Well, let's see... you have a piece of spam, and the spam has to somehow pay the spammer, right? So you can follow the money.
One common way is that when the person clicks on the link to buy, it buys with a special signature.
Okay, so I forward the spam to the District Attorney, saying "it's spam". His office waits until it has 100 copies of the spam, and collects all the copies it can. Then it goes ahead and "buys" the item, tracking the IP Addres, codes, and everything.
Then they subpoena the records of the host, or alternatively of the company selling the product, or of the credit card company. Needless to say, they place these purchases on a credit card, and they never have to pay (because they have a warrant showing that the sale was illegal).
When the money is tracked, they can track down the spammer. *IF* you've paid for the spam to be sent, and can't provide the spammer, then it is presumed that you are the spammer.
Sounds workable to me.
Of course, this is going to drive new forms of spam and new forms of payment, as the spammers try to avoid accountability. I have no idea what will pop up next.
What we really need is pgp source authentication, and the ability of SMTP servers to dump badly authenticated email at any point. Aside from that, it would be nice to have "percent unwanted email" flags, so that when you say "this is spam", that pgp source goes all the way back to its source, flagging every server. Server admins can then set their machines to service those with the lowest percentage "unwanted" requests, first.
In other words, if you rent your network out to spammers, it takes longer and longer for your email to get through. At such a point, you're going to see most ISPs come up with service contracts that prohibit spam, and you're going to see spamming become legally actionable by the ISPs against the spammers. Also, Korea will drop off the map.
I'm sorry, you completely lost me here. I'd love to know the correct thing to do, but the answer doesn't seem to make sense to me. Could you explain further, what you mean?
Norway and Sweden, if I understand correctly, already are good farmland. You just have to know how to farm it. Slightly to the south are Latvia and Lithuania, and the gardens there are incredible.
First of all, they build shiltunamai (warm houses they say, we say green houses) for their start seeds and for their tomatos. The tomato plants grow 6-8 feet high, so the green houses are good for that. Then, they alternate potatos with grain. Grain is for the cattle; potatos are for the humans; the alternation helps refresh the land, as *did* the spring flooding of the rivers. [That's less often nowadays, though].
In the spring they harvest strawberries.
Then, they run beets, onions, carrots, Swiss Chard, Currants, bilberries, and raspberries, through the year. Sunflowers, apples, plums, and grapes are common autumn foods. Flowers of all kinds are grown in quantity as well.
From the forests, they harvest mushrooms.
Each garden also has a bee hive to help fertilize things.
Unfortunately, the area is being deforested now, which means that less rain falls, and the fields don't flood. But I can say that the Baltic region is definitely good farmland already.
Just a thought: we can all post our corallaries all over the place, or we can put them together. I say, 3/4 of you post your corallaries here, and the other 1/4, make some more top-level posts reasonably identical to mine!
Okay, quite simply, here's the interpretation of the Book of Habakkuk.
When we raid other countries for ill-gotten profits [and remember, Enron, IP, IMF loans+insurrection in Zaire, our tariffs against non-1st-world-owned tropical fruit, the WTO helping only the 1st world, our oil companies in the 3rd world...], we destroy the infrastructure of our neighboring countries.
That, in turn, makes them incredibly vulnerable to disaster, especially to external attack. If you want to measure vulnerability, it is inversely proportional to the number of independantly operating economic units. When we raid these things, and have Chevron own Nigeria, it makes Nigeria vulnerable to attack.
That makes *us* vulnerable to barbarian attack. If you think that can't happen, you're wrong. ("that you will not believe, though it be told to you.")
So destruction comes, and there is nothing that we can do about it, except to live righteously and faithfully despite everything.
Of course, after the infrastructure is destroyed, you're going to have famine, and then plagues. That's natural to the state of things, too. You can have lots of farms exporting food to the city, but if there's no infrastructure to take the food to the city, then the city starves. If you're starving, you're also liable to get sick.
But when destruction comes, we can pray for mercy.
Meanwhile, we can also take refuge in God. To me, that last part that I put in italics is the most beautiful, wonderful statement of faith, when Habakkuk says "even if the crops all fail, even if everything is bad, I trust that my God is good, and that He loves us, and will strengthen us."
Would that we all had that faith.
"I am against software patents, but much more as well. I have far too much to say to list it here. But my entire feeling about the EU (and the US, and the WTO, and the IMF as well) can be summed up by the book of Habakkuk in the Bible. It's only three chapters long, and well worth reading before your next vote."
I'm not going to throw it in here, but I'm going to throw it in an A/C reply to myself. So if you want to read it, look in the replies below.
I think it isn't quite so cut and dried as that. To me, it's more along the lines of, "Everyone has knives. Suppose it was common for a certain class of criminals to steal peoples' knives, use them in a crime, and then return them, often in such a way that the original owner never knew."
Suppose someone else, just to test a hypothetical line of reasoning, then puts a knife in an enclosed (but not locked) porch, and sets a hidden camera watching it, and determines that the knife get's stolen, on average, after 3 hours.
Was that an irresponsible action?
I'd be inclined to argue that the answer is no. There are so many unsecured computers out there, that the addition of one unsecured computer for a limited amount of time is not going to make a difference to any of the criminals. Their "knife gathering" is automatic.
However, if by demonstrating this, one thinks that one can contribute to a solution to the problem, then the value of that data might possibly exceed the culpability of the test.
Now, where the problem involved direct loss of human life, I'd probably come down on the side of "don't leave your knife out." But where it's just financial or time, I'm probably going to come down on the side of "Why not try it, and see what you find out" *if* you have already thought out a reasonable plan.
(1) Get a Hotmail account, and send an email to the account that needs spam.
(2) Send lots of e-cards from different sources to yourself. Then recieve the announcement emails, connect through from that address, and read the cards.
(3) Get friends who have problems such that they keep installing Windows viruses to their computers [repeatedly!] to email your address once or twice.
(4) Look for info about the wthunk32.dll and c:\msdos.exe worm. Install that to a second computer, and make sure that the second computer has your target email address in its address book (and no other). You'll start recieving tons of spam, all nominally from different sources, but in reality from your infected computer.
While we're screaming wildly and flapping our arms, I want us to remember that there is continual concern over at my club, that the next nuclear test could set off a Nitrogen-chain-reaction, thereby blowing up the whole world. We've been very fortunate that this hasn't happened yet.
Now, I know that there isn't much Oxygen on Jupiter, but does that mean that there is no Nitrogen on Jupiter? It does not. Therefore I have proven that...
friend pulls tin hat down around ears, then down to chin
Ummm... I consider myself a casual Nixer. I don't understand a lot about security. But if something bad happens to my system, the first thing I do is turn off the power (forget logging in as root, syncing, and then shutdown -r -n now... I use that for power failures during the 1 minute my UPS gives me.)
The next thing I do is I boot off a floppy [except that now my floppy drive is physically damaged... it seems that it won't accept the disk. "Oh, Well; that's Packard Bell."] Lacking that, I boot off the Debian CD (which I can still do) and save my data from there. Then I either fix the problem or wipe disk; reinstall Debian; restore data.
But I don't think I'd fall for that trick at all.
On the subject of your "no system is immune...", yeah Knoppix starts to be. When you can boot off a CD with all your apps on board, you start to be immune.
Dude, did you used to be in Blacksburg, VA? Cause I knew a couple different guys like that, and one of them was a backyard mechanic. That is, he fixed other peoples' cars for them.
Whether you are or not, I do know such people, and I respect them tremendously. Backwards knowledge is a lot more useful than people realize, especially when things go bad.
Here in Lithuania, we're modernizing now, but even 5 years ago there weren't that many cars. People used horse and wagon. The decorative yard wagons have wheels a lot like the Conestoga wagon; but the real farmer's wagons use Soviet truck wheels, but aside from that are entirely traditional. There are garden houses, and everyone knows how to really grow a garden. Think "US-small sized yard, but entirely garden." They use their greenhouses [now that I know how they make them, I could make a 10'x30' for $100] for starting plants and for tomatos, and the tomato plants grow 8 feet tall, and produce like crazy.
Everyone here who works professionally buys their tools now, but also knows how to make their own hand tools. When they get a tractor part that doesn't fit, they take it back to their own little anvil, use a propane torch to heat it up, and fix it right on the spot.
Man, when things go south, people are going to want backwards knowledge. Way to go; keep it alive, and pass it on.
Let's see... it looks to me like there's nothing wrong with eating... we just can't overindulge (binge) and expect to live. Okay, I can handle that. Come to think of it, I really don't feel good after a binge anyhow.
Drinking. Again, a small quantity of wine is good for you, helps your heart and all. Quantities that get you drunk, make you fall down, are not. Okay, again, I really like a good glass of wine, or even better, half a glass. The red that they serve on the airlines is my favorite; as it turns out, they spend a good deal of effort to mix a nice combination. [I admit, I don't have the money for the really classy make/model wines; I have no idea what they're like.] But I also hate feeling like a cotton-head landlubber on a ship. So I actually prefer not to get drunk.
Now we get to smoking. You know, I hate the taste of cigarettes, but there have been times when I've walked past a pipe store when I've thought "I'd really get into having a pipe." However, as I remember, people with prion diseases and with Alzheimers do better with nicotine. So, if I get one of those diseases, you can bet I'll start using a pipe. Until then, why, I just don't complain on those rare occasions when a friend lights up, and I find that that's all the nicotine I need: maybe twice a year. I'm going to guess that second hand smoke, twice a year, isn't going to hurt me.
So now we get to your f*** word (which I shall call effing). Okay, I agree, effing has been shown to shorten people's life spans. There are a number of diseases and cancers associated with effing. But there's a word for when two people love each other enough to commit to each other, marry each other, and then have sex. It's called making love. As it turns out, making love is *good* for your lifespan, whether your a man or a woman. And though I have never effed in my life, I have to say that I find the "love" part of making love to be incredibly important, such that effing just would not be good at all. It would be, hmm, tasteless, like eating an ice cream cone, and finding out that it was really fluffed starch.
So what's the point of having life if you don't live it? I'd have to ask, what's the point of overdoing all those things so that you don't enjoy your life? Because from where I stand, the way to live your life is the way to enjoy it.
I think it's not quite useless. It sounds like you have a percentage chance of dying that increases with age; if you are in the process of a low-cal diet, though, then it doesn't have an opening. Go off your diet for 48 hours, and it does.
So it seems to me that the right strategy would to increasingly diet as you get older. Instead of eating more, and getting fatter, eat less and less (towards a goal calorie level in your 50's), and then maintain it.
At that point, keep it averaged out nicely over any 48 hour period. So 2 days before Christmas, you cut your eating back, or just still make sure to undereat for Christmas.
I know older folks who essentially do eat that way. They eat like a bird, but for the actual holiday meal, they still can eat a reasonable dinner. It's more the selection of tastes that's important, I guess.
Oh, yes... I notice that nobody's stated it here, but I'd just like to remind all you Windows users keep your machines updated with the latest patches. Ummm.... just, if you're in Europe, don't use the patches that get mailed out to you from Microsoft. Also, don't visit the wrong website (there's a unpatched flaw that allows bad websites to hijack your machine).
I only say this, because I've been getting tons of spam and Microsoft Updates (but fortunately use Linux, which is still the minority OS and therefore doesn't seem to get non-apt-type updates like this.)
Wow, their processes are better than normal. Normal planing takes 1/4" off every side, so the 2x4 is 1.5 x 3.5. If you're getting 1.75x3.75, you're doing pretty well.
What's really more important than the size is the lumber quality. You want architectural quality lumber for your house, and that'll be a good dollar or two more expensive than generic quality for a 2x4x8.
For an airplane, such as the "kitfox", you're going to want aeronautical quality, which is a good deal better than that... and then you're getting into some real expenses.
Of course, you *could* build you're house out of generic quality lumber, I suppose. I mean, moble homes are built out of 2x2s. However, if you were going to do that, I wouldn't space my joists every 2 feet. I'd put them at 1.5 feet or 1 foot; but that would decrease your savings, of course.
So far, though, the best plan I've seen for a house, yet, is one that needs no heating, even in NYState. And that one uses a ton of lumber. Essentially, they have a good deal of glass surrounding a wooden shell, and a good-sized airspace all the way around the wooden shell. They let the sun power a solar wind through the shell that essentially creates a natural heat pump. That, in turn, eliminates the need for AC in the summer or heating in the winter. Really interesting design, if you ask me. But it uses a ton of wood. If you're going to have a design like that, you probably don't need such a high quality of lumber. But don't take my word for it. After all, there's my sig...
Okay, accepted.
It can be silly, except that it's fun, and practice also improves your ability to understand the world better. You get into the habit of making estimates, and the idea of making a rough estimate doesn't scare you any more. At that point, you start taking a more engineering stance to the world: "well, let's block this answer in, back-of-the-envelope style, and then we'll refine it later."
Interestingly, the DC-1 was designed that way. The goal was to have a 3-engine aircraft that could fly over the Rockies with one engine out, and could take people nonstop from one side to the other. I think that that was for the TransAmerican Railroad of Golden Spike fame, which later became TransAmerican Airlines, and still later TWA.
Their goal, if I remember, was to cut out the Rockies in their railroad trip, and make the journey much safer and more comfortable. The airplanes were supposed to be "sleeper" aircraft, so that people would land and arrive refreshed, even.
Anyhow, there was a new engine being developed, and whenever you had a 3-engine plane, you had problems with vibration. So the designers of the DC-1 decided to block out their proposal, literally on the back of an envelope, to see if it would be feasible to build a 2-engine plane that could do the whole thing on 1 engine. [Engine out was a common enough condition, that they didn't want the plane crashing.]
So they found that yes, it was feasible, and then submitted their proposal for the RFP (Request for Proposals) based purely on that, and won the contract.
I think that 2 DC-1s were built; after that, they began building DC-2s. DC-3s were begun in the middle of the war; but they are so well built that a lot of the DC-3s are still flying today.
No, it was a typical fermi problem, and the answers are normally right.
If you'd like to see how to do a fermi problem, look here.
If you'd like to see about why we call these "fermi problems", look here.
For more history about the fermi problem, and a number of examples, try here.
I assure you, the fact that I was right on was not accidental. I'm used to doing such order-of-magnitude calculations as a part of doing my work (checking other peoples' work).
That's why I said order of magnitude. An order of magnitude calculation means that it's probably right within a factor of 10. So if I say 3 500 000, it might be anywhere from 1 Million to 9 Million.
For an order of magnitude calculation, you make reasonable guesses, and usually you're actually a good deal closer to being right than you'd think.
Taking into account your 162 seats, that might divide my figure by 2. So that means that it might be 2-3 years' worth of data, but it's still reasonably accurate.
You know, after reading this guy, I wish I'd found out about him a lot sooner.
I have this bridge that I'd like him to sell for me...
That said, it sounds like he's great with raising cash, just lousy with (a) coming out with a real product or (b) generating sales to individuals.
Looking at his plan to sell across ebay, I suspect it's (b), not (a).
But I am well aware of how hard it is to run a business; I'm looking at things, and thinking "broke" (though not bankrupt, with only $8k in debt and no investors), though we have a great little operation here.
That's where your "VAT Tax handling fee" comes in. You have 2 prices: 1 with VAT+fee, the other without. Countries without a VAT tax get no fee. Countries with VAT tax get tax+fee that *approximately* averages to 110% of the VAT tax. That way, you always make a profit, never a loss, and people get annoyed at their own government's VAT tax.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, let's see... you have a piece of spam, and the spam has to somehow pay the spammer, right? So you can follow the money.
One common way is that when the person clicks on the link to buy, it buys with a special signature.
Okay, so I forward the spam to the District Attorney, saying "it's spam". His office waits until it has 100 copies of the spam, and collects all the copies it can. Then it goes ahead and "buys" the item, tracking the IP Addres, codes, and everything.
Then they subpoena the records of the host, or alternatively of the company selling the product, or of the credit card company. Needless to say, they place these purchases on a credit card, and they never have to pay (because they have a warrant showing that the sale was illegal).
When the money is tracked, they can track down the spammer. *IF* you've paid for the spam to be sent, and can't provide the spammer, then it is presumed that you are the spammer.
Sounds workable to me.
Of course, this is going to drive new forms of spam and new forms of payment, as the spammers try to avoid accountability. I have no idea what will pop up next.
What we really need is pgp source authentication, and the ability of SMTP servers to dump badly authenticated email at any point. Aside from that, it would be nice to have "percent unwanted email" flags, so that when you say "this is spam", that pgp source goes all the way back to its source, flagging every server. Server admins can then set their machines to service those with the lowest percentage "unwanted" requests, first.
In other words, if you rent your network out to spammers, it takes longer and longer for your email to get through. At such a point, you're going to see most ISPs come up with service contracts that prohibit spam, and you're going to see spamming become legally actionable by the ISPs against the spammers. Also, Korea will drop off the map.
...is really to deal the legislation...
I'm sorry, you completely lost me here. I'd love to know the correct thing to do, but the answer doesn't seem to make sense to me. Could you explain further, what you mean?
For example, this could spawn the development of cryogenic storage. (Don't try this... it'd be cruel to the mouse.)
Yeah, it's alive, and it's 50 years old. It just breathes very, very slowly.
However, for my dollar, I think I prefer quality of life to quantity, which is why I take my Christianity seriously.
Norway and Sweden, if I understand correctly, already are good farmland. You just have to know how to farm it. Slightly to the south are Latvia and Lithuania, and the gardens there are incredible.
First of all, they build shiltunamai (warm houses they say, we say green houses) for their start seeds and for their tomatos. The tomato plants grow 6-8 feet high, so the green houses are good for that. Then, they alternate potatos with grain. Grain is for the cattle; potatos are for the humans; the alternation helps refresh the land, as *did* the spring flooding of the rivers. [That's less often nowadays, though].
In the spring they harvest strawberries.
Then, they run beets, onions, carrots, Swiss Chard, Currants, bilberries, and raspberries, through the year. Sunflowers, apples, plums, and grapes are common autumn foods. Flowers of all kinds are grown in quantity as well.
From the forests, they harvest mushrooms.
Each garden also has a bee hive to help fertilize things.
Unfortunately, the area is being deforested now, which means that less rain falls, and the fields don't flood. But I can say that the Baltic region is definitely good farmland already.
up ^
Then, to make things doubly clear, put another identifier near the bottom, with its own arrow:
dn v
That way, with up saying up, and dn for down, the UPS (pronounced oops) guys can't get it wrong.
Just a thought: we can all post our corallaries all over the place, or we can put them together. I say, 3/4 of you post your corallaries here, and the other 1/4, make some more top-level posts reasonably identical to mine!
Okay, quite simply, here's the interpretation of the Book of Habakkuk. When we raid other countries for ill-gotten profits [and remember, Enron, IP, IMF loans+insurrection in Zaire, our tariffs against non-1st-world-owned tropical fruit, the WTO helping only the 1st world, our oil companies in the 3rd world...], we destroy the infrastructure of our neighboring countries. That, in turn, makes them incredibly vulnerable to disaster, especially to external attack. If you want to measure vulnerability, it is inversely proportional to the number of independantly operating economic units. When we raid these things, and have Chevron own Nigeria, it makes Nigeria vulnerable to attack. That makes *us* vulnerable to barbarian attack. If you think that can't happen, you're wrong. ("that you will not believe, though it be told to you.") So destruction comes, and there is nothing that we can do about it, except to live righteously and faithfully despite everything. Of course, after the infrastructure is destroyed, you're going to have famine, and then plagues. That's natural to the state of things, too. You can have lots of farms exporting food to the city, but if there's no infrastructure to take the food to the city, then the city starves. If you're starving, you're also liable to get sick. But when destruction comes, we can pray for mercy. Meanwhile, we can also take refuge in God. To me, that last part that I put in italics is the most beautiful, wonderful statement of faith, when Habakkuk says "even if the crops all fail, even if everything is bad, I trust that my God is good, and that He loves us, and will strengthen us." Would that we all had that faith.
... I would probably just send this:
"I am against software patents, but much more as well. I have far too much to say to list it here. But my entire feeling about the EU (and the US, and the WTO, and the IMF as well) can be summed up by the book of Habakkuk in the Bible. It's only three chapters long, and well worth reading before your next vote."
I'm not going to throw it in here, but I'm going to throw it in an A/C reply to myself. So if you want to read it, look in the replies below.
I think it isn't quite so cut and dried as that. To me, it's more along the lines of, "Everyone has knives. Suppose it was common for a certain class of criminals to steal peoples' knives, use them in a crime, and then return them, often in such a way that the original owner never knew."
Suppose someone else, just to test a hypothetical line of reasoning, then puts a knife in an enclosed (but not locked) porch, and sets a hidden camera watching it, and determines that the knife get's stolen, on average, after 3 hours.
Was that an irresponsible action?
I'd be inclined to argue that the answer is no. There are so many unsecured computers out there, that the addition of one unsecured computer for a limited amount of time is not going to make a difference to any of the criminals. Their "knife gathering" is automatic.
However, if by demonstrating this, one thinks that one can contribute to a solution to the problem, then the value of that data might possibly exceed the culpability of the test.
Now, where the problem involved direct loss of human life, I'd probably come down on the side of "don't leave your knife out." But where it's just financial or time, I'm probably going to come down on the side of "Why not try it, and see what you find out" *if* you have already thought out a reasonable plan.
Okay, if you need spam:
(1) Get a Hotmail account, and send an email to the account that needs spam.
(2) Send lots of e-cards from different sources to yourself. Then recieve the announcement emails, connect through from that address, and read the cards.
(3) Get friends who have problems such that they keep installing Windows viruses to their computers [repeatedly!] to email your address once or twice.
(4) Look for info about the wthunk32.dll and c:\msdos.exe worm. Install that to a second computer, and make sure that the second computer has your target email address in its address book (and no other). You'll start recieving tons of spam, all nominally from different sources, but in reality from your infected computer.
Don't you think that the new puppy might cause some compatability issues with the CDs? I predict some data loss unless you do your homework...
While we're screaming wildly and flapping our arms, I want us to remember that there is continual concern over at my club, that the next nuclear test could set off a Nitrogen-chain-reaction, thereby blowing up the whole world. We've been very fortunate that this hasn't happened yet.
Now, I know that there isn't much Oxygen on Jupiter, but does that mean that there is no Nitrogen on Jupiter? It does not. Therefore I have proven that...
friend pulls tin hat down around ears, then down to chin
mph fph mumph fffhp...
Ummm... I consider myself a casual Nixer. I don't understand a lot about security. But if something bad happens to my system, the first thing I do is turn off the power (forget logging in as root, syncing, and then shutdown -r -n now... I use that for power failures during the 1 minute my UPS gives me.)
The next thing I do is I boot off a floppy [except that now my floppy drive is physically damaged... it seems that it won't accept the disk. "Oh, Well; that's Packard Bell."] Lacking that, I boot off the Debian CD (which I can still do) and save my data from there. Then I either fix the problem or wipe disk; reinstall Debian; restore data.
But I don't think I'd fall for that trick at all.
On the subject of your "no system is immune...", yeah Knoppix starts to be. When you can boot off a CD with all your apps on board, you start to be immune.
Rocks are immune.
Dude, did you used to be in Blacksburg, VA? Cause I knew a couple different guys like that, and one of them was a backyard mechanic. That is, he fixed other peoples' cars for them.
Whether you are or not, I do know such people, and I respect them tremendously. Backwards knowledge is a lot more useful than people realize, especially when things go bad.
Here in Lithuania, we're modernizing now, but even 5 years ago there weren't that many cars. People used horse and wagon. The decorative yard wagons have wheels a lot like the Conestoga wagon; but the real farmer's wagons use Soviet truck wheels, but aside from that are entirely traditional. There are garden houses, and everyone knows how to really grow a garden. Think "US-small sized yard, but entirely garden." They use their greenhouses [now that I know how they make them, I could make a 10'x30' for $100] for starting plants and for tomatos, and the tomato plants grow 8 feet tall, and produce like crazy.
Everyone here who works professionally buys their tools now, but also knows how to make their own hand tools. When they get a tractor part that doesn't fit, they take it back to their own little anvil, use a propane torch to heat it up, and fix it right on the spot.
Man, when things go south, people are going to want backwards knowledge. Way to go; keep it alive, and pass it on.
Let's see... it looks to me like there's nothing wrong with eating... we just can't overindulge (binge) and expect to live. Okay, I can handle that. Come to think of it, I really don't feel good after a binge anyhow.
Drinking. Again, a small quantity of wine is good for you, helps your heart and all. Quantities that get you drunk, make you fall down, are not. Okay, again, I really like a good glass of wine, or even better, half a glass. The red that they serve on the airlines is my favorite; as it turns out, they spend a good deal of effort to mix a nice combination. [I admit, I don't have the money for the really classy make/model wines; I have no idea what they're like.] But I also hate feeling like a cotton-head landlubber on a ship. So I actually prefer not to get drunk.
Now we get to smoking. You know, I hate the taste of cigarettes, but there have been times when I've walked past a pipe store when I've thought "I'd really get into having a pipe." However, as I remember, people with prion diseases and with Alzheimers do better with nicotine. So, if I get one of those diseases, you can bet I'll start using a pipe. Until then, why, I just don't complain on those rare occasions when a friend lights up, and I find that that's all the nicotine I need: maybe twice a year. I'm going to guess that second hand smoke, twice a year, isn't going to hurt me.
So now we get to your f*** word (which I shall call effing). Okay, I agree, effing has been shown to shorten people's life spans. There are a number of diseases and cancers associated with effing. But there's a word for when two people love each other enough to commit to each other, marry each other, and then have sex. It's called making love. As it turns out, making love is *good* for your lifespan, whether your a man or a woman. And though I have never effed in my life, I have to say that I find the "love" part of making love to be incredibly important, such that effing just would not be good at all. It would be, hmm, tasteless, like eating an ice cream cone, and finding out that it was really fluffed starch.
So what's the point of having life if you don't live it? I'd have to ask, what's the point of overdoing all those things so that you don't enjoy your life? Because from where I stand, the way to live your life is the way to enjoy it.
I think it's not quite useless. It sounds like you have a percentage chance of dying that increases with age; if you are in the process of a low-cal diet, though, then it doesn't have an opening. Go off your diet for 48 hours, and it does.
So it seems to me that the right strategy would to increasingly diet as you get older. Instead of eating more, and getting fatter, eat less and less (towards a goal calorie level in your 50's), and then maintain it.
At that point, keep it averaged out nicely over any 48 hour period. So 2 days before Christmas, you cut your eating back, or just still make sure to undereat for Christmas.
I know older folks who essentially do eat that way. They eat like a bird, but for the actual holiday meal, they still can eat a reasonable dinner. It's more the selection of tastes that's important, I guess.
Are we talking about ATMs made by Diebold?
I hate to say it, but any company that would use MS Access for their voting machines just maybe might use VB for their ATMs.
Oh, yes... I notice that nobody's stated it here, but I'd just like to remind all you Windows users keep your machines updated with the latest patches. Ummm.... just, if you're in Europe, don't use the patches that get mailed out to you from Microsoft. Also, don't visit the wrong website (there's a unpatched flaw that allows bad websites to hijack your machine).
I only say this, because I've been getting tons of spam and Microsoft Updates (but fortunately use Linux, which is still the minority OS and therefore doesn't seem to get non-apt-type updates like this.)
Wow, their processes are better than normal. Normal planing takes 1/4" off every side, so the 2x4 is 1.5 x 3.5. If you're getting 1.75x3.75, you're doing pretty well.
What's really more important than the size is the lumber quality. You want architectural quality lumber for your house, and that'll be a good dollar or two more expensive than generic quality for a 2x4x8.
For an airplane, such as the "kitfox", you're going to want aeronautical quality, which is a good deal better than that... and then you're getting into some real expenses.
Of course, you *could* build you're house out of generic quality lumber, I suppose. I mean, moble homes are built out of 2x2s. However, if you were going to do that, I wouldn't space my joists every 2 feet. I'd put them at 1.5 feet or 1 foot; but that would decrease your savings, of course.
So far, though, the best plan I've seen for a house, yet, is one that needs no heating, even in NYState. And that one uses a ton of lumber. Essentially, they have a good deal of glass surrounding a wooden shell, and a good-sized airspace all the way around the wooden shell. They let the sun power a solar wind through the shell that essentially creates a natural heat pump. That, in turn, eliminates the need for AC in the summer or heating in the winter. Really interesting design, if you ask me. But it uses a ton of wood. If you're going to have a design like that, you probably don't need such a high quality of lumber. But don't take my word for it. After all, there's my sig...
*cough* Windows is released 3 months ahead of schedule.
Interestingly, the DC-1 was designed that way. The goal was to have a 3-engine aircraft that could fly over the Rockies with one engine out, and could take people nonstop from one side to the other. I think that that was for the TransAmerican Railroad of Golden Spike fame, which later became TransAmerican Airlines, and still later TWA.
Their goal, if I remember, was to cut out the Rockies in their railroad trip, and make the journey much safer and more comfortable. The airplanes were supposed to be "sleeper" aircraft, so that people would land and arrive refreshed, even.
Anyhow, there was a new engine being developed, and whenever you had a 3-engine plane, you had problems with vibration. So the designers of the DC-1 decided to block out their proposal, literally on the back of an envelope, to see if it would be feasible to build a 2-engine plane that could do the whole thing on 1 engine. [Engine out was a common enough condition, that they didn't want the plane crashing.]
So they found that yes, it was feasible, and then submitted their proposal for the RFP (Request for Proposals) based purely on that, and won the contract.
I think that 2 DC-1s were built; after that, they began building DC-2s. DC-3s were begun in the middle of the war; but they are so well built that a lot of the DC-3s are still flying today.
If you'd like to see how to do a fermi problem, look here.
If you'd like to see about why we call these "fermi problems", look here.
For more history about the fermi problem, and a number of examples, try here.
I assure you, the fact that I was right on was not accidental. I'm used to doing such order-of-magnitude calculations as a part of doing my work (checking other peoples' work).
That's why I said order of magnitude. An order of magnitude calculation means that it's probably right within a factor of 10. So if I say 3 500 000, it might be anywhere from 1 Million to 9 Million. For an order of magnitude calculation, you make reasonable guesses, and usually you're actually a good deal closer to being right than you'd think. Taking into account your 162 seats, that might divide my figure by 2. So that means that it might be 2-3 years' worth of data, but it's still reasonably accurate.
You know, after reading this guy, I wish I'd found out about him a lot sooner.
I have this bridge that I'd like him to sell for me...
That said, it sounds like he's great with raising cash, just lousy with (a) coming out with a real product or (b) generating sales to individuals.
Looking at his plan to sell across ebay, I suspect it's (b), not (a).
But I am well aware of how hard it is to run a business; I'm looking at things, and thinking "broke" (though not bankrupt, with only $8k in debt and no investors), though we have a great little operation here.
That's where your "VAT Tax handling fee" comes in. You have 2 prices: 1 with VAT+fee, the other without. Countries without a VAT tax get no fee. Countries with VAT tax get tax+fee that *approximately* averages to 110% of the VAT tax. That way, you always make a profit, never a loss, and people get annoyed at their own government's VAT tax.
Okay, how about this: Say
PRICE: USA $20.00 EU $25.00 ***
*** EU price includes VAT Tax, plus our EU VAT Tax Handling Fee