Jocelyn Elders was fired for suggesting that teenagers should be taught masturbation isn't evil.
Elders wasn't canned for that, she was canned for suggesting marijuana was a public health issue that should be addressed there and not in the legal system, and for stating it probably wasn't very harmful. Even bringing up the idea of discussing a different approach to drug policy was enough for the Clinton administration to pull the rug on her.
Jadavis, that was the most right on comment I've seen in this entire discussion.
When you go back to the basics of what the constitution actually says, most of the current operation of the Federal Government is quite simply illegal under the law. There is an ammendment process for a reason, but instead of using the difficult process they stack the court with people to make convoluted decisions to increase federal power. It was sort of inevitable that this would happen as you have two different federal branches picking the candidates.
Other than brute force, I never understood why the states went along with it. Back then the state legislatures appointed the senate, so they did have some way to litmus test who they sending to the swamp and put a check on unruly behavoir of this kind, but I suppose just like judges you never really know what they will do with it till you put them in the office.
Every time I hear: "A seller of online marketing tools" the first words that pop into my mind are: Spammer and/or seller of spamming tools, Search Engine Optimizer/Spammer of search engines. When I hear that said "seller of online marketing tools" is suing I think, what your Nigerian investments crapped out?
So is "Click Defense" representing a (spammer) client, or are they the client/spammer?:)
I don't know the law in that respect, but it brings up the point of how can Utah law have jurisdiction on the internet.
I don't understand it either. It sounds very unconstitutional to me. They have a right to regulate the behavior of businesses to a degree within their own state, they could pass a law saying no Utah or no Michigan company will solicit these materials via email to minors on a list, but I do not understanding how they can apply their law to companies based in other states, much less other countries. Utah & Michigan do not have the authority to regulate interstate commerce. Of course, it will cost thousands upon thousands of dollars to the first person to get charged to challenge it.
Stupid legislators, good for lawyers, bad for you...
I read your post, and my opinion is: Your particular problem is probably power supply related, and if not that memory related. Digital stuff is "always right" (cough) it never makes mistakes (cough) it makes perfect copies (cough), it uses an invertor as a filter of sorts, high voltage goes here (1) low voltage goes here (0) and this is sufficent to deal with noise and keep ir error free most of the time, the problem is what happens when you get voltages inbetween and in an even mildly overstressed power supply this situation is quite frequent. Most people are overstressing their power supplies, yes, it runs, but it tends to lead to data corruption. The other culprit (though far less likely) is possibly ram....Even with good hardware...When you move large amounts of data around you have to be prepared for and expect some corruption, we need mv commands that actually check that what they are writing is what was there. The systems to copy we use now are so primitive they will even allow wrong file sizes and complete the operation without generating an error message. This is not good at all. (At least Windows & the versions of Linux I've used will). I realize this uses quite a few CPU cycles to check hashes when you copy and move files around, but this is an era where dual cores are coming to the desktop, processors are over 2Ghz (many over 3Ghz), and its not like manufacturers couldn't add this feature in hardware as well to take load off of the CPU. This kind of checking should be built into the OS, and if not automatic, should at least be an option that the user could turn on.
Anyone dealing with very large amounts of data has already delt with this, and hopefully found a workable solution for their needs. Now its just up to the OS vendors, and hardware makers to bring data integrity to the masses.
The real fraud isn't this, I doubt unemployement fraud of this kind is much of a factor if other states are doing anything like Missouri and North Carolina are. (I don't know about anyone elses system, but I assume they follow similar rules and each have their own new hires database and require the employer # to be on file and verify it with the employer, and the employer had to pay in to get it..etc)
The real fraud money that you can get from just a social security number is: Student Loans, and if you are really pushy and brazen (and it helps to be a so called minority for most of them) government grants.
Its not that hard to enroll in 7 different classes a week under 7 different names, show up for a month, and disappear with the money. Each semester you can pocket quite a bit till they get hip to what you look like.
Applying for those farming grants takes some time and paperwork, but I've never known them to come out and actually verify that you aren't growing corn/wheat/cotton on your land, or even that you own land. Worth a try, worst that happens is they ask to verify something you don't have and you hang up.
I hear this, and then I realize most people are simply clueless about what most drugs do, and the actual harms they cause. The vast majority of people who try & use these do so without any serious consequence to their life, yes a small percentage in the single digit range do have problems, most of them minor, and of them a small percentage in a single digit range go on to have major problems. I could just have easily replaced the word drugs with caffeine, chocolate, dextroamphetamine, opioid of your choice including heroin, and marijuana. Despite the TV stereotype, the vast majority pay for these things with their own money they have earned themself.
President Kennedy was taking very large amounts of opioids throughout his term and before, even during the "Ask what you can do for your country" speech. Reagan regularly smoked pot when he was an actor and during his term as governor. Rush Limbaugh still made it to work every single day, though he did probably eventually pay a penalty for using too much "tylenol". Even Bush Jr. was an occasional cocaine user and probably never suffered serious harm from any drugs until alcohol.
People have mostly lost their perspective on this. Drugs aren't usually an end point, they are simply a pit stop for most. A useful tool at times. Its all about risks management, and even in terms of the risks, the drugs themself are generally far less dangerous than getting into your car and driving to home to visit with your mother.
Most people moderate their habits on their own and are capable of managing those risks, they become a little more capable when given actual useful information about them. The most dangerous thing about drugs now is not the drugs, but the legal sanctions of having them illegal, and consequences of an illegal unregulated market. Adding another draconian consequence isn't going to chance anything, other than inflict suffering on the 998 out of 1000 who were never going to have a problem anyway to punsih the 2 who did who most likely could have been helped with treatment. This is very counterproductive for society as a whole.
Just about every drug you can think of has been banned at one time or another. Coffee by penalty of death, tea by penalty of land confiscation and later on death, chocolate by penalty of imprisonment & death, tobacco by every penalty known to mankind including death, alcohol by imprisonment, opium by death (China). Do you know what the net result of this was? The drugs are still here. They don't have pushers, they sell themself. They are what they are, and they are a part of our culture, they aren't going to go away, so we need to start figuring out good ways to live with them that reduce the harm to society and be realistic about what is actually possible to do.
I have to agree. The ECS Group (aka ECS, PC Chips, Asrock, etc) don't know how to make reliable stable hardware. At the present time ASRock is a division of AsusTek, IE: ASUS and not made by ECS.
Anyone know who actually makes stuff for Syntax? Or Biostar?
If ECS is really producing the volume of boards claimed by the article, then the percentage of boards worldwide which originated at ECS must be fairly large.
ECS used to make parts for IBM in the 90's. Which explains soo many of the failures in their consumer level stuff. ECS also has other brands it makets under "PC-Chips" is one of them. Many companies like say Mach Speed are largely relabeling outfits (just like you can buy blank ram chips, you can also buy blank other than a serial number motherboards). Many of the majors (HP/Compaq, Dell, Emachine/Gateway) don't make their own boards - they hire another company to make them. Lots of companies fill those needs, companies like: Tri-Gem of Korea(made 90% of Emachines motherboards until recently and probably 70% of HP boards until recently), MSI - shows up frequently in Gateway, Dell, EMachine boxes.
These days you can find even Asus motherboards showing up in the higher end HP's. DFI has a high quality 6 layer line of Micro-ATX boards that they sell to OEMs (with very few markings on the to give them away as to what they really are, and if you order enough of them they will make them however you want).
This isn't 1981 when we had the choice of IBM and Apple doing this stuff in house. Everyone in the game outsources parts. Probably 70% of the power supplies in OEMs are Lian or Forton Source - no matter what they are rebranded. Hell, half of the branded ones for sale to you are probably FSP (ala Sparkle for instance) as well.
ECS boards have never been great at reliability. Most electronics follows the bathtub curve if you were to plot out the failures. You see a high amount of DOA and dead within a couple months and if it survives that it tends to last for years *(7-10) until it hits death due to wear out. ECS's curve looks more like a porcupine.
Several of the white box builders here used them, usually the ones who only compete on price. The cheapest machine they sold almost always had ECS or PCChips boards. Many of them used a card and date system where they wrote the purchase date in several places (sometimes in a code) on the inside of the PC, and often on a sticker on it to deal with their own limited 90 day warranty (if they even offered that much before they disappeared). So it was not hard to tell how long a system had been in use to get some idea of how soon they were failing. Many companies (like Tiger Direct) also sell "Build your own kits" and we always asked for the paperwork if they had it because some of the items come with warranties that can save them some money in replacing it (Tiger will also look up the info if you ask, so they are very good about helping with warranty claims). Again, had the same pattern, except the kits (and warranty replacements) had unusually high DOA, and dead within a week. You would think the ones that survived that would make it to 2 years, but many of them were failing and much more than other brands (like MSI, SOYO) that also showed up in the cheap white box and build your own kit market.
A failure in 3 months is a warranty issue, 1 year and 3 months out it isn't. Just as well, getting an RMA was miserable with them, even trying to get a BIOS for half of their products was also miserable (as they like to hide relationships and so many white box builders bought an OEM's leftover junk and stuck it in the box. Can't expect support there, its the OEMs problem, not that tracking that down is easy either.) If you are working on a PCChips or ECS board that is actually labeled what it is with the model # on the PCB (or even a sticker) consider yourself lucky. Though you still may not be any better off on most of the support items. Integrated LAN missing from the BIOS on their site but still labeled with "-L" awwww, too bad, sorry sucker! Should have delt with a better company.
Ever open up an LCD? Notice how many of them are actually made by Samsung regardless of what is on the front of it? Open up 10 routers chosen at random (and not made by Cisco) and see
ECS can track board production times down to the second, monitoring how long each step of the process takes. If someone is a bit slow at their station, the computer system will say so, and they can be encouraged to go a bit faster after their next break. Also, if a set of boards starts to fail the testing process, they can tell exactly which one of the many production lines in Building 26 was responsible and if needed, track down the exact employee that was responsible for the section of the mainboard that's failing the test.
You were 0.2 seconds slower per board than last week, NO BREAK FOR YOU!!!
That is exactly the system that is in place by much of the garment industry and Nike, and I wouldn't be surprised to see that in the electronics industry in Mexico (or China, or South/Central America). The production is factored to the tenth of a second for each operation, and everyone lives in the company town (more accurately described as a dorm).
The conditions are better than we had company towns in the USA, but that is only because they have indoor plumbing, eletrcity, and other things that simply didn't exist for most of the population when the USA had company towns.
The pope was right, capitalism will destroy itself (and everyone else) if you don't temper it with morals.
To be honest, if children were not in those chat rooms, they would dry up
Actually, the bots would simply create the room. Most of those rooms are only occupied by porn bots, but it hasn't become exlcusive like all AIM chat has (nothing but porn bots). Even if the type of porn they are pitching has nothing to do with the title, porn bots would create as many rooms as possible to have another venue to pitch their wares.
Honestly, this problem is one of parasites. The person seeking 10 million dollars is the biggest parasite, IMHO. I'm sure they are in it with some group or another, the whole abuse industry is pretty rotten. If they don't have victims, they will create them, and when they do have a victim - they will exploit them. (Just as this "mother" is hoping to cash in...)
We are going to reach a point where we are going to have so many nannies, counselors, psychologist, lawyers, social workers, "helpless victims", and so many other useless riff raff types that they will be the whole of the economy and we wont actually produce anything anymore.
If you are Jerry Springer, its great. If you are anyone else, each & every one of these people diminishes the quality of your life just that little bit, some of it very blatant (in taxes for instance), much of it in subtle ways that have to be pointed out to people. Those of you that have to work with female coworkers probably already understand at least a few of the ways the victim mentality & culture has made your life less enjoyable.
Yet the corporate culture is spineless and will give in, if only a bit. The process is slow. Eventually you wont be able to say or do anything without someone being offended, suing you, or being forced off to some counselor because you have an opinion, maybe even an opinion others disagree with.
The 100,000+ people who used YahooChat member rooms are all suffering that diminished quality of life right now. And while the loss of a gathering place, a connection between friends, and the many support groups and other groups may seem like a small price, it is but one of thousands of small prices we are paying, and they do add up.
To those who are going to say that marketers tell the truth about products to people who don't know the truth...fuck that. That was true in 1955, and was called advertising. It's not true in 2005, and it's called marketing. I don't think that was true even in 1955. Snake oil salesmen have a longer history, and plenty of quack cures were touted by Madison Avenue long before that.
The Persistent Identification Element is just another example of the lengths marketing scum will go to clandestinely as possible track your movements and sell your data to anyone with a check book. Not that most users shouldn't realize by now that any plugin is likely to be some form of tracking/spyware. For those of you unfortunate enough to be trapped on IE, Flash Disable is a handy tool, its just a pretty front end to disabling & enabling the registry key for flash - one less icon that doing it with importing reg keys manually: Handy Reg Keys Way, both of them require a browser restart to take effect though. Of course, aside from flash being really annoying - its more effective to get to the root of the security problem itself with the security settings panel for Macromedia Flash Player, but you have to flip through several different settings to actually disable them and delete existing ones (under "allow websites to store information how much information on your computer"): Flash Settings Manager. Or perhaps you would like the more permanent fix of: Uninstalling Flash Player Entirely For those using Mozilla and Firefox, you likely already have Flashblock installed, but you should still check out the security settings for Flash.
Considering all of the provisions that are in this, and how extremely overbroad almost every single one of them is and unneeded most of them are, that the only thing congress finds fault with is the library and bookstore provisions is quite disturbing.
I think we need to clean house. The white house, and both houses of congress.
Electronic communications provisions would have ranked a lot higher for me, as well as banking & financial provisions, and detention provisions, ability to issue "secret" warrants, sneak and peak... All of those ranked a lot above worrying about my library card book list.
Man what a lame article. A little lacking in substance, I'd say. Why, I've got half a mind to email bomb the author! Better do it through an open socks proxy, that way he wont be able to strike back effectively.
I've knocked countless hosts off the net through the legal reporting means, but I get an average of 6000 spams a day from 3 hosts that are relentless(plus the continual dictionary attacks, and everything else they do), and with ISP's that simply will not act, with law enforcement that also will not act. At a certain point its cheaper to buy a plane ticket out there and break every bone in their body with a louisville slugger than keep trying legal means - which quite honestly - don't work on these cases.
If you were lucky enough to have a cold water stream that went by your location you could use this idea to easily route the water from the stream through it (need a screen on the intake), through the heat exchanger, and back out to the stream. Pretty minimal impact on anything. Would be a nice method for those lucky enough to have that circumstance. A pump might be needed depending on the lay of the land, good idea to have one anyway just to keep it free of debris and stagnant water if it is out of use for a period of time.
I hope he has an ice machine that the university is paying for, otherwise this isn't going to be as cost effective for him as just getting a window unit. As corporate America would say, externalizing cost is as good as free. (sigh)
I sure wouldn't want anyone spamming them, or contacting them with complaints and wasting their time like they waste mine having to remove their garbage...
Having a window in your home is an exploitable vulnerability, its vulnerable to my mag-lite and/or brick tool. Because this exploit exist doesn't give me the right to use it to break into everyones home that has a window.
The public has the right to know if the device works, and how well. Without knowing how it works how can a citizen know if the charges against them are valid?
Amen. Especially when dealing with a serious offense like a DUI, and a highly variable (and inaccurate) technology like a breath test for BAC. Blood test don't have the type of problems the breath test do, and are hard to refute, but the breath test can easily be off more than.06, and with only.08 being the DUI standard that really shouldn't be allowed into evidence at all in my opinion.
The conviction rate for anyone who actually challenges them is just a little over 50% in my area, so I'm not surprised that the Florida county is touting the "under 50%" number as a problem, but doing so without stating the number before this issue was raised is probably very misleading if their numbers are anything like my own county.
I understand your point of view. No one wants to pay more than they have to, or buy features they don't need.
My impression of ECS/PCChips boards (same company) comes from having worked on so many of them. In electronics you tend to see a bathtub curve for failure if you were to plot it out. Generally speaking, you have a fair amount of DOA and dead very quickly products. These tend to die within the first 90 days (some products this plays out over 5-6 months). Products that survive this initial period, tend to work for a long time (years) until they die because of wear out. Wear out usually happens in about 7-10 years for PC components if they are handled properly.
ECS & PCChips both seem to have usually high DOA and fail early rates, but they also seem to have an extremely high failure rate at 1-3 years out. Instead of a smooth bathtub curve that is high at the beginning and end but low during the middle, you get one that looks more like a porcupine.
They are by no means alone in this. Most of the MATX boards from DFI follow the bathtub curve, as do their high end ATX boards, but the ATX ones in the middle (probably due to using a thinner PCB, 4 layers instead of 6), tend to show the procupine pattern. The Compaq Presarios I've worked on also had this porcupine curve of failure, though a slightly lower DOA.
Early failure, while annoying, can usually be delt with under warranty. Its a hassle, but you aren't out the full cost of the motherboard to get a replacement. Those 1-3 year failures are a lot more problematic as the warranty has expired.
The other joy with PCChips/ECS boards is playing the "Guess my model # by serial & FCC ID" game. I've worked on several of them that didn't have a mark on them other than that.
It is possible that not all of this is the fault of ECS, as the people who tend to buy ECS also tend to buy the $30 case/power supply combo, or get the ECS/PCChips board from the local white box builder who competes exclusively on price and skimp wherever they can get away with it. Cheap power supplies tend to have a lot of ripple, they aren't very stable, and this does greatly shorten component life and lead to a lot of instability issues.
For instance ECS (awful boards) sold 1.26 million motherboards, 25,000 laptop boards. ASROCK/AsusTek 3.3 million boards, 200,000 notebooks. MSI 1.1 million boards. Gigabyte - 950,000 motherboards.
The problem with just running with those is that companies like MSI also make boards for Emachines-Gateway/HP/many others. ECS used to do extensive work for IBM in the 90's (which explains some of those awful machines from then) -- Some major player must be using them, I can't imagine home sales of ECS boards are that high (though they are favored by bargain basement whitebox builders). Even Asus boards are showing up in HP's these days. So it's hard to seperate out the markets.
If we could break these down by form factor it would be more enlightening. Most of the boards sold to OEMs are MATX. Most home builders aren't buying the MATX boards. I'm sure the motherboard companies have accurate numbers published somewhere, maybe in their financial statements of investment prospectus but I'm far too sleep deprived to go fishing.
The solution to this is to realize that WE ARE THE PRODUCT. These schemes can only work once they get critical mass. What they are selling is access to eyes, we are those eyes. If we walk away from this, media companies could still release their materials this way, but it would only be for a tiny niche market. I suggest that the best way to avoid this is to not give them that critical mass, and punish them for the attempt.
I suggest a 100% boycott of Intel products, and a 100% boycott of Sony products as a start.
The key words here are do not have unannounced DRM. They already announced the DRM in their press release, so apparently it just doesn't have some other form of DRM other than the vaguely announced DRM it already has.... This is just playing with words, they haven't changed anything. Its still shipping with the DRM in the chipset, fully activated and ready to go.
Don't they bust people for "offering" drugs, even when they don't have any real drugs. Usually they have some fake drugs (basil, powdered sugar, whatever).
That is a different matter. Some states have a "look-a-like" law, where if you were to misrepresent say chips of yellow soap as crack, and sold as such they could prosecute you under the look-a-like law. They can't prosecute you for selling crack, or posessing crack though. So you only get whatever sentence is handed down under that statute.
Now if you have any actual drug content in that soap, or better example say you had 1/2 of a gram of marijuana in that 10gram bag of basil, they would prosecute you for the entire weight of the mixture. The law in my state (and most states) spells it out as "marijuana or mixture containing marijuana" or "opium opium derivatives and mixtures thereof"..etc. So instead of getting charged for the law that applies to the half gram you could be charged under the one that applied to 10 grams. MANY people selling pharmacuticals go down for much longer sentences because of that, even though 99.9% of the pill is binder, or its combined with another drug that isn't controlled, they only consider the total weight of it as a whole.
In my state its better to sell 500mg of pure oxycodone powder than 3 oxycodone/apap tablets which = 15mg of oxycodone but over 2grams of actual weight, the difference is about 6 years in the potential sentence.
I have to second that reccommendation. Searchlores.org/Fravia.com is full of a lot of interesting and useful stuff on learning how to search more effectively. I still keep a local copy of a few of those scrolls, modified a bit for my needs for some hard to find things.
Slashdot Mirror
Jocelyn Elders was fired for suggesting that teenagers should be taught masturbation isn't evil.
Elders wasn't canned for that, she was canned for suggesting marijuana was a public health issue that should be addressed there and not in the legal system, and for stating it probably wasn't very harmful. Even bringing up the idea of discussing a different approach to drug policy was enough for the Clinton administration to pull the rug on her.
Jadavis, that was the most right on comment I've seen in this entire discussion.
When you go back to the basics of what the constitution actually says, most of the current operation of the Federal Government is quite simply illegal under the law. There is an ammendment process for a reason, but instead of using the difficult process they stack the court with people to make convoluted decisions to increase federal power. It was sort of inevitable that this would happen as you have two different federal branches picking the candidates.
Other than brute force, I never understood why the states went along with it. Back then the state legislatures appointed the senate, so they did have some way to litmus test who they sending to the swamp and put a check on unruly behavoir of this kind, but I suppose just like judges you never really know what they will do with it till you put them in the office.
Every time I hear: "A seller of online marketing tools" the first words that pop into my mind are: Spammer and/or seller of spamming tools, Search Engine Optimizer/Spammer of search engines. When I hear that said "seller of online marketing tools" is suing I think, what your Nigerian investments crapped out?
:)
So is "Click Defense" representing a (spammer) client, or are they the client/spammer?
Thanks to some changes in bankruptcy laws & tax laws, it might be worth it to spend a year dead for tax purposes.
I don't know the law in that respect, but it brings up the point of how can Utah law have jurisdiction on the internet.
I don't understand it either. It sounds very unconstitutional to me. They have a right to regulate the behavior of businesses to a degree within their own state, they could pass a law saying no Utah or no Michigan company will solicit these materials via email to minors on a list, but I do not understanding how they can apply their law to companies based in other states, much less other countries. Utah & Michigan do not have the authority to regulate interstate commerce. Of course, it will cost thousands upon thousands of dollars to the first person to get charged to challenge it.
Stupid legislators, good for lawyers, bad for you...
I read your post, and my opinion is: Your particular problem is probably power supply related, and if not that memory related. Digital stuff is "always right" (cough) it never makes mistakes (cough) it makes perfect copies (cough), it uses an invertor as a filter of sorts, high voltage goes here (1) low voltage goes here (0) and this is sufficent to deal with noise and keep ir error free most of the time, the problem is what happens when you get voltages inbetween and in an even mildly overstressed power supply this situation is quite frequent. Most people are overstressing their power supplies, yes, it runs, but it tends to lead to data corruption. The other culprit (though far less likely) is possibly ram. ...Even with good hardware...When you move large amounts of data around you have to be prepared for and expect some corruption, we need mv commands that actually check that what they are writing is what was there. The systems to copy we use now are so primitive they will even allow wrong file sizes and complete the operation without generating an error message. This is not good at all. (At least Windows & the versions of Linux I've used will).
I realize this uses quite a few CPU cycles to check hashes when you copy and move files around, but this is an era where dual cores are coming to the desktop, processors are over 2Ghz (many over 3Ghz), and its not like manufacturers couldn't add this feature in hardware as well to take load off of the CPU. This kind of checking should be built into the OS, and if not automatic, should at least be an option that the user could turn on.
Anyone dealing with very large amounts of data has already delt with this, and hopefully found a workable solution for their needs. Now its just up to the OS vendors, and hardware makers to bring data integrity to the masses.
The real fraud isn't this, I doubt unemployement fraud of this kind is much of a factor if other states are doing anything like Missouri and North Carolina are. (I don't know about anyone elses system, but I assume they follow similar rules and each have their own new hires database and require the employer # to be on file and verify it with the employer, and the employer had to pay in to get it..etc)
The real fraud money that you can get from just a social security number is: Student Loans, and if you are really pushy and brazen (and it helps to be a so called minority for most of them) government grants.
Its not that hard to enroll in 7 different classes a week under 7 different names, show up for a month, and disappear with the money. Each semester you can pocket quite a bit till they get hip to what you look like.
Applying for those farming grants takes some time and paperwork, but I've never known them to come out and actually verify that you aren't growing corn/wheat/cotton on your land, or even that you own land. Worth a try, worst that happens is they ask to verify something you don't have and you hang up.
I hear this, and then I realize most people are simply clueless about what most drugs do, and the actual harms they cause. The vast majority of people who try & use these do so without any serious consequence to their life, yes a small percentage in the single digit range do have problems, most of them minor, and of them a small percentage in a single digit range go on to have major problems. I could just have easily replaced the word drugs with caffeine, chocolate, dextroamphetamine, opioid of your choice including heroin, and marijuana. Despite the TV stereotype, the vast majority pay for these things with their own money they have earned themself.
President Kennedy was taking very large amounts of opioids throughout his term and before, even during the "Ask what you can do for your country" speech. Reagan regularly smoked pot when he was an actor and during his term as governor. Rush Limbaugh still made it to work every single day, though he did probably eventually pay a penalty for using too much "tylenol". Even Bush Jr. was an occasional cocaine user and probably never suffered serious harm from any drugs until alcohol.
People have mostly lost their perspective on this. Drugs aren't usually an end point, they are simply a pit stop for most. A useful tool at times. Its all about risks management, and even in terms of the risks, the drugs themself are generally far less dangerous than getting into your car and driving to home to visit with your mother.
Most people moderate their habits on their own and are capable of managing those risks, they become a little more capable when given actual useful information about them. The most dangerous thing about drugs now is not the drugs, but the legal sanctions of having them illegal, and consequences of an illegal unregulated market. Adding another draconian consequence isn't going to chance anything, other than inflict suffering on the 998 out of 1000 who were never going to have a problem anyway to punsih the 2 who did who most likely could have been helped with treatment. This is very counterproductive for society as a whole.
Just about every drug you can think of has been banned at one time or another. Coffee by penalty of death, tea by penalty of land confiscation and later on death, chocolate by penalty of imprisonment & death, tobacco by every penalty known to mankind including death, alcohol by imprisonment, opium by death (China). Do you know what the net result of this was? The drugs are still here. They don't have pushers, they sell themself. They are what they are, and they are a part of our culture, they aren't going to go away, so we need to start figuring out good ways to live with them that reduce the harm to society and be realistic about what is actually possible to do.
I have to agree. The ECS Group (aka ECS, PC Chips, Asrock, etc) don't know how to make reliable stable hardware. At the present time ASRock is a division of AsusTek, IE: ASUS and not made by ECS.
Anyone know who actually makes stuff for Syntax? Or Biostar?
If ECS is really producing the volume of boards claimed by the article, then the percentage of boards worldwide which originated at ECS must be fairly large.
ECS used to make parts for IBM in the 90's. Which explains soo many of the failures in their consumer level stuff. ECS also has other brands it makets under "PC-Chips" is one of them. Many companies like say Mach Speed are largely relabeling outfits (just like you can buy blank ram chips, you can also buy blank other than a serial number motherboards). Many of the majors (HP/Compaq, Dell, Emachine/Gateway) don't make their own boards - they hire another company to make them. Lots of companies fill those needs, companies like: Tri-Gem of Korea(made 90% of Emachines motherboards until recently and probably 70% of HP boards until recently), MSI - shows up frequently in Gateway, Dell, EMachine boxes.
These days you can find even Asus motherboards showing up in the higher end HP's. DFI has a high quality 6 layer line of Micro-ATX boards that they sell to OEMs (with very few markings on the to give them away as to what they really are, and if you order enough of them they will make them however you want).
This isn't 1981 when we had the choice of IBM and Apple doing this stuff in house. Everyone in the game outsources parts. Probably 70% of the power supplies in OEMs are Lian or Forton Source - no matter what they are rebranded. Hell, half of the branded ones for sale to you are probably FSP (ala Sparkle for instance) as well.
ECS boards have never been great at reliability. Most electronics follows the bathtub curve if you were to plot out the failures. You see a high amount of DOA and dead within a couple months and if it survives that it tends to last for years *(7-10) until it hits death due to wear out. ECS's curve looks more like a porcupine.
Several of the white box builders here used them, usually the ones who only compete on price. The cheapest machine they sold almost always had ECS or PCChips boards. Many of them used a card and date system where they wrote the purchase date in several places (sometimes in a code) on the inside of the PC, and often on a sticker on it to deal with their own limited 90 day warranty (if they even offered that much before they disappeared).
So it was not hard to tell how long a system had been in use to get some idea of how soon they were failing. Many companies (like Tiger Direct) also sell "Build your own kits" and we always asked for the paperwork if they had it because some of the items come with warranties that can save them some money in replacing it (Tiger will also look up the info if you ask, so they are very good about helping with warranty claims). Again, had the same pattern, except the kits (and warranty replacements) had unusually high DOA, and dead within a week. You would think the ones that survived that would make it to 2 years, but many of them were failing and much more than other brands (like MSI, SOYO) that also showed up in the cheap white box and build your own kit market.
A failure in 3 months is a warranty issue, 1 year and 3 months out it isn't. Just as well, getting an RMA was miserable with them, even trying to get a BIOS for half of their products was also miserable (as they like to hide relationships and so many white box builders bought an OEM's leftover junk and stuck it in the box. Can't expect support there, its the OEMs problem, not that tracking that down is easy either.) If you are working on a PCChips or ECS board that is actually labeled what it is with the model # on the PCB (or even a sticker) consider yourself lucky. Though you still may not be any better off on most of the support items. Integrated LAN missing from the BIOS on their site but still labeled with "-L" awwww, too bad, sorry sucker! Should have delt with a better company.
Ever open up an LCD? Notice how many of them are actually made by Samsung regardless of what is on the front of it? Open up 10 routers chosen at random (and not made by Cisco) and see
ECS can track board production times down to the second, monitoring how long each step of the process takes. If someone is a bit slow at their station, the computer system will say so, and they can be encouraged to go a bit faster after their next break. Also, if a set of boards starts to fail the testing process, they can tell exactly which one of the many production lines in Building 26 was responsible and if needed, track down the exact employee that was responsible for the section of the mainboard that's failing the test.
You were 0.2 seconds slower per board than last week, NO BREAK FOR YOU!!!
That is exactly the system that is in place by much of the garment industry and Nike, and I wouldn't be surprised to see that in the electronics industry in Mexico (or China, or South/Central America). The production is factored to the tenth of a second for each operation, and everyone lives in the company town (more accurately described as a dorm).
The conditions are better than we had company towns in the USA, but that is only because they have indoor plumbing, eletrcity, and other things that simply didn't exist for most of the population when the USA had company towns.
The pope was right, capitalism will destroy itself (and everyone else) if you don't temper it with morals.
To be honest, if children were not in those chat rooms, they would dry up
Actually, the bots would simply create the room. Most of those rooms are only occupied by porn bots, but it hasn't become exlcusive like all AIM chat has (nothing but porn bots). Even if the type of porn they are pitching has nothing to do with the title, porn bots would create as many rooms as possible to have another venue to pitch their wares.
Honestly, this problem is one of parasites. The person seeking 10 million dollars is the biggest parasite, IMHO. I'm sure they are in it with some group or another, the whole abuse industry is pretty rotten. If they don't have victims, they will create them, and when they do have a victim - they will exploit them. (Just as this "mother" is hoping to cash in...)
We are going to reach a point where we are going to have so many nannies, counselors, psychologist, lawyers, social workers, "helpless victims", and so many other useless riff raff types that they will be the whole of the economy and we wont actually produce anything anymore.
If you are Jerry Springer, its great. If you are anyone else, each & every one of these people diminishes the quality of your life just that little bit, some of it very blatant (in taxes for instance), much of it in subtle ways that have to be pointed out to people. Those of you that have to work with female coworkers probably already understand at least a few of the ways the victim mentality & culture has made your life less enjoyable.
Yet the corporate culture is spineless and will give in, if only a bit. The process is slow. Eventually you wont be able to say or do anything without someone being offended, suing you, or being forced off to some counselor because you have an opinion, maybe even an opinion others disagree with.
The 100,000+ people who used YahooChat member rooms are all suffering that diminished quality of life right now. And while the loss of a gathering place, a connection between friends, and the many support groups and other groups may seem like a small price, it is but one of thousands of small prices we are paying, and they do add up.
To those who are going to say that marketers tell the truth about products to people who don't know the truth...fuck that. That was true in 1955, and was called advertising. It's not true in 2005, and it's called marketing. I don't think that was true even in 1955. Snake oil salesmen have a longer history, and plenty of quack cures were touted by Madison Avenue long before that.
The Persistent Identification Element is just another example of the lengths marketing scum will go to clandestinely as possible track your movements and sell your data to anyone with a check book. Not that most users shouldn't realize by now that any plugin is likely to be some form of tracking/spyware. For those of you unfortunate enough to be trapped on IE, Flash Disable is a handy tool, its just a pretty front end to disabling & enabling the registry key for flash - one less icon that doing it with importing reg keys manually: Handy Reg Keys Way, both of them require a browser restart to take effect though. Of course, aside from flash being really annoying - its more effective to get to the root of the security problem itself with the security settings panel for Macromedia Flash Player, but you have to flip through several different settings to actually disable them and delete existing ones (under "allow websites to store information how much information on your computer"): Flash Settings Manager. Or perhaps you would like the more permanent fix of: Uninstalling Flash Player Entirely For those using Mozilla and Firefox, you likely already have Flashblock installed, but you should still check out the security settings for Flash.
Considering all of the provisions that are in this, and how extremely overbroad almost every single one of them is and unneeded most of them are, that the only thing congress finds fault with is the library and bookstore provisions is quite disturbing.
I think we need to clean house. The white house, and both houses of congress.
Electronic communications provisions would have ranked a lot higher for me, as well as banking & financial provisions, and detention provisions, ability to issue "secret" warrants, sneak and peak... All of those ranked a lot above worrying about my library card book list.
Man what a lame article. A little lacking in substance, I'd say. Why, I've got half a mind to email bomb the author! Better do it through an open socks proxy, that way he wont be able to strike back effectively.
I've knocked countless hosts off the net through the legal reporting means, but I get an average of 6000 spams a day from 3 hosts that are relentless(plus the continual dictionary attacks, and everything else they do), and with ISP's that simply will not act, with law enforcement that also will not act. At a certain point its cheaper to buy a plane ticket out there and break every bone in their body with a louisville slugger than keep trying legal means - which quite honestly - don't work on these cases.
If you were lucky enough to have a cold water stream that went by your location you could use this idea to easily route the water from the stream through it (need a screen on the intake), through the heat exchanger, and back out to the stream. Pretty minimal impact on anything. Would be a nice method for those lucky enough to have that circumstance. A pump might be needed depending on the lay of the land, good idea to have one anyway just to keep it free of debris and stagnant water if it is out of use for a period of time.
I hope he has an ice machine that the university is paying for, otherwise this isn't going to be as cost effective for him as just getting a window unit. As corporate America would say, externalizing cost is as good as free. (sigh)
Apparently these folks can be reached at:
ICQ: 291994264
and
traff@mail.com
I sure wouldn't want anyone spamming them, or contacting them with complaints and wasting their time like they waste mine having to remove their garbage...
Exactly.
Having a window in your home is an exploitable vulnerability, its vulnerable to my mag-lite and/or brick tool. Because this exploit exist doesn't give me the right to use it to break into everyones home that has a window.
The public has the right to know if the device works, and how well. Without knowing how it works how can a citizen know if the charges against them are valid?
.06, and with only .08 being the DUI standard that really shouldn't be allowed into evidence at all in my opinion.
Amen. Especially when dealing with a serious offense like a DUI, and a highly variable (and inaccurate) technology like a breath test for BAC. Blood test don't have the type of problems the breath test do, and are hard to refute, but the breath test can easily be off more than
The conviction rate for anyone who actually challenges them is just a little over 50% in my area, so I'm not surprised that the Florida county is touting the "under 50%" number as a problem, but doing so without stating the number before this issue was raised is probably very misleading if their numbers are anything like my own county.
I understand your point of view. No one wants to pay more than they have to, or buy features they don't need.
My impression of ECS/PCChips boards (same company) comes from having worked on so many of them. In electronics you tend to see a bathtub curve for failure if you were to plot it out. Generally speaking, you have a fair amount of DOA and dead very quickly products. These tend to die within the first 90 days (some products this plays out over 5-6 months). Products that survive this initial period, tend to work for a long time (years) until they die because of wear out. Wear out usually happens in about 7-10 years for PC components if they are handled properly.
ECS & PCChips both seem to have usually high DOA and fail early rates, but they also seem to have an extremely high failure rate at 1-3 years out. Instead of a smooth bathtub curve that is high at the beginning and end but low during the middle, you get one that looks more like a porcupine.
They are by no means alone in this. Most of the MATX boards from DFI follow the bathtub curve, as do their high end ATX boards, but the ATX ones in the middle (probably due to using a thinner PCB, 4 layers instead of 6), tend to show the procupine pattern. The Compaq Presarios I've worked on also had this porcupine curve of failure, though a slightly lower DOA.
Early failure, while annoying, can usually be delt with under warranty. Its a hassle, but you aren't out the full cost of the motherboard to get a replacement. Those 1-3 year failures are a lot more problematic as the warranty has expired.
The other joy with PCChips/ECS boards is playing the "Guess my model # by serial & FCC ID" game. I've worked on several of them that didn't have a mark on them other than that.
It is possible that not all of this is the fault of ECS, as the people who tend to buy ECS also tend to buy the $30 case/power supply combo, or get the ECS/PCChips board from the local white box builder who competes exclusively on price and skimp wherever they can get away with it. Cheap power supplies tend to have a lot of ripple, they aren't very stable, and this does greatly shorten component life and lead to a lot of instability issues.
I have some 2004 numbers for the 4rd quarter.
For instance ECS (awful boards) sold 1.26 million motherboards, 25,000 laptop boards. ASROCK/AsusTek 3.3 million boards, 200,000 notebooks. MSI 1.1 million boards. Gigabyte - 950,000 motherboards.
The problem with just running with those is that companies like MSI also make boards for Emachines-Gateway/HP/many others. ECS used to do extensive work for IBM in the 90's (which explains some of those awful machines from then) -- Some major player must be using them, I can't imagine home sales of ECS boards are that high (though they are favored by bargain basement whitebox builders). Even Asus boards are showing up in HP's these days. So it's hard to seperate out the markets.
If we could break these down by form factor it would be more enlightening. Most of the boards sold to OEMs are MATX. Most home builders aren't buying the MATX boards. I'm sure the motherboard companies have accurate numbers published somewhere, maybe in their financial statements of investment prospectus but I'm far too sleep deprived to go fishing.
The solution to this is to realize that WE ARE THE PRODUCT. These schemes can only work once they get critical mass. What they are selling is access to eyes, we are those eyes. If we walk away from this, media companies could still release their materials this way, but it would only be for a tiny niche market. I suggest that the best way to avoid this is to not give them that critical mass, and punish them for the attempt.
I suggest a 100% boycott of Intel products, and a 100% boycott of Sony products as a start.
The key words here are do not have unannounced DRM. They already announced the DRM in their press release, so apparently it just doesn't have some other form of DRM other than the vaguely announced DRM it already has.... This is just playing with words, they haven't changed anything. Its still shipping with the DRM in the chipset, fully activated and ready to go.
Don't they bust people for "offering" drugs, even when they don't have any real drugs. Usually they have some fake drugs (basil, powdered sugar, whatever).
That is a different matter. Some states have a "look-a-like" law, where if you were to misrepresent say chips of yellow soap as crack, and sold as such they could prosecute you under the look-a-like law. They can't prosecute you for selling crack, or posessing crack though. So you only get whatever sentence is handed down under that statute.
Now if you have any actual drug content in that soap, or better example say you had 1/2 of a gram of marijuana in that 10gram bag of basil, they would prosecute you for the entire weight of the mixture. The law in my state (and most states) spells it out as "marijuana or mixture containing marijuana" or "opium opium derivatives and mixtures thereof"..etc. So instead of getting charged for the law that applies to the half gram you could be charged under the one that applied to 10 grams. MANY people selling pharmacuticals go down for much longer sentences because of that, even though 99.9% of the pill is binder, or its combined with another drug that isn't controlled, they only consider the total weight of it as a whole.
In my state its better to sell 500mg of pure oxycodone powder than 3 oxycodone/apap tablets which = 15mg of oxycodone but over 2grams of actual weight, the difference is about 6 years in the potential sentence.
I have to second that reccommendation. Searchlores.org/Fravia.com is full of a lot of interesting and useful stuff on learning how to search more effectively. I still keep a local copy of a few of those scrolls, modified a bit for my needs for some hard to find things.