And here's another tip when making several cables at once...
Make one long cable of the total length of all of the cables you want, and terminate the two ends and test the cable. Then, you know those two ends are good. Then, for your first "finished" cable, snip off the length you want, and terminate the snipped end. Then, test the cable. If it fails, you know which end needs fixing.
Then, with the remaining slightly-less-long cable, terminate the snipped end of that, and test. Then, snip off the next length you need, etc...
I used to just pull off the length I needed from a spool, crimp the two ends, and test. But, if the cable failed the test, and I couldn't see where the problem was, I'd have to flip a coin to decide which end to re-do first. The above method avoids the coin flip. You'll know which end you have to re-do.
While 99% of the comments here debate the morality of whether this is right or not, I'd like to ask: Would this even *work*?
Let's suppose you're torrenting the latest hollywood movie and you're using TPB's VPN. The copyright police are out there, searching for people sharing it. They're paying the $7 for an account, too. So, they try to get a piece of the movie from you. I can only figure two ways they get the data: 1) TPB gives the downloader your real IP and instructs the downloader's VPN software to contact you directly (in which case, you're busted. Granted, nobody will know what traffic you exchanged with the copyright police except you and them... but you're still busted), or 2) all of the traffic goes through TPB, in which case you get a huge bottleneck... although, maybe they're planning on affording a huge pipe and huge servers at $7 per month per user.
Is there some other way this is supposed to work that I'm not seeing?
I've actually seen this happen up-close. My last roommate died of cancer. He was a religious dude and, although he didn't opt for dramatic resuscitation efforts, it did strike me as odd that he was pursuing surgery, chemo, *and* prayer.
Is the chemo in case gods needs help?
Is the chemo to give god a little more time to change his mind?:)
I wondered which he'd choose if he had to choose just one: prayer or medicine.
So much of it is so disingenuous. If you really thought that you were going to a better place, you'd be trying to accelerate the process (like southerners do with fried food) and, as a friend of mine says, once you're diagnosed with a terminal illness, god has decided. Are you trying to re-negotiate? Of course, if religious folk are just chickensh*ts who will cling to as many things as possible (even incongruent ones simultaneously) to avoid facing the fact that the lights are going to go out and that's the end of the show, then these findings make perfect sense.
This just provides more rationale for my suggestion for the stem-cell debate. Let's give gov't funding for stem-cell research but require that doctors inform their patients if any treatment options are derived from it. Slightly akin to the "dolphin-safe" tuna labels of 15 years ago, we could have doctors telling their patients "Well, we've got this treatment that will cure your 'XYZ'... but I'm required to tell you that the treatment was developed through research on embryonic stem-cells". My hunch is that, when forced to make a choice between their bible-thumping principles and self-preservation, most of them will let go of their opposition to research. This latest report makes me believe that even more of them would.
One of the things that I hope this administration does is give money to CERT (or some other appropriate agency) to provide a free anti-virus product for everybody.
Granted, it would have to be open-source so that we'd know that the gov't wasn't using it to snoop on us. But, unlike a typical open-source project, the gov't would pay a team to continually update the virus definitions and the source code.
Now, I realize that there already are free anti-virus products out there, and some of them score very well on av-comparatives. But they often have nag-screens prompting you to buy the premium verion and they're also not publicized very well, so only techie people like my co-workers know about them and use them. If one were provided by the gov't, it could eventually universally understood to be a gov't service as much as, say, free tax forms at the post-office.
Now, why should the gov't bother with this? Consider the amount of lost productivity due to virus infections? Imagine if that same amount of productivity were lost due to a biological virus. Imagine how much attention that would get from the Center for Disease Control. Or, if there was a group of people causing enough vandalism to businesses across the country to cause the same amount of lost productivity. Picture how much resources the FBI would be throwing toward stopping that.
Now, I don't know exactly how much it takes to maintain a team to provide daily virus updates, but I can't imagine it would take more than about $5 million per year (heck, that's about 50 top-notch programmers)... which is a pittance compared to the saved productivity and, of course, it would be a good PR move for whatever administration provided it, since we'd have that constant reminder of it in our system tray.
For about 20 years, I've daydreamed about a smaller-scale one which would zap any "parking enforcement" person trying to put a ticket on my windshield.
I've seen some comments that didn't think Hawaii was such a great venue for this, but I think it's perfect.
For an alternative-fuel demo, you need to have infrastructure (ie, fueling stations). In places like California, this results in the governor picking a single stretch of highway which runs the length of half of the state and plopping down hydrogen fueling stations at manageable distances between them. The problem being that, you better not miss your next fuel stop because every station is pretty much "Last Hydrogen for 100 Miles" and you better not need to stray too far off of the anointed highway. On the other hand, some cities are trying to plop charging stations everywhere so that you don't have to *plan* your fueling... but that stops at the city limits.
To really give people a picture of an alternative-fuel future, you need to have fueling/service available as ubiquitously as fossil-fuel stations are today.... and they need to extend as far as anyone might care to go. To keep costs down, you'd need to try a place that geographically limited... where people *can't* go too far away.
An island is perfect for that. And Hawaii, in particular, is even better because it's a vacation hotspot. People will vacation there, drive their electric rental car, get a tan, have lots of sex, come back home and have all of those memories intermixed. So, electric propulsion gets a "cool by association" bump.
So, I just want to be clear... I view this as a great *PR* move for alternative fuels. True, from an engineering point of view, there are better places to do it. True, it's a drop in the bucket compared to our continental consumption. True, we burn an assload of fuel to fly over there. But I see this as more about getting the U.S. to "buy in" more quickly to a future that doesn't involve petroleum. Something like this would finally be a testbed where people could experience electric cars without ever worrying about "Oh crap, where am I going to fuel it?". A possible true glimpse into the future.
Case 2:It's capable of the lower levels of human functionality. Say, somewhere between Forest Gump and a chimpanzee. Well, in this case, we have an intelligent being, who is a ward of the state, and who is unlike any other being on earth. It has no family, and potentially no human rights.
This is the scenario that I haven't settled in my own head, yet. As much as I would love that this one would eat away, more than any other scenario, at the religious notion of "humans are distinct from animals", I also toil with the "huge minefield", as you put it. I think it's reasonable to expect that this creature would crave companionship. Not just "caretakers", but an actual "mate" of some kind... but, short of creating a female counterpart for him (or some trailer-park chick from Jerry Springer deciding to have his love-child), what do we do?
And, do we keep him in a pen like the polar bears, or do we let him roam? We don't dare let him just go mingle, on his own, with the general public. Do we put him on some island? Do we give him a cave, or a shack with a bed?
What is it going to do when it's older?
Oh. That one's easy. He's going to get drafted in the first round to play fullback for the Packers.
If you look at the map of where DST is used, you'll notice that it's used more the closer you get to the poles (where there's a larger swing in the length of the day between the seasons). Now, when you realize that, then it dawns on you that there's no particular reason why there should just be a 1-hour shift for everyone in the US regardless of latitude.
Why doesn't California have a 1-hour shift and Washington have, say, a 2-hour shift... and Alaska have an 8-hour shift? Seems asinine, right? Well, then why even have a 1-hour shift, then? It's a slippery-slope argument, but it's difficult to argue that, as sub-optimal as a "1 hour fits all" approach is, that it's any less optimal to scrap the whole thing completely.
So, I'd can it. However, if you *really* still want it... how about this? With so many devices (computers, phones, etc.) syncing their clocks to servers, lets just have a national conversion to server-sync'd house clocks (kinda like the upcoming switch to digital TV) and then, if you really want DST, just have the servers gradually slew it in, day by day, as the sun moves toward solstice.
That's why I think we need to move to pictures that reflect scenarios from which future or past scenarios can be inferred by a human. Add to that some use of slang.
For example, show (amongst others) a picture of a gay-looking guy with a Michael Jackson glove in a country-western bar and have the server ask "Click on the picture with a dude about to get his ass kicked".
Or, show (amongst others) a picture of a prison inmate behind bars and ask "Click on the picture of a dude who had somebody drop a dime on him".
Of course, it's probably not feasible to generate these automatically, so you'd need a human to prepare each one... which limits the variety, which is a vulnerability. But still... my point is that humans can infer ancillary information about the scenario in the picture, which could prove very difficult for a computer to overcome.
If the child engaged in criminal libel or slander, prosecute him for that. No school official should have any jurisdiction over anything that happens out of the regular boundaries of school activities.
Exactly.
What I'm seeing here is a civil libel suit between the principal and the student (or her parents).
Defenders of the decision here are using the argument of "Well, the kid only got a suspension and didn't get sued, so she should consider herself lucky". But I think it's a dangerous road to go down if you say that it's okay to ignore jurisdiction and applicability of laws (ie, the fact that the student wasn't on campus at the time) in the name of utility (ie, that the student got off easier than she otherwise would).
Enforce the laws as they're written. If you got a problem with the punishment you had to dole out on some dumb student, then go back and change the law.
From this distance, I don't see any way that the school could have any authority over the kid when they're out of school. The school isn't held responsible if the kid robs a bank after school. Once the afternoon bell rings, the kid becomes "John Q. Public".
So, it seems the only way the school could claim that they're entitled to be involved is if they made some kind of "trade secrets" argument... that the student had made improper use of knowledge they gained while they were in the school. And, if that is the road they want to go down, then I want to see the NDA that the student signed where she agreed not to publicly divulge that the principal was a sex addict.:)
In an unusual move that could alienate a large segment of potential customers...
You're kidding, right?
Tell me if you've heard this before:
"Ampheta-Slim is too powerful for the casual dieter. Only use it if you need to lose at least 40 pounds or more."
or
"Possible side effects of Erectrify are a boner that lasts more than four hours..."
Yeah... those really scare customers away. So, again, we hear "Oooh. Our product is so good, it's probably too good for you... so you'd better not use it."
First, let me say that this isn't one of those "I've heard that this works..." things. I've actually used this method. I still do. It works. It's sounds crazy... but it works. It works with big, honkin', mondo scratches. It requires you buying a sander from Sears, but it's handy for other stuff, too... so, in the end, you've got yourself a nifty sander as well.
Next, you probably already know this, but the data is on the top of the disc. If you scratch the top, the data is gone and isn't coming back. So, check carefully to make sure that it's really a scratch on the underside.
First, go to Sears and get one of their "3D" sanders. It's a strange-looking 3-pad sander which is basically the sanding equivalent of a Norelco razor. They sell a variety of hook-n-loop sanding pads to go with it. Get the one with the buffing/polishing pads (get enough so that you have at least 6 of the felt-looking polishing pads) and also get the extra-fine sanding disc set (which has discs from grit 280 through 1000). Also, pick up a can of rubbing compound and a can of polishing compound.
[] Bring it all home and put one of your CD's face-down on some folder paper-towels.
[] Use a Sharpie or dark, permanent marker to mark the scratches so that you'll know when you've sanded them out.
[] Put the 400 or 600 grit discs on the sander and start sanding. Don't bother trying to get just that one spot where the scratch is... we're going to re-do the whole damn surface. So, hold the sander flat, and just move it around to get a good, even reduction of the surface. If you want, you can add some water to wet-sand it. Don't go too fast... no need to fling the water all over the place. Also, you don't want to overheat the sander OR the disc material. At this point, the disc will look like it's ruined forever. It's not. In fact, show it to some friends and see if they'll bet that it'll never play again.
[] If you're still not getting the scratch out, then you can go to a coarser grit.
[] Once it looks like you've sanded the scratch out, start moving through the finer and finer grits. It can be difficult to tell when you've gotten rid of the previous grit's scratches, so I usually draw big squiggles on the disc with a sharpie and then sand until they're gone... and then I do it again, and then I'll switch grits.
[] Once you've gone through the finest grit, get out the first set of polishing pads (the ones that look like yellowish felt) and put some rubbing compound on the disc and start polishing at a low speed. This can generate some heat and will dry up the compound pretty soon, so spritz some water on the disc to keep the compound working. Do this for a couple of minutes.
[] Now, clean all of the rubbing compound off of the disc, put the other 3 polishing discs on and do the same with the polishing compound.
[] Now, clean the disk off and put on the buffing pads (the ones that look like super-bushy white loop-velcro). You're going to do this one DRY and without any compounds or anything... just the pads. Go ahead and crank the sander up to higher speeds for this one... like 7 or 8 or so. You're going to generate a bit of static electricity and you'll be zapping yourself the whole time... just so you know.
[] After a few minutes of this, you should have a disc that is kinda hazy... but without any large scratches. Give it a play in your player. If it doesn't play right, then give it more time with the buffer. Or, if you still see some scratches, then back up to the sanding and get those scratches out.
[] Good luck.
Sorry, but this really isn't news. Hell... even *I* have done this, which means that it can't be anywhere near the cutting edge.:P The concept of putting a cantenna or bi-quad at the focal point of the dish has been out there on web pages for years. I fitted *my* dish so that I could interchange a cantenna or a USB dongle as the need arose.
The advantage of the USB dongle is that you don't incur the line losses of the antenna cable if your laptop/PC is a long way from the dish. You can get around the problem of USB cable-length limitations by using some nifty USB "extension cords" which are basically a long USB cable with a 1-port hub at the end.
I will add one thing that I haven't seen on any pages, however. Most satellite dishes have the arm positioned away from the centerline axis of the dish... usually below it, which must be accounted for when aiming. For example, if the arm holding your dongle/cantenna is 10 degrees below the centerline of the dish, then you'll be receiving signals from whatever is 10 degrees above the centerline. It's the same concept as flat mirrors... angle of reflection equals angle of incidence.
Why does this matter? Well, if you are trying to communicate with a station that's at relatively the same elevation as you, then you're going to have to point the dish down toward the ground a bit. This can be very conspicuous... especially if, ahem, the other station's owner doesn't know you're communicating with them (cough, cough). The best solution that I've come across is to turn the dish upside-down so that the arm holding the dongle is on top, which allows you to point the centerline of the dish skyward again, so that it looks more like the other dishes in the neighborhood. Almost nobody will notice that the arm is affixed to the top of the dish rather than the bottom... and even fewer will grasp the ramifications of it.
So, they just deliberately avoided provably knowing some information that they didn't want to comply with? That's nothing. When the whitehouse heard about the supreme court's recent decision regarding treatment of prisoners at Gitmo, they actually sent an email saying "We're rubber and you're glue..."
The juvenile behavior of these people... doesn't even surprise me anymore...
Exactly. About the closest I think we can come is PunchScan. As I recall, it lets you verify that your vote (via its receipt number) made it into the system, but you can't (as an individual) verify who it was cast for. I forget how it's all done, but I remember that it was pretty clever. Just a few dozen people checking their receipt (or checking the randomizing tables before the election) makes it highly unlikely that vote tampering of an appreciable scale would go uncaught.
First off, I'm not an expert. And also, I'll assume that you're not asking because you really want to find out what methods watchdogs would use to try to detect *you* messing with the votes so that you know how to properly cover your tracks.
But I have to say that the problem with e-voting (in my eyes, anyway) is that it's easier for an "inside" person (that means *you*) to tamper with the votes. To that end, at a minimum, I would feel that, even if a voter asks you for help, you shouldn't approach a voting machine without being accompanied by your Democratic counterpart (or some other official who's political interests are contrary to yours). Whenever possible, any citizen who cares (don't worry, I think there are only 4 in the nation) should be able to watch anything you do (short of approaching a machine at the behest of a voter).
As far as guarding against individual voters messing with stuff, that's particular to the voting machines you use in your precinct. If there's some software flaw that would let a voter get into an "admin" screen or something... then you're screwed, because the only way to detect it would probably be to *see* the screen, which I doubt you're allowed to do. Otherwise, there'd need to be a hardware intrusion, so you'd have to figure out the ways that someone could open the voting terminal (or somehow gain access to the data card or electronics) and do what you can to ensure that, were someone to try it, it would require very conspicuous behavior.
On a side note, one of the requirements of any secure voting system is that the public be aware of what chicanery to look for. For example, PunchScan looks like a very compelling system which allows voters to ensure that their vote made it into the finally tally unmodifies but *without* anyone being able to find out who they voted for afterward. However, the system can be defeated unless the public knows what (seemingly innocuous) anomalies should set off the alarm bells.
This thread is very timely for me because I'm currently trying to develop a way of "vetting" various Windows binaries that I don't yet trust... to make sure that they don't contain any rootkit/keylogger/etc.
My current plan is to start with my linux box and use VirtualBox to install Windows as a guest OS. Last time I checked, VirtualBox and VMWare create virtual network interfaces for providing network capability to the guest OS. So, I can use WireShark (formerly ethereal) to watch all traffic on that interface and see everything that goes into or out of the guest.
Additionally, I want to use some tool that looks at the registry and all files installed and then compares it to some previous snapshot, but I'm still looking for a good free tool that does that.
Two questions: 1) Has anybody else already developed a sandboxing method like this (and, if so, could you describe it and what kind of stuff you catch with it)? 2) Can you recommend a good "snapshot & compare" tool for the registry and filesystem like I mentioned?
Reminds me of the quote in Wargames: "He does fit the profile perfectly. He's intelligent, but an under-achiever; alienated from his parents; has few friends. Classic case for recruitment by the Soviets"
I had trouble thinking up many real ports that I'd put on the list (like that huge 30-something-pin D-sub connector I saw on some of my old MFM drive controllers on IBM XT's), and then I found that they didn't even restrict the race to just ports.
So, if any kind of bus or drive-connection format is fair game, then... How about MFM (and it's cousin RLL)? What about the huge din connectors for keyboards (those are certainly more obsolete than PS/2) And, speaking of PS/2, if you're going to list AGP as an obsolete bus, what about the proprietary bus that IBM invented for their PS/2 line (what the hell was it called? I forget. It had an "M" in it. "Micro-channel"?). Or what about EISA? And why is SCART representing the video ports and not CGA/EGA? The old 15-pin D-sub game port should be on there, too.... and floppy connectors... specifically their use as the interface for cheap-o QIC/Travan tape-drives.
And, for the last time, get the hell off my lawn, you damn kids!
What the hell makes these UIUC people think that they know how to make a browser? You'd think they'd leave this kind of thing to people who've done it before. Sheesh!:)
So we didn't miss it - but we will be missing it, as none of us are going to be living to be that old.
Unfortunately, I doubt anybody reading this will live to see 2718-2-8 18:28:46, either. Hopefully, they'll thaw out Ted Williams' head then. So, "Happy e-day, Ted!".
You claim a value. You make up the value - whatever you want to say it is. You are then taxed on that value. The only caveat is that if someone wants it from you they can buy the whole damn thing from you for the price you claimed it was worth
Hmmm. I'm not sure that would fly.... the whole "someone can come along and force you to sell it" bit. What I'd favor, instead, is your assigned value being tied to some limit on what you could sue an infringer for. In other words, if you say your cool logo is worth $10,000... then you can't sue anybody for more than that.
I've seen this and it lacks a WHOLE lot of data. It will take an army of volunteers...
I agree. I've read their instructions for how to edit the map data before you upload it, and it's just too painstaking to gain mass adoption. What they need to do (although, I admit that they probably don't have the money to do it) is design a little GPS recorder that you plug into your car and you drive around for a few weeks and then bring it to your PC and plug it into the USB port or something. If they had Google-like cleverness, they could then pool your data with all of the other submissions and accurately figure out things like: 1) Which streets are 1-way, 2) Which intersections have stop signs (if everyone always stops for 1 or 2 seconds), which have stop lights (if they sometimes stop for a minute, sometimes not at all, and all durations in between), and which ones have no stops at all. 3) What the *real* speed of traffic is on that street (even compiling time-of-day and day-of-week average speeds) for routing and ETA predictions which are more accurate than the ones based merely on the posted speed limit. 4) How many lanes the street had... whether it's a street or a freeway/highway... dimensions of parking areas... it just goes on.
Once you did that, all that the users would have to input are the street names and a few street numbers and the map software could interpolate the rest.
But really... what needs to happen is we need a federal mandate that all states/counties/towns have to make their street data available in some standard format. Frankly, I think that it's scandalous that the map companies like NavTeq (and the other suppliers to Garmin, TomTom, GoogleMaps, etc.) get the kind of money for these maps. The local governments all have this info already. They've had surveyors figure out exactly where all the streets go. They know what the street numbers are. It's all in a database at city hall in the planner's office. All that NavTeq does is goes to each city and gets the into and figures out how to massage the data into a consistent format. What's needed is a mandate to the cities (hey, maybe we can piggyback it into the RealID legislation!:P ) so that it has to be freely downloadable and in some standard format so that anybody can run a bot to aggregate it all into a nationwide map... or, better yet, so that anybody with a wifi-enabled GPS could have the GPS automatically connect to the server and fetch the local street data. Just a thought...
Slashdot Mirror
And here's another tip when making several cables at once...
Make one long cable of the total length of all of the cables you want, and terminate the two ends and test the cable. Then, you know those two ends are good. Then, for your first "finished" cable, snip off the length you want, and terminate the snipped end. Then, test the cable. If it fails, you know which end needs fixing.
Then, with the remaining slightly-less-long cable, terminate the snipped end of that, and test. Then, snip off the next length you need, etc...
I used to just pull off the length I needed from a spool, crimp the two ends, and test. But, if the cable failed the test, and I couldn't see where the problem was, I'd have to flip a coin to decide which end to re-do first. The above method avoids the coin flip. You'll know which end you have to re-do.
While 99% of the comments here debate the morality of whether this is right or not, I'd like to ask: Would this even *work*?
Let's suppose you're torrenting the latest hollywood movie and you're using TPB's VPN. The copyright police are out there, searching for people sharing it. They're paying the $7 for an account, too. So, they try to get a piece of the movie from you. I can only figure two ways they get the data: 1) TPB gives the downloader your real IP and instructs the downloader's VPN software to contact you directly (in which case, you're busted. Granted, nobody will know what traffic you exchanged with the copyright police except you and them... but you're still busted), or 2) all of the traffic goes through TPB, in which case you get a huge bottleneck... although, maybe they're planning on affording a huge pipe and huge servers at $7 per month per user.
Is there some other way this is supposed to work that I'm not seeing?
I wondered which he'd choose if he had to choose just one: prayer or medicine.
So much of it is so disingenuous. If you really thought that you were going to a better place, you'd be trying to accelerate the process (like southerners do with fried food) and, as a friend of mine says, once you're diagnosed with a terminal illness, god has decided. Are you trying to re-negotiate? Of course, if religious folk are just chickensh*ts who will cling to as many things as possible (even incongruent ones simultaneously) to avoid facing the fact that the lights are going to go out and that's the end of the show, then these findings make perfect sense.
This just provides more rationale for my suggestion for the stem-cell debate. Let's give gov't funding for stem-cell research but require that doctors inform their patients if any treatment options are derived from it. Slightly akin to the "dolphin-safe" tuna labels of 15 years ago, we could have doctors telling their patients "Well, we've got this treatment that will cure your 'XYZ'... but I'm required to tell you that the treatment was developed through research on embryonic stem-cells". My hunch is that, when forced to make a choice between their bible-thumping principles and self-preservation, most of them will let go of their opposition to research. This latest report makes me believe that even more of them would.
One of the things that I hope this administration does is give money to CERT (or some other appropriate agency) to provide a free anti-virus product for everybody.
Granted, it would have to be open-source so that we'd know that the gov't wasn't using it to snoop on us. But, unlike a typical open-source project, the gov't would pay a team to continually update the virus definitions and the source code.
Now, I realize that there already are free anti-virus products out there, and some of them score very well on av-comparatives. But they often have nag-screens prompting you to buy the premium verion and they're also not publicized very well, so only techie people like my co-workers know about them and use them. If one were provided by the gov't, it could eventually universally understood to be a gov't service as much as, say, free tax forms at the post-office.
Now, why should the gov't bother with this? Consider the amount of lost productivity due to virus infections? Imagine if that same amount of productivity were lost due to a biological virus. Imagine how much attention that would get from the Center for Disease Control. Or, if there was a group of people causing enough vandalism to businesses across the country to cause the same amount of lost productivity. Picture how much resources the FBI would be throwing toward stopping that.
Now, I don't know exactly how much it takes to maintain a team to provide daily virus updates, but I can't imagine it would take more than about $5 million per year (heck, that's about 50 top-notch programmers)... which is a pittance compared to the saved productivity and, of course, it would be a good PR move for whatever administration provided it, since we'd have that constant reminder of it in our system tray.
For about 20 years, I've daydreamed about a smaller-scale one which would zap any "parking enforcement" person trying to put a ticket on my windshield.
It's not a "Music Tax", it's a "Record Company Bailout"
I've seen some comments that didn't think Hawaii was such a great venue for this, but I think it's perfect.
For an alternative-fuel demo, you need to have infrastructure (ie, fueling stations). In places like California, this results in the governor picking a single stretch of highway which runs the length of half of the state and plopping down hydrogen fueling stations at manageable distances between them. The problem being that, you better not miss your next fuel stop because every station is pretty much "Last Hydrogen for 100 Miles" and you better not need to stray too far off of the anointed highway. On the other hand, some cities are trying to plop charging stations everywhere so that you don't have to *plan* your fueling... but that stops at the city limits.
To really give people a picture of an alternative-fuel future, you need to have fueling/service available as ubiquitously as fossil-fuel stations are today.... and they need to extend as far as anyone might care to go. To keep costs down, you'd need to try a place that geographically limited... where people *can't* go too far away.
An island is perfect for that. And Hawaii, in particular, is even better because it's a vacation hotspot. People will vacation there, drive their electric rental car, get a tan, have lots of sex, come back home and have all of those memories intermixed. So, electric propulsion gets a "cool by association" bump.
So, I just want to be clear... I view this as a great *PR* move for alternative fuels. True, from an engineering point of view, there are better places to do it. True, it's a drop in the bucket compared to our continental consumption. True, we burn an assload of fuel to fly over there. But I see this as more about getting the U.S. to "buy in" more quickly to a future that doesn't involve petroleum. Something like this would finally be a testbed where people could experience electric cars without ever worrying about "Oh crap, where am I going to fuel it?". A possible true glimpse into the future.
Case 2:It's capable of the lower levels of human functionality. Say, somewhere between Forest Gump and a chimpanzee. Well, in this case, we have an intelligent being, who is a ward of the state, and who is unlike any other being on earth. It has no family, and potentially no human rights.
This is the scenario that I haven't settled in my own head, yet. As much as I would love that this one would eat away, more than any other scenario, at the religious notion of "humans are distinct from animals", I also toil with the "huge minefield", as you put it. I think it's reasonable to expect that this creature would crave companionship. Not just "caretakers", but an actual "mate" of some kind... but, short of creating a female counterpart for him (or some trailer-park chick from Jerry Springer deciding to have his love-child), what do we do?
And, do we keep him in a pen like the polar bears, or do we let him roam? We don't dare let him just go mingle, on his own, with the general public. Do we put him on some island? Do we give him a cave, or a shack with a bed?
What is it going to do when it's older?
Oh. That one's easy. He's going to get drafted in the first round to play fullback for the Packers.
If you look at the map of where DST is used, you'll notice that it's used more the closer you get to the poles (where there's a larger swing in the length of the day between the seasons). Now, when you realize that, then it dawns on you that there's no particular reason why there should just be a 1-hour shift for everyone in the US regardless of latitude.
Why doesn't California have a 1-hour shift and Washington have, say, a 2-hour shift... and Alaska have an 8-hour shift? Seems asinine, right? Well, then why even have a 1-hour shift, then? It's a slippery-slope argument, but it's difficult to argue that, as sub-optimal as a "1 hour fits all" approach is, that it's any less optimal to scrap the whole thing completely.
So, I'd can it. However, if you *really* still want it... how about this? With so many devices (computers, phones, etc.) syncing their clocks to servers, lets just have a national conversion to server-sync'd house clocks (kinda like the upcoming switch to digital TV) and then, if you really want DST, just have the servers gradually slew it in, day by day, as the sun moves toward solstice.
That's why I think we need to move to pictures that reflect scenarios from which future or past scenarios can be inferred by a human. Add to that some use of slang.
For example, show (amongst others) a picture of a gay-looking guy with a Michael Jackson glove in a country-western bar and have the server ask "Click on the picture with a dude about to get his ass kicked".
Or, show (amongst others) a picture of a prison inmate behind bars and ask "Click on the picture of a dude who had somebody drop a dime on him".
Of course, it's probably not feasible to generate these automatically, so you'd need a human to prepare each one... which limits the variety, which is a vulnerability. But still... my point is that humans can infer ancillary information about the scenario in the picture, which could prove very difficult for a computer to overcome.
If the child engaged in criminal libel or slander, prosecute him for that. No school official should have any jurisdiction over anything that happens out of the regular boundaries of school activities.
Exactly.
:)
What I'm seeing here is a civil libel suit between the principal and the student (or her parents).
Defenders of the decision here are using the argument of "Well, the kid only got a suspension and didn't get sued, so she should consider herself lucky". But I think it's a dangerous road to go down if you say that it's okay to ignore jurisdiction and applicability of laws (ie, the fact that the student wasn't on campus at the time) in the name of utility (ie, that the student got off easier than she otherwise would).
Enforce the laws as they're written. If you got a problem with the punishment you had to dole out on some dumb student, then go back and change the law.
From this distance, I don't see any way that the school could have any authority over the kid when they're out of school. The school isn't held responsible if the kid robs a bank after school. Once the afternoon bell rings, the kid becomes "John Q. Public".
So, it seems the only way the school could claim that they're entitled to be involved is if they made some kind of "trade secrets" argument... that the student had made improper use of knowledge they gained while they were in the school. And, if that is the road they want to go down, then I want to see the NDA that the student signed where she agreed not to publicly divulge that the principal was a sex addict.
You're kidding, right?
Tell me if you've heard this before:
"Ampheta-Slim is too powerful for the casual dieter. Only use it if you need to lose at least 40 pounds or more."
or
"Possible side effects of Erectrify are a boner that lasts more than four hours..."
Yeah... those really scare customers away. So, again, we hear "Oooh. Our product is so good, it's probably too good for you... so you'd better not use it."
First, let me say that this isn't one of those "I've heard that this works..." things. I've actually used this method. I still do. It works. It's sounds crazy... but it works. It works with big, honkin', mondo scratches. It requires you buying a sander from Sears, but it's handy for other stuff, too... so, in the end, you've got yourself a nifty sander as well.
Next, you probably already know this, but the data is on the top of the disc. If you scratch the top, the data is gone and isn't coming back. So, check carefully to make sure that it's really a scratch on the underside.
First, go to Sears and get one of their "3D" sanders. It's a strange-looking 3-pad sander which is basically the sanding equivalent of a Norelco razor. They sell a variety of hook-n-loop sanding pads to go with it. Get the one with the buffing/polishing pads (get enough so that you have at least 6 of the felt-looking polishing pads) and also get the extra-fine sanding disc set (which has discs from grit 280 through 1000). Also, pick up a can of rubbing compound and a can of polishing compound.
[] Bring it all home and put one of your CD's face-down on some folder paper-towels.
[] Use a Sharpie or dark, permanent marker to mark the scratches so that you'll know when you've sanded them out.
[] Put the 400 or 600 grit discs on the sander and start sanding. Don't bother trying to get just that one spot where the scratch is... we're going to re-do the whole damn surface. So, hold the sander flat, and just move it around to get a good, even reduction of the surface. If you want, you can add some water to wet-sand it. Don't go too fast... no need to fling the water all over the place. Also, you don't want to overheat the sander OR the disc material. At this point, the disc will look like it's ruined forever. It's not. In fact, show it to some friends and see if they'll bet that it'll never play again.
[] If you're still not getting the scratch out, then you can go to a coarser grit.
[] Once it looks like you've sanded the scratch out, start moving through the finer and finer grits. It can be difficult to tell when you've gotten rid of the previous grit's scratches, so I usually draw big squiggles on the disc with a sharpie and then sand until they're gone... and then I do it again, and then I'll switch grits.
[] Once you've gone through the finest grit, get out the first set of polishing pads (the ones that look like yellowish felt) and put some rubbing compound on the disc and start polishing at a low speed. This can generate some heat and will dry up the compound pretty soon, so spritz some water on the disc to keep the compound working. Do this for a couple of minutes.
[] Now, clean all of the rubbing compound off of the disc, put the other 3 polishing discs on and do the same with the polishing compound.
[] Now, clean the disk off and put on the buffing pads (the ones that look like super-bushy white loop-velcro). You're going to do this one DRY and without any compounds or anything... just the pads. Go ahead and crank the sander up to higher speeds for this one... like 7 or 8 or so. You're going to generate a bit of static electricity and you'll be zapping yourself the whole time... just so you know.
[] After a few minutes of this, you should have a disc that is kinda hazy... but without any large scratches. Give it a play in your player. If it doesn't play right, then give it more time with the buffer. Or, if you still see some scratches, then back up to the sanding and get those scratches out.
[] Good luck.
Sorry, but this really isn't news. Hell... even *I* have done this, which means that it can't be anywhere near the cutting edge. :P The concept of putting a cantenna or bi-quad at the focal point of the dish has been out there on web pages for years. I fitted *my* dish so that I could interchange a cantenna or a USB dongle as the need arose.
The advantage of the USB dongle is that you don't incur the line losses of the antenna cable if your laptop/PC is a long way from the dish. You can get around the problem of USB cable-length limitations by using some nifty USB "extension cords" which are basically a long USB cable with a 1-port hub at the end.
I will add one thing that I haven't seen on any pages, however. Most satellite dishes have the arm positioned away from the centerline axis of the dish... usually below it, which must be accounted for when aiming. For example, if the arm holding your dongle/cantenna is 10 degrees below the centerline of the dish, then you'll be receiving signals from whatever is 10 degrees above the centerline. It's the same concept as flat mirrors... angle of reflection equals angle of incidence.
Why does this matter? Well, if you are trying to communicate with a station that's at relatively the same elevation as you, then you're going to have to point the dish down toward the ground a bit. This can be very conspicuous... especially if, ahem, the other station's owner doesn't know you're communicating with them (cough, cough). The best solution that I've come across is to turn the dish upside-down so that the arm holding the dongle is on top, which allows you to point the centerline of the dish skyward again, so that it looks more like the other dishes in the neighborhood. Almost nobody will notice that the arm is affixed to the top of the dish rather than the bottom... and even fewer will grasp the ramifications of it.
Don't anybody tell the guy what "420" means or there'll be even *more* (26^3) replacements.
So, they just deliberately avoided provably knowing some information that they didn't want to comply with? That's nothing. When the whitehouse heard about the supreme court's recent decision regarding treatment of prisoners at Gitmo, they actually sent an email saying "We're rubber and you're glue..."
The juvenile behavior of these people... doesn't even surprise me anymore...
Exactly. About the closest I think we can come is PunchScan. As I recall, it lets you verify that your vote (via its receipt number) made it into the system, but you can't (as an individual) verify who it was cast for. I forget how it's all done, but I remember that it was pretty clever. Just a few dozen people checking their receipt (or checking the randomizing tables before the election) makes it highly unlikely that vote tampering of an appreciable scale would go uncaught.
First off, I'm not an expert. And also, I'll assume that you're not asking because you really want to find out what methods watchdogs would use to try to detect *you* messing with the votes so that you know how to properly cover your tracks.
But I have to say that the problem with e-voting (in my eyes, anyway) is that it's easier for an "inside" person (that means *you*) to tamper with the votes. To that end, at a minimum, I would feel that, even if a voter asks you for help, you shouldn't approach a voting machine without being accompanied by your Democratic counterpart (or some other official who's political interests are contrary to yours). Whenever possible, any citizen who cares (don't worry, I think there are only 4 in the nation) should be able to watch anything you do (short of approaching a machine at the behest of a voter).
As far as guarding against individual voters messing with stuff, that's particular to the voting machines you use in your precinct. If there's some software flaw that would let a voter get into an "admin" screen or something... then you're screwed, because the only way to detect it would probably be to *see* the screen, which I doubt you're allowed to do. Otherwise, there'd need to be a hardware intrusion, so you'd have to figure out the ways that someone could open the voting terminal (or somehow gain access to the data card or electronics) and do what you can to ensure that, were someone to try it, it would require very conspicuous behavior.
On a side note, one of the requirements of any secure voting system is that the public be aware of what chicanery to look for. For example, PunchScan looks like a very compelling system which allows voters to ensure that their vote made it into the finally tally unmodifies but *without* anyone being able to find out who they voted for afterward. However, the system can be defeated unless the public knows what (seemingly innocuous) anomalies should set off the alarm bells.
This thread is very timely for me because I'm currently trying to develop a way of "vetting" various Windows binaries that I don't yet trust... to make sure that they don't contain any rootkit/keylogger/etc.
My current plan is to start with my linux box and use VirtualBox to install Windows as a guest OS. Last time I checked, VirtualBox and VMWare create virtual network interfaces for providing network capability to the guest OS. So, I can use WireShark (formerly ethereal) to watch all traffic on that interface and see everything that goes into or out of the guest.
Additionally, I want to use some tool that looks at the registry and all files installed and then compares it to some previous snapshot, but I'm still looking for a good free tool that does that.
Two questions: 1) Has anybody else already developed a sandboxing method like this (and, if so, could you describe it and what kind of stuff you catch with it)? 2) Can you recommend a good "snapshot & compare" tool for the registry and filesystem like I mentioned?
Reminds me of the quote in Wargames: "He does fit the profile perfectly. He's intelligent, but an under-achiever; alienated from his parents; has few friends. Classic case for recruitment by the Soviets"
I had trouble thinking up many real ports that I'd put on the list (like that huge 30-something-pin D-sub connector I saw on some of my old MFM drive controllers on IBM XT's), and then I found that they didn't even restrict the race to just ports.
... and floppy connectors... specifically their use as the interface for cheap-o QIC/Travan tape-drives.
So, if any kind of bus or drive-connection format is fair game, then...
How about MFM (and it's cousin RLL)?
What about the huge din connectors for keyboards (those are certainly more obsolete than PS/2)
And, speaking of PS/2, if you're going to list AGP as an obsolete bus, what about the proprietary bus that IBM invented for their PS/2 line (what the hell was it called? I forget. It had an "M" in it. "Micro-channel"?). Or what about EISA?
And why is SCART representing the video ports and not CGA/EGA?
The old 15-pin D-sub game port should be on there, too.
And, for the last time, get the hell off my lawn, you damn kids!
What the hell makes these UIUC people think that they know how to make a browser? You'd think they'd leave this kind of thing to people who've done it before. Sheesh! :)
Once you did that, all that the users would have to input are the street names and a few street numbers and the map software could interpolate the rest.
But really... what needs to happen is we need a federal mandate that all states/counties/towns have to make their street data available in some standard format. Frankly, I think that it's scandalous that the map companies like NavTeq (and the other suppliers to Garmin, TomTom, GoogleMaps, etc.) get the kind of money for these maps. The local governments all have this info already. They've had surveyors figure out exactly where all the streets go. They know what the street numbers are. It's all in a database at city hall in the planner's office. All that NavTeq does is goes to each city and gets the into and figures out how to massage the data into a consistent format. What's needed is a mandate to the cities (hey, maybe we can piggyback it into the RealID legislation!