, years ago, that it was far cheaper, easier, and better to run OpenWRT/DD-WRT/Alchemy on a WRT54G from Wal-Mart, than to maintain yet-another-fucking-PC at home.
The first time someone dies from heat overexposure, the taxpayer and utility customer will end up footing the bill to cover the liability payout.
Oh please. The first time someone dies from "heat overexposure" because their thermostat was moved from 72 to 74, I'll fork over the liability payout myself. Anybody who is that fragile needs to be in an intensive care unit.
If you want to make your computer shut down when the temperature gets too hot, you could probably rig something up.
I doubt it's even necessary.
Where I live it's 90F and 85+% humidity 365 days a year, and I absolutely never use air conditioning. Just leave the windows open and turn on a ceiling fan and it's perfectly nice. If I am leaving my computer on while I go out during the hottest part of the day, I leave a desk fan (on low setting) pointed at it, and it's never overheated yet.
Not many people live in parts of California that need aircon. Bakersfield, Fresno? Sure. But the real population centres just aren't very warm places.
Actually in this case it may just have been an innocent coincidence. I had been planning for months to register frooplimpreeger.com and finally got around to it today around 3:08pm.
Nope, not just USA. I am in Malaysia. I made up a ridiculous long domain name and checked it via their web whois interface. Available. Then checked via command-line whois 30 seconds later. Sure enough, owned by Network Solutions.
I think many of us geeks know that you can also use methods like DHCP to configure static IPs. What you are benefiting from here is DHCP, not your dynamic IP.
"In the demo at Digital Experience, PicoP cast a vibrant image of Disney's Finding Nemo on a common piece of 8.5-by-11-inch white paper. The image was clear, but the amount of light in the large conference hall did not offer an optimal viewing environment."
Just wait until the MPAA gets word of this. What are the chances PicoP had a public performance licence for Finding Nemo? The company will be sued into bankruptcy before the product gets anywhere near market.
Too late, I already beat the shit out of Zed this morning. He was coming out of Starbucks carrying a Tazo Chai Crème and giggling about his new Hello Kitty cravat, and frankly, I just couldn't help myself. One open hand to the face, and he dropped like a bad packet hitting ipf, and then just sort of sat there on the pavement cringing and giggling. A couple girl scouts came by and kicked him in the teeth, then skipped off laughing as he threatened through a rain of tears to badmouth them in his blog.
"It's endless world of hardware modifications that smart people worldwide have embraced"
There's a difference between correct grammar, and something that "anybody reasonably literate should have no trouble with."
Correct grammar it is not; it's missing an article (either "the" or "an") between the first two words. And even once the grammar has been fixed, it remains awkward.
How did you decide on $0.25/jar? Maybe the labour conditions of anonymous workers in Urumqi are less important to me than they are to you. Who can calculate the ultimate economic cost of making a river sick?
Jesus, read the damn article. There are exemptions for special uses like appliances. And it's not that any particular technology (e.g., CFL) is mandated, just a level of efficiency that doesn't currently happen to be available with incandescents.
This is the kind of crap that happens when clueless lawyers start making engineering decisions...
Just imagine if we left it up to clueless Slashdot posters...
How often do you actually break light bulbs? I don't think I've ever broken one in my entire life, unless you count the incandescent ones that randomly exploded on their own when I turned them on.
Divide the amount of mercury by the proportion of bulbs you reasonably expect to break and I think your quotient will equal non-issue.
with all the panic over lead in toys
Perhaps the solution to the panic is to stop panicking, rather than to pander to it further.
...and on that note, a little while ago I bought a $4 LED flashlight that needs no batteries. You just shake it a couple times, which passes a magnet through a coil and recharges a built-in battery. So far it's worked great. I've even used it to read in bed, and the incidental movement from me shifting around has been enough to keep it lit.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't see how this would be useful at any reasonable distance. You'd have to flood the area with enough RF to fry small animals. And it definitely wouldn't be useful for identifying individual phones (unless you have a REALLY good database of imperfections in their antennas, and how many keys each Talibanister carries in his pocket).
Furthermore, the Taliban have requested to have the towers turned off, not to have the batteries removed from each phone by some form of remote magic. So evidently they're already comfortable with remaining trackable, they just don't want to be annoyed by stupid ringtones after dark.
If the phone company towers were turned off and I were the CIA, then promptly at 5:01pm each evening I'd turn on my own promiscuous CIA towers, and all phones in the country would cheerfully tell me where they are.
Basically, it appears the Taliban's grasp of telecommunications is about on par with their grasp of Islam.
The plot thickens. Have a look at this OpenDNS blog entry which explains the rationale for the Google interception. At least it's a plausible justification, though I don't have a Dell and I'd prefer my Googling to go straight to the source without intermediaries, so I'm keeping OpenDNS off.
Thanks for the heads up. I've just removed OpenDNS from my router's configuration. My ISP's DNS sucks but there are some caching servers at work I can piggyback on.
I wonder if this OpenDNS business explains the error page I've been getting with increasing frequency from Google, something to the effect of my query looking like it came from malware on my computer.
If there is a god, I hope he has a sense of humour.
Who gets to decide who is and is not a Muslim? You? The Islamic Council's PR agency? You can't excommunicate them because you don't like the image their actions give the religion.
If they have spoken the shahadah, observe the five pillars, and believe that they have submitted themselves to the will of god, they are a Muslim, no matter how inconvenient you might find it.
Your objection is like saying that some people don't take fatal doses of cyanide and therefore cyanide is not fatal.
To the degree to which a religious person believes what a book tells them without question, he has abandoned his faculty of reason.
It is true that some people are not very religious, but that doesn't change the fact that religion ultimately represents an abandonment of the brains that God gave us.
Not very many decades. Here in east-ish Asia we depend on transpacific cables quite a bit. At least once a year, and sometimes more, some cable will take a hit, causing congestion on the alternate routes and making net access sucky for days or weeks.
But definitely centidecades go by without incident.
Exactly. All the Scrabulous people have to do is change the name, change the colours, change the font on the tiles, and they're done. Home free. By now they already have enough name recognition on the '-ulous' part of the name that they can come up with a different prefix that doesn't sound like 'Scrabble', and people will still know what it is.
Go to the manufacturer's web site and upgrade the firmware. These days they generally do support DHCP reservations. I've got a big box'o'routers and I think the SMC Barricade is the only one of the bunch that doesn't have it.
Bingo.
I live in Malaysia but I'm willing to accept the challenge. Can I fly business class?
Oh please. The first time someone dies from "heat overexposure" because their thermostat was moved from 72 to 74, I'll fork over the liability payout myself. Anybody who is that fragile needs to be in an intensive care unit.
I doubt it's even necessary.
Where I live it's 90F and 85+% humidity 365 days a year, and I absolutely never use air conditioning. Just leave the windows open and turn on a ceiling fan and it's perfectly nice. If I am leaving my computer on while I go out during the hottest part of the day, I leave a desk fan (on low setting) pointed at it, and it's never overheated yet.
Not many people live in parts of California that need aircon. Bakersfield, Fresno? Sure. But the real population centres just aren't very warm places.
Actually in this case it may just have been an innocent coincidence. I had been planning for months to register frooplimpreeger.com and finally got around to it today around 3:08pm.
Nope, not just USA. I am in Malaysia. I made up a ridiculous long domain name and checked it via their web whois interface. Available. Then checked via command-line whois 30 seconds later. Sure enough, owned by Network Solutions.
I think many of us geeks know that you can also use methods like DHCP to configure static IPs. What you are benefiting from here is DHCP, not your dynamic IP.
Just wait until the MPAA gets word of this. What are the chances PicoP had a public performance licence for Finding Nemo? The company will be sued into bankruptcy before the product gets anywhere near market.
Too late, I already beat the shit out of Zed this morning. He was coming out of Starbucks carrying a Tazo Chai Crème and giggling about his new Hello Kitty cravat, and frankly, I just couldn't help myself. One open hand to the face, and he dropped like a bad packet hitting ipf, and then just sort of sat there on the pavement cringing and giggling. A couple girl scouts came by and kicked him in the teeth, then skipped off laughing as he threatened through a rain of tears to badmouth them in his blog.
There's a difference between correct grammar, and something that "anybody reasonably literate should have no trouble with."
Correct grammar it is not; it's missing an article (either "the" or "an") between the first two words. And even once the grammar has been fixed, it remains awkward.
No cat has ever made me carry a robot.
How did you decide on $0.25/jar? Maybe the labour conditions of anonymous workers in Urumqi are less important to me than they are to you. Who can calculate the ultimate economic cost of making a river sick?
Just imagine if we left it up to clueless Slashdot posters...
How often do you actually break light bulbs? I don't think I've ever broken one in my entire life, unless you count the incandescent ones that randomly exploded on their own when I turned them on.
Divide the amount of mercury by the proportion of bulbs you reasonably expect to break and I think your quotient will equal non-issue.
Perhaps the solution to the panic is to stop panicking, rather than to pander to it further.
...and on that note, a little while ago I bought a $4 LED flashlight that needs no batteries. You just shake it a couple times, which passes a magnet through a coil and recharges a built-in battery. So far it's worked great. I've even used it to read in bed, and the incidental movement from me shifting around has been enough to keep it lit.
It's still an expensive way to get heat. Better to burn some gas for heat and use an efficient light-emitting device for illumination.