Start with the premise that guys who do this do it a lot, they are serialists. Say they start collecting this evidence and looking at pirated releases. They now go and look at the few seats at each instance of the pirated movie capture thing being triggered, and look for any human face matches. Once they have the same guy in more than one instance, they got a pretty good idea it really *is* him and not the people sitting next to him, the odds of him having the same random neighbors next to him in the seats are pretty far off-and if it is the same few people, then it is a crew effort, bigger fish for the companies to nail. Either way, they work on matches, not a single instance. It's a start on IDing the guy or guys then. The fuzz have most everyone's face in their data banks now with driver's licenses, and they take it from there. Allegedly, this facial recognition tech out there now is good enough for vegas to catch counters already, so if the casinos have that tech and ability to analyze and ID faces, the big studios do too, if they wanted to.
They could also use this if they actually caught (or suspected) the guy from some other slip up, and then went back and looked at their recordings of the identified area in the theater to see if they could find him inside the zero in range they recorded. If they did, it would would then be just some more evidence to throw at him in court.
If course the basic idea from the studio's POV is to get knowledge of this anti piracy tech out in the wild, just to discourage all but the most desperate or most retarded to even try it, knowing they will be the "star" on the in theater candid camera. Mostly, it is just a deterrent, especially if they perfect it and get a few convictions using the tech. The word will get out, that it is just not worth it.
...right now today in terms of dollars. For instance, we run a rather decent garden, have a small fruit orchard, plus grow poultry and beef. The cash made isn't that hot, but the *independence* of it, having a large amount of our food produced onsite and free from most worries about outside forces, means quite a lot to me. I can't put a dollar amount on that independence, but it sure eliminates a lot of worries about this economy to me. There's the actual dollar cost of replacement for the organic produce, grass fed beef and free range poultry there (worth some decent amount if I had to buy all of that), but the additional independence is worth more to me than the outright one for one cost savings/replacement. The same with using a woodheater for heat, and only using the propane that has to be bought as an occasional backup. Wood I got onsite, and a nice stack of it is comforting, "stored solar in the bank" as it were, that is rather easy to replace.
Electric cars and plug in hybrids are the same at this point in our tech history. They offer a driver the chance to get all or most of his "transportation stack" independent, paid off, done, and not be at the mercy of the oil cartels. (same with the guys who are making their own biofuels now at home) Many early adopters of electric vehicle conversions are also early adopters of alternative energy like solar PV, and can fuel their cars with onsite produced power, or eventually do that, get the ride, pay it off some years down the road, then take that amount your were spending for ther car note and put it towards your windcharger or solar PV, etc. Long range thinking.
Right now, penny for penny, maybe not such a clear cut economic advantage, but considering you can get independent of OPEC and commodity price swings, and political wildcards like an accidental WHOOPS in the mideast and some huge additional war breaking out, etc, and have your transpo covered and paid off for the next decade or two or even more with just an eventual (much better by then, and cheaper) battery pack replacement, this seems quite a good deal to a lot of people and is an example of a long term investment strategy using tangibles, instead of dumping your cash at the wall street crook store to "manage" for you in exchange for electronic promises of future money from a class of chronic serial liars....
Plus, all this early adoption helps, where would we be in the market now without all the early personal computer adopters? It was way expensive back then, not a lot of programs that "made money" for people and so on, there wasn't a lot of early "return on investment", but eventually there was. The people who did that (probably a huge percentage of the people reading this, thanks guys!) helped get us to where we are today with computers, which to me is science fiction come to life considering what we had in the 50s that I remember compared to today. It ain't flying cars, but damn, the internet and smartphones and the personal computer are still pretty slick compared to the ma bell long distance and being limited to only what the local library had in stock. No early adoption=not much in the way of advances. That's just how it works.
Just looking at the exact cost today is not the total picture at all with such tech advances, The intangible benefits of being one of the early adopters can be profoundly rewarding to those who want them and take advantage of it, and eventually it will be quite "cost effective" for most everyone.
Let them try! I don't think it would be hard at all to find at least *one million people* who have had their machines compromised over really insecure IE code, and maybe even lost money and had to go through and repair their credit when their logins or CC details were compromised.
Besides, that isn't the issue here, this is a set of state flunkies who are labeling a corporation's products as insecure, so bad that they dont allow access for official purposes from tax paying citizens of that state, and saying this other corporations products are secure, or secure enough to use, and their choice of what is or isn't "secure enough" is freaking LAUGHABLE. I mean, WTF?? It is bogus on so many levels it ain't funny.
Mozilla is an actual bona fide business allied with google among others, and as such I hope they sue the living snot out of that agency for making such a public claim. This sort of thing is no freakin joke. If they do, I would be interested to see what comes out in discovery with the actual human bureaucrats involved in setting this policy and posting that.
Right below this article is the article on the death of the video game... "This has lead to a generation of cliff-hangers at worst, and endings that hedge their bets at best.... As all the game's characters die, as the servers are shut down, as the data is erased or backed up and then boxed or whatever happens to MMO data once the game is done, it's hard not to be a little sad."... etc is the main point. And that is what the bulk of these created wall street "paper financial products" were and are, nothing more than legalized high stakes videogame "wealth". It was and still is completely bonkers *nuts* to allow that to be the basis for a real economy.
albeit heavier and larger than a kindle, but still doable, the tablet, or something like the nokia N series. Wouldn't those work to read most any format?
applause, clap, clap, clap hoot hoot and etc. You got it exactly. The *main* job of the big names in broadcast journalism is to push the party line indoctrination propaganda of the so called "elite" folks at the top of the economic globalist heap, they take orders from the bailed out billionaires once you get down to it. What is it, something like half a dozen or so owners cover the bulk of the alleged news out there now? Times change! The world is awash in decent cellphones with camera and video capabilities, man on the street, on the spot blogging is taking over.
Yes, you have to separate the wheat from the chaff looking at blogs and smaller independent news sites, etc, but it gets easier once a blog has been established and builds some netcred, and at least you *can*, the opportunity is there. Whereas if you restrict yourself to reading much of the big talking heads or even worse listening to them spew their tired 20th century propaganda they developed when talking to their "subjects", it gives you *no choice at all*, zero. Big name news is the equivalent of clear channel top 40 in music. Here's another one, a bakery analogy. Listening to those alleged journalists is like walking into a bakery and all they have for sale is 20 different types of cheap sliced white bread, all the same, just in different bags with different names.
I'm fully aware about how PV degrades with temperature rise, I own some solar PV and use it (since 99 actually), I just noticed a long time ago the backs get really hot. I haven't done it yet but I think you might be able to integrate a built in fluid radiator to the backs of them and remove heat that way and use it for hot water or additional space heating perhaps. Or something, that's the thing, you are gathering it, it is waste, it needs to be removed, so why not figure out what useful purpose it could be put to? Maybe as a preheater to a solar still, to make the distilled water for the battery bank? I don't know, but *something* can be done with it. As soon as I have the scratch for a "spare" one I wanted to try some experimentation on it, as it is now I don't want to chance destroying a multi hundred dollar PV panel, and I don't want to experiment on some cheap little bitty hardly useful one, I want something that is actually worthwhile to use and would give me real world results.
Just another one of those projects for the future, add it to the list.....heh, ya never run out of projects!
Or use the waste heat to drive a stirling engine as a booster perhaps. I know just regular solar panels get wicked hot on the backs of them when sitting in full direct sun, I mean it is black stuff sitting behind a clear surface and stuck on a metal backing, it gets *hot*. Just doubling that heat would turn it into some sort of decent viable optional energy source.
And why PV? Instant electricity from it, solid state, no moving parts, pretty spiffy stuff. Big solar concentrators with turbines are cool too, we have those for giant megawatt scale production now, but we don't have them for joe homeowner yet or joe back packer, PV fits the bill for those purposes.
hmmm..that has been accomplished if you want to go check it out. The north eastern states have just huge amounts of forests. Go out in the woods there where the big trees live and go for a hike. Every once in awhile you'll find still intact but usually quite overgrown huge long stone walls, some ten feet high even with trees growing from the tops of them. Some are hard to see because they have been so long overgrown, but you can see the lines of them easily. There are thousands of miles of them still to see.
All those stone walls came from back in the 1800s and earlier when all that land was cleared. With the advent of tractors and cars and so on, the need for draft animals diminished greatly and all those carefully cut and cleared and de-rocked by man power and oxen power pastures were allowed to grow back to forests again. Now there was a *second* big forest clearing effort during world war two in new England. Huge amounts of trees were cut and burned in huge pits for the woodash, the ash was shipped to England by the shipload to use for fertilizer there so they wouldn't starve, although it did get close and it took their agricultural base to well into the 50s to get back to somewhat normal. But even most of those areas have grown back already.
You leave a cleared area untended, within ten years it is covered in trees again, at least east of the Mississippi where you get more normal and adequate rainfall. You don't have to do a thing either, just let it grow up. I know I spend a lot of time keeping our pastures cleared of baby trees every year. Luckily though where I live we don't "grow rocks" like New England does. Every spring you have to go around your fields and pick the newly heaved up rocks out of the fields, man, it gets to be a lot like work sometimes.. it also pushes wooden fence poles out of the ground as well.(farmed in new england as well as where I live now, and some other places)(and the rocks, cold weather and thin soil and too many baby mountains is why so many farmers moved west from there back during our pioneering days)
I'm with you 100%, perfectly willing to pay not even a quarter, but a buck or two more per gadget to give folks a much better life. I mean a buck or two for a 5-10 dollar keyboard, and proportionally so on up the gadget line. If that means less gadgets, higher prices and a longer wait between "upgrades", I don't care. I'm old enough to have in my hands right now stuff that was considered far out sci fi when I was a kid, so who cares really, it's already way cool enough. We have suck laws about this global trade crap and labor arbitraging to places that have no..what is a word..just normal human decency about things..
I seriously *doubt* the billionaire bonus babies Cxx class is unaware of these things, these sweatshop conditions, the same guys who looted the world economy to near ruin so they could have gold dust sprinkled on their fancy chow are nickle and diming people to death to get there.
This is the 21st century, sweatshops like this in the article shouldn't exist *anyplace*, for any reason. "Shareholder value" and "maximizing profits" can kiss my ass as an excuse for this sort of slimeball greedy behavior. This current setup is pure serfdom, just a teeny bit removed from outright slavery. Ya, those people can quit, go next door and get the same working conditions at the next factory. If they can pass "green content" laws about electronics, they can pass "minimum non-suck human working condition standards" about manufactured items, and let the prices rise accordingly.
I don't know about "free trade", but "fair to all humans" trade might be closer to a more humane and sustainable type of economy.
I'm really not trying to flame you, just inform. They sell all the same gadget stuff out here you can get probably, and fed ex goes everywhere. We have all the big chain stores, all the various *marts, various whitebox computer shops, office depots, radio hovels, fast food to gourmet restaurants, etc, just a bit further drive, but they are here, along with all the gadgets you could sling a yagi at. In fact, like I said, we probably have *more* because you can get all the gadgets plus all the cool mechanical gadgets and stuff, from half a million dollar a whack crawlers and trackhoes down to you name itm low end chainsaws, let alone your regular assortment of cars, trucks, motorcycles, ATVs, RVs whatever, boats, all that stuff..
You want a giant plasma TV, you can get it, a fancy stereo home theater rig, you can get it. Home automation, available. The *only* thing we lack is broadband down the last little roads, that's it, but a lot of folks do have broadband, it just isn't quite everywhere yet. If you *really* need it, there's satellite broadband and whatever the cell phone guys have, it is just spendy. We lack cheap DSL and cable down the last mile here and there, but probably 2/3rds of the county I am in can get one or the other or both already, and wireless is creeping in here and there, new towers going up just for it, in fact one of the wireless isps locally is getting some new gear this week coming up and they are going to try and shoot me a better signal, so then I can get broadband that way if the new gear works..
Where's there's money, retail is there, dense urban areas or over in flyover country in the little towns. It doesn't go from highrises and subways to poof wilderness in other words, there's a LOT of inbetween areas that sill have all the amenities.
The US really has four basic zone types, ultra urban, suburban (which is way more urban than rural), farm-rural like here where I am (a vast amount of turf in this nation), then way the heck out in the boonies (again a huge amount) where you need to fly in or take a horse or something. Regular "farm rural" covers a lot of ground, and we got all the same stuff you got in the much larger cities, with plenty of merchants to take your cash.
The scenery can change a lot within a few miles, drive 15 or so minutes one way, national forests, etc, good hunting and fishing and hiking, etc, 15 minutes another way, walmart and banks and various stores and so on in town. There's way more "diversity" here as to human cultural lifestyles and living situations than in any big city I ever saw within reasonablly short travel distance, mansions to townhouses to apartments to cheap trailers to rambling ranches that are *real* ranches, and as to social multiculturalism, there's folks from all over live around here, up the street from me some Vietnamese folks have a farm, we get some Russian boys (BIG dudes) come help on the farm here sometimes, the first store up the road from me is run by a family from Pakistan, and so many hispanic folks they have a lot of their own stores now with all the signs in Spanish.
Plenty of gadgets, with just the right mix and size of city without being stifling and cut off from some real nature, lots of land and trees and creeks and lakes and "green" around.
Like I said, a starbucks is more of a drive for me, like a half an hour or so if I lead foot it, but frankly, a waffle house or huddle house coffee is just as good, loads cheaper, and tons of those places around here have free wifi now as well.
In other words, not bad at all, and 1/3rd to 1/2 the living costs say from living in or very near metro Atlanta, last really big city I lived in. We have a freezer packed with our own grass fed beef and free range chicken, and a fridge full of fresh produce (more in the summer of course, but we do get some stuff year round and have a greenhouse as well) from our garden and shelves full of stuff we canned, all organic. Not sure what that costs in the expensive
People out in the sticks don't have gadgets? Are you for real? It's exactly the same on a per capita basis near as I have ever seen. Probably much higher once you get into tools and mechanical things, but for electronics, about the same. We don't have as good broadband plans, that's about it for lack, everything else is the same. I work on a farm, it is definitely in the sticks, deer and turkeys around, etc, we can target shoot on the property no problem, including long range rifle, we heat with wood,(establishing official sticks bona fides there) but just in this room I am sitting in are half a dozen computers, two active cellphones and several more in the drawer, two TVs, one with the converter for digital (I was just playing with it, switched antennas and went from 4 to 9 channels..)(although most people have sat dishes), about a dozen radios including HAM and shortwave gear, etc, we have various music players, etc and we are some of the poorer folks around here! Heck, I pulled a vid card and 80 gig drive out of the damn dumpster nearby, just three days ago.
Rule of thumb: when you see every other guy driving 40 grand pickups with ten grand worth of customization, they ain't hurting for the scratch to by cheap iPhones and such like gadgets.
Really man, get out, meet some folks in the country, it isn't 1950s andy of mayberry all over with technology in some sort of locked time warp. Broadband, that's it, no cable or anything, and wireless doesn't cut the mustard yet here..yet, but I am sure it will eventually penetrate to us yokels. Hopefully, when they get done dicking around with the TV digital switchover the freed up spectrum might lead to that broadband problem being fixed as well. Ya, have to drive pretty far to a starbucks..whoopedy zing.
...just the arm chip and linux on the laptop and skip the whole x86 and windows deal...for a hundred to two hundred bucks tops..and the os boots from a ssd and then runs from RAM.
Air conditioning. That's normally a rather significant drag on engine performance and mileage, whereas if the power needed could be scavenged from what would normally be wasted energy lost in the shocks, it would be a net actual gain for the driver. No hybrid drive needed to use the extra juice. You'd probably need an additional battery or two though, so granted, more weight to lug, but with modern lithium styled batts it might not be too bad. The cost purchase ratio would have to be figured in of coursde, then quantifiably you'd have to determine what "comfort" is worth as well, that's a person to person variable. Additionally, I think it would be nice if once in awhile you could set your ride so the AC (or vent fans) would operate when the vehicle was parked, say as you went into a store or something, so the interior stayed cool and didn't re heat back up. Vehicle interior temps can skyrocket sitting out in a hot parking lot someplace.
And it is also a potential safety feature, as an adjunct to keeping the normal battery charged and to run the engine, say if the alternator goes out which happens at inopportune times, or if the belt slips or breaks, etc. Power redundancy is a spiffy idea really. I'd also like to see solar PV incorporated into vehicle roofs just on general principles, again, to add to the available electric supply. It wouldn't run the vehicle, but to keep the batteries full and hot, would help, especially when it is cold out and it is harder to start, and again, for parking and keeping the interior cooler during the summer.
Another use for additional electricity is for workers with pickups to be able to plug tools in at the jobsite. If they had onboard additional battery power, you could just use an inverter instead of cranking up the portable generator. Contractors and RV owners could make use of such tech easily. Now I don't have the electric shocks, but I *did* add a couple of solar panels and additional batteries to my RV, made all the diff in the world, didn't need to run the genny while parked. Lived in that thing for a few years and it was our primary electricity source, just those two panels, worked adequately (we had to learn to live with much reduced consumption though, but it worked)
...you choose to live far away from where the food, water and energy comes from, don't expect the people there to subsidize your consumption, they should be able to step in and have fair market rates and be able to sit on supplies until they get what level of profit they can extract.
It works both ways friend, unless you think your food is magically produced in the back room of your favorite restaurant or deli, or that your water comes from the magic pixie dust tap, or that your energy supplies all come from the magic Mr. fusion plug in the wall, or that manufactured goods all come from the walmart replicator trucks.
All of those things and more are heavily dependent on a "commons" approach to extraction/production and delivery. No water would get to you without a commons run pipeline system and water being taken from the rural areas without compensation, zip,nada, it is just seized and diverted and taken, food comes from there, and is delivered to you on the commons maintained highway system, we don't have universal toll roads where every piece of property maintains their own roads and can charge what the market will bear. And so on. If the power company had to negotiate a transit fee with every property owner that their electric lines cross, and cut them a check forever, what do you think your electricity bill would really be today? All the buildings you hang out in, they just magically sprang into existence, or did they get built with materials extracted and then formed into modern building materials in the rural areas first? Can we just keep all our resources in the rural areas and force you to move there if you want an apartment to hang out in, or food to eat or water to drink, at our rates we get to set without any governmental oversight or interference? To cut to the chase in this thread, just to make it even simpler, how about what we are talking about, copper wires or fiber in various forms for data? How about each property owner gets to negotiate if this data line is run through their property or not, then we'll see what "broadband" would really cost.
See?
A little bit of reverse caring and sharing and understanding would sure help with a modern more or less necessity now, advanced communication. The only reason we have a government is to negotiate the big picture things, and in the 21st century, communications are now part of the big picture.
Colonialism is the suxors, man, folks who are outside the major urban areas just want a bit more of a fairer shake in things. It isn't a whole lot to ask *at all* considering the bulk of your life's necessities come from there, and so many of them are subsidised in your favor already by government mandate and commons investment.
Actually, I like none of the above at this time, but Fedora has an interesting project going now where updates will be distributed as just the diff, not an entire redownload of the package and/or the dependencies. *That* project I admit has me interested and will make me stay with them until I can see if it has legs or not, if not, then ya, I'll go elsewhere, Mepis maybe, not sure at this time, maybe even try slack. I always keep a knoppix disk handy as my backup, so there's debian for ya (and it sure has come in handy at times). I tried ubuntu and didn't like it. I've been using rpm based since redhat 7, so I am more comfortable in it, but offered a suggestion (now a few times here) that perhaps the fedora devs and redhat (any of whom might have a good chance of reading such discussions) might reconsider the twice a year release and go to once a year and really concentrate on bug fixing what's been released (that and picking some audio standard and staying with it). Or actually come out with a real home user desktop release with support, charge some dollars for it. Here is the link to this ipdates project, which will be just the shitznit for folks like me on diaolup if they get the kinks out of it. You see that is the major problem, the sheer size of maintaining updates is very hard on dialup, no matter which distro you use at this time. I can milk out a release and not update every six months, but you still have to constantly update even if you are one or two releases behind, respins don't help with security bugfixes in a timely manner, so that point is moot and I get my distros for a coupla bucks snail mail anyway, so that isn't that important.
...I cannot figure out exactly what pulse audio is really for, but I "fixed" my fedora 10 system sounds by totally removing PA, going to sound prefs and checking alsa everything, rebooting, going to terminal and doing alsaunmute. Bam, all my sound works fine now. And I fixed my vid by downloading system-config-display and using that. Why they don't include that in the default install like they used to I do not know.
I wish there was something along the lines of a more stable RH/RPM desktop system between bleeding edge and always something broken fedora and expensive "enterprise" redhat.* I'd actually pay RH for a consumer desktop system that would do all media and etc even if it was only 99% "pure if they made one with long term support, just not what they are asking for some business model server hybrid "workstation" system. They used to charge 60 bucks, then dumped that for free broken or expensive mostly not broken, I want a sweet spot in the middle there someplace. Twice a year fedora releases is too much, by the time you have everything all tweaked and running smooth, its back to broken stuff, and on dialup, forget it, about impossible to stay updated. I understand and that's fine for devs and tinkerers, but not for just a user who isn't a dev (that would be me and I bet a few million other people).
*The CentOS guys are adamant they are enterprise/server and don't care too much for the desktop, I've checked them out and don't like that attitude on their forums too much, and I don't run servers anyway, just want a bit more of a better and longer running desktop. I think the market is there especially if they (they being redhat) did an apple and sold hardware with it preinstalled so everything "just worked", a desktop system, a lappie, and a netbook.. And not the Dell example either, they play act at support for ubuntu (top of Dell's linux pages they recommend vista-that's play acting at support IMO)
I'm on dialup with little chance of ever getting a wired broadband connection, so have been investigating wireless options. Cellphone wireless is way expensive per month, and satellite has much technical suckage to it and is also expensive. Unfortunately, the Wisps local to me (using motorola canopy tech) are line of sight, and I am in a little valley with restricted coverage, ie, it won't work. However, on the property we have a hill around a quarter mile away that has sufficient height to get a signal I am sure. So, I need some sort of cheap stand alone unit-commercial or do it yourself-that I can use for a wireless bridge, and can be powered from one solar panel,which I have extra now. The units I have seen are all in the one thousand bucks and up category and need mains power and are more designed for ISPs, which I am not, just need to send the signal down to me, one point, and be low powered all DC so I can use my solar panel (80 watts in full sun) and storage battery and be cheaper to buy or make. Any thoughts? Or is there even a way to have an unpowered bridge? Thanks in advance, this seemed like a good thread to ask this!
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Start with the premise that guys who do this do it a lot, they are serialists. Say they start collecting this evidence and looking at pirated releases. They now go and look at the few seats at each instance of the pirated movie capture thing being triggered, and look for any human face matches. Once they have the same guy in more than one instance, they got a pretty good idea it really *is* him and not the people sitting next to him, the odds of him having the same random neighbors next to him in the seats are pretty far off-and if it is the same few people, then it is a crew effort, bigger fish for the companies to nail. Either way, they work on matches, not a single instance. It's a start on IDing the guy or guys then. The fuzz have most everyone's face in their data banks now with driver's licenses, and they take it from there. Allegedly, this facial recognition tech out there now is good enough for vegas to catch counters already, so if the casinos have that tech and ability to analyze and ID faces, the big studios do too, if they wanted to.
They could also use this if they actually caught (or suspected) the guy from some other slip up, and then went back and looked at their recordings of the identified area in the theater to see if they could find him inside the zero in range they recorded. If they did, it would would then be just some more evidence to throw at him in court.
If course the basic idea from the studio's POV is to get knowledge of this anti piracy tech out in the wild, just to discourage all but the most desperate or most retarded to even try it, knowing they will be the "star" on the in theater candid camera. Mostly, it is just a deterrent, especially if they perfect it and get a few convictions using the tech. The word will get out, that it is just not worth it.
...right now today in terms of dollars. For instance, we run a rather decent garden, have a small fruit orchard, plus grow poultry and beef. The cash made isn't that hot, but the *independence* of it, having a large amount of our food produced onsite and free from most worries about outside forces, means quite a lot to me. I can't put a dollar amount on that independence, but it sure eliminates a lot of worries about this economy to me. There's the actual dollar cost of replacement for the organic produce, grass fed beef and free range poultry there (worth some decent amount if I had to buy all of that), but the additional independence is worth more to me than the outright one for one cost savings/replacement. The same with using a woodheater for heat, and only using the propane that has to be bought as an occasional backup. Wood I got onsite, and a nice stack of it is comforting, "stored solar in the bank" as it were, that is rather easy to replace.
Electric cars and plug in hybrids are the same at this point in our tech history. They offer a driver the chance to get all or most of his "transportation stack" independent, paid off, done, and not be at the mercy of the oil cartels. (same with the guys who are making their own biofuels now at home) Many early adopters of electric vehicle conversions are also early adopters of alternative energy like solar PV, and can fuel their cars with onsite produced power, or eventually do that, get the ride, pay it off some years down the road, then take that amount your were spending for ther car note and put it towards your windcharger or solar PV, etc. Long range thinking.
Right now, penny for penny, maybe not such a clear cut economic advantage, but considering you can get independent of OPEC and commodity price swings, and political wildcards like an accidental WHOOPS in the mideast and some huge additional war breaking out, etc, and have your transpo covered and paid off for the next decade or two or even more with just an eventual (much better by then, and cheaper) battery pack replacement, this seems quite a good deal to a lot of people and is an example of a long term investment strategy using tangibles, instead of dumping your cash at the wall street crook store to "manage" for you in exchange for electronic promises of future money from a class of chronic serial liars....
Plus, all this early adoption helps, where would we be in the market now without all the early personal computer adopters? It was way expensive back then, not a lot of programs that "made money" for people and so on, there wasn't a lot of early "return on investment", but eventually there was. The people who did that (probably a huge percentage of the people reading this, thanks guys!) helped get us to where we are today with computers, which to me is science fiction come to life considering what we had in the 50s that I remember compared to today. It ain't flying cars, but damn, the internet and smartphones and the personal computer are still pretty slick compared to the ma bell long distance and being limited to only what the local library had in stock. No early adoption=not much in the way of advances. That's just how it works.
Just looking at the exact cost today is not the total picture at all with such tech advances, The intangible benefits of being one of the early adopters can be profoundly rewarding to those who want them and take advantage of it, and eventually it will be quite "cost effective" for most everyone.
Let them try! I don't think it would be hard at all to find at least *one million people* who have had their machines compromised over really insecure IE code, and maybe even lost money and had to go through and repair their credit when their logins or CC details were compromised.
Besides, that isn't the issue here, this is a set of state flunkies who are labeling a corporation's products as insecure, so bad that they dont allow access for official purposes from tax paying citizens of that state, and saying this other corporations products are secure, or secure enough to use, and their choice of what is or isn't "secure enough" is freaking LAUGHABLE. I mean, WTF?? It is bogus on so many levels it ain't funny.
Mozilla is an actual bona fide business allied with google among others, and as such I hope they sue the living snot out of that agency for making such a public claim. This sort of thing is no freakin joke. If they do, I would be interested to see what comes out in discovery with the actual human bureaucrats involved in setting this policy and posting that.
You just need to use the correct search engine "wifi config"
Good luck and better skill on your expedition, I'll be following your blog!
Right below this article is the article on the death of the video game ... "This has lead to a generation of cliff-hangers at worst, and endings that hedge their bets at best. ... As all the game's characters die, as the servers are shut down, as the data is erased or backed up and then boxed or whatever happens to MMO data once the game is done, it's hard not to be a little sad."... etc is the main point. And that is what the bulk of these created wall street "paper financial products" were and are, nothing more than legalized high stakes videogame "wealth". It was and still is completely bonkers *nuts* to allow that to be the basis for a real economy.
albeit heavier and larger than a kindle, but still doable, the tablet, or something like the nokia N series. Wouldn't those work to read most any format?
I think you mean Fennec for the mobile browser. The name follows a theme, the Fennec is a small African fox.
applause, clap, clap, clap hoot hoot and etc. You got it exactly. The *main* job of the big names in broadcast journalism is to push the party line indoctrination propaganda of the so called "elite" folks at the top of the economic globalist heap, they take orders from the bailed out billionaires once you get down to it. What is it, something like half a dozen or so owners cover the bulk of the alleged news out there now? Times change! The world is awash in decent cellphones with camera and video capabilities, man on the street, on the spot blogging is taking over.
Yes, you have to separate the wheat from the chaff looking at blogs and smaller independent news sites, etc, but it gets easier once a blog has been established and builds some netcred, and at least you *can*, the opportunity is there. Whereas if you restrict yourself to reading much of the big talking heads or even worse listening to them spew their tired 20th century propaganda they developed when talking to their "subjects", it gives you *no choice at all*, zero. Big name news is the equivalent of clear channel top 40 in music. Here's another one, a bakery analogy. Listening to those alleged journalists is like walking into a bakery and all they have for sale is 20 different types of cheap sliced white bread, all the same, just in different bags with different names.
I'm fully aware about how PV degrades with temperature rise, I own some solar PV and use it (since 99 actually), I just noticed a long time ago the backs get really hot. I haven't done it yet but I think you might be able to integrate a built in fluid radiator to the backs of them and remove heat that way and use it for hot water or additional space heating perhaps. Or something, that's the thing, you are gathering it, it is waste, it needs to be removed, so why not figure out what useful purpose it could be put to? Maybe as a preheater to a solar still, to make the distilled water for the battery bank? I don't know, but *something* can be done with it. As soon as I have the scratch for a "spare" one I wanted to try some experimentation on it, as it is now I don't want to chance destroying a multi hundred dollar PV panel, and I don't want to experiment on some cheap little bitty hardly useful one, I want something that is actually worthwhile to use and would give me real world results.
Just another one of those projects for the future, add it to the list.....heh, ya never run out of projects!
Or use the waste heat to drive a stirling engine as a booster perhaps. I know just regular solar panels get wicked hot on the backs of them when sitting in full direct sun, I mean it is black stuff sitting behind a clear surface and stuck on a metal backing, it gets *hot*. Just doubling that heat would turn it into some sort of decent viable optional energy source.
And why PV? Instant electricity from it, solid state, no moving parts, pretty spiffy stuff. Big solar concentrators with turbines are cool too, we have those for giant megawatt scale production now, but we don't have them for joe homeowner yet or joe back packer, PV fits the bill for those purposes.
That is *slavery* for profit, human trafficking.
hmmm..that has been accomplished if you want to go check it out. The north eastern states have just huge amounts of forests. Go out in the woods there where the big trees live and go for a hike. Every once in awhile you'll find still intact but usually quite overgrown huge long stone walls, some ten feet high even with trees growing from the tops of them. Some are hard to see because they have been so long overgrown, but you can see the lines of them easily. There are thousands of miles of them still to see.
All those stone walls came from back in the 1800s and earlier when all that land was cleared. With the advent of tractors and cars and so on, the need for draft animals diminished greatly and all those carefully cut and cleared and de-rocked by man power and oxen power pastures were allowed to grow back to forests again. Now there was a *second* big forest clearing effort during world war two in new England. Huge amounts of trees were cut and burned in huge pits for the woodash, the ash was shipped to England by the shipload to use for fertilizer there so they wouldn't starve, although it did get close and it took their agricultural base to well into the 50s to get back to somewhat normal. But even most of those areas have grown back already.
You leave a cleared area untended, within ten years it is covered in trees again, at least east of the Mississippi where you get more normal and adequate rainfall. You don't have to do a thing either, just let it grow up. I know I spend a lot of time keeping our pastures cleared of baby trees every year. Luckily though where I live we don't "grow rocks" like New England does. Every spring you have to go around your fields and pick the newly heaved up rocks out of the fields, man, it gets to be a lot like work sometimes.. it also pushes wooden fence poles out of the ground as well.(farmed in new england as well as where I live now, and some other places)(and the rocks, cold weather and thin soil and too many baby mountains is why so many farmers moved west from there back during our pioneering days)
I'm with you 100%, perfectly willing to pay not even a quarter, but a buck or two more per gadget to give folks a much better life. I mean a buck or two for a 5-10 dollar keyboard, and proportionally so on up the gadget line. If that means less gadgets, higher prices and a longer wait between "upgrades", I don't care. I'm old enough to have in my hands right now stuff that was considered far out sci fi when I was a kid, so who cares really, it's already way cool enough. We have suck laws about this global trade crap and labor arbitraging to places that have no ..what is a word..just normal human decency about things..
I seriously *doubt* the billionaire bonus babies Cxx class is unaware of these things, these sweatshop conditions, the same guys who looted the world economy to near ruin so they could have gold dust sprinkled on their fancy chow are nickle and diming people to death to get there.
This is the 21st century, sweatshops like this in the article shouldn't exist *anyplace*, for any reason. "Shareholder value" and "maximizing profits" can kiss my ass as an excuse for this sort of slimeball greedy behavior. This current setup is pure serfdom, just a teeny bit removed from outright slavery. Ya, those people can quit, go next door and get the same working conditions at the next factory. If they can pass "green content" laws about electronics, they can pass "minimum non-suck human working condition standards" about manufactured items, and let the prices rise accordingly.
I don't know about "free trade", but "fair to all humans" trade might be closer to a more humane and sustainable type of economy.
We are humans, not ferengis.
I'm really not trying to flame you, just inform. They sell all the same gadget stuff out here you can get probably, and fed ex goes everywhere. We have all the big chain stores, all the various *marts, various whitebox computer shops, office depots, radio hovels, fast food to gourmet restaurants, etc, just a bit further drive, but they are here, along with all the gadgets you could sling a yagi at. In fact, like I said, we probably have *more* because you can get all the gadgets plus all the cool mechanical gadgets and stuff, from half a million dollar a whack crawlers and trackhoes down to you name itm low end chainsaws, let alone your regular assortment of cars, trucks, motorcycles, ATVs, RVs whatever, boats, all that stuff..
You want a giant plasma TV, you can get it, a fancy stereo home theater rig, you can get it. Home automation, available. The *only* thing we lack is broadband down the last little roads, that's it, but a lot of folks do have broadband, it just isn't quite everywhere yet. If you *really* need it, there's satellite broadband and whatever the cell phone guys have, it is just spendy. We lack cheap DSL and cable down the last mile here and there, but probably 2/3rds of the county I am in can get one or the other or both already, and wireless is creeping in here and there, new towers going up just for it, in fact one of the wireless isps locally is getting some new gear this week coming up and they are going to try and shoot me a better signal, so then I can get broadband that way if the new gear works..
Where's there's money, retail is there, dense urban areas or over in flyover country in the little towns. It doesn't go from highrises and subways to poof wilderness in other words, there's a LOT of inbetween areas that sill have all the amenities.
The US really has four basic zone types, ultra urban, suburban (which is way more urban than rural), farm-rural like here where I am (a vast amount of turf in this nation), then way the heck out in the boonies (again a huge amount) where you need to fly in or take a horse or something. Regular "farm rural" covers a lot of ground, and we got all the same stuff you got in the much larger cities, with plenty of merchants to take your cash.
The scenery can change a lot within a few miles, drive 15 or so minutes one way, national forests, etc, good hunting and fishing and hiking, etc, 15 minutes another way, walmart and banks and various stores and so on in town. There's way more "diversity" here as to human cultural lifestyles and living situations than in any big city I ever saw within reasonablly short travel distance, mansions to townhouses to apartments to cheap trailers to rambling ranches that are *real* ranches, and as to social multiculturalism, there's folks from all over live around here, up the street from me some Vietnamese folks have a farm, we get some Russian boys (BIG dudes) come help on the farm here sometimes, the first store up the road from me is run by a family from Pakistan, and so many hispanic folks they have a lot of their own stores now with all the signs in Spanish.
Plenty of gadgets, with just the right mix and size of city without being stifling and cut off from some real nature, lots of land and trees and creeks and lakes and "green" around.
Like I said, a starbucks is more of a drive for me, like a half an hour or so if I lead foot it, but frankly, a waffle house or huddle house coffee is just as good, loads cheaper, and tons of those places around here have free wifi now as well.
In other words, not bad at all, and 1/3rd to 1/2 the living costs say from living in or very near metro Atlanta, last really big city I lived in. We have a freezer packed with our own grass fed beef and free range chicken, and a fridge full of fresh produce (more in the summer of course, but we do get some stuff year round and have a greenhouse as well) from our garden and shelves full of stuff we canned, all organic. Not sure what that costs in the expensive
People out in the sticks don't have gadgets? Are you for real? It's exactly the same on a per capita basis near as I have ever seen. Probably much higher once you get into tools and mechanical things, but for electronics, about the same. We don't have as good broadband plans, that's about it for lack, everything else is the same. I work on a farm, it is definitely in the sticks, deer and turkeys around, etc, we can target shoot on the property no problem, including long range rifle, we heat with wood,(establishing official sticks bona fides there) but just in this room I am sitting in are half a dozen computers, two active cellphones and several more in the drawer, two TVs, one with the converter for digital (I was just playing with it, switched antennas and went from 4 to 9 channels..)(although most people have sat dishes), about a dozen radios including HAM and shortwave gear, etc, we have various music players, etc and we are some of the poorer folks around here! Heck, I pulled a vid card and 80 gig drive out of the damn dumpster nearby, just three days ago.
Rule of thumb: when you see every other guy driving 40 grand pickups with ten grand worth of customization, they ain't hurting for the scratch to by cheap iPhones and such like gadgets.
Really man, get out, meet some folks in the country, it isn't 1950s andy of mayberry all over with technology in some sort of locked time warp. Broadband, that's it, no cable or anything, and wireless doesn't cut the mustard yet here..yet, but I am sure it will eventually penetrate to us yokels. Hopefully, when they get done dicking around with the TV digital switchover the freed up spectrum might lead to that broadband problem being fixed as well. Ya, have to drive pretty far to a starbucks..whoopedy zing.
...to electric hybrids, the Hydraulic hybrid
...just the arm chip and linux on the laptop and skip the whole x86 and windows deal...for a hundred to two hundred bucks tops..and the os boots from a ssd and then runs from RAM.
Air conditioning. That's normally a rather significant drag on engine performance and mileage, whereas if the power needed could be scavenged from what would normally be wasted energy lost in the shocks, it would be a net actual gain for the driver. No hybrid drive needed to use the extra juice. You'd probably need an additional battery or two though, so granted, more weight to lug, but with modern lithium styled batts it might not be too bad. The cost purchase ratio would have to be figured in of coursde, then quantifiably you'd have to determine what "comfort" is worth as well, that's a person to person variable. Additionally, I think it would be nice if once in awhile you could set your ride so the AC (or vent fans) would operate when the vehicle was parked, say as you went into a store or something, so the interior stayed cool and didn't re heat back up. Vehicle interior temps can skyrocket sitting out in a hot parking lot someplace.
And it is also a potential safety feature, as an adjunct to keeping the normal battery charged and to run the engine, say if the alternator goes out which happens at inopportune times, or if the belt slips or breaks, etc. Power redundancy is a spiffy idea really. I'd also like to see solar PV incorporated into vehicle roofs just on general principles, again, to add to the available electric supply. It wouldn't run the vehicle, but to keep the batteries full and hot, would help, especially when it is cold out and it is harder to start, and again, for parking and keeping the interior cooler during the summer.
Another use for additional electricity is for workers with pickups to be able to plug tools in at the jobsite. If they had onboard additional battery power, you could just use an inverter instead of cranking up the portable generator. Contractors and RV owners could make use of such tech easily. Now I don't have the electric shocks, but I *did* add a couple of solar panels and additional batteries to my RV, made all the diff in the world, didn't need to run the genny while parked. Lived in that thing for a few years and it was our primary electricity source, just those two panels, worked adequately (we had to learn to live with much reduced consumption though, but it worked)
...you choose to live far away from where the food, water and energy comes from, don't expect the people there to subsidize your consumption, they should be able to step in and have fair market rates and be able to sit on supplies until they get what level of profit they can extract.
It works both ways friend, unless you think your food is magically produced in the back room of your favorite restaurant or deli, or that your water comes from the magic pixie dust tap, or that your energy supplies all come from the magic Mr. fusion plug in the wall, or that manufactured goods all come from the walmart replicator trucks.
All of those things and more are heavily dependent on a "commons" approach to extraction/production and delivery. No water would get to you without a commons run pipeline system and water being taken from the rural areas without compensation, zip,nada, it is just seized and diverted and taken, food comes from there, and is delivered to you on the commons maintained highway system, we don't have universal toll roads where every piece of property maintains their own roads and can charge what the market will bear. And so on. If the power company had to negotiate a transit fee with every property owner that their electric lines cross, and cut them a check forever, what do you think your electricity bill would really be today? All the buildings you hang out in, they just magically sprang into existence, or did they get built with materials extracted and then formed into modern building materials in the rural areas first? Can we just keep all our resources in the rural areas and force you to move there if you want an apartment to hang out in, or food to eat or water to drink, at our rates we get to set without any governmental oversight or interference? To cut to the chase in this thread, just to make it even simpler, how about what we are talking about, copper wires or fiber in various forms for data? How about each property owner gets to negotiate if this data line is run through their property or not, then we'll see what "broadband" would really cost.
See?
A little bit of reverse caring and sharing and understanding would sure help with a modern more or less necessity now, advanced communication. The only reason we have a government is to negotiate the big picture things, and in the 21st century, communications are now part of the big picture.
Colonialism is the suxors, man, folks who are outside the major urban areas just want a bit more of a fairer shake in things. It isn't a whole lot to ask *at all* considering the bulk of your life's necessities come from there, and so many of them are subsidised in your favor already by government mandate and commons investment.
Actually, I like none of the above at this time, but Fedora has an interesting project going now where updates will be distributed as just the diff, not an entire redownload of the package and/or the dependencies. *That* project I admit has me interested and will make me stay with them until I can see if it has legs or not, if not, then ya, I'll go elsewhere, Mepis maybe, not sure at this time, maybe even try slack. I always keep a knoppix disk handy as my backup, so there's debian for ya (and it sure has come in handy at times). I tried ubuntu and didn't like it. I've been using rpm based since redhat 7, so I am more comfortable in it, but offered a suggestion (now a few times here) that perhaps the fedora devs and redhat (any of whom might have a good chance of reading such discussions) might reconsider the twice a year release and go to once a year and really concentrate on bug fixing what's been released (that and picking some audio standard and staying with it). Or actually come out with a real home user desktop release with support, charge some dollars for it. Here is the link to this ipdates project, which will be just the shitznit for folks like me on diaolup if they get the kinks out of it. You see that is the major problem, the sheer size of maintaining updates is very hard on dialup, no matter which distro you use at this time. I can milk out a release and not update every six months, but you still have to constantly update even if you are one or two releases behind, respins don't help with security bugfixes in a timely manner, so that point is moot and I get my distros for a coupla bucks snail mail anyway, so that isn't that important.
Here is the link Presto
...I cannot figure out exactly what pulse audio is really for, but I "fixed" my fedora 10 system sounds by totally removing PA, going to sound prefs and checking alsa everything, rebooting, going to terminal and doing alsaunmute. Bam, all my sound works fine now. And I fixed my vid by downloading system-config-display and using that. Why they don't include that in the default install like they used to I do not know.
I wish there was something along the lines of a more stable RH/RPM desktop system between bleeding edge and always something broken fedora and expensive "enterprise" redhat.* I'd actually pay RH for a consumer desktop system that would do all media and etc even if it was only 99% "pure if they made one with long term support, just not what they are asking for some business model server hybrid "workstation" system. They used to charge 60 bucks, then dumped that for free broken or expensive mostly not broken, I want a sweet spot in the middle there someplace. Twice a year fedora releases is too much, by the time you have everything all tweaked and running smooth, its back to broken stuff, and on dialup, forget it, about impossible to stay updated. I understand and that's fine for devs and tinkerers, but not for just a user who isn't a dev (that would be me and I bet a few million other people).
*The CentOS guys are adamant they are enterprise/server and don't care too much for the desktop, I've checked them out and don't like that attitude on their forums too much, and I don't run servers anyway, just want a bit more of a better and longer running desktop. I think the market is there especially if they (they being redhat) did an apple and sold hardware with it preinstalled so everything "just worked", a desktop system, a lappie, and a netbook.. And not the Dell example either, they play act at support for ubuntu (top of Dell's linux pages they recommend vista-that's play acting at support IMO)
Arora
I'm on dialup with little chance of ever getting a wired broadband connection, so have been investigating wireless options. Cellphone wireless is way expensive per month, and satellite has much technical suckage to it and is also expensive. Unfortunately, the Wisps local to me (using motorola canopy tech) are line of sight, and I am in a little valley with restricted coverage, ie, it won't work. However, on the property we have a hill around a quarter mile away that has sufficient height to get a signal I am sure. So, I need some sort of cheap stand alone unit-commercial or do it yourself-that I can use for a wireless bridge, and can be powered from one solar panel,which I have extra now. The units I have seen are all in the one thousand bucks and up category and need mains power and are more designed for ISPs, which I am not, just need to send the signal down to me, one point, and be low powered all DC so I can use my solar panel (80 watts in full sun) and storage battery and be cheaper to buy or make. Any thoughts? Or is there even a way to have an unpowered bridge? Thanks in advance, this seemed like a good thread to ask this!