You, of all people, should be a proponent of said new acreage cultivation. Why?
I'll pull a random number out of my ass. Say we need to cultivate 50 million acres above and beyond what is currently cultivated for *crop* production. Where does all that land come from?
A quick, easy and obvious answer is: take the vast tracts of land used by to-be-consumed-for-food animals and convert it in to crop-production land.
Benefits? The nation begins to shift its thinking from feeding an anmial for five years and then killing it and eating it (highly inefficient) to growing crops whose byproduct is oil, which could be used for biodiesel production. Since the veggies already have value because of their oil-production properties, the left-overs could end up getting used elsewhere at a deep discount.
I'll admit, if everyone converted over to biodiesel tomorrow we'd be hard-pressed to supply fuel. But everyone converting over tomorrow is impossible. Instead, if biodiesel is cheap and readily available (on top of the other numerous benefits) then I suspect it will be a slow, multi-decade transistion, as people purchase new (or used) diesel vehicles.
Every decision, alternative-to-the-norm or not, requires a bit of "homework" if you're going to make an informed decision. But I digress.
Here's an example of instructions on making biodiesel. As far as I can tell, these instructions are similar to the ones that the GoBiodiesel Cooperative of Portland, OR (of which I'm a member) are going to use (and which several members currently use) to make biodiesel.
http://www.stewardwood.org/resources/DIYbiodiese l. htm
It looks like it's approximately 3.5-4.0 grams of lye per litre of vegetable oil. There's also a quantity of ethanol (or methanol, which is mentioned in the yahoo.com article) but I'm not sure of the amount. I believe it's (super approximate) 1:1 ethanol or methanol to vegetable oil (or waste vegetable oil).
Other than the lye, vegetable oil and ethanol or methanol, there is a few cents of electricity used to power a small stirring motor. There's also a small bit of electricity (or some sort of natural gas) used to heat up the vegetable oil. To make a 25 gallon batch, for example, there's about 12.5 gallons of oil that's been heated from room temp to 120F.
How the electricity is generated could be a (small) point of contention, I suppose. For the above 25 gallon batch example, though, there's maybe 25-50 cents of electricity consumed.
I can't tell you how lye is produced/obtained. It can't be too difficult - a (20lb?) bag is about $50 or so. I'm going off've memory here, but the gist is that a big ass bag of lye doesn't cost much. Name-brand laundry detergent, by weight, probably costs more.
And keep in mind that the meat factor is a VOLUNTARY one! The company in this article is using waste (poop) to produce methanol. You can always use ethanol instead, or methanol produced in different ways. Methanol is the preferred "other half" of the biodiesel process, but it's more expensive so it isn't used as much.
Not to flame, but you haven't done any homework in this area, have you? Fortunately I (and many others) have.
What we need less of, MUCH less of, is gasoline and gasoline engines.
I can list off more benefits of biodiesel than there is space for this comment. So I'll stick to just the highlights:
(From http://www.epa.gov/otaq/consumer/fuels/altfuels/bi odiesel.pdf)
- Use of 100% biodiesel will reduce CO2 emissions (when compared to regular diesel) by 50 percent
- Use of 100% biodiesel will reduce particulate emissions by 70% when compared to regular diesel).
- Again, use of 100% biodiesel will reduce Total Hydrocarbon (THC on your DEQ test results) emissions by 40% compared to regular diesel.
- 100% reduction in sulfate emissions when using 100% biodiesel!
"Other" benefits:
- Biodiesel is produced, distributed and locally used. Don't want a war in some middle eastern country with people you've never met? A way to avoid such conflicts is to be self-reliant in terms of fuel.
- Biodiesel can be produced from damn near any vegetable oil you can think of. See: http://journeytoforever.org/biodiesel_yield.html...Which means that biodiesel can be produced from vegetables grown locally - just about anywhere people live.
- Biodiesel can be produced from waste vegetable oil. This helps to "close the loop", meaning that that WVO doesn't end up in a landfill.
- Biodiesel represents a "closed carbon cycle". Regular diesel and gasoline come from oil, which has been safely buried in the ground for millions of years. When it comes up and we burn it, we're adding CO2. When Biodiesel is burned, since it came from living plants or animals it doesn't represent an increase in CO2 - just a redistribution.
- Use of biodiesel requires zero modifications to a late model diesel vehicle and only minor upgrades of fuel lines and other rubber bits to older diesel vehicles.
I could go on and on, but I won't. Any benefit you can think of for regular gasoline or diesel, biodiesel will trump. And biodiesel is available RIGHT NOW, as opposed to hydrogen-based fuels cells or other good-idea-but-not-yet-practical green technologies.
If you're in the Portland, OR area and are interested in making, distributing and using biodiesel then you're welcome to join the GoBiodiesel Cooperative. You can get more info at the website, GoBiodiesel.org. We're about 6 weeks from having a processor that will be capable of producing up to several hundred gallons of biodiesel per week.
Since we're a cooperative and a new one at that, there are opportunities in all aspects of biodiesel: sales/marketing, engineering/processor design, oil collection, administrative stuff, etc. Whatever floats your boat (or drives your car).
...someone that gets a lot of pr0n off've ebay, I guess. rlcsljo, the current high bidder at $13,050 has made quite a few interesting purchases recently!
I guess it's just a bit odd. His buying record is going to be: pr0n, pr0n, pr0n, $13k on a night at Keck, pr0n, pr0n...
Courageous works for "BBN Technologies" in San Diego, CA. I clicked on his home page link. Intel also does this for its employees - people are given, I believe, about a month or so to find a new job. They have assistance from counselors and such.
In America, according to various sources I've read on the web, the "for non-road use" fuels are dyed. If a law officer catches you driving with dyed fuel you will supposedly get a hefty fine.
Additionally, I believe that you are supposed to report the use of homemade fuels for road use, but I don't know what the tax rates and such are for that sort of thing.
While the idea of a Hydrogen-powered vehicle is a great one, if Slashdot readers are interested in a "more" environmentally-friendly vehicle there are options right now.
Biodiesel (more info here and here) is diesel fuel that will work in any new-ish diesel-powered vehicle with out ANY modifications. Benefits?
- Availability of the vehicle. Volkswagen produces a line of turbo diesel injected vehicles right now. They are available from about US$15k - $30k, depending on which model and features you ask for.
- Availability of the fuel. Biodiesel is NOT as wide-spread as diesel - not by far. But it IS available. There's a station in my hometown, Portland, OR and one down in Eugene, OR. According to the map of refueling sites provided by biodiesel.org, there are nine biodiesel stations in California.
- Cost of the fuel. B20, that is 20% biodiesel and 80% regular diesel, costs about US$1.75/gallon in Portland, OR. That's about what premium/super goes for here, give or take 10 cents. I don't have info on what B100 costs - probably around $2.25 or more or possibly less. Depends on your supplier.
- Biodiesel benefits the American (or local) economy. Biodiesel is created from plants. Soy and such. Soy beans can be grown locally in many places of the world. Oil can be had in America, too, but there's not much of it and one it's gone, it is GONE. More soy beans can be grown at any time.
- Biodiesel is "environmentally friendly". According to the US EPA in this PDF document, use of B100 biodiesel will reduce the output of carbon monoxide from a single veh by 50%. B100 will reduce particulate emissions by 70% (less smog). Total hydrocarbon emissions reduced by 40%. Reductions in sulfate emissions by 100%.
- Biodiesel takes less energy to make than diesel and much less energy to make than gasoline.
- Diesel vehicles, particularly the TDI's from VW, are VERY fuel efficient. Expect to get 40/city, 45+/highway (expessed in miles per gallon). Many people report getting 600+ miles to the tank.
Hydrogen-powered vehicles will be great when they are mass-produced in 10 years. Until then, look at Biodiesel. I think the benefits far outweigh the added expense of the fuel.
Another issue is misuse, free wireless reminds me of the net of yester year, you could for instance use SMTP servers all over the globe and the vast majority of users didn't abuse that facility, but obviously the small majority of spammers swiftly made that a thing of the past and continue to annoy us today, how would open wireless networks be any [bbc.co.uk] different [com.com]?
A well-configured and robust firewall will neatly address your concern. Don't want spamming? Block port 25. Don't want anyone to do anything but surf the web? Block 'em all except outgoing to port 80, 443, etc.
I assume the counter to my argument is: "But for every one person with a well-configured firewall there's 99 people with poorly-configured firewalls - or no firewalls at all!"
My response to that would be: do you have a deadbolt on your door? Security system in your house? A handgun for self-defense? Some or all of the above?
The "I'm illiterate when it comes to computers" excuse is a nice one. So nice that, if that's the case you can do one of two things. One: don't run a wireless network if you can't secure it. Two: be an idiot and run an unsecured wireless network. Hope that you don't get too badly abused. Realise that, eventually, you will get horribly abused.
No one, today, says "I close my front door, that should be good enough." No. They arm their alarm system, lock the door, lock the deadbolt, etc. Why? Everyone knows that's what you have to do to meet a minimum level of acceptable security (in a populated area).
Re:Is GPL best license for this purpose
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Open Source TV
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· Score: 1
Actually, according to gnu.org, the OCL is not recommended for use seeing as how it is not free in the GPL sense. Specifically, the OCL is not considered "free" because, "there are restrictions on charging money for copies."
gnu.org recommends the use of their GPL Free Documentation License instead of the OCL. You might also be able to use the Free Art License, a copy of which is available here: http://artlibre.org/licence/lalgb.html
See my comment from the other day here on this topic.
An analogy I used, which is still applicable here, is: "If I walk by your house in the middle of the night and knock on your door and you, sleep-muddled and confused, let me in, then I'll assume I can walk around, sleep on the couch, etc." It should be noted that simply being invited into the house/network does not give you permission to steal physical objects/intellectual property/etc. Using bandwidth isn't stealing in this analogy because it's what a WLAN/Wifi is. Access.
Note that "sleep-muddled and confused" may be used in some legal wrangling in some court, but that isn't the point here. The point is that someone asked for something (dhcp assigned IP) and got what they asked for.
I also noted that a local group here, Personal Telco operates several free and un-restricted nodes in the Portland area. To that, someone replied with: and how is a novice user supposed to know when they've roamed (e.g. the user is walking around) from this 100% open and public node to a private node? Especially when the private node happily gave you the IP you requested?
It's not as b&w as some "Wardriving is theft, plain and simple." would have you think.
Whether wardriving is illegal is up to the courts. I'm not a judge, nor am I a lawyer. But I have a bit of common sense and know that if I set up this magical wireless internet access that works even from my back porch, then I'll also assume the neighbors can get access through me, too. If I leave a "EVERYONE is WELCOME!" sign on my wide-open door, I'll expect people to come in side and wander around. Closing the door and removing the sign is easy. If someone is too damn novice to figure out how, they need to shut down their wireless setup until they figure out or pay someone to figure out how.
I love using PageMaker for anything more than a simple report. Sure, I may type it up in Word or whatever...but when I want to do the actual layout, nothing kicks ass like PageMaker.
Dropping in graphics? Want to wrap some text around something? PM will handle that without even considering breaking a sweat. And it is so freakin' easy to move those text blocks and graphics and such around. So every time I try to do anything complex in Word I just start cursing and if it really is going to be complex, I just do it in PM.
The collaboration issue is a sticky one but, frankly, if the document is long enough and has a bunch of graphics or formatting...no one other than the publications people or the designer should be touching it, anyway. Just have a meeting (!) and take notes or mark up a hard copy.
Actually, my employer (Intel), has a fairly smart firewall that blocks damn near everything.
Example: You can't SSH out. So, I tried setting up SSH on 443. No go. I hated the thought of reading my email unencrypted, so I finally setup SquirrelMail and modssl/apache (on port 443).
Why one encrypted protocol is blocked and another is not is beyond me, but that's what the case is.
As many others have already pointed out, much like copy protection...people will find a way to beat restrictive firewalls. It may take some time and work, but unless the firewall blocks all outgoing traffic...
I stumbled upon a HAM on top of Rocky Butte in Portland, OR last year when they were doing emergency practices. They'd parked a small RV on top of the butte - a very odd site, since vehicles are normally not allowed up on the top of the butte.
The HAM guys were nice, explaining what they were doing and letting us check out their equipment.
For those slashdot readers in the Portland Area, go check 'em out on top of the Rocky Butte again!
I challenge IPaq users, Sony Clie users, Palm users - anyone using a commercially available PDA - to prove to me that their PDA is more versatile than
mine - a Handspring Visor w/ the open-arms springboard slot.
I've got a 64MB compact flash card in my Handspring Visor right now via Innopocket's FlashPlus adapter. I make full backups onto the CF card, along
with store books, maps of the majority of Oregon and Washington and I run applications off've the CF card. On the weekends I pop in the Geode GPS
from GeoDiscovery (a VERY under developed product) and go Geocaching. I keep the 64MB CF card on hand incase I need some of those maps.
My friends have a wireless springboard module and a modem module, respectively. They've customized their PDA's. As I have customized my PDA to fit my specific needs. SD, by definition, is not as versatile. And that's kind of sad, because SD isn't better - it's just more widespread.
Everyone out there whining about how springboard modules weren't all they were advertised to be or how there aren't as many as you'd like or whatnot ...Ask yourself: Are the first games released for the PS2 the best damn PS2 games you'll ever see? Hell no. The first games take advantage of the new technology and by definition are cool. But they by no means take full advantage of that technology. By being early product releasors, producers of many springboard slots took risks. Some did ok, others did not. But since the PDA market is much more fragmented than the game console market, they cheesed off some users who simply skipped the customization in favour of something more standardized. Something more comfortable.
Ask yourself...is a broad/dynamic slot such as the springboard slot, really such a bad idea? Especially when compared to the alternative, an SD slot? Or maybe you're an IPaq user. You have more options on the IPaq, as I understand it - but is it an option where that CF card or modem will fit flush in your PDA?
Handelman states, "If ways can be found to get computers for more of them, or to reduce the economic sacrifices they have to make to get them, can we all agree that it is a good thing?"
There are ways and some of us have already agreed that it's a good thing. Furthermore, those of us who have agreed it's a good thing are already doing something about it.
I volunteer at Free Geek, a 501(c)(3) non-profit org in Portland, OR. After donating 24 hours (8 in receiving, 8 in recycling and 8 in Testing) a volunteer will qualify for a pentium-class box with 48MB of RAM, a 28.8+ modem pre-loaded with Mandrake and some software like AbiWord, Netscape, the GIMP, etc. Free Geek volunteers teach receipients how to use their new computer, too.
Whether the digital divide exists is great for debate. But in reality, some people can not afford a computer. Free Geek allows them to donate time in any amount they can, whenever they can in order to get a computer for "free."
I've got it, too. It most certainly was NOT free, however. As I recall, I acquired my copy for about $25. That was from someone who had got it directly (for $100 or so) from someone who had paid about $750 or so for the CD. There was/is a local guy here who had been acquiring the CD, legally, from the DMV, since at least '94 and we always got the yearly update from hin.
There's NOT that much information on the CD, though (regarding licenses), even on the last year. There's all the information that's on your normal license: Driver's license #, name, DOB, sex, height, weight, class, restrictions and some other crap which I don't know what it means.
Here's an example from the License's database:
"LAST, FIRST A","1234 NICEROAD DR NE","","SOMEWHERE","OR",24,97123,67,4,7,"M",603,20 0,"",0,"D","","N","","B",91,3,25,95,3,15,99,4,7,95,3,16,0,0,0,"1234567"
Everyone I knew who had this CD saw this coming. I have no idea why the DMV thought it was a good idea to publish this information, but they did and a bunch of people bought it. Suprise, suprise, some people used it for Bad Things. Live and learn, I guess.
What do you use to read "ebooks" on your Handspring unit?
Up until recently I've been using SmartDoc (now Quickword) but I have since switched to CSpotRun, since it lets me use the entire screen.
I, like you and many other people, enjoy reading stuff on my Visor whenever I have a few minutes. I've been interviewing a lot lately, so there's always 10 minutes beforehand where I'll read a bit of Ender's Game.
I don't think ebooks will replace the paper kind any time soon, but they're nice because they're not heavy and use a device that I'd have with me anyway.
What reader do you use for the PalmOS? Until recently I had been using SmartDoc (predecessor to Quickword) but I've since started using CSpotRun - I like that I can use the entire screen to read with.
I just recently picked up about 1,300+ "ebooks" via the Gnutella network. They're in ASCII text format. I'll be converting them to.PDB for use on devices running the PalmOS and making them available via a sub site of mine that I've recently started.
The reason I like "ebooks" or, more specifically, books that have been converted into PDB's, is that I always have my Visor with me. I don't mind reading books on it at all - in fact I've read through five or six books on my Visor in the last year or so. This doesn't mean I prefer ebooks to the real thing - far from it - but they're nice when I'm waiting around for a meeting, at the airport, or generally just sitting around waiting for something to happen.
Haha, fashion is just as important as political freedom? I wish the authors of the Declaration of Independance and the US Bill of Rights had known that! What would they have included (or excluded)?! Examples:
We hereby ban hypercolour pants and shorts for obvious reasons.
Well-proportioned women are encouraged to wear open-back shirts, short skirts and to show off their belly buttons.
Beer hats are also banned, not because they're ugly but because they're fucking stupid! [yes, the authors would have said "fucking", setting another important precedant]
Those shoes with lights? No!
Fisherman style hats are in and should be worn to all of the nation's important events, like Presidental trials, the Boston Tea Party (date not yet set) and weddings, if necessary.
As you can see, these would have nicely complimented such rights as... you have the right to bare arms, you have the right to speak freely, you have the right to vote even if you're a chick or black, etc.
To be on topic for just a moment: no one in their right mind gives two shits about the name of the encoder used on some music! The things people care about are: "Is it free?" and "is it easy?"...and that's it. "People" being the general public, not slashdot.
As many people have commented, the thing holding Vorbis back are not its technical merits - to most tin ears it sounds fine - but the fact that it's the new guy and MP3 usually sounds "good enough" anyway. OGG will have to make sure that Vorbis is very free (beer/speech) and leave it at that. 3rd party people will make snazzy decoders and hardware vendors, like anyone, will look hard at the bottom line - trying to figure out if pushing a new format on consumers will eventually translate in a lower overall cost.
Carolyn Meinel is, in a nutshell, a flaming idiot. It's a credit to her social engineering skills that she managed to get Scientific American to publish her nasty fluff - and a discredit to SA.
Slashdot Mirror
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/PIADetQuery.html
Images are available from the 2001 Mars Odyssey, Cassini, Galileo, etc. Go check 'em out!
You, of all people, should be a proponent of said new acreage cultivation. Why?
I'll pull a random number out of my ass. Say we need to cultivate 50 million acres above and beyond what is currently cultivated for *crop* production. Where does all that land come from?
A quick, easy and obvious answer is: take the vast tracts of land used by to-be-consumed-for-food animals and convert it in to crop-production land.
Benefits? The nation begins to shift its thinking from feeding an anmial for five years and then killing it and eating it (highly inefficient) to growing crops whose byproduct is oil, which could be used for biodiesel production. Since the veggies already have value because of their oil-production properties, the left-overs could end up getting used elsewhere at a deep discount.
I'll admit, if everyone converted over to biodiesel tomorrow we'd be hard-pressed to supply fuel. But everyone converting over tomorrow is impossible. Instead, if biodiesel is cheap and readily available (on top of the other numerous benefits) then I suspect it will be a slow, multi-decade transistion, as people purchase new (or used) diesel vehicles.
Every decision, alternative-to-the-norm or not, requires a bit of "homework" if you're going to make an informed decision. But I digress.
e l. htm
Here's an example of instructions on making biodiesel. As far as I can tell, these instructions are similar to the ones that the GoBiodiesel Cooperative of Portland, OR (of which I'm a member) are going to use (and which several members currently use) to make biodiesel.
http://www.stewardwood.org/resources/DIYbiodies
It looks like it's approximately 3.5-4.0 grams of lye per litre of vegetable oil. There's also a quantity of ethanol (or methanol, which is mentioned in the yahoo.com article) but I'm not sure of the amount. I believe it's (super approximate) 1:1 ethanol or methanol to vegetable oil (or waste vegetable oil).
Other than the lye, vegetable oil and ethanol or methanol, there is a few cents of electricity used to power a small stirring motor. There's also a small bit of electricity (or some sort of natural gas) used to heat up the vegetable oil. To make a 25 gallon batch, for example, there's about 12.5 gallons of oil that's been heated from room temp to 120F.
How the electricity is generated could be a (small) point of contention, I suppose. For the above 25 gallon batch example, though, there's maybe 25-50 cents of electricity consumed.
I can't tell you how lye is produced/obtained. It can't be too difficult - a (20lb?) bag is about $50 or so. I'm going off've memory here, but the gist is that a big ass bag of lye doesn't cost much. Name-brand laundry detergent, by weight, probably costs more.
And keep in mind that the meat factor is a VOLUNTARY one! The company in this article is using waste (poop) to produce methanol. You can always use ethanol instead, or methanol produced in different ways. Methanol is the preferred "other half" of the biodiesel process, but it's more expensive so it isn't used as much.
Not to flame, but you haven't done any homework in this area, have you? Fortunately I (and many others) have.
i odiesel.pdf)
...Which means that biodiesel can be produced from vegetables grown locally - just about anywhere people live.
What we need less of, MUCH less of, is gasoline and gasoline engines.
I can list off more benefits of biodiesel than there is space for this comment. So I'll stick to just the highlights:
(From http://www.epa.gov/otaq/consumer/fuels/altfuels/b
- Use of 100% biodiesel will reduce CO2 emissions (when compared to regular diesel) by 50 percent
- Use of 100% biodiesel will reduce particulate emissions by 70% when compared to regular diesel).
- Again, use of 100% biodiesel will reduce Total Hydrocarbon (THC on your DEQ test results) emissions by 40% compared to regular diesel.
- 100% reduction in sulfate emissions when using 100% biodiesel!
"Other" benefits:
- Biodiesel is produced, distributed and locally used. Don't want a war in some middle eastern country with people you've never met? A way to avoid such conflicts is to be self-reliant in terms of fuel.
- Biodiesel can be produced from damn near any vegetable oil you can think of. See: http://journeytoforever.org/biodiesel_yield.html
- Biodiesel can be produced from waste vegetable oil. This helps to "close the loop", meaning that that WVO doesn't end up in a landfill.
- Biodiesel represents a "closed carbon cycle". Regular diesel and gasoline come from oil, which has been safely buried in the ground for millions of years. When it comes up and we burn it, we're adding CO2. When Biodiesel is burned, since it came from living plants or animals it doesn't represent an increase in CO2 - just a redistribution.
- Use of biodiesel requires zero modifications to a late model diesel vehicle and only minor upgrades of fuel lines and other rubber bits to older diesel vehicles.
I could go on and on, but I won't. Any benefit you can think of for regular gasoline or diesel, biodiesel will trump. And biodiesel is available RIGHT NOW, as opposed to hydrogen-based fuels cells or other good-idea-but-not-yet-practical green technologies.
If you're in the Portland, OR area and are interested in making, distributing and using biodiesel then you're welcome to join the GoBiodiesel Cooperative. You can get more info at the website, GoBiodiesel.org. We're about 6 weeks from having a processor that will be capable of producing up to several hundred gallons of biodiesel per week.
Since we're a cooperative and a new one at that, there are opportunities in all aspects of biodiesel: sales/marketing, engineering/processor design, oil collection, administrative stuff, etc. Whatever floats your boat (or drives your car).
...someone that gets a lot of pr0n off've ebay, I guess. rlcsljo, the current high bidder at $13,050 has made quite a few interesting purchases recently!
I guess it's just a bit odd. His buying record is going to be: pr0n, pr0n, pr0n, $13k on a night at Keck, pr0n, pr0n...
Courageous works for "BBN Technologies" in San Diego, CA. I clicked on his home page link. Intel also does this for its employees - people are given, I believe, about a month or so to find a new job. They have assistance from counselors and such.
In America, according to various sources I've read on the web, the "for non-road use" fuels are dyed. If a law officer catches you driving with dyed fuel you will supposedly get a hefty fine.
Additionally, I believe that you are supposed to report the use of homemade fuels for road use, but I don't know what the tax rates and such are for that sort of thing.
While the idea of a Hydrogen-powered vehicle is a great one, if Slashdot readers are interested in a "more" environmentally-friendly vehicle there are options right now.
Biodiesel (more info here and here) is diesel fuel that will work in any new-ish diesel-powered vehicle with out ANY modifications. Benefits?
- Availability of the vehicle. Volkswagen produces a line of turbo diesel injected vehicles right now. They are available from about US$15k - $30k, depending on which model and features you ask for.
- Availability of the fuel. Biodiesel is NOT as wide-spread as diesel - not by far. But it IS available. There's a station in my hometown, Portland, OR and one down in Eugene, OR. According to the map of refueling sites provided by biodiesel.org, there are nine biodiesel stations in California.
- Cost of the fuel. B20, that is 20% biodiesel and 80% regular diesel, costs about US$1.75/gallon in Portland, OR. That's about what premium/super goes for here, give or take 10 cents. I don't have info on what B100 costs - probably around $2.25 or more or possibly less. Depends on your supplier.
- Biodiesel benefits the American (or local) economy. Biodiesel is created from plants. Soy and such. Soy beans can be grown locally in many places of the world. Oil can be had in America, too, but there's not much of it and one it's gone, it is GONE. More soy beans can be grown at any time.
- Biodiesel is "environmentally friendly". According to the US EPA in this PDF document, use of B100 biodiesel will reduce the output of carbon monoxide from a single veh by 50%. B100 will reduce particulate emissions by 70% (less smog). Total hydrocarbon emissions reduced by 40%. Reductions in sulfate emissions by 100%.
- Biodiesel takes less energy to make than diesel and much less energy to make than gasoline.
- Diesel vehicles, particularly the TDI's from VW, are VERY fuel efficient. Expect to get 40/city, 45+/highway (expessed in miles per gallon). Many people report getting 600+ miles to the tank.
Hydrogen-powered vehicles will be great when they are mass-produced in 10 years. Until then, look at Biodiesel. I think the benefits far outweigh the added expense of the fuel.
A well-configured and robust firewall will neatly address your concern. Don't want spamming? Block port 25. Don't want anyone to do anything but surf the web? Block 'em all except outgoing to port 80, 443, etc.
I assume the counter to my argument is: "But for every one person with a well-configured firewall there's 99 people with poorly-configured firewalls - or no firewalls at all!"
My response to that would be: do you have a deadbolt on your door? Security system in your house? A handgun for self-defense? Some or all of the above?
The "I'm illiterate when it comes to computers" excuse is a nice one. So nice that, if that's the case you can do one of two things. One: don't run a wireless network if you can't secure it. Two: be an idiot and run an unsecured wireless network. Hope that you don't get too badly abused. Realise that, eventually, you will get horribly abused.
No one, today, says "I close my front door, that should be good enough." No. They arm their alarm system, lock the door, lock the deadbolt, etc. Why? Everyone knows that's what you have to do to meet a minimum level of acceptable security (in a populated area).
Actually, according to gnu.org, the OCL is not recommended for use seeing as how it is not free in the GPL sense. Specifically, the OCL is not considered "free" because, "there are restrictions on charging money for copies."
gnu.org recommends the use of their GPL Free Documentation License instead of the OCL. You might also be able to use the Free Art License, a copy of which is available here: http://artlibre.org/licence/lalgb.html
See my comment from the other day here on this topic.
An analogy I used, which is still applicable here, is: "If I walk by your house in the middle of the night and knock on your door and you, sleep-muddled and confused, let me in, then I'll assume I can walk around, sleep on the couch, etc." It should be noted that simply being invited into the house/network does not give you permission to steal physical objects/intellectual property/etc. Using bandwidth isn't stealing in this analogy because it's what a WLAN/Wifi is. Access.
Note that "sleep-muddled and confused" may be used in some legal wrangling in some court, but that isn't the point here. The point is that someone asked for something (dhcp assigned IP) and got what they asked for.
I also noted that a local group here, Personal Telco operates several free and un-restricted nodes in the Portland area. To that, someone replied with: and how is a novice user supposed to know when they've roamed (e.g. the user is walking around) from this 100% open and public node to a private node? Especially when the private node happily gave you the IP you requested?
It's not as b&w as some "Wardriving is theft, plain and simple." would have you think.
Whether wardriving is illegal is up to the courts. I'm not a judge, nor am I a lawyer. But I have a bit of common sense and know that if I set up this magical wireless internet access that works even from my back porch, then I'll also assume the neighbors can get access through me, too. If I leave a "EVERYONE is WELCOME!" sign on my wide-open door, I'll expect people to come in side and wander around. Closing the door and removing the sign is easy. If someone is too damn novice to figure out how, they need to shut down their wireless setup until they figure out or pay someone to figure out how.
I love using PageMaker for anything more than a simple report. Sure, I may type it up in Word or whatever ...but when I want to do the actual layout, nothing kicks ass like PageMaker.
...no one other than the publications people or the designer should be touching it, anyway. Just have a meeting (!) and take notes or mark up a hard copy.
Dropping in graphics? Want to wrap some text around something? PM will handle that without even considering breaking a sweat. And it is so freakin' easy to move those text blocks and graphics and such around. So every time I try to do anything complex in Word I just start cursing and if it really is going to be complex, I just do it in PM.
The collaboration issue is a sticky one but, frankly, if the document is long enough and has a bunch of graphics or formatting
Actually, my employer (Intel), has a fairly smart firewall that blocks damn near everything.
...people will find a way to beat restrictive firewalls. It may take some time and work, but unless the firewall blocks all outgoing traffic...
Example: You can't SSH out. So, I tried setting up SSH on 443. No go. I hated the thought of reading my email unencrypted, so I finally setup SquirrelMail and modssl/apache (on port 443).
Why one encrypted protocol is blocked and another is not is beyond me, but that's what the case is.
As many others have already pointed out, much like copy protection
I stumbled upon a HAM on top of Rocky Butte in Portland, OR last year when they were doing emergency practices. They'd parked a small RV on top of the butte - a very odd site, since vehicles are normally not allowed up on the top of the butte.
The HAM guys were nice, explaining what they were doing and letting us check out their equipment.
For those slashdot readers in the Portland Area, go check 'em out on top of the Rocky Butte again!
The above comment is right on.
...is a broad/dynamic slot such as the springboard slot, really such a bad idea? Especially when compared to the alternative, an SD
I challenge IPaq users, Sony Clie users, Palm users - anyone using a commercially available PDA - to prove to me that their PDA is more versatile than
mine - a Handspring Visor w/ the open-arms springboard slot.
I've got a 64MB compact flash card in my Handspring Visor right now via Innopocket's FlashPlus adapter. I make full backups onto the CF card, along
with store books, maps of the majority of Oregon and Washington and I run applications off've the CF card. On the weekends I pop in the Geode GPS
from GeoDiscovery (a VERY under developed product) and go Geocaching. I keep the 64MB CF card on hand incase I need some of those maps.
My friends have a wireless springboard module and a modem module, respectively. They've customized their PDA's. As I have customized my PDA to fit
my specific needs. SD, by definition, is not as versatile. And that's kind of sad, because SD isn't better - it's just more widespread.
Everyone out there whining about how springboard modules weren't all they were advertised to be or how there aren't as many as you'd like or whatnot
...Ask yourself: Are the first games released for the PS2 the best damn PS2 games you'll ever see? Hell no. The first games take advantage of the
new technology and by definition are cool. But they by no means take full advantage of that technology. By being early product releasors, producers
of many springboard slots took risks. Some did ok, others did not. But since the PDA market is much more fragmented than the game console market,
they cheesed off some users who simply skipped the customization in favour of something more standardized. Something more comfortable.
Ask yourself
slot? Or maybe you're an IPaq user. You have more options on the IPaq, as I understand it - but is it an option where that CF card or modem will fit
flush in your PDA?
Win2k 5.00.2195
MSIE 6.0.2600.0000 (56 bit)
Handelman states, "If ways can be found to get computers for more of them, or to reduce the economic sacrifices they have to make to get them, can we all agree that it is a good thing?"
There are ways and some of us have already agreed that it's a good thing. Furthermore, those of us who have agreed it's a good thing are already doing something about it.
I volunteer at Free Geek, a 501(c)(3) non-profit org in Portland, OR. After donating 24 hours (8 in receiving, 8 in recycling and 8 in Testing) a volunteer will qualify for a pentium-class box with 48MB of RAM, a 28.8+ modem pre-loaded with Mandrake and some software like AbiWord, Netscape, the GIMP, etc. Free Geek volunteers teach receipients how to use their new computer, too.
Whether the digital divide exists is great for debate. But in reality, some people can not afford a computer. Free Geek allows them to donate time in any amount they can, whenever they can in order to get a computer for "free."
I've got it, too. It most certainly was NOT free, however. As I recall, I acquired my copy for about $25. That was from someone who had got it directly (for $100 or so) from someone who had paid about $750 or so for the CD. There was/is a local guy here who had been acquiring the CD, legally, from the DMV, since at least '94 and we always got the yearly update from hin.
There's NOT that much information on the CD, though (regarding licenses), even on the last year. There's all the information that's on your normal license: Driver's license #, name, DOB, sex, height, weight, class, restrictions and some other crap which I don't know what it means.
Here's an example from the License's database:
"LAST, FIRST A","1234 NICEROAD DR NE","","SOMEWHERE","OR",24,97123,67,4,7,"M",603,20 0,"",0,"D","","N","","B",91,3,25,95,3,15,99,4,7,95 ,3,16,0,0,0,"1234567"
Here's an example from the plates database:
"QXT637","1","FORD","","4S","1FAPP36X3LK123456", "9 013464418",90,1,98,3,31,"LASTNAME, BOB",8,7,20,508616,"LASTNAME, JANE",9,8,31,6564,"123 SOSOLANE DR","","FLORENCE","OR",97789,20,"",1,96,2,26,0,0," ","","","","","","",0
Everyone I knew who had this CD saw this coming. I have no idea why the DMV thought it was a good idea to publish this information, but they did and a bunch of people bought it. Suprise, suprise, some people used it for Bad Things. Live and learn, I guess.
Alexxis - I hope you see this message. email me (don't remove "spam"). I wanna talk about your Visor and all the memory it has - is it CF?
What do you use to read "ebooks" on your Handspring unit?
Up until recently I've been using SmartDoc (now Quickword) but I have since switched to CSpotRun, since it lets me use the entire screen.
I, like you and many other people, enjoy reading stuff on my Visor whenever I have a few minutes. I've been interviewing a lot lately, so there's always 10 minutes beforehand where I'll read a bit of Ender's Game.
I don't think ebooks will replace the paper kind any time soon, but they're nice because they're not heavy and use a device that I'd have with me anyway.
What reader do you use for the PalmOS? Until recently I had been using SmartDoc (predecessor to Quickword) but I've since started using CSpotRun - I like that I can use the entire screen to read with.
I just recently picked up about 1,300+ "ebooks" via the Gnutella network. They're in ASCII text format. I'll be converting them to .PDB for use on devices running the PalmOS and making them available via a sub site of mine that I've recently started.
The reason I like "ebooks" or, more specifically, books that have been converted into PDB's, is that I always have my Visor with me. I don't mind reading books on it at all - in fact I've read through five or six books on my Visor in the last year or so. This doesn't mean I prefer ebooks to the real thing - far from it - but they're nice when I'm waiting around for a meeting, at the airport, or generally just sitting around waiting for something to happen.
Haha, fashion is just as important as political freedom? I wish the authors of the Declaration of Independance and the US Bill of Rights had known that! What would they have included (or excluded)?! Examples:
As you can see, these would have nicely complimented such rights as... you have the right to bare arms, you have the right to speak freely, you have the right to vote even if you're a chick or black, etc.
To be on topic for just a moment: no one in their right mind gives two shits about the name of the encoder used on some music! The things people care about are: "Is it free?" and "is it easy?" ...and that's it. "People" being the general public, not slashdot.
As many people have commented, the thing holding Vorbis back are not its technical merits - to most tin ears it sounds fine - but the fact that it's the new guy and MP3 usually sounds "good enough" anyway. OGG will have to make sure that Vorbis is very free (beer/speech) and leave it at that. 3rd party people will make snazzy decoders and hardware vendors, like anyone, will look hard at the bottom line - trying to figure out if pushing a new format on consumers will eventually translate in a lower overall cost.
Carolyn Meinel is, in a nutshell, a flaming idiot. It's a credit to her social engineering skills that she managed to get Scientific American to publish her nasty fluff - and a discredit to SA.
http://www.dis.org/shipley/cpm/http://www.shmoo.com/mail/cypherpunks/may99/msg00
http://www.landfield.com/isn/mail-archive/1998/No
Wooo! Just do the following search on google: "Carolyn Meinel" site:attrition.org
...She's made about as many friends in the security community as Bill Gates would at a LUG meeting.