They weren't saying it would have actual GPS tracking. It would just be "like" GPS, or as they said "Think of it as a GPS for your assets,"
TFA says each tag is $14, and a rack cost is $200 to $400.
If you had actual GPS tracking, it's one thing to capture the coordinates. It's another thing to send them somewhere. If someone walked out of your datacenter with a machine, it can't exactly talk over the network. It would need an embedded cell phone solution. It could be done for about $50 to $100 each, plus data service for the tracking, but the device would kind of stand out on a 1u server.:)
- Depopulate: Less babies == less humans == less need for energy
There are tried and true methods for depopulating, and they usually don't involve reducing the number of babies born. It's been used all throughout history. The method is war.
US Civil War resulted in approximately 625,000 deaths.
World War I resulted in approximately 16,000,000 deaths.
World War II resulted in approximately 60,000,000 million deaths.
Obviously humanity got better at making people dead as they learned better ways to kill. The numbers since then haven't been as high since then. War has become more humane. Don't try to tell that to the families of the victims though.
That's exactly what I was saying. Well, without the obvious and direct threat of government action against you.
An individual rarely gets the attention of the federal government when trying to enforce their rights on a piece of land, unless it's in a cartoon (ref: Family Guy s02e18 "E. Peterbus Unum"). What's more likely is that the local police will come in and arrest you. Failure to do that may get the next level up (local SWAT, county, or state police), who won't have any problems reminding you who owns it.
But the government was never entitled to claim the land to distribute to the people either.
There was a day, not all that long ago, where you could go to an unclaimed area, and say "this is mine, thanks." It is our right as humans to be able to live and thrive. In the United States, there isn't an inch of unclaimed land in the contiguous 48 states. We had a right to go somewhere and live.
If you are in the US, where ever you are, you are on someone's property. In turn, if that someone doesn't pay their taxes to the government, the government will put their own claim on the land and anything which may remain on it. So, regardless if you're in a private home, driving on the street, or sitting in a lake in the middle of nowhere, you are on US Government property. You do not have the right to be there, you pay for the privilege of renting that land temporarily. Huh?
Your property taxes are rent for your home.
Your vehicle taxes and registration fees are rent for the right to put your vehicle on the government's roads, or even on your own property (yes, vehicles without valid registrations on your property can result in a fine).
Your taxes say that you may have purchased limited rights to be in various places. Don't be too hopeful on those being anything resembling the rights you think you have.
Here's a little exercise for you. It's a lot harder than it sounds. I've known several people who have tried it with limited success. With the economic downturn, many found themselves without the ability to pay their rent, mortgages, or taxes. If they were only renting an apartment or home, they were removed rather quickly. If they had a mortgage, this took longer, but the end result was the same. For those who couldn't find residences with friends or family, they turned to the only possession that they may have still had, their vehicle.
Living in a passenger vehicle is possible. I've only done it for days at a time on road trips. Where can you put that vehicle? Parking lots are private property, and it's likely you will be removed. Empty driveways of abandon homes are private property, and you will be removed. Even stopping on the side of the road or on "public" government land, will find you being removed. Hopefully in that "removed", it doesn't involve arrested and impounding of your vehicle. You may find very quickly that ownership of that is actually just rent also, as more than 90 days in jail can find your vehicle being seized by the state and auctioned off, and you won't receive anything from that.
Exactly what rights do you think you have? You don't have the right of land ownership, forging for food, or even free travel. You have the right to pay for the privilege of having any rights.
You shouldn't be embarrassed by not knowing it. You should be embarrassed that you live in a country where such a thing would happen.
Where I live (same country, different state), if there's an emergency, emergency response workers show up and do their job. If they are the closest available unit, they'll cross city and/or county boundaries to help people.
After that's all done, if there is a fee, it's handled by financial people. It's possible his homeowner insurance may have paid the costs related to reducing their cost. A fire that damages one wall is a lot cheaper to replace than an entire house and the contained possessions. I know, TFA said that his coverage wouldn't cover everything in his house, but that wouldn't have really mattered since it wouldn't have been a total loss.
Most emergency response workers don't care about the money. They are doing their job to help people. Who else would sign up to run into burning buildings, or any of the other stuff that they do?
What's the pink page of death? o.O (I'd really like to know)
The Pink Page of Death is a polite warning that shows up here, saying your IP has been blocked, and it won't be unblocked until you ask for forgiveness. You may get it through ToR, but you're most likely to get it if you go out hunting for lists of anonymous web proxies, and then come in here through one. They automagically block spammers for some reasons (I don't know the qualifications) to keep the noise down to us humans (usually). I've only ever seen it while experimenting with anonymous (and published) proxies.
If you happen to be so unlucky that you ever see it from home, well, you must have really pissed someone off.:) Most users shouldn't ever see it, because they shouldn't do anything to deserve seeing it.
That's the dream of everyone with a terminal disease, isn't it? Unfortunately, most die waiting for the cure. Well, in the end, we're all terminal, and many people wish that they could do anything to stretch their life out just a little bit longer.
A friend of my sister ended up in a state like that. I don't recall the disorder right off, but it wasn't pretty.
The onset was like the common cold. That became pneumonia. He was hospitalized, and over the next few days, he ended up in a vegetative state. He had no sort of motor control at all. It was to the point where he couldn't even twitch a finger or toe. He couldn't speak. He couldn't see because his eyes wouldn't focus or track, or even blink. He could hear, but couldn't react to anything. He was fully aware, trapped in a completely useless body.
It took them a little while to discover the disorder. All they could do was treat him with IV antibiotics. After about 3 months, he could sort of mumble words, but they were indistinct. After 6 months, he had regained his motor skills, but his body had atrophied so much he couldn't do much. Walking was out of the question. Even doing something as easy as typing was beyond him for a while. There was a pretty good period of physical rehabilitation before he was able to move like a normal person.
He described it as absolute hell. He was fully conscious when he was awake, and the difference between awake and asleep wasn't visible to anyone observing him. For the first months of it, he said he wished he could have just died. After he recovered, he wasn't all rays of sunshine either. It took him a while to work through his depression that set in while he was in his vegetative state. Even after that, he wasn't himself.
I wouldn't wish that on anyone, regardless if it was a temporary condition like his, nor living the last months of your life.
Actually, Slashdot has done some work to reduce/prevent it. If I remember Slashcode right from years ago, there were significant safeguards. There was a period of a couple weeks where some determined spammers were hitting here, but even then they were only getting 3 or 4 spammy posts in per 100 real ones. I suspect there may have been some upset users who may have taken matters into their own hands on them, or at least it was suggested in the threads at the time.:)
Ok, great solution. But how many forums are run by people who picked a package and got a friend to install it? And of them, how many never upgrade the software, regardless of how many spambots abuse them, or warnings on the publishers site say "you must upgrade because of this huge security flaw"?
I remember one that was a pretty good little site. He stopped maintaining it, because the forum wasn't just exploited, but they locked him out of the admin interface. He didn't take the site down, he just abandon it, and it ran for quite a while as a pathetic dumping ground for illicit pharmaceutical ads. It did finally go away, but it was waste of a good little online community he had going.
I've found quite a few sites like that still out there. The owners just stop caring and abandon them.
Thanks for trying.:) So I'm still curious to who really made it.
For everyone else, here's the translation of the popup.
Following media coverage of the weekend, of the first implantation of a cardiac artificial heart in a 15 year old child in Italy, we wish to inform you that Carmat, which visuals were used - without permission - for illustrate stories, has no connection with this news and plans to proceed as planned with the first implantation in humans in late 2011.
The procedure publicized this weekend is the implantation of a ventricular assist device, and therefore a pump, which comes in support of the heart. The natural heart remains in place in the patient's chest and the surgeon says this mini pump to support the failing ventricle.
This operation does not therefore present the characteristics of artificial heart developed by Carmat (www.carmatsas.com), which is the total artificial heart the most advanced in the world.
With that prognosis, it sounds like an early heart failure is the better way out. I can't imagine having a complete skeletal muscular failure, so you're stuck in bed. Respiratory failure and now you're on a machine to keep you breathing. A feeding tube because you can't swallow. Catheterized and colostomy to capture your waste when you lose control of those functions. Sometimes lucky isn't so lucky for anyone involved.
Well, if you remember in "Bicentennial Man", he slowly perfected artificial human organs, until there wasn't much that couldn't be replaced.
I'm a bit surprised at the 20 to 25 year claim. I thought it wasn't more than a year or so ago that artificial hearts, though promising, were never practical for long-term use. At best they were a stop gap measure between the original heart failing, and getting a real flesh donor heart.
I went looking for more information. The most detailed I could find was this 2006 news story
Of the 14 original recipients, two died on the operating table. The rest survived for an average of 5.2 months, with the longest living 17 months....
The original patients all had a life expectancy of a month or less when the device was put in, and their net gain in longevity was 4.5 months.
It sounds like they're offering the kid a very optimistic view of life. The article is very short on information, like specifics on the device (who makes it, what it's called, what testing has been done, what have the long term animal trials shown, etc). I'm sure they're very good engineers and doctors, but it would be nice to have more information before people start really believing that they can have an artificial heart with a MTBF of 20 to 25 years.
I did it and came up with what looked like avatar photos on a bunch of forums.
It's pretty easy for any of us to figure out the rest. If her name and her picture are on a bunch of forums that are not well maintained (i.e., spammed heavily) then they have both been related to each other pretty well. That would make the search engines accurate to associate the two. Well, as accurate as those get. If you do the same search for me, you'll see on page 3, I died on August 21, 1939. Damn, I missed my own funeral.
You've never tried to choreograph a dance routine with a dozen unicorns and walking trees, have you? It might sound like fun and games, but it's not.
The fire was purely an accident I tell you. It had nothing to do with that backtalking birch. I told her if she didn't shut her hole, she'd get what was coming to her, but nooooo. nooooo. A guy can only take so much I tell you.
(ohhh, if we could only post the pictures inline, it would make this so much funnier)
eventually our dinosaur Windows PCs and Linux PC's can't open files
I'm amazed how many dissatisfied Windows users have complained because newer MS Office files aren't usable by their older versions of MS Office. I've had people send me.docx files that were broken, just so I could convert it and send it back over. I do tell them the right way to do it (get the free converter from the obscure Microsoft link, and convert it yourself). Most MS users are... well... users. They can point and click. They can type at 15 to 20 wpm in their application. And of course, they can somehow make 100 page Powerpoint presentations to give as much information as a one page text document would hold.
I'm avoiding your piracy vs paid licensing and MS winning argument. It's just not one of those arguments that's even worth fighting any more. You're right, when the numbers come through, it's still "x% of the users are on x platform". I've looked at plenty of statistics, usually web based parsed from the user agent strings. Yup, the platform reported is the platform used for the statistics.
It's usually a terminal hardware fault of some sort. Many were hard drives. Some were mystery problems related to motherboard/cpu/memory. I can swap memory for known good ones, but when it's to the point that you have a 1Ghz machine with a 40Gb hard drive, I could start upgrading parts, or they can buy a new machine. A few have just been the machine wasn't strong enough to handle their current needs. Again, the 1Ghz machine with 512Mb RAM, but their home office needs demanded having multiple memory hungry applications open, and the motherboard wasn't expandable to support the memory. Cases where the machine was still a viable machine, I'd usually take their old machine and use it for something else (like you said, a happy little Linux box).
I don't like Windows, but I only feel it is responsible of me to know how to use and repair any OS that people are going to bring to me. If the machine just needs the OS reinstalled because it's terminally borked, I'll do it. I don't ask anyone to spend unnecessary expenses. I offer all options with legitimate costs, and it's up to them to decide what to do.
I have yet to have anyone come to me and say "I need a machine with Windows 7, because it's required for [some application]".
I've only known of a very few people who upgraded to Win7 because they "wanted" it. They wanted it because it was the new Microsoft toy, and they wanted the latest greatest. The majority of people I know with Win7 use it because it came on their new PC, that they usually bought because the old one died. Some of them have had me downgrade them to WinXP.
You are right, Win7 likes to have 2Gb RAM or more, but it'll run with 1Gb if you aren't doing much in it. I've used it, both in VM's and on physical hardware. BTW, it works very well in VirtualBox, if you get tired of tweaking VMWare to make it work right.:) I had to set it up for a Mac user, who needed to use MSIE for their college assignments.
My biggest reason to have Windows at all, is to run Windows specific apps. That's mostly Windows games, and a few apps like the Blackberry Desktop Manager, which are only a small part of what I do with a PC. Otherwise, I prefer Linux. I have OSX in a VM too, but haven't found much use for it.:)
On the other hand, if I am going out of town, there are very few places I can go on a single tank of gas. Even if there were charging stations available everywhere, the amount of time it takes to charge is unpractical for long drives. I would want to to hold a full day's drive, at least 1000 miles, and confidence that there would be a somewhere to charge where I slept, before I considered using a pure electric for out of town trips.
I hate to argue against you, but....
1,000 mile trip would be... Let me do some math.
I'm going to use a hypothetical car. 16 gallon tank, and 20mpg economy. Most cars are designed for a max range of 300 to 400 miles, which puts this right in that range. You never want to go to empty, because gas stations are never spaced for exactly the distance you need. We'll give you an operating range of 300 miles (15 gallons).
This trip will require 4 fuel stops. Someone else gave the number of 10 gal/min for fueling, which sounds fine, so you'll spend 1.5 minutes fueling, but we'll assume you'll want to go take a leak, grab cold drinks, etc. I've found it usually takes about 10 to 15 minutes at a fuel stop for all these luxuries (and it's a good idea to check tire pressures, oil and water levels, etc). So allow 1 hour total for fuel stops, assuming you won't do anything silly like sit down and eat.
1000 miles of driving at 65mph will still only usually average 50mph (sucks, but it's true), but we'll say you averaged 60 mph, because you were on an Interstate in the middle of nowhere, with no other cars on the road, and no bad weather. That gives you 17 hours of drive time.
So 18 hours on the road.
Truckers are only permitted a maximum of 11 hours of driving, and must take a 10 hour break. On my last cross country drive, a trucker friend of mine called me rather frequently to see where I was. After 6 hours, he asked if I was tired. After 8 hours, he said he would have had to stop (because of company rules). After 12 hours he told me I would have broken federal rules. After 20 hours, he said I'd have to keep 3 sets of logbooks.:) At 25 hours, I was tired and stopped. That was about 1,700 miles, driving from full tank to under 1/4 tank (about 13 gallons), rather briskly. Another friend who has done lots of long drives said that the common day range is 600 miles.
It's not all that common that someone will leave their departure point at 8am, and stop at their destination at 2am the next morning. That's not to say it doesn't happen, or even that I haven't done it on many occasions, it just isn't normal. Even with two drivers, you'll find that you're both tired after 8 to 12 hours.
To design a car to say it'll do 1,000 miles/day for normal driving is a bit extreme. I do like that I can do it though. I don't like the idea of driving for 4 to 6 hours, and then parking for a couple hours while it charges. And sometimes there are oh-shit moments. Once in the middle of Texas somewhere, I stopped because I was getting very close to empty. The only gas station on that exit wasn't working. They didn't have normal electrical service. They had to run on a generator, and it was broken. The next gas station was 40 miles away. I rolled in on fumes. If I had run out of gas, I could have called AAA, and they would have brought me 5 gallons. I'd like to see the same happen for an electric car.
You know, something they really miss out on is the TCO. It's occasionally mentioned, but frequently ignored. "Oohh, I get 60mpg". Great. When the vehicle costs more than a regular gas vehicle, and replacement parts are a deal breaker, it's not feasible.
I'm driving my 10 year old car. I've had to replace some parts (brake pads, clutch, water pump, 2 batteries, and a few belts), but it's also done me very well over 115,000 miles, some of it was amazingly abusive driving. Besides my daily driver, I've had several opportunities to take it out racing on tracks, where it does very well.
Back to the mileage, my car gets 26mpg on the highway, and 20mpg on my daily commutes. Over the years, I've adjusted my driving slightly to get better mileage. It has a 6 speed manual transmission, and I've learned that it gets the best milage right around 2000 RPM. That means if I'm doing 45mph, I should only be in 4th gear. 55mph, I should have just shifted into 5th gear. 85mph (I-10 through Texas is 80mph for parts of it) is 6th gear, and that gives me my best mileage (26mpg running from full tank to almost empty with no stops or speed changes).
Higher speeds in a hybrid take a substantial mileage hit.
But back to the parts cost. The batteries have a rather short life. They're not just the one 12V battery that you can swap at any parts store. They are an array of batteries that (to the best of my knowledge) must be replaced by the dealer, or at least purchased from the dealer. They'll last 4 or 5 years, or just about 100k miles. If you're out of warranty, the best option is to sell the car to some sucker who doesn't know how much the batteries will cost. The cost for the battery pack is more than to buy a rebuilt engine for an older rear wheel drive car, and apparently just about as much work. I've seen (and done) weekend "shadetree" engine swaps in plenty of older cars, sometimes where the shadetree is what you use to pull the engine out (chain and hand winch, then roll the car out from under it). I have a friend with an old (1980's) Caprice Wagon, where we're talking about repowering it (rebuilt engine and transmission), and the parts price can be under $1,000, depending on how much power he decides to put in it.:)
I have a friend who has a Prius. The headlights started doing this wonky thing where they'll just turn off, or flicker for no apparent reason. The real reason is that they're HID lights (higher power, higher output). That doesn't make a damned bit of sense. They should have more efficient lighting, not the heaviest draw lighting possible. The lights in that car are special, and very expensive. It's not usually the lights though, there's a light controller that can cause it too. If you go look for how to change the headlights in a Prius, it involves dismantling the whole front of the car. Seriously. I've never had or worked on a car that took more than a few minutes with a common screwdriver (or torx screwdriver) to replace the headlights. I was willing to do the work, but dedicating a whole day to changing the headlights is insane.
So if you had a hybrid or ev, and had to change the batteries every 5 years or 100,000 miles, you'll have put substantially more into the car than if you had a gas car in 10 years. Forget it, if you plan to drive it for 20+ years. They are overpriced, disposable status symbols. "Green" isn't just about saving mpg. "Green" is doing your part for the environment, which includes utilizing things for as long as possible, not trading your car every 4 years.
Oh, and I was talking to the Prius owner. They were almost out of gas. God forbid that happens. If the battery pack runs down, you can't just jump start the gas engine and be on your way. You have to have Toyota tow your vehicle and service the full battery pack. I believe that is charging the whole system back up before the car will
Actually, most of the root "servers" are "anycast" now (9 of 13), so a single site failure doesn't matter. The US DoD runs two (G and H). G is anycast. H isn't. There wasn't clarification to what the issue was. It's easy to be quick to say "oh they suck", but shit happens sometimes. That's part of why we don't run on just one root nameserver.:)
For all we know, it could have been a planned outage. I kinda doubt it with that size window, but who knows. It was only 1 of 13, which makes it more like 1 of an awful lot since 9 of the "servers" are really servers distributed world wide. I was doing some monitoring a while back, showing how our traffic moved, and that included monitoring the root servers. It made some really screwy routes, where one check would be in the US, and the next one would be somewhere in Europe.
I was very disappointed a while back. Someone had an original boxed Novell Unixware set. It was still sealed. If I remember right, they had a server in their office, but it was set up at the head office, and both were shipped down. The network was restructured a few times, and finally they asked if I wanted the box (the media box, not the server). I took it home, kept it under my desk for quite a while. Finally, I thought it may be fun to play with it in a virtual machine. I took the shrink wrap off, pulled out the envelope with the floppies, and tore the nice EULA seal. The first disk booted. I was so happy. That was the end of it though. None of the rest of the disks were readable.
The timespan was probably that the disks were manufactured in 1995. That would have been about 2002 when I tried them.
I'm trying to gather my old digital photos into one place. I've migrated servers several times, and had a couple disaster recoveries along the way. I found some pictures from the World Trade Center 09/02/2001 from about 7am to 11am. Some other pictures that were left in other places, like various workstations and company servers, were lost forever.
I remember working in a computer store years ago, a customer brought in their PC with a RLL drive. He wanted his data. We didn't have a controller to attach it to, and his was already fried. If you were to bring an old PC into a store now with an RLL drive, you'd just get a blank stare from the tech, followed by a "what is that thing?". As time goes on, things that didn't follow the migration become harder and harder to use. I went through some hell a while back trying to convert some old letters, stored in some ancient format, to something that they could use today. They were important, so I took the time to do it. That was they were legitimately important, not the normal customer "Oh my god, everything on there is essential, I'll die without it", just to find out that they're pictures of their cat from a few weeks ago.:)
Ya, there's always edge cases that survive way beyond their life expectancy. There was a story (or a few of them) where Google was restoring newsgroup postings from 1981. Some tapes worked. Some didn't. I couldn't find a story about how many tapes worked, but I found this one referencing the event.
I had an old Apple IIe and a big box of floppies. A few worked, but it had been so long since I touched it that I had a real hard time trying to remember how to do anything. It took several tries to find a boot disk that worked.
I warned people about depending on floppy disks for long term storage. After a few years, the media degrades and the data is impossible to retrieve. They didn't listen until they went back to floppies from years ago that no longer work.
I warned people that home recordable CD's and DVD's had a shelf life of less than 10 years after they were burnt. I've seen CD's burnt, verified, and then put away in a good climate controlled environment, where a few years later they couldn't be read. For those who have listened to me, I've told them, make at least two copies, in different places, (like their hard drive and a CD), and burn new disks once a year. It sucks to have years of research on something, just to find the old information is lost.
This isn't exactly news, but every so often someone finds out, writes a story, and it makes the news again.
Slashdot Mirror
They weren't saying it would have actual GPS tracking. It would just be "like" GPS, or as they said "Think of it as a GPS for your assets,"
TFA says each tag is $14, and a rack cost is $200 to $400.
If you had actual GPS tracking, it's one thing to capture the coordinates. It's another thing to send them somewhere. If someone walked out of your datacenter with a machine, it can't exactly talk over the network. It would need an embedded cell phone solution. It could be done for about $50 to $100 each, plus data service for the tracking, but the device would kind of stand out on a 1u server. :)
There are tried and true methods for depopulating, and they usually don't involve reducing the number of babies born. It's been used all throughout history. The method is war.
US Civil War resulted in approximately 625,000 deaths.
World War I resulted in approximately 16,000,000 deaths.
World War II resulted in approximately 60,000,000 million deaths.
Obviously humanity got better at making people dead as they learned better ways to kill. The numbers since then haven't been as high since then. War has become more humane. Don't try to tell that to the families of the victims though.
That's exactly what I was saying. Well, without the obvious and direct threat of government action against you.
An individual rarely gets the attention of the federal government when trying to enforce their rights on a piece of land, unless it's in a cartoon (ref: Family Guy s02e18 "E. Peterbus Unum"). What's more likely is that the local police will come in and arrest you. Failure to do that may get the next level up (local SWAT, county, or state police), who won't have any problems reminding you who owns it.
Well, that is unless you happen to start a cult in a place called Wacko. Then you're fair game to everything but a nuclear strike.
(Why would anyone think starting a cult in a town called Wacko, in Texas, was a good idea?. I still don't get it.)
But the government was never entitled to claim the land to distribute to the people either.
There was a day, not all that long ago, where you could go to an unclaimed area, and say "this is mine, thanks." It is our right as humans to be able to live and thrive. In the United States, there isn't an inch of unclaimed land in the contiguous 48 states. We had a right to go somewhere and live.
If you are in the US, where ever you are, you are on someone's property. In turn, if that someone doesn't pay their taxes to the government, the government will put their own claim on the land and anything which may remain on it. So, regardless if you're in a private home, driving on the street, or sitting in a lake in the middle of nowhere, you are on US Government property. You do not have the right to be there, you pay for the privilege of renting that land temporarily. Huh?
Your property taxes are rent for your home.
Your vehicle taxes and registration fees are rent for the right to put your vehicle on the government's roads, or even on your own property (yes, vehicles without valid registrations on your property can result in a fine).
Your taxes say that you may have purchased limited rights to be in various places. Don't be too hopeful on those being anything resembling the rights you think you have.
Here's a little exercise for you. It's a lot harder than it sounds. I've known several people who have tried it with limited success. With the economic downturn, many found themselves without the ability to pay their rent, mortgages, or taxes. If they were only renting an apartment or home, they were removed rather quickly. If they had a mortgage, this took longer, but the end result was the same. For those who couldn't find residences with friends or family, they turned to the only possession that they may have still had, their vehicle.
Living in a passenger vehicle is possible. I've only done it for days at a time on road trips. Where can you put that vehicle? Parking lots are private property, and it's likely you will be removed. Empty driveways of abandon homes are private property, and you will be removed. Even stopping on the side of the road or on "public" government land, will find you being removed. Hopefully in that "removed", it doesn't involve arrested and impounding of your vehicle. You may find very quickly that ownership of that is actually just rent also, as more than 90 days in jail can find your vehicle being seized by the state and auctioned off, and you won't receive anything from that.
Exactly what rights do you think you have? You don't have the right of land ownership, forging for food, or even free travel. You have the right to pay for the privilege of having any rights.
You shouldn't be embarrassed by not knowing it. You should be embarrassed that you live in a country where such a thing would happen.
Where I live (same country, different state), if there's an emergency, emergency response workers show up and do their job. If they are the closest available unit, they'll cross city and/or county boundaries to help people.
After that's all done, if there is a fee, it's handled by financial people. It's possible his homeowner insurance may have paid the costs related to reducing their cost. A fire that damages one wall is a lot cheaper to replace than an entire house and the contained possessions. I know, TFA said that his coverage wouldn't cover everything in his house, but that wouldn't have really mattered since it wouldn't have been a total loss.
Most emergency response workers don't care about the money. They are doing their job to help people. Who else would sign up to run into burning buildings, or any of the other stuff that they do?
The Pink Page of Death is a polite warning that shows up here, saying your IP has been blocked, and it won't be unblocked until you ask for forgiveness. You may get it through ToR, but you're most likely to get it if you go out hunting for lists of anonymous web proxies, and then come in here through one. They automagically block spammers for some reasons (I don't know the qualifications) to keep the noise down to us humans (usually). I've only ever seen it while experimenting with anonymous (and published) proxies.
If you happen to be so unlucky that you ever see it from home, well, you must have really pissed someone off. :) Most users shouldn't ever see it, because they shouldn't do anything to deserve seeing it.
That's the dream of everyone with a terminal disease, isn't it? Unfortunately, most die waiting for the cure. Well, in the end, we're all terminal, and many people wish that they could do anything to stretch their life out just a little bit longer.
A friend of my sister ended up in a state like that. I don't recall the disorder right off, but it wasn't pretty.
The onset was like the common cold. That became pneumonia. He was hospitalized, and over the next few days, he ended up in a vegetative state. He had no sort of motor control at all. It was to the point where he couldn't even twitch a finger or toe. He couldn't speak. He couldn't see because his eyes wouldn't focus or track, or even blink. He could hear, but couldn't react to anything. He was fully aware, trapped in a completely useless body.
It took them a little while to discover the disorder. All they could do was treat him with IV antibiotics. After about 3 months, he could sort of mumble words, but they were indistinct. After 6 months, he had regained his motor skills, but his body had atrophied so much he couldn't do much. Walking was out of the question. Even doing something as easy as typing was beyond him for a while. There was a pretty good period of physical rehabilitation before he was able to move like a normal person.
He described it as absolute hell. He was fully conscious when he was awake, and the difference between awake and asleep wasn't visible to anyone observing him. For the first months of it, he said he wished he could have just died. After he recovered, he wasn't all rays of sunshine either. It took him a while to work through his depression that set in while he was in his vegetative state. Even after that, he wasn't himself.
I wouldn't wish that on anyone, regardless if it was a temporary condition like his, nor living the last months of your life.
Actually, Slashdot has done some work to reduce/prevent it. If I remember Slashcode right from years ago, there were significant safeguards. There was a period of a couple weeks where some determined spammers were hitting here, but even then they were only getting 3 or 4 spammy posts in per 100 real ones. I suspect there may have been some upset users who may have taken matters into their own hands on them, or at least it was suggested in the threads at the time. :)
Ok, great solution. But how many forums are run by people who picked a package and got a friend to install it? And of them, how many never upgrade the software, regardless of how many spambots abuse them, or warnings on the publishers site say "you must upgrade because of this huge security flaw"?
I remember one that was a pretty good little site. He stopped maintaining it, because the forum wasn't just exploited, but they locked him out of the admin interface. He didn't take the site down, he just abandon it, and it ran for quite a while as a pathetic dumping ground for illicit pharmaceutical ads. It did finally go away, but it was waste of a good little online community he had going.
I've found quite a few sites like that still out there. The owners just stop caring and abandon them.
Thanks for trying. :) So I'm still curious to who really made it.
For everyone else, here's the translation of the popup.
Basically, the device is what they empowered Dick Cheney to be a first generation Terminator earlier this year.
With that prognosis, it sounds like an early heart failure is the better way out. I can't imagine having a complete skeletal muscular failure, so you're stuck in bed. Respiratory failure and now you're on a machine to keep you breathing. A feeding tube because you can't swallow. Catheterized and colostomy to capture your waste when you lose control of those functions. Sometimes lucky isn't so lucky for anyone involved.
Well, if you remember in "Bicentennial Man", he slowly perfected artificial human organs, until there wasn't much that couldn't be replaced.
I'm a bit surprised at the 20 to 25 year claim. I thought it wasn't more than a year or so ago that artificial hearts, though promising, were never practical for long-term use. At best they were a stop gap measure between the original heart failing, and getting a real flesh donor heart.
I went looking for more information. The most detailed I could find was this 2006 news story
It sounds like they're offering the kid a very optimistic view of life. The article is very short on information, like specifics on the device (who makes it, what it's called, what testing has been done, what have the long term animal trials shown, etc). I'm sure they're very good engineers and doctors, but it would be nice to have more information before people start really believing that they can have an artificial heart with a MTBF of 20 to 25 years.
I did it and came up with what looked like avatar photos on a bunch of forums.
It's pretty easy for any of us to figure out the rest. If her name and her picture are on a bunch of forums that are not well maintained (i.e., spammed heavily) then they have both been related to each other pretty well. That would make the search engines accurate to associate the two. Well, as accurate as those get. If you do the same search for me, you'll see on page 3, I died on August 21, 1939. Damn, I missed my own funeral.
You've never tried to choreograph a dance routine with a dozen unicorns and walking trees, have you? It might sound like fun and games, but it's not.
The fire was purely an accident I tell you. It had nothing to do with that backtalking birch. I told her if she didn't shut her hole, she'd get what was coming to her, but nooooo. nooooo. A guy can only take so much I tell you.
(ohhh, if we could only post the pictures inline, it would make this so much funnier)
I'm amazed how many dissatisfied Windows users have complained because newer MS Office files aren't usable by their older versions of MS Office. I've had people send me .docx files that were broken, just so I could convert it and send it back over. I do tell them the right way to do it (get the free converter from the obscure Microsoft link, and convert it yourself). Most MS users are ... well ... users. They can point and click. They can type at 15 to 20 wpm in their application. And of course, they can somehow make 100 page Powerpoint presentations to give as much information as a one page text document would hold.
I'm avoiding your piracy vs paid licensing and MS winning argument. It's just not one of those arguments that's even worth fighting any more. You're right, when the numbers come through, it's still "x% of the users are on x platform". I've looked at plenty of statistics, usually web based parsed from the user agent strings. Yup, the platform reported is the platform used for the statistics.
It's usually a terminal hardware fault of some sort. Many were hard drives. Some were mystery problems related to motherboard/cpu/memory. I can swap memory for known good ones, but when it's to the point that you have a 1Ghz machine with a 40Gb hard drive, I could start upgrading parts, or they can buy a new machine. A few have just been the machine wasn't strong enough to handle their current needs. Again, the 1Ghz machine with 512Mb RAM, but their home office needs demanded having multiple memory hungry applications open, and the motherboard wasn't expandable to support the memory. Cases where the machine was still a viable machine, I'd usually take their old machine and use it for something else (like you said, a happy little Linux box).
I don't like Windows, but I only feel it is responsible of me to know how to use and repair any OS that people are going to bring to me. If the machine just needs the OS reinstalled because it's terminally borked, I'll do it. I don't ask anyone to spend unnecessary expenses. I offer all options with legitimate costs, and it's up to them to decide what to do.
I have yet to have anyone come to me and say "I need a machine with Windows 7, because it's required for [some application]".
I've only known of a very few people who upgraded to Win7 because they "wanted" it. They wanted it because it was the new Microsoft toy, and they wanted the latest greatest. The majority of people I know with Win7 use it because it came on their new PC, that they usually bought because the old one died. Some of them have had me downgrade them to WinXP.
You are right, Win7 likes to have 2Gb RAM or more, but it'll run with 1Gb if you aren't doing much in it. I've used it, both in VM's and on physical hardware. BTW, it works very well in VirtualBox, if you get tired of tweaking VMWare to make it work right. :) I had to set it up for a Mac user, who needed to use MSIE for their college assignments.
My biggest reason to have Windows at all, is to run Windows specific apps. That's mostly Windows games, and a few apps like the Blackberry Desktop Manager, which are only a small part of what I do with a PC. Otherwise, I prefer Linux. I have OSX in a VM too, but haven't found much use for it. :)
I hate to argue against you, but....
1,000 mile trip would be ... Let me do some math.
I'm going to use a hypothetical car. 16 gallon tank, and 20mpg economy. Most cars are designed for a max range of 300 to 400 miles, which puts this right in that range. You never want to go to empty, because gas stations are never spaced for exactly the distance you need. We'll give you an operating range of 300 miles (15 gallons).
This trip will require 4 fuel stops. Someone else gave the number of 10 gal/min for fueling, which sounds fine, so you'll spend 1.5 minutes fueling, but we'll assume you'll want to go take a leak, grab cold drinks, etc. I've found it usually takes about 10 to 15 minutes at a fuel stop for all these luxuries (and it's a good idea to check tire pressures, oil and water levels, etc). So allow 1 hour total for fuel stops, assuming you won't do anything silly like sit down and eat.
1000 miles of driving at 65mph will still only usually average 50mph (sucks, but it's true), but we'll say you averaged 60 mph, because you were on an Interstate in the middle of nowhere, with no other cars on the road, and no bad weather. That gives you 17 hours of drive time.
So 18 hours on the road.
Truckers are only permitted a maximum of 11 hours of driving, and must take a 10 hour break. On my last cross country drive, a trucker friend of mine called me rather frequently to see where I was. After 6 hours, he asked if I was tired. After 8 hours, he said he would have had to stop (because of company rules). After 12 hours he told me I would have broken federal rules. After 20 hours, he said I'd have to keep 3 sets of logbooks. :) At 25 hours, I was tired and stopped. That was about 1,700 miles, driving from full tank to under 1/4 tank (about 13 gallons), rather briskly. Another friend who has done lots of long drives said that the common day range is 600 miles.
It's not all that common that someone will leave their departure point at 8am, and stop at their destination at 2am the next morning. That's not to say it doesn't happen, or even that I haven't done it on many occasions, it just isn't normal. Even with two drivers, you'll find that you're both tired after 8 to 12 hours.
To design a car to say it'll do 1,000 miles/day for normal driving is a bit extreme. I do like that I can do it though. I don't like the idea of driving for 4 to 6 hours, and then parking for a couple hours while it charges. And sometimes there are oh-shit moments. Once in the middle of Texas somewhere, I stopped because I was getting very close to empty. The only gas station on that exit wasn't working. They didn't have normal electrical service. They had to run on a generator, and it was broken. The next gas station was 40 miles away. I rolled in on fumes. If I had run out of gas, I could have called AAA, and they would have brought me 5 gallons. I'd like to see the same happen for an electric car.
You know, something they really miss out on is the TCO. It's occasionally mentioned, but frequently ignored. "Oohh, I get 60mpg". Great. When the vehicle costs more than a regular gas vehicle, and replacement parts are a deal breaker, it's not feasible.
I'm driving my 10 year old car. I've had to replace some parts (brake pads, clutch, water pump, 2 batteries, and a few belts), but it's also done me very well over 115,000 miles, some of it was amazingly abusive driving. Besides my daily driver, I've had several opportunities to take it out racing on tracks, where it does very well.
Back to the mileage, my car gets 26mpg on the highway, and 20mpg on my daily commutes. Over the years, I've adjusted my driving slightly to get better mileage. It has a 6 speed manual transmission, and I've learned that it gets the best milage right around 2000 RPM. That means if I'm doing 45mph, I should only be in 4th gear. 55mph, I should have just shifted into 5th gear. 85mph (I-10 through Texas is 80mph for parts of it) is 6th gear, and that gives me my best mileage (26mpg running from full tank to almost empty with no stops or speed changes).
Higher speeds in a hybrid take a substantial mileage hit.
But back to the parts cost. The batteries have a rather short life. They're not just the one 12V battery that you can swap at any parts store. They are an array of batteries that (to the best of my knowledge) must be replaced by the dealer, or at least purchased from the dealer. They'll last 4 or 5 years, or just about 100k miles. If you're out of warranty, the best option is to sell the car to some sucker who doesn't know how much the batteries will cost. The cost for the battery pack is more than to buy a rebuilt engine for an older rear wheel drive car, and apparently just about as much work. I've seen (and done) weekend "shadetree" engine swaps in plenty of older cars, sometimes where the shadetree is what you use to pull the engine out (chain and hand winch, then roll the car out from under it). I have a friend with an old (1980's) Caprice Wagon, where we're talking about repowering it (rebuilt engine and transmission), and the parts price can be under $1,000, depending on how much power he decides to put in it. :)
I have a friend who has a Prius. The headlights started doing this wonky thing where they'll just turn off, or flicker for no apparent reason. The real reason is that they're HID lights (higher power, higher output). That doesn't make a damned bit of sense. They should have more efficient lighting, not the heaviest draw lighting possible. The lights in that car are special, and very expensive. It's not usually the lights though, there's a light controller that can cause it too. If you go look for how to change the headlights in a Prius, it involves dismantling the whole front of the car. Seriously. I've never had or worked on a car that took more than a few minutes with a common screwdriver (or torx screwdriver) to replace the headlights. I was willing to do the work, but dedicating a whole day to changing the headlights is insane.
So if you had a hybrid or ev, and had to change the batteries every 5 years or 100,000 miles, you'll have put substantially more into the car than if you had a gas car in 10 years. Forget it, if you plan to drive it for 20+ years. They are overpriced, disposable status symbols. "Green" isn't just about saving mpg. "Green" is doing your part for the environment, which includes utilizing things for as long as possible, not trading your car every 4 years.
Oh, and I was talking to the Prius owner. They were almost out of gas. God forbid that happens. If the battery pack runs down, you can't just jump start the gas engine and be on your way. You have to have Toyota tow your vehicle and service the full battery pack. I believe that is charging the whole system back up before the car will
Actually, most of the root "servers" are "anycast" now (9 of 13), so a single site failure doesn't matter. The US DoD runs two (G and H). G is anycast. H isn't. There wasn't clarification to what the issue was. It's easy to be quick to say "oh they suck", but shit happens sometimes. That's part of why we don't run on just one root nameserver. :)
For all we know, it could have been a planned outage. I kinda doubt it with that size window, but who knows. It was only 1 of 13, which makes it more like 1 of an awful lot since 9 of the "servers" are really servers distributed world wide. I was doing some monitoring a while back, showing how our traffic moved, and that included monitoring the root servers. It made some really screwy routes, where one check would be in the US, and the next one would be somewhere in Europe.
I was very disappointed a while back. Someone had an original boxed Novell Unixware set. It was still sealed. If I remember right, they had a server in their office, but it was set up at the head office, and both were shipped down. The network was restructured a few times, and finally they asked if I wanted the box (the media box, not the server). I took it home, kept it under my desk for quite a while. Finally, I thought it may be fun to play with it in a virtual machine. I took the shrink wrap off, pulled out the envelope with the floppies, and tore the nice EULA seal. The first disk booted. I was so happy. That was the end of it though. None of the rest of the disks were readable.
The timespan was probably that the disks were manufactured in 1995. That would have been about 2002 when I tried them.
Oh, I know exactly what you mean.
I'm trying to gather my old digital photos into one place. I've migrated servers several times, and had a couple disaster recoveries along the way. I found some pictures from the World Trade Center 09/02/2001 from about 7am to 11am. Some other pictures that were left in other places, like various workstations and company servers, were lost forever.
I remember working in a computer store years ago, a customer brought in their PC with a RLL drive. He wanted his data. We didn't have a controller to attach it to, and his was already fried. If you were to bring an old PC into a store now with an RLL drive, you'd just get a blank stare from the tech, followed by a "what is that thing?". As time goes on, things that didn't follow the migration become harder and harder to use. I went through some hell a while back trying to convert some old letters, stored in some ancient format, to something that they could use today. They were important, so I took the time to do it. That was they were legitimately important, not the normal customer "Oh my god, everything on there is essential, I'll die without it", just to find out that they're pictures of their cat from a few weeks ago. :)
Ya, there's always edge cases that survive way beyond their life expectancy. There was a story (or a few of them) where Google was restoring newsgroup postings from 1981. Some tapes worked. Some didn't. I couldn't find a story about how many tapes worked, but I found this one referencing the event.
I had an old Apple IIe and a big box of floppies. A few worked, but it had been so long since I touched it that I had a real hard time trying to remember how to do anything. It took several tries to find a boot disk that worked.
This is kind of funny.
I warned people about depending on floppy disks for long term storage. After a few years, the media degrades and the data is impossible to retrieve. They didn't listen until they went back to floppies from years ago that no longer work.
I warned people that home recordable CD's and DVD's had a shelf life of less than 10 years after they were burnt. I've seen CD's burnt, verified, and then put away in a good climate controlled environment, where a few years later they couldn't be read. For those who have listened to me, I've told them, make at least two copies, in different places, (like their hard drive and a CD), and burn new disks once a year. It sucks to have years of research on something, just to find the old information is lost.
This isn't exactly news, but every so often someone finds out, writes a story, and it makes the news again.