Is someone able to provide us a breakdown of how these panels compare to other available solutions?
- how well do they perform as they age? (some panels lose 50% of their capacity in their first 7 yrs) - how delicate are they? (some panels are damaged by RAIN unless protected) - are they flexible at all? - can they be fitted to curved surfaces? - is it easy to fit them to non-square shapes, such as sides of a peak of a house, without the "checkerboard edge"? - also getting into the delicacy aspect, how well do they respond to vibration? (think solar powered vehicles) - how are they for weight?
I'm assuming they produce electricity on par with existing solutions, and are reasonably inexpensive.
Those contests where the solar powered cars have to drive from A to B make excellent benchmarks for solar technology, as they press all of the above to their limits. If they want to impress me, make a solar car that clears the room.
When someone discusses the local police department personnel, I think of people trying to protect me and fight crime. When they upgraded their radio system to communicate better I considered that a good thing.
But when I think of the FBI, I don't see them that way. I see an orgnization that appears to be a threat to my privacy and basic rights and fredoms. I don't think this is how it should be, but there it is. So things like this just worry me more.
I don't see the FBI getting better at what they do as being a good thing for me. Anyone else feel this way?
The lingo used here for that is a "LADS line". I have no idea what it stands for. Also referred to as "dry copper", or an "alarm circuit". They are used by alarm companies to run point to point monitoring, so it cannot be tampered with. (they can tell if the cable's been cut or tampered with) I had a "MVL modem" to my isp several years back, before my rural area had cable or DSL. Worked nice, though it was pricey. The line itself, since it had no dialtone, was something like $14/mo. Insane for what could be used for a digital line. The MVL modem was $450 though. Got up to 768/768, smokin' in these parts at that time.
About the time DSL came to town, the telco figured out what the ISP was doing, and jacked the rates. LADS lines are now $56/mo. (wow...) The trick to the LADS lines is they are "dry copper", meaning no coils or lightning arrestors, at least not what's normally on the lines. So to set up a LADS they have to find a run of copper from you to the telco that they can run around to and remove all the coils. (so setup can be pricey) What makes a LADS line possible is that MVL modems transmit in such a way as to be able to pass the "jumper clips" at the various network boxes and terminals etc that jumper one side of a block to the other. Most high speed digital lines see this as a small RF choke, and it heavily attenuates their signal at every hop. It' quickly becomes unusable. MVL modems are able to run signal through jumper clips.
I never had a problem wiht my MLV modem setup. Then after they skyrocketed the line price I went to cable and they started really jacking me around. (my "static" ip address changing every 3 mos, capping my upstream at 24kbs, etc) Now I'm content with a business grade DSL. Waiting for FIOS but not holding my breath.
"Could this be an effective argument against the proliferation of cameras or will politicians simply ignore the facts and press ahead?"
as if there could possibly be any other logical conclusion....
Is "belligerence" the word I'm looking for? Something that means you will press forward with your position, argument, or plan, even though it's patently obvious you and everyone around you understand you are wrong.
The correct way to do this is to reverse the ip address and find out who owns that netblock. Then you call law enforcement in that area that has juristiction and THEY take it from there. Been through that once. We got a call from a sherriff due to a hot credit card charged from our location. They will not give YOU the information, but if they are dilligent they will take the information that you provide and will take it from there.
In this case, lets say the thief stole it from your car and took it home and logged into your guest account and browsed the web. (left there to entice them to play with it rather than reformat it) So your server logs the IP address, and it's (fortunately) from your local cable company. So you call your county sherriff or police department and report it. THEY will not give you jack. (nor will the cable co) But the sherriff can go ask for the records, and more often than not, even without a court order, they will get them. (legally it probably requires a warrant, but for reasonable minor requests from a badge they sometimes just give it up) From there it may be of varying degrees of difficulty, it may be as simple as the sherriff going to the guy's house and politely asking for what he "borrowed". Or it may require a search warrant. The warrant is easy to get if the suspect has priors for larceny and you have even weak evidence.
It's difficult to have much pity for the pawns that covered their eyes and ears and hummed loudly when most of the rest of the world was buzzing about the writing on the wall.
Any of the pawns that didn't have a few resumes out by this point deserve what they get. That's the built-in penalty for being a stupid sheep.
so if they have a law that doesn't help them catch criminals, and they make a new law that contradicts an existing law so they can proceed, which takes precedence?
Simply because a few people abuse a fredom does not justify outlawing it.
That's like the idiots that don't want stores to sell crowbars because some burglers use them to break into houses. Common sense here says my right to buy a crowbar without obtaining a permit from the government is not a fredom that should be revoked simply because some people abuse it. If you don't like them using a crowbar to pry open your front door, find another way to deal with them. Don't revoke a right from me.
This is just a government's typical reaction to a situation where something is happening that they don't like, and they can't come up with an effective yet reasonable way to stop it, so they take draconian measures to make it stop, regardless of the fredoms that get trampled upon. Most of the rights abuses we see nowadays can be tracked back to this thought process.
Laws like this follow closely with "the end justifies the means" line of thinking. The end (alone) never justifies the means. If every reason you have for passing a law can be reduced to that one pilar, you are making a bad law.
We'd like to apologize for getting an unexpectedly large backlash due to our usual behavior of being dicks to the linux users. In the future we will strive to continue our inexcusable treatment of our linux based customers without attracting such public negative PR in the process. Thank you for your support in these difficult times!
Does anyone know how open is "open"? Does this mean that two glaciers have parted three feet from each other and now I can sneak my rowboat between them to make it all the way? Also not just any boat can dodge ice drifts that roam those areas. You won't see a Carnival Line Cruiser out there anytime soon. Who all can take advantage of this anyway? Hopefully they don't just mean there's a few feet of exposed water in areas where there's solid ice 5 feet below the surface.
I don't think it matters really whether or not it exists as a matter of fact. The earth has undergone extreme changes over the eons and this may just be another one that's happening a little quicker. Just because its causing things to happen that are inconvenient for us or others on the planet doesn't mean it has to be a bad thing. I'm sure the dinosaurs didn't like the asteroid or whatever it was that wiped them out, but can we look back at that and say it was bad? Just because things aren't going like one hopes does not make them bad or something that must be stopped.
that creates the shortest route (the grand circle)
I've always heard of that referred to as a "great arc". Different terminology or different thing? (if it is grand circle, that doesn't make as much sense because you're rarely flying in a circle...)
In case anyone cares, the reboot (or "reload" as cisco likes to call it) is caused by a stack overflow resulting from an uncaught recursive processing of specific combinations of regex options. The overflow must be input from the command line interface, after providing a valid username and password to login to the device. If you are being DOS'd by someone that has a valid login and password on your hardware, you have bigger issues that need dealing with before investigating firmware bugs in your router.
The goal of most copy protection is to prevent "casual copying" - where you can just drop it on your flash drive and shuttle it home and pop it on your machine.
The use of license codes to prevent CC has never been terribly effective, but it's on the "too easy" side of the fence, so most people don't mind. It doesn't take it quite as far as it maybe should, but doesn't take it too far, so it's tolerated.
When we start talking about license codes you get that are tied to your business name (where the Name and License fields have to agree with each other to install, and then they plaster the name on the opening banner when the software is launched) is where we start questioning the invasive nature of the software.
At the far end of the scale is the online activations. These have been addressed in this thread but most of them missed the most important point. The software will be installable (or in extreme cases, usable) only as long as the author is around. If the author's business closes and a year later your HD crashes and you pull out your restore disk, you cannot 'activate' it anymore because the activation server is down. We have not actually seen this problem come up too much yet which really surprises me, but it will happen. Actually, most of the "honorable" authors have released a crack that strips off some or all license requirements after they go out of business. I've seen several other software that many years after release, the final software update the software offered removed things like requirements for the CD to be in the drive to play the game, etc. Even though most authors seem to be good this way, it's in no way required and I really loathe buying software that requires activation for this reason. It pisses me off to think that if a business in California closes it could render a piece of software that I depend on useless, after I have paid for it.
Some companies are notorious for having viscious systems Quark comes immediately to mind. DP is another. I spent almost four hours assisting a customer last year trying to get DP reinstalled following a HD crash because he'd owned it since version 1, and had purchased upgrades all the way up to something like version 4.5. So we had to dig up his FLOPPIES, find a floppy drive, and install version 1 on a different machine (that could run the version of OS that v1.0 would run on!) Then upgrade to version 2. Then crobar it onto a newer machine in a usable state. (it wouldn't run but it was enough for the upgrader to accept it) Then upgrade to version 3. Then 3.5. Then 4. Then 4.5. Had to find the upgrade codes and software for each and every one of them. (we could not find one set of older media and I had to go find a copy elsewhere) Frankly I'm amazed we pulled it off, I was almost certain we were not going to find everything we needed. But he did keep all his goodies well-organized which is the only reason he wasn't left to buy another full version of DP.
This perfectly illustrates why software should not be aggressively protected. For any nazi software developers reading this, take note. If you make an upgrader, make it be able to accept the typed in serial number of the previous version as an alternative to detecting the previous installation on the HD. And if they put the previous number in and it's an upgrade, for gods sake don't ask for the next older sn. We don't always keep those things back to the 80's. I've deal with thiat both ways in the past, one of them we had to dig up four sets of SNs to get something installed, but at least we didn't have to hunt for ancient media. Another stopped at one upgrade level and just assumed you had all the prior licenses.
Problem is they already have your money at that point, and there's no motivation to make REinstsallation painless. Some of them I think could really care less.
Basically this is just a case of providing something at no or reduced price, because as a side effect you are benefiting. There has been no promise that good things will be guaranteed to you as a result, but in the past that's how it's worked out. This does not constitute a guarantee nor a promise. Yesterday I took a cab to work, today I'm going to walk. That doesn't mean I'm stealing something from the cabbie today.
A man in the park sets out a basket full of roses and sets up a camera a short distance away, he is a professional photographer that wants some pictures of random good looking gals picking up the roses and smiling. An ugly hag strolls up and takes a flower. Did she just steal from him? He didn't get what he wanted and provided something free in exchange for nothing. Oh the thief! Same thing.
if you provide something free as "bait" so that you benefit by some indirect means, and some people decide they don't want you to have that benefit but still take your bait, it does not change the fact that you are giving something away. There was no contract made and you freely gave something away. Quit complaining.
Theft in this variation requires there to be an agreement between two parties for an equitable exchange, where one party delivers and the other fails to deliver. Or when one party fails to enter into the agreement and takes from the other what was only offerend under conditions. And here I think lies the problem - it's hard to draw a line where a contract has been formed. The seller usually wants to benefit from the openness of no contact to help his image which will improve his trade, but on the other hand does not like having create the possibility of giving something away when he will get anything in return. You can't have it both ways. You either give something away without requiring compensation, or you don't. If the trade you're interested in is not practical to prevent me from not giving you what you want in exchange, then you are doing something wrong. That's like setting cases of pop on the street with a pail beside it for people to drop their 50c into as they pick up cans of pop, and then coming back an hour later and being pissed off that there's little or nothing in the pail and all the pop's gone. Don't be mad at the public. You did something stupid. If you go to the police station and ask them to post guards or arrest people that are walking by and snag a can, you are working on the wrong end of the problem. (think "vending machine", there is the proper solution to the problem)
Jatropha requires no pesticides, little water other than rain and no fertilizer beyond the nutrient-rich seed cake left after oil is pressed from its nuts
That last part sounds like the core of most perpetual motion machines. (or any other system they try to pass off as a "something for nothing" exchange, or "you get more out than you put in) To say that you can fertilze it with only its ground up remains implies that it somehow ends you up with more "nutrient-rich seed cake" year after year. You get out less than what you put in, never more, and almost never the same.
Saying that I suppose is true - practically any plant can be fertilized with ground up bits of itself. The way it's stated here it just sounds like it produces it in the quantity required to fertilize the entire next year's crop of equal size. Assuming it's efficient at reuse though, hopefully only a small amount of fertilization is required. Otherwise every year either (A) the crop is smaller than the year before it, or (B) the soil is more barren (and less productive) than last year.
Probably any plant that doesn't outright poison the soil it's grown in over time could do this.
you are quite correct. I had purchased a pair of them two months prior due to running low on space here. I had a collection of many smaller drives, 160gb through 320gb, that I copied the contents off from and set aside to see how the new drives worked out. About a week before the "event", I repurposed the smaller drives.
Needless to say that sent me scurrying for the pile of smaller drives, many of which I had not reformatted yet. I did lose quite a bit of data though which is unfortunate. The only good note on that was a lot of it I wa able to rebuild. I have the entire babylon 5 series of box sets here which I had ripped, and I had to re-rip them all. (took about 3 weeks)
Up until now I have relied on purchasing what I consider high quality drives, and by keeping a very close eye on them by running weekly automatic surface scans. Drives that start failing scans get replaced immediately. This vigilance was no help to a catastrophic sudden head crash.
When I took it back to Best Buy they were ready to give me another. I was not too happy with the idea of getting another one, so I opted for store credit instead. I used that credit and some added coin to buy a pair of 1tb maxtors. Maxtor has been true crap in the past but they seem to have improved quite a bit. I now have 100% of my data here mirrored or better. I'm done trusting my data to any brand. Redundancy is the only way to go. Still bugs me that I have the other seagate 500 still in service, but it's fully mirrored to one of the maxtors so I am not so concerned.
In addition to the data loss, one must factor in the inconvenience involved. It's like getting a new car and having it spend 1/2 of its first three months in the shop getting various defects fixed that keep coming up. A frustrating experience that makes the idea of a warranty much less comforting,
This experience also inspired me to burn several DVDs of the truly irreplaceable data such as family history records.
And yes, I am a seagate/maxtor fanboy. I still have a 1.6gb maxtor from 95 that works fine.
I was a seagate fanboy until 3 months ago. Lets just say that evening I could hear the (2 month old) 500gb seagate in my basement before I put the key in the door. (sounded like a circular saw)
Slashdot Mirror
Is someone able to provide us a breakdown of how these panels compare to other available solutions?
- how well do they perform as they age? (some panels lose 50% of their capacity in their first 7 yrs)
- how delicate are they? (some panels are damaged by RAIN unless protected)
- are they flexible at all?
- can they be fitted to curved surfaces?
- is it easy to fit them to non-square shapes, such as sides of a peak of a house, without the "checkerboard edge"?
- also getting into the delicacy aspect, how well do they respond to vibration? (think solar powered vehicles)
- how are they for weight?
I'm assuming they produce electricity on par with existing solutions, and are reasonably inexpensive.
Those contests where the solar powered cars have to drive from A to B make excellent benchmarks for solar technology, as they press all of the above to their limits. If they want to impress me, make a solar car that clears the room.
When someone discusses the local police department personnel, I think of people trying to protect me and fight crime. When they upgraded their radio system to communicate better I considered that a good thing.
But when I think of the FBI, I don't see them that way. I see an orgnization that appears to be a threat to my privacy and basic rights and fredoms. I don't think this is how it should be, but there it is. So things like this just worry me more.
I don't see the FBI getting better at what they do as being a good thing for me. Anyone else feel this way?
The lingo used here for that is a "LADS line". I have no idea what it stands for. Also referred to as "dry copper", or an "alarm circuit". They are used by alarm companies to run point to point monitoring, so it cannot be tampered with. (they can tell if the cable's been cut or tampered with) I had a "MVL modem" to my isp several years back, before my rural area had cable or DSL. Worked nice, though it was pricey. The line itself, since it had no dialtone, was something like $14/mo. Insane for what could be used for a digital line. The MVL modem was $450 though. Got up to 768/768, smokin' in these parts at that time.
About the time DSL came to town, the telco figured out what the ISP was doing, and jacked the rates. LADS lines are now $56/mo. (wow...) The trick to the LADS lines is they are "dry copper", meaning no coils or lightning arrestors, at least not what's normally on the lines. So to set up a LADS they have to find a run of copper from you to the telco that they can run around to and remove all the coils. (so setup can be pricey) What makes a LADS line possible is that MVL modems transmit in such a way as to be able to pass the "jumper clips" at the various network boxes and terminals etc that jumper one side of a block to the other. Most high speed digital lines see this as a small RF choke, and it heavily attenuates their signal at every hop. It' quickly becomes unusable. MVL modems are able to run signal through jumper clips.
I never had a problem wiht my MLV modem setup. Then after they skyrocketed the line price I went to cable and they started really jacking me around. (my "static" ip address changing every 3 mos, capping my upstream at 24kbs, etc) Now I'm content with a business grade DSL. Waiting for FIOS but not holding my breath.
I'm shocked and appalled that somebody would wear this type of device to an airport.
Actually I'm shocked and appalled that an airport would react in such a way to someone wearing this type of device anywhere.
Well, not shocked, really. Not in the world we live in today. Merely appalled.
"Could this be an effective argument against the proliferation of cameras or will politicians simply ignore the facts and press ahead?"
as if there could possibly be any other logical conclusion....
Is "belligerence" the word I'm looking for? Something that means you will press forward with your position, argument, or plan, even though it's patently obvious you and everyone around you understand you are wrong.
"IT was ME!"
(liar liar)
The correct way to do this is to reverse the ip address and find out who owns that netblock. Then you call law enforcement in that area that has juristiction and THEY take it from there. Been through that once. We got a call from a sherriff due to a hot credit card charged from our location. They will not give YOU the information, but if they are dilligent they will take the information that you provide and will take it from there.
In this case, lets say the thief stole it from your car and took it home and logged into your guest account and browsed the web. (left there to entice them to play with it rather than reformat it) So your server logs the IP address, and it's (fortunately) from your local cable company. So you call your county sherriff or police department and report it. THEY will not give you jack. (nor will the cable co) But the sherriff can go ask for the records, and more often than not, even without a court order, they will get them. (legally it probably requires a warrant, but for reasonable minor requests from a badge they sometimes just give it up) From there it may be of varying degrees of difficulty, it may be as simple as the sherriff going to the guy's house and politely asking for what he "borrowed". Or it may require a search warrant. The warrant is easy to get if the suspect has priors for larceny and you have even weak evidence.
It's difficult to have much pity for the pawns that covered their eyes and ears and hummed loudly when most of the rest of the world was buzzing about the writing on the wall.
Any of the pawns that didn't have a few resumes out by this point deserve what they get. That's the built-in penalty for being a stupid sheep.
(cups hand to ear) "What's that? What's that sound? sounds almost like... a paper shredder..."
so if they have a law that doesn't help them catch criminals, and they make a new law that contradicts an existing law so they can proceed, which takes precedence?
Simply because a few people abuse a fredom does not justify outlawing it.
That's like the idiots that don't want stores to sell crowbars because some burglers use them to break into houses. Common sense here says my right to buy a crowbar without obtaining a permit from the government is not a fredom that should be revoked simply because some people abuse it. If you don't like them using a crowbar to pry open your front door, find another way to deal with them. Don't revoke a right from me.
This is just a government's typical reaction to a situation where something is happening that they don't like, and they can't come up with an effective yet reasonable way to stop it, so they take draconian measures to make it stop, regardless of the fredoms that get trampled upon. Most of the rights abuses we see nowadays can be tracked back to this thought process.
Laws like this follow closely with "the end justifies the means" line of thinking. The end (alone) never justifies the means. If every reason you have for passing a law can be reduced to that one pilar, you are making a bad law.
We'd like to apologize for getting an unexpectedly large backlash due to our usual behavior of being dicks to the linux users. In the future we will strive to continue our inexcusable treatment of our linux based customers without attracting such public negative PR in the process. Thank you for your support in these difficult times!
Wish I had read your comment before posting this one earlier. I share your sentiments.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=299049&cid=20620915
ya, the garbage cans of all the scientists camped up nort' are good eatin
Does anyone know how open is "open"? Does this mean that two glaciers have parted three feet from each other and now I can sneak my rowboat between them to make it all the way? Also not just any boat can dodge ice drifts that roam those areas. You won't see a Carnival Line Cruiser out there anytime soon. Who all can take advantage of this anyway? Hopefully they don't just mean there's a few feet of exposed water in areas where there's solid ice 5 feet below the surface.
I don't think it matters really whether or not it exists as a matter of fact. The earth has undergone extreme changes over the eons and this may just be another one that's happening a little quicker. Just because its causing things to happen that are inconvenient for us or others on the planet doesn't mean it has to be a bad thing. I'm sure the dinosaurs didn't like the asteroid or whatever it was that wiped them out, but can we look back at that and say it was bad? Just because things aren't going like one hopes does not make them bad or something that must be stopped.
that creates the shortest route (the grand circle)
I've always heard of that referred to as a "great arc". Different terminology or different thing? (if it is grand circle, that doesn't make as much sense because you're rarely flying in a circle...)
In case anyone cares, the reboot (or "reload" as cisco likes to call it) is caused by a stack overflow resulting from an uncaught recursive processing of specific combinations of regex options. The overflow must be input from the command line interface, after providing a valid username and password to login to the device. If you are being DOS'd by someone that has a valid login and password on your hardware, you have bigger issues that need dealing with before investigating firmware bugs in your router.
The goal of most copy protection is to prevent "casual copying" - where you can just drop it on your flash drive and shuttle it home and pop it on your machine.
The use of license codes to prevent CC has never been terribly effective, but it's on the "too easy" side of the fence, so most people don't mind. It doesn't take it quite as far as it maybe should, but doesn't take it too far, so it's tolerated.
When we start talking about license codes you get that are tied to your business name (where the Name and License fields have to agree with each other to install, and then they plaster the name on the opening banner when the software is launched) is where we start questioning the invasive nature of the software.
At the far end of the scale is the online activations. These have been addressed in this thread but most of them missed the most important point. The software will be installable (or in extreme cases, usable) only as long as the author is around. If the author's business closes and a year later your HD crashes and you pull out your restore disk, you cannot 'activate' it anymore because the activation server is down. We have not actually seen this problem come up too much yet which really surprises me, but it will happen. Actually, most of the "honorable" authors have released a crack that strips off some or all license requirements after they go out of business. I've seen several other software that many years after release, the final software update the software offered removed things like requirements for the CD to be in the drive to play the game, etc. Even though most authors seem to be good this way, it's in no way required and I really loathe buying software that requires activation for this reason. It pisses me off to think that if a business in California closes it could render a piece of software that I depend on useless, after I have paid for it.
Some companies are notorious for having viscious systems Quark comes immediately to mind. DP is another. I spent almost four hours assisting a customer last year trying to get DP reinstalled following a HD crash because he'd owned it since version 1, and had purchased upgrades all the way up to something like version 4.5. So we had to dig up his FLOPPIES, find a floppy drive, and install version 1 on a different machine (that could run the version of OS that v1.0 would run on!) Then upgrade to version 2. Then crobar it onto a newer machine in a usable state. (it wouldn't run but it was enough for the upgrader to accept it) Then upgrade to version 3. Then 3.5. Then 4. Then 4.5. Had to find the upgrade codes and software for each and every one of them. (we could not find one set of older media and I had to go find a copy elsewhere) Frankly I'm amazed we pulled it off, I was almost certain we were not going to find everything we needed. But he did keep all his goodies well-organized which is the only reason he wasn't left to buy another full version of DP.
This perfectly illustrates why software should not be aggressively protected. For any nazi software developers reading this, take note. If you make an upgrader, make it be able to accept the typed in serial number of the previous version as an alternative to detecting the previous installation on the HD. And if they put the previous number in and it's an upgrade, for gods sake don't ask for the next older sn. We don't always keep those things back to the 80's. I've deal with thiat both ways in the past, one of them we had to dig up four sets of SNs to get something installed, but at least we didn't have to hunt for ancient media. Another stopped at one upgrade level and just assumed you had all the prior licenses.
Problem is they already have your money at that point, and there's no motivation to make REinstsallation painless. Some of them I think could really care less.
Basically this is just a case of providing something at no or reduced price, because as a side effect you are benefiting. There has been no promise that good things will be guaranteed to you as a result, but in the past that's how it's worked out. This does not constitute a guarantee nor a promise. Yesterday I took a cab to work, today I'm going to walk. That doesn't mean I'm stealing something from the cabbie today.
A man in the park sets out a basket full of roses and sets up a camera a short distance away, he is a professional photographer that wants some pictures of random good looking gals picking up the roses and smiling. An ugly hag strolls up and takes a flower. Did she just steal from him? He didn't get what he wanted and provided something free in exchange for nothing. Oh the thief! Same thing.
if you provide something free as "bait" so that you benefit by some indirect means, and some people decide they don't want you to have that benefit but still take your bait, it does not change the fact that you are giving something away. There was no contract made and you freely gave something away. Quit complaining.
Theft in this variation requires there to be an agreement between two parties for an equitable exchange, where one party delivers and the other fails to deliver. Or when one party fails to enter into the agreement and takes from the other what was only offerend under conditions. And here I think lies the problem - it's hard to draw a line where a contract has been formed. The seller usually wants to benefit from the openness of no contact to help his image which will improve his trade, but on the other hand does not like having create the possibility of giving something away when he will get anything in return. You can't have it both ways. You either give something away without requiring compensation, or you don't. If the trade you're interested in is not practical to prevent me from not giving you what you want in exchange, then you are doing something wrong. That's like setting cases of pop on the street with a pail beside it for people to drop their 50c into as they pick up cans of pop, and then coming back an hour later and being pissed off that there's little or nothing in the pail and all the pop's gone. Don't be mad at the public. You did something stupid. If you go to the police station and ask them to post guards or arrest people that are walking by and snag a can, you are working on the wrong end of the problem. (think "vending machine", there is the proper solution to the problem)
Jatropha requires no pesticides, little water other than rain and no fertilizer beyond the nutrient-rich seed cake left after oil is pressed from its nuts
That last part sounds like the core of most perpetual motion machines. (or any other system they try to pass off as a "something for nothing" exchange, or "you get more out than you put in) To say that you can fertilze it with only its ground up remains implies that it somehow ends you up with more "nutrient-rich seed cake" year after year. You get out less than what you put in, never more, and almost never the same.
Saying that I suppose is true - practically any plant can be fertilized with ground up bits of itself. The way it's stated here it just sounds like it produces it in the quantity required to fertilize the entire next year's crop of equal size. Assuming it's efficient at reuse though, hopefully only a small amount of fertilization is required. Otherwise every year either (A) the crop is smaller than the year before it, or (B) the soil is more barren (and less productive) than last year.
Probably any plant that doesn't outright poison the soil it's grown in over time could do this.
but also eliminates any possibility of falsification in the process
I just love it when people automatically consider a system impenetrable the second you seal it up with so much as a strip of duct tape.
Who does he work for? Diebold?
Security is never absolute.
you are quite correct. I had purchased a pair of them two months prior due to running low on space here. I had a collection of many smaller drives, 160gb through 320gb, that I copied the contents off from and set aside to see how the new drives worked out. About a week before the "event", I repurposed the smaller drives.
Needless to say that sent me scurrying for the pile of smaller drives, many of which I had not reformatted yet. I did lose quite a bit of data though which is unfortunate. The only good note on that was a lot of it I wa able to rebuild. I have the entire babylon 5 series of box sets here which I had ripped, and I had to re-rip them all. (took about 3 weeks)
Up until now I have relied on purchasing what I consider high quality drives, and by keeping a very close eye on them by running weekly automatic surface scans. Drives that start failing scans get replaced immediately. This vigilance was no help to a catastrophic sudden head crash.
When I took it back to Best Buy they were ready to give me another. I was not too happy with the idea of getting another one, so I opted for store credit instead. I used that credit and some added coin to buy a pair of 1tb maxtors. Maxtor has been true crap in the past but they seem to have improved quite a bit. I now have 100% of my data here mirrored or better. I'm done trusting my data to any brand. Redundancy is the only way to go. Still bugs me that I have the other seagate 500 still in service, but it's fully mirrored to one of the maxtors so I am not so concerned.
In addition to the data loss, one must factor in the inconvenience involved. It's like getting a new car and having it spend 1/2 of its first three months in the shop getting various defects fixed that keep coming up. A frustrating experience that makes the idea of a warranty much less comforting,
This experience also inspired me to burn several DVDs of the truly irreplaceable data such as family history records.
And yes, I am a seagate/maxtor fanboy. I still have a 1.6gb maxtor from 95 that works fine.
I was a seagate fanboy until 3 months ago. Lets just say that evening I could hear the (2 month old) 500gb seagate in my basement before I put the key in the door. (sounded like a circular saw)
The Darwin Awards are proof that stupidity often overrides common sense for survival.