You don't need spyware to do that. A buddy of mine wrote a stupid HTML page that gets and displays your external IP address. All the crap that Evidence Eliminator's page shows you is stuff you can see _without_ spyware. Go to www.grc.com, Gibson Research, for a good firewall test page that includes your IP info, or just do a Google search for "external IP" and try the 1st page or two it comes up with.
Spyware transmits information that cannot be readily extracted by browser responses, otherwise browsers would be considered "spyware" too!
Well, if you do what the sticker on the pump says, and turn off the car while fueling, by the time you get back in, the wind will have carried the fumes away. Contrast this with the Celluloid Moron standing right over the filler neck with the pump handle in one hand and the cellphone in the other, directly in the stream of fumes.
The thing about intrinsically safe radios is really true, though, they probably wouldn't let you start your car down in a mine shaft!
I know what you mean. I have LOTS of rare filez on older CR-R's I have since moved off of HD. I'd hate to think I need to go get 500 new CD-R's every year or two and re-copy the entire collection just to ward off bit rot.
And isn't it ironic - the thing that deteriorates in CR-R's just happens to also be - an organic dye!
Close, but actually it is inducing a color change in an organic dye. This dye is either green (unburned) or clear (burned), and is sandwiched between a reflective and a non-reflective layer.
Re:Gas stations and lithium ...
on
Flaming Cellphones
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Actually, I'm not confused here. I was indeed referring to lithium-ion _rechargable_ cells.
I know of lithium batteries, and yes they have been around for cameras, etc. since the 70's.
As for the self-discharge, I think _you're_ confused - you must be thinking of Nickel Metal Hydride (NiMH) batteries, which self-discharge up to 10% per day. Li-ion is more like 5% the 1st day, then 1-2% per day thereafter. I think the spec you are mis-quoting is a self-discharge of 10% _per month_ with Li-Ion.
Finally, any self-discharge is irrelevant. The rechargeable lamps and radios they carry are sitting in rapid charging adapters in their tents or tanks until they are pulled for use (like police radios) and are thus always "topped off".
Not only that, but the energy density of the Li-Ion cells allows for the batteries to be made with more overall power capacity (by whatever factor is desired) to compensate for any possible increased losses.
The military uses a different animal than consumer lithium-ion batteries. The military version has about 10 times the power/weight ratio of the consumer versions, and also 10 times the explosive potential.
The military used them for about 15 years before they were introduced into civilian use. The delay was not due to classification, but because they were simply too dangerous and unstable.
After some years, the designers were able to dilute the strength (and volatility) of the cells by a factor of about 10, enough to make them semi-safe for the idiot consumer public.
To get them to do this on command?? Perfect for rude users in theaters, restaraunts, etc! Use the detonate destination feature:)
I do commercial radio repairs for a living so I may have a little insight here.
First, let me say that the heat generated by the phones while transmitting in analog mode is due to heat generated by the RF power amplifier IC Module in the phone. It is the most power-consuming part of the phone, followed by battery recharging and backlight hi-voltage power supplies. Hand held cell handsets are usually power limited to 300 mW max. The old Motorola Shoe Phones used to put out 3W of power max. (!) before the cell tower infrastructure was sufficiently built up to not need those levels of power.
But anyway, the battery only gets hot while charging. If it gets hot during discharge, it's under a serious over-current situation that is a "Bad Thing" and would never be designed as such. The only situation like that I've ever heard of is with some R/C racing cars that have special hi-temperature battery packs that are specifically designed to deliver high current into a near-short circuit condition. And they don't last very long in that sort of service!
Finally, about the urban legend - there actually may be something to it. I know that Motorola Handie-Talkies are sold in what the call "Intrinsically Safe" versions, that are for use in mines, and explosive atmospheres (chemical spills, fires, etc.)
All of the contacts and switches inside the radio are not hermetically sealed, and even the tiny arcs they make at 5-7 volts are enough to detonate an explosive atmosphere. So they make the radios with something like a tire valve at the bottom, and positively pressurize the radio to +1 atmosphere with nitrogen. These radios and their batteries are marked with green dots, and have an MSA (Mine Safety Associates) approval sticker on them.
To the extent that gas fumes are explosive in the air while refueling a vehicle, if the radio isn't an intrinsically safe one, the possibilty of detonation exists. Probably it would only happen from switch contact closure, if you were talking and not dialing or opening/closing the phone by the pump, then nothing would be likely to happen.
Do you understand what the word "redundant" means? Idiot. Did anyone else post about the fact that they built their website for them? I really hope I get to metamod you, schmuck.
It was for Lufthansa USA, the US division of their Air carrier operations. I don't know the exact domain name, etc of the final website, that part (the outside IP and domain, etc.) was configured by their people in Germany after I got it built.
This was not the root domain of lufthansa.com, but thanks for playing.
I consult to company in the Chicago area who hosts their US website. I was contracted to build their webfarm!
I am normally a Redhat fan, but they insisted I use SuSE 7 (the latest at the time) running on a cluster of 10 Compaq DL380's, using a cool content-based traffic load-balancing switch to make the individual servers into a _non-beowulf_ cluster!
I got the whole thing up and running, then web-hardened the servers, and then let the boys from Munich do their customization and configuration.
Your rates can't go up for that reason. There are legal regulations called tarriffs that keep them from randomly gouging you if they feel they didn't make enough money. The bastards are already bleeding you for all they can. Also, they didn't know (or weren't sure) they were losing money to this fraud until now.
It's like the gaspumps in Illinois used to have stickers on them stating: "We have calculated the maximum legal price and our fuel is at or below that price". At least they're not lying about it - they're gouging you to the fullest extent of the law.
Quiet! You might give them the idea to pull the same thing with Linux as SCO did!
Actually from the comment, I'm sure that Bill has an entire Primary Adjunct of drones already cross-indexing the billions of lines of MS source with the Linux kernel sources!
If he even finds 2 lines the same, I'm sure we'll hear all about it - Probably from the Gartner Group.
Acutally, I'm glad they did! It saved me the time that it usually takes to go into the story, and find the (-1 Redundant) post that has the partner link in it!! Thanks!
Website registration sucks, anyway. They just feed the harvested data to some annoying form of spammer scum, anyhow.
Acutally it wouldn't be quite that bad; all they need to check is the beginning and end of the call, and verify that the source and destination were correctly specified for the confirmed call from here to there... If the source and "here" don't match - fraud alert!
The calls that were switched onto another LD carrier would be much more difficult to backtrace, because they would all show origination from whatever local office they were transferred through. They most likely had forged source information that showed the origination as the local office that they were first illegally transferred to. That's a double whammy, not only are they getting out of termination tarrifs, but they are actually using their competitor's infrastructure for free and charging the termination fee to them to boot! Wow.
You as a customer wouldn't see any money out of em, anyway. They were cheating other phone companies out of their cut for originating or terminating the call. They were charging their customers the full tarriffed (sp?) rate, but not overcharging them. They were just lowering their overhead by fraudulent methods. Any fines or remuneration would be to the telcos they cheated. Sigh.
I have several Abaci (?), one of which is encased in glass with a little hammer on a chain, with a sign reading "In case of power failure, break glass"
It's not that C64's etc. are old or rare, they just have a crapflood of them. Almost everyone has one (or more) sitting in the bottom of an old closet) and thinks it's gonna be (or already is) a valuable old piece someday. They have enough, already!
I have a PDP-8, 3 NEXT's and a TRS-80 Model I in my collection of really old and wierd stuff. And, I know my TRS-80 ain't worth diddly, but it's what I learned assembler on, so I'm keeping it for _my_ museum of computer history...
Acually, my $49.00 Cyberhome CH-402 (from Radio Shack, no less!) has RGB outputs for a progressive scan display. Unfortunately, my $1000.00 Sony monitor doesn't do progressive scan. D'oh!
So, I use it to go via S-Video into my ATI All-in-Wonder Radeon 8500 Card, and could get perfect captures at 740x480. It sounds like you have the same setup (or similar to) as mine, with a video card that has RGB and S-Video output.
The best part is the ATI AIW card puts out S-video without Macrovision, and ignores it on the inputs witht the proper software "patches" applied.;)
However, for actually ripping a DVD, though, DVDx or DVDdecrypter seem to be the best tools I have seen yet. They remove all the digial Macrovision information and region coding, and do a totally digital copy with no D/A/D conversion.
For an excellent source of how-to info see the www.dvdhelp.com website, AKA vcdhelp, svcdhelp, etc.
Not true. If you look at the spec for Macrovision, it encompasses about 7 or 8 layers (features) some of which are analog in nature (twisting chroma phase, screwing with the black level) and some are purely digtal and are present as detectable signatures in a decoded stream of digital video. Take a look if you don't believe me.
The USB Coffee warmer was a JOKE. I don't remember where I saw it, but it was on April Fool's Day, and it took me a minute or two to realize that. I'd already done the math on how many watts of power at 5 Volts = too many amps to draw from a USB port when I realized it was April 1.
It woudn't surprise me that the "pleasure accessory" item was a joke, too...
No, the problems won't just go away, but the people don't have to sit around and be depressed by them.
For those that can't afford cable, sat TV, or $9.50 a head movie tickets, that may be their only distraction from the fact that life sucks, a.k.a. "Entertainment".
Or would you rather have them spend prime time learning new and creative ways to jack cars and sell (or do) crack? Drugs also equal entertainment in this case, they also tend to make people forget that life sucks for a while.
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You don't need spyware to do that. A buddy of mine wrote a stupid HTML page that gets and displays your external IP address. All the crap that Evidence Eliminator's page shows you is stuff you can see _without_ spyware. Go to www.grc.com, Gibson Research, for a good firewall test page that includes your IP info, or just do a Google search for "external IP" and try the 1st page or two it comes up with.
Spyware transmits information that cannot be readily extracted by browser responses, otherwise browsers would be considered "spyware" too!
Well, if you do what the sticker on the pump says, and turn off the car while fueling, by the time you get back in, the wind will have carried the fumes away. Contrast this with the Celluloid Moron standing right over the filler neck with the pump handle in one hand and the cellphone in the other, directly in the stream of fumes.
The thing about intrinsically safe radios is really true, though, they probably wouldn't let you start your car down in a mine shaft!
I know what you mean. I have LOTS of rare filez on older CR-R's I have since moved off of HD. I'd hate to think I need to go get 500 new CD-R's every year or two and re-copy the entire collection just to ward off bit rot.
And isn't it ironic - the thing that deteriorates in CR-R's just happens to also be - an organic dye!
Close, but actually it is inducing a color change in an organic dye. This dye is either green (unburned) or clear (burned), and is sandwiched between a reflective and a non-reflective layer.
Actually, I'm not confused here. I was indeed referring to lithium-ion _rechargable_ cells.
I know of lithium batteries, and yes they have been around for cameras, etc. since the 70's.
As for the self-discharge, I think _you're_ confused - you must be thinking of Nickel Metal Hydride (NiMH) batteries, which self-discharge up to 10% per day. Li-ion is more like 5% the 1st day, then 1-2% per day thereafter. I think the spec you are mis-quoting is a self-discharge of 10% _per month_ with Li-Ion.
Finally, any self-discharge is irrelevant. The rechargeable lamps and radios they carry are sitting in rapid charging adapters in their tents or tanks until they are pulled for use (like police radios) and are thus always "topped off".
Not only that, but the energy density of the Li-Ion cells allows for the batteries to be made with more overall power capacity (by whatever factor is desired) to compensate for any possible increased losses.
The military uses a different animal than consumer lithium-ion batteries. The military version has about 10 times the power/weight ratio of the consumer versions, and also 10 times the explosive potential.
The military used them for about 15 years before they were introduced into civilian use. The delay was not due to classification, but because they were simply too dangerous and unstable.
After some years, the designers were able to dilute the strength (and volatility) of the cells by a factor of about 10, enough to make them semi-safe for the idiot consumer public.
To get them to do this on command?? Perfect for rude users in theaters, restaraunts, etc! Use the detonate destination feature :)
I do commercial radio repairs for a living so I may have a little insight here.
First, let me say that the heat generated by the phones while transmitting in analog mode is due to heat generated by the RF power amplifier IC Module in the phone. It is the most power-consuming part of the phone, followed by battery recharging and backlight hi-voltage power supplies. Hand held cell handsets are usually power limited to 300 mW max. The old Motorola Shoe Phones used to put out 3W of power max. (!) before the cell tower infrastructure was sufficiently built up to not need those levels of power.
But anyway, the battery only gets hot while charging. If it gets hot during discharge, it's under a serious over-current situation that is a "Bad Thing" and would never be designed as such. The only situation like that I've ever heard of is with some R/C racing cars that have special hi-temperature battery packs that are specifically designed to deliver high current into a near-short circuit condition. And they don't last very long in that sort of service!
Finally, about the urban legend - there actually may be something to it. I know that Motorola Handie-Talkies are sold in what the call "Intrinsically Safe" versions, that are for use in mines, and explosive atmospheres (chemical spills, fires, etc.)
All of the contacts and switches inside the radio are not hermetically sealed, and even the tiny arcs they make at 5-7 volts are enough to detonate an explosive atmosphere. So they make the radios with something like a tire valve at the bottom, and positively pressurize the radio to +1 atmosphere with nitrogen. These radios and their batteries are marked with green dots, and have an MSA (Mine Safety Associates) approval sticker on them.
To the extent that gas fumes are explosive in the air while refueling a vehicle, if the radio isn't an intrinsically safe one, the possibilty of detonation exists. Probably it would only happen from switch contact closure, if you were talking and not dialing or opening/closing the phone by the pump, then nothing would be likely to happen.
Do you understand what the word "redundant" means? Idiot. Did anyone else post about the fact that they built their website for them? I really hope I get to metamod you, schmuck.
It was for Lufthansa USA, the US division of their Air carrier operations. I don't know the exact domain name, etc of the final website, that part (the outside IP and domain, etc.) was configured by their people in Germany after I got it built.
This was not the root domain of lufthansa.com, but thanks for playing.
I consult to company in the Chicago area who hosts their US website. I was contracted to build their webfarm!
I am normally a Redhat fan, but they insisted I use SuSE 7 (the latest at the time) running on a cluster of 10 Compaq DL380's, using a cool content-based traffic load-balancing switch to make the individual servers into a _non-beowulf_ cluster!
I got the whole thing up and running, then web-hardened the servers, and then let the boys from Munich do their customization and configuration.
It was a fun project, one I'm proud of...
The link to kernel.org is busted. If you notice, it has 3 "t"'s in the "http" part. Try this:
kernel.org
Your rates can't go up for that reason. There are legal regulations called tarriffs that keep them from randomly gouging you if they feel they didn't make enough money. The bastards are already bleeding you for all they can. Also, they didn't know (or weren't sure) they were losing money to this fraud until now.
It's like the gaspumps in Illinois used to have stickers on them stating: "We have calculated the maximum legal price and our fuel is at or below that price". At least they're not lying about it - they're gouging you to the fullest extent of the law.
Quiet! You might give them the idea to pull the same thing with Linux as SCO did!
Actually from the comment, I'm sure that Bill has an entire Primary Adjunct of drones already cross-indexing the billions of lines of MS source with the Linux kernel sources!
If he even finds 2 lines the same, I'm sure we'll hear all about it - Probably from the Gartner Group.
Acutally, I'm glad they did! It saved me the time that it usually takes to go into the story, and find the (-1 Redundant) post that has the partner link in it!! Thanks!
Website registration sucks, anyway. They just feed the harvested data to some annoying form of spammer scum, anyhow.
Acutally it wouldn't be quite that bad; all they need to check is the beginning and end of the call, and verify that the source and destination were correctly specified for the confirmed call from here to there... If the source and "here" don't match - fraud alert!
The calls that were switched onto another LD carrier would be much more difficult to backtrace, because they would all show origination from whatever local office they were transferred through. They most likely had forged source information that showed the origination as the local office that they were first illegally transferred to. That's a double whammy, not only are they getting out of termination tarrifs, but they are actually using their competitor's infrastructure for free and charging the termination fee to them to boot! Wow.
You as a customer wouldn't see any money out of em, anyway. They were cheating other phone companies out of their cut for originating or terminating the call. They were charging their customers the full tarriffed (sp?) rate, but not overcharging them. They were just lowering their overhead by fraudulent methods. Any fines or remuneration would be to the telcos they cheated. Sigh.
I have several Abaci (?), one of which is encased in glass with a little hammer on a chain, with a sign reading "In case of power failure, break glass"
It's not that C64's etc. are old or rare, they just have a crapflood of them. Almost everyone has one (or more) sitting in the bottom of an old closet) and thinks it's gonna be (or already is) a valuable old piece someday. They have enough, already!
I have a PDP-8, 3 NEXT's and a TRS-80 Model I in my collection of really old and wierd stuff. And, I know my TRS-80 ain't worth diddly, but it's what I learned assembler on, so I'm keeping it for _my_ museum of computer history...
Acually, my $49.00 Cyberhome CH-402 (from Radio Shack, no less!) has RGB outputs for a progressive scan display. Unfortunately, my $1000.00 Sony monitor doesn't do progressive scan. D'oh!
;)
So, I use it to go via S-Video into my ATI All-in-Wonder Radeon 8500 Card, and could get perfect captures at 740x480. It sounds like you have the same setup (or similar to) as mine, with a video card that has RGB and S-Video output.
The best part is the ATI AIW card puts out S-video without Macrovision, and ignores it on the inputs witht the proper software "patches" applied.
However, for actually ripping a DVD, though, DVDx or DVDdecrypter seem to be the best tools I have seen yet. They remove all the digial Macrovision information and region coding, and do a totally digital copy with no D/A/D conversion.
For an excellent source of how-to info see the www.dvdhelp.com website, AKA vcdhelp, svcdhelp, etc.
Not true. If you look at the spec for Macrovision, it encompasses about 7 or 8 layers (features) some of which are analog in nature (twisting chroma phase, screwing with the black level) and some are purely digtal and are present as detectable signatures in a decoded stream of digital video. Take a look if you don't believe me.
Revolution: O/S, an excellent documentary about Linyx and Open Source Software, released their DVD not only with no CSS encryption, but Region-Free!
Thanks. You are quite right. All of my past indiscretions and old age have finally caught up with me. :)
What you have there, my friend, is an "Amsterdam Jar" (as opposed to a "Leyden Jar") :)
I made one out of a beaker and tinfoil as a kid, it held quite a charge. In later life, I calculated the capacity to be around 2 Farads or so. Yowza!
The USB Coffee warmer was a JOKE. I don't remember where I saw it, but it was on April Fool's Day, and it took me a minute or two to realize that. I'd already done the math on how many watts of power at 5 Volts = too many amps to draw from a USB port when I realized it was April 1.
It woudn't surprise me that the "pleasure accessory" item was a joke, too...
No, the problems won't just go away, but the people don't have to sit around and be depressed by them.
For those that can't afford cable, sat TV, or $9.50 a head movie tickets, that may be their only distraction from the fact that life sucks, a.k.a. "Entertainment".
Or would you rather have them spend prime time learning new and creative ways to jack cars and sell (or do) crack? Drugs also equal entertainment in this case, they also tend to make people forget that life sucks for a while.
Would that be better, in your humble opinion?