Our dryer died one day, and since it did not belong to us (it belonged to the landlord; he did not want to fix it; long story), we just left it there and started hanging our clothes instead. We were a little irritated by the inconvenience at first, but after that first electric bill we were sold. $25/mo less per month. I made sure to compare all the transmission/generation charges just to be sure it was all from the dryer.
Our family is one of those pseudo back-to-the-land kinds that tries to raise as much food (and use as few resources) as possible w/o going insane.
We haven't has a dryer in almost 5 years now. Not only will you realize a major cost savings due to reduced electrical demands, but over time you will notice a substantial increase in clothing life. While the washing machine does the most damage to your clothes, the dryer does a non-trivial share as well. The heat shortens the life of elastic, so things like socks last a *lot* longer w/o regularly going through a dryer. But jeans, tees, and most other things will last much longer, too.
For reference, our family of 4 averages between $25 and $30 per month outside the cold months (when the well-house heater kicks on in sub-freezing temps -- bringing it to just over $40). Our local flat residential rate is (rounded up) seven cents per KWH. We use mostly CFs for lighting, use a propane stove (wood stove in winter), no microwave, no water heater (heated on the stove), and have no TV or entertainment center (we use a PC for watching movies). The crusty fridge that came with the house is responsible for about 50% of our non-winter electricity consumption.
I always thought Matsui "Gold" and "Silver" were the top-rated media. At least for CD-Rs (though I thought they were held in high regard for DVD blank media, too). I used to mail-order un-branded blanks them by the spool.
What if you forget your password for one of the many sites you registered at? The 'I lost my password' function is worthless if there is no longer an address to retrieve it at.
Ummm.... how about not forgetting it? This truly is a non-issue. Use a password manager, USB fob backup, hard copy, or something.
I have a GPG-encrypted file with all my web site passwords. All of those passwords are unique, as I use the largest value for x supported by each web site in the following: "ps waux | md5 | cut -c 1-x". So, for example, the actual password I have for one of the sites I've purchased from is "48750be49b0cb2d6ad9469d54".
So for backup, I email myself this symmetrically-encrypted, ascii-armoured file to my gmail account. Otherwise, I open up a shell and type "gpg -d/home/foo/internet_passwords.asc", cut-n-paste, and I'm good to go.
Of course, these are important sites/passwords. I use a small handful of easily-memorized passwords for sites like this one.
I usually send any junk mail with a postage-paid envelope back to the sender. Just fold, spindle, and mutilate everything to fit it in the envelope, then drop it back in the mail box. Let someone else deal w/ the trash. If you're lucky, you may jam up one of those big mail handling machines at the credit card processing shop. Everything else gets tossed into the wood stove. As much as I like shredding, fire (being old tech) is much less prone to malfunction, and I don't send yet more crap off to the landfill.
Personally, I'd love it if New York had such a law. Forget clubs, why exactly does Verizon Wireless need to retain a copy of my licence to give me cell phone service? And don't say "take my business elsewhere" because they all do it. So the choice is to go without telecommunications or hand it over.
Pre-pay cell phones? The market has already corrected for classes of people who want privacy or have shitty credit.
The point is that these agencies are pro actively taking money from all of those who purchase media with the aforementioned media "tax" under the assumption that people are infringing copyright in some way with the media. If they have the omniscience to know that everyone is making unauthorized copies (and dinging us all for it when we buy media), they should suck it up and let everyone enjoy what they've already paid for, as they do in more enlightened countries like (I believe) Canada, and not be allowed to pursue downloaders/seeders. If they can't stomach loosing their settle-out-of-court-extortion income stream, they should lose any tariffs on media.
I guess my broader suggestion is that someone needs to challenge either the tariffs or the lawsuits, as the RIAA/MPAA shouldn't be able to have their cake and eat it, too.
I'd love to see a defendant in one of these suits argue that because they had previously bought a spindle of CDs or any media storage device that has the tariff/tax included in the price (that supposedly to compensate for piracy) they should not be held liable for the copyright violations, and *then* counter sue to force the RIAA/MPAA's hands to either give up the tariff or the right to sue for the violations.
Seems these orgs are double-dipping in a *big* way with the current system, and they need to get spanked hard in court for doing so.
So.... any lawyers or other legal eagles out there care to comment on the feasibility of these strategy?
I know a dude you left his state yesterday to camp out at some place in Idaho (which borders his state) with a wad of cash in hand. He wants to pick up as many units as he can afford and hawk them online for mucho profit. I'll give him credit for having a brass pair, as I'd never risk the kind of coin he was proposing on a gamble like that. But a minimum of 100% profits for a couple of days' work must a siren's song to some folks. I wish my friend well.:)
Like for most of us, this is pretty common. If you want to generate your own such gibberish texts, based on input texts, search for a program called 'dadadodo'. I stumbled across it in the FreeBSD ports tree and had some fun experimenting it. "Know thy enemy" and all that.
Isn't this the tail wagging the dog? Shouldn't the video card industry have hardware API standards and shouldn't the software vendors be releasing stuff compatible with the hardware?
"DirectX 10 Cards" sounds as silly as saying "Vista compatible PC BIOS". WTF?
I maintain a small site that uses the Gossamer Threads Links 2.x package (any decent, free PHP/database packages to replace this cruft with?). It's one of those apps that allows related sites to submit links to be added to our 'partner links' page.
I quickly eyeball the 100+ bot submissions daily for the few *real* submissions. The rest are for "Laboratory Equipment", Viagra, mail-order brides, porn, and other crap.
And before anyone asks, I *have* looked into modding the scripts to add a simple barrier for these bots, but the scripts are in the ugliest perl code I've ever seen in my life (sorry Gossamer, but the code makes my eyes bleed), and while I have written/tweaked perl in the past, I don't have the patience to tackle Links.
I have noticed in the logs that the submission POST is the the only hit from the bot, so this package must be well-known to these bots, and not customized for *my* site (or so I assume). Would this be thwarted by generating random form field names each time the page is loaded and processed? If the same CGI page does the initial form *and* processes the POST, this should be feasible, no? Or do these bots actually process the human-readable rendered form to do their work?
If the hyper-caffeinated, sugar-popping, MTV-watching, blipvert-desensitized ADD kids of today can tolerate the glacially loading site known as MySpace, I'd bet dollars to donuts that the slightly older, credit card-holding demographic of online shoppers gladly tolerate more than 4 seconds on we sites, and do so without much prejudice.
Either the summary is totally off, or this 'research' is total bunk.
...with talk about mere "copyright infringement". It just doesn't have the desired effect because people realize that - compared to other illegal activities - copyright infringements are rather harmless offences (as long as not commited on a really, really large scale).
Even with "real" piracy in Asia (that was going on long before digital tech), the major US media producers don't seem to be having financial woes. Eisner's lack of vision (resulting is shitty movies and stagnation or creativity) at Disney probably cost the company far more than the last 30 years of Asian bootlegs.
These same nations that eat, or at least use to, live monkey brains served complete with the screaming monkey strapped to the table?
I saw that on "Faces of Death" (the original) many years ago. Quite the sick, twisted ritual, isn't it?
I feel major remorse when I slaughter our chickens or rabbits. Those fools in the movie looked like they got a major thrill out of bashing that poor monkey's head in. Gruesome. It's one thing to assert your place in the food chain, but it's quite another to make 'sport' out of the killing/suffering of another creature.
Then again, I've talked with rednecks in the Southwest who got their kicks out of trying to hit as many rabbits, foxes, and coyotes as possible on their way to work in the early morning. Sick fucks.
I haven't gamed in a good many years (the occasional hop onto the 'family' PC to play my kids' copy of The Sims doesn't count), so I'm sure I've missed out. However, the only *truly* frightening experience I ever had was while playing the Doom TC Aliens conversion, in the dark, with a good set of headphones. I can't count how many times I jumped while playing that game, or held my breath while I hesitated to turn a certain corner.
So, to anyone who remembers the Doom mod I mentioned above.. do many modern games stack up to that experience?
How many natives of this continent has the US government killed? How about imported slaves?
Do you think we would have looked kindly about other countries telling us how to handle internal issues such as those above?
I'm certainly not playing down the massive attrocities that people in *many* countries endure at present. But the US is no shining beacon of morality, be it now or 200 years ago.
I tend to think we (the international community) should proceed *very* carefully when meddling with another culture's natural development. A kind of non-interferrence directive, as it were.
The US is the only nation to have ever used a nuke on another. Who the hell can actually have any trust in us when it comes to nuclear weapons?
This whole (queue scare quotes...) "WMD" thing is just silly. Sovereign nations should be able to do whatever the hell they want in their own borders w/o the meddling of other nations. Sure, it may be an eventual problem for other nations, but any nation should realize that the retaliation they would incur should they use those weapons in this modern time would be swift and harsh, to say the least.
Nations that cause financial hardships for the citizens of countries like NK should be ashamed. It rarely seems to have any affect on those in power (see Cuba and the 10 years between Gulf Wars I and II), and it just causes more suffering of the lower classes than they had before the sanctions.
That said, leaders who fold under international pressure against nukes (like, Kadafi, for example) are lame. Look where the US stands with India and China (both pursuing nuke tech). Very hypocritical, especially regarding China. But hey.... Wal Mart gets to import cheap shit from Asia, so we'll turn the other cheek.
The Sims and The Sims 2 were two of the all-time best sellig games in history, and you can do all sorts of things w/ same-sex interactions. Hasn't seemed to have an impact on sales one bit.
(Somewhat related: Jack Thompson also thinks that Sims 2 is a pedophile's dream-come-true, as well, since you can remove the pixel blur for children and even apply third-party skins with teh boobies! Somebody please think of the virtual children!!!)
I'm well aware of when PG-13 came to be. My (somewhat tangential) point was that those of us young moviegoers before the PG-13 era turned out just fine. These days we're a society that thinks lite-porn glossy mags like Maxim are okay for kids to thumb through at the grocery store, tons of violence in TV and PG-13 movies are cool, but whoa! stop the presses! if a nipple is shown.
There was more real nudity in PG movies in the 70s/80s than there is in today's PG-13 movies. Hell, even in today's (American) R-rated movies, nudity and sex seem pretty rare (at least to me). Compare Porky's to the American Pie franchise.
Maybe my memory is off, but the ratings of today make less sense as compared to 20 years ago.
who haven't seen some of the content yet, here's a Google Images search for a handful of hi-rez pics.
Not as tame as the Sims/Sim2 w/o the pixel blur, but it is a bit more graphic than Janet's nipple. Though I recall seeing about as much skin as a kid when my mom's soaps were on the tube.
Funny how our standards (as a society) change over time. Anyone remember the full-frontal nudity of a baby Clark Kent in the theater release of Superman in the 70's (PG)? Or how about those obviously gratitous bare breasts briefly flashed in the foreground on the panic scene in Airplane (also PG).
As you grow older I think you might realize that having no children means your life has substantially less meaning than if you have a couple well raised children. It fosters continuity and stability which is why governments like marriage and children so much.
Assume much?
I happen to be the happy father of two, thank-you-very-much. One came as part of a package deal with my wife, and we had one more. We got her tubes tied, and have been happy with our mere two replacements on this planet ever since.
Why is it necessary for citizens of one of the richest first-world economies to be hand-held in their responsible *choice* to breed? I honestly can't fathom that a couple that concluded that they were too financially strapped to responsibly have children would actually reconsider that choice when they take a goofy tax tax credit into account. That's just silly.
Again, I think that tax breaks for things like having children is lame -- why the hell should people who breed (or get married, for that matter) get off the hook for some dollar figure come tax time? Sure, I take advantage of them myself, because, well, I also think taxes are lame, so I'll take advantage of any legal means I have to reduce my taxes. But you can bet your ass that I'd vote for any candidate or ballot measure that aimed to eliminate the punishment of the child-free and unmarried.
I feed our laying hens crushed oyster shell (available at feed stores in 50-lb bags) for supplimental calcium. They don't seem any friskier with the rooster (or he with them) than when they don't get the stuff.:)
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Our family is one of those pseudo back-to-the-land kinds that tries to raise as much food (and use as few resources) as possible w/o going insane.
We haven't has a dryer in almost 5 years now. Not only will you realize a major cost savings due to reduced electrical demands, but over time you will notice a substantial increase in clothing life. While the washing machine does the most damage to your clothes, the dryer does a non-trivial share as well. The heat shortens the life of elastic, so things like socks last a *lot* longer w/o regularly going through a dryer. But jeans, tees, and most other things will last much longer, too.
For reference, our family of 4 averages between $25 and $30 per month outside the cold months (when the well-house heater kicks on in sub-freezing temps -- bringing it to just over $40). Our local flat residential rate is (rounded up) seven cents per KWH. We use mostly CFs for lighting, use a propane stove (wood stove in winter), no microwave, no water heater (heated on the stove), and have no TV or entertainment center (we use a PC for watching movies). The crusty fridge that came with the house is responsible for about 50% of our non-winter electricity consumption.
I always thought Matsui "Gold" and "Silver" were the top-rated media. At least for CD-Rs (though I thought they were held in high regard for DVD blank media, too). I used to mail-order un-branded blanks them by the spool.
I don't give it a second thought. Doesn't seem much like a hassle to me. To each their own.
He was looking for his big jar of pennies.
Ummm.... how about not forgetting it? This truly is a non-issue. Use a password manager, USB fob backup, hard copy, or something.
I have a GPG-encrypted file with all my web site passwords. All of those passwords are unique, as I use the largest value for x supported by each web site in the following: "ps waux | md5 | cut -c 1-x". So, for example, the actual password I have for one of the sites I've purchased from is "48750be49b0cb2d6ad9469d54".
So for backup, I email myself this symmetrically-encrypted, ascii-armoured file to my gmail account. Otherwise, I open up a shell and type "gpg -d /home/foo/internet_passwords.asc", cut-n-paste, and I'm good to go.
Of course, these are important sites/passwords. I use a small handful of easily-memorized passwords for sites like this one.
I usually send any junk mail with a postage-paid envelope back to the sender. Just fold, spindle, and mutilate everything to fit it in the envelope, then drop it back in the mail box. Let someone else deal w/ the trash. If you're lucky, you may jam up one of those big mail handling machines at the credit card processing shop. Everything else gets tossed into the wood stove. As much as I like shredding, fire (being old tech) is much less prone to malfunction, and I don't send yet more crap off to the landfill.
Pre-pay cell phones? The market has already corrected for classes of people who want privacy or have shitty credit.
I guess my broader suggestion is that someone needs to challenge either the tariffs or the lawsuits, as the RIAA/MPAA shouldn't be able to have their cake and eat it, too.
Seems these orgs are double-dipping in a *big* way with the current system, and they need to get spanked hard in court for doing so.
So.... any lawyers or other legal eagles out there care to comment on the feasibility of these strategy?
I know a dude you left his state yesterday to camp out at some place in Idaho (which borders his state) with a wad of cash in hand. He wants to pick up as many units as he can afford and hawk them online for mucho profit. I'll give him credit for having a brass pair, as I'd never risk the kind of coin he was proposing on a gamble like that. But a minimum of 100% profits for a couple of days' work must a siren's song to some folks. I wish my friend well. :)
Like for most of us, this is pretty common. If you want to generate your own such gibberish texts, based on input texts, search for a program called 'dadadodo'. I stumbled across it in the FreeBSD ports tree and had some fun experimenting it. "Know thy enemy" and all that.
"DirectX 10 Cards" sounds as silly as saying "Vista compatible PC BIOS". WTF?
I quickly eyeball the 100+ bot submissions daily for the few *real* submissions. The rest are for "Laboratory Equipment", Viagra, mail-order brides, porn, and other crap.
And before anyone asks, I *have* looked into modding the scripts to add a simple barrier for these bots, but the scripts are in the ugliest perl code I've ever seen in my life (sorry Gossamer, but the code makes my eyes bleed), and while I have written/tweaked perl in the past, I don't have the patience to tackle Links.
I have noticed in the logs that the submission POST is the the only hit from the bot, so this package must be well-known to these bots, and not customized for *my* site (or so I assume). Would this be thwarted by generating random form field names each time the page is loaded and processed? If the same CGI page does the initial form *and* processes the POST, this should be feasible, no? Or do these bots actually process the human-readable rendered form to do their work?
Either the summary is totally off, or this 'research' is total bunk.
Even with "real" piracy in Asia (that was going on long before digital tech), the major US media producers don't seem to be having financial woes. Eisner's lack of vision (resulting is shitty movies and stagnation or creativity) at Disney probably cost the company far more than the last 30 years of Asian bootlegs.
I saw that on "Faces of Death" (the original) many years ago. Quite the sick, twisted ritual, isn't it?
I feel major remorse when I slaughter our chickens or rabbits. Those fools in the movie looked like they got a major thrill out of bashing that poor monkey's head in. Gruesome. It's one thing to assert your place in the food chain, but it's quite another to make 'sport' out of the killing/suffering of another creature.
Then again, I've talked with rednecks in the Southwest who got their kicks out of trying to hit as many rabbits, foxes, and coyotes as possible on their way to work in the early morning. Sick fucks.
Unless you disable uploads on your client. Then you can download a torrent without allowing the risk of being nailed with sharing.
I haven't gamed in a good many years (the occasional hop onto the 'family' PC to play my kids' copy of The Sims doesn't count), so I'm sure I've missed out. However, the only *truly* frightening experience I ever had was while playing the Doom TC Aliens conversion, in the dark, with a good set of headphones. I can't count how many times I jumped while playing that game, or held my breath while I hesitated to turn a certain corner.
So, to anyone who remembers the Doom mod I mentioned above.. do many modern games stack up to that experience?
Do you think we would have looked kindly about other countries telling us how to handle internal issues such as those above?
I'm certainly not playing down the massive attrocities that people in *many* countries endure at present. But the US is no shining beacon of morality, be it now or 200 years ago.
I tend to think we (the international community) should proceed *very* carefully when meddling with another culture's natural development. A kind of non-interferrence directive, as it were.
This whole (queue scare quotes...) "WMD" thing is just silly. Sovereign nations should be able to do whatever the hell they want in their own borders w/o the meddling of other nations. Sure, it may be an eventual problem for other nations, but any nation should realize that the retaliation they would incur should they use those weapons in this modern time would be swift and harsh, to say the least.
Nations that cause financial hardships for the citizens of countries like NK should be ashamed. It rarely seems to have any affect on those in power (see Cuba and the 10 years between Gulf Wars I and II), and it just causes more suffering of the lower classes than they had before the sanctions.
That said, leaders who fold under international pressure against nukes (like, Kadafi, for example) are lame. Look where the US stands with India and China (both pursuing nuke tech). Very hypocritical, especially regarding China. But hey.... Wal Mart gets to import cheap shit from Asia, so we'll turn the other cheek.
(Somewhat related: Jack Thompson also thinks that Sims 2 is a pedophile's dream-come-true, as well, since you can remove the pixel blur for children and even apply third-party skins with teh boobies! Somebody please think of the virtual children!!!)
There was more real nudity in PG movies in the 70s/80s than there is in today's PG-13 movies. Hell, even in today's (American) R-rated movies, nudity and sex seem pretty rare (at least to me). Compare Porky's to the American Pie franchise.
Maybe my memory is off, but the ratings of today make less sense as compared to 20 years ago.
Not as tame as the Sims/Sim2 w/o the pixel blur, but it is a bit more graphic than Janet's nipple. Though I recall seeing about as much skin as a kid when my mom's soaps were on the tube.
Funny how our standards (as a society) change over time. Anyone remember the full-frontal nudity of a baby Clark Kent in the theater release of Superman in the 70's (PG)? Or how about those obviously gratitous bare breasts briefly flashed in the foreground on the panic scene in Airplane (also PG).
Damned puritan nation...
Assume much?
I happen to be the happy father of two, thank-you-very-much. One came as part of a package deal with my wife, and we had one more. We got her tubes tied, and have been happy with our mere two replacements on this planet ever since.
Why is it necessary for citizens of one of the richest first-world economies to be hand-held in their responsible *choice* to breed? I honestly can't fathom that a couple that concluded that they were too financially strapped to responsibly have children would actually reconsider that choice when they take a goofy tax tax credit into account. That's just silly.
Again, I think that tax breaks for things like having children is lame -- why the hell should people who breed (or get married, for that matter) get off the hook for some dollar figure come tax time? Sure, I take advantage of them myself, because, well, I also think taxes are lame, so I'll take advantage of any legal means I have to reduce my taxes. But you can bet your ass that I'd vote for any candidate or ballot measure that aimed to eliminate the punishment of the child-free and unmarried.
I feed our laying hens crushed oyster shell (available at feed stores in 50-lb bags) for supplimental calcium. They don't seem any friskier with the rooster (or he with them) than when they don't get the stuff. :)