If you can get green beans and roast them yourself - a press pot works fantastic. I'm a little too lazy to roast them all of the time, so I found some compromise blends that aren't too stale. But if I really want it nice, I have to trek down and get ones to roast myself. Nothing fancy, just pan roast here.
That only worked out for Harley Davidson because they achieved icon status. Fender music company survived CBS for the same reason, even though it probably shouldn't have. Gibson survived for much of the same reason. People put up with the problems with their Vespa scooters...yadda. But my router, my phone, it isn't a vespa, it isn't a harley, it isn't a ferarri. I just want it to work right, out of the box. I bought it to do those things, and when it doesn't -- and when nearly every model on the shelf doesn't - that becomes a severe problem.
The art of finding a quality box fan...or quality fan period... I've got an Emerson made in 193X...Works great, out lasted every single fan I've ever owned in my lifetime. Goes bad? Worth every penny to repair it. I miss stuff like that being available. Best I've been able to do here is the "commercial quality" items and even though are loud, obnoxious, and still have more plastic than I feel justified for my 6x-27x price premium. No, that kind of quality doesn't exist anymore, not at any price.
I went to the store to buy a guage for measuring air pressure. Every single one of them now, plastic. Went to another store, same thing, went to another one, same thing. Now this one is a gift for my father, I wanted to get him one like mine - hard metal, rotary design, thick glass, accurate, and you could run it over without breaking it. The best I could do is the barbie & ken special, well, hell, its digital and at least back lighted display. But drop it from 3-4 ft and its probably toast, whereas mine I could throw it off a cliff, have an 18 wheeler run over it, and it might just scratch the metal.
Bought a USR 8054, the features I needed weren't actually there... The update...however long later added them, or the illusion of them, they never worked. The entire router became less & less stable as time went on. I tried to find a good one, but all of them were cheap POS because of the software involved. Even the "quality" stuff was hampered by poor software. So I figured I would try my luck using replacement software and not care. This I have a couple routers with 3rd party firmware now that work great, and do what they should have done out of the box that didn't.
While I appreciate the work the 3rd party firmware developers did, and it would be sucksville without them, its because none of the makers are making a good finished product period that we are in this situation and they had to develop something.
Sure there are probably a few difficult to do work arounds (as it takes more than changing a user agent to get this to play nice). According to some developers, using "flash" is a workaround in and of itself since it "displays the same in all browsers". Of course, that isn't really true, and even when flash does display, I can't resize flash, the fonts are often so tiny that I & my elderly parents have to break out a magnifying glass to even attempt to make use of the content.
I still expect that when I attempt Ecommerce on the web that I'll likely have to use IE 6 or better at some point. I have been pleasantly surprised as of late that most of the companies I've delt with on the web allowed me to complete transactions in Opera and/or Mozilla/Firefox. One of the ironies I've encountered is that it is often the bigger companies which make it impossible to use IE & not the smaller shops. Sometimes you come across a poorly coded site on a small shop, but the large companies try to add everything under the sun to allegedly make the experience better and it ends up breaking things. Larger companies tend to set up more roadblocks of endless forms to fill out as well, and forced registration..etc I've abandoned more purchases due to if I can't complete my transaction in two screens (and really only want one) then its not worth my time to buy there. If it takes 20 minutes to checkout, to hell with them -- my time isn't free. Amazon.com will *never* have me as a customer due to their checkout. I don't care if I only have to fill it out once. If it takes longer on the web to order than calling the place on the phone, I'm not going to do business with them -- and if I have to use flash to complete the transaction, I'm likely not going to do business with them either as many of the applications written for it break in other browsers without reporting an error despite the touts of many developers that "flash makes everything display and work the same".
If they would simply give up the use (and we could legislate this away very easily) of gypsum phosphate based fertilizers on tobacco crops we could cut cancer from smoking by more than 80% (some say 90%). Its the radiation they pick up from the fertilizer, polonium, radium, uranium..etc that is actually responsible for most of the damage. This damage includes much of COPD & Emphysema. We are not talking about a small exposure here, not unless you consider a thousand chest x-rays a year a small dose.
They've known this since the 50's, and ammonia phosphates are available without the contamination issue. Seems like it should have been delt with by now. But, we couldn't do anything to reduce the risk to smokers, now could we? Thats how anti-tobacco zealots think. Its also how prohibitionist by other names at the FDA think by making the more dangerous forms of pain drugs easier to prescribe than safer non-compounded ones. I'm sure someone at MADD is thinking about adding arsenic to the beer too... But don't worry, they are putting it in the chicken, PETA should be happy...
To be perfectly honest, the big solid yellow mass of cables scares the hell out me of to think about how much stuff must be bundled up in that mess and what possibly could be so critical as to need all that...and actually depend on all of that. Something like that, you get a problem, you might as well just run another cable and throw it in the pile, you will NEVER find the one that is faulty in that mess to pull it out.
I have, however, seen something about 2/3 of the way to that bad at one of the hospitals near here that is always under construction. They no longer bother to put the ceiling tiles back in place. Their phones look like that, their network looks like that, their intercoms look like that, much of the wiring for the important monitoring stuff for patient care looks like that, the patient call system looks like that, and worse - the equipment that runs to their own paging tower looks pretty close to that. The only thing is even remotely close to straight forward is the electrical wiring, and I'm told half of that is dead from moving it around so much with the changes to the hospital. They at least bundled that and supported it so it isn't hanging down in the service & employees areas like a spider doing its ninja impersonation ready to pounce like so much of the twisted pair phone system. Some places where they do have it covered over in tiles and/or drywall like ceiling -- the weight of all of the unsupported, non-secured cables and literally buckling the ceiling. Not just popping out tiles, but bending the framework that holds it to together, most of this isn't even tied together with band straps, of if it is, its so far between sections that its all come apart.
Nothing is labeled either - with the exception of a few smaller sections of private office (for doctors that treat mostly outpatient in another wing) data centers - there are no labels. They at least bundle some of it at the racks to get it out of the way in a few spots, but its not exactly bundled to organize it by what it does or even where it goes in there, it was an attempt to overcome where the duct tape failed to keep people from tripping over it... And I mean a LOT of duct tape. I have no idea how they would diagnose say a phone problem if they thought it was the line itself, the only thing they could do would be to go run another line and add to the pile, and that looks like what has been SOP for a long time. This stuff can get way out of control so quickly when its done wrong the first time.
I have a DIMM I keep about strictly because it's bad and causes massive data corruption yet passes MemTest86 no sweat every time. I've allowed this sucker to run for weeks before without a single error yet you can barely get an OS installed. Odd but it happens once in a while. That situation is likely a reflection of variable power supply voltage. When running memtest86, the power supply isn't on a huge load, you don't have all of the disk revving up, CD rom revving up, and everything else you have when trying to get through an OS install. Everything in the computer runs off of a high/low voltage, and there is usually a series of invertors to try to make the ones that are a little low, or a little high back into a strong high or low voltage signal...But sometimes you get ripple and other fluctuations, and you end up with signals right in the middle, and its anyones guess whether it decides this is a high state or low state and what it does with it. This is the most likely culprit. That isn't to say you can't just get the occasional one that will pass memtest and still be flaky, I've seen it, just not very often. Different RAM sticks have different tolerances for that voltage fluctuation as well.
Be prepared for lots of payment issues. You'll need to be able to accept credit card payments, check out the quicken site, they have an online store that will link in with your quickbooks install and they'll handle all the fraud issues for you. If you do market to the low end, parent is right, you'll have people slow pay/no pay, accuse you of 'hacking' them when they don't pay (that was a treat, guy basically wanted more free service under the threat of legal action), etc. Humanity is a cess pool, you'll be at the bottom when you're performing services in people's homes.
If you go too cheap, you attract the scammers too. Had one guy that wanted the diagnosis, and we offered a "free diagnosis if its under 30 minutes" at the time to get new clients in the door and made up for it on the parts & labor to fix to the problems. Most hardware issues you can figure out in less than that, and they get an estimate of what is wrong within an hour or two. Anyway, guy dropped off a box, had a bios virus and a flaky board. Was a PCChips "special" board made for low budget OEMS that no one supported and its maker had closed up shop. So no bios replacement. Found a suitable board cheap, gave him the estimate to swap it out, save all of his data, and have it back to him in a week. Said no to work. Okay, told him to come pick up the machine. He left the machine sit here for a couple weeks, left him several messages to come get it. Finally does. No charge, free diagnosis, no business, fine. Figure he will go try to get it done cheaper somewhere else. Nope! Two weeks later get a court summons, and this guy is suing us for stealing his processor.
Now I have to warn you, if you expect judges to be the least bit useful on any technical matter, then you are out of your mind. If you can't come up with a good car analogy, good luck, and even if you can... In this case, we took the processor out in front of the judge, and slapped it down on his desk in front of him. Still got ruled in this guys favor - who was not charged a dime. Had to take this to the appeals level just to avoid giving in to a scammer, which meant actually having someone write up an appeal. No problem there, got someone 25 years younger that could grasp the auto analogy of "If you take your car into the mechanic, and he tells you that your starter motor & alternator have gone bad, and you need to replace them... You elect not to have the work done, your engine isn't missing, and you don't sue the mechanic because your car doesn't start." Appeal fixed it, yadda, but it was $70 out of our pocket & time.
If your state allows contracts to force disputes to be settled by mediators of your choosing (and better if their expense), put it in the contract. For us, two days in court was two days of wasted time we much rather would have spent doing other things, absolute disillusionment with the legal system. If you are going into peoples houses, there are issues that can crop up as well - say the claimed $2500 vase wrapped around the hornets nest of everything electronic in their house cables in one spot? Fluffy their evil dog they assure you "Doesn't bite" which means doesn't bite them. There are situations where trying to preserve data is on the order of needing a recovery service with an electron microscope, but the average joe will not grasp this. So you better have a contract, and have it include a way around whatever you think you might encounter that makes some attempt at being fair to everyone involved. If you can force mediation in your area, do so, its much better than the current system. You may think "Ahh, I don't need that.." but believe me, you deal with 100 people - if just 6 of them are a-holes, you will need it. If you accept boxes dropped off, be prepared for the stored in the basement filled with mud special too, or the cockroach farm box. "You can fix this right?" Let me call an exterminator first... Believe me, you don't want those clients. Raise your rates to something enough to cut out the riff raff & its always better in the long run -- and draw up a good contract and don't touch squat without it.
I happen to agree with that assessment. This is likely to be just as phony as the rest of the these, and will always find extensive links back to the government. From train cars with the bottoms of the train blasted up and not down, photoshop'd (and very poorly done I might add) pictures of people entering the tube area (Hey, steel rails don't commonly slide through arms...) I'm sure this "attack plot" will have it roots from the same internal government sources, and we can look forward to more manufactured evidence as in the last time.
All part of the war for hearts and minds of those in the United States, United Kingdom, & Australia. There is a long history of this kind of action. In Italy it was (US run) P2 blowing things up to blame it on socialist & communist. I hate commies as much as the next guy, but its in our history, learn it, embrace it. They don't even change the names much, they have a group to do similar things now called "P2OG". The planned but not carried out "Operation Northwoods" to run a false flag operation (blowing a US plane out of the sky, blaming it on Cuba -- in addition to other things) during the Kennedy administration. Gulf Of Tonkin staged "attack" that never happened, but they lied about it anyway to get us into it. The U.S.S. Liberty attack by the Israeli's designed to be blamed on Egypt (and the US went along just fine with this lie for the American market...for a time...). How about good ol' "Weapons of mass destruction?", yeah, well, it sounded good. (Not to mention "strange" things like British soldiers driving around a 2ton car bomb dressed in arab gear, captured by the Iraqi police, and then "rescued" from their captors with British & American tanks. No one ever asks, why are they driving around a car bomb?) Ever notice that the media now claims Al Qaeda means "The base" or "The movement", it doesn't, it means "THE DATABASE" and it is the CIA project file name for their contacts in the middle east & Afghanistan. You see how many of the people at Gitmo are just hapless farmers or a garden variety solider with no ties to anything? You see that they don't care that who they have is that?
You ever notice that even with $25,000,000.00 rewards for information leading the capture of Al-Qaeda members that no one in the world can seem to find them? Not even all of the intelligence agencies of the world? That they have no achievable goals? No base of operations? "World wide Islamic revolution", C'mon, who writes this stuff? What are we 12? I want you to think about every other so called terrorist organization in the world. Hizbollah -- why were they formed? They were formed after Israel invaded Lebanon. Their goals? Drive the Israelis completely out of Israel (Israel still occupied a portion of Lebanon, so they were not entirely successful). The IRA, why were they formed? To drive the Brits out. The PLO - why where they formed? Israeli occupation. Hamas? Same basic reasons. (Though this one is more complicated as Israel gave them seed money to use them as a wedge against the PLO, and maybe to justify some of the things they did.) Turn your compass south and look at the Philipines, why are they fighting there? To rid their land of a corrupt goverment that caters to foreign interest. You notice what they all have in common? Either an occupation to drive out an aggressor, or a resistance against a hostile government.
The non-organic terrorist groups (those being government created) tend to be used to either discredit movements that are threatening to big business or the government itself. To provoke wars, or build the anger to make it easier to lead people there. Look at what you are seeing and think about which is more likely when you evaluate these things. In the case of Al-Qaeda, its to get them to dislike us, and us to dislike them - so we are less averse to going over there and slaughtering a mess of people to take the resources and occupy the land -to increase power for the governments whom participate to prot
These low prices are only to gain market share, and things will change. Maybe, but for the moment the telcos are using DSL tied to a land line as an incentive to keep you on their high profit copper land line service - and to try to force you to take one of their long distance carriers to keep your low DSL prices. They aren't worried about cable as much as they are worried about VOIP. If the customer goes VOIP - they likely lose everything. Most people have a cell phone, they have no need for a landline if they can get broadband reasonable elsewhere. Thus the phone company gets 0 business in that scenario. That is their real fear, and the primary motivation behind the pricing structure. Its also the primary drive behind their lobbying efforts to be able to end net neutrality.
Here on slashdot no less, a bunch of people decried my overclocking of a Celeron 300A to 450... FYI, its still running right now...
You decried my overclocking of my AMD Barton 2500+ to 3200+... I am still using THAT as my primary machine...
I am aware of the risks of overclocking, but I am also aware of the benifits. I weigh those considerations carefully before doing so. Overclocking not for you? Fine. No problem.
I'm not that shocked by their results to be honest. I do question the overvoltage they are using to get there, however. On air with a completely unimpressive cooler I've taken my Celeron-D 2.93 Ghz chip to 3.6Ghz, just raise the bus up a knotch to the next memory setting. Now the onboard graphics doesn't work at that setting, so you have to have an AGP card - but the board works fine, and at least in the winter & spring temps here can be kept from overheating (though it gets a little hotter than I would like). With summer rolling around I'm going to swap out the heatsink and go with larger intake and exhaust fans. After rebates, I paid $30 for this CPU, and its worth every penny. Considering the Pentium-D 506 is basically two Celeron-D's slapped together, I would fully expect most of them to get to 3.6Ghz with a little care in the right motherboards, at least 3.34Ghz. Of course, this wont happen with the stock cooler. You need to get one with at least partial copper and a bigger fan that runs a little faster.
On the downside of OC'ing, I killed a motherboard overclocking. The chip was fine, everything else was fine, but the drive controller went snap crackle pop. So YMMV, that was in a K6 system (which were poor OC'ers to begin with), I expected the chip to heat up a bit and was prepared to deal with that - I didn't expect the drive controller to die on me. That was at a trivial 20mhz overclock as well, which tells me the components in the board were not up to snuff.
Celerons I've OC'd with impunity. They have been great chips for it, and I've never gone out and purchased a water cooler or any of that nonsense. I've still got a Celeron 300 OC'd, running what, 8-9 years? I've still got a PIII OC'd running 6 years (that I've owned it). I don't expect my current system to last 10 years, I'll likely replace it in 2 as even at 3.6ghz its less suited for the way I actually use my computer than a dual core chip would be. Seeing this does give me another option. Though I'll likely save a little extra money and get a 4400X2 anyway.
80% of the IP addresses measured no longer support spoofing!
Given the move to broadband with home routers and NAT it seems obvious that spoofing capable networks are on the decline.
I am behind a NAT, got exactly (and expected) the results you described. So I decided to directly connect & test this. Same results. My ISP has egress filtering in place. I still get spoofed packets showing up in the firewall log from the net, but not at the level I did a year ago.
Truly privatized would be your work place paying you money to obtain your own health care. Whether you bank it and pay straight cash after that(frequently gets a 50% discount), or buy a health care insurance program, or some combination of the two is up to you.
Have you every tried paying cash in the US Health Care system? I had a dentist that I loved dearly, compared to some of the other dentists I've seen - this guy is the best in the field I've come across. My insurance used to pay him $650 for a root canal and crown. But he charged a cash customer $1500 for the same thing.
I have to pick up a couple medicines every month at the pharmacy. (Now I suppose Walmart & Costco are a few bucks cheaper, but not on my pharmacy plan) I pay a trivial deductable ($1 each on generics) for my medicines and a straight percentage for non-generics. They pay $65 for one of my scripts, but the cash price for it is $128 at Walgreens. They don't even hide that they are paying half what I would, I have hard caps on the policy and everything everyone is paid out is listed. Go try to find a pair of MRIs with & without contrast for $530 paying cash. I know why my GP isn't always happy to see me either, I know what he is paid for it.
Cash wont get you far in the American Health Care system, they rape cash customers blind. $50 for a hot towel, $75 for an ice pack... (*This is from my physical therapy bill before insurance, and these are the cash billing prices.)
I know there are some doctors you can negotiate with, and there is always the Doc-In-The-Box for routine things, but if you need anything more than the very routine, its a very expensive proposition. Some of the health care system is pure price gouging, but its targeted at the cash customer the worst.
I'm currently working as a contractor, and using COBRA for my old insurance policy. When its up, I'm going to buy this policy outright, its far from cheap, but I've done the math both ways. I can't win paying cash, and can't afford the risk of needing some specialized bit of care if I have any complications.
I'll tell you what I really think causes the difference between here and the UK. Although I haven't lived in the UK, I spent a year working in Germany. Its the food, its the stress, and its the climate of work. Half of the additives to the food you wont find in theirs - it makes a difference. The work environment was a lot better, shorter hours, less pressures for overtime (I was reminded of this several times when I suggested time tables that would be perfectly acceptable here - just work people 55 hours a week to do it.), very little stress coming out (there was virtually no crime where I was at). Even though I had the stress of dealing with a language I hadn't mastered, navigating a city I barely knew, and a bit of culture shock - I still came home with less need to unwind. Where I was at less traffic as well, of course it was expensive to drive. It was very typical on any job site I was at for them to offer us good coffee, and a few minutes to talk to everyone before starting. (That almost never happens here, just get led to the problem and dive in and avoid talking to anyone unless you have to, or they will think you are slacking off.)
For me, at least, the monitors have to be identical, as subtle color shifts between different monitors become especially evident when using a multimon setup. It's annoying when one monitor's 9300K differs from another I run a triple head now, and I have that problem. Even with a near perfectly matched pair of Iiyama monitors with very close to consecutive serial numbers its no guarantee they will be an exact color match. Mine isn't, and my third display is a used Compaq 7550 - which is substantially brighter than the other two (though I did finally get the colors to match up very very close). The difference in the two Iiyama's is very slight, but you can see it with greens and very bright reds. I spent hours when I first got them trying to color match them, adjusting every setting to try to get them to perfectly line up, but in the end its a luck of the draw thing I think.
Then of course, is the issue of deskspace. For my desk to support 3CRTs I had to add a brace to the center of it for the added weight (it was beginning to bend in the center), and I built a small extra edge on the left (a L type joint with a cross brace, everything dovetailed, glued, and nailed for extra stability) to give me 7" more space for dealing with the bulk. I could fit 3 21"'s on here if I had to now, but I'll settle for 2 and a 17". I've often thought that the ultimate desk for this type setup would be a large C shaped desk, with space for 3-4 monitors, your laser printer/copier and phone. (I have my printer on a desk next to this one with routers & switches & my phone). I looked into getting a large C shaped desk, one of the furniture stores had one I liked (even with holes you could pop out to run the cables through), but they wanted $2700 for it. Given that, my only option when this one finally starts to buckle from the weight will be to build one myself. I might break down and get LCD's instead next time, they are coming down in price, but even those in the larger sizes take up quite a bit of room. LCD's would cut down on the heat as well, which I approve of in the winter, but it can be bothersome in the summer.
So there are some issues with running a triple display that have to be overcome. There is a market for a company to make desks for this purpose - especially ones with space for the computer beneath (but elevated) and holes for all of the cables. I have to imagine quite a few people in graphic design, and possibly for some monitoring applications are buying SLI machines simply to run 3-4 displays. Most of the desks available are woefully inadequate for this task, and setting this up on a huge flat table (which is what I've seen a lot) waste a lot of room and is unhandy (though you can often fit your laserprinter/copier that way).
There are also quite a few software issues when running triple head. If you have a Parhelia, no problem - powerdesk is very nice. If you can meet your needs with a G450 or so - fine. I've tried ATI's Hydravision and Nvidias NView setup - which are okay on dual monitor setups though not as nice as powerdesk, but things don't work as smoothly on triple and quad monitor setups - there are issues with applications not launching where you want them, or not being able to send a movie to a particular display automatically or to the video out automatically. All of them have driver & setup issues in Linux, though Matrox products tend to have less, but that depends on the application you wish to run (they have a lot of specialty drivers available for fixes with CAD/CAM applications if you need them). Listed on their page with this TripleHead2Go product it says "WinXP/Win2000" so it may still need a driver of some kind and may not work under Linux (though I suspect it probably will in a limited functionality mode, with the issue being the software for controlling the displays needing Windows).
Its certainly an intersting product, but $299 a little steep for it. If you can afford $299+ plus a reasonably high end graphics card, you can afford a Parhelia, and might be better served going with that.
It is true that they shouldn't expect their users to suck all of their capacity around the clock, but I don't think that gives them the right to enforce measures for them not to do it. They offered a service that allowed their users a certain bandwidth, usually around the clock, and the (note: paying) subscribers have the right to use as much as they want from that service. All fine and well, and I can understand some arguements for limiting high bandwidth users at the extreme ends of the sclae. However, I am not a very high bandwidth user. I pay "extra" for a faster higher tier connection speed so its there for the burst of activity when I need it and want it. I don't want to have to sit around all day to wait for a CD's worth of data to move about before I can get back to work. Even though I rarely use Bittorrent, or any P2P, and I'm seldom using more than 10GB a month upstream & downstream combined, whenever I DO use any of these services, or lately even transfer a file through a messenger service or even via IRC/DCC -- my traffic is being shaped by the ISP in a way that is not favorable to me. Quite simply, I am NOT getting what I paid for. I might be more forgiving of this if I hadn't shelled out more money for a faster connecion specifically to have it available for these uses when I want it. I'm not harming their network, I'm not an excessive user with my upsteam & downstream maxed out all day. I do, however, need to occasionally transfer a 700MB-2GB file around. Not only have they been rate limting those task (even FTP) they have been dropping connections randomly in the middle of it (so I know its intentional, my connection never resets otherwise unless the power cycles). My ISP is SBC-Yahoo, recently acquired by AT&T, but this problem started before the merger. It was not a problem at the beginning of my contract, but has since become one - so I know they have implimented some kind of measures to cause this disruption & degredation of service. Quite honestly, I'm not getting what I paid for, and as far as I can tell - unless I'm willing to pay $149 a month more - I'm not going to get the service they advertised & promised me in their contract. If they broke that promise, what is to say they wont do it again even if I did shell out $200 a month. For what? 10GB? It starts getting cheaper to use a courier service at that point.
So in my case, the method they are using to control traffic, has no consideration for your total cumulative use of the service. I am penalized exactly the same as someone whom uploads and downloads 150GB a month or more. If I have to rate limit my FTP when I'm transferring a file to avoid running into the traffic shaping & disconnection issues - what is the point of paying the extra money for the upsteam if I can't use it? Worst of all, I can't figure out exactly what it flags. Perhaps it isn't monitoring it at all times of the day, or it randomly picks people to monitor. I much prefer being able to walk away from my transfers and know they will complete than having to babysit them due to the disconnection issue.
Generally speaking, the reactive armor systems in use now do not detonate when shot with rifle rounds. They might go off from a very lucky hand grenade throw, but hand grenades are not much of a threat to most tanks other than in the treads. They need a pretty large amount of force impact to set them going and exploding. This thinking was intentional. The people designing this system, which is a radar targeting reactive system (launches a scattering type projectile likely to shear the incoming round apart in anticipation of where it is aimed) probably also had similar thoughts, and it would likely not activate from simple gunshot rounds (not enough mass), rocks (to low of velocity), beach balls, or a hand grenade (though it might potentially fire if one detonated at the right distance in the air from it). It probably will detonate for mortar fire, RPGs, and large shells aimed at it -- which is what you want.
Radar allows you to do several things, you can tell the mass, velocity of the object, and given a little bit of time predict with a fair degree of certainty the path. From looking at the pictures of it, if you are close enough to fire an RPG at this system, you are likely close enough to fire your rifle at it with some accuracy. It may potentially be vulnerable to small arms fire directed at the radar placements. It may be possible to damage those, and then hit it with your RPG rounds. However, these vehicles are likely equipped with active armor as well. So you may still end up not doing a lot of damage to the vehicle.
Radar wont do a damn thing against IED's placed on the ground, anti-tank mines, and tank traps that are simply digging the kind of holes in the ground at the right spacing to get the tank stuck in the mud per se. It will make the tank a lot safer place to be against rockets that explode above the tank, RPG rounds, mortars, and tank fired rounds.
You should probably dye your hair bright red colors and be really interesting?:) I'll keep it in mind if I ever have another one. I don't think my daughter said anything for 14 months that was more than normal cooing, crying, and depriving us of lots of sleep. Her first word was: "Kitty!". My sisters kid is 8 months old and says "Hi!". So I don't doubt that some kids are quite capable of speaking very early. It probably helped that when her dad sees her, or anyone for that matter, the first word they say is "Hi!!".
Simple to navigate really helps, call it ugly, but its functional... However, there is another reason that sites like Craigslist, and PlentyOfFish do well - they tap into a legit, useful need. In the case of dating sites, exploiting human loneliness is not exactly difficult, AOL offered a matchmaker service for free to its users with a hideous interface and it did quite well in terms of people using it, and I'm sure all of their advertisements plastered over it everywhere made them a fair bit of revenue. Its a proven model. By the same token, Craigslist fills a lot of needs, and has been very successful because of that.
Slick site with no useful content or function is just eye candy. Ugly site with no useful content or function is just an eyesore.
I'm still amazed what people do and do not visit on the web. I once put together a very basic set of geocities pages with step by step computer setup directions, and reasonably complete directions (before adblock) for stripping out advertising and other web annoyances. Before Geocities killed it for not updating, I had over 180K hits on it, and that counts only people who had that particular javascript function still enabled. Pretty shocking for an abandoned site. People obviously need a lot of howto style computer help, and really hate advertising on the web.
Maybe it was "fool play" rather than "foul play" but whoever is in charge of running the election should, at a minimum, step aside until the negligence (or otherwise) is investigated with the rigor a technological disaster desrves.
Aside from very serious issues with accountability in terms of not being able to verify the software you are running, the memory card is genuine, the... and on and on... that most of these systems still suffer from and are technical problems that can be solved with technical fixes, we have another set of problems that are NOT technical. The other set of problems relates to chain of custody, physical security, hardware reliability and proceedural issues. Under the old system, you had to keep your ballots secure, and keep a couple counting machines secure. This is not an impossible task. Under the new system, you have to keep memory cards secure, the voting machines secure, the software in them secure, the counting machines secure, prevent "switching" of any of these components, and a whole lot more complicated set of proceedural tasks that have to be carried out to ensure an accurate result. Added to that, is that you have to keep all of this secure for longer periods of time because tampering can now be done at periods well before the election, during the election, and after the election. Not just at counting machines, but at every level. Instead of making the system easier, and adding more accountability, they added more complexity, more security issues, more proceedural issues, even less accountability, plus a whole host of hardware reliability issues that were largely absent from older systems. This system also adds a huge burden in training. Remember how people solve issues with their computers when they don't know what they are doing? This about elderly election workers dealing with this system with very minimal training, the kind whose VCR still flashes 12:00...
I am reasonably conifedent that on issues of a technical nature that software could be (provided those doing it actually wanted to) made to eliminate a great many of the bugs. If the money was properly spent and good engineering used, enough redundancy could be created to deal with the probability of hardware failures without (hopefully) losing too many votes. But on the proceedural issues, I do not have confidence that they will be carried out to the letter and that they can be verified & enforced enough to secure elections performed in this manner. So we have technical flaws, chain of custody flaws, proceedural flaws, training flaws, hardware flaws, and most likely human flaws (if votes were in fact manipulated by people before the election). Anyone still doubting that calling the results from the vote "unreliable" is an overreaction - reread that last sentence. There is no "this may not have changed the election", because with the number of problems and challenges faced, you have no way to know from adam if any of the results are accurate within any degree of error short of 100% error. Machines were obviously not secured if logs can be believed, cards may not have been either, machines may not have been functioning correctly (and there are multiple indications that many were not), proceedures were not followed, and there is a very strong indication (though not proof) of fraud involved.
I would not be willing to bank on these results. This is unacceptable. I do not believe that this pursuit as it is currently being done is worthwhile, nor do I believe it is an improvement over existing systems. Nor is a "quick fix" to smooth out these problems likely, they are structural, and will remain regardless of the software used. This method is broken at every level, and I don't think its worth fixing the method, as the hightened degree of challenges & security issues will remain. We need a new system, or to return to a proven system.
Both those examples *are* absurd, even as portenders. This story has feels lkike it has been planted by the telecom companies to help in their lobbying efforts for multi-tiered service.....
This is exactly what it is, a PR-Hit.
As is about 40% of the news you read in the paper or watch on TV. One of the things I really love about Google News is that it allows me to check up on PR hits very easily. If I simply take a couple phrases from a PR hit and punch them into the search, I usually turn up 200 copies of the same story (maybe with slightly different wording in parts, but on the whole they are lazy and just print the copy given to them). Of course, PR firms also astroturf the wire services... Video News Releases (VNR's) and Audio News Releases (ANR's) for TV and Radio can't quite be tracked in the same way, and they give different versions to different segments - larger companies get a raw footage collection with notes so they can edit in their own people to read the copy - smaller markets get a shiny complete package with all of the work done for them - so they don't have any production and editing costs to use it.
I had business dealings with a very large PR firm in St Louis, Missouri. It was not unusual for 3000 ANR's to go out every day from there, 400-500VNR's, and if they were lucky they could get their stuff printed in 200-400 papers or magazines. (Most of them on the behalf of a pair of large chemical companies one of which dabbled in GMO foods, the other major client a large beer company.) I didn't track their online efforts at the time, but they were working on that as well. In their trade magazines they would openly celebrate their hits and media manipulations. If the client had the money to spend, they could not only create the story, get it aired on many outlets, astroturf the comments, phone-in's to talk radio stations, and letters to the editor. They also did work for creating astroturf political lobbying.
I prefer to call them the Paid Professional Liars Industry rather than PR. The average person truly has no comprehension of how much of the media they read is nothing more than PR-hits. The interenet is now fairly well saturated as well with them. You'll see a lot more of this story, worded differently, but it will be the same story. As long as the telco's (and maybe a few media companies with specific interest in this as well) are paying the bill to SPAM the net with it. Soon you will also see the astroturf lobbying sites go up as well. Not that they don't have a huge army of lobbyist already. This is a pretty basic formula: Create a problem, cause a reaction, offer a solution. They simply want to be all 3 steps in the problem, reaction, solution scenario - and all of them manufactured.
I got asked this question in an interview one time- pointed the guy to my web site which has pictures of the network and got the job on the spot:) Sirket, what helped you the most, was having everything organized into a pair of racks, neatly, and with a minimum of space wasted. That is what I like to see when looking for someone for any IT based project. If they have their machines scattered all over the house, and it looks like a junk pile -- it says quite a bit about how they value organization & planning, and not very good things at that.
Which seems reasonable... at first. Looking a bit deeper, apparantly some users will report mail as spam rather than unsubscribe -- even for a mailing list that they explicitly subscribed to themselves (i.e. send a mail to list-subscribe@whatever, then reply to the confirmation email with the special cookie...) I suggest adding your group/list name to the subject line of the email, otherwise its highly likely to get flagged as spam, and for people that get high volumes of spam, the occasional 1 in 1000 good that gets flagged is the price to be paid. Even when every single email has unsubscribe instructions at the bottom. Yes, so do about 95% of the spam emails I get,and those don't work.
Again, differentiation of your mail from the bulk of spam is a very subtle thing. If your sending address includes something referring to the list, and the subject line does as well - you are far less likely to face that problem.
Nevertheless, I can't help but wonder if all of the new "domestic security measures" are actually any better than the pre-9/11 security measures. Those measures failed to prevent 9/11 (and I doubt that anything could have), true; but it seems likely to me that they DID prevent a good number of attacks before 9/11 anyway. The Administration says they've prevented a number of attacks since 9/11; I say (and Congress should be saying), "Show me the money."
This is a straw man. NORAD does not stand down without orders, buildings of that type do not collapse by fire alone, the fire wasn't hot enough to, building 7 wasn't hit and still collapsed, then there is the missing gold, the cell phone calls that were obviously fakes, the faked tape after (compare picture of Bin Laden, who is a left handed by the way, to the one in the "I did 911" video where he writes with his right hand, and look at how radically different his facial structure is. Hell, frickin' Marvin Bush was in charge of security for the building. This is a family affair indeed. A mafia crime family, but still a family.
I know its ugly to think it, but this is an inside job. No laws taking away our freedom are going to protect us from a government whom is orchestrating the attacks themself. This isn't even the first time. The history of these type of operations goes back a long way. The president is right, the people who did these attacks do indeed hate our freedom. They demonstrate it with all of the gestapo BS they are doing, including the patriot act.
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If you can get green beans and roast them yourself - a press pot works fantastic. I'm a little too lazy to roast them all of the time, so I found some compromise blends that aren't too stale. But if I really want it nice, I have to trek down and get ones to roast myself. Nothing fancy, just pan roast here.
That only worked out for Harley Davidson because they achieved icon status. Fender music company survived CBS for the same reason, even though it probably shouldn't have. Gibson survived for much of the same reason. People put up with the problems with their Vespa scooters ...yadda. But my router, my phone, it isn't a vespa, it isn't a harley, it isn't a ferarri. I just want it to work right, out of the box. I bought it to do those things, and when it doesn't -- and when nearly every model on the shelf doesn't - that becomes a severe problem.
The art of finding a quality box fan...or quality fan period... I've got an Emerson made in 193X ...Works great, out lasted every single fan I've ever owned in my lifetime. Goes bad? Worth every penny to repair it. I miss stuff like that being available. Best I've been able to do here is the "commercial quality" items and even though are loud, obnoxious, and still have more plastic than I feel justified for my 6x-27x price premium. No, that kind of quality doesn't exist anymore, not at any price.
I went to the store to buy a guage for measuring air pressure. Every single one of them now, plastic. Went to another store, same thing, went to another one, same thing. Now this one is a gift for my father, I wanted to get him one like mine - hard metal, rotary design, thick glass, accurate, and you could run it over without breaking it. The best I could do is the barbie & ken special, well, hell, its digital and at least back lighted display. But drop it from 3-4 ft and its probably toast, whereas mine I could throw it off a cliff, have an 18 wheeler run over it, and it might just scratch the metal.
Bought a USR 8054, the features I needed weren't actually there... The update ...however long later added them, or the illusion of them, they never worked. The entire router became less & less stable as time went on. I tried to find a good one, but all of them were cheap POS because of the software involved. Even the "quality" stuff was hampered by poor software. So I figured I would try my luck using replacement software and not care. This I have a couple routers with 3rd party firmware now that work great, and do what they should have done out of the box that didn't.
While I appreciate the work the 3rd party firmware developers did, and it would be sucksville without them, its because none of the makers are making a good finished product period that we are in this situation and they had to develop something.
Sure there are probably a few difficult to do work arounds (as it takes more than changing a user agent to get this to play nice). According to some developers, using "flash" is a workaround in and of itself since it "displays the same in all browsers". Of course, that isn't really true, and even when flash does display, I can't resize flash, the fonts are often so tiny that I & my elderly parents have to break out a magnifying glass to even attempt to make use of the content.
I still expect that when I attempt Ecommerce on the web that I'll likely have to use IE 6 or better at some point. I have been pleasantly surprised as of late that most of the companies I've delt with on the web allowed me to complete transactions in Opera and/or Mozilla/Firefox. One of the ironies I've encountered is that it is often the bigger companies which make it impossible to use IE & not the smaller shops. Sometimes you come across a poorly coded site on a small shop, but the large companies try to add everything under the sun to allegedly make the experience better and it ends up breaking things. Larger companies tend to set up more roadblocks of endless forms to fill out as well, and forced registration..etc I've abandoned more purchases due to if I can't complete my transaction in two screens (and really only want one) then its not worth my time to buy there. If it takes 20 minutes to checkout, to hell with them -- my time isn't free. Amazon.com will *never* have me as a customer due to their checkout. I don't care if I only have to fill it out once. If it takes longer on the web to order than calling the place on the phone, I'm not going to do business with them -- and if I have to use flash to complete the transaction, I'm likely not going to do business with them either as many of the applications written for it break in other browsers without reporting an error despite the touts of many developers that "flash makes everything display and work the same".
If they would simply give up the use (and we could legislate this away very easily) of gypsum phosphate based fertilizers on tobacco crops we could cut cancer from smoking by more than 80% (some say 90%). Its the radiation they pick up from the fertilizer, polonium, radium, uranium..etc that is actually responsible for most of the damage. This damage includes much of COPD & Emphysema. We are not talking about a small exposure here, not unless you consider a thousand chest x-rays a year a small dose.
They've known this since the 50's, and ammonia phosphates are available without the contamination issue. Seems like it should have been delt with by now. But, we couldn't do anything to reduce the risk to smokers, now could we? Thats how anti-tobacco zealots think. Its also how prohibitionist by other names at the FDA think by making the more dangerous forms of pain drugs easier to prescribe than safer non-compounded ones. I'm sure someone at MADD is thinking about adding arsenic to the beer too... But don't worry, they are putting it in the chicken, PETA should be happy...
To be perfectly honest, the big solid yellow mass of cables scares the hell out me of to think about how much stuff must be bundled up in that mess and what possibly could be so critical as to need all that ...and actually depend on all of that. Something like that, you get a problem, you might as well just run another cable and throw it in the pile, you will NEVER find the one that is faulty in that mess to pull it out.
I have, however, seen something about 2/3 of the way to that bad at one of the hospitals near here that is always under construction. They no longer bother to put the ceiling tiles back in place. Their phones look like that, their network looks like that, their intercoms look like that, much of the wiring for the important monitoring stuff for patient care looks like that, the patient call system looks like that, and worse - the equipment that runs to their own paging tower looks pretty close to that. The only thing is even remotely close to straight forward is the electrical wiring, and I'm told half of that is dead from moving it around so much with the changes to the hospital. They at least bundled that and supported it so it isn't hanging down in the service & employees areas like a spider doing its ninja impersonation ready to pounce like so much of the twisted pair phone system. Some places where they do have it covered over in tiles and/or drywall like ceiling -- the weight of all of the unsupported, non-secured cables and literally buckling the ceiling. Not just popping out tiles, but bending the framework that holds it to together, most of this isn't even tied together with band straps, of if it is, its so far between sections that its all come apart.
Nothing is labeled either - with the exception of a few smaller sections of private office (for doctors that treat mostly outpatient in another wing) data centers - there are no labels. They at least bundle some of it at the racks to get it out of the way in a few spots, but its not exactly bundled to organize it by what it does or even where it goes in there, it was an attempt to overcome where the duct tape failed to keep people from tripping over it... And I mean a LOT of duct tape. I have no idea how they would diagnose say a phone problem if they thought it was the line itself, the only thing they could do would be to go run another line and add to the pile, and that looks like what has been SOP for a long time. This stuff can get way out of control so quickly when its done wrong the first time.
I have a DIMM I keep about strictly because it's bad and causes massive data corruption yet passes MemTest86 no sweat every time. I've allowed this sucker to run for weeks before without a single error yet you can barely get an OS installed. Odd but it happens once in a while. That situation is likely a reflection of variable power supply voltage. When running memtest86, the power supply isn't on a huge load, you don't have all of the disk revving up, CD rom revving up, and everything else you have when trying to get through an OS install. Everything in the computer runs off of a high/low voltage, and there is usually a series of invertors to try to make the ones that are a little low, or a little high back into a strong high or low voltage signal...But sometimes you get ripple and other fluctuations, and you end up with signals right in the middle, and its anyones guess whether it decides this is a high state or low state and what it does with it. This is the most likely culprit. That isn't to say you can't just get the occasional one that will pass memtest and still be flaky, I've seen it, just not very often. Different RAM sticks have different tolerances for that voltage fluctuation as well.
Be prepared for lots of payment issues. You'll need to be able to accept credit card payments, check out the quicken site, they have an online store that will link in with your quickbooks install and they'll handle all the fraud issues for you. If you do market to the low end, parent is right, you'll have people slow pay/no pay, accuse you of 'hacking' them when they don't pay (that was a treat, guy basically wanted more free service under the threat of legal action), etc. Humanity is a cess pool, you'll be at the bottom when you're performing services in people's homes.
If you go too cheap, you attract the scammers too. Had one guy that wanted the diagnosis, and we offered a "free diagnosis if its under 30 minutes" at the time to get new clients in the door and made up for it on the parts & labor to fix to the problems. Most hardware issues you can figure out in less than that, and they get an estimate of what is wrong within an hour or two. Anyway, guy dropped off a box, had a bios virus and a flaky board. Was a PCChips "special" board made for low budget OEMS that no one supported and its maker had closed up shop. So no bios replacement. Found a suitable board cheap, gave him the estimate to swap it out, save all of his data, and have it back to him in a week. Said no to work. Okay, told him to come pick up the machine. He left the machine sit here for a couple weeks, left him several messages to come get it. Finally does. No charge, free diagnosis, no business, fine. Figure he will go try to get it done cheaper somewhere else. Nope! Two weeks later get a court summons, and this guy is suing us for stealing his processor.
Now I have to warn you, if you expect judges to be the least bit useful on any technical matter, then you are out of your mind. If you can't come up with a good car analogy, good luck, and even if you can... In this case, we took the processor out in front of the judge, and slapped it down on his desk in front of him. Still got ruled in this guys favor - who was not charged a dime. Had to take this to the appeals level just to avoid giving in to a scammer, which meant actually having someone write up an appeal. No problem there, got someone 25 years younger that could grasp the auto analogy of "If you take your car into the mechanic, and he tells you that your starter motor & alternator have gone bad, and you need to replace them... You elect not to have the work done, your engine isn't missing, and you don't sue the mechanic because your car doesn't start." Appeal fixed it, yadda, but it was $70 out of our pocket & time.
If your state allows contracts to force disputes to be settled by mediators of your choosing (and better if their expense), put it in the contract. For us, two days in court was two days of wasted time we much rather would have spent doing other things, absolute disillusionment with the legal system. If you are going into peoples houses, there are issues that can crop up as well - say the claimed $2500 vase wrapped around the hornets nest of everything electronic in their house cables in one spot? Fluffy their evil dog they assure you "Doesn't bite" which means doesn't bite them. There are situations where trying to preserve data is on the order of needing a recovery service with an electron microscope, but the average joe will not grasp this. So you better have a contract, and have it include a way around whatever you think you might encounter that makes some attempt at being fair to everyone involved. If you can force mediation in your area, do so, its much better than the current system. You may think "Ahh, I don't need that.." but believe me, you deal with 100 people - if just 6 of them are a-holes, you will need it. If you accept boxes dropped off, be prepared for the stored in the basement filled with mud special too, or the cockroach farm box. "You can fix this right?" Let me call an exterminator first... Believe me, you don't want those clients. Raise your rates to something enough to cut out the riff raff & its always better in the long run -- and draw up a good contract and don't touch squat without it.
I happen to agree with that assessment. This is likely to be just as phony as the rest of the these, and will always find extensive links back to the government. From train cars with the bottoms of the train blasted up and not down, photoshop'd (and very poorly done I might add) pictures of people entering the tube area (Hey, steel rails don't commonly slide through arms...) I'm sure this "attack plot" will have it roots from the same internal government sources, and we can look forward to more manufactured evidence as in the last time.
...for a time...). How about good ol' "Weapons of mass destruction?", yeah, well, it sounded good. (Not to mention "strange" things like British soldiers driving around a 2ton car bomb dressed in arab gear, captured by the Iraqi police, and then "rescued" from their captors with British & American tanks. No one ever asks, why are they driving around a car bomb?) Ever notice that the media now claims Al Qaeda means "The base" or "The movement", it doesn't, it means "THE DATABASE" and it is the CIA project file name for their contacts in the middle east & Afghanistan. You see how many of the people at Gitmo are just hapless farmers or a garden variety solider with no ties to anything? You see that they don't care that who they have is that?
All part of the war for hearts and minds of those in the United States, United Kingdom, & Australia. There is a long history of this kind of action. In Italy it was (US run) P2 blowing things up to blame it on socialist & communist. I hate commies as much as the next guy, but its in our history, learn it, embrace it. They don't even change the names much, they have a group to do similar things now called "P2OG". The planned but not carried out "Operation Northwoods" to run a false flag operation (blowing a US plane out of the sky, blaming it on Cuba -- in addition to other things) during the Kennedy administration. Gulf Of Tonkin staged "attack" that never happened, but they lied about it anyway to get us into it. The U.S.S. Liberty attack by the Israeli's designed to be blamed on Egypt (and the US went along just fine with this lie for the American market
You ever notice that even with $25,000,000.00 rewards for information leading the capture of Al-Qaeda members that no one in the world can seem to find them? Not even all of the intelligence agencies of the world? That they have no achievable goals? No base of operations? "World wide Islamic revolution", C'mon, who writes this stuff? What are we 12? I want you to think about every other so called terrorist organization in the world. Hizbollah -- why were they formed? They were formed after Israel invaded Lebanon. Their goals? Drive the Israelis completely out of Israel (Israel still occupied a portion of Lebanon, so they were not entirely successful). The IRA, why were they formed? To drive the Brits out. The PLO - why where they formed? Israeli occupation. Hamas? Same basic reasons. (Though this one is more complicated as Israel gave them seed money to use them as a wedge against the PLO, and maybe to justify some of the things they did.) Turn your compass south and look at the Philipines, why are they fighting there? To rid their land of a corrupt goverment that caters to foreign interest. You notice what they all have in common? Either an occupation to drive out an aggressor, or a resistance against a hostile government.
The non-organic terrorist groups (those being government created) tend to be used to either discredit movements that are threatening to big business or the government itself. To provoke wars, or build the anger to make it easier to lead people there. Look at what you are seeing and think about which is more likely when you evaluate these things. In the case of Al-Qaeda, its to get them to dislike us, and us to dislike them - so we are less averse to going over there and slaughtering a mess of people to take the resources and occupy the land -to increase power for the governments whom participate to prot
These low prices are only to gain market share, and things will change. Maybe, but for the moment the telcos are using DSL tied to a land line as an incentive to keep you on their high profit copper land line service - and to try to force you to take one of their long distance carriers to keep your low DSL prices. They aren't worried about cable as much as they are worried about VOIP. If the customer goes VOIP - they likely lose everything. Most people have a cell phone, they have no need for a landline if they can get broadband reasonable elsewhere. Thus the phone company gets 0 business in that scenario. That is their real fear, and the primary motivation behind the pricing structure. Its also the primary drive behind their lobbying efforts to be able to end net neutrality.
What is it with you people?
Here on slashdot no less, a bunch of people decried my overclocking of a Celeron 300A to 450... FYI, its still running right now...
You decried my overclocking of my AMD Barton 2500+ to 3200+... I am still using THAT as my primary machine...
I am aware of the risks of overclocking, but I am also aware of the benifits. I weigh those considerations carefully before doing so. Overclocking not for you? Fine. No problem.
I'm not that shocked by their results to be honest. I do question the overvoltage they are using to get there, however. On air with a completely unimpressive cooler I've taken my Celeron-D 2.93 Ghz chip to 3.6Ghz, just raise the bus up a knotch to the next memory setting. Now the onboard graphics doesn't work at that setting, so you have to have an AGP card - but the board works fine, and at least in the winter & spring temps here can be kept from overheating (though it gets a little hotter than I would like). With summer rolling around I'm going to swap out the heatsink and go with larger intake and exhaust fans. After rebates, I paid $30 for this CPU, and its worth every penny. Considering the Pentium-D 506 is basically two Celeron-D's slapped together, I would fully expect most of them to get to 3.6Ghz with a little care in the right motherboards, at least 3.34Ghz. Of course, this wont happen with the stock cooler. You need to get one with at least partial copper and a bigger fan that runs a little faster.
On the downside of OC'ing, I killed a motherboard overclocking. The chip was fine, everything else was fine, but the drive controller went snap crackle pop. So YMMV, that was in a K6 system (which were poor OC'ers to begin with), I expected the chip to heat up a bit and was prepared to deal with that - I didn't expect the drive controller to die on me. That was at a trivial 20mhz overclock as well, which tells me the components in the board were not up to snuff.
Celerons I've OC'd with impunity. They have been great chips for it, and I've never gone out and purchased a water cooler or any of that nonsense. I've still got a Celeron 300 OC'd, running what, 8-9 years? I've still got a PIII OC'd running 6 years (that I've owned it). I don't expect my current system to last 10 years, I'll likely replace it in 2 as even at 3.6ghz its less suited for the way I actually use my computer than a dual core chip would be. Seeing this does give me another option. Though I'll likely save a little extra money and get a 4400X2 anyway.
80% of the IP addresses measured no longer support spoofing!
Given the move to broadband with home routers and NAT it seems obvious that spoofing capable networks are on the decline.
I am behind a NAT, got exactly (and expected) the results you described. So I decided to directly connect & test this. Same results. My ISP has egress filtering in place. I still get spoofed packets showing up in the firewall log from the net, but not at the level I did a year ago.
Time to make the donuts...
Truly privatized would be your work place paying you money to obtain your own health care. Whether you bank it and pay straight cash after that(frequently gets a 50% discount), or buy a health care insurance program, or some combination of the two is up to you.
Have you every tried paying cash in the US Health Care system? I had a dentist that I loved dearly, compared to some of the other dentists I've seen - this guy is the best in the field I've come across. My insurance used to pay him $650 for a root canal and crown. But he charged a cash customer $1500 for the same thing.
I have to pick up a couple medicines every month at the pharmacy. (Now I suppose Walmart & Costco are a few bucks cheaper, but not on my pharmacy plan) I pay a trivial deductable ($1 each on generics) for my medicines and a straight percentage for non-generics. They pay $65 for one of my scripts, but the cash price for it is $128 at Walgreens. They don't even hide that they are paying half what I would, I have hard caps on the policy and everything everyone is paid out is listed. Go try to find a pair of MRIs with & without contrast for $530 paying cash. I know why my GP isn't always happy to see me either, I know what he is paid for it.
Cash wont get you far in the American Health Care system, they rape cash customers blind. $50 for a hot towel, $75 for an ice pack... (*This is from my physical therapy bill before insurance, and these are the cash billing prices.)
I know there are some doctors you can negotiate with, and there is always the Doc-In-The-Box for routine things, but if you need anything more than the very routine, its a very expensive proposition. Some of the health care system is pure price gouging, but its targeted at the cash customer the worst.
I'm currently working as a contractor, and using COBRA for my old insurance policy. When its up, I'm going to buy this policy outright, its far from cheap, but I've done the math both ways. I can't win paying cash, and can't afford the risk of needing some specialized bit of care if I have any complications.
I'll tell you what I really think causes the difference between here and the UK. Although I haven't lived in the UK, I spent a year working in Germany. Its the food, its the stress, and its the climate of work. Half of the additives to the food you wont find in theirs - it makes a difference. The work environment was a lot better, shorter hours, less pressures for overtime (I was reminded of this several times when I suggested time tables that would be perfectly acceptable here - just work people 55 hours a week to do it.), very little stress coming out (there was virtually no crime where I was at). Even though I had the stress of dealing with a language I hadn't mastered, navigating a city I barely knew, and a bit of culture shock - I still came home with less need to unwind. Where I was at less traffic as well, of course it was expensive to drive. It was very typical on any job site I was at for them to offer us good coffee, and a few minutes to talk to everyone before starting. (That almost never happens here, just get led to the problem and dive in and avoid talking to anyone unless you have to, or they will think you are slacking off.)
For me, at least, the monitors have to be identical, as subtle color shifts between different monitors become especially evident when using a multimon setup. It's annoying when one monitor's 9300K differs from another I run a triple head now, and I have that problem. Even with a near perfectly matched pair of Iiyama monitors with very close to consecutive serial numbers its no guarantee they will be an exact color match. Mine isn't, and my third display is a used Compaq 7550 - which is substantially brighter than the other two (though I did finally get the colors to match up very very close). The difference in the two Iiyama's is very slight, but you can see it with greens and very bright reds. I spent hours when I first got them trying to color match them, adjusting every setting to try to get them to perfectly line up, but in the end its a luck of the draw thing I think.
Then of course, is the issue of deskspace. For my desk to support 3CRTs I had to add a brace to the center of it for the added weight (it was beginning to bend in the center), and I built a small extra edge on the left (a L type joint with a cross brace, everything dovetailed, glued, and nailed for extra stability) to give me 7" more space for dealing with the bulk. I could fit 3 21"'s on here if I had to now, but I'll settle for 2 and a 17". I've often thought that the ultimate desk for this type setup would be a large C shaped desk, with space for 3-4 monitors, your laser printer/copier and phone. (I have my printer on a desk next to this one with routers & switches & my phone). I looked into getting a large C shaped desk, one of the furniture stores had one I liked (even with holes you could pop out to run the cables through), but they wanted $2700 for it. Given that, my only option when this one finally starts to buckle from the weight will be to build one myself. I might break down and get LCD's instead next time, they are coming down in price, but even those in the larger sizes take up quite a bit of room. LCD's would cut down on the heat as well, which I approve of in the winter, but it can be bothersome in the summer.
So there are some issues with running a triple display that have to be overcome. There is a market for a company to make desks for this purpose - especially ones with space for the computer beneath (but elevated) and holes for all of the cables. I have to imagine quite a few people in graphic design, and possibly for some monitoring applications are buying SLI machines simply to run 3-4 displays. Most of the desks available are woefully inadequate for this task, and setting this up on a huge flat table (which is what I've seen a lot) waste a lot of room and is unhandy (though you can often fit your laserprinter/copier that way).
There are also quite a few software issues when running triple head. If you have a Parhelia, no problem - powerdesk is very nice. If you can meet your needs with a G450 or so - fine. I've tried ATI's Hydravision and Nvidias NView setup - which are okay on dual monitor setups though not as nice as powerdesk, but things don't work as smoothly on triple and quad monitor setups - there are issues with applications not launching where you want them, or not being able to send a movie to a particular display automatically or to the video out automatically. All of them have driver & setup issues in Linux, though Matrox products tend to have less, but that depends on the application you wish to run (they have a lot of specialty drivers available for fixes with CAD/CAM applications if you need them). Listed on their page with this TripleHead2Go product it says "WinXP/Win2000" so it may still need a driver of some kind and may not work under Linux (though I suspect it probably will in a limited functionality mode, with the issue being the software for controlling the displays needing Windows).
Its certainly an intersting product, but $299 a little steep for it. If you can afford $299+ plus a reasonably high end graphics card, you can afford a Parhelia, and might be better served going with that.
It is true that they shouldn't expect their users to suck all of their capacity around the clock, but I don't think that gives them the right to enforce measures for them not to do it. They offered a service that allowed their users a certain bandwidth, usually around the clock, and the (note: paying) subscribers have the right to use as much as they want from that service. All fine and well, and I can understand some arguements for limiting high bandwidth users at the extreme ends of the sclae. However, I am not a very high bandwidth user. I pay "extra" for a faster higher tier connection speed so its there for the burst of activity when I need it and want it. I don't want to have to sit around all day to wait for a CD's worth of data to move about before I can get back to work. Even though I rarely use Bittorrent, or any P2P, and I'm seldom using more than 10GB a month upstream & downstream combined, whenever I DO use any of these services, or lately even transfer a file through a messenger service or even via IRC/DCC -- my traffic is being shaped by the ISP in a way that is not favorable to me. Quite simply, I am NOT getting what I paid for. I might be more forgiving of this if I hadn't shelled out more money for a faster connecion specifically to have it available for these uses when I want it. I'm not harming their network, I'm not an excessive user with my upsteam & downstream maxed out all day. I do, however, need to occasionally transfer a 700MB-2GB file around. Not only have they been rate limting those task (even FTP) they have been dropping connections randomly in the middle of it (so I know its intentional, my connection never resets otherwise unless the power cycles). My ISP is SBC-Yahoo, recently acquired by AT&T, but this problem started before the merger. It was not a problem at the beginning of my contract, but has since become one - so I know they have implimented some kind of measures to cause this disruption & degredation of service. Quite honestly, I'm not getting what I paid for, and as far as I can tell - unless I'm willing to pay $149 a month more - I'm not going to get the service they advertised & promised me in their contract. If they broke that promise, what is to say they wont do it again even if I did shell out $200 a month. For what? 10GB? It starts getting cheaper to use a courier service at that point.
So in my case, the method they are using to control traffic, has no consideration for your total cumulative use of the service. I am penalized exactly the same as someone whom uploads and downloads 150GB a month or more. If I have to rate limit my FTP when I'm transferring a file to avoid running into the traffic shaping & disconnection issues - what is the point of paying the extra money for the upsteam if I can't use it? Worst of all, I can't figure out exactly what it flags. Perhaps it isn't monitoring it at all times of the day, or it randomly picks people to monitor. I much prefer being able to walk away from my transfers and know they will complete than having to babysit them due to the disconnection issue.
Generally speaking, the reactive armor systems in use now do not detonate when shot with rifle rounds. They might go off from a very lucky hand grenade throw, but hand grenades are not much of a threat to most tanks other than in the treads. They need a pretty large amount of force impact to set them going and exploding. This thinking was intentional. The people designing this system, which is a radar targeting reactive system (launches a scattering type projectile likely to shear the incoming round apart in anticipation of where it is aimed) probably also had similar thoughts, and it would likely not activate from simple gunshot rounds (not enough mass), rocks (to low of velocity), beach balls, or a hand grenade (though it might potentially fire if one detonated at the right distance in the air from it). It probably will detonate for mortar fire, RPGs, and large shells aimed at it -- which is what you want.
Radar allows you to do several things, you can tell the mass, velocity of the object, and given a little bit of time predict with a fair degree of certainty the path. From looking at the pictures of it, if you are close enough to fire an RPG at this system, you are likely close enough to fire your rifle at it with some accuracy. It may potentially be vulnerable to small arms fire directed at the radar placements. It may be possible to damage those, and then hit it with your RPG rounds. However, these vehicles are likely equipped with active armor as well. So you may still end up not doing a lot of damage to the vehicle.
Radar wont do a damn thing against IED's placed on the ground, anti-tank mines, and tank traps that are simply digging the kind of holes in the ground at the right spacing to get the tank stuck in the mud per se. It will make the tank a lot safer place to be against rockets that explode above the tank, RPG rounds, mortars, and tank fired rounds.
You should probably dye your hair bright red colors and be really interesting? :) I'll keep it in mind if I ever have another one. I don't think my daughter said anything for 14 months that was more than normal cooing, crying, and depriving us of lots of sleep. Her first word was: "Kitty!". My sisters kid is 8 months old and says "Hi!". So I don't doubt that some kids are quite capable of speaking very early. It probably helped that when her dad sees her, or anyone for that matter, the first word they say is "Hi!!".
Salt
Simple to navigate really helps, call it ugly, but its functional...
However, there is another reason that sites like Craigslist, and PlentyOfFish do well - they tap into a legit, useful need.
In the case of dating sites, exploiting human loneliness is not exactly difficult, AOL offered a matchmaker service for free to its users with a hideous interface and it did quite well in terms of people using it, and I'm sure all of their advertisements plastered over it everywhere made them a fair bit of revenue. Its a proven model. By the same token, Craigslist fills a lot of needs, and has been very successful because of that.
Slick site with no useful content or function is just eye candy. Ugly site with no useful content or function is just an eyesore.
I'm still amazed what people do and do not visit on the web. I once put together a very basic set of geocities pages with step by step computer setup directions, and reasonably complete directions (before adblock) for stripping out advertising and other web annoyances. Before Geocities killed it for not updating, I had over 180K hits on it, and that counts only people who had that particular javascript function still enabled. Pretty shocking for an abandoned site. People obviously need a lot of howto style computer help, and really hate advertising on the web.
Just like before the breakup...minus regulation.
It does bother me quite a bit that they will have near total control of the DSL market.
Maybe it was "fool play" rather than "foul play" but whoever is in charge of running the election should, at a minimum, step aside until the negligence (or otherwise) is investigated with the rigor a technological disaster desrves.
... and on and on ... that most of these systems still suffer from and are technical problems that can be solved with technical fixes, we have another set of problems that are NOT technical. The other set of problems relates to chain of custody, physical security, hardware reliability and proceedural issues. Under the old system, you had to keep your ballots secure, and keep a couple counting machines secure. This is not an impossible task. Under the new system, you have to keep memory cards secure, the voting machines secure, the software in them secure, the counting machines secure, prevent "switching" of any of these components, and a whole lot more complicated set of proceedural tasks that have to be carried out to ensure an accurate result. Added to that, is that you have to keep all of this secure for longer periods of time because tampering can now be done at periods well before the election, during the election, and after the election. Not just at counting machines, but at every level. Instead of making the system easier, and adding more accountability, they added more complexity, more security issues, more proceedural issues, even less accountability, plus a whole host of hardware reliability issues that were largely absent from older systems. This system also adds a huge burden in training. Remember how people solve issues with their computers when they don't know what they are doing? This about elderly election workers dealing with this system with very minimal training, the kind whose VCR still flashes 12:00...
Aside from very serious issues with accountability in terms of not being able to verify the software you are running, the memory card is genuine, the
I am reasonably conifedent that on issues of a technical nature that software could be (provided those doing it actually wanted to) made to eliminate a great many of the bugs. If the money was properly spent and good engineering used, enough redundancy could be created to deal with the probability of hardware failures without (hopefully) losing too many votes. But on the proceedural issues, I do not have confidence that they will be carried out to the letter and that they can be verified & enforced enough to secure elections performed in this manner. So we have technical flaws, chain of custody flaws, proceedural flaws, training flaws, hardware flaws, and most likely human flaws (if votes were in fact manipulated by people before the election). Anyone still doubting that calling the results from the vote "unreliable" is an overreaction - reread that last sentence. There is no "this may not have changed the election", because with the number of problems and challenges faced, you have no way to know from adam if any of the results are accurate within any degree of error short of 100% error. Machines were obviously not secured if logs can be believed, cards may not have been either, machines may not have been functioning correctly (and there are multiple indications that many were not), proceedures were not followed, and there is a very strong indication (though not proof) of fraud involved.
I would not be willing to bank on these results. This is unacceptable. I do not believe that this pursuit as it is currently being done is worthwhile, nor do I believe it is an improvement over existing systems. Nor is a "quick fix" to smooth out these problems likely, they are structural, and will remain regardless of the software used. This method is broken at every level, and I don't think its worth fixing the method, as the hightened degree of challenges & security issues will remain. We need a new system, or to return to a proven system.
Both those examples *are* absurd, even as portenders. This story has feels lkike it has been planted by the telecom companies to help in their lobbying efforts for multi-tiered service.....
... Video News Releases (VNR's) and Audio News Releases (ANR's) for TV and Radio can't quite be tracked in the same way, and they give different versions to different segments - larger companies get a raw footage collection with notes so they can edit in their own people to read the copy - smaller markets get a shiny complete package with all of the work done for them - so they don't have any production and editing costs to use it.
This is exactly what it is, a PR-Hit.
As is about 40% of the news you read in the paper or watch on TV. One of the things I really love about Google News is that it allows me to check up on PR hits very easily. If I simply take a couple phrases from a PR hit and punch them into the search, I usually turn up 200 copies of the same story (maybe with slightly different wording in parts, but on the whole they are lazy and just print the copy given to them). Of course, PR firms also astroturf the wire services
I had business dealings with a very large PR firm in St Louis, Missouri. It was not unusual for 3000 ANR's to go out every day from there, 400-500VNR's, and if they were lucky they could get their stuff printed in 200-400 papers or magazines. (Most of them on the behalf of a pair of large chemical companies one of which dabbled in GMO foods, the other major client a large beer company.) I didn't track their online efforts at the time, but they were working on that as well. In their trade magazines they would openly celebrate their hits and media manipulations. If the client had the money to spend, they could not only create the story, get it aired on many outlets, astroturf the comments, phone-in's to talk radio stations, and letters to the editor. They also did work for creating astroturf political lobbying.
I prefer to call them the Paid Professional Liars Industry rather than PR. The average person truly has no comprehension of how much of the media they read is nothing more than PR-hits. The interenet is now fairly well saturated as well with them. You'll see a lot more of this story, worded differently, but it will be the same story. As long as the telco's (and maybe a few media companies with specific interest in this as well) are paying the bill to SPAM the net with it. Soon you will also see the astroturf lobbying sites go up as well. Not that they don't have a huge army of lobbyist already. This is a pretty basic formula: Create a problem, cause a reaction, offer a solution. They simply want to be all 3 steps in the problem, reaction, solution scenario - and all of them manufactured.
I got asked this question in an interview one time- pointed the guy to my web site which has pictures of the network and got the job on the spot :) Sirket, what helped you the most, was having everything organized into a pair of racks, neatly, and with a minimum of space wasted. That is what I like to see when looking for someone for any IT based project. If they have their machines scattered all over the house, and it looks like a junk pile -- it says quite a bit about how they value organization & planning, and not very good things at that.
Which seems reasonable ... at first. Looking a bit deeper, apparantly some users will report mail as spam rather than unsubscribe -- even for a mailing list that they explicitly subscribed to themselves (i.e. send a mail to list-subscribe@whatever, then reply to the confirmation email with the special cookie ...) I suggest adding your group/list name to the subject line of the email, otherwise its highly likely to get flagged as spam, and for people that get high volumes of spam, the occasional 1 in 1000 good that gets flagged is the price to be paid. Even when every single email has unsubscribe instructions at the bottom. Yes, so do about 95% of the spam emails I get,and those don't work.
Again, differentiation of your mail from the bulk of spam is a very subtle thing. If your sending address includes something referring to the list, and the subject line does as well - you are far less likely to face that problem.
Nevertheless, I can't help but wonder if all of the new "domestic security measures" are actually any better than the pre-9/11 security measures. Those measures failed to prevent 9/11 (and I doubt that anything could have), true; but it seems likely to me that they DID prevent a good number of attacks before 9/11 anyway. The Administration says they've prevented a number of attacks since 9/11; I say (and Congress should be saying), "Show me the money."
This is a straw man. NORAD does not stand down without orders, buildings of that type do not collapse by fire alone, the fire wasn't hot enough to, building 7 wasn't hit and still collapsed, then there is the missing gold, the cell phone calls that were obviously fakes, the faked tape after (compare picture of Bin Laden, who is a left handed by the way, to the one in the "I did 911" video where he writes with his right hand, and look at how radically different his facial structure is. Hell, frickin' Marvin Bush was in charge of security for the building. This is a family affair indeed. A mafia crime family, but still a family.
I know its ugly to think it, but this is an inside job. No laws taking away our freedom are going to protect us from a government whom is orchestrating the attacks themself. This isn't even the first time. The history of these type of operations goes back a long way. The president is right, the people who did these attacks do indeed hate our freedom. They demonstrate it with all of the gestapo BS they are doing, including the patriot act.