I get EBay phish email all the time, and I get real EBay email all the time.
It's easy to tell them apart. EBay never ask for credit card information (they don't have it); the phishers always do.
EBay know my name, and use it. The phishers don't.
My criterion for buying something in
the U.S. is it must be a steal (50% off the Canadian price is my usual
target), or just plain unobtainable in Canada. This applies to all things,
not just cars.
New cars from the U.S. can be difficult, because dealers often have
franchise agreements that only permit them to sell to U.S. customers.
Used cars are another matter, and then the RIV folks get involved.
Consider also dealer support: a Canadian dealer may not be thrilled with
providing warranty coverage on a U.S. car.
Buying cars from other countries gets even more interesting.
My van is
imported from Japan and has metric instrumentation,
which a U.S. import will not have.
Computer stuff is actually cheaper in Vancouver
than in Seattle, unless you hit a sale at Fry's.
I find removable storage a pain on XP. I find XP a pain, generally. YMMV.
On my Mac and my Linux boxes external hard drives work just fine.
On the Mac I have a choice of USB 2 and FireWire. Both work fine, though FireWire
may have a performance edge. On my old Slackware laptop it's
USB 1.1 or FireWire. Since my laptop only has a 4 pin FireWire connector I have to use
an external power supply on external hard drives. This may help.
The legal term is "bona fide occupational requirement".
The onus is on the employer to demonstrate that it's legit, but in this
case it is.
Airline flight attendants have similar
height requirements, for similar reasons. They must be tall enough to reach the overhead
storage bins,
but not so tall that they keep bumping their heads on things.
I always build a custom kernel, and view the distro kernel
only as a platform
for bootstrapping the real kernel. The box I'm typing this on
right now is a Slackware box, with a custom kernel. What the hell do
I need RAID drivers for?
At the risk of heresy, if we really
want a desktop operating system, we might want to look at a ground-up
redesign. There are lots of ideas out there, and lots of goodness
too, just looking for a home.
...laura who has played with both Minix and Syllable
The City on the Edge of Forever is a classic Greek tragedy:
The hero is going to lose.
The here knows he is going to lose.
The hero knows there's nothing he can do about it.
We like the hero, and share his pain in an impossible situation. The result: gripping drama.
Generally, I find there were only a few clunker TNG episodes, while more than
a few TOS episodes are clunkers 40 years later. A few just plain haven't aged well;
others were silly to begin with. But the best ones remain excellent to this day.
The only criterion is 15 years old, and pass provincial inspection so you
can register it. This ranges from straightforward to somewhat draconian,
depnding on the province. All the Feds care about is the age, and make sure there
is no foreign mud or plants to screw up Canadian agridculture.
Japanese imports need new headlights (dip to the right
on low-beam) with the correct E certification. I'm taking delivery of a Delica
this weekend, and the replacement headlights came from Germany. Here in Vancouver
it will need to pass its smog check too, which is why 99% of the Delicas around town
are diesels. The
importer I'm working with have lots of cool
stuff on their lot.
Kei cars are perfectly legit, and there are lots around. I'd love a Honda
Beat to zip around town in, but even if
I managed to shoehorn myself in to one, you'd need a cutting torch to get me out.:-(
Canada is almost as weird on the subject of cars as the U.S. Not quite,
but almost.
There are a few models that sell well here, like Smart, that aren't sold in the U.S.
There are a few the other way around: the Lotus Elise appeared in the U.S. before it
appeared in Canada.
It gets weirder with private imports. A long time ago, the Feds passed laws that permitted private
imports if the car was 15 years old. This was mainly aimed at collectors of 1960s
and 1970s U.S. muscle cars. It's 2007 now, 15 years old means 1992 cars, and a lot
of very desirable stuff is coming across the Pacific. We're talking
Nissan Skylines, Toyota Soarers, lots of other Japanese goodies. The Mitsubishi Delica
(we get the 4x4 diesel version) has
become a hot item with outdoorsy types. The government reaction?
An FUD campaign on how evil imports are (especially those Japanese ones with the
steering wheel on the wrong side), with threats to increase the age limit to 25 years.
...laura who wants to import the first Renault Twingo to Canada next year (1993 + 15 = 2008)
it's going to be expensive. Not to say untested. And with the probes being where they are, it's not like you get a second chance if there's a bug. Things have to work perfectly, every time. You'd have a hard time convincing anyone that your emulation would be perfect enough to replace something that's aced the test of time for 25 years.
Isn't that always the case? Yes, the system could be rewritten, if there was time and money to do so.
Yes, the old hardware could be emulated, as-is, in new hardware. But the old hardware's
bugs are known, are understood, and may even have become part of the de facto specification.
Under the circumstances, I'd nurse the old hardware along too.
Yup, I've heard of people going south of the border to buy new cars and paying the fees to bring them back, saves thousands of the price of a new vehicle. Books are the same thing. $3 or $4 price difference on something
less than $10!
The car angle is easy to understand. U.S. car dealers have much lower support and distribution costs, due to
higher volume and higher population density. So they don't have to mark the cars up
as much as a Canadian dealer would. You still have to pay GST and PST at the border,
and may have to pay to bring the car up to Canadian specs (daytime running lights, metric
speedometer, etc.). You can't generally bring in new cars, but can easily bring in
used ones.
The other reason to import a car yourself is to get
a model that was never sold in Canada in the first place.
You can bring in just about anything, from anywhere, if it's
over 15 years old.
We have lots of Japanese imports
in B.C., everything from Nissan Skylines to Mitsubishi Delicas.
They're not cheap (my Delica is clearing Customs and getting its daytime running
lights as I write this), but if that's
what you want, there is no other way to get it.
In the field I use GPS for accurate (atomic clock accurate, in fact) time.
If I have a shortwave radio with me I use WWV. WWV's audio feed is on 303 499 7111,
which can be useful. Sometimes, for the hell of it, I'll
dial WWVH on 808 335 4363 instead. I have both as contacts in my cellphone. Sad
or what?
The March eclipse was over by moonrise here, but I will be in good shape for the August one.
Except that totality is around 0300 local time.:-(
It's quite the show watching Earth's shadow creep across the moon, with the colour
contrast betwen the greyish-white moon and Earth's copper-coloured shadow. And, unlike a solar
eclipse, you can take your time. The last couple of lunar eclipses here have been relatively bright. The one I saw from Toronto
in
2000
was dark, with the moon replaced by this dark, burned-out ash thing in the sky.
Quite the sight!
I've only seen one total solar eclipse
(29 March 2006, from Turkey). Unlike lunar eclipses,
something deep inside us freaks out when the sun goes out during the day. It rattled us, and we
knew what was happening; it must
have scared the crap out of our ancestors.
I was recognized as bright very early on,
but in a small town in the 1970s, there was little they could do
about it. I skipped a couple of grades, which helped, but also had
me a couple of years younger than my classmates. At an age when a year or two
makes a big difference.
About all they could offer was tutoring other students; if that's all that's on
offer, I'd rather be dumb. I remained bored stiff until about 3rd year university.
In my last couple of years of high school I had the run of the school library, labs and stuff,
and the teachers did everything they could to cut me some slack on
attendance if I was doing something interesting, more interesting
than what they were going to teach.
I'm now Auntie Laura several times over, and, sadly, the education system is failing
my two very bright nieces exactly the same way it failed me. I hope it doesn't
damage them too badly before they can get to university and maybe do
something a little more interesting.
My DSL carrier is the local phone company, and their voice response system
drives everybody nuts. And there is no way to get to a human until
they get to you. I just hung up after half on hour of crummy music
and being told
that all agents were busy, interspersed with ads for them hiring new call centre people.
Yeah. Maybe if they did they would answer their fucking phone!
They also treat all customers like idiots. My current beef (why I was on the phone): lots of DNS failures (with tcpdump
output to show what's going wrong). My bet with myself: the first thing they'll
tell me to do is reset my DSL modem. They always ask me to do that.
Here in British Columbia we
had a look at how to run elections,
which ended up with a provincial referendum on changing from
our current first-past-the-post system to Single Transferable Vote.
Other jurisdictions (e.g. Ireland) use STV, and it works for them.
I did some research, liked what I saw, and voted YES on
STV.
Lots of others did, but not enough for the referendum to pass.
The best math always is. It's hard, gives you a headache, you lose sleep
trying to figure it out. But once you do you are astonished at how
elegant it is and how it all fits together so beautifully.
And it doesn't matter in the slightest what anatomy you have between your legs, or what your
23rd chromosome pair looks like.
I object to the word "mathematics" being debased to elementary-school
arithmetic. But that's another matter.
Here in Canada Smart Cars sell well, and are all over the place. In the last couple of years
people have been importing grey-market Japanese Kei cars in sufficient numbers
to make The Authorities nervous enough to mount a
desperate FUD
campaign on the subject.
They never actually say so, but their target is right-hand drive
cars in a country that also drives on the right. I took a
Mitsubishi Delica
for a test drive, liked it, and bought one (due off the boat later in August). The driving position is so
high, and the visibility is so good, that it makes very little
difference where the steering wheel is. Though it's hardly a little vehicle...
It was might kind of you to make sure it was nothing but raw slag before you turned it loose for anybody else to recover.
Get a clue. Please.
We didn't do it because we were nasty. We did it because if the boards were genuinely scrapped, with
no possibility of re-entering commercial service, we got a big tax writeoff. The accountants and tax people
are sometimes
picky about this.
The
outfit I work for went from 500 people to about 20 when the bubble
burst, and we had a lot of surplus stuff to get rid of. We ended up selling
lots of cool-looking flashing-light junk to movie people for props, cherry-picked a bit for ourselves,
and sold the rest to a local guy who specializes in industrial
cleanup. He
ground up most of it (circuit boards and things) to extract the metals. We promptly christened him
Dr. Junk.
Before he got the boards (some quite valuable in their time) we made sure, with a hammer and an anvil, that
the boards wouldn't make it back in to service. Downsizing can have its rewards.:-)
Why don't any car makers in the US make a car with the clutch on the right, and the gas on the left? There's nothing inherently wrong with that.
The pedal layout in cars was only finalized after World War 2. Prior to that many
cars had the accelerator in the middle. Then there
were the really different ones, like the Model T Ford.
I still reject your argument. By your reasoning, nobody would want to
ride a motorcycle unless it had three pedals on the floor, and nobody would
want to operate a bulldozer because it doesn't have a steering wheel.
I'm typing this on a Linux desktop. It's a pretty hefty system
(dual-core, 2.8 GHz, 4 GB RAM), but it earns its living, I assure you.
It's Slackware, with a custom kernel. As I've mentioned before,
my view is that the distro kernel is solely there for bootstrapping
the system until you can build a custom kernel to match your hardware
and your needs. It's open source. We can do that, you know.
My biggest frustration with Linux is the notion that Linux systems
must emulate Windows to be acceptable (e.g. Mono), and that the Unix interface is a priori
incomprehensible, for no other reason than that it doesn't look and feel like Windows.
I like the concept of lightweight desktop-oriented distros like Puppy,
but do not like they way they so desperately emulate Windows.
Right down to the icons.
Is that all there is? We have an open-source OS here, with open
source applications. If we don't like how they work, we can roll our
own. Mindlessly aping whatever Microsoft are dumping in to Vista this
week is dumb.
So make your own. That's why I bought a geiger counter on EBay, though
it was so much fun to play with I never got around to hooking it up to a computer
as I had originally intended. I even have some nicely radioactive camera lenses.
I'm not interested in SSH or https; I'm more interested in using random numbers
for one-time pad encryption so my Mom and I can send unbreakably encrypted email
and drive The Authorities nuts.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
I get EBay phish email all the time, and I get real EBay email all the time.
It's easy to tell them apart. EBay never ask for credit card information (they don't have it); the phishers always do. EBay know my name, and use it. The phishers don't.
...laura
My criterion for buying something in the U.S. is it must be a steal (50% off the Canadian price is my usual target), or just plain unobtainable in Canada. This applies to all things, not just cars.
New cars from the U.S. can be difficult, because dealers often have franchise agreements that only permit them to sell to U.S. customers. Used cars are another matter, and then the RIV folks get involved. Consider also dealer support: a Canadian dealer may not be thrilled with providing warranty coverage on a U.S. car.
Buying cars from other countries gets even more interesting. My van is imported from Japan and has metric instrumentation, which a U.S. import will not have.
Computer stuff is actually cheaper in Vancouver than in Seattle, unless you hit a sale at Fry's.
...laura
I find removable storage a pain on XP. I find XP a pain, generally. YMMV.
On my Mac and my Linux boxes external hard drives work just fine. On the Mac I have a choice of USB 2 and FireWire. Both work fine, though FireWire may have a performance edge. On my old Slackware laptop it's USB 1.1 or FireWire. Since my laptop only has a 4 pin FireWire connector I have to use an external power supply on external hard drives. This may help.
...laura
The legal term is "bona fide occupational requirement". The onus is on the employer to demonstrate that it's legit, but in this case it is.
Airline flight attendants have similar height requirements, for similar reasons. They must be tall enough to reach the overhead storage bins, but not so tall that they keep bumping their heads on things.
...laura
I always build a custom kernel, and view the distro kernel only as a platform for bootstrapping the real kernel. The box I'm typing this on right now is a Slackware box, with a custom kernel. What the hell do I need RAID drivers for?
At the risk of heresy, if we really want a desktop operating system, we might want to look at a ground-up redesign. There are lots of ideas out there, and lots of goodness too, just looking for a home.
...laura who has played with both Minix and Syllable
The City on the Edge of Forever is a classic Greek tragedy:
The hero is going to lose.
The here knows he is going to lose.
The hero knows there's nothing he can do about it.
We like the hero, and share his pain in an impossible situation. The result: gripping drama.
Generally, I find there were only a few clunker TNG episodes, while more than a few TOS episodes are clunkers 40 years later. A few just plain haven't aged well; others were silly to begin with. But the best ones remain excellent to this day.
...laura
The only criterion is 15 years old, and pass provincial inspection so you can register it. This ranges from straightforward to somewhat draconian, depnding on the province. All the Feds care about is the age, and make sure there is no foreign mud or plants to screw up Canadian agridculture.
Japanese imports need new headlights (dip to the right on low-beam) with the correct E certification. I'm taking delivery of a Delica this weekend, and the replacement headlights came from Germany. Here in Vancouver it will need to pass its smog check too, which is why 99% of the Delicas around town are diesels. The importer I'm working with have lots of cool stuff on their lot.
Kei cars are perfectly legit, and there are lots around. I'd love a Honda Beat to zip around town in, but even if I managed to shoehorn myself in to one, you'd need a cutting torch to get me out. :-(
...laura who drives a Honda Beat just fine in GT4
Canada is almost as weird on the subject of cars as the U.S. Not quite, but almost.
There are a few models that sell well here, like Smart, that aren't sold in the U.S. There are a few the other way around: the Lotus Elise appeared in the U.S. before it appeared in Canada.
It gets weirder with private imports. A long time ago, the Feds passed laws that permitted private imports if the car was 15 years old. This was mainly aimed at collectors of 1960s and 1970s U.S. muscle cars. It's 2007 now, 15 years old means 1992 cars, and a lot of very desirable stuff is coming across the Pacific. We're talking Nissan Skylines, Toyota Soarers, lots of other Japanese goodies. The Mitsubishi Delica (we get the 4x4 diesel version) has become a hot item with outdoorsy types. The government reaction? An FUD campaign on how evil imports are (especially those Japanese ones with the steering wheel on the wrong side), with threats to increase the age limit to 25 years.
...laura who wants to import the first Renault Twingo to Canada next year (1993 + 15 = 2008)
Isn't that always the case? Yes, the system could be rewritten, if there was time and money to do so. Yes, the old hardware could be emulated, as-is, in new hardware. But the old hardware's bugs are known, are understood, and may even have become part of the de facto specification.
Under the circumstances, I'd nurse the old hardware along too.
...laura
Isn't the traffic always congested in Bangalore?
The car angle is easy to understand. U.S. car dealers have much lower support and distribution costs, due to higher volume and higher population density. So they don't have to mark the cars up as much as a Canadian dealer would. You still have to pay GST and PST at the border, and may have to pay to bring the car up to Canadian specs (daytime running lights, metric speedometer, etc.). You can't generally bring in new cars, but can easily bring in used ones.
The other reason to import a car yourself is to get a model that was never sold in Canada in the first place. You can bring in just about anything, from anywhere, if it's over 15 years old. We have lots of Japanese imports in B.C., everything from Nissan Skylines to Mitsubishi Delicas. They're not cheap (my Delica is clearing Customs and getting its daytime running lights as I write this), but if that's what you want, there is no other way to get it.
...laura
My main time reference at home is a WWVB clock.
In the field I use GPS for accurate (atomic clock accurate, in fact) time. If I have a shortwave radio with me I use WWV. WWV's audio feed is on 303 499 7111, which can be useful. Sometimes, for the hell of it, I'll dial WWVH on 808 335 4363 instead. I have both as contacts in my cellphone. Sad or what?
Aloha!
...laura, with many temporal options
What's wrong with attrib +h my_secret_file?
There are legitimate ways to hide files from casual inspection. There is no need to fuck with the user's system to do so.
...laura
The March eclipse was over by moonrise here, but I will be in good shape for the August one. Except that totality is around 0300 local time. :-(
It's quite the show watching Earth's shadow creep across the moon, with the colour contrast betwen the greyish-white moon and Earth's copper-coloured shadow. And, unlike a solar eclipse, you can take your time. The last couple of lunar eclipses here have been relatively bright. The one I saw from Toronto in 2000 was dark, with the moon replaced by this dark, burned-out ash thing in the sky. Quite the sight!
I've only seen one total solar eclipse (29 March 2006, from Turkey). Unlike lunar eclipses, something deep inside us freaks out when the sun goes out during the day. It rattled us, and we knew what was happening; it must have scared the crap out of our ancestors.
...laura
I was recognized as bright very early on, but in a small town in the 1970s, there was little they could do about it. I skipped a couple of grades, which helped, but also had me a couple of years younger than my classmates. At an age when a year or two makes a big difference.
About all they could offer was tutoring other students; if that's all that's on offer, I'd rather be dumb. I remained bored stiff until about 3rd year university. In my last couple of years of high school I had the run of the school library, labs and stuff, and the teachers did everything they could to cut me some slack on attendance if I was doing something interesting, more interesting than what they were going to teach.
I'm now Auntie Laura several times over, and, sadly, the education system is failing my two very bright nieces exactly the same way it failed me. I hope it doesn't damage them too badly before they can get to university and maybe do something a little more interesting.
...laura
My DSL carrier is the local phone company, and their voice response system drives everybody nuts. And there is no way to get to a human until they get to you. I just hung up after half on hour of crummy music and being told that all agents were busy, interspersed with ads for them hiring new call centre people. Yeah. Maybe if they did they would answer their fucking phone!
They also treat all customers like idiots. My current beef (why I was on the phone): lots of DNS failures (with tcpdump output to show what's going wrong). My bet with myself: the first thing they'll tell me to do is reset my DSL modem. They always ask me to do that.
...laura
Here in British Columbia we had a look at how to run elections, which ended up with a provincial referendum on changing from our current first-past-the-post system to Single Transferable Vote. Other jurisdictions (e.g. Ireland) use STV, and it works for them.
I did some research, liked what I saw, and voted YES on STV. Lots of others did, but not enough for the referendum to pass.
...laura
The best math always is. It's hard, gives you a headache, you lose sleep trying to figure it out. But once you do you are astonished at how elegant it is and how it all fits together so beautifully. And it doesn't matter in the slightest what anatomy you have between your legs, or what your 23rd chromosome pair looks like.
I object to the word "mathematics" being debased to elementary-school arithmetic. But that's another matter.
...laura
Here in Canada Smart Cars sell well, and are all over the place. In the last couple of years people have been importing grey-market Japanese Kei cars in sufficient numbers to make The Authorities nervous enough to mount a desperate FUD campaign on the subject.
They never actually say so, but their target is right-hand drive cars in a country that also drives on the right. I took a Mitsubishi Delica for a test drive, liked it, and bought one (due off the boat later in August). The driving position is so high, and the visibility is so good, that it makes very little difference where the steering wheel is. Though it's hardly a little vehicle...
...laura
In Soviet Russia car networks YOU!
Get a clue. Please.
We didn't do it because we were nasty. We did it because if the boards were genuinely scrapped, with no possibility of re-entering commercial service, we got a big tax writeoff. The accountants and tax people are sometimes picky about this.
Besides, it was fun.
...laura
The outfit I work for went from 500 people to about 20 when the bubble burst, and we had a lot of surplus stuff to get rid of. We ended up selling lots of cool-looking flashing-light junk to movie people for props, cherry-picked a bit for ourselves, and sold the rest to a local guy who specializes in industrial cleanup. He ground up most of it (circuit boards and things) to extract the metals. We promptly christened him Dr. Junk.
Before he got the boards (some quite valuable in their time) we made sure, with a hammer and an anvil, that the boards wouldn't make it back in to service. Downsizing can have its rewards. :-)
...laura
The pedal layout in cars was only finalized after World War 2. Prior to that many cars had the accelerator in the middle. Then there were the really different ones, like the Model T Ford.
I still reject your argument. By your reasoning, nobody would want to ride a motorcycle unless it had three pedals on the floor, and nobody would want to operate a bulldozer because it doesn't have a steering wheel.
...laura
I'm typing this on a Linux desktop. It's a pretty hefty system (dual-core, 2.8 GHz, 4 GB RAM), but it earns its living, I assure you. It's Slackware, with a custom kernel. As I've mentioned before, my view is that the distro kernel is solely there for bootstrapping the system until you can build a custom kernel to match your hardware and your needs. It's open source. We can do that, you know.
My biggest frustration with Linux is the notion that Linux systems must emulate Windows to be acceptable (e.g. Mono), and that the Unix interface is a priori incomprehensible, for no other reason than that it doesn't look and feel like Windows. I like the concept of lightweight desktop-oriented distros like Puppy, but do not like they way they so desperately emulate Windows. Right down to the icons.
Is that all there is? We have an open-source OS here, with open source applications. If we don't like how they work, we can roll our own. Mindlessly aping whatever Microsoft are dumping in to Vista this week is dumb.
What next, DRM?
...laura
So make your own. That's why I bought a geiger counter on EBay, though it was so much fun to play with I never got around to hooking it up to a computer as I had originally intended. I even have some nicely radioactive camera lenses.
I'm not interested in SSH or https; I'm more interested in using random numbers for one-time pad encryption so my Mom and I can send unbreakably encrypted email and drive The Authorities nuts. :-)
...laura