Can these things be adapted to use a vent? I have a spot where there used to be a regular wall heater; the vent and propane lines are still there. (The propane line is in the attic, of all places.)
I wouldn't care to use one without venting, no matter how "safe" it's supposed to be.
The local heating etc. contractor told me that these "use your water heater" systems are by far the cheapest/most efficient to run. After all, the water heater has to keep the water hot all the time anyway, so when you're not using hot water for something else, why not use it to heat the house? otherwise it's just wasted!
If I were building a new house, I'd certainly install such a system.
When mine was replaced in 2001, I was told that the low/adjustable-flame type (presumably this blue-flame type) was no longer available, since the newer models all depend on a certain gas pressure to work, rather than having a user-controllable throttle valve like the old ones.
Remember that copyright is not the right to possess. It is the right to PUBLISH; ie. TO MAKE COPIES AVAILABLE TO THE PUBLIC.
Before the "automatic copyright on everything you create" rule, you could only file copyright on something you fully intended to PUBLISH -- that is, to make public. You *couldn't* copyright something you planned to hide in a vault.
I was told this by the copyright office itself. I probably still have the letter here somewhere.
When AKC was backing PAWS (the legislation that would have ultimately made breeding companion animals illegal in the US), they had a dozen obviously-astroturf "breeders for PAWS" letters on their site. I took the trouble to track down each and every one of the purported authors. About half were single-pet owners with NO knowledge of animal husbandry, and one had been dead for five years.
With two such disparate industries both engaging in "I see dead people", one must grow suspicious of endorsements of any sort.
(Even if you weren't already. In my experience, the more-famous the endorser, the shittier the product, whatever that product may be.)
That works well IF temps never get below 10F or so... but even then, a mere drip won't do it. It has to run at a rate of about 5 gallons an hour from each and every faucet, and over a winter that's a LOT of water. (I do this every night in winter, to keep my "work hose" from freezing. The overflow waters some trees, so is not wasted.) And there is still some risk of freezing if a crook in the pipe makes a sluggish spot.
But if your temps get well below zero, as happens in New England, it merely delays the inevitable.
The problem with relying on gravity is that low spots (amazingly common in older houses) won't drain, and can still freeze/burst. It's better to air-flush the lines, same as you should to winterize an underground sprinkler system.
And don't forget to drain the washing machine, water heater, etc. (And be sure to turn off the water heater's power or gas, too!!)
Turn off the water at the meter, and have ALL the water pipes *professionally* flushed out, the same way you would winterize a sprinkler system. Do the same for anything that contains water, like a washing machine, hot water heater, hot water heat, etc. Then if the heat does fail, no harm done.
Nothing else will be harmed by freezing. (I speak as a former resident of Montana and similar climates, where winter temps regularly hit -65F, *before* wind chill.)
If there's an exposed water pipe that you can't flush, invest in some electric "heat tape" -- you can buy this (and get instructions on how to install it) at any good mobile-home supply store. It automatically comes on at about 40 degrees, and uses very little power.
Same here. We've had endless problems with our landlines, and the ONLY way to get Verizon to even admit there ARE problems is to threaten to complain to the PUC. Then it's amazing how quickly a for-really repair dude shows up, rather than a trouble report producing only an automated "Your line is fixed" callback.
Mind you, they still haven't FIXED our lines, but at least someone made an honest effort, instead of totally blowing off the trouble ticket.
This story came across some other news service a few days ago. It has nothing to do with ELN's main mail servers. The problem is with a specialty mail server, used by roaming clients or some such off-network use (I forget exactly, but it was NOT about the regular mail servers).
At any rate, I still have a running crosscheck on my ELN mail, and it does not appear that any is going missing.
As to MBAs -- I'd say the stock market is driving such problems with most businesses today. Business is no longer run by the people who built it. They've aged out and been replaced by people with shiny degrees but little realworld experience, and crop of managers who are beholden *solely* to the stockholders. Customers? Bah!! They're just a line in the Expense column, to be minimized, or if possible, eliminated.:/
Yahoo has historically had issues with their mail servers; my understanding is that many are misconfigured. Some Yahoo groups started eating mail (if a group is affected, posts just vanish) back in September, and it's still happening intermittently.
Also, about a month ago one of the more vigilante-type anti-spam outfits (I forget which one) put Earthlink on their blacklist again, apparently because of spam coming thru a leased 3rd party POP (not thru an actual ELN mail server). That caused randomly bounced mail for a couple weeks.
Default at Earthlink is NO filtering at all. The ELN customer has to manually log into their webmail page, then change their preferences to "whitelist". (I suppose it can be changed thru the Total Access interface too, but most ELN customers don't use that.) It's not something you can do by accident, tho many do it with no understanding of how it works, or that real mail WILL be lost IF:
1) the sender says To Hell With It when they get the challenge/response thing that is part and parcel of whitelisting,
2) the sender uses a "No Reply" replyto, as so many commercial and newsletters senders do (ie. no real human ever sees the C-R), or
3) the user doesn't check their Suspect folders via the webmail interface, where the "blocked" mail sits for 14 days before being autodeleted.
If you've set the account to whitelist, Earthlink DOES send out a list of your blocked emails every day, but how many people read it? Damn few, I'd guess.
Also, to my understanding this story is taken out of context. The original story referred to a particular specialty mail server used (IIRC) by roaming clients, NOT one of ELN's regular mail servers.
As far as I know (and I have a running crosscheck on my ELN mail, so I'm immediately aware when mail doesn't get through) no regular mail is being lost. I've been with ELN for 10 years, PRIMARILY because their email is so much more reliable than anyone else's. That's why I kept my ELN account even now that I can finally get broadband (choice of one, tiny local wireless outfit).
And I'm not a fanboy -- if their email does go unreliable... I'm outta there.
A while back someone gave me a $50 Best Buy gift card. So off I went, hot to spend it...... and even with $50 off, EVERY computer component was STILL more expensive than damnear *anywhere* else.
550,000 registered sex offenders in the U.S. -- given a population of 300M, that's roughly one in every 500 persons, or (excluding females, children, and elderly) somewhere around one out of every 100 young-adult and middle-aged males (the classes that mostly populate the category "sex offenders").
So.. in numbers that are admittedly vague, but good enough for gov't work, one out of every 100 adult males is a registered sex offender. Doesn't that number seen a little high to you??
Hmm... Given a similar illicit-activity rate, you only need 99 other such criminal classes to make EVERY adult male have to register as some sort of offender!!
What Allofmp3.com shows, is that you can indeed SELL music in a freely shareable format, and despite the fact that free copies are everywhere, people will *still* BUY the files if it's sufficiently easy and cheap. Allofmp3.com wouldn't have been in the business so long if they weren't making money at it.
Which in turn shows that the RIAA argument that "if it's freely shareable, we can't SELL any" doesn't hold water.
My own price points, that I'd gladly pay to save hassle and get a guaranteed good file:
64kbit mono: free, as a sample to see if you like a tune well enough to pay for it (64k *mono* makes a small file that sounds better than 64k stereo, and is sufficient to tell what the song really sounds like, and get addicted to the point where you want a better copy)
128 to 192kbit, stereo: 10 cents
320kbit: 25 cents
Original-CD-quality WAV: 99 cents (about the same price per track as a discounted CD, but saves them the cost of pressing/distributing it)
(If I've gotta pay a buck for a lowly MP3, I'll wait til I find the CD used or discounted, and make my own. And I'm NOT interested in clips as the "free sample"; they're too annoying.)
This is all provided the files are 100% DRM-free. I don't care about filesharing; I'm just not interested in buying what I can't horse around among my own equipment however I please. If they want to watermark their downloadable files, no problem.
Better yet, watermark the files AND use filesharing to DISTRIBUTE them, with a small commission paid to the sharer for each file that a downloader subsequently pays for. That would penetrate what is now a completely uncontrollable market, with a chance for profit where none now exists, and at NO cost to the content owners.
Probably someone could figure out how to do this using ID3 tags.
I was about to post the same complaint. A while back I had to give up using Yahoo's finance page because it's no longer usable, and last weekend they buggered up the TV listings too, so they take forever to load (30+ seconds on broadband?!!) and then they only halfway work. (I'm now using the NYTimes TV listings, which are still FAST and PLAIN and FUNCTIONAL, and even have a text-only option.)
I'm expecting Yahoo's Movies section to get unusable next.
And last time I tried to access the "old" Yahoo mail, I couldn't get to it. I can't use the new one.
Yahoo used to be my portal of choice for many such functions, but they're rapidly making themselves into a site I want to AVOID.
And that's what I don't like about class action suits. The lawyer makes a killing, everyone else gets nothing, corp insurance rates go up to no benefit, consumer costs go up...
Sometimes there is harm and a company needs to be bitchslapped for it, but I'd like to see the lawyer get exactly the same payment as the members of the class. That might cure the problem.:)
Restricted expression could certainly account for some of the weird ("smeared watercolour") shades I saw in my randomly-bred petunias. The parent plants were mainly the dark and brilliant colours (blood-red, deep purple, etc.), yet the offspring were primarily these weird pastels, with wrinkled blooms.
Some also had a veined-colour effect. I didn't see that in a commercial petunia til a couple years later. The first one I saw in a retail store was a peculiar but very pretty lemon-yellow colour. Unfortunately that one wasn't particularly viable and didn't join my twisted gene pool in any visible way.
Wheras I think more like you: even a major glitch or attack is not going to affect the stock market in any lasting way. It's now too diversified for any single player or event to take it down permanently.
People watch the DOW go up and down and get in a panic when it abruptly drops 100 points. But I remember when the DOW breaking 1000 was a BIG DEAL, yet now it's over 10,000. Taken in perspective, a drop of 100 points now was only ten points in the old sub-1000 DOW, and back then nothing under 100 points (ten percent) was considered significant. That'd be 1000 points today. At its present level, 100 points is just ONE percent. Hardly enough to get your knickers in a twist about.
Howcom sometimes the emoticon alone suffices to end-punctuate a sentence, and sometimes it doesn't? Each "sounds different" as I type or read it, but I haven't formulated a Rule yet.
Slashdot Mirror
Can these things be adapted to use a vent? I have a spot where there used to be a regular wall heater; the vent and propane lines are still there. (The propane line is in the attic, of all places.)
I wouldn't care to use one without venting, no matter how "safe" it's supposed to be.
The local heating etc. contractor told me that these "use your water heater" systems are by far the cheapest/most efficient to run. After all, the water heater has to keep the water hot all the time anyway, so when you're not using hot water for something else, why not use it to heat the house? otherwise it's just wasted!
If I were building a new house, I'd certainly install such a system.
That's as far as I got too :)
When mine was replaced in 2001, I was told that the low/adjustable-flame type (presumably this blue-flame type) was no longer available, since the newer models all depend on a certain gas pressure to work, rather than having a user-controllable throttle valve like the old ones.
Remember that copyright is not the right to possess. It is the right to PUBLISH; ie. TO MAKE COPIES AVAILABLE TO THE PUBLIC.
Before the "automatic copyright on everything you create" rule, you could only file copyright on something you fully intended to PUBLISH -- that is, to make public. You *couldn't* copyright something you planned to hide in a vault.
I was told this by the copyright office itself. I probably still have the letter here somewhere.
And if the labels were banks, they'd be prosecuted for usury -- at a level even the mob never engaged in.
It occurs to me that prosecution for usury and racketeering may be a much better angle to pursue than the copyright issue.
http://www.lectlaw.com/files/ban02.htm
Happens in any union town. Once you join the union, you can never leave, in body or in spirit!!
When AKC was backing PAWS (the legislation that would have ultimately made breeding companion animals illegal in the US), they had a dozen obviously-astroturf "breeders for PAWS" letters on their site. I took the trouble to track down each and every one of the purported authors. About half were single-pet owners with NO knowledge of animal husbandry, and one had been dead for five years.
With two such disparate industries both engaging in "I see dead people", one must grow suspicious of endorsements of any sort.
(Even if you weren't already. In my experience, the more-famous the endorser, the shittier the product, whatever that product may be.)
That works well IF temps never get below 10F or so... but even then, a mere drip won't do it. It has to run at a rate of about 5 gallons an hour from each and every faucet, and over a winter that's a LOT of water. (I do this every night in winter, to keep my "work hose" from freezing. The overflow waters some trees, so is not wasted.) And there is still some risk of freezing if a crook in the pipe makes a sluggish spot.
But if your temps get well below zero, as happens in New England, it merely delays the inevitable.
The problem with relying on gravity is that low spots (amazingly common in older houses) won't drain, and can still freeze/burst. It's better to air-flush the lines, same as you should to winterize an underground sprinkler system.
And don't forget to drain the washing machine, water heater, etc. (And be sure to turn off the water heater's power or gas, too!!)
Turn off the water at the meter, and have ALL the water pipes *professionally* flushed out, the same way you would winterize a sprinkler system. Do the same for anything that contains water, like a washing machine, hot water heater, hot water heat, etc. Then if the heat does fail, no harm done.
Nothing else will be harmed by freezing. (I speak as a former resident of Montana and similar climates, where winter temps regularly hit -65F, *before* wind chill.)
If there's an exposed water pipe that you can't flush, invest in some electric "heat tape" -- you can buy this (and get instructions on how to install it) at any good mobile-home supply store. It automatically comes on at about 40 degrees, and uses very little power.
What's different between a "blue flame wall heater" and a regular one?
I have a propane wall heater, less than 5 years old, and it's anything but efficient. And it cost around $400 installed.
Same here. We've had endless problems with our landlines, and the ONLY way to get Verizon to even admit there ARE problems is to threaten to complain to the PUC. Then it's amazing how quickly a for-really repair dude shows up, rather than a trouble report producing only an automated "Your line is fixed" callback.
Mind you, they still haven't FIXED our lines, but at least someone made an honest effort, instead of totally blowing off the trouble ticket.
This story came across some other news service a few days ago. It has nothing to do with ELN's main mail servers. The problem is with a specialty mail server, used by roaming clients or some such off-network use (I forget exactly, but it was NOT about the regular mail servers).
:/
At any rate, I still have a running crosscheck on my ELN mail, and it does not appear that any is going missing.
As to MBAs -- I'd say the stock market is driving such problems with most businesses today. Business is no longer run by the people who built it. They've aged out and been replaced by people with shiny degrees but little realworld experience, and crop of managers who are beholden *solely* to the stockholders. Customers? Bah!! They're just a line in the Expense column, to be minimized, or if possible, eliminated.
Yahoo has historically had issues with their mail servers; my understanding is that many are misconfigured. Some Yahoo groups started eating mail (if a group is affected, posts just vanish) back in September, and it's still happening intermittently.
Also, about a month ago one of the more vigilante-type anti-spam outfits (I forget which one) put Earthlink on their blacklist again, apparently because of spam coming thru a leased 3rd party POP (not thru an actual ELN mail server). That caused randomly bounced mail for a couple weeks.
Default at Earthlink is NO filtering at all. The ELN customer has to manually log into their webmail page, then change their preferences to "whitelist". (I suppose it can be changed thru the Total Access interface too, but most ELN customers don't use that.) It's not something you can do by accident, tho many do it with no understanding of how it works, or that real mail WILL be lost IF:
1) the sender says To Hell With It when they get the challenge/response thing that is part and parcel of whitelisting,
2) the sender uses a "No Reply" replyto, as so many commercial and newsletters senders do (ie. no real human ever sees the C-R), or
3) the user doesn't check their Suspect folders via the webmail interface, where the "blocked" mail sits for 14 days before being autodeleted.
If you've set the account to whitelist, Earthlink DOES send out a list of your blocked emails every day, but how many people read it? Damn few, I'd guess.
Also, to my understanding this story is taken out of context. The original story referred to a particular specialty mail server used (IIRC) by roaming clients, NOT one of ELN's regular mail servers.
As far as I know (and I have a running crosscheck on my ELN mail, so I'm immediately aware when mail doesn't get through) no regular mail is being lost. I've been with ELN for 10 years, PRIMARILY because their email is so much more reliable than anyone else's. That's why I kept my ELN account even now that I can finally get broadband (choice of one, tiny local wireless outfit).
And I'm not a fanboy -- if their email does go unreliable... I'm outta there.
A while back someone gave me a $50 Best Buy gift card. So off I went, hot to spend it... ... and even with $50 off, EVERY computer component was STILL more expensive than damnear *anywhere* else.
550,000 registered sex offenders in the U.S. -- given a population of 300M, that's roughly one in every 500 persons, or (excluding females, children, and elderly) somewhere around one out of every 100 young-adult and middle-aged males (the classes that mostly populate the category "sex offenders").
So.. in numbers that are admittedly vague, but good enough for gov't work, one out of every 100 adult males is a registered sex offender. Doesn't that number seen a little high to you??
Hmm... Given a similar illicit-activity rate, you only need 99 other such criminal classes to make EVERY adult male have to register as some sort of offender!!
What Allofmp3.com shows, is that you can indeed SELL music in a freely shareable format, and despite the fact that free copies are everywhere, people will *still* BUY the files if it's sufficiently easy and cheap. Allofmp3.com wouldn't have been in the business so long if they weren't making money at it.
Which in turn shows that the RIAA argument that "if it's freely shareable, we can't SELL any" doesn't hold water.
My own price points, that I'd gladly pay to save hassle and get a guaranteed good file:
64kbit mono: free, as a sample to see if you like a tune well enough to pay for it (64k *mono* makes a small file that sounds better than 64k stereo, and is sufficient to tell what the song really sounds like, and get addicted to the point where you want a better copy)
128 to 192kbit, stereo: 10 cents
320kbit: 25 cents
Original-CD-quality WAV: 99 cents (about the same price per track as a discounted CD, but saves them the cost of pressing/distributing it)
(If I've gotta pay a buck for a lowly MP3, I'll wait til I find the CD used or discounted, and make my own. And I'm NOT interested in clips as the "free sample"; they're too annoying.)
This is all provided the files are 100% DRM-free. I don't care about filesharing; I'm just not interested in buying what I can't horse around among my own equipment however I please. If they want to watermark their downloadable files, no problem.
Better yet, watermark the files AND use filesharing to DISTRIBUTE them, with a small commission paid to the sharer for each file that a downloader subsequently pays for. That would penetrate what is now a completely uncontrollable market, with a chance for profit where none now exists, and at NO cost to the content owners.
Probably someone could figure out how to do this using ID3 tags.
Given the recent defunctionalization of many of their sites (finance, TV, mail) methinks "Yahoo.com" is the PERFECT name for them :/
Tho give 'em a couple more years to finish cutting themselves down to size, and "Lilliputian.com" may be more appropriate.
I was about to post the same complaint. A while back I had to give up using Yahoo's finance page because it's no longer usable, and last weekend they buggered up the TV listings too, so they take forever to load (30+ seconds on broadband?!!) and then they only halfway work. (I'm now using the NYTimes TV listings, which are still FAST and PLAIN and FUNCTIONAL, and even have a text-only option.)
I'm expecting Yahoo's Movies section to get unusable next.
And last time I tried to access the "old" Yahoo mail, I couldn't get to it. I can't use the new one.
Yahoo used to be my portal of choice for many such functions, but they're rapidly making themselves into a site I want to AVOID.
And I doubt we're alone in that.
And that's what I don't like about class action suits. The lawyer makes a killing, everyone else gets nothing, corp insurance rates go up to no benefit, consumer costs go up...
:)
Sometimes there is harm and a company needs to be bitchslapped for it, but I'd like to see the lawyer get exactly the same payment as the members of the class. That might cure the problem.
Restricted expression could certainly account for some of the weird ("smeared watercolour") shades I saw in my randomly-bred petunias. The parent plants were mainly the dark and brilliant colours (blood-red, deep purple, etc.), yet the offspring were primarily these weird pastels, with wrinkled blooms.
Some also had a veined-colour effect. I didn't see that in a commercial petunia til a couple years later. The first one I saw in a retail store was a peculiar but very pretty lemon-yellow colour. Unfortunately that one wasn't particularly viable and didn't join my twisted gene pool in any visible way.
Wheras I think more like you: even a major glitch or attack is not going to affect the stock market in any lasting way. It's now too diversified for any single player or event to take it down permanently.
People watch the DOW go up and down and get in a panic when it abruptly drops 100 points. But I remember when the DOW breaking 1000 was a BIG DEAL, yet now it's over 10,000. Taken in perspective, a drop of 100 points now was only ten points in the old sub-1000 DOW, and back then nothing under 100 points (ten percent) was considered significant. That'd be 1000 points today. At its present level, 100 points is just ONE percent. Hardly enough to get your knickers in a twist about.
And here's another question:
Howcom sometimes the emoticon alone suffices to end-punctuate a sentence, and sometimes it doesn't? Each "sounds different" as I type or read it, but I haven't formulated a Rule yet.