Which is one of my biggest complaints about X10 (other than their lame advertising and sometimes poor quality). I don't understand why X10 can't make a switch that doesn't support dimming. As for needing an incandescent bulb, I have some X10 switches that also have a neutral wire. With this, no incandescent bulb is required at all since it can detect the signal between the hot and neutral lines.
I have found X10 compatible switches that work with CFL's, but they're 3x as expensive as X10. It should be a simple software change for X10 in their PIC controllers for some of their switches. Given how popular CFLs have become, it's absolutely stupid for the company to not support them. As it is, I checked X10 this morning for such a switch and found a feedback form, where I left a complaint about the fact that they don't have switches for CFLs.
I also have found dimming CFLs, and even dimming fluorescent circular tube ceiling lights which I have installed.
A lot of this depends on the bulb. Some bulbs suck and have terrible color output, buzz, or exhibit all the problems you mentioned. Others don't have these problems. In fact, most of the CFL's I've bought in recent years are fairly decent at color rendition, nor do they buzz or flicker (the exception is the insanely bright bulbs I put in my garage, but they're getting old [note: Lights of America bulbs don't seem to last very long]).
Even the CFL lights I pick up at the grocery store (4 for $2) look fine.
Your apartment manager probably found the 10 for $1 special someplace and went with those.
You need to check some things when you buy them, like what is the color temperature. The high color temperature bulbs will often look bluish and cause colors to look harsh, especially compared to an incandescent.
This has been discussed many times in different circles. Even with coal power plants, the amount of pollution created by electric cars is less than gasoline cars. For one, pollution needs to be controlled in a few centralized sources, and with the proper equipment, which modern plants are required to have, coal power plants emit less pollution than the gasoline and diesel vehicles it could replace. Also, the efficiency of electric cars is higher than internal combustion powered cars, even taking into account the line losses. It is not unusual for batteries to reach 90% efficiency, and electric motors also are able to get into the high 80's and 90's in efficiency. Plus, there's much less drive train with electric, often requiring no transmission, or like the Tesla, a 2 gear transmission. Many power plants are at least 40% efficient, which is much better than what an ICE is capable of. And when power comes from sources like hydroelectric, geothermal, wind, solar or even natural gas, the pollution is significantly reduced or eliminated. Also, most people would be charging their cars at night, where there is often a vast surplus of electricity since power plants can't just shut down for the night, and hence it is a lot cheaper.
Batteries also have come a long way and are fairly efficient for storage. It's much better than, say, hydrogen powered cars.
The main drawback right now for electric cars is the cost, and even so they remain popular. I know a couple of people at Tesla Motors and they have already sold out their allotment of cars for the first two years, and these are going for $100K each. It sounds like they will be coming out with a 5 passenger vehicle at around $50K around 2009. With the rapid rate of battery evolution I expect they will become more and more affordable.
One final note, the cost per mile for an electric vehicle is much less than gasoline, even without the large deductions EV owners can typically make. Last I looked, it worked out to something around $1.50/mile even with the very high cost of electricity where I live (where I often pay over $0.20/kwh).
The solution I see for our energy needs is to not only continue to invest in solar and wind, but to also build nuclear breeder reactors and nuclear power generation. The breeder reactors will significantly increase the amount of nuclear fuel available and eliminate much of the nuclear waste which they want to bury in Nevada. And modern nuclear power plants are far safer than the ones of the past. Solar and wind alone will not solve our energy needs though they will help. Hydroelectric is mostly tapped out, though there's still a lot of room for geothermal.
Interesting. I have found KDE to be quite stable, especially recent versions. On my Sun at work I will often be logged into my desktop for months at a time without issues. The browser will usually survive a week or so of heavy usage, though sometimes it will crash or consume too much memory. I have found, however, that Konqueror is much better with memory usage than Firefox, which often gobbles up everything it can get its hands on within a matter of hours.
On the Sun I went out of my way to download KDE (and a few apps like Amarok) since Sun's default of CDE sucks so bad. I quickly got fed up with Gnome when I could not for the life of me find a way to change it so the desktop used focus follows mouse instead of clicking. That and Gnome's horrible file dialog (which I also detest in Firefox).
I tried to see if I could get a modern version of Gnome to run about a year ago but quickly had to give up because some of the core Gnome libraries required Xrender, which Sun does not support on Solaris 8 on Sparc, (and Xorg does not run on Solars 8 Sparc either).
I have on a few occasions had KDE appear to lock up. I learned that killing kded and restarting it (not the whole desktop, just the daemon) made everything recover.
In the latest version of Kate (Kate 2.5.6 from KDE 3.5.6) I found it in the following:
Click Settings -> Configure Kate... Then go to Editor->Editing
It's right there called "Tab Width" It is a little confusing since I first went to Editor->Indentation where I guessed it would be, but only took me about 30 seconds to find (which is still about 25 seconds too long).
I think both the article and post are misleading. Basically all they are doing is turning down the temperature at night and letting it warm up during the day. This just means that most of their energy consumption occurs at night, when there is often a surplus of electricity. It's a great idea though. Many forms of power generation cannot quickly adjust their outputs due to the wear and tear it would cause by temperature changes. I.e. coal, natural gas and nuclear power plants usually run at one output level, resulting in a lot of extra energy available at night when demand is low.
This wouldn't be restricted to just wind power like the article says. It would also be very useful for many other power sources.
One other method I heard about many years ago was to use the extra energy at night to pump water to a high elevation resavoir and during the day use that water to help generate electricity.
I generally have not had any problems dealing with Quicktime on Linux. Granted, I needed to install libquicktime and a recent version of MPlayer and/or ffmpeg, but in general the only format I have had problems with is Microsoft's WMV (i.e. J-frames are not supported and some WMA formats are completely unsupported).
I must admit, though, that I have had some problems with interoperability when I tried exporting DV under Quicktime from Kino where some Windows applications like Premier had problems.
I toured their new facility in San Francisco. They have over 300 10Gbps ports and all PCs are connected via gigabit. Their datacenter was 2/3 full of dual-Opteron servers running SuSE Linux (though they were considering switching). Their server room was spotless. No cables were visible anywhere, but I did see a Roomba moving about the floor. The fellow who ran it said that since they're ILM, they have to have droids.
The facility was absolutely beautiful. When going between two buildings on an overhead walkway I saw the Golden Gate bridge with a nice orange sunset behind it. I wish I had my camera with me.
They said that they have many dedicated OC-48 pipes to various studios and can handle just about any format, since every studio uses their own format. They convert it to their own internal format, which I believe they open sourced.
When they moved from Skywalker Ranch, it was completely seamless. They had an OC-192 (10gbps) link running between the old and new facility as more and more equipment was migrated to the new facility but people continued to work at the old one.
And ffmpeg is not perfect. When it comes to WMV files it still has problems. It cannot decode J-frames and some forms of WMA are not supported.
It also tends to be a bit buggy, with various bugs popping in and out depending on exactly when you check out the code. It also does not have regular released versions like other software.
I just recently had to convert several hundred gigabytes of various videos people have uploaded with varying degrees of success. WMV caused problems, and I cannot get 3gp audio files to decode (possibly due to the fact that I'm running 64-bit.
I watched a documentary on the history of aircraft. The current glass windows are *much* stronger than lexan. They demonstrated by showing one window pane lifting a car, with the car attached to the two outside edges and a bar in the center attached to a crane.
Adding all of the extra armor would add a significant amount of weight, requiring more fuel and shorter maximum distances. There are also many items on a plane that do not react well to being hit by bullets, including fuel tanks, wiring harnesses and hydrolics. There is a *lot* of wiring in modern planes and it's amazing they're as reliable as they are given how many miles of wiring are in a modern jumbo jet.
Arming everyone on a plane would not be a good idea. All it takes is one unstable person going off when the baby behind them starts bawling for the 1000th time or any of the other million annoyances that frequently take place on an airplane. That and some people don't do well in enclosed spaces for long periods of time. Let the air marshalls be armed, who are trained on how to deal with these sorts of situations, not everyone else. If everyone were allowed to carry guns, you would hear of a lot of shootings taking place on planes, or accidental shootings as morons are bored to death on the plane and start fiddling with their guns.
Fiet bulbs seem especially bad at this. My father pronounces them "Pffft" as in the sizzling sound they make when they fizzle and die. Generally I've had fairly decent luck with CFLs and have replaced many of the lights in my house with them. They're especially cheap here, with 4 packs of 100 watt equivalent bulbs at the grocery store (not Walmart) costing $2.
The only drawbacks are that they don't work as well in cold temperatures and some of them take a while to reach full brightness. Also, you need to check the color temperature of the bulbs.
In my case I was getting not only spam, but constant probes and attacks coming out of China, repeatedly from known problem IP addresses so I shut them off at the firewall. A few months back, at least half of my spam could be traced to China. Since I do not know anybody in that part of the world, I have no problem just blocking it. For personal use, I see no problem blocking email geographically. Since I don't know anyone in Nigeria, Malaysia or Russia, I might as well just block it off.
About half of the spam is blocked by country before even hitting the other RBLs. I don't know anyone in Russia, Nigeria, China, Argentina, Malaysia, Thailand, China or Korea so I just block them. In the past most of my spam came from China, as well as most of the attacks on my firewall, so I just blocked the whole country.
While most of the spammers are likely in the US, most of the machines trying to send me spam appear to be outside the US.
In the time I've written this, my logs show spam being blocked from Argentina, Korea, Malaysia and China, as well as one from Great Briton, three from the US and one from Germany.
The amount from China appears to be less, but then it's hard to tell because I blocked off the worst offending subnets at my firewall.
Several years ago I found a RBL that works by country. For example, I use cn-kr.blackholes.us which effectively blocks all of China and Korea.
Also, the following code will grab all the subnets by country, this example grabs them for China:
My Internet access at work would go a *lot* faster. Spam has managed to fill the entire 8Mbps pipe, completely saturating the link, 24 hours a day. It's not a very large company either.
Spam has become such a problem where I work that it has completely flooded the corporate Internet connection. I personally feel they should host an external mail server and spam filter off-site someplace. For my personal server I use various RBLs and country blacklists, like blocking all of China, Korea, Russia, Nigeria and a few other countries. Those seem to block most of the spam from even entering my mail server.
I know people talk about legal solutions not working, but I think if law enforcement made use of existing laws and went after these people it might make a difference. I'd love to see the FTC go after the pump and dump spammers and confiscate everything they own before locking them up, or the food and drug administration go after all the enhancement pill spammers. Also, perhaps a law to fine idiots who buy from these spammers.
Just change the federal law to let some of the state laws take effect, i.e. defeat the Can-spam act.
I think if law enforcement made a good effort to go after these spammers and lock them up then it might make a difference.
I was pleased to see Koko the gorilla on the list. When I was young I managed to see her when my father was doing some work to help the gorilla foundation back in the early 1980s. At the time, I wore braces and she found them very interesting and made up a new sign on the spot for them. They also had another gorilla, Michael. My sister made the sign "Koko loves Michael" to which Koko responded, "Michael dirty toilet", which apparently she came up with and was not taught. Koko was never very fond of Michael, though her attraction to some of her handlers was known even back then.
I think a lot of this is coming out of XBox 360 users. They too put their heads in the sand because all they have to do is turn on the requirement for HDMI and the XBox users won't be able to play their HD-DVDs. Many refuse to believe it because that requirement has not yet been enabled. If and when it is, they'll be left without a player.
Also, Blu-ray is not a Sony only format. There are a number of 3rd parties who are supporting it, both with media and players. It's taking a little longer, but it is far from dead. There are also players coming out that will handle both HD and Blu-ray. Once those players come out, the argument will go away. Like HD-DVD, Blu-Ray is a consortium. Most of the work was done by Sony, who was also involved in such horrible formats as the audio CD and DVD.
It's like DVD-R and DVD+R. Remember when recorders could only handle one format or the other? Early adopters will be stuck with only one format, but I expect the dual format players will take off, probably in the next year or so.
For movies, the only significant differences between the two formats are the extra storage of Blu-ray and the fact that Blu-ray includes native timing for 1080p 24fps whereas HD-DVD uses 30fps timing which may result in stuttering (according to the Wikipedia article on Blu-ray). Better HD-DVD players should be able to convert back to the original timing, however, by detecting and removing the repeated frames in the MPEG stream. Also, Blu-ray allows for higher audio bandwidth than HD-DVD.
Adding unicode to DNS names would make phishing much more difficult to detect unless all the browsers, email clients and other tools are modified to indicate that a URL may not be what the user thinks it is. It is bad enough as it is, and remember, most Internet users are not as savvy as those of us on Slashdot. I forsee a lot of security implications by adding this.
I agree with your sentiments regarding Mono and SuSE's huge shift toward Gnome. I will likely change distros after the 10.1 disaster. Rug/zypp/zen/whatever they call it package management *SUCKS* badly. It frequently grinds my Athlon64 3700+ to a crawl, sometimes getting stuck in an endless loop for hours until I kill it. It's also based on mono. mono reminds me of the disease. It consumes vast amounts of memory and seems to grind my system to a crawl, much like Java, but even java seems to be a lot better now.
The update procedure seems to break at least half of the time, either with undecipherable error messages about packages which prevents it from running or just hanging. Adding new repositories has been a nightmare, and it seems that Novell kept moving them around frequently, breaking updates. If 10.2 doesn't fix everything and work perfectly wrt package management, I'll dump it and not look back. I've been running SuSE since version 6.x. I'll likely move to Kubuntu or some other distro with good KDE support.
My ancient (by digital standards) Canon SD100 camera has a nice metal case while being very compact. It certainly doesn't feel like a toy other than its size. It's survived well traveling around in my pocket. My only real problem with it is the horrible, often unpredictable, lag and the fact that it eats batteries like crazy and the poor low light quality... all the reasons I went to a Nikon D70s, which has a plastic case but feels solid. The other advantage I have with the D70 is the larger size and mass makes the camera much more stable for taking pictures.
I've seen numerous other digicams also with metal cases that seem to hold up fine with abuse.
Power requirements? The manual with my D70s claims 2500 shots without flash and 500 with the built-in flash used every other shot. I have no problems with battery life, though I have had it run down if I spend a lot of time reviewing pictures (and the fact that I tend to shoot in raw format). I will often shoot 300-400 pictures with the battery still showing that it's full, though I often use an external flash which does drain batteries after a couple hundred shots. And this is with the 18-200mm lens which also consumes a lot of power with VR (Vibration Reduction - Nikon's name for image stabilization), which works quite well. I travel with only one spare battery for my camera and three sets of batteries for my flash since I rarely shoot over 500 pictures in a given day.
As of today, the battle between 35mm film and digital is over. A good digital camera wins in almost every category. Now medium or large format is a different story. And when you take into account the flexibility and cost difference between the two, it's a no brainer. Digital wins hands down.
As for cost, there are rumours everywhere about Nikon releasing the D40 real soon, so cost won't be so much an issue.
I don't see all the mudslinging campaign commercials since I have a Replay and tend to watch channels they don't advertise on. So I went through the voter guides with statements by various candidates. At least where I live, a number of candidates could not take the time to fill out what they stand for and why I should vote for them. One Green party candidate complained that it cost $20 per word and would say nothing else but refer to a web site. I'm sorry, but even at $20 per word it looks like the major candidates spent only around $5000, which I'm sure isn't too big of a burden on the Green party or some other part, especially for a state as large as California. In other cases, there were no 3rd party candidates to choose from or their philosophies were so far out of mainstream that I couldn't stomach them.
Unexpectedly, the local race was pretty easy to decide. For our city council there were two incumbents who have done a fairly decent job. The other candidates went from flaky to just plain deranged.
Similarly with the water board... the quality of the local water is pretty good and it's cheap and they've done a good job maintaining a good supply. If the incumbent has done a good job, why change it?
Secretary of State for California was also a no-brainer for me. Debra Bowen, the democratic candidate, has made numerous statements in support of an open-source voting system while her republican opponent is fine and dandy with Diebold and co and more worried about illegal immigrants voting.
I seriously considered 3rd party candidates for governor, but none of them put forth a compelling reason why I should vote for them and either came out as being too far to the right or the left.
I'm sorry, but if I'm to vote for a Green Party or some other 3rd party, a majority of their views should be relatively mainstream middle of the road. After all, whoever is elected will need to work with the state legislature. I mean, why can't a Green Party candidate come out for the environment and not be totally anti-corporation, i.e. try and encourage corporations to be more eco-friendly. Most corporations aren't really evil and have their place. Some actively help promote environmental protection.
The propositions took a bit of research.
Some positions I just didn't know enough about, so I left those blank. Some I went by endorsements since I knew some of the people making the endorsements.
Only 20K? For a while I was getting 80-100K bounced emails a day because some spammer decided he liked my domain name. Anyway, I only have a handful of accounts I use. Fortunately, all the bounces were blocked by postfix as undeliverable and I didn't even notice the load on my super fast 333MHz Pentium 2 server (no, not fast but my load hovered around 0.05). Sadly, it did kill a couple firewall routers... I think all the logging killed the flash in one router, and the new one would usually crash and burn after 5 minutes (Netgear) until I replaced it with a real router.
It also looks like RBL is highly effective. It seems to block about 90% of the spam. DSpam then catches at least 90% of anything that makes it through so I maybe see 1-2 spams per day instead of hundreds.
I also frequently report spam to Spamcop and notify the FEC of the pump and dump scams. I just wish they'd put some serious effort to go after these guys and fine them into oblivion and/or put them in jail.
I too am in Alameda County. I voted absentee as did my parents did. I just dropped off my ballot at the polling place, spending no more than 30 seconds. No line or wait.
I was also pleasantly surprised to see all the Diebold machines gone and a new paper-based system. They do have a few machine-based systems for disabled voters, though. Though voting absentee is much nicer since I can vote at the diningroom table and just mail or drop off my vote.
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Which is one of my biggest complaints about X10 (other than their lame advertising and sometimes poor quality). I don't understand why X10 can't make a switch that doesn't support dimming. As for needing an incandescent bulb, I have some X10 switches that also have a neutral wire. With this, no incandescent bulb is required at all since it can detect the signal between the hot and neutral lines.
I have found X10 compatible switches that work with CFL's, but they're 3x as expensive as X10. It should be a simple software change for X10 in their PIC controllers for some of their switches. Given how popular CFLs have become, it's absolutely stupid for the company to not support them. As it is, I checked X10 this morning for such a switch and found a feedback form, where I left a complaint about the fact that they don't have switches for CFLs.
I also have found dimming CFLs, and even dimming fluorescent circular tube ceiling lights which I have installed.
-Aaron
A lot of this depends on the bulb. Some bulbs suck and have terrible color output, buzz, or exhibit all the problems you mentioned. Others don't have these problems. In fact, most of the CFL's I've bought in recent years are fairly decent at color rendition, nor do they buzz or flicker (the exception is the insanely bright bulbs I put in my garage, but they're getting old [note: Lights of America bulbs don't seem to last very long]).
Even the CFL lights I pick up at the grocery store (4 for $2) look fine.
Your apartment manager probably found the 10 for $1 special someplace and went with those.
You need to check some things when you buy them, like what is the color temperature. The high color temperature bulbs will often look bluish and cause colors to look harsh, especially compared to an incandescent.
I meant the equivalent of $1.50 per gallon of gasoline. Brain fart.
This has been discussed many times in different circles. Even with coal power plants, the amount of pollution created by electric cars is less than gasoline cars. For one, pollution needs to be controlled in a few centralized sources, and with the proper equipment, which modern plants are required to have, coal power plants emit less pollution than the gasoline and diesel vehicles it could replace. Also, the efficiency of electric cars is higher than internal combustion powered cars, even taking into account the line losses. It is not unusual for batteries to reach 90% efficiency, and electric motors also are able to get into the high 80's and 90's in efficiency. Plus, there's much less drive train with electric, often requiring no transmission, or like the Tesla, a 2 gear transmission. Many power plants are at least 40% efficient, which is much better than what an ICE is capable of. And when power comes from sources like hydroelectric, geothermal, wind, solar or even natural gas, the pollution is significantly reduced or eliminated. Also, most people would be charging their cars at night, where there is often a vast surplus of electricity since power plants can't just shut down for the night, and hence it is a lot cheaper.
Batteries also have come a long way and are fairly efficient for storage. It's much better than, say, hydrogen powered cars.
The main drawback right now for electric cars is the cost, and even so they remain popular. I know a couple of people at Tesla Motors and they have already sold out their allotment of cars for the first two years, and these are going for $100K each. It sounds like they will be coming out with a 5 passenger vehicle at around $50K around 2009. With the rapid rate of battery evolution I expect they will become more and more affordable.
One final note, the cost per mile for an electric vehicle is much less than gasoline, even without the large deductions EV owners can typically make. Last I looked, it worked out to something around $1.50/mile even with the very high cost of electricity where I live (where I often pay over $0.20/kwh).
The solution I see for our energy needs is to not only continue to invest in solar and wind, but to also build nuclear breeder reactors and nuclear power generation. The breeder reactors will significantly increase the amount of nuclear fuel available and eliminate much of the nuclear waste which they want to bury in Nevada. And modern nuclear power plants are far safer than the ones of the past. Solar and wind alone will not solve our energy needs though they will help. Hydroelectric is mostly tapped out, though there's still a lot of room for geothermal.
Interesting. I have found KDE to be quite stable, especially recent versions. On my Sun at work I will often be logged into my desktop for months at a time without issues. The browser will usually survive a week or so of heavy usage, though sometimes it will crash or consume too much memory. I have found, however, that Konqueror is much better with memory usage than Firefox, which often gobbles up everything it can get its hands on within a matter of hours.
On the Sun I went out of my way to download KDE (and a few apps like Amarok) since Sun's default of CDE sucks so bad. I quickly got fed up with Gnome when I could not for the life of me find a way to change it so the desktop used focus follows mouse instead of clicking. That and Gnome's horrible file dialog (which I also detest in Firefox).
I tried to see if I could get a modern version of Gnome to run about a year ago but quickly had to give up because some of the core Gnome libraries required Xrender, which Sun does not support on Solaris 8 on Sparc, (and Xorg does not run on Solars 8 Sparc either).
I have on a few occasions had KDE appear to lock up. I learned that killing kded and restarting it (not the whole desktop, just the daemon) made everything recover.
In the latest version of Kate (Kate 2.5.6 from KDE 3.5.6) I found it in the following:
Click Settings -> Configure Kate...
Then go to Editor->Editing
It's right there called "Tab Width"
It is a little confusing since I first went to Editor->Indentation where I guessed it would be, but only took me about 30 seconds to find (which is still about 25 seconds too long).
I think both the article and post are misleading. Basically all they are doing is turning down the temperature at night and letting it warm up during the day. This just means that most of their energy consumption occurs at night, when there is often a surplus of electricity. It's a great idea though. Many forms of power generation cannot quickly adjust their outputs due to the wear and tear it would cause by temperature changes. I.e. coal, natural gas and nuclear power plants usually run at one output level, resulting in a lot of extra energy available at night when demand is low.
This wouldn't be restricted to just wind power like the article says. It would also be very useful for many other power sources.
One other method I heard about many years ago was to use the extra energy at night to pump water to a high elevation resavoir and during the day use that water to help generate electricity.
I generally have not had any problems dealing with Quicktime on Linux. Granted, I needed to install libquicktime and a recent version of MPlayer and/or ffmpeg, but in general the only format I have had problems with is Microsoft's WMV (i.e. J-frames are not supported and some WMA formats are completely unsupported).
I must admit, though, that I have had some problems with interoperability when I tried exporting DV under Quicktime from Kino where some Windows applications like Premier had problems.
I toured their new facility in San Francisco. They have over 300 10Gbps ports and all PCs are connected via gigabit. Their datacenter was 2/3 full of dual-Opteron servers running SuSE Linux (though they were considering switching). Their server room was spotless. No cables were visible anywhere, but I did see a Roomba moving about the floor. The fellow who ran it said that since they're ILM, they have to have droids.
The facility was absolutely beautiful. When going between two buildings on an overhead walkway I saw the Golden Gate bridge with a nice orange sunset behind it. I wish I had my camera with me.
They said that they have many dedicated OC-48 pipes to various studios and can handle just about any format, since every studio uses their own format. They convert it to their own internal format, which I believe they open sourced.
When they moved from Skywalker Ranch, it was completely seamless. They had an OC-192 (10gbps) link running between the old and new facility as more and more equipment was migrated to the new facility but people continued to work at the old one.
-Aaron
And ffmpeg is not perfect. When it comes to WMV files it still has problems. It cannot decode J-frames and some forms of WMA are not supported.
It also tends to be a bit buggy, with various bugs popping in and out depending on exactly when you check out the code. It also does not have regular released versions like other software.
I just recently had to convert several hundred gigabytes of various videos people have uploaded with varying degrees of success. WMV caused problems, and I cannot get 3gp audio files to decode (possibly due to the fact that I'm running 64-bit.
It also is flakey when dealing with AC-3.
-Aaron
I watched a documentary on the history of aircraft. The current glass windows are *much* stronger than lexan. They demonstrated by showing one window pane lifting a car, with the car attached to the two outside edges and a bar in the center attached to a crane.
Adding all of the extra armor would add a significant amount of weight, requiring more fuel and shorter maximum distances. There are also many items on a plane that do not react well to being hit by bullets, including fuel tanks, wiring harnesses and hydrolics. There is a *lot* of wiring in modern planes and it's amazing they're as reliable as they are given how many miles of wiring are in a modern jumbo jet.
Arming everyone on a plane would not be a good idea. All it takes is one unstable person going off when the baby behind them starts bawling for the 1000th time or any of the other million annoyances that frequently take place on an airplane. That and some people don't do well in enclosed spaces for long periods of time. Let the air marshalls be armed, who are trained on how to deal with these sorts of situations, not everyone else. If everyone were allowed to carry guns, you would hear of a lot of shootings taking place on planes, or accidental shootings as morons are bored to death on the plane and start fiddling with their guns.
-Aaron
Fiet bulbs seem especially bad at this. My father pronounces them "Pffft" as in the sizzling sound they make when they fizzle and die. Generally I've had fairly decent luck with CFLs and have replaced many of the lights in my house with them. They're especially cheap here, with 4 packs of 100 watt equivalent bulbs at the grocery store (not Walmart) costing $2.
The only drawbacks are that they don't work as well in cold temperatures and some of them take a while to reach full brightness. Also, you need to check the color temperature of the bulbs.
-Aaron
In my case I was getting not only spam, but constant probes and attacks coming out of China, repeatedly from known problem IP addresses so I shut them off at the firewall. A few months back, at least half of my spam could be traced to China. Since I do not know anybody in that part of the world, I have no problem just blocking it. For personal use, I see no problem blocking email geographically. Since I don't know anyone in Nigeria, Malaysia or Russia, I might as well just block it off.
About half of the spam is blocked by country before even hitting the other RBLs. I don't know anyone in Russia, Nigeria, China, Argentina, Malaysia, Thailand, China or Korea so I just block them. In the past most of my spam came from China, as well as most of the attacks on my firewall, so I just blocked the whole country.
While most of the spammers are likely in the US, most of the machines trying to send me spam appear to be outside the US.
In the time I've written this, my logs show spam being blocked from Argentina, Korea, Malaysia and China, as well as one from Great Briton, three from the US and one from Germany.
The amount from China appears to be less, but then it's hard to tell because I blocked off the worst offending subnets at my firewall.
-Aaron
Also, the following code will grab all the subnets by country, this example grabs them for China:
My Internet access at work would go a *lot* faster. Spam has managed to fill the entire 8Mbps pipe, completely saturating the link, 24 hours a day. It's not a very large company either.
-Aaron
Spam has become such a problem where I work that it has completely flooded the corporate Internet connection. I personally feel they should host an external mail server and spam filter off-site someplace. For my personal server I use various RBLs and country blacklists, like blocking all of China, Korea, Russia, Nigeria and a few other countries. Those seem to block most of the spam from even entering my mail server.
I know people talk about legal solutions not working, but I think if law enforcement made use of existing laws and went after these people it might make a difference. I'd love to see the FTC go after the pump and dump spammers and confiscate everything they own before locking them up, or the food and drug administration go after all the enhancement pill spammers. Also, perhaps a law to fine idiots who buy from these spammers.
Just change the federal law to let some of the state laws take effect, i.e. defeat the Can-spam act.
I think if law enforcement made a good effort to go after these spammers and lock them up then it might make a difference.
-Aaron
I was pleased to see Koko the gorilla on the list. When I was young I managed to see her when my father was doing some work to help the gorilla foundation back in the early 1980s. At the time, I wore braces and she found them very interesting and made up a new sign on the spot for them. They also had another gorilla, Michael. My sister made the sign "Koko loves Michael" to which Koko responded, "Michael dirty toilet", which apparently she came up with and was not taught. Koko was never very fond of Michael, though her attraction to some of her handlers was known even back then.
-Aaron
I think a lot of this is coming out of XBox 360 users. They too put their heads in the sand because all they have to do is turn on the requirement for HDMI and the XBox users won't be able to play their HD-DVDs. Many refuse to believe it because that requirement has not yet been enabled. If and when it is, they'll be left without a player.
Also, Blu-ray is not a Sony only format. There are a number of 3rd parties who are supporting it, both with media and players. It's taking a little longer, but it is far from dead. There are also players coming out that will handle both HD and Blu-ray. Once those players come out, the argument will go away. Like HD-DVD, Blu-Ray is a consortium. Most of the work was done by Sony, who was also involved in such horrible formats as the audio CD and DVD.
It's like DVD-R and DVD+R. Remember when recorders could only handle one format or the other? Early adopters will be stuck with only one format, but I expect the dual format players will take off, probably in the next year or so.
For movies, the only significant differences between the two formats are the extra storage of Blu-ray and the fact that Blu-ray includes native timing for 1080p 24fps whereas HD-DVD uses 30fps timing which may result in stuttering (according to the Wikipedia article on Blu-ray). Better HD-DVD players should be able to convert back to the original timing, however, by detecting and removing the repeated frames in the MPEG stream. Also, Blu-ray allows for higher audio bandwidth than HD-DVD.
-Aaron
Adding unicode to DNS names would make phishing much more difficult to detect unless all the browsers, email clients and other tools are modified to indicate that a URL may not be what the user thinks it is. It is bad enough as it is, and remember, most Internet users are not as savvy as those of us on Slashdot. I forsee a lot of security implications by adding this.
I agree with your sentiments regarding Mono and SuSE's huge shift toward Gnome. I will likely change distros after the 10.1 disaster. Rug/zypp/zen/whatever they call it package management *SUCKS* badly. It frequently grinds my Athlon64 3700+ to a crawl, sometimes getting stuck in an endless loop for hours until I kill it. It's also based on mono. mono reminds me of the disease. It consumes vast amounts of memory and seems to grind my system to a crawl, much like Java, but even java seems to be a lot better now.
The update procedure seems to break at least half of the time, either with undecipherable error messages about packages which prevents it from running or just hanging. Adding new repositories has been a nightmare, and it seems that Novell kept moving them around frequently, breaking updates. If 10.2 doesn't fix everything and work perfectly wrt package management, I'll dump it and not look back. I've been running SuSE since version 6.x. I'll likely move to Kubuntu or some other distro with good KDE support.
My ancient (by digital standards) Canon SD100 camera has a nice metal case while being very compact. It certainly doesn't feel like a toy other than its size. It's survived well traveling around in my pocket. My only real problem with it is the horrible, often unpredictable, lag and the fact that it eats batteries like crazy and the poor low light quality... all the reasons I went to a Nikon D70s, which has a plastic case but feels solid. The other advantage I have with the D70 is the larger size and mass makes the camera much more stable for taking pictures.
I've seen numerous other digicams also with metal cases that seem to hold up fine with abuse.
-Aaron
Power requirements? The manual with my D70s claims 2500 shots without flash and 500 with the built-in flash used every other shot. I have no problems with battery life, though I have had it run down if I spend a lot of time reviewing pictures (and the fact that I tend to shoot in raw format). I will often shoot 300-400 pictures with the battery still showing that it's full, though I often use an external flash which does drain batteries after a couple hundred shots. And this is with the 18-200mm lens which also consumes a lot of power with VR (Vibration Reduction - Nikon's name for image stabilization), which works quite well. I travel with only one spare battery for my camera and three sets of batteries for my flash since I rarely shoot over 500 pictures in a given day.
As of today, the battle between 35mm film and digital is over. A good digital camera wins in almost every category. Now medium or large format is a different story. And when you take into account the flexibility and cost difference between the two, it's a no brainer. Digital wins hands down.
As for cost, there are rumours everywhere about Nikon releasing the D40 real soon, so cost won't be so much an issue.
-Aaron
I don't see all the mudslinging campaign commercials since I have a Replay and tend to watch channels they don't advertise on. So I went through the voter guides with statements by various candidates. At least where I live, a number of candidates could not take the time to fill out what they stand for and why I should vote for them. One Green party candidate complained that it cost $20 per word and would say nothing else but refer to a web site. I'm sorry, but even at $20 per word it looks like the major candidates spent only around $5000, which I'm sure isn't too big of a burden on the Green party or some other part, especially for a state as large as California. In other cases, there were no 3rd party candidates to choose from or their philosophies were so far out of mainstream that I couldn't stomach them.
Unexpectedly, the local race was pretty easy to decide. For our city council there were two incumbents who have done a fairly decent job. The other candidates went from flaky to just plain deranged.
Similarly with the water board... the quality of the local water is pretty good and it's cheap and they've done a good job maintaining a good supply. If the incumbent has done a good job, why change it?
Secretary of State for California was also a no-brainer for me. Debra Bowen, the democratic candidate, has made numerous statements in support of an open-source voting system while her republican opponent is fine and dandy with Diebold and co and more worried about illegal immigrants voting.
I seriously considered 3rd party candidates for governor, but none of them put forth a compelling reason why I should vote for them and either came out as being too far to the right or the left.
I'm sorry, but if I'm to vote for a Green Party or some other 3rd party, a majority of their views should be relatively mainstream middle of the road. After all, whoever is elected will need to work with the state legislature. I mean, why can't a Green Party candidate come out for the environment and not be totally anti-corporation, i.e. try and encourage corporations to be more eco-friendly. Most corporations aren't really evil and have their place. Some actively help promote environmental protection.
The propositions took a bit of research.
Some positions I just didn't know enough about, so I left those blank. Some I went by endorsements since I knew some of the people making the endorsements.
Only 20K? For a while I was getting 80-100K bounced emails a day because some spammer decided he liked my domain name. Anyway, I only have a handful of accounts I use. Fortunately, all the bounces were blocked by postfix as undeliverable and I didn't even notice the load on my super fast 333MHz Pentium 2 server (no, not fast but my load hovered around 0.05). Sadly, it did kill a couple firewall routers... I think all the logging killed the flash in one router, and the new one would usually crash and burn after 5 minutes (Netgear) until I replaced it with a real router.
It also looks like RBL is highly effective. It seems to block about 90% of the spam. DSpam then catches at least 90% of anything that makes it through so I maybe see 1-2 spams per day instead of hundreds.
I also frequently report spam to Spamcop and notify the FEC of the pump and dump scams. I just wish they'd put some serious effort to go after these guys and fine them into oblivion and/or put them in jail.
-Aaron
I too am in Alameda County. I voted absentee as did my parents did. I just dropped off my ballot at the polling place, spending no more than 30 seconds. No line or wait.
I was also pleasantly surprised to see all the Diebold machines gone and a new paper-based system. They do have a few machine-based systems for disabled voters, though. Though voting absentee is much nicer since I can vote at the diningroom table and just mail or drop off my vote.