For $10,000 they offer a marginal reduction in rates. (Hell, if borrowing money were free and this thing saved 100% and needed no maintenance and was 100% efficient it would still take me a decade to recover the cost.)
If I had $10,000 to throw at the problem I'd install $10,000 of photovoltaics. No batteries, just run the meter backwards during the day when power is needed most anyway. And I'd be contributing to production not just shifting my consumption.
It's worse than that. My former roommate used to work for a company that built high-tech meters that would report use, outages, etc. in near-real-time and, conversely, the spot rates could be reported back to the meter.
Now imagine what happens when big industrial users start up and shut down based on spot pricing. Demand increases -> rates increase -> plants shut down -> demand drops -> rates drop -> plants start up.... Rinse, lather, repeat.
Each customer will have different profiles of price sensitivity, startup/shutdown delays, costs of production pauses and such. It's impossible to quick start/stop a refinery or chemical plant, hard to switch your manufacturing plant on and off, but if your building air conditioning uses an ice storage system (make ice when rates are cheap, melt it when costs are high) then you can flip on and off pretty much at will.
Managing the effect on the grid turns out to be a difficult problem.
But at $10,000/home, this thing isn't going into mass usage.
1. People with a high spyware IQ don't choose either option. But that doesn't make for good headlines when you're trying to peddle your spyware-killing software.
2. People with a higher spyware IQ don't run IE. At least they passed this test.
3. People with even higher spyware IQ update FireFox when the little red "you need an update" icon appears. Bzzzt....bad form for an anti-virus company.
4. People at the top of the spyware IQ scale don't run Windoze.
Last time I checked, 10% of all surfers have disabled javascript and a significant percentage which I don't recall at the moment don't run Windows. Makes that 97% figure a bit hard to swallow.
You notice I did say "ideally"... As one who has been involved in searches for applicants I yearn as much as the next person for the silver bullet that would let me identify, in advance, how appropriate a particular applicant is for the job.
Education can be seen as a proxy for lots of desirable employee characteristics, and whilst also clearly imperfect it's a low-cost method.... To the extent that education is more costly (in terms of time, effort, forgone earnings...) to obtain for "undesirable" applicants...
"Can be seen as a proxy" is a far cry from "is an accurate indicator of". Ability to do X chinups was once a requirement for police applicants. When challenged as to how many chinups the typical officer does in a career the response was while officers don't generally do chinups, it was a general strength and fitness measure. Also did a pretty good job of keeping women out of police work till it was thrown out by the courts. Modern physical-agility tests are based on what officer are actually often required to do (drag an injured person to safety, scale a fence, place handcuffs on a resisting person). The modern tests aren't perfect but they are a good attempt at aligning the test with job requirements.
As you say, college is more difficult for some to obtain than for others. Want to keep the blacks out out of your company - demand a degree and call it a proxy for "insert some legit-sounding attibute". You don't have to look far to find plenty of examples.
Actually I think that ideally an employer should discriminate on one thing and one thing only - aptitude for the job (where aptitude encompases all the attributes required by the job whether it be attention to detail, working well with others, willingness/ability to learn new tasks, etc.). Asking about education would not even be legal.
Hell, half the IT job descriptions I've seen were written by some mental-midget in HR who would round-file Bill Gates' app due to lack of a degree. Others require "a degree" but as far as HR is concerned, a BA in Tibetan culture would suffice just as well as one in computer science.
Some government jobs set pay levels based on GPA as if there were some correlation between a 3.5 from Podunk U. and one from MIT, Cal Tech, U.C. Berkeley or Stanford.
But formulas are easy and people are lazy so I don't expect things to change, soon.
Titles don't matter nearly as much as your written legal agreements - especially with the VCs but also with your partner(s).
If you truly have a great idea, money spent on an attorney now is money very well spent. It may keep you from spending much more money on attorneys later and may even prevent you from losing your friendship with your partner.
Don't waste your time thinking about whether or not you are being robbed by your business partner and more time thinking about whether or not you are being robbed by your investors.
Yikes! I'd hate to have to deal with that kind of battle.
I'm very fortunate that things are relatively uncomplicated. Neither parent was ever divorced and we have sufficient cash available so we aren't faced with the not-unusual problem of "we'll be getting a few hundred grand when we sell the house but right now we can't pay the tax/insurance/mortgage (actually, the house is paid off which further simplifies things).
But most important of all, we get along great so the biggest "problem" is just coordinating schedules to go to the house and get it ready for sale.
Ah, yes. The safe. My dad told us the combination of the fire-safe and I guess he assumed we would remember it. It wasn't among the things written down so after trying all the likely combos I had to have it drilled.
Funny story. My dad was with my sister and me when he died and I decided it would be prudent to get some things out of the house so the weekend after he died I drove the 800 miles round-trip to pick them up. On the way back I called my sister and joked that, given the fact that I was carrying a couple boxes of silver and silverware, human ashes (mother), a couple guns and ammo, a box full of drugs from both parents and a safe I couldn't open, it would be a bad time to get pulled over. Fortunately my 20+ year run of not being stopped remained uninterrupted.
For all the other posters talking only about "Intel Architecture", remember that Intel is more than processors. They make network switches, motherboards, NICs, etc.
Here's something to watch: Intel has an entire line of telephony products (Dialogic) but the lack of open-source drivers has frustrated some development efforts. This is probably about to change. I spent some time at the Intel booth at VON in San Jose last month and he mentioned that Intel plans to open-source the Dialogic drivers over the next few months. This would be great news for those developing Linux telephony apps.
My mother died a few years ago and my father died last year. Fortunately death wasn't a taboo subject in our family and also my parents believed in preparation. My father left us a document detailing all of his accounts, the web sites associated with them, the logins and passwords, etc. There were a couple of gaps but it was mostly complete. He had also detailed the relevant stock prices as of my mother's death which saved a lot of time in tax preparation and allowed us to quickly identify which assets should be sold to limit tax liability.
My parents had established trusts which vastly simplified handling of the estate. I had transfered his memorial society membership and pre-selected a cremation facility so when he died, we just had to make one phone call and transport, cremation, death-certificates, etc. were all handled.
Still, the whole death thing has been a learning experience.
When things have been done correctly, handling things is a breeze. The house and larger accounts were in the trust and we were properly named as successor trustees on the accounts. Disbursing them was simply a matter of providing a death-certificate, disbursal instructions and a couple signatures.
When the Ts aren't crossed and Is not dotted, things are more of a problem. My father had a small checking account on which he forgot to list beneficiaries. Although it amounts to less than 0.1% of the estate it was more work to deal with than the large accounts.
Email and electronic access presents an interesting problem. Just try to close a paypal account when you don't have access to the email of the deceased. Fortunately, I had my dad's laptop (and he was using my email server to handle his mail) so I was able to "forget" the password and ultimately to cancel the account. It also allowed me to unsubscribe from his mailing lists and made it easier to transfer control of various web accounts.
Check caching is a pain, too. Turn in your FastTrak transponder, cancel the landline, insurance, cell service, internet service, etc., and submit final insurance claims. Suddenly you will get a bunch of checks made out to the dead person. When you notify financial institutions that a person has died they freeze the accounts and cashing checks made out to the deceased is an exercise in paperwork. You also have to track down things that are on autopay. Then when you cancel them you may ultimately find money appearing in accounts that you thought you had closed. While not "legal", I was told by an attorney that things are a lot easier if at least one financial institution doesn't know the person is dead. Tell them only after you have deposited all the checks.
My advice....
If you care for your loved ones, take a moment in the next couple days to make a list of all of your accounts. Then verify the beneficiary information on all of them.
Make funeral arrangements. In our family this was easy since none of us are into forking over cash to the "death mafia" and so have opted for the least expensive cremation available through the local memorial society. When my neighbor died (expectedly at 90+), her son suddenly realized that he didn't know what to do next so he called the fire department. It's nice to have things pre-arranged so you aren't stuck thinking, "now what am I supposed to do" at an already difficult time. It also makes you less vulnerable to fast-talking funeral arrangers.
If you have assets in excess of $100,000 (in California, anyway), establish a trust. And assets != net worth. You may owe $599,000 on your $600,000 house but the asset still exceeds $100,000 and your loved ones will have to slog through probate which is a royal pain involving $$$, lawyers, courts and time. It's also all open to the public. With a properly drawn trust your successors may not need a lawyer at all and your business will stay private. (We have an attorney for the occasional question but have handled nearly all the estate ourselves.)
Given the overwhelming amount of time required just to deal with a house and two lifetimes of collected stuff, I'm extremely thankful that we aren't dealing with probate, too.
I was older than 6 months but my parents had bought me a tool set. They had also installed one of those old expanding gates to block off the door to where my mother was doing some sewing since I had discovered the pedal and liked playing race-car with it which did not please my mother.
Anyway, my parents thought I'd scream in protest about being blocked from the room but I was, instead, quiet and content. Warning: when kids are quiet, be afraid. The silence came to an end when the gate crashed down. I had been cheerfully removing all the screws that held it together.
Back on topic...my daughter is 19 months old and picking up words like a sponge. Every day when I get home she surprises me with new additions to her vocabulary. Long ago it became clear that she understands quite a bit of language even when she can't form certain words or complete sentences. By understand language I don't mean just knowing a couple words - I mean being able to follow directions like "Please go to daddy's dresser and bring him a shirt and some socks." or "Grab your bib and take it to mommy in the kitchen."
Oh, and latches are fascinating - my daughter always makes sure to close the latch on the child-gate when we are leaving and she crawls under her high-chair and locks all the wheels. She is also quite busy trying to figure out the child-proofing and is starting to open doors. I guess it's time for more child-proofing...
One "problem" with PostgreSQL is that it assumes actual competence on the part of the administrator. The default./configure ; make ; make install is designed to create a system that will actually start up on as many platforms as possible. After that, it is up to the competent administrator to tune it for the specifics of the installation. Using the default PG install in a performance comparison demonstration shows nothing but the incompetence of reviewer.
Have a 2 CPU AMD64 box and 16 GB RAM and fast SCSI drives as your dedicated DB server? Fine, make your settings appropriate for that. Running on a shared P200 with 128M RAM and a slow IDE drive? Different tuning entirely. I have production systems at both ends of the scale.
I am extremely happy with PostgreSQL. It's robust as hell - I've had individual PG connections to the DB up for over a year. On rare occasions I've had a machine running PostgreSQL get unceremoniously killed but every single time when the machine has been restarted, PostgreSQL has started up without any problem. This is not always the case.
Good comments. I even have a copy of the mentioned "source code" cartoon somewhere in my files.
My mother died of breast cancer 6 years ago. She was diagnosed in her mid/late 50s and insisted that we not tell anyone. She didn't want to be viewed or treated differently. When her cancer recurred, her doctor called it "terminal recurring breast cancer" and gave her 6 months to a year to live. She lived 8 more years after the reappearance and died of cancer at age 80.
When first diagnosed and for most of the time following that the web didn't exist but she did take advantage of other resources like medical libraries. Research is important as the author attests. Equally important, however, is finding the right experts.
My mother saw one doctor who, after a cursory exam and x-ray viewing, declared that the cancer had spread and had eaten away part of her ribs and said, "come back next week and we'll start chemo". No discussion of options (other than joining a statistical study the Dr. was involved in). She saw another doctor who spent some time on the case. She saw the same x-rays and patient but was able to determine that the darkness on the x-ray was not due to "dissolved ribs" but due to dense soft-tissue blocking the x-ray and that the range-of-motion issues were due to the tumor. A couple months of Tamoxifen and the tumor had shrunk to golf-ball size and was removed with relative ease. The range-of-motion issues started easing within a couple weeks of starting Tamoxifen.
Also, don't get complacent. My mother had a mastectomy so she didn't think cancer when she started having discomfort raising her arm on that side. She assumed that if she did get cancer it would be on the remaining breast. Wrong. If you have cancer, be extra careful about continuing checkups even after you are "cured".
My dad got prostate cancer which was discovered due to urinary symptoms. Routine screening wasn't done at that time and through careful research and good medicine he lived 13 more years. He died last year at age 76. With earlier detection he might still be with us.
So for the rest of us, get those exams. I'm in my 40s but get regular PSA and prostate checks due to the family history. I also get a full body check for skin-cancer every couple years (from birth to age 18 I lived in the Mojave desert sun with my hair turning white and my skin turning brown every summer - we didn't know from sunscreen back then). When I turn 50 I'll probably be first in line for the colonoscopy. If I do get cancer, I want to catch it early.
The company I work for uses a webhosting and colocation company. As our bandwidth utilization grows, we have begun searching for ways to make our network more efficient. The biggest hit from the colocation company comes in the peak usage charge, which penalizes (rather severely) for the highest sustained burst of network usage during a billing period. Due to the nature of the web business, we can't control how much or when visitors use bandwidth, so I'm wondering: is there's something we can do at the datacenter level to help smooth out our bandwidth consumption, over the course of a given period of time?
Maybe a lot of/.ers are too young to remember the great penny hoarding of a few decades back. At the time, copper reached a price that a penny contained more than a penny worth of copper so people started hoarding them and melting them down. There was a shortage of pennies for change and some shopkeepers resorted to rounding to the nickel, others used candy for change.
The composition of the penny was changed to use copper plate. I seem to recall that the feds outlawed melting of pennies as well but that was a long time ago.
Anyway, I agree that eliminating the penny is long overdue but the feds don't seem to want to make that embarrasing admission that inflation exists and money is becoming worthless. Back in the day when Nixon imposed the (ill-considered and ineffective) wage and price freeze it was in response to runaway inflation at ~3%. Nowdays we call that rate "controlled". Hell, during the reign of the great inflation-controlling Greenspan, the dollar lost about half of its purchasing power. Time to drop the charade.
The Axis is what you asked for. It is pre-packaged, embedded-linux-based, open (you can edit the scripts on the device if you want) and very easy to set-up and configure (sometimes as easy as plug in camera, access camera from browser).
Encrypt everything. Don't make it obvious what is important and what isn't and force "them" to waste lots of processor cycles to get Aunt Betty's cobbler recipe. I'm planning to convert all my web sites to HTTPS.
Also, help throw up smoke screens. Spare bandwidth can be used to send random garbage - some of it should be truly random so no amount of work will allow someone to conclude that they have successfully decrypted usless data but rather that they still have work to do.
Educate yourself so you know how to protect your rights in the event that you become an unjust target.
Donate to the EFF, ACLU or other rights-defender of your choice.
Write your legislators, support those who will defend your freedoms, fight those who don't, and vote.
And remember to separate the people, the goals and the techniques. There really are "bad guys" out there and we have many smart and dedicated people defending us against them. Help them where you can. But remember that they are all sworn to defend the Constitution (here in the U.S.) and it's up to us to make sure they remember and abide by that pledge. The ends do not always justify the means.
Slashdot Mirror
At least if you read the 10-second health news today: http://abclocal.go.com/wls/story?section=health&id =4146981
Men who drink more than 2 litres of tap-water per day have a 50% increase in bladder cancer.
Read the article (I did - just when I submitted the story someone else's submission of it hit the front page)....
The suit seeks class-action status for all artists who signed between 1962 and 2002. That's not chump-change.
For $10,000 they offer a marginal reduction in rates. (Hell, if borrowing money were free and this thing saved 100% and needed no maintenance and was 100% efficient it would still take me a decade to recover the cost.)
If I had $10,000 to throw at the problem I'd install $10,000 of photovoltaics. No batteries, just run the meter backwards during the day when power is needed most anyway. And I'd be contributing to production not just shifting my consumption.
It's worse than that. My former roommate used to work for a company that built high-tech meters that would report use, outages, etc. in near-real-time and, conversely, the spot rates could be reported back to the meter.
Now imagine what happens when big industrial users start up and shut down based on spot pricing. Demand increases -> rates increase -> plants shut down -> demand drops -> rates drop -> plants start up.... Rinse, lather, repeat.
Each customer will have different profiles of price sensitivity, startup/shutdown delays, costs of production pauses and such. It's impossible to quick start/stop a refinery or chemical plant, hard to switch your manufacturing plant on and off, but if your building air conditioning uses an ice storage system (make ice when rates are cheap, melt it when costs are high) then you can flip on and off pretty much at will.
Managing the effect on the grid turns out to be a difficult problem.
But at $10,000/home, this thing isn't going into mass usage.
1. People with a high spyware IQ don't choose either option. But that doesn't make for good headlines when you're trying to peddle your spyware-killing software.
2. People with a higher spyware IQ don't run IE. At least they passed this test.
3. People with even higher spyware IQ update FireFox when the little red "you need an update" icon appears. Bzzzt....bad form for an anti-virus company.
4. People at the top of the spyware IQ scale don't run Windoze.
Last time I checked, 10% of all surfers have disabled javascript and a significant percentage which I don't recall at the moment don't run Windows. Makes that 97% figure a bit hard to swallow.
"Can be seen as a proxy" is a far cry from "is an accurate indicator of". Ability to do X chinups was once a requirement for police applicants. When challenged as to how many chinups the typical officer does in a career the response was while officers don't generally do chinups, it was a general strength and fitness measure. Also did a pretty good job of keeping women out of police work till it was thrown out by the courts. Modern physical-agility tests are based on what officer are actually often required to do (drag an injured person to safety, scale a fence, place handcuffs on a resisting person). The modern tests aren't perfect but they are a good attempt at aligning the test with job requirements.
As you say, college is more difficult for some to obtain than for others. Want to keep the blacks out out of your company - demand a degree and call it a proxy for "insert some legit-sounding attibute". You don't have to look far to find plenty of examples.
Actually I think that ideally an employer should discriminate on one thing and one thing only - aptitude for the job (where aptitude encompases all the attributes required by the job whether it be attention to detail, working well with others, willingness/ability to learn new tasks, etc.). Asking about education would not even be legal.
Hell, half the IT job descriptions I've seen were written by some mental-midget in HR who would round-file Bill Gates' app due to lack of a degree. Others require "a degree" but as far as HR is concerned, a BA in Tibetan culture would suffice just as well as one in computer science.
Some government jobs set pay levels based on GPA as if there were some correlation between a 3.5 from Podunk U. and one from MIT, Cal Tech, U.C. Berkeley or Stanford.
But formulas are easy and people are lazy so I don't expect things to change, soon.
Titles don't matter nearly as much as your written legal agreements - especially with the VCs but also with your partner(s).
If you truly have a great idea, money spent on an attorney now is money very well spent. It may keep you from spending much more money on attorneys later and may even prevent you from losing your friendship with your partner.
Don't waste your time thinking about whether or not you are being robbed by your business partner and more time thinking about whether or not you are being robbed by your investors.
Yikes! I'd hate to have to deal with that kind of battle.
I'm very fortunate that things are relatively uncomplicated. Neither parent was ever divorced and we have sufficient cash available so we aren't faced with the not-unusual problem of "we'll be getting a few hundred grand when we sell the house but right now we can't pay the tax/insurance/mortgage (actually, the house is paid off which further simplifies things).
But most important of all, we get along great so the biggest "problem" is just coordinating schedules to go to the house and get it ready for sale.
My condolences to you as well. It's not fun.
Ah, yes. The safe. My dad told us the combination of the fire-safe and I guess he assumed we would remember it. It wasn't among the things written down so after trying all the likely combos I had to have it drilled.
Funny story. My dad was with my sister and me when he died and I decided it would be prudent to get some things out of the house so the weekend after he died I drove the 800 miles round-trip to pick them up. On the way back I called my sister and joked that, given the fact that I was carrying a couple boxes of silver and silverware, human ashes (mother), a couple guns and ammo, a box full of drugs from both parents and a safe I couldn't open, it would be a bad time to get pulled over. Fortunately my 20+ year run of not being stopped remained uninterrupted.
Yes, it would. You heard it here first. :)
For all the other posters talking only about "Intel Architecture", remember that Intel is more than processors. They make network switches, motherboards, NICs, etc.
Here's something to watch: Intel has an entire line of telephony products (Dialogic) but the lack of open-source drivers has frustrated some development efforts. This is probably about to change. I spent some time at the Intel booth at VON in San Jose last month and he mentioned that Intel plans to open-source the Dialogic drivers over the next few months. This would be great news for those developing Linux telephony apps.
My mother died a few years ago and my father died last year. Fortunately death wasn't a taboo subject in our family and also my parents believed in preparation. My father left us a document detailing all of his accounts, the web sites associated with them, the logins and passwords, etc. There were a couple of gaps but it was mostly complete. He had also detailed the relevant stock prices as of my mother's death which saved a lot of time in tax preparation and allowed us to quickly identify which assets should be sold to limit tax liability.
My parents had established trusts which vastly simplified handling of the estate. I had transfered his memorial society membership and pre-selected a cremation facility so when he died, we just had to make one phone call and transport, cremation, death-certificates, etc. were all handled.
Still, the whole death thing has been a learning experience.
When things have been done correctly, handling things is a breeze. The house and larger accounts were in the trust and we were properly named as successor trustees on the accounts. Disbursing them was simply a matter of providing a death-certificate, disbursal instructions and a couple signatures.
When the Ts aren't crossed and Is not dotted, things are more of a problem. My father had a small checking account on which he forgot to list beneficiaries. Although it amounts to less than 0.1% of the estate it was more work to deal with than the large accounts.
Email and electronic access presents an interesting problem. Just try to close a paypal account when you don't have access to the email of the deceased. Fortunately, I had my dad's laptop (and he was using my email server to handle his mail) so I was able to "forget" the password and ultimately to cancel the account. It also allowed me to unsubscribe from his mailing lists and made it easier to transfer control of various web accounts.
Check caching is a pain, too. Turn in your FastTrak transponder, cancel the landline, insurance, cell service, internet service, etc., and submit final insurance claims. Suddenly you will get a bunch of checks made out to the dead person. When you notify financial institutions that a person has died they freeze the accounts and cashing checks made out to the deceased is an exercise in paperwork. You also have to track down things that are on autopay. Then when you cancel them you may ultimately find money appearing in accounts that you thought you had closed. While not "legal", I was told by an attorney that things are a lot easier if at least one financial institution doesn't know the person is dead. Tell them only after you have deposited all the checks.
My advice....
If you care for your loved ones, take a moment in the next couple days to make a list of all of your accounts. Then verify the beneficiary information on all of them.
Make funeral arrangements. In our family this was easy since none of us are into forking over cash to the "death mafia" and so have opted for the least expensive cremation available through the local memorial society. When my neighbor died (expectedly at 90+), her son suddenly realized that he didn't know what to do next so he called the fire department. It's nice to have things pre-arranged so you aren't stuck thinking, "now what am I supposed to do" at an already difficult time. It also makes you less vulnerable to fast-talking funeral arrangers.
If you have assets in excess of $100,000 (in California, anyway), establish a trust. And assets != net worth. You may owe $599,000 on your $600,000 house but the asset still exceeds $100,000 and your loved ones will have to slog through probate which is a royal pain involving $$$, lawyers, courts and time. It's also all open to the public. With a properly drawn trust your successors may not need a lawyer at all and your business will stay private. (We have an attorney for the occasional question but have handled nearly all the estate ourselves.)
Given the overwhelming amount of time required just to deal with a house and two lifetimes of collected stuff, I'm extremely thankful that we aren't dealing with probate, too.
I was older than 6 months but my parents had bought me a tool set. They had also installed one of those old expanding gates to block off the door to where my mother was doing some sewing since I had discovered the pedal and liked playing race-car with it which did not please my mother.
Anyway, my parents thought I'd scream in protest about being blocked from the room but I was, instead, quiet and content. Warning: when kids are quiet, be afraid. The silence came to an end when the gate crashed down. I had been cheerfully removing all the screws that held it together.
Back on topic...my daughter is 19 months old and picking up words like a sponge. Every day when I get home she surprises me with new additions to her vocabulary. Long ago it became clear that she understands quite a bit of language even when she can't form certain words or complete sentences. By understand language I don't mean just knowing a couple words - I mean being able to follow directions like "Please go to daddy's dresser and bring him a shirt and some socks." or "Grab your bib and take it to mommy in the kitchen."
Oh, and latches are fascinating - my daughter always makes sure to close the latch on the child-gate when we are leaving and she crawls under her high-chair and locks all the wheels. She is also quite busy trying to figure out the child-proofing and is starting to open doors. I guess it's time for more child-proofing...
One "problem" with PostgreSQL is that it assumes actual competence on the part of the administrator. The default ./configure ; make ; make install is designed to create a system that will actually start up on as many platforms as possible. After that, it is up to the competent administrator to tune it for the specifics of the installation. Using the default PG install in a performance comparison demonstration shows nothing but the incompetence of reviewer.
Have a 2 CPU AMD64 box and 16 GB RAM and fast SCSI drives as your dedicated DB server? Fine, make your settings appropriate for that. Running on a shared P200 with 128M RAM and a slow IDE drive? Different tuning entirely. I have production systems at both ends of the scale.
I am extremely happy with PostgreSQL. It's robust as hell - I've had individual PG connections to the DB up for over a year. On rare occasions I've had a machine running PostgreSQL get unceremoniously killed but every single time when the machine has been restarted, PostgreSQL has started up without any problem. This is not always the case.
Good comments. I even have a copy of the mentioned "source code" cartoon somewhere in my files.
My mother died of breast cancer 6 years ago. She was diagnosed in her mid/late 50s and insisted that we not tell anyone. She didn't want to be viewed or treated differently. When her cancer recurred, her doctor called it "terminal recurring breast cancer" and gave her 6 months to a year to live. She lived 8 more years after the reappearance and died of cancer at age 80.
When first diagnosed and for most of the time following that the web didn't exist but she did take advantage of other resources like medical libraries. Research is important as the author attests. Equally important, however, is finding the right experts.
My mother saw one doctor who, after a cursory exam and x-ray viewing, declared that the cancer had spread and had eaten away part of her ribs and said, "come back next week and we'll start chemo". No discussion of options (other than joining a statistical study the Dr. was involved in). She saw another doctor who spent some time on the case. She saw the same x-rays and patient but was able to determine that the darkness on the x-ray was not due to "dissolved ribs" but due to dense soft-tissue blocking the x-ray and that the range-of-motion issues were due to the tumor. A couple months of Tamoxifen and the tumor had shrunk to golf-ball size and was removed with relative ease. The range-of-motion issues started easing within a couple weeks of starting Tamoxifen.
Also, don't get complacent. My mother had a mastectomy so she didn't think cancer when she started having discomfort raising her arm on that side. She assumed that if she did get cancer it would be on the remaining breast. Wrong. If you have cancer, be extra careful about continuing checkups even after you are "cured".
My dad got prostate cancer which was discovered due to urinary symptoms. Routine screening wasn't done at that time and through careful research and good medicine he lived 13 more years. He died last year at age 76. With earlier detection he might still be with us.
So for the rest of us, get those exams. I'm in my 40s but get regular PSA and prostate checks due to the family history. I also get a full body check for skin-cancer every couple years (from birth to age 18 I lived in the Mojave desert sun with my hair turning white and my skin turning brown every summer - we didn't know from sunscreen back then). When I turn 50 I'll probably be first in line for the colonoscopy. If I do get cancer, I want to catch it early.
What goes around, comes around.
http://radiolabs.com/products/wireless/waverv.php
Maybe a lot of /.ers are too young to remember the great penny hoarding of a few decades back. At the time, copper reached a price that a penny contained more than a penny worth of copper so people started hoarding them and melting them down. There was a shortage of pennies for change and some shopkeepers resorted to rounding to the nickel, others used candy for change.
The composition of the penny was changed to use copper plate. I seem to recall that the feds outlawed melting of pennies as well but that was a long time ago.
Anyway, I agree that eliminating the penny is long overdue but the feds don't seem to want to make that embarrasing admission that inflation exists and money is becoming worthless. Back in the day when Nixon imposed the (ill-considered and ineffective) wage and price freeze it was in response to runaway inflation at ~3%. Nowdays we call that rate "controlled". Hell, during the reign of the great inflation-controlling Greenspan, the dollar lost about half of its purchasing power. Time to drop the charade.
I don't know the current government policy on use of computers for non-work use but it used to be very strict. Same thing at many large corporations.
So does the presence of such a policy weaken any case against Sony?
Government: You infected our computers.
Sony: Surely this is not true as your policy clearly forbids personal use of computers. Are you operating in violation of your own policy?
I'm interested in setting up a Linux based webcam
Step 1: Buy an Axis.
Step 2: There is no step 2.
The Axis is what you asked for. It is pre-packaged, embedded-linux-based, open (you can edit the scripts on the device if you want) and very easy to set-up and configure (sometimes as easy as plug in camera, access camera from browser).
Wow this sounds like a lot of work. I think I'll stick to my current "system":
1. Too chilly? Turn on the heater for a few minutes.
2. Too hot? Open the windows/turn on a fan.
But you're right - energy is getting expensive. I just broke $100 for gas/electricity last month.
Encrypt everything. Don't make it obvious what is important and what isn't and force "them" to waste lots of processor cycles to get Aunt Betty's cobbler recipe. I'm planning to convert all my web sites to HTTPS.
Also, help throw up smoke screens. Spare bandwidth can be used to send random garbage - some of it should be truly random so no amount of work will allow someone to conclude that they have successfully decrypted usless data but rather that they still have work to do.
Educate yourself so you know how to protect your rights in the event that you become an unjust target.
Donate to the EFF, ACLU or other rights-defender of your choice.
Write your legislators, support those who will defend your freedoms, fight those who don't, and vote.
And remember to separate the people, the goals and the techniques. There really are "bad guys" out there and we have many smart and dedicated people defending us against them. Help them where you can. But remember that they are all sworn to defend the Constitution (here in the U.S.) and it's up to us to make sure they remember and abide by that pledge. The ends do not always justify the means.
...you're asking a bunch of Open Source fanatics for a justification for client access licenses? Good luck.