"Reversed polarity" is meaningless in AC equipment -- the polarity switches all by itself 60 times a second.
We lived for decades without even the option of polarized plugs. Now we've got polarized plugs, but even that is only to provide pseudo-grounding safety by failing to the neutral line instead of the hot line.
For the sake of safety in no-ground-plug devices it's useful to make the right line hot, but you're not going to break any equipment by crossing the wires.
1) Your generator will simply cut out at the current limit. Welcome to current-limiting circuit interrupters -- you probably shouldn't be speaking in a thread about generators if you haven't heard of them.
2) If your cords fall out you're doing it wrong. Buy better sockets and/or increase the spacing between the pins to increase retention. Plus there's always the option to use twist-in plugs, which can't fall out even if pulled.
3) Electric water heaters don't have any (significant) additional startup draw. There's no rotor lock on a heating wire. And you can easily avoid overnight overcurrent issues by unplugging non-essentials at night -- the fridge will stay cold enough overnight while no one is using it. When only the furnace fan and sump pump are competing (and even then only when it's above freezing but below comfortable sleeping temperatures) I'm willing to take my chances on simultaneous startup, particularly when the "failure" mode simply involves me resetting a circuit breaker and restarting the generator.
4) Turning off the generator for 10 minutes every day (or twice a day) while refueling and checking fluids is hardly a big problem unless your household includes someone on a ventilator.
5) People have been able to, for the large part, successfully refuel all sorts of engines without major incident for about 100 years. Sometimes even while drunk and half asleep. I'll grant you that your car has better fuel storage isolation, but your lawn mower, outboard motor, or even motorcycle probably do not. Somehow we've survived; I doubt portable generators will be man's downfall.
Because switches marketed for use with generators are somehow safer than switches that don't come with that label? It is important that your switch completely isolates the house -- which the poster specifically mentioned -- but beyond that I can't understand why you think his switching solution is insufficient.
Seriously, all you have to do is interrupt the current path to isolate your house from the grid. After you do that there is absolutely no chance of harming linemen no matter what you're doing on your internal wiring.
There's no reason to ever share your password. It's a bad plan, even if you "trust" the person you're sharing with (which is not the case in the example you give).
If your child needs supervised email access then you should simply send and receive email directly on their behalf out of your own account without sharing credentials. Letting someone else use your account under your direct supervision is generally acceptable; alternatively you could exchange electronic or print messages with your child out-of-band and reproduce them in email as necessary for communication with the outside world.
If your goal is to provide out-of-band monitoring you should simply configure your child's email account to BCC you on all messages in both directions, or to allow secondary access under your own credentials. There's no practical reason that a single email box cannot be accessed with more than one set of distinct credentials.
If your goal is to limit access by time of day/etc. and not to supervise the content directly you should consider secondary access control mechanisms that enforce those limits, rather than a credentials-sharing plan that not only fails to enforce that plan but also creates additional risk of unauthorized use.
Being a registered sex offender is not parole -- you don't have the option to get out early if you choose to register -- you must register even after serving all your time, whether or not that time includes parole.
Frankly I think it's absurd that we even have such a list, regardless of what you did to get on it. If we want to punish "sex offenders" for their entire lives, why not simply increase the length their jail sentences? Why create this whole underclass of half-citizens that are required to work for a living but not allowed to live in town?
A) It would require secondary wiring to be installed, which is expensive even in new homes, let alone as a retrofit
B) There is no existing standard to design around, so no devices are compatible with the non-existent secondary wiring
C) Electricity is sufficiently cheap that it doesn't make economic sense to introduce incompatibilities, special equipment, or new standards unless you use an awful lot of it
D) It's expensive to get new wiring standards approved, and even if you do liability is a killer for manufacturers and installers
E) In applications where power requirements are low there are task-specific solutions (e.g. power over Ethernet, USB-powered disks/chargers/etc.) There's probably room of expansion and standardization along these lines, but probably never to the level of a single DC supply for the whole house.
F) For anything other than low-power application you'd need high-voltage DC. Converting from high-voltage DC to low-voltage DC is essentially the same efficiency as converting high-voltage AC to low-voltage DC.
G) While low-voltage DC power is safer than AC, high-voltage DC can easily cause continuous muscle contraction; you can generally release from 120 VAC contact, but if you conduct 120 VCD you'll be stuck holding whatever you touched.
But typically LED-based "white" lighting is a series of discreet spectra between red and blue, rather than a continuous spectra from red to blue; color temperature by itself is not a sufficient metric for comparison.
That seems ridiculous. I haven't bothered to examine any of the LED strings -- I don't do Christmas lights -- but I can't imagine why they wouldn't at least include a bridge rectifier to give you 120 Hz half-waves. Even without any additional smoothing that would be sufficient to eliminate visible flicker, and would cost less than the fuse required for UL listing. Plus it would be 100% brighter than the same string powered by unrectified current (because of the 100% increase in duty cycle), which seems like a marketing point to me.
You really think an odometer is harder to tamper with than a GPS tracking unit?
Ignoring direct alteration of tracking data stored on media that you have physical access to -- which is well within the realm of possibility for anyone with a JTAG interface (and quite probably anyone with a serial interface) -- you could simply add a local GPS simulator to your vehicle so the government-mandated unit always got radio signals telling it the car was sitting in your driveway. Such hacking is totally wireless -- it requires no electrical interface to the GPS system -- so it could be added/removed or activated/deactivated even by a brain-dead tax-dodger.
What makes you think the GPS-based system would exclude your off-road/private-road use, as opposed to simply deciding that you're "in Oregon" and counting the miles anyway?
But the real answer is -- as anyone who has ever driven a farm vehicle knows -- if you have a farm vehicle, or a dual-use vehicle, you register it as such and are exempt from (or pay a reduced rate for) road-use taxes.
Does your email client only allows one attachment per message? Is there something wrong with zip/tar/rar/etc. archives?
Seriously, Word is a terrible way to collect screen shots. Among other things, it often re-sizes the image to fit the page, so I end up with a 1/4-size screen shot that's much, much to small to be of any diagnostic value.
At least the new docx format stores images in a way I can read without Word -- just unzip it and pull the image files out of the media folder.
Only if your users have never seen a pervious version of Word. I won't debate whether or not the UI is better in an absolute sense, but for existing users the transition causes much more pain than any productivity gains that might come from UI improvement. Even several months after deployment my users are still regularly unable to use Word efficiently because they can't figure out where to find certain controls.
If you spend 15 years training someone to do things "the hard way" you'll often find that "the new, easy way" isn't actually all that easy for them -- it's not only a new process to learn, but it's 15 years of old process to un-learn.
Who do they study -- people who have never used Word? Or do they study real users and then do the opposite of what the studies recommend?
I haven't yet "upgraded" a user to Word 2007 without having them call (often repeatedly) in utter frustration while trying to use some important feature that Word 2007 has but they can't find because it's neither in the same place it was in previous versions nor in the place that their intuition suggested. Certainly there's some degree of frustration with any software upgrade, but Word 2007 is far and away the worst of anything I've installed for clients in the past 5 years.
What are you talking about? GnuCash uses Perl's LWP for HTTP transactions, which generally uses the Net::SSLeay (or similar) interface to OpenSSL, which supports (i.e. can parse, validate, and generate) EV certificates without a problem.
So I have no idea what your point is either than "troll, troll troll".
I agree that useful financial regulation may be helpful. But I'm baffled as to why you think we need to leave in place something that you agree doesn't work until we get something that does.
If your car had razor blades instead of seat belts, would you leave them in place until you could have seat belts installed or would you take them out as an entirely separate process, possibly while also working to find seat belts?
Or just make users choose their card type before you present an input box for the number and redirect to the appropriate domain.
Alternatively you could take a PayPal approach, where the retailer directs me to visa.com and I input secret data there, authorizing payment back to the retailer without giving the retailer any secret information or trusting their certificate at all (other than to hide my purchasing/browsing history from snooping).
I know Visa et. al don't want to be in that business, but it's a significantly more secure approach -- I can trust the CA issued by Visa for purchases I make with Visa and I can avoid giving my secret data to anyone that doesn't already have a copy.
I'd like to know if my bank's cert suddenly changed from the old cert to some cert signed by some CA in Elbonia.:)
Parts of the problem here is the reliance on third-party trust when no such abstracted trust is necessary.
Is there some reason my bank couldn't just give me the fingerprint of their CA cert and a link to download it when I open an account? Or provide a copy of it on a CD/flash drive? I don't understand why my bank needs a third-party CA in the first place, other than current OSes make it more complicated than necessary to install new CAs.
Certainly there are people who need trusted third-party introducers -- I've never been to a physical Amazon.com store, so there's no good way to get me a certificate or fingerprint. But even there I think some manual verification would be a good plan -- warn users the first time they visit and on any certificate change. I'm glad to have someone claim to authenticate the certificate, as opposed to being issued against an unknown CA, but there's no reason my browser should simply accept all those "known" CAs as 100% trusted with my manual input.
I don't understand your argument. The parent said that Apple makes money in large part by avoiding the low-end market. Then you talk about how they have (now and for years) only one machine in the low-end market, and it's not very competitive there, as though that disproves rather than affirms the parent's post.
I agree, the mini is overpriced and underpowered. But it also hasn't been updated in well over a year, and Apple is obviously waiting for it to die -- probably because they don't want to be in the low-end markets, where they have trouble making money and matching prices.
--
As far as upgrades go, I also agree -- Apple charges waaay to much for RAM, and somewhat too much for HDs. But compare that to upgrade prices in the high-end lines of other manufactures and you'll see similar practices. Yes, on the $400 Dell they offer cheap(ish) RAM upgrades. But on their $3000 server, where they are already making an arm and a leg, they overcharge just like anyone else. It's a common practice in any industry in any market where low price is not that #1 selling point.
I'll grant you that it's an average of 481.4 days between OS X releases -- there were frequently releases in the 10.0-10.2 days as one might expect; 10.0 was so bad they didn't even make it the default OS on new machines -- but the numbers have been steadily climbing in subsequent releases, with 910 days between 10.4 and 10.5.
And while there are many fanatics who upgrade on release day, there are also a lot of people still using the OS that came with their machine, just like on Windows -- there is a huge portion of the computing world that wouldn't know how to install an OS, Mac or otherwise, if their life depended on it, and certainly wouldn't pay $129 for the privilege.
I'm not saying Apple doesn't like charging for software upgrades, but be realistic in your math -- it was 2.5 years between the last two releases, and even in tech-savvy forums 10.5 penetration is only about 75%, so if their goal is $129/customer-year somebody screwed up big-time.
Guys, we all need to stop eating and switch to IV-delivered glucose. Poop is gross, and your digestive tract is mostly unnecessary with modern technology.
I'm not against a hair styling -- be it head, face, or otherwise -- but to suggest that a standard bit of anatomy is "gross" and must be entirely removed is absurd.
While I agree that the IRS is a bad plan, you'll care when someone deletes their record of your tax payments, and they freeze your assets pending (a second) payment of your taxes.
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"Reversed polarity" is meaningless in AC equipment -- the polarity switches all by itself 60 times a second.
We lived for decades without even the option of polarized plugs. Now we've got polarized plugs, but even that is only to provide pseudo-grounding safety by failing to the neutral line instead of the hot line.
For the sake of safety in no-ground-plug devices it's useful to make the right line hot, but you're not going to break any equipment by crossing the wires.
1) Your generator will simply cut out at the current limit. Welcome to current-limiting circuit interrupters -- you probably shouldn't be speaking in a thread about generators if you haven't heard of them.
2) If your cords fall out you're doing it wrong. Buy better sockets and/or increase the spacing between the pins to increase retention. Plus there's always the option to use twist-in plugs, which can't fall out even if pulled.
3) Electric water heaters don't have any (significant) additional startup draw. There's no rotor lock on a heating wire. And you can easily avoid overnight overcurrent issues by unplugging non-essentials at night -- the fridge will stay cold enough overnight while no one is using it. When only the furnace fan and sump pump are competing (and even then only when it's above freezing but below comfortable sleeping temperatures) I'm willing to take my chances on simultaneous startup, particularly when the "failure" mode simply involves me resetting a circuit breaker and restarting the generator.
4) Turning off the generator for 10 minutes every day (or twice a day) while refueling and checking fluids is hardly a big problem unless your household includes someone on a ventilator.
5) People have been able to, for the large part, successfully refuel all sorts of engines without major incident for about 100 years. Sometimes even while drunk and half asleep. I'll grant you that your car has better fuel storage isolation, but your lawn mower, outboard motor, or even motorcycle probably do not. Somehow we've survived; I doubt portable generators will be man's downfall.
Because switches marketed for use with generators are somehow safer than switches that don't come with that label? It is important that your switch completely isolates the house -- which the poster specifically mentioned -- but beyond that I can't understand why you think his switching solution is insufficient.
Seriously, all you have to do is interrupt the current path to isolate your house from the grid. After you do that there is absolutely no chance of harming linemen no matter what you're doing on your internal wiring.
If you bothered to read the grandparent, he specifically noted that you'd need to cut the main breaker in your panel to avoid backfeeding the grid.
There's no reason to ever share your password. It's a bad plan, even if you "trust" the person you're sharing with (which is not the case in the example you give).
If your child needs supervised email access then you should simply send and receive email directly on their behalf out of your own account without sharing credentials. Letting someone else use your account under your direct supervision is generally acceptable; alternatively you could exchange electronic or print messages with your child out-of-band and reproduce them in email as necessary for communication with the outside world.
If your goal is to provide out-of-band monitoring you should simply configure your child's email account to BCC you on all messages in both directions, or to allow secondary access under your own credentials. There's no practical reason that a single email box cannot be accessed with more than one set of distinct credentials.
If your goal is to limit access by time of day/etc. and not to supervise the content directly you should consider secondary access control mechanisms that enforce those limits, rather than a credentials-sharing plan that not only fails to enforce that plan but also creates additional risk of unauthorized use.
Being a registered sex offender is not parole -- you don't have the option to get out early if you choose to register -- you must register even after serving all your time, whether or not that time includes parole.
Frankly I think it's absurd that we even have such a list, regardless of what you did to get on it. If we want to punish "sex offenders" for their entire lives, why not simply increase the length their jail sentences? Why create this whole underclass of half-citizens that are required to work for a living but not allowed to live in town?
A) It would require secondary wiring to be installed, which is expensive even in new homes, let alone as a retrofit
B) There is no existing standard to design around, so no devices are compatible with the non-existent secondary wiring
C) Electricity is sufficiently cheap that it doesn't make economic sense to introduce incompatibilities, special equipment, or new standards unless you use an awful lot of it
D) It's expensive to get new wiring standards approved, and even if you do liability is a killer for manufacturers and installers
E) In applications where power requirements are low there are task-specific solutions (e.g. power over Ethernet, USB-powered disks/chargers/etc.) There's probably room of expansion and standardization along these lines, but probably never to the level of a single DC supply for the whole house.
F) For anything other than low-power application you'd need high-voltage DC. Converting from high-voltage DC to low-voltage DC is essentially the same efficiency as converting high-voltage AC to low-voltage DC.
G) While low-voltage DC power is safer than AC, high-voltage DC can easily cause continuous muscle contraction; you can generally release from 120 VAC contact, but if you conduct 120 VCD you'll be stuck holding whatever you touched.
Watts / hour == m^2 kg / s^4
I'm not sure what I'd measure with those units, but it is technically valid.
But typically LED-based "white" lighting is a series of discreet spectra between red and blue, rather than a continuous spectra from red to blue; color temperature by itself is not a sufficient metric for comparison.
That seems ridiculous. I haven't bothered to examine any of the LED strings -- I don't do Christmas lights -- but I can't imagine why they wouldn't at least include a bridge rectifier to give you 120 Hz half-waves. Even without any additional smoothing that would be sufficient to eliminate visible flicker, and would cost less than the fuse required for UL listing. Plus it would be 100% brighter than the same string powered by unrectified current (because of the 100% increase in duty cycle), which seems like a marketing point to me.
You really think an odometer is harder to tamper with than a GPS tracking unit?
Ignoring direct alteration of tracking data stored on media that you have physical access to -- which is well within the realm of possibility for anyone with a JTAG interface (and quite probably anyone with a serial interface) -- you could simply add a local GPS simulator to your vehicle so the government-mandated unit always got radio signals telling it the car was sitting in your driveway. Such hacking is totally wireless -- it requires no electrical interface to the GPS system -- so it could be added/removed or activated/deactivated even by a brain-dead tax-dodger.
What makes you think the GPS-based system would exclude your off-road/private-road use, as opposed to simply deciding that you're "in Oregon" and counting the miles anyway?
But the real answer is -- as anyone who has ever driven a farm vehicle knows -- if you have a farm vehicle, or a dual-use vehicle, you register it as such and are exempt from (or pay a reduced rate for) road-use taxes.
Does your email client only allows one attachment per message? Is there something wrong with zip/tar/rar/etc. archives?
Seriously, Word is a terrible way to collect screen shots. Among other things, it often re-sizes the image to fit the page, so I end up with a 1/4-size screen shot that's much, much to small to be of any diagnostic value.
At least the new docx format stores images in a way I can read without Word -- just unzip it and pull the image files out of the media folder.
Office 2007's new UI, which is a huge improvement
Only if your users have never seen a pervious version of Word. I won't debate whether or not the UI is better in an absolute sense, but for existing users the transition causes much more pain than any productivity gains that might come from UI improvement. Even several months after deployment my users are still regularly unable to use Word efficiently because they can't figure out where to find certain controls.
If you spend 15 years training someone to do things "the hard way" you'll often find that "the new, easy way" isn't actually all that easy for them -- it's not only a new process to learn, but it's 15 years of old process to un-learn.
Who do they study -- people who have never used Word? Or do they study real users and then do the opposite of what the studies recommend?
I haven't yet "upgraded" a user to Word 2007 without having them call (often repeatedly) in utter frustration while trying to use some important feature that Word 2007 has but they can't find because it's neither in the same place it was in previous versions nor in the place that their intuition suggested. Certainly there's some degree of frustration with any software upgrade, but Word 2007 is far and away the worst of anything I've installed for clients in the past 5 years.
What are you talking about? GnuCash uses Perl's LWP for HTTP transactions, which generally uses the Net::SSLeay (or similar) interface to OpenSSL, which supports (i.e. can parse, validate, and generate) EV certificates without a problem.
So I have no idea what your point is either than "troll, troll troll".
I agree that useful financial regulation may be helpful. But I'm baffled as to why you think we need to leave in place something that you agree doesn't work until we get something that does.
If your car had razor blades instead of seat belts, would you leave them in place until you could have seat belts installed or would you take them out as an entirely separate process, possibly while also working to find seat belts?
Or just make users choose their card type before you present an input box for the number and redirect to the appropriate domain.
Alternatively you could take a PayPal approach, where the retailer directs me to visa.com and I input secret data there, authorizing payment back to the retailer without giving the retailer any secret information or trusting their certificate at all (other than to hide my purchasing/browsing history from snooping).
I know Visa et. al don't want to be in that business, but it's a significantly more secure approach -- I can trust the CA issued by Visa for purchases I make with Visa and I can avoid giving my secret data to anyone that doesn't already have a copy.
I'd like to know if my bank's cert suddenly changed from the old cert to some cert signed by some CA in Elbonia. :)
Parts of the problem here is the reliance on third-party trust when no such abstracted trust is necessary.
Is there some reason my bank couldn't just give me the fingerprint of their CA cert and a link to download it when I open an account? Or provide a copy of it on a CD/flash drive? I don't understand why my bank needs a third-party CA in the first place, other than current OSes make it more complicated than necessary to install new CAs.
Certainly there are people who need trusted third-party introducers -- I've never been to a physical Amazon.com store, so there's no good way to get me a certificate or fingerprint. But even there I think some manual verification would be a good plan -- warn users the first time they visit and on any certificate change. I'm glad to have someone claim to authenticate the certificate, as opposed to being issued against an unknown CA, but there's no reason my browser should simply accept all those "known" CAs as 100% trusted with my manual input.
I don't understand your argument. The parent said that Apple makes money in large part by avoiding the low-end market. Then you talk about how they have (now and for years) only one machine in the low-end market, and it's not very competitive there, as though that disproves rather than affirms the parent's post.
I agree, the mini is overpriced and underpowered. But it also hasn't been updated in well over a year, and Apple is obviously waiting for it to die -- probably because they don't want to be in the low-end markets, where they have trouble making money and matching prices.
--
As far as upgrades go, I also agree -- Apple charges waaay to much for RAM, and somewhat too much for HDs. But compare that to upgrade prices in the high-end lines of other manufactures and you'll see similar practices. Yes, on the $400 Dell they offer cheap(ish) RAM upgrades. But on their $3000 server, where they are already making an arm and a leg, they overcharge just like anyone else. It's a common practice in any industry in any market where low price is not that #1 selling point.
I'll grant you that it's an average of 481.4 days between OS X releases -- there were frequently releases in the 10.0-10.2 days as one might expect; 10.0 was so bad they didn't even make it the default OS on new machines -- but the numbers have been steadily climbing in subsequent releases, with 910 days between 10.4 and 10.5.
And while there are many fanatics who upgrade on release day, there are also a lot of people still using the OS that came with their machine, just like on Windows -- there is a huge portion of the computing world that wouldn't know how to install an OS, Mac or otherwise, if their life depended on it, and certainly wouldn't pay $129 for the privilege.
I'm not saying Apple doesn't like charging for software upgrades, but be realistic in your math -- it was 2.5 years between the last two releases, and even in tech-savvy forums 10.5 penetration is only about 75%, so if their goal is $129/customer-year somebody screwed up big-time.
The the placement of the hyphen to distinguish between "labeled by Apple" (i.e. Apple-labled) vs. "has a label with Apple logo" (i.e. "Apple" labeled)
Because there is only one botnet in the world so once you're infected you won't be attacked? I'm not following your logic here.
Guys, we all need to stop eating and switch to IV-delivered glucose. Poop is gross, and your digestive tract is mostly unnecessary with modern technology.
I'm not against a hair styling -- be it head, face, or otherwise -- but to suggest that a standard bit of anatomy is "gross" and must be entirely removed is absurd.
While I agree that the IRS is a bad plan, you'll care when someone deletes their record of your tax payments, and they freeze your assets pending (a second) payment of your taxes.