At LINUXCON, saw more Thinkpads than anything else which would meet your specs.
However, I repair old laptops for fun at FreeGeek.org and Gateways are easier to work on than anything else, IMHO.
Never have felt I needed anything special. If I need to touch the metadata on a USB Flash drive, I use a script to 'make it so'.
Every one I have is FAT32 because on occasion I do have to share files with a Windows user.
If you explode a nuke outside the Van Allens, the fallout is swept away by solar wind. We've done it before. http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/nuclear/hane.html
However, a conventional nuke might only decimate an incoming Big Rock, leaving 90% behind. I'd rather see a pusher plate mated to the Big Rock, then detonate specially designed nukes against the plate, like in the Project Orion ship in FOOTFALL. http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/O/OrionProj.htmlhttp://books.google.com/books?id=4S2KocYp8AkC&pg=PA159&lpg=PA159&dq="pusher+plate"+Orion&source=bl&ots=yRM2KRDRst&sig=NWZvu3gbjAAwyKva2-Jl_jlduhM&hl=en&ei=qnucSs-xCJSwsgPxwNCaDg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4#v=onepage&q=%22pusher%20plate%22%20Orion&f=false
{snip} IMHO, lets work on finding and tracking large asteroids first.
Agreed. However, http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/programs/ shows ten programs looking for Near-Earth Objects, including a joint Italio-German program and a Japanese project. Despite all of those, 2008_TC3 got within 20 hours of earth before detection. Had its composition been different, its 2 KT explosion would have been a ground burst.
Scale the mass up by an order of magnitude, and we're talking Hiroshima. Its diameter and detectability need only be 3x larger, so detection within 60 hours before a town-buster arrives.
Scale it up another order of magnitude, and we have less than a week to evacuate from a 200KT city-buster.
What will your town look like when a mandatory evac order is declared?
...and when a disaster strikes, there won't be any BoPL in use at the disaster site, as there's no power, and the other disaster sites scattered around the country to handle the radio traffic can EASILY be used at locations where interference from BoPL is either minimal or non-existant, since they can have power anywhere they want to and choose their location accordingly in advance. Honestly, this is not a real sxcenario for concern preventing BoPL deployment.
Actually, not true. BoPL radio waves bounce off the E layers and can reappear thousands of miles away as interference. It is not easy to predict where long radio waves will appear, despite over a hundred years of careful experimentation and observation.
http://www.launchloop.com/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launch_loop detail the Lofstrom Launch Loop. Lofstrom, an IC designer and FreeGeek.org volunteer in metro Portland, Oregon, has a system which requires no unobtainium and could be built today, without any 'suitable mountain top' with only COTS (Cheap Off The Shelf) components.
Put RFID readers on the buses, RFID tags on the kid's backpacks, and sound an alert when a kid boards who is not assigned to the bus? This ain;t the world I grew up in, where you could cound on the bus driver knowing you; this is the worst of the 21st, where you're lucky if the driver hablamos Ingles.
Clear's VOIP service does offer Enhanced 911.
Now, using 3rd party voice over a WiMAX connection? Not reliable. My connection, two blocks from one tower (suburbs of Portland, OR), and a quarter-mile from another, nosedives randomly at night. No connection = no Officer Friendly or Fire Marshal Bill when needed.
I still pay for a landline just for 911 reliability
(and, monitor my landline regularly to make sure the local telco, Qworst, formerly known as US Worst, does not put a 'pair gain' box on it to let then share the copper pair with a neighbor so they can deliver two dial tones over one copper pair - that takes batteries, and batteries fail).
I also keep a two-way radio in the house, with the instructions for 911 access through the local repeater on a plastic tag.
The universe is not friendly, and enough humans are also not friendly, for me to consider artful paranoia as a potentially life-saving interesting hobby.
Put a recovery file set (such as USB editions of Knoppix, Puppy, or Damn Small Linux) on the stick with instructions on how to recover from a Windows system crash. In the remaining space, an e-book reader, the Baen Free Library and other free e-books worth their salt.
Although this would reduce the amount of energy used for cooling, heating costs would go up. For most people, it takes far more energy to heat a house than cool it. It takes 1200 KWh to cool a house in a temperate climate for a year, but it takes 12000 KWh to heat one . It is more useful to look for ways to heat a house more efficiently than cool it.
In winter, the angle of sunlight is far shallower than in summer, so wall color is far more critical than roof color. Do the math.
TV, like radio, is a way to get news out quickly to the population.
News like people have to get off their fat asses before a certain date to get a DTV converter, else they'll no longer get TV?
That is, IF they don't
a) have cable OR
b) don't have satellite
This reduces us to 19.5% of households, from 130 million US households (Census) to 25.3 million households (ABI Research via Ars Technica).
Figure 2.1 sets/household (again, Census), and the converter production should have been at least 54 million; not allowing for distribution inefficiencies and bad/broken converters.
The aforementioned Ars Technica article noted estimates (again, sourced from ABI Research) that 20% households will let one or all sets go dark, and 10% will switch to cable or satellite.
The remaining 70% either are ready, or will get in line for converters and antennas.
I wish we in the OSS world had "Open Source" printer chips and toner formula. These would enable anyone with the ambition, to build "free" printers instead of shelling dough to these greedy companies.
Dayumn! Superb idea?
1) Which obsolete hardware would be best to start with?
2) What's the high-volume, most available?
3) Sturdiest, least likely to be a pain?
Freegeek.org has oodles of used printers if anyone wants to start building a hardware base.
freegeek.org will put them to good use. It's a 501(c)(3) so donations will result in a tax break, and they will go into PCs reloaded w/ Ubuntu and donated to schools & other non-profits. Some machines (laptops, mostly) are sold in the Thrift Store to keep the lights on and pay the rent, and some go to volunteers to keep them motivated, but the vast majority go to worthy causes.
Anything which doesn't run is recycled responsibly.
After like 10 years I'm still reading the "works on my machine" posts with no mention of the machine type.
I call them the "Well, its raining HERE" comments.
You need to identify the (OS::distro) and plugins in use for these "Release [ ] suxx0rs!!!" posts to have any meaning.
I generally find that if that question is answered, it's some guy running the L33tware distro in 24MB of RAM on a Transmeta Crusoe who is enraged that his opensource software crashes, and no, he hasn't logged a bug because God told him that it is destiny to always have bugless software AND will be Lord of Faerun in time.
(No offense to parent;) High instability of 3b5 on Windows XP Spack 2 on a Intel mobo w/ Q6600 processor and 4GB of RAM. Many, many incidents logged and sent back to Mozilla. Removed every theme, every extension, and every add-on, as a part of debugging, then reinstalled from scratch twice after uninstalling, removing directories and checking the Registry for remnants. Still crashing randomly.
However, screening is also a tripwire. If Abdul gets caught, everyone shifts from Condition Eggshell to Condition Off-White, and EVERYONE gets searched. If nothing else, the US has learned the terrs have so few suicidals which can pass and have enough backbone to stay focused for the several days it takes to get here, that they have to use them carefully, so the terrs save up their nutjobs for wide open targets with maximum exposure.
Portlanders (the Oregonian variety) have coughed up $50 cash to pay for shipment postal charges.
A game store, Rainy Day Games, discounts purchases for donation and accepts donations to be held for shipment.
My wife's Girrll Gamers group sewed their little fingers to the bone making dice bags and packaging sets of dice, as well as donating several pounds of dice, many, many miniatrues, and many books and games.
Details at the blog for Operation Dice Drop.
Yep. Could not have said it better. However, let the troops know who likes them, and you will have several hundred thousand heavily armed friends some day.
Slashdot Mirror
At LINUXCON, saw more Thinkpads than anything else which would meet your specs. However, I repair old laptops for fun at FreeGeek.org and Gateways are easier to work on than anything else, IMHO.
Never have felt I needed anything special. If I need to touch the metadata on a USB Flash drive, I use a script to 'make it so'. Every one I have is FAT32 because on occasion I do have to share files with a Windows user.
If you explode a nuke outside the Van Allens, the fallout is swept away by solar wind. We've done it before. http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/nuclear/hane.html However, a conventional nuke might only decimate an incoming Big Rock, leaving 90% behind. I'd rather see a pusher plate mated to the Big Rock, then detonate specially designed nukes against the plate, like in the Project Orion ship in FOOTFALL. http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/O/OrionProj.html http://books.google.com/books?id=4S2KocYp8AkC&pg=PA159&lpg=PA159&dq="pusher+plate"+Orion&source=bl&ots=yRM2KRDRst&sig=NWZvu3gbjAAwyKva2-Jl_jlduhM&hl=en&ei=qnucSs-xCJSwsgPxwNCaDg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4#v=onepage&q=%22pusher%20plate%22%20Orion&f=false
{snip} IMHO, lets work on finding and tracking large asteroids first.
Agreed. However, http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/programs/ shows ten programs looking for Near-Earth Objects, including a joint Italio-German program and a Japanese project. Despite all of those, 2008_TC3 got within 20 hours of earth before detection. Had its composition been different, its 2 KT explosion would have been a ground burst. Scale the mass up by an order of magnitude, and we're talking Hiroshima. Its diameter and detectability need only be 3x larger, so detection within 60 hours before a town-buster arrives. Scale it up another order of magnitude, and we have less than a week to evacuate from a 200KT city-buster. What will your town look like when a mandatory evac order is declared?
Or, Bill Gates.
A year? A year? With 2008_TC3, we had twenty hours. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_TC3 We need an Project Orion ship http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion), an Archangel Michael design http://www.up-ship.com/apr/michael.htm to shove the next Dinosaur Killer Rock out of the way.
...and when a disaster strikes, there won't be any BoPL in use at the disaster site, as there's no power, and the other disaster sites scattered around the country to handle the radio traffic can EASILY be used at locations where interference from BoPL is either minimal or non-existant, since they can have power anywhere they want to and choose their location accordingly in advance. Honestly, this is not a real sxcenario for concern preventing BoPL deployment.
Actually, not true. BoPL radio waves bounce off the E layers and can reappear thousands of miles away as interference. It is not easy to predict where long radio waves will appear, despite over a hundred years of careful experimentation and observation.
Aftermath very well explained in RULES OF THE GAME (a quick read)
http://web.archive.org/web/20060221022525/http://www.liddyshow.us/mustread11.php
by G. Gordon Liddy, as well as in ONE SECOND AFTER by William Forstchen
http://www.amazon.com/One-Second-After-William-Forstchen/dp/0765317583/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1248755961&sr=8-1
http://www.launchloop.com/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launch_loop detail the Lofstrom Launch Loop. Lofstrom, an IC designer and FreeGeek.org volunteer in metro Portland, Oregon, has a system which requires no unobtainium and could be built today, without any 'suitable mountain top' with only COTS (Cheap Off The Shelf) components.
Put RFID readers on the buses, RFID tags on the kid's backpacks, and sound an alert when a kid boards who is not assigned to the bus? This ain;t the world I grew up in, where you could cound on the bus driver knowing you; this is the worst of the 21st, where you're lucky if the driver hablamos Ingles.
Milspec GPS? Naah... enhanced good enough. See http://diydrones.com/ for more.
http://futurehobbies.com/index.php?page=shop.product_details&flypage=flypage.tpl&product_id=95&category_id=23&option=com_virtuemart&Itemid=53
Clear's VOIP service does offer Enhanced 911. Now, using 3rd party voice over a WiMAX connection? Not reliable. My connection, two blocks from one tower (suburbs of Portland, OR), and a quarter-mile from another, nosedives randomly at night. No connection = no Officer Friendly or Fire Marshal Bill when needed. I still pay for a landline just for 911 reliability (and, monitor my landline regularly to make sure the local telco, Qworst, formerly known as US Worst, does not put a 'pair gain' box on it to let then share the copper pair with a neighbor so they can deliver two dial tones over one copper pair - that takes batteries, and batteries fail). I also keep a two-way radio in the house, with the instructions for 911 access through the local repeater on a plastic tag. The universe is not friendly, and enough humans are also not friendly, for me to consider artful paranoia as a potentially life-saving interesting hobby.
Put a recovery file set (such as USB editions of Knoppix, Puppy, or Damn Small Linux) on the stick with instructions on how to recover from a Windows system crash. In the remaining space, an e-book reader, the Baen Free Library and other free e-books worth their salt.
Although this would reduce the amount of energy used for cooling, heating costs would go up. For most people, it takes far more energy to heat a house than cool it. It takes 1200 KWh to cool a house in a temperate climate for a year, but it takes 12000 KWh to heat one . It is more useful to look for ways to heat a house more efficiently than cool it.
In winter, the angle of sunlight is far shallower than in summer, so wall color is far more critical than roof color. Do the math.
For a light read in which the US is crippled, in no small part due to transformer failure, see G. Gordon Liddy, "Rules of the Game," pp. 44-?, OMNI, (January 1989), reprinted in "Fight Back" by G. Gordon Liddy, et al., and found here: http://web.archive.org/web/20050406214119/http://www.liddyshow.us/mustread11.php
News like people have to get off their fat asses before a certain date to get a DTV converter, else they'll no longer get TV?
That is, IF they don't
a) have cable OR
b) don't have satellite
This reduces us to 19.5% of households, from 130 million US households (Census) to 25.3 million households (ABI Research via Ars Technica).
Figure 2.1 sets/household (again, Census), and the converter production should have been at least 54 million; not allowing for distribution inefficiencies and bad/broken converters.
The aforementioned Ars Technica article noted estimates (again, sourced from ABI Research) that 20% households will let one or all sets go dark, and 10% will switch to cable or satellite.
The remaining 70% either are ready, or will get in line for converters and antennas.
I wish we in the OSS world had "Open Source" printer chips and toner formula. These would enable anyone with the ambition, to build "free" printers instead of shelling dough to these greedy companies.
Dayumn! Superb idea? 1) Which obsolete hardware would be best to start with? 2) What's the high-volume, most available? 3) Sturdiest, least likely to be a pain? Freegeek.org has oodles of used printers if anyone wants to start building a hardware base.
freegeek.org will put them to good use. It's a 501(c)(3) so donations will result in a tax break, and they will go into PCs reloaded w/ Ubuntu and donated to schools & other non-profits. Some machines (laptops, mostly) are sold in the Thrift Store to keep the lights on and pay the rent, and some go to volunteers to keep them motivated, but the vast majority go to worthy causes. Anything which doesn't run is recycled responsibly.
Why not? Launching with a non-nuclear starter chemical-high-explosive bomb, from a steel-plated launch site, with a specific low-radiation 'fuel capsule' (not just a bomb, but a special efficient bomb designed for no fallout) would result in no fallout. Read the book and learn: http://www.amazon.com/Project-Orion-Story-Atomic-Spaceship/dp/0805072845/ref=sr_1_32?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211597734&sr=8-32
However, screening is also a tripwire. If Abdul gets caught, everyone shifts from Condition Eggshell to Condition Off-White, and EVERYONE gets searched. If nothing else, the US has learned the terrs have so few suicidals which can pass and have enough backbone to stay focused for the several days it takes to get here, that they have to use them carefully, so the terrs save up their nutjobs for wide open targets with maximum exposure.
Portlanders (the Oregonian variety) have coughed up $50 cash to pay for shipment postal charges.
A game store, Rainy Day Games, discounts purchases for donation and accepts donations to be held for shipment.
My wife's Girrll Gamers group sewed their little fingers to the bone making dice bags and packaging sets of dice, as well as donating several pounds of dice, many, many miniatrues, and many books and games.
Details at the blog for Operation Dice Drop.
Yep.
Could not have said it better.
However, let the troops know who likes them, and you will have several hundred thousand heavily armed friends some day.
http://kiloseven.blogspot.com/2007/04/operation-di ce-drop-live-from-iraq-its.html
has the list of games they want, a link to a postal cost calculator , deadlines for timely arrival of parcels, and the e-mail address for the Con Chair.