Coders plus it's everyone who works in these fields that revolve around "computers". man, it's big. B EYE GEE BIG. The cross section of slashdot readers basically. The only exceptions are the young guys here, who real soon are gonna need jobs, too, and most of them would probably be sympathetic and could help out too.. Think they aren't thinking about this? First generation in US history who have a real credible chance of having a much lower standard of living than their parents generation?
The network engineers, the sys admins, the ISP workers, telco guys,cable guys, data entry folks,various media technicians, print and electronic, the people in the financial sectors who run the banks and insurance industries and that fat rip off the middle class magic beans for the cow casino called "wall street", on and on and etc. "IT workers". Guys who run the boxes in the remaining factories. All over. Remember Y2K? Right now the threat of what the ramifications were then is still real,because those dire predictions can be implemented *at will* by the application of coordinated effort, merely by...stopping work. that's it, just don't do it. No sabotage needed, nuthin, just the willingness one day to say ENOUGH! and make it stick.. Just the threat to shut that sucker down, all of it, would be sufficient for major concessions, because there is-NO-replacement for the US IT labor force at this moment in time. Nothing immediate, nothing that would work, it's not even patchable if even a large percentage chipped in and went along with it. it would be an unfixable proble for "da man" and his greed. I mean, IT controls even if people get paychecks across the nation. Everything. I can't think of a single thing that doesn't have IT people connected to it, directly or tangentially.
It's an awesome amount of power there going to waste. The fatcats desparately try to keep it DIS unified, so they can maintain control, and keep the bulk of the power and wealth in a very few hands. Geez, I mean look around, who really calls the shots in this nation? I bet you could fit them in one small room, but it's BECAUSE they got so many IT workers who are willing to EAT IT RAW AND LOVE IT just like these poor folks in the article.
Man I'm hot over that article, because it's already happened to me in blue collar meat world, TWICE.
It-the unionizing and strike potential- CAN be used as a bargaining chip for great social, economic and political change, change that will benefit all of the US basically, at the expense of the less than 1% fatcats who call the shots now, and the mindless fatcat drone wannabes who go along with such practices as outlined in the article, making you train your outsourced replacement! And WHO CARES if it inconveniences those goons! That is not only nuts, it's an obscene moral affront. I'm not an IT guy, just a blue collar schmoo who likes computers,who happens to have an extremly well developed sense of "right/wrong" when it comes to people getting shafted by bullies,from individual on up, who's SEEN the effects "outsourcing" and "insourcing" serf workers has had in my few professions, and now seeing it in the employment fields that were PROMISED to the US people to be the "new replacement" industries. ALL A BIG FAT LIE.
These fatcat goons want as their main goal nothing less than a global two class society, them, and 99% everyone else as near serfs. They want what they get in those second world nations they dig, a technofeudalistic neo aristocracy class, then powerless shufflin drones, blue and white collar, and huge domestic police forces/paramilitary to keep eveeryone cowed.
Look at what their poster boy golden nation is now-one "party", no freedoms to speak of, keep your mouth shut or we'll kill you china. THAT'S their model nation/society/economic model. SAY WHUT? Technologically bent, feudalistic in political orientation. That's what these globalists want in the US, and that means the gradual destruction of the middle clas
... but then, when you (generically speaking)get a response from people who ARE doing it, who aren't hypocrites,it mostly gets ignored, then a month or so later, yet again another article about alternatives comes out, the same old FUD gets spewed about how it "won't work" a few people reply "but, I"M DOING IT RIGHT NOW AND IT ROX!" , they get mostly ignored,and the cycle continues. I have seen this so much on many many forums when this gets discussed. already there's at least one guy here who's posted of being on solar, and I know I posted on it a lot last year.
The deal is, and the *real* main deal is, it doesn't have to be either grid OR alternative home produced power. You CAN have both. I keep reading over and over and over again "wah, it won't run my home bacvkyard neutron smelter and..." Well, you can have BOTH. Both. You don't give up anything, you GAIN. You get MO POWAH! This is slick. You can make a decent dent in your overall useage, have a _jam-up_ home UPS system for your boxes, have a guaranteed source of SOME power for lights,TV, radio, etc, even when all your neighbors are borked and sitting in the dark from a storm or some drunk fool taking out a transformer by smacking into a pole, etc, for just not that much money, especially when you figure that many lenders now will amortize the installation right into your 20 year home note right from the git-go..
This is slick!
Until last year, I lived the previous (almost) 4 at a place that was 80% or so all solar powered. I was a caretaker on an estate, the main house was three stories, had every gadget you can imagine, these folks were electronic gadget freaks. Almost everything in the house ran just fine off the solar except the heatpumps. Those were pure grid, but in a pinch, for the winter, there was a whopper centralised woodstove, and in the summer, well, fans and window screens. Mostly though they used grid for the heatpumps, and solar for everdang thing else, which was a lot. The owners (pretty upper middle class to be fair) popped about what -say- someone might pay for a slightly better than average new vehicle, or a ski boat that got used 6 times a year, along those lines cost wise. That could have been reduced considerably if they had done their own install, but they hired it out.
The system worked well, and I ran it, which was basically checking some levels on the trace boxes, and topping off batts once in awhile with distilled water, in other words, not much maintenance. I lived on the property in an RV, I still have it, I had/still-have actually my own smallish solar rig, ran my computer, fans, tv, etc off of it. I ran an underground line to their house for my own circuit from their larger solar, and that ran my electric heater in the winter (very small but it worked). I used propane for my cooking. Their house had all the normal things, washing machine, many tv's, several computers, faxes, lights,stereos, fridge, freezer, you name it, a normal home, actually borderline mansion. We ran the deep well off of grid 220 most of the time, but in a pinch, we could flick two levers and keep water during a blackout from the solar. For backup to that was a 12 KW diesel genny we never had to use, but I ran it once a month anyway, mostly to keep the starter batts charged. The stuff WORKS man, don't believe the FUD. It's clean, too, real clean power. If you (anyone you's) locale has good solar potential, it's a great adjunct, and it's infinetly scaleable, you can start at under one grand for useful power and storage,(a good panel-medium sized, a couple storage batts, inverter, charge controller)(my rig would be around 1500 clams today, basically what I outlined except three panels and 4 batts) then scale to whatever you want. Other locations, wind might be a better option, etc, it's a big variable. Some places, solar is good in the summer, wind in the winter, so a hybrid system using both is used. That's quite a common rig across the US, BTW. It just depends, all you need is what is called a "site survey" to determine what might
... are missing it. Think about unionizing. And if you do, watch the union bosses and make sure they don't get blackmailed or bribed. That's it for advice. The two choices are watch jobs go away and paycheck shrink or vanish, or keep jobs, build better stuff, keep mo money for yourself and inside the nation where it recirculates and helps the economy as a whole.
You are one of only two or three professions who have the clout-if unionized-to shut the country down business-wise, a *pretty_dang_ snazzy* bargaining chip. And there ain't didlly squat uncle sam or any coalition of corporate bosses could do about it, because YOU CONTROL ALL THE STUFF AND THEY DON'T KNOW HOW.
You could force an end to outsourcing and H1B abuses, you could force "fair trade" over hideous and erroneously termed "free trade" scam billionaire's ripoffs with it's unequal excise taxes between nations (our exports are taxed a lot higher usually by other nations on most products), you could force "safe computing" as a standard on the manufacturers, you could actually stand a chance against the marketing weenies on important technical and engineering aspects..... you could make quality job 1 everywhere, and keep getting paid for it, instead of "ohh, it's shiny now, ship it out!" decisions...
buy a clue, look at the article again...
wall
handwriting
All you need is a union. If you wait, it'll be too late. Snooze ya lose....
I bet just over slashdot you could have several thousand people start a union within a few days....or hours really
--I just read his autobiography a month or so again, very interesting. The gist of it is, before the era of large malpractice awards, the insurance companies were absolute scumbags when it came to legitimate medical malpractice claims. Human beings were actually really screwed bad and it was brushed off, ignored, justice wasn't being done, and the med establishment was hunky dory with that. They screwed up, weren't self policing enough of their own colleagues. Generally speaking of course, But that really was it. Spence and a few others finally cracked it, on blatantly obvious cases that the doctors and insurance companies chose to fight, rather than just cutting a much smaller check to the victims of the malpractice. The juries awarded the verdicts,partly to reimburse the victims (or next of kin unfortunately) and partly to SEND A MESSAGE to those big corps and shaky docs to not screw people over. they still kept trying, so they got pushed hard back, and now it's a mess. Based on verifiable data and the disgust they felt at those corporations, the juries did it, just folks like thee and me. IF the insurance companies and med establishment hadn't been such outright dinks, most likely it never would have gotten so bad. I realise it has see sawed now, but originally, they brought it on themselves. I am no fanboy of the law profession, I tend to think they make life a lot more complicated and expensive than it needs to be, but sometimes there IS no other remedy to try and get some relief*. It's hard as heck to be joe paycheck and get screwed over by megacorp and even think about fighting it in court. Default in 99% of the cases with joe paycheck against some corp is the corp will never admit they are wrong, EVEN when they know full well they are. That's been proven over and over again, and they use that ridiculous ruling allowing corps to be treated as almost blameless "persons" to hide behind.. Some balance is needed, and it's not *all* one side or the other is the complete bad guy. There's A-"profit is the ultimate king, whatever it takes" business plan, then there's B- "we at XYZ corp are in business to make money,and we will, but our policy is honesty and we do not engage in unethical behavior or lying".
If these big corps would just buy a single clue with the zillions they make and adopt business plan B over A, they might avoid a lot of problems down the road.
As to software, this is an easy question. If it's for-profit, it should be held to useability standards, same as any other product. If it's free, then, ya take your chances and get what ya pay for. I see no reason whatsoever that a company like microsoft is able to make hundreds of billions over the years, yet they incur no liability when their software is so blatantly hideous that it costs inncoent purchasers and other folks on the net actual folding money and lotsa time to fix their stuff. It has never computed for me anyway. There should be, at the very least, some sort of minimum threshold security model before selling software that accesses the net. It should be built in and functional. What they have had traditionally was profits first, and down the list at job 73 or something was "oh ya, have joe check on the security thing after his break, will ya?" That's nuts. I am especially incensed that any of my tax dollars have gone to support them, especially the last few years when it was obvious even to non computer users that their stuff was seriously borked when it came to security.
*Mr. Subliminal says "dueling". It worked for thousands of years.
Like a lot of folks, I no gottum broadband, still dialup, best connect I get is a 28... I would love to be able to get a fresh burned CD of a distro WITH THE LATEST PATCHES, maybe even use a menu and pick and chose my apps and have it do dependencies, etc, so I don't get the stuff i really don't use or want. I am running FC1 now, and I'm almost done updating it, only some hundred odd megs to go. When is release 2? Oh, yah, next month..... Swell..... just swelllllll
Thing is, it would cost me a lot more to drive to some computer store to get it than to just order it from a clone burner and snail mail it....which is what I do now.
If the time between identifying the new viruses and getting the latest definitions from the vendors gets much worse, might I suggest time delayed email then? It still gets sent, just not immediately, let it queue up and re run it after you recheck the latest and baddest new exploit, say 3 or 4 times a day? something like that? Maybe longer if a particular nasty one gets loose.. I know that idea sucks initially, but if it can help stop viruses from propagating as fast, it might be worth it, Especially for business. Extremely important info time-critical to a business decision can still be transmitted using the old fashioned but still reliable "hey earl, check this out..." phone call.
Personally, I more or less stopped using email a coupla years ago, I check mine every other day, that's it. I couldn't get people to stop sending me crap more or less, got sick of it. At this moment I don't have much need for immediate delivery. That might change back, I used to be a fiend on it, newsgroups, lists, etc, but now... got tired of it, that's all. I know, that's just me, everyone else on the planet needs updated email every other nano second...oh well.. And I use text only option, too, just because it makes sense to me.
... the 4 way power radio, is basically shirt pocket/PDA sized and doesn't use a spring, it's just direct crank/genny/into the recharageables. It is identical in size to normal "couple of AAs only" shirt pocket radios, basically, just a fold out crank on the side.
I agre the current crop of clockwork spring driven baygen/freeplays are big, but they were designed to be table top portables for use in third world countries where many people could sit around and listen to them with the big speaker inside, there aren't any provisions for batteries in them at all (earlier models like I own anyway). the newer ones have recharagables and built in LED small reading light.. Most of the case if you open it up is hollow, BTW, it's just a platform to house the large speaker. The radio itself is just a small normal card, (analog tuning however), and the crank/spring assembly is not that large removed, and it could be made lots smaller if it only had to power earbuds. Springs are just correctly tempered steel after all, size is just normal engineering, nothing exotic to it.
My other thoughts on the laptop "battery don't last long enough!" so called dilemma is.. really.. are people such weenies they couldn't carry one extra lb? I have 3 laptops, all older and a few lbs heavier than current models, but really, people carried them around. I just think there would be a market still for a laptop that carried multiple batteries on board to give it the range peole need, a lot of folks want ultra small light weight, but a lot of people could "struggle by" with an additional 1-2 lbs weight if it doubled or tripled their running time. some wouldn't, my guess is a lot of actual power users just might. The weight would be exactly what they were carrying just a few years ago, and no one got hernias then. Same weight, better computer, much longer running time then just a few years ago, by the simple addition of one or two exisiting batteries. Why is this such a dilemma? I'm sorry but as a blue collar worker I do NOT have mucvh sympathy for climate controlled indoor workers who make serious folding money and can't carry an extra lb or two occassionaly as they step from AC office to AC office. None. Zero sympathy. Weenies.
And the multiple batteries have to be onboard, parallel wired and hot swappable. There's the obvious solution. ONE battery onboard and having to carry loose spares is nuts, IMO. You want to turn on your machine and not have to dick with it for a long workday, that's the bottom line. It's like cellphones now, sure they are teeny tiny, etc, but sheesh, I can NOT even hardly see the screens or use those ridiculous lilliputian contraptions that pass as the keyboards. Sucks. I will hold on to my older larger cell phone as long as possible because of this, and I'm not gonna pop 2 to 500 clams for a cell phone, no matter what it does, ain't happening.
grumble, rant, kvetch....
Sometimes little is cool, sometimes you just got to go with the mass needed to do the job.
Now I go outside to buck up some whopper big oak branches the tree service just dropped before lunch. Will I use my small dinky homelite xl because it's lighter, or will I fire up the 18 inch bar husky 55?
Sometimes the right tool for the job is just bigger than "any" similar tool on the market. People have to figure out what their job is, to get the bosses work done, or to look cool and trendy.
Back in dee-troit when I was a kid, there was all the usual fanboy ragging on each other over cars and engines, etc, but there was one cosmic truth that EVERYONE agreed on. You can have all your fancy turbos and whatnots, but where the rubber meets the road, day in and day out for power --> "there's no replacement for displacement"
Same deal with laptops, the solutions are there for long battery life if people weren't such weenies about it. They are designing for wimps it appears. Get the "fab five" out of the design room and stick a couple of good ole boys in there, they'll tell the engineers how to design
soprry, just thought I'd stick these comments here, vis a vis capitalism, free stuff etc.
Google can skip the email data mining and institute this for the voluntary and free ad based service. When you get an account with them, you are presented with a menu option, you have to check off a certain minimum number of topics (goods/services) that you are interested in. You can revisit that whenever you want to. You can't NOT choose a certain number to be fair to google, so it's in your interest to check off what floats your boat. Those ads get served, and google must promise to not sell the email addy or the topics, they are the trusted middleman in this. . The email stays reasonably secure (+ - ), and you should also have an option to either store email on their servers OR delete it, similar to what most ISPs have now. There should also be an option so that you can check off "please, text only both ways, no images, etc" mail. People who want "ohh shiny" email (biggest problem out there IMO) can have it, people who would rather skip the exploit dujour can have that. Text ads are perfectly acceptable to me at least, for a free email service, and I might actually purchase a product, because I *would* check topics of interest. I know I have purchased stuff (RAM to be precise) I saw as a result of googles sidebar ads when I ran a search. And the login cookie can be dealt with, just log out when you want to surf and trash that particular cookie, or set it to expire or whatever.
... and the mothers and chilluns, all ate "organic" and were beyond radical, they were "terrorists" and their "protests" against "the establishment" involved the selective application of Pb based "packets" using the "flashmob" techniques of the day.. It was an effective strategy.
If you are against organic and radical, it makes you un-USA patriotic, IMO.
... can't you just pre filter all email attachments and run them through your own scanner, deleting the nasties while still delivering the email, perhaps with a message "sorry, had to delete the attachment, it contained the whatever virus"? Is this not an option? And if the email recipient keeps getting infected email from wherever, just blacklisting the sender? As in "tough noogies"?
I agree with another post though, from what I hear in meatworld from people I know who have gotten nailed, it's very casual non-guru users running outlook and downloading songs or warez where most of the problem lies. Well, the problem STARTS with virus and worm authors of course, don't mean to neglect that, I don't want to blame the victim, except to the point to gently nudge them into safe computing practices and choice of software.
--just looked at their page. Yes it does seem to be what they are doing and how they are thinking. Crusoe chip, solid state storage, etc seems the way to go in laptop/mobile design. So is it just marketing now? Who's got the laptops that use this chip, and are they any more energy efficient than your mainstream IBM's and Dells and Sonys, etc?
I really don't know. Is it the processor, the screen and video card/widget, or the various drives? I DO know the power supply with it's voltage changes, etc dumps heat like a big dog, there's got to be some efficiency to be gained there by designing the whole system from the git-go to use all the same voltage somehow.. Inverting and transforming seems like such a waste...
If it's the drives, I think making laptops work from a more efficient and well designed RAM image/cache might be the way to go, but I'm not any sort of engineer either. Getting the hard drive to not have to work much past first boot might go a long way to increasing battery life methinks, but I dunno.... Using an embedded OS on a chip rather than keeping it on the hard drive?
There's got to be some better laptop design criteria out there other than trying to cram an energy hog desktop design (basically) inside a small folding case.... And maybe live with the limitations rather than expecting near identical performance and features.
really, springs, clocksprings to be exact. I brought this up in another discussion last week. I have two radios (baygen/freeplay)that make quite good use of windup to tighten a spring to run a microgenerator technology in lieu of batteries. I have another radio that has built in solar and a crank on the side that is a direct generator to on board rechargeable battery, plus it has another compartment that holds disposable batteries, or you can plug in a voltage adapter. It's an inexpensive radio, but it has 4 way power and works quite well. I understand now that grundig has an even higher quality radio with a similar crank to microgenerator scheme. This sort of technology makes use of extremely efficient energy conversion and energy storage, ie, biochemical from the human body, that beats heck out of any battery out there. How about at least starting with a PDA to see if the windup style concepts have merit and can be adapted up the useage scale then? I see a lot of these PDAs use AA or AAA batteries, the same as these small radios, seems a natural to me. Even just a power adapter that is the spring, crank and battery bank, and that plugs into existing PDAs if they have a DC jack in. something along those lines. It's just not that hard to run a tiny crank for 30 to 60 seconds.
... on the condensation point. I didn't mean for my post to be the total outline, just a gross overview. A partial solution is to provide a few sumps in the pipeline. Incidently, a similar arrangment has been developed PRECISELY as a water harvesting tool in water-poor areas. I believe that too was covered in a slashdot article last year or the year before, perhaps inside the peruvian airdams article IIRC.
Another good idea for the backyard geothermal cooling idea would be to place an air cleaner device such as an aranizer (brand name) in the input air stream. Indoor air should be scrubbed/charcoal filtered/ treated with ozone whatever anyway, IMO. Most buildings have too many toxins in them. You want to have efficient heating and cooling, but ya want clean fresh air, too. With the super insulation techniques, you are forced to consider air ingress and egress, because the resulting structure is (as close as possible) fairly air tight. In fact, a super insulated structure has to have direct air feed for gas burning devices (dryer, stove, hot water heater, furnace, etc) or woodstoves for instance.
Incorporating adequate air intake and filtration is a must have-in those structures.
That Legionnaires outbreak was in Phily I believe.
We are always going to have cootieth in our environments, the best bet is to keep joe immune system in top notch shape. One less jolt and one more apple juice in other words, and so on and so forth.. And definetly part of that is to keep your local micro environment, your home and indoor office worspace, clean in all manners.
I think the potential problems associated with a passive thermosiphon/geothermal rig can be addressed adequately. After all, it really is only outside air as the initial source, not a lot different from opening the window to the screens. a little foreplanning and some sumps, and a way to periodically flush and clean the sytem using the hose and some detergent solution should be adequate. Thanks for bringing up that aspect of this. Energy and using it more efficiently is of prime importance to this changing whirrled, something I was reminded of the other day when I went to the gas pump. Ouch!
heh, I have an antique moped (around a 78 I believe)I need new piston rings and other 2 stroke whatnot for, I think I'll work on it this summer sometime. When it was running it got like 40-50 miles to the quart! Something nuts like that anyway, way non-thirsty. Couldn't hurt if (when) this oil business gets even more expensive! A HORSE might be nice, too! heh heh heh heh
--legally, you don't even need one. You will need a government issued taxpayer ID though, in most instances. Private companies that are issuing credit to you (starting your utilities, etc) can require a number and refuse service if you won't give it. It's not impossible to get rid of your SSN and still deal with modern reality, but it IS difficult, requires some legal BS, and beyond the scope of even a long forum post. There are numerous places to google for and investigate this matter.
With that said, and because it's the truth, I've had good luck NOT providing my number by relating a story of identity theft that occurred to me, and offering to pay a deposit up front. someone apparently got my number from some place where I worked, turned utilities on at some place I never lived, then when they moved they left the bills outstanding. I really tried to clear it up, but one utility in particular just slap refused to admit they were wrong, and I was forced to pay them to avoid having my service at my lawful residence turned off. 90 clams, I'm still hot over it sometimes. the rest I got straightened out satisfactorily. Just a few months ago I got a cell phone this way, I gave a cliff notes version of my story, asked politely if I could just get the service, offered to show proof of "me" and where I lived, etc. the manager gave in and gave me the cell service. No idea what he inputed into his forms.
It's a real crapshoot, some companies will let ya skate and give you the service, others are dinks abut it. My current ISP and my last ISP were both good about it, I was able to get netservice without providing anything but cash and a name.
I think the crisis with outsourcing and cross linked data bases is going to result in an explosion of identity theft and fraud sometime soon. I'm a curmedgeon, I try to use cash as much as possible, and I live cheaply, simply, frugally and within the law, but I have stopped thinking that this brave new world corporate/government sharing and mining data stuff is going to really help things, it won't, just make privacy evaporate. IMO anyway. It certainly won't do zip-squat to stop any "terrorism", that's for sure.
Good luck! For broadband, I just might offer my #, I admit to a certain lust there, I get a decent 28.8 connection and that's it for what you can get where I live and I'm greatful for that. Wireless broadband whenever it comes might be it for me to enter the 21st century. I put up with the tradeoffs, it's more important for me to live rural than it is to have broadband. To each their own.
..uinless. perhaps.... remember the discussions when IBM sold off it's hard drive division to Hitachi? I remember thinking on it and postulating (on another forum) something along the lines of "I smell a rat, IBM wouldn't sell unless they had some new whizzbang storage method in their skunkworks". Well, a short time later they announced their brick storage and that other technique, dang forget the name now, but I was right. Now, this sun business the last coupla weeks is interesting to me, and is similar. Sun settling with microsoft and cross licensing *could be* Sun slipping it to MS and getting paid for it.. now WHATIF Sun got a new cross platform development tool/language under wraps that blows the doors off of java? That leaves MS with 1.6 billion in egg on their face, and they are free to keep develioping what might be in essence a quickly abandoned platform, along with trying to make.Net a still-viable option. MS would be sweating. They are sweating now in a lot of areas, that would be like giving them an extra wool blannky on a 90 degree day.
I am not saying this is fact, just a-wondering is all. On the surface, the settlement makes no (not much anyway) sense, so there needs to be a reason, and I just don't think Sun and MS turned into butt buddies overnight, too much long standing hard feelings and mistrust to overcome there. NO ONE trusts microsoft (anymore) to make a deal with them that will make them any money, at best, people make deals with microsoft just to mitigate their losses, ie, take the lesser of two evils when confronted with rock/hard place. Sun isn't stupid, I just can't help but think there's a single big clue that hasn't been made public yet.
The only reason I can think of to Sun to cozy up to MS is if they are scared out of their shorts that their hardware is going to go, too, and figure that the only way they can save it is to 100% give in to MS and become an almost full partnership, with them making the hardware and MS making the software that runs on it. A super Apple in other words.
maybe, don't know, the whole deal just seems fishy to me, and not worth the bantered about figures to either side. something else is up..
... the ability to customise your display preferences, and also an easy way to keep track of on-going discussions that you have participated in. At least that's why I registered.
I have been politically active since the 64 election cycle. Have done a lot of writing and working on various campaigns (not for a long time though with any Ds or Rs). I also walk the walk on being independent and working within the traditional constitutional framework by my personal lifestyle. I use honest money when I can, I try to help-say in energy- by using some solar, and renewables like wood, and by limiting my driving and using combined trips, and growing a lot of my own food, etc, showing by example, not just bitching about it and talking about it, but by doing. I don't wait for "government" to fix things for me, to the best of my ability and resources. I send a lot of letters, etc to various politicians, etc, but have mostly slowed that down, it's an obvious waste of time. sometimes a letter or direct phone callis effective, but it's sorta obvious now if you aren't a lobbyist with bundles of cash, that any sort of normal activism is lost on them. sucks but there ya go, I don't believe in paying bribes. I've posted a lot to various forums since being on the net full time, and helped people get the information they need to better able to see more of the big picture, to use an old quote, "It's an information war". The net is the best thing since burritos in a bag for getting information out. If we had had the net in the 60's I doubt they could have gotten away with the nam war as long asd they did. We at least got the stinking draft removed. I'm not a part of the major media, but by using the net I can reach a lot of people. Cool Beans. It's a useful tool, and I know from feedback that I have gotten over the years that a lot of people have been helped, and in some instances, it's gone up the food chain to TPTB, whereas just little ole me trying to do it it gets lost in the noise.
We used to have a saying that is still relevant today "you are part of the problem or part of the solution". My goal is to help people realise they can be part of the solution by getting involved, spreading the word on various issues, etc. and that's IT, you really can't do much more than that, it will take masses of people getting hip(per) to effect change.
Whether or not that does any good is hard to say. If by my writings I can encourage a government whistleblower, swell, maybe it's happened. If it has made someone think twice over following illegal "orders", then swell. I do have a past record of being involved personally in lawsuits against the government (one local, some pretty serious corruption that resulted in a lot of city council changes and inspector changes), and in both cases I have won, representing myself by the way, hard enough to do in any normal legal conflict. that took months out of my time just to research codes, court procedure, etc, and it further opened my eyes to how broad and deep the rot goes. It got my dander up bigtime. I've never liked bullies, and the biggest bully out there is uncle sam, and I am truly sad to say that, too, but it's TRUE.
To my way of thinking, short of armed resistance, there isn't a lot you can do other than showing, via writing or by the spoken word, what the problems are, and to offer possible solutions. Trying to change the democratic or republican party from within is RIDICULOUS, it's gone on too long now as a criminal enterprise, it's a waste of time. At lower levels, there's a ton of concerned, well meaning and honest people, at the county boss level and above, nope, crooked enterprise run by crooks for crooks, with few exceptions. They just are not going to change those parties in any meaningful way, they got too much to lose. It's like asking the mafia to go straight, just ain't happening anytime soon.
If enough critical mass of people can be motivated to really look at the problems, to drag themselves away from the pablum of bread and circuses the PTB use to keep people in ignorance,then eventually even strong forces in government resistant to constructive change might be mitigated to something more-fair and more-legal. Around the nation it's
... that it's legitimate to want to have both honest, efficient, and constitutionally correct government, and we aren't getting it since the rise of the mega corporations and government by bribe, or by the entrenched two criminal gangs that hijacked government and hold it hostage. There is little to no chance of any meaningful change with the ballot box-for instance- if credible third party candidates get little to no press covereage, nor are allowed to participate in the so called "national debates". At the federal and state levels, it's mostly a lock in, and the mega corps who, with their bribed and blackmailed paid off reps and senators control the mass media to such an extent that little to no news coverage of any alternatives is the norm. There are several credible third parties out there-where's the news coverage? I've talked to a lot of people on this subject, most folks have never even heard of any third parties, they never get a chance to really even think about it. And even if they do, and lobby the news orgs for coverage, they get ignored.
The court system at the higher levels is staffed with hand picked crony candidates from one of the two cooperating political gangs. There is NO way a judge will be appointed who would go against the entrenched establishment, he wouldn't make the preliminary cut for consideration. it's back room deals, totally.
We have no separation of powers in *fact*, although that's the theory. We have a carefully constructed illusion of constitutional government, but it's long gone, too many examples to list in a short reply post to show that.
I have no wish to move to another nation, I merely want this nation to be run better, with some honesty and dignity and respect for the basic philosophy behind our creation as a nation, that is, the individual is paramount, we are born with our basic rights and they are not government granted. We are supposed to have honest government, a severely restricted and small in size federal government, we aren't supposed to have permanent large standing armies, we are supposed to have honest productive wealth based currency, not debit fiat counterfeit based currency, and the various other basic premises outlined in common english words in the original constitution. the original constitution didn't delineate the basic born with rights, and concern was felt at the time that in the future that these might be abused, so the first ten were written to delineate them,. and they are prohibited from being changed, as they are called "born with" rights. that's a clear distinction over all the other supposed "laws of the land". They are obviously being ignored now, government is out of control, completely. I don't think that is in any way "wrong" to point these issues out or to want a return to the original ideas, that are quite sound.
again for what it's worth, I can turn you on to a couple of different roofing insulation schemes, again, in use around my locale. One uses a rubberized elastic + insulation spray-on coating in place of paint on metal roofing, but the same can be applied to normal shingled roofing as well. The other is a normal paint that has heat reflective properties. Hmm, I have to check the name, BRB....
Had to go outside and look at a bucket. The paint is called "polar cap", from integratedcoatings.com. The chicken farmer here (16 buildings, that's a lot of cluckers) swears by it, says it will drop his roof temps 10 degrees F in the georgia heat, saving beau coup on the electric.
The roofing insulation stuff I can't remember the name of right now, but it was a spin-off from normal rubberized roofing systems. It added around a one inch thick layer of sprayed on self hardening foam first (I am guessing some sort of poly urethane), then the spray on rubber compound. Allegedly lasted lots longer than normal roofing, and could be directly applied to about any exisiting roofing system wiuthout removing the old shingles or whatever. Hope that's enough info to go googling with.
... failed systems. It might not be cost effective for google to deal with them, but I bet you could piece together a lot of functioning boxes from the scrappage.
Slashdot Mirror
... underwriters laboratories or like consumer reports magazine? Are there any other remotely credible industry neutral testers or analysts out there?
/more generic ranting on this topic
Coders plus it's everyone who works in these fields that revolve around "computers". man, it's big. B EYE GEE BIG. The cross section of slashdot readers basically. The only exceptions are the young guys here, who real soon are gonna need jobs, too, and most of them would probably be sympathetic and could help out too.. Think they aren't thinking about this? First generation in US history who have a real credible chance of having a much lower standard of living than their parents generation?
The network engineers, the sys admins, the ISP workers, telco guys,cable guys, data entry folks,various media technicians, print and electronic, the people in the financial sectors who run the banks and insurance industries and that fat rip off the middle class magic beans for the cow casino called "wall street", on and on and etc. "IT workers". Guys who run the boxes in the remaining factories. All over. Remember Y2K? Right now the threat of what the ramifications were then is still real,because those dire predictions can be implemented *at will* by the application of coordinated effort, merely by...stopping work. that's it, just don't do it. No sabotage needed, nuthin, just the willingness one day to say ENOUGH! and make it stick.. Just the threat to shut that sucker down, all of it, would be sufficient for major concessions, because there is-NO-replacement for the US IT labor force at this moment in time. Nothing immediate, nothing that would work, it's not even patchable if even a large percentage chipped in and went along with it. it would be an unfixable proble for "da man" and his greed. I mean, IT controls even if people get paychecks across the nation. Everything. I can't think of a single thing that doesn't have IT people connected to it, directly or tangentially.
It's an awesome amount of power there going to waste. The fatcats desparately try to keep it DIS unified, so they can maintain control, and keep the bulk of the power and wealth in a very few hands. Geez, I mean look around, who really calls the shots in this nation? I bet you could fit them in one small room, but it's BECAUSE they got so many IT workers who are willing to EAT IT RAW AND LOVE IT just like these poor folks in the article.
Man I'm hot over that article, because it's already happened to me in blue collar meat world, TWICE.
It-the unionizing and strike potential- CAN be used as a bargaining chip for great social, economic and political change, change that will benefit all of the US basically, at the expense of the less than 1% fatcats who call the shots now, and the mindless fatcat drone wannabes who go along with such practices as outlined in the article, making you train your outsourced replacement! And WHO CARES if it inconveniences those goons! That is not only nuts, it's an obscene moral affront. I'm not an IT guy, just a blue collar schmoo who likes computers,who happens to have an extremly well developed sense of "right/wrong" when it comes to people getting shafted by bullies,from individual on up, who's SEEN the effects "outsourcing" and "insourcing" serf workers has had in my few professions, and now seeing it in the employment fields that were PROMISED to the US people to be the "new replacement" industries. ALL A BIG FAT LIE.
These fatcat goons want as their main goal nothing less than a global two class society, them, and 99% everyone else as near serfs. They want what they get in those second world nations they dig, a technofeudalistic neo aristocracy class, then powerless shufflin drones, blue and white collar, and huge domestic police forces/paramilitary to keep eveeryone cowed.
Look at what their poster boy golden nation is now-one "party", no freedoms to speak of, keep your mouth shut or we'll kill you china. THAT'S their model nation/society/economic model. SAY WHUT? Technologically bent, feudalistic in political orientation. That's what these globalists want in the US, and that means the gradual destruction of the middle clas
... but then, when you (generically speaking)get a response from people who ARE doing it, who aren't hypocrites,it mostly gets ignored, then a month or so later, yet again another article about alternatives comes out, the same old FUD gets spewed about how it "won't work" a few people reply "but, I"M DOING IT RIGHT NOW AND IT ROX!" , they get mostly ignored,and the cycle continues. I have seen this so much on many many forums when this gets discussed. already there's at least one guy here who's posted of being on solar, and I know I posted on it a lot last year.
The deal is, and the *real* main deal is, it doesn't have to be either grid OR alternative home produced power. You CAN have both. I keep reading over and over and over again "wah, it won't run my home bacvkyard neutron smelter and..." Well, you can have BOTH. Both. You don't give up anything, you GAIN. You get MO POWAH! This is slick. You can make a decent dent in your overall useage, have a _jam-up_ home UPS system for your boxes, have a guaranteed source of SOME power for lights,TV, radio, etc, even when all your neighbors are borked and sitting in the dark from a storm or some drunk fool taking out a transformer by smacking into a pole, etc, for just not that much money, especially when you figure that many lenders now will amortize the installation right into your 20 year home note right from the git-go..
This is slick!
Until last year, I lived the previous (almost) 4 at a place that was 80% or so all solar powered. I was a caretaker on an estate, the main house was three stories, had every gadget you can imagine, these folks were electronic gadget freaks. Almost everything in the house ran just fine off the solar except the heatpumps. Those were pure grid, but in a pinch, for the winter, there was a whopper centralised woodstove, and in the summer, well, fans and window screens. Mostly though they used grid for the heatpumps, and solar for everdang thing else, which was a lot. The owners (pretty upper middle class to be fair) popped about what -say- someone might pay for a slightly better than average new vehicle, or a ski boat that got used 6 times a year, along those lines cost wise. That could have been reduced considerably if they had done their own install, but they hired it out.
The system worked well, and I ran it, which was basically checking some levels on the trace boxes, and topping off batts once in awhile with distilled water, in other words, not much maintenance. I lived on the property in an RV, I still have it, I had/still-have actually my own smallish solar rig, ran my computer, fans, tv, etc off of it. I ran an underground line to their house for my own circuit from their larger solar, and that ran my electric heater in the winter (very small but it worked). I used propane for my cooking. Their house had all the normal things, washing machine, many tv's, several computers, faxes, lights,stereos, fridge, freezer, you name it, a normal home, actually borderline mansion. We ran the deep well off of grid 220 most of the time, but in a pinch, we could flick two levers and keep water during a blackout from the solar. For backup to that was a 12 KW diesel genny we never had to use, but I ran it once a month anyway, mostly to keep the starter batts charged. The stuff WORKS man, don't believe the FUD. It's clean, too, real clean power. If you (anyone you's) locale has good solar potential, it's a great adjunct, and it's infinetly scaleable, you can start at under one grand for useful power and storage,(a good panel-medium sized, a couple storage batts, inverter, charge controller)(my rig would be around 1500 clams today, basically what I outlined except three panels and 4 batts) then scale to whatever you want. Other locations, wind might be a better option, etc, it's a big variable. Some places, solar is good in the summer, wind in the winter, so a hybrid system using both is used. That's quite a common rig across the US, BTW. It just depends, all you need is what is called a "site survey" to determine what might
what he said... I think.....
... are missing it. Think about unionizing. And if you do, watch the union bosses and make sure they don't get blackmailed or bribed. That's it for advice. The two choices are watch jobs go away and paycheck shrink or vanish, or keep jobs, build better stuff, keep mo money for yourself and inside the nation where it recirculates and helps the economy as a whole.
You are one of only two or three professions who have the clout-if unionized-to shut the country down business-wise, a *pretty_dang_ snazzy* bargaining chip. And there ain't didlly squat uncle sam or any coalition of corporate bosses could do about it, because YOU CONTROL ALL THE STUFF AND THEY DON'T KNOW HOW.
You could force an end to outsourcing and H1B abuses, you could force "fair trade" over hideous and erroneously termed "free trade" scam billionaire's ripoffs with it's unequal excise taxes between nations (our exports are taxed a lot higher usually by other nations on most products), you could force "safe computing" as a standard on the manufacturers, you could actually stand a chance against the marketing weenies on important technical and engineering aspects..... you could make quality job 1 everywhere, and keep getting paid for it, instead of "ohh, it's shiny now, ship it out!" decisions...
buy a clue, look at the article again...
wall
handwriting
All you need is a union. If you wait, it'll be too late. Snooze ya lose....
I bet just over slashdot you could have several thousand people start a union within a few days....or hours really
--I just read his autobiography a month or so again, very interesting. The gist of it is, before the era of large malpractice awards, the insurance companies were absolute scumbags when it came to legitimate medical malpractice claims. Human beings were actually really screwed bad and it was brushed off, ignored, justice wasn't being done, and the med establishment was hunky dory with that. They screwed up, weren't self policing enough of their own colleagues. Generally speaking of course, But that really was it. Spence and a few others finally cracked it, on blatantly obvious cases that the doctors and insurance companies chose to fight, rather than just cutting a much smaller check to the victims of the malpractice. The juries awarded the verdicts,partly to reimburse the victims (or next of kin unfortunately) and partly to SEND A MESSAGE to those big corps and shaky docs to not screw people over. they still kept trying, so they got pushed hard back, and now it's a mess. Based on verifiable data and the disgust they felt at those corporations, the juries did it, just folks like thee and me. IF the insurance companies and med establishment hadn't been such outright dinks, most likely it never would have gotten so bad. I realise it has see sawed now, but originally, they brought it on themselves. I am no fanboy of the law profession, I tend to think they make life a lot more complicated and expensive than it needs to be, but sometimes there IS no other remedy to try and get some relief*. It's hard as heck to be joe paycheck and get screwed over by megacorp and even think about fighting it in court. Default in 99% of the cases with joe paycheck against some corp is the corp will never admit they are wrong, EVEN when they know full well they are. That's been proven over and over again, and they use that ridiculous ruling allowing corps to be treated as almost blameless "persons" to hide behind.. Some balance is needed, and it's not *all* one side or the other is the complete bad guy. There's A-"profit is the ultimate king, whatever it takes" business plan, then there's B- "we at XYZ corp are in business to make money,and we will, but our policy is honesty and we do not engage in unethical behavior or lying".
If these big corps would just buy a single clue with the zillions they make and adopt business plan B over A, they might avoid a lot of problems down the road.
As to software, this is an easy question. If it's for-profit, it should be held to useability standards, same as any other product. If it's free, then, ya take your chances and get what ya pay for. I see no reason whatsoever that a company like microsoft is able to make hundreds of billions over the years, yet they incur no liability when their software is so blatantly hideous that it costs inncoent purchasers and other folks on the net actual folding money and lotsa time to fix their stuff. It has never computed for me anyway. There should be, at the very least, some sort of minimum threshold security model before selling software that accesses the net. It should be built in and functional. What they have had traditionally was profits first, and down the list at job 73 or something was "oh ya, have joe check on the security thing after his break, will ya?" That's nuts. I am especially incensed that any of my tax dollars have gone to support them, especially the last few years when it was obvious even to non computer users that their stuff was seriously borked when it came to security.
*Mr. Subliminal says "dueling". It worked for thousands of years.
Like a lot of folks, I no gottum broadband, still dialup, best connect I get is a 28... I would love to be able to get a fresh burned CD of a distro WITH THE LATEST PATCHES, maybe even use a menu and pick and chose my apps and have it do dependencies, etc, so I don't get the stuff i really don't use or want. I am running FC1 now, and I'm almost done updating it, only some hundred odd megs to go. When is release 2? Oh, yah, next month..... Swell..... just swelllllll
Thing is, it would cost me a lot more to drive to some computer store to get it than to just order it from a clone burner and snail mail it....which is what I do now.
... pricey, but cool.
If the time between identifying the new viruses and getting the latest definitions from the vendors gets much worse, might I suggest time delayed email then? It still gets sent, just not immediately, let it queue up and re run it after you recheck the latest and baddest new exploit, say 3 or 4 times a day? something like that? Maybe longer if a particular nasty one gets loose.. I know that idea sucks initially, but if it can help stop viruses from propagating as fast, it might be worth it, Especially for business. Extremely important info time-critical to a business decision can still be transmitted using the old fashioned but still reliable "hey earl, check this out..." phone call.
Personally, I more or less stopped using email a coupla years ago, I check mine every other day, that's it. I couldn't get people to stop sending me crap more or less, got sick of it. At this moment I don't have much need for immediate delivery. That might change back, I used to be a fiend on it, newsgroups, lists, etc, but now... got tired of it, that's all. I know, that's just me, everyone else on the planet needs updated email every other nano second...oh well.. And I use text only option, too, just because it makes sense to me.
... the 4 way power radio, is basically shirt pocket/PDA sized and doesn't use a spring, it's just direct crank/genny/into the recharageables. It is identical in size to normal "couple of AAs only" shirt pocket radios, basically, just a fold out crank on the side.
I agre the current crop of clockwork spring driven baygen/freeplays are big, but they were designed to be table top portables for use in third world countries where many people could sit around and listen to them with the big speaker inside, there aren't any provisions for batteries in them at all (earlier models like I own anyway). the newer ones have recharagables and built in LED small reading light.. Most of the case if you open it up is hollow, BTW, it's just a platform to house the large speaker. The radio itself is just a small normal card, (analog tuning however), and the crank/spring assembly is not that large removed, and it could be made lots smaller if it only had to power earbuds. Springs are just correctly tempered steel after all, size is just normal engineering, nothing exotic to it.
My other thoughts on the laptop "battery don't last long enough!" so called dilemma is.. really.. are people such weenies they couldn't carry one extra lb? I have 3 laptops, all older and a few lbs heavier than current models, but really, people carried them around. I just think there would be a market still for a laptop that carried multiple batteries on board to give it the range peole need, a lot of folks want ultra small light weight, but a lot of people could "struggle by" with an additional 1-2 lbs weight if it doubled or tripled their running time. some wouldn't, my guess is a lot of actual power users just might.
The weight would be exactly what they were carrying just a few years ago, and no one got hernias then. Same weight, better computer, much longer running time then just a few years ago, by the simple addition of one or two exisiting batteries. Why is this such a dilemma? I'm sorry but as a blue collar worker I do NOT have mucvh sympathy for climate controlled indoor workers who make serious folding money and can't carry an extra lb or two occassionaly as they step from AC office to AC office. None. Zero sympathy. Weenies.
And the multiple batteries have to be onboard, parallel wired and hot swappable. There's the obvious solution. ONE battery onboard and having to carry loose spares is nuts, IMO. You want to turn on your machine and not have to dick with it for a long workday, that's the bottom line. It's like cellphones now, sure they are teeny tiny, etc, but sheesh, I can NOT even hardly see the screens or use those ridiculous lilliputian contraptions that pass as the keyboards. Sucks. I will hold on to my older larger cell phone as long as possible because of this, and I'm not gonna pop 2 to 500 clams for a cell phone, no matter what it does, ain't happening.
grumble, rant, kvetch....
Sometimes little is cool, sometimes you just got to go with the mass needed to do the job.
Now I go outside to buck up some whopper big oak branches the tree service just dropped before lunch. Will I use my small dinky homelite xl because it's lighter, or will I fire up the 18 inch bar husky 55?
Sometimes the right tool for the job is just bigger than "any" similar tool on the market. People have to figure out what their job is, to get the bosses work done, or to look cool and trendy.
Back in dee-troit when I was a kid, there was all the usual fanboy ragging on each other over cars and engines, etc, but there was one cosmic truth that EVERYONE agreed on. You can have all your fancy turbos and whatnots, but where the rubber meets the road, day in and day out for power --> "there's no replacement for displacement"
Same deal with laptops, the solutions are there for long battery life if people weren't such weenies about it. They are designing for wimps it appears. Get the "fab five" out of the design room and stick a couple of good ole boys in there, they'll tell the engineers how to design
soprry, just thought I'd stick these comments here, vis a vis capitalism, free stuff etc.
Google can skip the email data mining and institute this for the voluntary and free ad based service. When you get an account with them, you are presented with a menu option, you have to check off a certain minimum number of topics (goods/services) that you are interested in. You can revisit that whenever you want to. You can't NOT choose a certain number to be fair to google, so it's in your interest to check off what floats your boat. Those ads get served, and google must promise to not sell the email addy or the topics, they are the trusted middleman in this. . The email stays reasonably secure (+ - ), and you should also have an option to either store email on their servers OR delete it, similar to what most ISPs have now. There should also be an option so that you can check off "please, text only both ways, no images, etc" mail. People who want "ohh shiny" email (biggest problem out there IMO) can have it, people who would rather skip the exploit dujour can have that. Text ads are perfectly acceptable to me at least, for a free email service, and I might actually purchase a product, because I *would* check topics of interest. I know I have purchased stuff (RAM to be precise) I saw as a result of googles sidebar ads when I ran a search. And the login cookie can be dealt with, just log out when you want to surf and trash that particular cookie, or set it to expire or whatever.
That more or less would work I think.
... and the mothers and chilluns, all ate "organic" and were beyond radical, they were "terrorists" and their "protests" against "the establishment" involved the selective application of Pb based "packets" using the "flashmob" techniques of the day.. It was an effective strategy.
If you are against organic and radical, it makes you un-USA patriotic, IMO.
... can't you just pre filter all email attachments and run them through your own scanner, deleting the nasties while still delivering the email, perhaps with a message "sorry, had to delete the attachment, it contained the whatever virus"? Is this not an option? And if the email recipient keeps getting infected email from wherever, just blacklisting the sender? As in "tough noogies"?
I agree with another post though, from what I hear in meatworld from people I know who have gotten nailed, it's very casual non-guru users running outlook and downloading songs or warez where most of the problem lies. Well, the problem STARTS with virus and worm authors of course, don't mean to neglect that, I don't want to blame the victim, except to the point to gently nudge them into safe computing practices and choice of software.
--just looked at their page. Yes it does seem to be what they are doing and how they are thinking. Crusoe chip, solid state storage, etc seems the way to go in laptop/mobile design. So is it just marketing now? Who's got the laptops that use this chip, and are they any more energy efficient than your mainstream IBM's and Dells and Sonys, etc?
I really don't know. Is it the processor, the screen and video card/widget, or the various drives? I DO know the power supply with it's voltage changes, etc dumps heat like a big dog, there's got to be some efficiency to be gained there by designing the whole system from the git-go to use all the same voltage somehow.. Inverting and transforming seems like such a waste...
If it's the drives, I think making laptops work from a more efficient and well designed RAM image/cache might be the way to go, but I'm not any sort of engineer either. Getting the hard drive to not have to work much past first boot might go a long way to increasing battery life methinks, but I dunno.... Using an embedded OS on a chip rather than keeping it on the hard drive?
There's got to be some better laptop design criteria out there other than trying to cram an energy hog desktop design (basically) inside a small folding case.... And maybe live with the limitations rather than expecting near identical performance and features.
really, springs, clocksprings to be exact. I brought this up in another discussion last week. I have two radios (baygen/freeplay)that make quite good use of windup to tighten a spring to run a microgenerator technology in lieu of batteries. I have another radio that has built in solar and a crank on the side that is a direct generator to on board rechargeable battery, plus it has another compartment that holds disposable batteries, or you can plug in a voltage adapter. It's an inexpensive radio, but it has 4 way power and works quite well. I understand now that grundig has an even higher quality radio with a similar crank to microgenerator scheme. This sort of technology makes use of extremely efficient energy conversion and energy storage, ie, biochemical from the human body, that beats heck out of any battery out there. How about at least starting with a PDA to see if the windup style concepts have merit and can be adapted up the useage scale then? I see a lot of these PDAs use AA or AAA batteries, the same as these small radios, seems a natural to me. Even just a power adapter that is the spring, crank and battery bank, and that plugs into existing PDAs if they have a DC jack in. something along those lines. It's just not that hard to run a tiny crank for 30 to 60 seconds.
... you help out then? If there are more tips n tricks out there, help to implement them if you have the skills and memory.
... on the condensation point. I didn't mean for my post to be the total outline, just a gross overview. A partial solution is to provide a few sumps in the pipeline. Incidently, a similar arrangment has been developed PRECISELY as a water harvesting tool in water-poor areas. I believe that too was covered in a slashdot article last year or the year before, perhaps inside the peruvian airdams article IIRC.
Another good idea for the backyard geothermal cooling idea would be to place an air cleaner device such as an aranizer (brand name) in the input air stream. Indoor air should be scrubbed/charcoal filtered/ treated with ozone whatever anyway, IMO. Most buildings have too many toxins in them. You want to have efficient heating and cooling, but ya want clean fresh air, too. With the super insulation techniques, you are forced to consider air ingress and egress, because the resulting structure is (as close as possible) fairly air tight. In fact, a super insulated structure has to have direct air feed for gas burning devices (dryer, stove, hot water heater, furnace, etc) or woodstoves for instance.
Incorporating adequate air intake and filtration is a must have-in those structures.
That Legionnaires outbreak was in Phily I believe.
We are always going to have cootieth in our environments, the best bet is to keep joe immune system in top notch shape. One less jolt and one more apple juice in other words, and so on and so forth.. And definetly part of that is to keep your local micro environment, your home and indoor office worspace, clean in all manners.
I think the potential problems associated with a passive thermosiphon/geothermal rig can be addressed adequately. After all, it really is only outside air as the initial source, not a lot different from opening the window to the screens. a little foreplanning and some sumps, and a way to periodically flush and clean the sytem using the hose and some detergent solution should be adequate. Thanks for bringing up that aspect of this. Energy and using it more efficiently is of prime importance to this changing whirrled, something I was reminded of the other day when I went to the gas pump. Ouch!
heh, I have an antique moped (around a 78 I believe)I need new piston rings and other 2 stroke whatnot for, I think I'll work on it this summer sometime. When it was running it got like 40-50 miles to the quart! Something nuts like that anyway, way non-thirsty. Couldn't hurt if (when) this oil business gets even more expensive! A HORSE might be nice, too! heh heh heh heh
--legally, you don't even need one. You will need a government issued taxpayer ID though, in most instances. Private companies that are issuing credit to you (starting your utilities, etc) can require a number and refuse service if you won't give it. It's not impossible to get rid of your SSN and still deal with modern reality, but it IS difficult, requires some legal BS, and beyond the scope of even a long forum post. There are numerous places to google for and investigate this matter.
With that said, and because it's the truth, I've had good luck NOT providing my number by relating a story of identity theft that occurred to me, and offering to pay a deposit up front. someone apparently got my number from some place where I worked, turned utilities on at some place I never lived, then when they moved they left the bills outstanding. I really tried to clear it up, but one utility in particular just slap refused to admit they were wrong, and I was forced to pay them to avoid having my service at my lawful residence turned off. 90 clams, I'm still hot over it sometimes. the rest I got straightened out satisfactorily. Just a few months ago I got a cell phone this way, I gave a cliff notes version of my story, asked politely if I could just get the service, offered to show proof of "me" and where I lived, etc. the manager gave in and gave me the cell service. No idea what he inputed into his forms.
It's a real crapshoot, some companies will let ya skate and give you the service, others are dinks abut it. My current ISP and my last ISP were both good about it, I was able to get netservice without providing anything but cash and a name.
I think the crisis with outsourcing and cross linked data bases is going to result in an explosion of identity theft and fraud sometime soon. I'm a curmedgeon, I try to use cash as much as possible, and I live cheaply, simply, frugally and within the law, but I have stopped thinking that this brave new world corporate/government sharing and mining data stuff is going to really help things, it won't, just make privacy evaporate. IMO anyway. It certainly won't do zip-squat to stop any "terrorism", that's for sure.
Good luck! For broadband, I just might offer my #, I admit to a certain lust there, I get a decent 28.8 connection and that's it for what you can get where I live and I'm greatful for that. Wireless broadband whenever it comes might be it for me to enter the 21st century. I put up with the tradeoffs, it's more important for me to live rural than it is to have broadband. To each their own.
..uinless. perhaps.... remember the discussions when IBM sold off it's hard drive division to Hitachi? I remember thinking on it and postulating (on another forum) something along the lines of "I smell a rat, IBM wouldn't sell unless they had some new whizzbang storage method in their skunkworks". Well, a short time later they announced their brick storage and that other technique, dang forget the name now, but I was right. Now, this sun business the last coupla weeks is interesting to me, and is similar. Sun settling with microsoft and cross licensing *could be* Sun slipping it to MS and getting paid for it.. now WHATIF Sun got a new cross platform development tool/language under wraps that blows the doors off of java? That leaves MS with 1.6 billion in egg on their face, and they are free to keep develioping what might be in essence a quickly abandoned platform, along with trying to make .Net a still-viable option. MS would be sweating. They are sweating now in a lot of areas, that would be like giving them an extra wool blannky on a 90 degree day.
I am not saying this is fact, just a-wondering is all. On the surface, the settlement makes no (not much anyway) sense, so there needs to be a reason, and I just don't think Sun and MS turned into butt buddies overnight, too much long standing hard feelings and mistrust to overcome there. NO ONE trusts microsoft (anymore) to make a deal with them that will make them any money, at best, people make deals with microsoft just to mitigate their losses, ie, take the lesser of two evils when confronted with rock/hard place. Sun isn't stupid, I just can't help but think there's a single big clue that hasn't been made public yet.
The only reason I can think of to Sun to cozy up to MS is if they are scared out of their shorts that their hardware is going to go, too, and figure that the only way they can save it is to 100% give in to MS and become an almost full partnership, with them making the hardware and MS making the software that runs on it. A super Apple in other words.
maybe, don't know, the whole deal just seems fishy to me, and not worth the bantered about figures to either side. something else is up..
... the ability to customise your display preferences, and also an easy way to keep track of on-going discussions that you have participated in.
At least that's why I registered.
I have been politically active since the 64 election cycle. Have done a lot of writing and working on various campaigns (not for a long time though with any Ds or Rs). I also walk the walk on being independent and working within the traditional constitutional framework by my personal lifestyle. I use honest money when I can, I try to help-say in energy- by using some solar, and renewables like wood, and by limiting my driving and using combined trips, and growing a lot of my own food, etc, showing by example, not just bitching about it and talking about it, but by doing. I don't wait for "government" to fix things for me, to the best of my ability and resources. I send a lot of letters, etc to various politicians, etc, but have mostly slowed that down, it's an obvious waste of time. sometimes a letter or direct phone callis effective, but it's sorta obvious now if you aren't a lobbyist with bundles of cash, that any sort of normal activism is lost on them. sucks but there ya go, I don't believe in paying bribes. I've posted a lot to various forums since being on the net full time, and helped people get the information they need to better able to see more of the big picture, to use an old quote, "It's an information war". The net is the best thing since burritos in a bag for getting information out. If we had had the net in the 60's I doubt they could have gotten away with the nam war as long asd they did. We at least got the stinking draft removed. I'm not a part of the major media, but by using the net I can reach a lot of people. Cool Beans. It's a useful tool, and I know from feedback that I have gotten over the years that a lot of people have been helped, and in some instances, it's gone up the food chain to TPTB, whereas just little ole me trying to do it it gets lost in the noise.
We used to have a saying that is still relevant today "you are part of the problem or part of the solution". My goal is to help people realise they can be part of the solution by getting involved, spreading the word on various issues, etc. and that's IT, you really can't do much more than that, it will take masses of people getting hip(per) to effect change.
Whether or not that does any good is hard to say. If by my writings I can encourage a government whistleblower, swell, maybe it's happened. If it has made someone think twice over following illegal "orders", then swell. I do have a past record of being involved personally in lawsuits against the government (one local, some pretty serious corruption that resulted in a lot of city council changes and inspector changes), and in both cases I have won, representing myself by the way, hard enough to do in any normal legal conflict. that took months out of my time just to research codes, court procedure, etc, and it further opened my eyes to how broad and deep the rot goes. It got my dander up bigtime. I've never liked bullies, and the biggest bully out there is uncle sam, and I am truly sad to say that, too, but it's TRUE.
To my way of thinking, short of armed resistance, there isn't a lot you can do other than showing, via writing or by the spoken word, what the problems are, and to offer possible solutions. Trying to change the democratic or republican party from within is RIDICULOUS, it's gone on too long now as a criminal enterprise, it's a waste of time. At lower levels, there's a ton of concerned, well meaning and honest people, at the county boss level and above, nope, crooked enterprise run by crooks for crooks, with few exceptions. They just are not going to change those parties in any meaningful way, they got too much to lose. It's like asking the mafia to go straight, just ain't happening anytime soon.
If enough critical mass of people can be motivated to really look at the problems, to drag themselves away from the pablum of bread and circuses the PTB use to keep people in ignorance,then eventually even strong forces in government resistant to constructive change might be mitigated to something more-fair and more-legal. Around the nation it's
... that it's legitimate to want to have both honest, efficient, and constitutionally correct government, and we aren't getting it since the rise of the mega corporations and government by bribe, or by the entrenched two criminal gangs that hijacked government and hold it hostage. There is little to no chance of any meaningful change with the ballot box-for instance- if credible third party candidates get little to no press covereage, nor are allowed to participate in the so called "national debates". At the federal and state levels, it's mostly a lock in, and the mega corps who, with their bribed and blackmailed paid off reps and senators control the mass media to such an extent that little to no news coverage of any alternatives is the norm. There are several credible third parties out there-where's the news coverage? I've talked to a lot of people on this subject, most folks have never even heard of any third parties, they never get a chance to really even think about it. And even if they do, and lobby the news orgs for coverage, they get ignored.
The court system at the higher levels is staffed with hand picked crony candidates from one of the two cooperating political gangs. There is NO way a judge will be appointed who would go against the entrenched establishment, he wouldn't make the preliminary cut for consideration. it's back room deals, totally.
We have no separation of powers in *fact*, although that's the theory. We have a carefully constructed illusion of constitutional government, but it's long gone, too many examples to list in a short reply post to show that.
I have no wish to move to another nation, I merely want this nation to be run better, with some honesty and dignity and respect for the basic philosophy behind our creation as a nation, that is, the individual is paramount, we are born with our basic rights and they are not government granted. We are supposed to have honest government, a severely restricted and small in size federal government, we aren't supposed to have permanent large standing armies, we are supposed to have honest productive wealth based currency, not debit fiat counterfeit based currency, and the various other basic premises outlined in common english words in the original constitution. the original constitution didn't delineate the basic born with rights, and concern was felt at the time that in the future that these might be abused, so the first ten were written to delineate them,. and they are prohibited from being changed, as they are called "born with" rights. that's a clear distinction over all the other supposed "laws of the land". They are obviously being ignored now, government is out of control, completely. I don't think that is in any way "wrong" to point these issues out or to want a return to the original ideas, that are quite sound.
again for what it's worth, I can turn you on to a couple of different roofing insulation schemes, again, in use around my locale. One uses a rubberized elastic + insulation spray-on coating in place of paint on metal roofing, but the same can be applied to normal shingled roofing as well. The other is a normal paint that has heat reflective properties. Hmm, I have to check the name, BRB....
Had to go outside and look at a bucket. The paint is called "polar cap", from integratedcoatings.com. The chicken farmer here (16 buildings, that's a lot of cluckers) swears by it, says it will drop his roof temps 10 degrees F in the georgia heat, saving beau coup on the electric.
The roofing insulation stuff I can't remember the name of right now, but it was a spin-off from normal rubberized roofing systems. It added around a one inch thick layer of sprayed on self hardening foam first (I am guessing some sort of poly urethane), then the spray on rubber compound. Allegedly lasted lots longer than normal roofing, and could be directly applied to about any exisiting roofing system wiuthout removing the old shingles or whatever. Hope that's enough info to go googling with.
good luck, stay cool!
... failed systems. It might not be cost effective for google to deal with them, but I bet you could piece together a lot of functioning boxes from the scrappage.