Yeah - there was show a long while back (about 5 years ago) on Discovery Channel about HPR. One of the guys built this beautiful rocket. Basically, he knew nothing about rocketry (I don't even think he even built any Estes models), but he had credit cards with large limits.
You probably have seen the type: macho dudes with too much credit and not enough sense living in a cracker-jack box of the suburb home on a second mortgage (taken out to finance the big boat, truck, and jet skis he just had to have). Anyhow, he and his friends spent a ton of his "money" on this rocket - custom carbon fiber tube made on a custom jig, painted perfectly - the thing was huge (12 feet or so long). They build the launch apparatus, got the engines and such (you can buy a lot of this stuff in kits and such). They put it all together, and they were being featured on the show.
What was funny was that every time he was bragging about something or another, you could see his wife in the background just rolling her eyes. She had that "look" on her face, which if you are married (I am), you are familiar with: The look that said "We are in so much debt OVER THIS?! - Geesh! Grow UP!" - but she didn't say anything. She didn't need to, her attitude said it all. IIRC, he had dumped around $20,000 into this project, and this was his first launch.
So, they tote this thing out to the launch site (some desert in Nevada, I think). They show several other launches, most go off without a hitch. A couple explode on the pad (one minute a pretty rocket, the next minute confetti!). Then, his rocket is next in line.
It launches beautifully - it goes up and up, waaaay up. The flight is perfect. Then comes the ejection charge...
I can't remember exactly - it either didn't go off, or the nose cone didn't separate properly and the side of the rocket blew out. Basically the thing comes tumbling down from some insane height and impacts the desert floor (tumbling, it didn't lawn dart). The rocket is a complete and total write-off.
You could just see how crushed he was, and how pissed off his wife was. I would have loved to been a "fly-on-the-wall" for the ride back home. Yeah - he was in the dog house (personally, if I was her, I would divorce his ass for being such a dumbshit with the family finances)...
People aren't buying into this because of several reasons, which I will summarize:
For most people and their equipment, DVDs are "good enough"
Most people have plain-jane TVs, and don't have the money to get an HD set
What is point of "Will and Grace" in HD?
What is the point of most television in HD?
Overall, cable TV sucks
You mean I have to re-buy all of my movies - AGAIN?
When choosing between energy costs and entertainment, energy will ALWAYS win
Credit is maxed out, both on cards and on mortgages
There isn't much more to say - HD content on a standard-def TV makes no sense, most people aren't buying HD sets because they can't afford it (because of being overextended on credit and energy costs), those that do have HD sets may buy it, but they are facing the same issues (plus the content on HD disks currently isn't compelling), etc, etc.
When will we know when HD content disks have "arrived" - when you can buy porn on them, and not a moment before.
Whenever I'm asked for my SSN, I always ask if there's an alternative. (And wait while they check with their supervisor). I succeed maybe half the time. The other half, well, I usually cave.
In many cases (particularly insurance) - you simply put on the form "please assign", and a number will be assigned to you. Do this at your job (for your medical insurance), then when you go to the emergency room, give them the card - it will all match. If not, they can't refuse you treatment in the emergency room (I am pretty sure there are laws against refusing treatment to patients for lack of payment or whatnot - otherwise, how would so many illegal immigrants get treatment, because they do), so put "please assign" or some fake number. With the risk to the hospital of a malpractice or wrongful death suit (from your family if you die), do you really think they are going to refuse you treatment? I suppose they could try, but hospitals have been sued for less (and in many cases they lost). I am sure if they let you die in an emergency because you didn't supply a 9 digit number, they would lose that suit (not that it would help you, though).
For credit cards and other financial instruments, you are pretty much hosed because of IRS laws and such - they really didn't think that one out when they thought to tie it together to the SSN (big surprise).
Rather than trying to restrict what *protocols* are used on networks, I suspect that, some time in the future, ISP's will begin charging the same way almost every other utility does: charging per unit of bandwidth consumed, possibly with a flat fee until some cap is reached, and then a price per unit of bandwidth consumed after that.
I don't use bittorrent, but for me, if my ISP (cox) would do this, that would be perfectly fine - with only a few conditions: give me a static IP and don't limit my ability to run any server I want to (web, mail, etc). In other words, let me be a minimum level "peer" to you, just like the internet was designed to allow.
I doubt I will ever see that happen, though - not without spending some bucks for "business-class service"...
Ask them the following: "Would you buy a book to read if it had a lock on it, like a diary?" - "What if it came with the key?" - "What if the key only worked for that book, and no other book?" - "What if you lost the key?" - "What if the publisher of the book wouldn't sell you another key?" - "What if the key stopped working after a period of time - 1 day - 1 month - 1 year - 10 years - 100 years - would you still buy the book?" - "Would you hand the book down to your kids? Grandkids? Etc?" - "What if the publisher came out with the same book, but with pictures, and it used a different key - would you buy it again?" - "What if that were the only copy of the book left, and the key was lost to time - what then?"
Then ask them to imagine a future where all knowledge and all information - from stories, to works of art, paintings, even our laws - were all written in these books. Then ask them "What if the keys were lost to some of them - would that be OK?" - "Would that be fair to the future?" - "Would it be fair to the citizens?" - "Would it be fair to your children?"
Then, ask them if they have bought any DVDs - then tell them that DVDs are such "books" - today and forever...
Tell them we better hope to not lose any of the keys...
I actually hope kids aren't doing this - plenty of adults have died from it, some in very embarassing situations (of course, they are dead, so they probably don't care). It's a dangerous kink that even when done properly can kill you - I wouldn't expect a kid to do it "properly" when most adults who practice it, don't. For the record, I don't practice such a kink - any kind of kink where you hang yourself just to make it feel better seems to Darwin Award for me - I am not that stupid. But that doesn't mean I think everyone else should do the same or it should be outlawed - I say if you want to potentially kill yourself, you should have every right to do so - after all, it is your body.
I mean, I'd just hate to have a nice record of what we talked about to refer back to, copies of relevant text, images of relevant popups, etc.
If you had that record, then you would be able to point to it when they come to you and say "This isn't what I wanted!" - you could point to that record and say "This is what you told me to do, and furthermore what I gave you works exactly as you asked for!". Of course, the more extreme and insane clients would still look you straight in the eye and deny it - even if it had their signature and signoff on it. Believe me, this is the reason.
If I had the time, I would do it myself - alas, I have way to many other projects going on to do this. However, I don't see why someone else couldn't "pick up the torch" based on this blurb...
I want to see a LiveCD which you can pop into a machine with two NICs, and it runs giving you:
An iptables NAT firewall/router (hell, maybe even make it a real firewall)
SQUID proxy server
Dynamic TOR router with "whitelist" config
Custom P2P search engine spider
You would set up your browser to proxy through the SQUID. The whitelist for the TOR router would only route requests and such through TOR for certain IPs/domains you have configured. The P2P search engine would use a spidering approach to check its cache of found sites and return them for searches, but if not found, it would queue up a search to look for it to populate the cache while also sending out the request to others in the grid of users of the system (via TOR or otherwise - the P2P app needs to be at least as secure as FreeNet). Every month your spider would "dance" and re-spider the sites and any others found (maybe it could use google as a seed) to update your cache. It would only be specific to your tastes - the P2P aspect would handle the rest (that is, if you search your personal search using something not in your spidered cache of stuff, it would use the P2P engine to find the results hopefully on the grid - if it doesn't find it, it would use TOR and google to seed itself and cache it).
Your "homepage" would point to this P2P search page (residing on the server - cache is stored on hard drive, possibly encrypted), and when you click on a result, if not already defined, it would "block" it, saying you are going to an "unknown" site - use regular proxy or TOR proxy - to let you set up a filter system whereby for sites you want to remain anonymous about, it TORs you to them.
All of this would also have a web-based configuration system - hell, if they could fit all of this into a WRT54G (is that right) Linux wifi router box, that would be perfect - but such a system may be too heavy for it (dunno).
I figure this would be the minimum thing needed to keep the bastards from seeing what we do and what we search - we need our own private and free search system, even if it isn't as fast or complete as google. TOR and P2P takes care of the rest. Now, I am sure I am missing something, but I think this kind of a system would be a good start. Does anybody else have some suggestions? The TOR router would be used only b
My situation isn't as extreme, and I am only concerned with backing up "important" stuff. For me, this is development work from my webserver and home directories. My webserver is also my fileserver (at some point I want to split this to separate machines, but for now it works out OK).
So, every night on the various workstations (for now mine and my wife's boxes - both running Linux) I have a cron job that backs up the "important" portions of the home directories - for us, this includes the ~/.mozilla directory as well as various subdirs under ~/data (and in my case, my.jpilot directory to save my palm pilot stuff), which hold "on the workstation" development/work files. This cron job copies these files over to the fileserver which is mounted as a "home" SMB share (dynamically by the backup script) - one per user. Each are staggered - mine runs at 1am, hers at 2am.
At 6am, on the fileserver, a cron job runs a similar task, but in this case it copies from the backup areas on the mounted SMB home shares to a central staging area. It also copies various work directories on the server - mainly backing up webserver (apache) directories, and several config files for apache and mysql, as well as a backup dump of the mysql DB. Once all of this is in the staging area, it uses mkisofs to build an ISO9660 image of the staging area. It names this file in a certain manner, then copies it to a public SMB share under/iso. Multiple copies are kept (last 7 days) in this archival area. Once a week I burn a "latest" copy to CD. At one time I had it do this automatically to a burner in the server, but because this server currently sits in an unairconditioned room (that doubles as a workshop - not the best place for a server, I know), CD-R drives don't last long. In theory, I could have another cron job on my workstations pull the iso across and burn it, but I have been a bit lazy.
This system has served me well for about a year now. I have had to make a few tweaks and changes over time (recently caught an issue that was causing my backup images to grow by 5 meg each week - turned out to be a.mozilla cache I was saving that I shouldn't have been), and it has worked well. It even saved my butt once - I had the system die on me (the server itself, unfortunately - at the time running Debian Woody, and it was my own fault because I tried to do a apt-get update on it and it was after the switchover to sarge on the update servers and it borked my system good) and I had to rebuild it (switched to Mandrake 10.1), then restore off of backup. Everything restored beautifully - including the mysql DB image and everything. I had it all back up in a day, and it has been humming along fine since.
I store the ISO image CDs in a CD binder that holds around 40 or so CDs - when it is full, the "first" one is taken out and put on a spindle in storage, all of them shift upward, and the new one is put at the tail (LIFO? FILO?) - I figure when the spindle is full, it will go into "archival" storage to collect dust. In a way, I can in theory go back for years to grab old images if I ever need to - I haven't yet, though. When a CD isn't big enough (I am at about 300MB on my images so far), I can switch to DVDs or span CDs or something.
I don't think this is the perfect backup solution (for home, and definitely not for business), and if I wish I had something different (I have given thought to mirroring the images to a USB drive hanging off the server as more insurance). However, it is better than nothing at all, and has proved itself in an emergency to boot, plus it didn't cost me a dime (just many hours of tweaking).
Re:What about other (non-STS) launches?
on
Watching a Space Shot?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
The problem with just about all launches, manned or unmanned (aside from weather sounding) is that most of them take place as close to the equator as possible to get a "boost" from the earth's rotational speed. Thus, if you live in Montana, expect to drive a little.
Now, something you might consider, while nowhere near as large as a real launch, but still a fun day out that you and your kids will enjoy, is to attend a high-power model rocket gathering in your area. Despite the name of "model rocket", these things are anything but models - don't expect Estes launches here (although some clubs run small launches for kids in between the main launches). These things are as big as and act the same way as a regular missle (and if you want a "thundering" launch, the hybrid liquid NOS/solid fuel rockets are very fun to watch). Flights of +10,000-20,000 feet are not unheard of. These are great events to go to, many of them have vendors selling smaller kits, but if you buy, be prepared for a very expensive hobby (a rocket costing $5-10,000.00 to build, then exploding on the pad, is also not unheard of). Also, you need to be mindful of all warnings and such of the launches, and watch/listen to everything - I have seen large rockets lawn-dart not too far from crowds, and if you aren't looking, you could have a painful lesson.
But don't let that put you off - it can be a fun occasion for the entire family - bring some lawn chairs and binoculars, maybe a barbeque or a picnic basket. Lasts for a few hours, and you will have a great time, and meet some interesting people (at one I attended, I met a guy who successfully launched a homemade rocket he made out of PVC pipe and some two-by-fours - no kidding!)...
Consenting adults demean and beat each other senseless all the time, and no one is killed or maimed.
Hell, non-consenting adults demean and beat (and shoot and stab) each other senseless all the time, at the behest of their country and ruler far away (where s/he doesn't have to get dirty), and it is a-ok, as long as the those being maimed are elsewhere and look different than you and hold different views.
This form of cognitive dissonance is frightening: It is alright for a group we call The State (a sovereign entity) to tell someone (another sovereign entity) to "kill that man over there" (in war or sentence of death), but the moment that self-same individual decides to do the same thing on their own volition, it is suddenly a very heinous crime and must be punished accordingly.
Why is it ok if we as a group do it, but suddenly wrong if we as an individual does it? Logically, shouldn't it always be WRONG, regardless of the actor?
But consider that by our society's own rules we've recognized that children have not fully formed their decision-making processes and that we've placed them under the thumb of adults.
Unless they kill somebody, or do something equally heinous, then they most likely will be "tried as an adult for their actions". All of a sudden, if it is a violent act they partake in, they suddenly have the capability of adult decision making and should pay the price adults do. Otherwise, nothing is their fault at all.
Oh, and they also don't have any say in the process of the creation of laws (ie, voting), so they have no way of influencing the process and laws surrounding, say, the death penalty - which they just might get as their punishment "as an adult" who has been tried and sentenced for whatever heinous crime they partook in.
I absolutely, positivily hate human society - completely illogical and irrational when it comes to how it operates - and somehow everyone justifies this as the group, but the moment an individual attempts to act in the same manner as the group, it is suddenly bad and wrong (unless it revolves around religion, then - for some religions - it is a-ok!).
I seriously doubt that, particularly in the case of "Jack" - based on all written accounts I have read and the various photos of his deeds, this dude, whoever he (or she?) was, was messed up in the head, big time. Psychopathic serial killer big time, as a matter of fact...
Actually, the bulb itself generates little heat, but the ballast portion gets pretty hot (not as hot as an incandescent bulb, but pretty hot for the electronics used in the ballast)...
I don't want to start a "Star Trek" flame war, as I am not a ST geek to know everything about everything in the series (I do enjoy it though), but I think that scene isn't too far from what might actually occur.
Think of it this way: What Scotty knows about engineering and such is in the context of his time period, which in that movie was pretty far displaced from "now". True, he probably does know of older computer technology, but most of his day-to-day knowledge centers around the technology available to him in his own time. It shouldn't be any wonder that he might make a few mistakes and take a little bit to "get up to speed" when faced with what to him was a very old piece of technology.
I don't know if you have ever had a chance to visit a well stocked computer museum, but if you ever do, you will be amazed. Take a look at an old IBM card sorter or card punch - these were two of many devices used to communicate with computers in the 1950's and 1960's - even if you know what they do, and have read about how a Hollerith or IBM card is formatted, you would still be stymied by both of the devices (though the sorter is easier to understand, and becomes even easier to understand if you operate it with a real deck of unsorted cards). Here we are only talking technology 50 or so years old. Most people don't even know how to properly load an open-reel 9-track tape into a vacuum column drive...
Go back a little further to the plug-board era of ENIAC and other machines, and things get really hairy. Go back further to the 1930's and you see analog differential analyzer devices which had to be set up by positioning belts and motors and wheels and such (knife edge wheels on glass disks, etc) - to get a calculation output from that (in the form of graph on a 2-axis pen plotter if you were lucky) requires a lot of knowledge in many different areas that most people don't even have today. Go back a little further, and you are back in punch-card territory with Hollerith tabulation machines (which were used not only for census tracking, but in some cases warehouse inventory tracking and purchasing tracking - some of the first credit processing systems were done with Hollerith tabulators). Go back much further, and you are talking devices made by Pascal, Napier, and others for simple mechanical-based calculations - while a Pascaline is fairly easy to operate (although very finicky and fragile), your first time setting up a calculation for multiplication might give you pause.
I have only scratched the surface here, too - the history of computation and calculation using machinery and mechanical/electronic means is long and varied, and not nearly as large a time span as that between "today" and the time period Scotty hailed from. So, no, I don't find the scene as unrealistic as some imagine it to be, given the examples I have explained above...
Furthermore, even if it is properly crimped/soldered, it is a mechanical connection, and if in an area subject to vibration, it may become loose, thus unbalancing the signal and radiating in time...
...of any good tutorials and such on how to properly resize a swap partition in Linux? I am running a Mandrake 10.1 box right now, and while I have no real problems with it, I am pretty sure when I set it up I made the swap undersized, and I would like to increase it (I have 512MB, and I think my swap is either that size or maybe even smaller - I have yet to notice an issue, though). Whether using a GUI tool under X or using the CLI is fine with me, just as long as I understand the process and don't muck up my system...
How is it that we netizens seemingly can effect change on an issue like this, which in the grand scheme of things is pretty minor, but are at the same time seemingly unable to effect changes on issues which really effect us (bad laws governing the internet, DRM, etc)? It seems like all we care about are things which cause problems with our material goods, rather than things which can potentially effect us personally...
$10,000 for a solar electric install is about right to offset about 1/2 the typical energy usage in a 2000 s.f. home. From what I have seen, it takes around $25,000 to $30,000 to go completely off-grid (electricity-wise) in a 2000 s.f. home. Unfortunately, these figures always neglect one thing: cost of battery maintenance. You see, when you build a solar electric system for a house, you need to charge up batteries - you are really running off the batteries with the panels keeping things charged up and distributing the load in spikes. You also have to replace a lot of things with more energy efficient "solar" 12/24 volt DC stuff - this means things like fans, lights, refrigerators, etc. Not a difficult thing to do, most of the stuff is available from boat and RV dealers. It is just more efficient to do this than to use inverters and standard machines.
However, if you really want to save money, solar electricity isn't where it is at. Just look at what your big energy users are in your house: invariably it is the water heater and refrigerator that suck the most energy. Figure out how to make both of them solar powered, and you are golden. The fridge is the hard one - there are solar powered fridges out there (they work similar to propane powered fridges in RVs). Solar water heating, though, is a no-brainer. Given enough time and materials (even junk), you could build and install your own solar water heating system.
There are a ton of options available for alternative energy use - if you really want to do this, I reccommend the following: Knowledge Publications book "Sunshine to Dollars" (knowledgepublications.com) - they also have some great information on homebrew hydrogen generation and usage. Also, look at the Mother Earth News archive (they have the entire thing online - google for it) - Mother Earth has been doing alternative-everything since before it was "cool" (their archive stretches way back into the 1970's - seriously, you can find articles on how to run your car on wood gas from a gas generator you tow behind you - crazy junk like that). Do a lot of googling on this subject, and you will quickly see that there are options out there that are cheap and easy to build, but expensive to buy pre-made (unfortunately, while you can homebrew a solar electric device, there isn't a way to build one that is as efficient as pre-made panels - however, you can build your own panels for far less than buying them if: 1) you are willing to do so, 2) you can find a source of surplus/second/broken solar cells, and 3) you are handy with a soldering iron).
I think part of this issue has to do with the brand of the bulb, the orientation of the fixture, and the fixture itself. At home on my computer desk my lamp is a magnifying glass lamp (has a large magnifying lens with a bulb behind it mounted on an adjustable arm). I used to have an incandescent lamp in it, but I soon switched it to a CFL because of heat output. The first CFL I put in it died within a year, making some erratic buzzing noises, and the color was weird. I switched it to a different brand CFL, and it has worked fine for a couple of years now.
I found that the old bulb had burned and brown spots on it, and looking at the lamp, the cooling vents on the ballast portion were different from the new bulb - the new bulb had different sizes and spacing. I figure that in the confined area of the desk lamp socket, it couldn't keep the ballast cool enough and it started overloading with heat.
Maybe such a bulb would have worked fine in a regular desk lamp (where the bulb stands upright) or in a lamp with the socket more exposed and horizontal. In a downward facing lamp (like a recessed can light) such a lamp might actually start a fire if the ballast got too hot and the heat had nowhere to go. I think users need to take this into account when they replace their bulbs with CFLs, and purchase accordingly. Manufacturers also need to take this into account, and educate the buyer via the packaging and instructions. In the meantime, they should work on making the bulbs more robust and the ballasts less heat sensitive (or more efficient, which can only help everything), so that the CFL's can be used in any orientation with nearly any fixture.
Finally, they really need to figure out how to make a dimmable CFL, as well as smaller CFLs (for use where incandescent miniture base bulbs are used, like on ceiling fans and chandeliers that use 40 watt small base bulbs).
Personally, what I would do is tear down the printers and save all the loose parts - gears, belts, shafts, bearings (especially any linear bearings!), stepper motors (and controller chips, if any!), fasteners, etc. The rest would go into recycling. Then I would package the parts together and attempt to sell them on Ebay (and other forums) as DIY CNC machine parts. If you have the skills, build up a set of plans or whatnot to show how to build such a machine and hook it up to a custom Linux/DOS/Windows box. I am not sure if you would make more money or not by parting out printers, but you would be doing others a favor (the difficult work of disassembling a printer for small CNC machine parts). If you had the tools, skills, time, and materials, you could even fabricate CNC building kits or full machines made from recycled printer parts! How cool would it be to take a 2D printer and recycle it for low cost as a 3D printer (I wonder how many people would buy a $200.00 CNC machine)?
Unless things have changed there is a cost problem with a color laser printer, and that problem is the toner cartridges. Depending on how much color printing you do, and how "uniform" the color printing you do is, you could end up in the bad situation of having to replace not one, but three to four toner cartridges. Since most of the toner cartridges today have an integrated drum (which is a good thing), you can probably expect to pay $150-300.00 (at the outside maximum) when you have to change toner cartridges. If you only change one or another, you could find yourself running out again on one of the other cartridges, or with color mismatching (as others are lower and spread out wrong versus the filled ones), etc. If you can afford it, great, but keep it in mind if you go that route - your printer might be cheap (if you get lucky and find one used for $20 like your LaserJet), but the toner might eat you in the end (however, depending on the smarts of the printer and how much you do color printing, they may last for years as well - so the money will still be worth it). For myself, I only do B&W printing using my LaserJet 6MP - if I ever need color (has yet to occur in the 3 years I have had the printer), I will do it at work or take it to a Kinkos or something...
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You probably have seen the type: macho dudes with too much credit and not enough sense living in a cracker-jack box of the suburb home on a second mortgage (taken out to finance the big boat, truck, and jet skis he just had to have). Anyhow, he and his friends spent a ton of his "money" on this rocket - custom carbon fiber tube made on a custom jig, painted perfectly - the thing was huge (12 feet or so long). They build the launch apparatus, got the engines and such (you can buy a lot of this stuff in kits and such). They put it all together, and they were being featured on the show.
What was funny was that every time he was bragging about something or another, you could see his wife in the background just rolling her eyes. She had that "look" on her face, which if you are married (I am), you are familiar with: The look that said "We are in so much debt OVER THIS?! - Geesh! Grow UP!" - but she didn't say anything. She didn't need to, her attitude said it all. IIRC, he had dumped around $20,000 into this project, and this was his first launch.
So, they tote this thing out to the launch site (some desert in Nevada, I think). They show several other launches, most go off without a hitch. A couple explode on the pad (one minute a pretty rocket, the next minute confetti!). Then, his rocket is next in line.
It launches beautifully - it goes up and up, waaaay up. The flight is perfect. Then comes the ejection charge...
I can't remember exactly - it either didn't go off, or the nose cone didn't separate properly and the side of the rocket blew out. Basically the thing comes tumbling down from some insane height and impacts the desert floor (tumbling, it didn't lawn dart). The rocket is a complete and total write-off.
You could just see how crushed he was, and how pissed off his wife was. I would have loved to been a "fly-on-the-wall" for the ride back home. Yeah - he was in the dog house (personally, if I was her, I would divorce his ass for being such a dumbshit with the family finances)...
I am pretty sure that title went to "Microsoft Bob"...
There isn't much more to say - HD content on a standard-def TV makes no sense, most people aren't buying HD sets because they can't afford it (because of being overextended on credit and energy costs), those that do have HD sets may buy it, but they are facing the same issues (plus the content on HD disks currently isn't compelling), etc, etc.
When will we know when HD content disks have "arrived" - when you can buy porn on them, and not a moment before.
In many cases (particularly insurance) - you simply put on the form "please assign", and a number will be assigned to you. Do this at your job (for your medical insurance), then when you go to the emergency room, give them the card - it will all match. If not, they can't refuse you treatment in the emergency room (I am pretty sure there are laws against refusing treatment to patients for lack of payment or whatnot - otherwise, how would so many illegal immigrants get treatment, because they do), so put "please assign" or some fake number. With the risk to the hospital of a malpractice or wrongful death suit (from your family if you die), do you really think they are going to refuse you treatment? I suppose they could try, but hospitals have been sued for less (and in many cases they lost). I am sure if they let you die in an emergency because you didn't supply a 9 digit number, they would lose that suit (not that it would help you, though).
For credit cards and other financial instruments, you are pretty much hosed because of IRS laws and such - they really didn't think that one out when they thought to tie it together to the SSN (big surprise).
I don't use bittorrent, but for me, if my ISP (cox) would do this, that would be perfectly fine - with only a few conditions: give me a static IP and don't limit my ability to run any server I want to (web, mail, etc). In other words, let me be a minimum level "peer" to you, just like the internet was designed to allow.
I doubt I will ever see that happen, though - not without spending some bucks for "business-class service"...
Ask them the following: "Would you buy a book to read if it had a lock on it, like a diary?" - "What if it came with the key?" - "What if the key only worked for that book, and no other book?" - "What if you lost the key?" - "What if the publisher of the book wouldn't sell you another key?" - "What if the key stopped working after a period of time - 1 day - 1 month - 1 year - 10 years - 100 years - would you still buy the book?" - "Would you hand the book down to your kids? Grandkids? Etc?" - "What if the publisher came out with the same book, but with pictures, and it used a different key - would you buy it again?" - "What if that were the only copy of the book left, and the key was lost to time - what then?"
Then ask them to imagine a future where all knowledge and all information - from stories, to works of art, paintings, even our laws - were all written in these books. Then ask them "What if the keys were lost to some of them - would that be OK?" - "Would that be fair to the future?" - "Would it be fair to the citizens?" - "Would it be fair to your children?"
Then, ask them if they have bought any DVDs - then tell them that DVDs are such "books" - today and forever...
Tell them we better hope to not lose any of the keys...
I actually hope kids aren't doing this - plenty of adults have died from it, some in very embarassing situations (of course, they are dead, so they probably don't care). It's a dangerous kink that even when done properly can kill you - I wouldn't expect a kid to do it "properly" when most adults who practice it, don't. For the record, I don't practice such a kink - any kind of kink where you hang yourself just to make it feel better seems to Darwin Award for me - I am not that stupid. But that doesn't mean I think everyone else should do the same or it should be outlawed - I say if you want to potentially kill yourself, you should have every right to do so - after all, it is your body.
If you had that record, then you would be able to point to it when they come to you and say "This isn't what I wanted!" - you could point to that record and say "This is what you told me to do, and furthermore what I gave you works exactly as you asked for!". Of course, the more extreme and insane clients would still look you straight in the eye and deny it - even if it had their signature and signoff on it. Believe me, this is the reason.
CYA through deniability...
I want to see a LiveCD which you can pop into a machine with two NICs, and it runs giving you:
You would set up your browser to proxy through the SQUID. The whitelist for the TOR router would only route requests and such through TOR for certain IPs/domains you have configured. The P2P search engine would use a spidering approach to check its cache of found sites and return them for searches, but if not found, it would queue up a search to look for it to populate the cache while also sending out the request to others in the grid of users of the system (via TOR or otherwise - the P2P app needs to be at least as secure as FreeNet). Every month your spider would "dance" and re-spider the sites and any others found (maybe it could use google as a seed) to update your cache. It would only be specific to your tastes - the P2P aspect would handle the rest (that is, if you search your personal search using something not in your spidered cache of stuff, it would use the P2P engine to find the results hopefully on the grid - if it doesn't find it, it would use TOR and google to seed itself and cache it).
Your "homepage" would point to this P2P search page (residing on the server - cache is stored on hard drive, possibly encrypted), and when you click on a result, if not already defined, it would "block" it, saying you are going to an "unknown" site - use regular proxy or TOR proxy - to let you set up a filter system whereby for sites you want to remain anonymous about, it TORs you to them.
All of this would also have a web-based configuration system - hell, if they could fit all of this into a WRT54G (is that right) Linux wifi router box, that would be perfect - but such a system may be too heavy for it (dunno).
I figure this would be the minimum thing needed to keep the bastards from seeing what we do and what we search - we need our own private and free search system, even if it isn't as fast or complete as google. TOR and P2P takes care of the rest. Now, I am sure I am missing something, but I think this kind of a system would be a good start. Does anybody else have some suggestions?
The TOR router would be used only b
So, every night on the various workstations (for now mine and my wife's boxes - both running Linux) I have a cron job that backs up the "important" portions of the home directories - for us, this includes the ~/.mozilla directory as well as various subdirs under ~/data (and in my case, my
At 6am, on the fileserver, a cron job runs a similar task, but in this case it copies from the backup areas on the mounted SMB home shares to a central staging area. It also copies various work directories on the server - mainly backing up webserver (apache) directories, and several config files for apache and mysql, as well as a backup dump of the mysql DB. Once all of this is in the staging area, it uses mkisofs to build an ISO9660 image of the staging area. It names this file in a certain manner, then copies it to a public SMB share under
This system has served me well for about a year now. I have had to make a few tweaks and changes over time (recently caught an issue that was causing my backup images to grow by 5 meg each week - turned out to be a
I store the ISO image CDs in a CD binder that holds around 40 or so CDs - when it is full, the "first" one is taken out and put on a spindle in storage, all of them shift upward, and the new one is put at the tail (LIFO? FILO?) - I figure when the spindle is full, it will go into "archival" storage to collect dust. In a way, I can in theory go back for years to grab old images if I ever need to - I haven't yet, though. When a CD isn't big enough (I am at about 300MB on my images so far), I can switch to DVDs or span CDs or something.
I don't think this is the perfect backup solution (for home, and definitely not for business), and if I wish I had something different (I have given thought to mirroring the images to a USB drive hanging off the server as more insurance). However, it is better than nothing at all, and has proved itself in an emergency to boot, plus it didn't cost me a dime (just many hours of tweaking).
Now, something you might consider, while nowhere near as large as a real launch, but still a fun day out that you and your kids will enjoy, is to attend a high-power model rocket gathering in your area. Despite the name of "model rocket", these things are anything but models - don't expect Estes launches here (although some clubs run small launches for kids in between the main launches). These things are as big as and act the same way as a regular missle (and if you want a "thundering" launch, the hybrid liquid NOS/solid fuel rockets are very fun to watch). Flights of +10,000-20,000 feet are not unheard of. These are great events to go to, many of them have vendors selling smaller kits, but if you buy, be prepared for a very expensive hobby (a rocket costing $5-10,000.00 to build, then exploding on the pad, is also not unheard of). Also, you need to be mindful of all warnings and such of the launches, and watch/listen to everything - I have seen large rockets lawn-dart not too far from crowds, and if you aren't looking, you could have a painful lesson.
But don't let that put you off - it can be a fun occasion for the entire family - bring some lawn chairs and binoculars, maybe a barbeque or a picnic basket. Lasts for a few hours, and you will have a great time, and meet some interesting people (at one I attended, I met a guy who successfully launched a homemade rocket he made out of PVC pipe and some two-by-fours - no kidding!)...
Hell, non-consenting adults demean and beat (and shoot and stab) each other senseless all the time, at the behest of their country and ruler far away (where s/he doesn't have to get dirty), and it is a-ok, as long as the those being maimed are elsewhere and look different than you and hold different views.
This form of cognitive dissonance is frightening: It is alright for a group we call The State (a sovereign entity) to tell someone (another sovereign entity) to "kill that man over there" (in war or sentence of death), but the moment that self-same individual decides to do the same thing on their own volition, it is suddenly a very heinous crime and must be punished accordingly.
Why is it ok if we as a group do it, but suddenly wrong if we as an individual does it? Logically, shouldn't it always be WRONG, regardless of the actor?
Unless they kill somebody, or do something equally heinous, then they most likely will be "tried as an adult for their actions". All of a sudden, if it is a violent act they partake in, they suddenly have the capability of adult decision making and should pay the price adults do. Otherwise, nothing is their fault at all.
Oh, and they also don't have any say in the process of the creation of laws (ie, voting), so they have no way of influencing the process and laws surrounding, say, the death penalty - which they just might get as their punishment "as an adult" who has been tried and sentenced for whatever heinous crime they partook in.
I absolutely, positivily hate human society - completely illogical and irrational when it comes to how it operates - and somehow everyone justifies this as the group, but the moment an individual attempts to act in the same manner as the group, it is suddenly bad and wrong (unless it revolves around religion, then - for some religions - it is a-ok!).
stupid, stupid, stupid.
"Blame the Jew (and other undesirables)"?
I hear that here in America we have a similar game coming out, except it is called "Blame the Immigrant"...
Stupid humans - they never seem to learn...
I seriously doubt that, particularly in the case of "Jack" - based on all written accounts I have read and the various photos of his deeds, this dude, whoever he (or she?) was, was messed up in the head, big time. Psychopathic serial killer big time, as a matter of fact...
Umm, no. Autoerotic Asphyxiation is where you choke yourself while masturbating - what you are describing is what is known as "breath play" (IIRC)...
Actually, the bulb itself generates little heat, but the ballast portion gets pretty hot (not as hot as an incandescent bulb, but pretty hot for the electronics used in the ballast)...
Think of it this way: What Scotty knows about engineering and such is in the context of his time period, which in that movie was pretty far displaced from "now". True, he probably does know of older computer technology, but most of his day-to-day knowledge centers around the technology available to him in his own time. It shouldn't be any wonder that he might make a few mistakes and take a little bit to "get up to speed" when faced with what to him was a very old piece of technology.
I don't know if you have ever had a chance to visit a well stocked computer museum, but if you ever do, you will be amazed. Take a look at an old IBM card sorter or card punch - these were two of many devices used to communicate with computers in the 1950's and 1960's - even if you know what they do, and have read about how a Hollerith or IBM card is formatted, you would still be stymied by both of the devices (though the sorter is easier to understand, and becomes even easier to understand if you operate it with a real deck of unsorted cards). Here we are only talking technology 50 or so years old. Most people don't even know how to properly load an open-reel 9-track tape into a vacuum column drive...
Go back a little further to the plug-board era of ENIAC and other machines, and things get really hairy. Go back further to the 1930's and you see analog differential analyzer devices which had to be set up by positioning belts and motors and wheels and such (knife edge wheels on glass disks, etc) - to get a calculation output from that (in the form of graph on a 2-axis pen plotter if you were lucky) requires a lot of knowledge in many different areas that most people don't even have today. Go back a little further, and you are back in punch-card territory with Hollerith tabulation machines (which were used not only for census tracking, but in some cases warehouse inventory tracking and purchasing tracking - some of the first credit processing systems were done with Hollerith tabulators). Go back much further, and you are talking devices made by Pascal, Napier, and others for simple mechanical-based calculations - while a Pascaline is fairly easy to operate (although very finicky and fragile), your first time setting up a calculation for multiplication might give you pause.
I have only scratched the surface here, too - the history of computation and calculation using machinery and mechanical/electronic means is long and varied, and not nearly as large a time span as that between "today" and the time period Scotty hailed from. So, no, I don't find the scene as unrealistic as some imagine it to be, given the examples I have explained above...
Furthermore, even if it is properly crimped/soldered, it is a mechanical connection, and if in an area subject to vibration, it may become loose, thus unbalancing the signal and radiating in time...
...of any good tutorials and such on how to properly resize a swap partition in Linux? I am running a Mandrake 10.1 box right now, and while I have no real problems with it, I am pretty sure when I set it up I made the swap undersized, and I would like to increase it (I have 512MB, and I think my swap is either that size or maybe even smaller - I have yet to notice an issue, though). Whether using a GUI tool under X or using the CLI is fine with me, just as long as I understand the process and don't muck up my system...
How is it that we netizens seemingly can effect change on an issue like this, which in the grand scheme of things is pretty minor, but are at the same time seemingly unable to effect changes on issues which really effect us (bad laws governing the internet, DRM, etc)? It seems like all we care about are things which cause problems with our material goods, rather than things which can potentially effect us personally...
However, if you really want to save money, solar electricity isn't where it is at. Just look at what your big energy users are in your house: invariably it is the water heater and refrigerator that suck the most energy. Figure out how to make both of them solar powered, and you are golden. The fridge is the hard one - there are solar powered fridges out there (they work similar to propane powered fridges in RVs). Solar water heating, though, is a no-brainer. Given enough time and materials (even junk), you could build and install your own solar water heating system.
There are a ton of options available for alternative energy use - if you really want to do this, I reccommend the following: Knowledge Publications book "Sunshine to Dollars" (knowledgepublications.com) - they also have some great information on homebrew hydrogen generation and usage. Also, look at the Mother Earth News archive (they have the entire thing online - google for it) - Mother Earth has been doing alternative-everything since before it was "cool" (their archive stretches way back into the 1970's - seriously, you can find articles on how to run your car on wood gas from a gas generator you tow behind you - crazy junk like that). Do a lot of googling on this subject, and you will quickly see that there are options out there that are cheap and easy to build, but expensive to buy pre-made (unfortunately, while you can homebrew a solar electric device, there isn't a way to build one that is as efficient as pre-made panels - however, you can build your own panels for far less than buying them if: 1) you are willing to do so, 2) you can find a source of surplus/second/broken solar cells, and 3) you are handy with a soldering iron).
Good luck!
I found that the old bulb had burned and brown spots on it, and looking at the lamp, the cooling vents on the ballast portion were different from the new bulb - the new bulb had different sizes and spacing. I figure that in the confined area of the desk lamp socket, it couldn't keep the ballast cool enough and it started overloading with heat.
Maybe such a bulb would have worked fine in a regular desk lamp (where the bulb stands upright) or in a lamp with the socket more exposed and horizontal. In a downward facing lamp (like a recessed can light) such a lamp might actually start a fire if the ballast got too hot and the heat had nowhere to go. I think users need to take this into account when they replace their bulbs with CFLs, and purchase accordingly. Manufacturers also need to take this into account, and educate the buyer via the packaging and instructions. In the meantime, they should work on making the bulbs more robust and the ballasts less heat sensitive (or more efficient, which can only help everything), so that the CFL's can be used in any orientation with nearly any fixture.
Finally, they really need to figure out how to make a dimmable CFL, as well as smaller CFLs (for use where incandescent miniture base bulbs are used, like on ceiling fans and chandeliers that use 40 watt small base bulbs).
Personally, what I would do is tear down the printers and save all the loose parts - gears, belts, shafts, bearings (especially any linear bearings!), stepper motors (and controller chips, if any!), fasteners, etc. The rest would go into recycling. Then I would package the parts together and attempt to sell them on Ebay (and other forums) as DIY CNC machine parts. If you have the skills, build up a set of plans or whatnot to show how to build such a machine and hook it up to a custom Linux/DOS/Windows box. I am not sure if you would make more money or not by parting out printers, but you would be doing others a favor (the difficult work of disassembling a printer for small CNC machine parts). If you had the tools, skills, time, and materials, you could even fabricate CNC building kits or full machines made from recycled printer parts! How cool would it be to take a 2D printer and recycle it for low cost as a 3D printer (I wonder how many people would buy a $200.00 CNC machine)?
Unless things have changed there is a cost problem with a color laser printer, and that problem is the toner cartridges. Depending on how much color printing you do, and how "uniform" the color printing you do is, you could end up in the bad situation of having to replace not one, but three to four toner cartridges. Since most of the toner cartridges today have an integrated drum (which is a good thing), you can probably expect to pay $150-300.00 (at the outside maximum) when you have to change toner cartridges. If you only change one or another, you could find yourself running out again on one of the other cartridges, or with color mismatching (as others are lower and spread out wrong versus the filled ones), etc. If you can afford it, great, but keep it in mind if you go that route - your printer might be cheap (if you get lucky and find one used for $20 like your LaserJet), but the toner might eat you in the end (however, depending on the smarts of the printer and how much you do color printing, they may last for years as well - so the money will still be worth it). For myself, I only do B&W printing using my LaserJet 6MP - if I ever need color (has yet to occur in the 3 years I have had the printer), I will do it at work or take it to a Kinkos or something...