...where the referrer header is required? Besides webstats, what use are they?
I turned mine off awhile ago (just because, it's no one's beeswax where I have been just before) and haven't noticed anything different about my surfing, that's why I am asking....
--they seized the authority under the commerce clause, and have been abusing it ever since. Just like the BATF (and a host of other federal bureaucracies) seized illegal authority in their domain.
Of course, I'm a realist and understand they got the goons with guns to make whatever they say sorta stick, too.
no provision for minors in the bill, other than normal contract and civil law. So say if your kid, gets your computer infected, but the installed program has an EULA click through, is it spyware, or not? As mentioned, tracking cookies, would be a problem there as well. Automatic software updates, unless you click each time to manually check.
Too vague, too many obvious loopholes. It won't apply to most of the common commercial advertising spyware.
I'll have to read ron pauls take on why he voted against it, but I am guessing it's because most folks DO voluntarily install what is called spyware, so this would be more or less useless in the real world. What it would seem to logically cover more is like email trojans. So it's department of redundancy department, election year grand standing.
I brought this up recently on another thread, because I am in favor of it also. One of the things I really liked about my previous mac experience. Are you (or anyone) aware of any linux distros that do packaging like this?
...for a ride? Sell chance tickets, limited to one to a human slashdotter,once enough accumulated for a ticket, then have a webcast with a live drawing?
what say, owners, nifty idea? what say slashdotters?
...IS "at war" with north korea. We've had a truce, but no legal technical end to the war since it first started. It's quite strange actually. The war was based on a UN decision. We have had sporadic "truce talks" as long as I can remember. The major shooting war stopped (more or less) once UN forces made it to the red chinese border and indications were good that they could continue the push. China used quite a lot of it's soldiers as "volunteers" to assist NK, and in the early stages of the war were fairly successful, almost routing the US and other UN forces.
It gets more complicated than that of course, interesting subject. I've always considered it to be the worlds major flashpoint for initiation of widespread nuclear warfare, as there is little in the way of conventional weapons we could bring to bear that would defeat north korea easily if any hostilities resumed large scale, they are just too well dug in and have so many armaments and the distances involved are so short that it would require multiples of nukes and bunker busters and whatnot to make a dent in what they have. It's not that they have just amazing modern technology, it's that they have just a huge amount of older technology that isn't vulnerable to any sophisticated jamming or other buck rogers high tech neutralization. They are diggers, build deep hardened bunkers and tunnels, and have been doing so for 50 years now non stop.
that's a relatively easy answer, that is addressed in the day to day lives of people known as "survivalists" if you prefer the original "scary" non politically correct term, or the more modern "preppers" short for those who practice practical preparations. Basically carrying the boy scout motto to "be prepared" into a fuller understanding. To those of us who follow these precepts, depending on an intact infrastructure all the time with no backups at allother than a piece of paper called insurance and maybe a credit card with a decent borrowing limit just don't cut it all the way. You have to deal with tangibles.
Our infrastructure is vulnerable because it is a centralised distribution model primarily (I am very generally speaking, but that's it in the gist of it), and almost all of it is vulnerable to the current JIT or "just in time" delivery method. It "all" sorta has to work or none of it works. there's a certain minimum amount percentage wise of damage we live with day to day, but the pain threshold rises dramatically as more of it becomes destroyed or severely damaged or disrupted.
Here's your short list, and what I have done in addition to using the "normal" centralised products which is what most folks have in total.
electricity - grid, then solar, wind, fuel generator phone - landline, cell, internet then various multiband receivers, and transcievers 2 meter, 10 meter, FRS, CB gas -gas stationstill shy here,needs improvement, no on site production yet (I could produce small quantities of burnable ethanol if pushed obviously) but I make-do with stockpiling, gasoline, diesel and propane, along with a lot of firewood.
transportation - personal vehicles or public transportation, rail, plane, subway, bus, no public transportation locally except for greyhound next city over. Then, multiple vehicles,some decent off road capability, multiple bicycles,and I'm in the cheap market for a horse now actually. Looking forward to it really.
I'll add 2 more, the most important two in my opinion, people's day to day necessities as opposed to luxuries that they take for granted a little too much, that are vulnerable to the centralised distribution business model. Most people have only one vulnerable source for each of these topics. I have that, then my additions
food - grocery store, restaurants, other markets like delis, etc, then we have stored food of the short term (grocery store level) medium (home canned and dried ) and long-term storage capable (nitrogen packed, or packed with oxygen absorbers in sealed cans), to the tune of at least two years total, in addition, extensive year round working gardens, very good knowledge of wild plants and foraging and other sorts of food gathering, like hunting, fishing, trapping, etc, and more importantly,live in an area where this is possible right out the door.
water -several hundred gallons stored on site, two sources locally (personal well and pond),and several of the best quality filtration systems you can get.
As to what society can do, really, I'm a geek, if I waited for society or big business or government to "do" for me what I already know how to do anyway, and what I should do, I'd still be waiting. They aren't ever going to be able to provide backup complete infrastructure, it's about all they can do for them to maintain the infrastructure they attempt to keep running now. They *barely* can deal with hurricanes that are well known to happen, the areas of them happening are well known, the effects are well understood, the time to prepare is basically all of the time, because they know it'll happen. That is about the maximum effort the government could do on any realistic scale. Anything beyond that, you would be on your own. Depending on the disruption, it could conceivable be a lot worse than a hurricane, for example, a regular small nuke in a major city. A major biological disease outbreak, either from an attack of just "natural".
Best bet is to do it yourself now, at least some basic backups. It's a good idea for data, it's a good idea for your basic day to day stuff too, IMO. Paper insurance, then some "real" insurance.
1-5 = 0, don't have any computerised music. All I have is Cds I bought used and insert them when I want to play them. Besides that it's OTA radio. I have "portable music players" going way back, but use none of them now. Holding out until the latest cellphone completely expires, then will get one that is the most PDA ish I can find, probably a PDA with phone capabilities. with the rate of things happening in that market I expect a fully multifunctional computer and wireless commo device shortly. It will probably play music, and by then I'll have broadband, which means I can finally get groovy digitial "fair use shared" music, because right now I'm still stuck on dialup, you insensitive clod!, so no downloading for me!
I put an am/fm/cassette player radio AND a CB radio on my lawn tractor! I certainly understand the appeal to having a radio on a bicycle. I only have one hand held 2 meter, else I'd probably add one of those too. And I'm seriously contemplating adding a laptop or a 12 volt mini itx rig, for a variety of reasons. I also added an additional heavy truck battery in parallel with the tiny stock 12 volt battery that comes in those things, hung it on a rack off the rear of the thing where the additional weight greatly improves traction going up hill, it lets me tow my little work wagon better without using dumb wheel weights that add little functionality besides their weight. I use this thing almost daily working around the complex where I live.
I think it's because once you get used to having full time communications of some sort, you feel nekkid without it. Or something.
That's why we are geeks and nerds and not "straights". We think straight people are weird because if someone (society, consumer pressure brainwashing, etc) doesn't tell them to do something, they never do anything different, they are ultimate follow the herd mentality which gives us the buckwheats. It is hard coded DNA someplace, we as geeks and nerds have the "gotta do it no matter whut!" gene.
Note, the group they are referring to,PNAC, go to their website, or read some on them with various google links, very easy to find, you'll see the bulk of the heavy hitters inside the current regime had this whole deal planned out well in advance of 9-11. Combine that with a lot of the "government prior knowledge" evidence about 9-11 that you can find, and maybe it will make things clearer.
Realistically, it's a pretty bad scene right now, the US is in fairly dire straits. Basically we've been junta-ized. All the evidence is there, just spread out. A lot of people really don't want to accept it, or psychologically can't accept it, because they would have to live with that lie, knowing and accepting and excusing it, or do something about it, and the "doing something" is potentially pretty serious when you realise there's absolutely no chance of "voting" our way back to any sort of rational sanity or true honest governing.
...products on the shelves at walmart represent products that one generation ago or less were manufactured inside the US. My beef isn't with the workers at walmart, and no idea how or why you would infer that, so I'll officially dispell that notion right now. My beef is high level collusion, bad foreign policy, supporting massive human rights abusers, and the notion that destroying the US economy and security just to make much less than 1% of the population a ton of loot is a good idea. Nuts to that!
As to folks who lost their jobs over the past 20 years due to outsourcing, I sincerely doubt that ALL those people willingly begged their bosses to please close the factory and take it to china, so that they could shop at some store like a walmart while they looked for a new job. For some folks it has happened multiple times so far. Comes a point in time you got to say "ok, enough" It just happened to them. It was sold to us as opening up global trade, "everyone wins". Yet we CONSISTENTLY run trade imbalances, especially with china? Why is that? Give me an exact answer to that if you can, why the trade imbalance? shouldn't it have settled out by now? (My pov,hint: china makes more money, and a very few very wealthy people make more money with things like that), but I'd still like to hear the official approved version of why this imbalance with "free trade" exists to such a huge extent.
25 years ago, the USA was the worlds largest CREDITOR nation, now we are the worlds largest DEBTOR nation. True facts, look 'emup. Exact same time frame the walmartization-the outsourcing- of the economy occurred.
You may think it's a coincidence, but I sure don't. I wrote and predicted way back then what is happening now would occur. You'll have to take my word on that, but it happened. It's OBVIOUS as all get out what happens when you open up the labor market intenationally WITHOUT opening up the housing and whatnot true "cost of living market" internationally and simultaneously.
I don't claim to know every human who works at walmart,but the three I know personally all had much better jobs that evaporated, and took walmart jobs out of *desperation* to have any income at all. I will grant that it's most probable that humans have an incredible variety of reasons for seeking employment most places. I think though it would be fair to assume that most folks working there would rather have 40 hours with better pay and some bennies, like most "middle class" jobs used to be inside the US.
Like I said, I used to be a supporter of walmart and shopped there, back when it was first open and sam walton ran it and it had mostly all USA products. Now that it's switched to being merely the arm of the Peoples Republic of China-retail division*, I can see that it is harmful to our domestic economy, because of the raw hard observable data, and from the perspective that a truly strong and independent nation *must* have a fully integrated vertical economy. It is an incredibly boneheaded move to fund, develop, enrich the one nation that is most likely to be your biggest global competitor (and most probgably military antagonist) once the oil really starts evaporating. It's a strategic blunder of almost unfathomable proportions. That is my opinion, but it is shared by many people of geopolitical and scholary bent. People who are only concerned about short term financial profits, no, they don't share that opinion. Some folks just have different priorities.
****WHY any nation that values freedom allegedly wants to do business with a one party total dictatorship, with NO RIGHTS whatsoever for it's people,and who have verifiably murdered millions of their own peoples is beyond me. In ww2 we fought against such a system, then we had a massive and expensive cold war against a similar system, but now, an extremly similar situation and nation, differing only in language, ethnicity and gross physical size becomes "most favored nation" trading partner with every big "american" businessman
I can't despise walmart enough, and this is from someone who thought they were a good idea when they started out and used to be a regular shopper. They make MS look like a benevolent charity. They've had to resort to what in essence are a series of public propoganda commercials on the TV (seen 'em? pure FUD) in order to keep up what they are attempting to maintain as an "all amwerican" image with smiling happy workers. It's right out of kim ill dungs ministry of truth video factory.
Here's a paste from this url http://www.familyfarmdefenders.org/whatsgoingon/wa lmart.html
" Wal-Mart Exploits Children in Overseas Sweatshops
Behind the slick veneer of success, though, there is incredible misery. Contrary to its "all-American" advertising hype, Wal-Mart sources over 80% of its products from overseas. According to the National Labor Committee, there are 1000 sweatshops in China alone supplying Wal-Mart - many of them owned and operated by the Red Army using political prisoners. Chinese teenagers get just 12 1/5 cents per hour for an 84 hour work week and at night are packed into squalid dormitories under armed guard. In Bangladesh, teenage girls receive as little as 9 cents per hour - far below the official minimum wage of 33 cents/hour - sewing Wal-Mart clothes. Wal-Mart refuses to reveal its factory locations to independent human rights monitors since, in the words of spokewoman, Betsy Reithmeyer, "This is very competitive. If we find a very good factory, we want to keep it to ourselves."
Wal-Mart Also Exploits Its Own Workers in the U.S.!
While, those sitting on Wal-Mart's board of directors earn a whopping $1500/day for their "hard work," the rest of the workforce languishes among America's working poor. Wal-Mart's vehement anti-union attitude means over half of its 720,000 "associates" qualify for federal food stamps. Wal-Mart employees average just $7.50/hr. - well below the national retail wage average of $8.71/hr. At 30 hours per week, a Wal-Mart worker earns barely $11,700 per year - $2000 below the federal poverty line for a single mother with two children."
Basically walmart says, we'll force you to lose your job, then please come shop at our store! It's the american way! Oooh, unions are evil commies, but our trade associations and our relationships with dictatorial regimes are fine!
ohhh..wait... this IS the american way now! How could I forget!
This is what all these globalist goons want for the united states, this is how you will compete, so remember to vote for the NWO R.epressive And D.omineering corporate party this election, it will speed up the transformation to a glorius culture of low pay, dismal working conditions, and the cheapest designed and built crap possible! YaaaaY!
Pretty funny! I think it's hysterical when all these major corporations keep suing each other over software patents! Maybe ONE DAY they will wake up and realise software patents only help LAWYERS! It's like the entire concept of software patents was designed by the barristers guild and universal profit center, it's job security!
Wonder if there's a website that just tracks all the various lawsuits involving patents of intangibles? Would be interesting to see how much money is wasted over that scene, how many man hours of time wasted, how much gets sucked out of computing with it.
thanks for the reply! I figured it was probably closer to most of the newer full gui distros in requirements. Nowadays seems like you need two sticks of 128 ram for most of them to be decent. On my all antique machines, linux runs better on the 200 with 224 ram than a 333 or 400 with 64 or 128 ram. Go figger.... RAM seems to be where it's at more than CPU speed.
some interesting ideas there. I like that it's gnome, and also that laptop and wireless and usb support seems to be important to these guys. Also like the offered bounty for developers, cash plus functionality seems a good inducement. And free Cds!! Not bad for those folks on dialup!
Anyway, can't seem to find minimum hardware requirements for trying it out. Anyone?
You mean, stand around inside a cage called a free speech zone? Or be out in the street with cops with rifles on the building tops, military helos over head, and sonic cannons and whatnot pointed at you?
That's the state of "protest" today in the US and why most people don't engage in it. Everyone knows it's one incident away from beoming a bad news scene with a lot of people hurt, and better than even odds some undercover "officer" agent provocateurs starting it.
Everything else by the way of protest in the traditional way they can and will ignore, they could care less about letters to the editor or any emails you send them basically. Petitions, bah, ignored. Redress of grievences? Sure, you have the "right" to cough up thousands of dollars to begin talking to some lawyer, then it gets more expensive from there. He's gonna giggle all the way to his mercedes dealer while you sue the government over something. And the vote? See the so called "official national presidential debates"? An infomercial for the NWO corporate party basically, as much diversity and differences of opinion there as at any regular Klan meeting....and for backup they have new & improved voting, courtesy of blackbox diebold..
Funny, for the primaries and the debates for the two for one party they seem to have no problems finding enough podiums for half a dozen guys up on stage, but once down to the wire,for the biggee, all they can find is two podiums. Funny how that works out. Let me see, two dudes, frat bros for some elitist neo nazi satanic frat, both wearing black suits, wives wearing white suits....Yep, a true difference, there's your choice, and you can protest it all you want..but it won't change a dang thing either....
Nope, we are graciously "allowed" the illusion of protest, but americans know what's up, and what's upo is basically "shutup, sit down, do what you are told or else, here, have some trinkets and gadgets and cheap beer and nascar and football, that's it, don't rock the boat too hard..or ELSE!'".
It's not as bad yet as say north korea, but give it some time, it'll get there. That's eventually what these technofeudalists want, that's why red china is their poster boy model nation, BTW, they dig on that scene there. it's efficient. A few folks give the orders, you get to "vote", and they throw you some bones.
If folks don't agree it will get there,as bad as them other places are now, let them try an easy experiment. Next time you are stopped at a "random courtesy checkpoint" roadblock, you know, those kinds that never existed except for the last few years and are now common, where everyone gets stopped and checked for their "paperz, pleezz! and whatnot" by Darth Vader officer friendly with the glock and MP5, just..don't stop! They don't have any probable cause or even reasonable suspicion, they are just stopping you because they can, so go for it, keep driving on your merry way, see what happens, see if it isn't already a lot closer to north korea than you want to contemplate. Of course, you might not make it to even report back, either...in "free" america today.
There's no real protest anymore, people talk about protest, play-act at protest, but the authorites control protest close to 100% now, and they aren't giving up that sort of power. It'sincremental, on a thousand fronts, we read about it all the time here, but it's relentlessly forward for those globalists. That's their plan, you and me and we can "protest" all we want as long as we follow thier rules, their schedule, their methods, manner and location, and remain satisfied with the outcome of any such "protest", which is carved in stone, "they win, you lose."
American Wind Energy Association, you can look around the reference library section there for costs, financing, etc sorts of questions. If you want more detailed and varied sources, just run a google search on wind generation cost analysis, ton of hits, I just checked, and it's where I got this one site I linked to.
As an aside, commercial wind power was one place where enron was really doing some good. GE picked up that division and it's still in operation and doing well, last I checked.
..other forms of energy conversion devices, or just normal throw away human products? Payback? Yes, they have net gains with energy over their useful projected lifespans, there's a payback then gravy period with them. They really wouldn't drop millions on them (or small thousands on homeowner scale) if this wasn't so.
Contrast that with game consoles, ipods, big screen TVs, various home audio equipment, jetskis, movies and video, whatever format, and the players needed, and etc, etc, etc, that people have no problems with,either the upfront manufacturing cost in terms of energy and raw materials used, and the ongoing cost of powering those purely for amusement and entertainment devices. I think the energy impact and benefit from wind turbines is justified economically and resource-wise at a human and societal scale of where we put our collective interests currently.
I find it kinda humorous really, anything designed to provide humans with energy needs to be justified down to the penny, and it's usually decried as "not cost effective" unless it's a ridiculous one year payback or something like that, or it can only be done by existing energy monopolies, whatever method they choose,yet, anything designed to just use up what energy and raw resources we have, merely for amusement, as fast as possible, gets a free skate on the "payback" part as regards energy and raw materials and pollution impact, etc. Really quite an amusing phenomenon I've noticed with most people in these discussions.
As to the wind effect, basically not a lot different than trees or buildings of similar size, as has been pointed out elsehwere in the replies.
they work very well as long as you can deal with the corrosive nature of the acids that get produced along with the methane gas. there's a very large example at a poultry farm near me that was running one for awhile and it worked well, but it corroded too quickly. Different materials and processes are needed for very long term operation.
I built a very small test digester one time, worked well, got useable gas. Just used junk parts I had kicking around, a washtub, a cut off oil drum, some milking machine parts, and some manure and water. all I ever did with the gas was accumulate it in plastic bags and set it off for people to see that that it worked. took me well under 1/2 hour to build it, too. Kinda a fun project, I'd like to build another one sometime, just at a useable scale for something..
Another time I built a really good hot water maker. Basiucally a variant on leaving a hose out in the yard on a sunny day, but I got the heat source from aerobic decomposition. The concept was simple, we had a big storm locally and woodchips were free for the asking from the power line crews because they had so much of the stuff, so we got some. I buried a few hundred feet of garden hose in the pile (all my spare sections on hand, this was just an experiment). As the stuff started to compost out, it got pretty hot inside, you could get a small stream of 160 degree water from it, pumping in cold at the entrance end, as long as you kept the pressure low enough. this was in the *winter*, too, BTW. Seems like you could build a closed system with something like that, using an antifreeze solution, high temp hoses, and radiators, put the whole thing downhill from you, let thermosiphoning pump it to where you needed the heat, radiate it out, the antifreeze cools down, falls back downhill to get reheated in the pile, where it gets reheated, starts working it's way back uphill, and etc,so you would have free heat 24/7 for as long as the chips held out, then use them for mulch someplace and replace them with fresh chips (or other compostable matter).
I LOVE this whole energy subject, too much fun, too many places joe backyard tinkerer can have fun and do useful projects!
Those are called vertical axis rotors, a variant of the savonius rotor. I've seen a few, they work well enough for a project any back yard handy dude can build. Usually they used truck differentials and axles, then some more pulleys, for the gearing to the alternator to get the speed up enough from the pretty slow turning oil drum halves.
There are some large commercial examples of them now also. I remember seeing a link to one company in wyoming that makes and sells them, but I have forgotten the name or I would provide a link to their page. IIRC, they look like big towers with wind openings, totally different from the airplane propeller blade looking projects.
Personally, I'd love to see a lot more R & D work on using atmospheric static electricty potential, I think it would be a serious contender in the alternative energy market. I like the idea of no moving parts whatsoever. I've read some on hobbiest experiments with them, some guys are getting useful amounts of juice from it, using wrapped bundles of stock fencing to act as the static accumulators in effect, and automotive coils as capacitors, then going to an opened up severely (large electrode gap) spark plug, then to a storage battery. Wind blowing over the fencing induces a slight charge, when it reaches potential to work the coil and spark, it jumps, gets into the battery in a series of very high voltage but low amperage pulses. Interesting concept. I'm not an EE, but that is my understanding about how it works.
...whether or not we experience one of the pole reversals concurrently with a rapid heating trend. Then it's anyone's guess what will shake out.
Something I've noticed though, over the decades. When I was a kid, the sun looked a lot more yellow colored, now it's a lot more white colored. Wonder what that means...There's also a heck of a lot less wild birds then there used to be, and the trees in general all seem wimpy, not as robust and healthy as they could and should be. All very generally speaking of course..
We've also been experiencing some rather strange geomagnetic differences with the planet, from what I read it's reducing in intensity and moving around a lot more than it used to.
All interesting topics to be sure.
The polar regions ice melting though, is the most convincing to me of imminent severe global weather changes, you just can't fake or ignore how much the arctic and antarctic regions have been melting the past few years, you can see it with any subsequent series of pictures taken in the same areas, the stuff is melting, fast. It WILL have some profound effects on global weather patterns. And if the atlantic conveyor slows down or stops, there will be crash programs to burn more coal, burn more trees, burn more oil and tarsands stuff, and etc, etc, a lot more human activity which will lead to more greenhouse gases being released, which will lead to more environmental changes, and on and on.
Maybe it's time to think about a multi person presidency, an elected council with different assigned priorities and duties. A foreign policy president (trade), a foreign policy president (security/defense), a domestic president (government civil services), a domestic president (federal law enforcement), and so on and so forth. Then one guy wouldn't be responsible for everything, and we could narrow down selections better. Candidate A is closer to your feelings on security/defense, but you think he sucks on donmestic civil services, etc. So you could still vote for him, and vote for another guy closer to your feelings on the other subjects.
Now all we have is the "lesser of evils, and winner take all" approach, even with third and fourth and fifth parties, because it's still the deal they get the entire presidency and by default the executive branch. I think the job's too important and too powerful and just too complicated to be entirely decided by ONE guy, I honestly don't think ANYONE is qualified to be the US president. It's too impossible of a job to do adequately, so all we get is has-beens.
In the olden days the guy who came in second was made vice president, and took his duties in the senate (with his tie breaking vote) more seriously,so at leasrt there everyones vote counted a scosh better, and the senators were elected by their state legislators instead of a popular vote directly, which made paying attention to your state races more important, so people did it.
With that said it's all a buncha crap! I'm for going back to even pre biblical ways, trial by combat! Texas cage whippin match! Several men enter, one man leaves! (and leads)! HAHAHAHAHAH!
Why not, makes as much sense as what we have now, which is *zero*!
Certainly more entertaining than the debates, which consisted of "My opponent said blah blah and sucks"
Other guy "did not, and you suck MORE!"
"Did so!"
"Not!"
I mean, that wasn't a debate last thursday, that was a really lame infomercial for advanced mediocrity. I expected them to say something like "have you checked with your doctor to see if you need the magenta pill?"
looks to me it's aimed at suse/novell and redhat, and IBM for that matter. Anyone who's a customer of theirs care to comment? How are they priced now, what formula? Would this patent apply to their way of offering for-lease software?
Slashdot Mirror
...where the referrer header is required? Besides webstats, what use are they?
I turned mine off awhile ago (just because, it's no one's beeswax where I have been just before) and haven't noticed anything different about my surfing, that's why I am asking....
--they seized the authority under the commerce clause, and have been abusing it ever since. Just like the BATF (and a host of other federal bureaucracies) seized illegal authority in their domain.
Of course, I'm a realist and understand they got the goons with guns to make whatever they say sorta stick, too.
no provision for minors in the bill, other than normal contract and civil law. So say if your kid, gets your computer infected, but the installed program has an EULA click through, is it spyware, or not? As mentioned, tracking cookies, would be a problem there as well. Automatic software updates, unless you click each time to manually check.
Too vague, too many obvious loopholes. It won't apply to most of the common commercial advertising spyware.
I'll have to read ron pauls take on why he voted against it, but I am guessing it's because most folks DO voluntarily install what is called spyware, so this would be more or less useless in the real world. What it would seem to logically cover more is like email trojans. So it's department of redundancy department, election year grand standing.
I brought this up recently on another thread, because I am in favor of it also. One of the things I really liked about my previous mac experience. Are you (or anyone) aware of any linux distros that do packaging like this?
...for a ride? Sell chance tickets, limited to one to a human slashdotter,once enough accumulated for a ticket, then have a webcast with a live drawing?
what say, owners, nifty idea? what say slashdotters?
...IS "at war" with north korea. We've had a truce, but no legal technical end to the war since it first started. It's quite strange actually. The war was based on a UN decision. We have had sporadic "truce talks" as long as I can remember. The major shooting war stopped (more or less) once UN forces made it to the red chinese border and indications were good that they could continue the push. China used quite a lot of it's soldiers as "volunteers" to assist NK, and in the early stages of the war were fairly successful, almost routing the US and other UN forces.
It gets more complicated than that of course, interesting subject. I've always considered it to be the worlds major flashpoint for initiation of widespread nuclear warfare, as there is little in the way of conventional weapons we could bring to bear that would defeat north korea easily if any hostilities resumed large scale, they are just too well dug in and have so many armaments and the distances involved are so short that it would require multiples of nukes and bunker busters and whatnot to make a dent in what they have. It's not that they have just amazing modern technology, it's that they have just a huge amount of older technology that isn't vulnerable to any sophisticated jamming or other buck rogers high tech neutralization. They are diggers, build deep hardened bunkers and tunnels, and have been doing so for 50 years now non stop.
Here is a synopsis of the situation from a korean viewpoint
that's a relatively easy answer, that is addressed in the day to day lives of people known as "survivalists" if you prefer the original "scary" non politically correct term, or the more modern "preppers" short for those who practice practical preparations. Basically carrying the boy scout motto to "be prepared" into a fuller understanding. To those of us who follow these precepts, depending on an intact infrastructure all the time with no backups at allother than a piece of paper called insurance and maybe a credit card with a decent borrowing limit just don't cut it all the way. You have to deal with tangibles.
Our infrastructure is vulnerable because it is a centralised distribution model primarily (I am very generally speaking, but that's it in the gist of it), and almost all of it is vulnerable to the current JIT or "just in time" delivery method. It "all" sorta has to work or none of it works. there's a certain minimum amount percentage wise of damage we live with day to day, but the pain threshold rises dramatically as more of it becomes destroyed or severely damaged or disrupted.
Here's your short list, and what I have done in addition to using the "normal" centralised products which is what most folks have in total.
electricity - grid, then solar, wind, fuel generator
phone - landline, cell, internet then various multiband receivers, and transcievers 2 meter, 10 meter, FRS, CB
gas -gas stationstill shy here,needs improvement, no on site production yet (I could produce small quantities of burnable ethanol if pushed obviously) but I make-do with stockpiling, gasoline, diesel and propane, along with a lot of firewood.
transportation - personal vehicles or public transportation, rail, plane, subway, bus, no public transportation locally except for greyhound next city over. Then, multiple vehicles,some decent off road capability, multiple bicycles,and I'm in the cheap market for a horse now actually. Looking forward to it really.
I'll add 2 more, the most important two in my opinion, people's day to day necessities as opposed to luxuries that they take for granted a little too much, that are vulnerable to the centralised distribution business model. Most people have only one vulnerable source for each of these topics. I have that, then my additions
food - grocery store, restaurants, other markets like delis, etc, then we have stored food of the short term (grocery store level) medium (home canned and dried ) and long-term storage capable (nitrogen packed, or packed with oxygen absorbers in sealed cans), to the tune of at least two years total, in addition, extensive year round working gardens, very good knowledge of wild plants and foraging and other sorts of food gathering, like hunting, fishing, trapping, etc, and more importantly,live in an area where this is possible right out the door.
water -several hundred gallons stored on site, two sources locally (personal well and pond),and several of the best quality filtration systems you can get.
As to what society can do, really, I'm a geek, if I waited for society or big business or government to "do" for me what I already know how to do anyway, and what I should do, I'd still be waiting. They aren't ever going to be able to provide backup complete infrastructure, it's about all they can do for them to maintain the infrastructure they attempt to keep running now. They *barely* can deal with hurricanes that are well known to happen, the areas of them happening are well known, the effects are well understood, the time to prepare is basically all of the time, because they know it'll happen. That is about the maximum effort the government could do on any realistic scale. Anything beyond that, you would be on your own. Depending on the disruption, it could conceivable be a lot worse than a hurricane, for example, a regular small nuke in a major city. A major biological disease outbreak, either from an attack of just "natural".
Best bet is to do it yourself now, at least some basic backups. It's a good idea for data, it's a good idea for your basic day to day stuff too, IMO. Paper insurance, then some "real" insurance.
...yeager was the first US guy in space, in a deal very similar to spaceship one (rocket plane launched from a jetplane at altitude)
1-5 = 0, don't have any computerised music. All I have is Cds I bought used and insert them when I want to play them. Besides that it's OTA radio. I have "portable music players" going way back, but use none of them now. Holding out until the latest cellphone completely expires, then will get one that is the most PDA ish I can find, probably a PDA with phone capabilities. with the rate of things happening in that market I expect a fully multifunctional computer and wireless commo device shortly. It will probably play music, and by then I'll have broadband, which means I can finally get groovy digitial "fair use shared" music, because right now I'm still stuck on dialup, you insensitive clod!, so no downloading for me!
I put an am/fm/cassette player radio AND a CB radio on my lawn tractor! I certainly understand the appeal to having a radio on a bicycle. I only have one hand held 2 meter, else I'd probably add one of those too. And I'm seriously contemplating adding a laptop or a 12 volt mini itx rig, for a variety of reasons. I also added an additional heavy truck battery in parallel with the tiny stock 12 volt battery that comes in those things, hung it on a rack off the rear of the thing where the additional weight greatly improves traction going up hill, it lets me tow my little work wagon better without using dumb wheel weights that add little functionality besides their weight. I use this thing almost daily working around the complex where I live.
I think it's because once you get used to having full time communications of some sort, you feel nekkid without it. Or something.
That's why we are geeks and nerds and not "straights". We think straight people are weird because if someone (society, consumer pressure brainwashing, etc) doesn't tell them to do something, they never do anything different, they are ultimate follow the herd mentality which gives us the buckwheats. It is hard coded DNA someplace, we as geeks and nerds have the "gotta do it no matter whut!" gene.
It doesn't, unless you know it was all pre planned.
Here is a short synopsis of the situation.
Note, the group they are referring to,PNAC, go to their website, or read some on them with various google links, very easy to find, you'll see the bulk of the heavy hitters inside the current regime had this whole deal planned out well in advance of 9-11. Combine that with a lot of the "government prior knowledge" evidence about 9-11 that you can find, and maybe it will make things clearer.
Realistically, it's a pretty bad scene right now, the US is in fairly dire straits. Basically we've been junta-ized. All the evidence is there, just spread out. A lot of people really don't want to accept it, or psychologically can't accept it, because they would have to live with that lie, knowing and accepting and excusing it, or do something about it, and the "doing something" is potentially pretty serious when you realise there's absolutely no chance of "voting" our way back to any sort of rational sanity or true honest governing.
...products on the shelves at walmart represent products that one generation ago or less were manufactured inside the US. My beef isn't with the workers at walmart, and no idea how or why you would infer that, so I'll officially dispell that notion right now. My beef is high level collusion, bad foreign policy, supporting massive human rights abusers, and the notion that destroying the US economy and security just to make much less than 1% of the population a ton of loot is a good idea. Nuts to that!
As to folks who lost their jobs over the past 20 years due to outsourcing, I sincerely doubt that ALL those people willingly begged their bosses to please close the factory and take it to china, so that they could shop at some store like a walmart while they looked for a new job. For some folks it has happened multiple times so far. Comes a point in time you got to say "ok, enough" It just happened to them. It was sold to us as opening up global trade, "everyone wins". Yet we CONSISTENTLY run trade imbalances, especially with china? Why is that? Give me an exact answer to that if you can, why the trade imbalance? shouldn't it have settled out by now? (My pov,hint: china makes more money, and a very few very wealthy people make more money with things like that), but I'd still like to hear the official approved version of why this imbalance with "free trade" exists to such a huge extent.
25 years ago, the USA was the worlds largest CREDITOR nation, now we are the worlds largest DEBTOR nation. True facts, look 'emup. Exact same time frame the walmartization-the outsourcing- of the economy occurred.
You may think it's a coincidence, but I sure don't. I wrote and predicted way back then what is happening now would occur. You'll have to take my word on that, but it happened. It's OBVIOUS as all get out what happens when you open up the labor market intenationally WITHOUT opening up the housing and whatnot true "cost of living market" internationally and simultaneously.
I don't claim to know every human who works at walmart,but the three I know personally all had much better jobs that evaporated, and took walmart jobs out of *desperation* to have any income at all. I will grant that it's most probable that humans have an incredible variety of reasons for seeking employment most places. I think though it would be fair to assume that most folks working there would rather have 40 hours with better pay and some bennies, like most "middle class" jobs used to be inside the US.
Like I said, I used to be a supporter of walmart and shopped there, back when it was first open and sam walton ran it and it had mostly all USA products. Now that it's switched to being merely the arm of the Peoples Republic of China-retail division*, I can see that it is harmful to our domestic economy, because of the raw hard observable data, and from the perspective that a truly strong and independent nation *must* have a fully integrated vertical economy. It is an incredibly boneheaded move to fund, develop, enrich the one nation that is most likely to be your biggest global competitor (and most probgably military antagonist) once the oil really starts evaporating. It's a strategic blunder of almost unfathomable proportions. That is my opinion, but it is shared by many people of geopolitical and scholary bent. People who are only concerned about short term financial profits, no, they don't share that opinion. Some folks just have different priorities.
****WHY any nation that values freedom allegedly wants to do business with a one party total dictatorship, with NO RIGHTS whatsoever for it's people,and who have verifiably murdered millions of their own peoples is beyond me. In ww2 we fought against such a system, then we had a massive and expensive cold war against a similar system, but now, an extremly similar situation and nation, differing only in language, ethnicity and gross physical size becomes "most favored nation" trading partner with every big "american" businessman
I can't despise walmart enough, and this is from someone who thought they were a good idea when they started out and used to be a regular shopper. They make MS look like a benevolent charity. They've had to resort to what in essence are a series of public propoganda commercials on the TV (seen 'em? pure FUD) in order to keep up what they are attempting to maintain as an "all amwerican" image with smiling happy workers. It's right out of kim ill dungs ministry of truth video factory.
a lmart.html
Here's a paste from this url http://www.familyfarmdefenders.org/whatsgoingon/w
" Wal-Mart Exploits Children in Overseas Sweatshops
Behind the slick veneer of success, though, there is incredible misery. Contrary to its "all-American" advertising hype, Wal-Mart sources over 80% of its products from overseas. According to the National Labor Committee, there are 1000 sweatshops in China alone supplying Wal-Mart - many of them owned and operated by the Red Army using political prisoners. Chinese teenagers get just 12 1/5 cents per hour for an 84 hour work week and at night are packed into squalid dormitories under armed guard. In Bangladesh, teenage girls receive as little as 9 cents per hour - far below the official minimum wage of 33 cents/hour - sewing Wal-Mart clothes. Wal-Mart refuses to reveal its factory locations to independent human rights monitors since, in the words of spokewoman, Betsy Reithmeyer, "This is very competitive. If we find a very good factory, we want to keep it to ourselves."
Wal-Mart Also Exploits Its Own Workers in the U.S.!
While, those sitting on Wal-Mart's board of directors earn a whopping $1500/day for their "hard work," the rest of the workforce languishes among America's working poor. Wal-Mart's vehement anti-union attitude means over half of its 720,000 "associates" qualify for federal food stamps. Wal-Mart employees average just $7.50/hr. - well below the national retail wage average of $8.71/hr. At 30 hours per week, a Wal-Mart worker earns barely $11,700 per year - $2000 below the federal poverty line for a single mother with two children."
Basically walmart says, we'll force you to lose your job, then please come shop at our store! It's the american way! Oooh, unions are evil commies, but our trade associations and our relationships with dictatorial regimes are fine!
ohhh..wait... this IS the american way now! How could I forget!
This is what all these globalist goons want for the united states, this is how you will compete, so remember to vote for the NWO R.epressive And D.omineering corporate party this election, it will speed up the transformation to a glorius culture of low pay, dismal working conditions, and the cheapest designed and built crap possible! YaaaaY!
Pretty funny! I think it's hysterical when all these major corporations keep suing each other over software patents! Maybe ONE DAY they will wake up and realise software patents only help LAWYERS! It's like the entire concept of software patents was designed by the barristers guild and universal profit center, it's job security!
Wonder if there's a website that just tracks all the various lawsuits involving patents of intangibles? Would be interesting to see how much money is wasted over that scene, how many man hours of time wasted, how much gets sucked out of computing with it.
thanks for the reply! I figured it was probably closer to most of the newer full gui distros in requirements. Nowadays seems like you need two sticks of 128 ram for most of them to be decent. On my all antique machines, linux runs better on the 200 with 224 ram than a 333 or 400 with 64 or 128 ram. Go figger.... RAM seems to be where it's at more than CPU speed.
some interesting ideas there. I like that it's gnome, and also that laptop and wireless and usb support seems to be important to these guys. Also like the offered bounty for developers, cash plus functionality seems a good inducement. And free Cds!! Not bad for those folks on dialup!
Anyway, can't seem to find minimum hardware requirements for trying it out. Anyone?
You mean, stand around inside a cage called a free speech zone? Or be out in the street with cops with rifles on the building tops, military helos over head, and sonic cannons and whatnot pointed at you?
That's the state of "protest" today in the US and why most people don't engage in it. Everyone knows it's one incident away from beoming a bad news scene with a lot of people hurt, and better than even odds some undercover "officer" agent provocateurs starting it.
Everything else by the way of protest in the traditional way they can and will ignore, they could care less about letters to the editor or any emails you send them basically. Petitions, bah, ignored. Redress of grievences? Sure, you have the "right" to cough up thousands of dollars to begin talking to some lawyer, then it gets more expensive from there. He's gonna giggle all the way to his mercedes dealer while you sue the government over something. And the vote? See the so called "official national presidential debates"? An infomercial for the NWO corporate party basically, as much diversity and differences of opinion there as at any regular Klan meeting....and for backup they have new & improved voting, courtesy of blackbox diebold..
Funny, for the primaries and the debates for the two for one party they seem to have no problems finding enough podiums for half a dozen guys up on stage, but once down to the wire,for the biggee, all they can find is two podiums. Funny how that works out. Let me see, two dudes, frat bros for some elitist neo nazi satanic frat, both wearing black suits, wives wearing white suits....Yep, a true difference, there's your choice, and you can protest it all you want..but it won't change a dang thing either....
Nope, we are graciously "allowed" the illusion of protest, but americans know what's up, and what's upo is basically "shutup, sit down, do what you are told or else, here, have some trinkets and gadgets and cheap beer and nascar and football, that's it, don't rock the boat too hard..or ELSE!'".
It's not as bad yet as say north korea, but give it some time, it'll get there. That's eventually what these technofeudalists want, that's why red china is their poster boy model nation, BTW, they dig on that scene there. it's efficient. A few folks give the orders, you get to "vote", and they throw you some bones.
If folks don't agree it will get there,as bad as them other places are now, let them try an easy experiment. Next time you are stopped at a "random courtesy checkpoint" roadblock, you know, those kinds that never existed except for the last few years and are now common, where everyone gets stopped and checked for their "paperz, pleezz! and whatnot" by Darth Vader officer friendly with the glock and MP5, just..don't stop! They don't have any probable cause or even reasonable suspicion, they are just stopping you because they can, so go for it, keep driving on your merry way, see what happens, see if it isn't already a lot closer to north korea than you want to contemplate. Of course, you might not make it to even report back, either...in "free" america today.
There's no real protest anymore, people talk about protest, play-act at protest, but the authorites control protest close to 100% now, and they aren't giving up that sort of power. It'sincremental, on a thousand fronts, we read about it all the time here, but it's relentlessly forward for those globalists. That's their plan, you and me and we can "protest" all we want as long as we follow thier rules, their schedule, their methods, manner and location, and remain satisfied with the outcome of any such "protest", which is carved in stone, "they win, you lose."
American Wind Energy Association, you can look around the reference library section there for costs, financing, etc sorts of questions. If you want more detailed and varied sources, just run a google search on wind generation cost analysis, ton of hits, I just checked, and it's where I got this one site I linked to.
As an aside, commercial wind power was one place where enron was really doing some good. GE picked up that division and it's still in operation and doing well, last I checked.
..other forms of energy conversion devices, or just normal throw away human products? Payback? Yes, they have net gains with energy over their useful projected lifespans, there's a payback then gravy period with them. They really wouldn't drop millions on them (or small thousands on homeowner scale) if this wasn't so.
Contrast that with game consoles, ipods, big screen TVs, various home audio equipment, jetskis, movies and video, whatever format, and the players needed, and etc, etc, etc, that people have no problems with,either the upfront manufacturing cost in terms of energy and raw materials used, and the ongoing cost of powering those purely for amusement and entertainment devices. I think the energy impact and benefit from wind turbines is justified economically and resource-wise at a human and societal scale of where we put our collective interests currently.
I find it kinda humorous really, anything designed to provide humans with energy needs to be justified down to the penny, and it's usually decried as "not cost effective" unless it's a ridiculous one year payback or something like that, or it can only be done by existing energy monopolies, whatever method they choose,yet, anything designed to just use up what energy and raw resources we have, merely for amusement, as fast as possible, gets a free skate on the "payback" part as regards energy and raw materials and pollution impact, etc. Really quite an amusing phenomenon I've noticed with most people in these discussions.
As to the wind effect, basically not a lot different than trees or buildings of similar size, as has been pointed out elsehwere in the replies.
they work very well as long as you can deal with the corrosive nature of the acids that get produced along with the methane gas. there's a very large example at a poultry farm near me that was running one for awhile and it worked well, but it corroded too quickly. Different materials and processes are needed for very long term operation.
I built a very small test digester one time, worked well, got useable gas. Just used junk parts I had kicking around, a washtub, a cut off oil drum, some milking machine parts, and some manure and water. all I ever did with the gas was accumulate it in plastic bags and set it off for people to see that that it worked. took me well under 1/2 hour to build it, too. Kinda a fun project, I'd like to build another one sometime, just at a useable scale for something..
Another time I built a really good hot water maker. Basiucally a variant on leaving a hose out in the yard on a sunny day, but I got the heat source from aerobic decomposition. The concept was simple, we had a big storm locally and woodchips were free for the asking from the power line crews because they had so much of the stuff, so we got some. I buried a few hundred feet of garden hose in the pile (all my spare sections on hand, this was just an experiment). As the stuff started to compost out, it got pretty hot inside, you could get a small stream of 160 degree water from it, pumping in cold at the entrance end, as long as you kept the pressure low enough. this was in the *winter*, too, BTW. Seems like you could build a closed system with something like that, using an antifreeze solution, high temp hoses, and radiators, put the whole thing downhill from you, let thermosiphoning pump it to where you needed the heat, radiate it out, the antifreeze cools down, falls back downhill to get reheated in the pile, where it gets reheated, starts working it's way back uphill, and etc,so you would have free heat 24/7 for as long as the chips held out, then use them for mulch someplace and replace them with fresh chips (or other compostable matter).
I LOVE this whole energy subject, too much fun, too many places joe backyard tinkerer can have fun and do useful projects!
Those are called vertical axis rotors, a variant of the savonius rotor. I've seen a few, they work well enough for a project any back yard handy dude can build. Usually they used truck differentials and axles, then some more pulleys, for the gearing to the alternator to get the speed up enough from the pretty slow turning oil drum halves.
There are some large commercial examples of them now also. I remember seeing a link to one company in wyoming that makes and sells them, but I have forgotten the name or I would provide a link to their page. IIRC, they look like big towers with wind openings, totally different from the airplane propeller blade looking projects.
Personally, I'd love to see a lot more R & D work on using atmospheric static electricty potential, I think it would be a serious contender in the alternative energy market. I like the idea of no moving parts whatsoever. I've read some on hobbiest experiments with them, some guys are getting useful amounts of juice from it, using wrapped bundles of stock fencing to act as the static accumulators in effect, and automotive coils as capacitors, then going to an opened up severely (large electrode gap) spark plug, then to a storage battery. Wind blowing over the fencing induces a slight charge, when it reaches potential to work the coil and spark, it jumps, gets into the battery in a series of very high voltage but low amperage pulses. Interesting concept. I'm not an EE, but that is my understanding about how it works.
...whether or not we experience one of the pole reversals concurrently with a rapid heating trend. Then it's anyone's guess what will shake out.
Something I've noticed though, over the decades. When I was a kid, the sun looked a lot more yellow colored, now it's a lot more white colored. Wonder what that means...There's also a heck of a lot less wild birds then there used to be, and the trees in general all seem wimpy, not as robust and healthy as they could and should be. All very generally speaking of course..
We've also been experiencing some rather strange geomagnetic differences with the planet, from what I read it's reducing in intensity and moving around a lot more than it used to.
All interesting topics to be sure.
The polar regions ice melting though, is the most convincing to me of imminent severe global weather changes, you just can't fake or ignore how much the arctic and antarctic regions have been melting the past few years, you can see it with any subsequent series of pictures taken in the same areas, the stuff is melting, fast. It WILL have some profound effects on global weather patterns. And if the atlantic conveyor slows down or stops, there will be crash programs to burn more coal, burn more trees, burn more oil and tarsands stuff, and etc, etc, a lot more human activity which will lead to more greenhouse gases being released, which will lead to more environmental changes, and on and on.
Interesting times, glad I am a survivalist.
Maybe it's time to think about a multi person presidency, an elected council with different assigned priorities and duties. A foreign policy president (trade), a foreign policy president (security/defense), a domestic president (government civil services), a domestic president (federal law enforcement), and so on and so forth. Then one guy wouldn't be responsible for everything, and we could narrow down selections better. Candidate A is closer to your feelings on security/defense, but you think he sucks on donmestic civil services, etc. So you could still vote for him, and vote for another guy closer to your feelings on the other subjects.
Now all we have is the "lesser of evils, and winner take all" approach, even with third and fourth and fifth parties, because it's still the deal they get the entire presidency and by default the executive branch. I think the job's too important and too powerful and just too complicated to be entirely decided by ONE guy, I honestly don't think ANYONE is qualified to be the US president. It's too impossible of a job to do adequately, so all we get is has-beens.
In the olden days the guy who came in second was made vice president, and took his duties in the senate (with his tie breaking vote) more seriously,so at leasrt there everyones vote counted a scosh better, and the senators were elected by their state legislators instead of a popular vote directly, which made paying attention to your state races more important, so people did it.
With that said it's all a buncha crap! I'm for going back to even pre biblical ways, trial by combat! Texas cage whippin match! Several men enter, one man leaves! (and leads)! HAHAHAHAHAH!
Why not, makes as much sense as what we have now, which is *zero*!
Certainly more entertaining than the debates, which consisted of "My opponent said blah blah and sucks"
Other guy "did not, and you suck MORE!"
"Did so!"
"Not!"
I mean, that wasn't a debate last thursday, that was a really lame infomercial for advanced mediocrity. I expected them to say something like "have you checked with your doctor to see if you need the magenta pill?"
At least trial by combat would be fun!
looks to me it's aimed at suse/novell and redhat, and IBM for that matter. Anyone who's a customer of theirs care to comment? How are they priced now, what formula? Would this patent apply to their way of offering for-lease software?
their=there, duh, need another coffee I can see... heh heh heh
actually, I'd like to promote "thare" as a "one size fits all" word based on the context solution.
Same with "yore", eliminate all that other nonsense, the meaning can be different based on context and situation, but the spelling will be universal.