ARexx is nothing like a basic IMO. More like a higher level of C thats interpreted rather than compiled. And I've written stuff in ARexx that couldn't be done near as easily in any other langage I've found so far, simply because ARexx isn't a subset of Rexx, its a superset. No other language has a similar concept of an "arexx comm port", where any arexx program can talk to and therefore control or exchange data with, any other arexx program that makes use of this feature.
I have some scripts I wrote in '97, running yet today on an amiga, simply because I haven't figured out a way to do them in any other language that doesn't have this feature. They generate the news archives for wdtv.com's web site by extracting the prompter/CC text from the newsrooms newsserver NT box, and html formatting it for your reading pleasure.
Lots of the amiga's arexx scripts can be run by regina, but the minute you bring in the ports functions, regina is tits up and dead in the water. And when the regina list was asked about "ports", and I tried to describe them, their response was to play dumb. They couldn't envision the utility it represented at all, and couldn't see any usefull reason to even consider adding them to the language.
Now, if William (Bill) Hawes, who wrote arexx, had been paid by commode door, he might have been interested in porting his version to other platforms, but as far as I have been able to find out, he never was able to collect a penny for his efforts in doing it. The only money collection he ever did was by his own marketing efforts, selling it to amiga users whose OS version didn't come with the freebie. I know, we bought 2 copies of it ourselves. I also personally bought a copy of an arexx compiler called rexxplus that turned the scripts into standalone binaries that ran much faster on less cpu.
Yes, arexx had its warts with its typeless data, but they were entirely tolerable considering what it could do.
If you are asking that question honestly, then its obvious to the scientists among us that you have little or no appreciation for the information that this great instrument has brought us, and will continue to bring us for quite some time if its maintained. That instrument has single-handedly multiplied our knowledge of the universe we live in by a factor of at least 100, and refined some of our +- 50% guesses down to +- 5%, simply by being beyond the reach of the limitations in optical bandwidth that our planets atmosphere places on all the ground based scopes. Its done things that all the active optical stuff we've put on mountains so high that they are run by remote control still couldn't do.
The "next generation" telescope everyone is drooling over is designed to do an entirely different job, and is in no way capable of overlapping what the Hubble can do in the visible and near infrared spectrum. And it will be like the Hubble in terms of delays, so I don't see it going up in my remaining lifetime since I'm 69 now. Yes, it will also do good science when it goes up, but it cannot do what the Hubble is doing in the wavelength range between visible light and near infrared, say an octave either way from yellow/green as our eyes see color. IIRC its designed to work in the far infrared and into the microwave, where its resolution at best will be 1/10th that of the Hubble. But it will see thru dust clouds the Hubble can't too. We won't know what the region around Sag A really looks like until it does go up, Sag A IIRC, is supposedly very near if not the black hole this galaxy spins around.
As far as a manned mission to mars is concerned, thats where I feel that the remoteness and generally inhospitable conditions which combine to make it a one way trip preclude using anything but prisoners already sentenced to death for such a mission.
Considering the intelligence level of someone dumb enough to have gotten themselves in such a predicament in the first place, I'm not too sure that we would gain much in the way of scientific knowledge by following that distastefull to many path.
I look at it as political posturing, an attempt at giving NASA a "reason de terre", as opposed to fireing that whole bunch and starting all over again. Thats something we should have done when the first one blew up. This new shuttle loss just confirms that the old boy network that covers their ass MOST of the time by sheer luck alone, is still in place.
Human nature being what it is, I'm not even 75% sure that a total housecleaning would even fix it now. But I think a wholesale fireing, and maybe even a highly public manslaughter prosecution of the decision maker who passed on the loose foam problem might have a sobering effect on all the pie in the sky folks NASA seems to have collected down thru the decades. Nobody learned anything about common sense safety after the fire in Houston (and the test admin who ordered that test should have been prosecuted for murder) nor from Apollo 13 when there was a clear indication of a problem with the tank heaters thermostat before they launched, the only thing actually fixed was the booster seals after the late 80's blowup, and this time the loose foam was known, and had been known for at least the last 20 launches, possibly for much more time than that. But nobody has stepped forward to actually admit that doing the launch was a bad idea, "after all, it hasn't been a problem before now, why should this time be any different?"
IMO that attitude will not change until someone actually does some hard time. The agency needs the same accountability as you and I would get in a prosecution for no less than manslaughter in 3 of these 4 "accidents".
The Maytag, made in Newton Iowa, 20 some miles east of where I was born in 1934, had one big disadvantage, it like to kick back when you were starting it.
It could do it violently enough to break bones, and did in fact break my grandmothers ankle in about 1942.
Grandpa said that was it and went to town on that one, and came back with enough stuff from the Windcharger folks to get started with a "Delco" 32 volt electrical system on his farm, eventually expanding it to include our "house" a couple of hundred feet away.
But the real idea was to get the washing machine electrified, so we had the first electric washing machine in Madison County Iowa, home of all those bridges they made the movie about, by about 5 or 6 years because it wasn't till 47 or 48 that the REA came thru. It was the same old maytag wringer machine of course, but with a 1/4 horse electric motor replacing the old kickstart maytag put-put.
I ran a hand thru the wringer when I was about 6 and still wear the scars of that as it tore up my middle finger on the right hand rather badly. The ligaments survived, so its been 100% usable even now as Arther Itis has taken up residence.
Trivia:
The county seat town of Winterset in Madison County is also the home of one Mr. Marion Morrison, whom you know as the movie star John Wayne. I've been in the house he was born in, playing tourist, a couple of times. John also had a habit of posting his wats line number on the base bulletin board at North Island, and at the Naval Yards in Vallejo, so I've talked to my kids on his nickle several hours worth back when they were doing their military thing. That bit of his patriotism wasn't well known, and it occasionally ran him out of funds till the next movie started paying off, but he did it with a smile.
My, I seem to have drifted off topic, must be time to shut up.
Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) 99.22% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly Yahoo.com attornies please note, additions to this message by Gene Heskett are: Copyright 2004 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved
Cheers, Gene -- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) 99.22% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly Yahoo.com attornies please note, additions to this message by Gene Heskett are: Copyright 2004 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved
Have you taken note that the latest shipment doesn't even have the spindle locators in the case, making it worthless except as a puzzle if you pull the label that says to "open here"?
It might make the kids keep quiet for 10 seconds...
-- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) 99.22% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly Yahoo.com attornies please note, additions to this message by Gene Heskett are: Copyright 2004 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved
We aren't slaves to the Microsoft Empire, just sharecroppers.
'scuse me, but I don't even share the same dirt with that monopolistic bunch of jerks.
There isn't ANY windows in this house that aren't made out of transparent silica sand and held in either wooden or polyvinal(sp) frames, good for keeping out the cold (or hot) breezes of the outdoors.
Linux keeps me comfortable in the presence of 200+ copies of the latest windows-centric worm de-jour a day in my inbox, and deleted on sight.
IMO, AOL, like windows and microsoft, will be nothing but a footnote in judicial history in another 10 years.
Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) 99.22% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly Yahoo.com attornies please note, additions to this message by Gene Heskett are: Copyright 2004 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved
Well, haveing had several of them in my nearly 70 years, (and the other responder is correct in that Dometic is the maker,) I can relate that no one ever actually serviced those things by any method other than ordering a complete, new, factory sealed, plumbing system which could usually be adapted by small amounts of bending to fit the existing box. This was a several hundred dollar item for both the coilset and the labor. That made it very cost effective to just have the dealer order a new fridge that would fit the hole in the cabinetry. Either way, by the '70's, a failed unit could be expected to lighten your wallet by around 900 1979 dollars.
No one ever serviced them since once they leaked, so much moisture got into them that it was hopeless to attempt finding and fixing the leak and recharging the system with fresh sulpher dioxide. Those who tried found they leaked anew in weeks from the moisture now in the systems.
If someone made the ammonia cycle work in a small box for RV's, then I'm not aware of it. My last one however, was a 1975 30 foot Pace Arrow, and the box had to be replaced twice during my 5 year tenure at the wheel of that 2.7 mpg monstrosity.
I finally called it quits with the bitch that was in love with the RV idea, and lifes been a whole lot simpler since. Rather like the neurosurgion friend of mine (Dr. Roy Crowder) whose wife left, taking his Rolls with her. He celebrated the loss of the Rolls as it was costing him $265 every few weeks for a new generator, and had been for years. Unforch, he was one of the 272 victims of the June 9, 1972 Rapid City S.D. flood.
like the type you see in RV's that are powered by propane.?????????????
Ammonia????????
WhatRU smoking?
Those things don't run on ammonia AFAIK, and never have.
RV fridges, are powered, generally speaking, by a small boiler heated by a somewhat largish "pilot light" type flame, the active gas in those is sulpher dioxide.
Its quite efficient since it runs full time, and is the same process that powered all those 700+lb Servel brand refrigerators sold all over before the electrically driven compressor/evaporator types replaced them in the late 40's as electricity became available thanks to the REA and friends after WWII.
Its one disadvantage is that it requires a totally sealed environment within the "coils" of the system that is absolutely devoid of even a single water molecule, or any oxygen in any form if its to have a useable service life.
Sulpher dioxide is a very active gas, extremely unstable in that it will borrow an atom of oxygen from ANY available source and become sulpher trioxide, which is the proper name for sulpheric acid, C.P., with a specific gravity of 1.85 or more.
This includes, if the system leaks, and you are "in range" of breathing the leakage, the moisture in your lungs as you breathe, leading to severely chemically burnt, and non-functional (thats quickly fatal by the way) lungs. One diluted whiff of it and I guarantee you'll remember that smell the rest of your life.
The life of such a device is inversely proportional to how dry it was made before the gas was pumped in. Really dry and it can sit there and run for a hundred years, but generally, they weren't that dry and I've known them to leak from the internal corrosion from the self generated acid in 5 years time. I almost lost an aunt and her family when one of them let go about 3am back in the 50's, it was months before they could get a decent breath, playing particular hell on the aunt who had already had a session with rhuematic fever.
This type of refrigeration has been relegated to only being made by one Swedish company whose name I do not recall ATM, but I'm sure your favorite motor home dealer can tell you.
Today I expect them to be getting rare, since the average motor home now comes with a generator, and a quite useable small fridge with a mini compressor and whatever passes for freon 12 as the working gas can be had for a hundred or so at Wally World.
I'd like to know where that howstuffworks site managed to translate the ammonia systems normally used for really huge industrial refrigeration systems, like Con-Agra at their meat packing plants, into something used in an RV. That plumb boggles the mind with its sheer stupidity...
Yeah, I can see it now. Some poor schmuck gets convicted of sub-vocalizing "Wow!, you could plug one of them into each ear & hear your gun go off better" in front of a well endowed female who definitly isn't interested.
Some thoughts are better kept silent... But one really should pay attention to the body language and pheremones being broadcast if one wants the maximum "action". They don't lie near as much as the mouth.
I think these people who intend to make money from the good name of Project Gutenburg should be drawn and quartered. Thats inexcusable.
I hate to see the real project folks have to waste money on attornies to kick these jerks where it hurts, but I don't see a real, usable, alternative to doing just that.
Maybe its time we found a place to submit donations if the real PG site doesn't have such a facility available. I don't have very deep pockets as I'm on SS as I approach my 70th birthday, but surely there are folks out there with deeper pockets than mine, and equally committed to shooting back instead of being mugged by the likes of these low lifes.
We need the literary equivalent of a CWP, and a posse comitatus. To paraphrase Willy Nelson & friends, "whiskey for my men, and beer for our horses" when the job is done seems like a hell of a good idea.
And don't forget Thor, the single most integrated combination email and newsreader ever.
But I'd have to give the real nod to arexx. That was, even with its warts (and it had a few), the damndest language ever for a budding programmer to cut his teeth on, making it possible for the likes of Jim and I to write a real cron (EzCron) and a home automation program called EzHome.
Sadly a drive crash took most of the sources years ago, but I'd really like to do an EzCron for linux some day and see how long it would take to make vixiecron a footnote in linux history. EzCrons ease of configuration would win even the diehards over in time I think, but then I'm an optimist WRT the amiga.
Many years ago, the color of the paint we were required to use on tall towers for daytime aviation visibility contained rather large amounts of red lead oxide and other such obnoxious chemical dyes. Some of it was so bad that tower painters had skin cancers 2" across on their arms from the constant, getting dripped or rubbed on them, contact. Some of them were so gung ho that they used those big shaggy car wash mitts, and dipped their whole arm in a 5 gallon bucket to paint towers with. My thoughts were, yeah its fast, but at what cost to you personally. I never got the point across to any of them. I presume that it eventually killed them because I never saw the same painters 2 paint jobs in a row until the paint itself was changed.
Even though that paint has been supplanted now with alkhyde resin stuff with a slightly different orange color that is twice as brite due to self flourescense, the same effect that makes your white shirt really really bright white, and now lasts 2 to 3 x longer, the amount of that old paint that leached off into the ground around those towers means that it will be another 40 years before we can actually have good grass growing there. At one tower I'm familiar with, the grass on the downwind side is now about 10 feet closer to the tower than it was 20 years ago. With another 20 feet to go. And yes, we've repeatedly seeded the area.
The whole point of this story is that when that went up back in the 60's, the required by the FAA paint was indeed some ugly fscking stuff when looked at environmentally. Considering the sheer amount of it in that structure, I'm not in favor of continueing the insult to what is already a somewhat fragile piece of real estate I've been able to look at personally, particularly when its inside a designated wild life zone. Let the recyclers worry about how to remove that paint safely before its stuffed back into the furnace polluting the hell out of the neighborhood the recycler has to live in. Just make sure the recycling contract has such safe paint (and the galvanizeing under it) disposal written into it.
-- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author)
If you cannot afford the lawyer, then reject the job unless they change it to be equitable, not you.
Its really that simple IMO, based on about 70 years of living. You absolutely must be able to look yourself in the mirror and see somebody you'd like to shave rather than cutting the throat you see in the mirror.
-- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author)
I don't believe I had a premise since I was not making any type of argument, just stating fact.
Humm, fact as you choose to interpret it, but I don't believe that will pass the simmer test. If congress has to approve that budget, its taxpayer dollars they are spending. If they simply set the rules they operate under, with no input to the money details one way or the other, then I'd soften my stance. The chances of that happening are, as another engineer friend of mine once said:
Thats real small, somewhere between point double ought shit and nothing.
Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author)
I'd draw the line in defining self funded by asking if they can keep the profits, or if it goes back into the general fund, and likewise, will the government make up for the losses should there be any?
I haven't actually checked, but it would be a write it on th town water tank first for a government agency to actually get to keep, and to re-invest as that agency see's fit, any profits they might accrue.
If they cannot, but are run by financial rules such as the FCC operates under, (all those sometimes considerablke fines they levy against broadcasters and which you read about in the papers? That check, when it does come in, is forwarded to the treasury for deposit into the general fund, the FCC can't keep a cent of it.) then by my definition they are indeed a taxpayer funded agency. There may be lots of used male bovine feed in the official agency description, but thats what it all boils down to if you simmer that pot long enough.
This is what I claim must cease, putting that agency on the same financial and legal page as any other publicly held enterprise, with equally severe or even enhanced penalties for missing the point of their real job, the proper administration of our patent system.
I like the idea of a reverse auction, where the one claiming they can run it for the lowest per customer fee gets to run it for one calendar year, renewable if their performance was satisfactory. Blow it, and the thing goes up for auction at the end of the contractual year.
Or, congress could, and this is unheard of to the point of being blasphemous here in the states, shade of the Bundestags method of maintaining the autobahn and all that, where the job still goes to the lowest bidder, but inherent and implicit is a 5 year warranty on the work you do. If it cracks again, you fix it for free, and the 5 year warranty is still in force. If you wanna build a 1/2 year road, thats fine, but you get paid once even if you have to go back and redo it every 6 months to fullfill the warranty. ISTR there is a final payment of 20% to the contractor at the end of the warranty period if the work was satisfactory, this to guarantee that the warranty will be performed. Yeah, we build a mile of interstate for the price of maybe 300 meters of the autobahn. But its smooth enough to run at 220+ mph if you have sufficient training and balls and the vehicle is safely capable of it.
Their fatality rate per mile driven is about 85% of what we achieve on our 75 mph maximum interstate system that falls apart every winter, so we spend the summer in 30 mph construction zones.
The safety difference isn't the speed, its the quality of the road, and driver training. A german drivers licensee often has 1500-2000 dollars invested in training to get that license. One DUI and its all gone for the rest of your life too, automaticly. Me, its a 10 dollar bill every 4 years plus an eyeball check for us old farts.
But back to our broken patent system. We're not having fun with our patent system, so to me, its patently (ick) obvious we aren't doing it right.
Any patent ought to have a warranty, say 5 years, and if a legal action results that invalidates it, then all legal fees on both sides of the suite to adjudicate it again should be born by the USTPO.
And your premise was?
Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author)
If you get sued by someone with a patent, and the patent is found to be invalid. The Patent Office should have to pay your legal fees, as well as other punitive damages.
Where do I sign up to vote for this? I'm gonna make sure that everyone in all the local cemetaries is also registered and votes for it.
Seriously, this, if it weren't for the USTPO being paid for by taxpayer dollars in the first place, and therefore any punitive action against them translates directly to a punitive action against the public at large, while they are still insulated from the results of their usually brainless actions. This has got to stop, and do so without allowing politics into the picture.
So the first step is to privatize the USTPO, making someone at the top responsible for the agencies continued financial viability, maybe even with jail time for a proven in the courts failure. If damages were against them for granting a bogus patent, you can bet your ass that efficient means of searching for prior art would be just a perl script away from reality.
As it exists today, it appears that the USTPO has no real incentive to "waste time on all that folderol".
So yes, I'm in favor of a large, smoking, hole in the ground where the present agency resides, but we also have a very very real need for something that actually works.
We'd have to pay the top person well enough to make the job appealing even while holding that person punitively responsible for failures. That would go a long ways toward assuring that a granted patent in indeed a patentable idea, unclouded by any possible tainting by prior art.
Fees for fileing a patent would of course have to go up, way up to the point that the only way I could afford to file one is if I sold 90% of myself to somebody in the VC business. As thats often the case today anyway, I don't see that as all that huge an impediment if the idea itself is a valid, patentable idea. That would make the VC people do some real investigations themselves, which cannot help but be a Good Thing(tm).
There would of course have to be severe criminal penalties, including hard time in the federal ass pound for VC's who betrayed that trust by attempting to steal the idea after the inventor has revealed enough to them to generate their interest and help. The inventor deserves to be protected from such pond scum.
I feel sorry for the kids mostly, because unless they really like to read, and have unlimited access to the internet, they will not see the effects of the pendulum swing until its too late, and they have a head full of knowledge only marginally usefull in their future job market.
The pendulum is indeed swinging, and it certainly isn't toward M$.
That un-named educator should be relieved of his post and salary, he is doing his students a dis-service, the roots of which are buried in his unwavering belief that M$ will rule forever. They won't...
They (M$) will use every means at their disposal including buying a few more lawmakers than they have already wined and dined. But when that pendulum has the whole planets IT weight behind it, and many governments too, rest assured, the swing will take place. Where it comes to rest if ever I have no idea. But I do have faith that within my remaining lifetime of maybe 10 more years if I'm real carefull, the forces of economics 101 combined with the buying populaces feelings of demanding their freedom instead of pledgeing their firstborn in the EULA that comes with the latest service pack to fix a security hole thats over a year old, will have reduced M$ to the niche marketplace category. A place where M$ will be forced to produce secure, user-friendly and stable code just to survive another year. A not very pretty footnote to american history for what was once the driving force behind the productivity of america IMO.
Is your un-named educator prosecutable for the dis-service he is doing to his students? Probably not, but he certainly needs wined and dined with his further political education being the main topic of discussion. Email him everytime a story link can be found that shows the swing of that ficticious pendulum away from M$. In short, get political yourself.
If you can afford the wineing and dining, then by all means you do it. If you have fears that it might hurt a little, well some fights are worth the pain of the effort, and the future of our childrens (my great grandchildren) education does seem to be worth taking the chance of collecting a bruise or 3 to ones ego.
I make my views known locally about this to anyone who'll listen, and folks can take me or leave me, but at least I can say I tried.
Can you?
-- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author)
The courses of action defined in my sig used on emails is getting closer and closer to the last option I fear. I mean, just how much longer is the american public actually going to tolerate what nearly 100% of us see as justice for sale to the highest bidder?
As Harry Truman once said about the buck stopping here, there will come a point when enough of us have had enough, and the passing of the buck will come to a screeching halt, with much of our constitution restored to its original meaning.
My sig?:
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Re:Well :: I said it more than once, I'll say it
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I take it you are one of those to whom Benjaman Franklin was refering when he made the comment about "he who would give up a his liberty for a bit of security deserves neither" Or words to that effect.
Sorry. Our constitution's appended "Bill of Rights", aka the first 10 amendments to that grand old document, serve as the guarantee that we *will* stay a free country.
Go and read it, particularly the 1st and 2nd. The 1st guarantees your right to say anything you please as long as its not libelous. Recently amended by the non-patriot act part 2 and the campaign finance reform law to specifically enjoin anyone from saying something factual but detrimental about a currrent office holder within 60 days of a general election.
That, in and of itself, is unconstitutional according to the 1st amendment, but the supremes have somehow managed to warp their version of the first amendment around to protect the incumbents.
The 2nd guarantees the citizens rights to the tools to change that government back to a constitutionally constructed one should it deviate from that path and the need arise.
Some states, and some feds are hell bent on nibbling that right away like a flock of ducks.
Funny thing is that as of right now 32 states have signed onto some sort of legislation affirming that right, with another 1 or 2 coming on-board every year. Fortunately, I live in one of those states, so yes, if they come knocking on my door, they had better have a duely sworn and signed by a judge known to me, notarized search warrant in hand and readable by me else the ultimate weapon will be used to defend my home. Without that document in hand, they have no more standing than the average burglar. That my erstwhile friend, is my constitutional right.
As Thomas Paine, whose signature is on that grand old document, once said, "the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
This is interesting, particularly since Canon has seen fit to only make it work on an XP system.
I think it behooves the open source crowd to determine if their so-called validation code might in fact be the md5sum of the image.
If that was the case, or even some other not so commonly used large number of bits crc was done, it still possible that we could do it. For crc's of course, you would have to be privy to the seed number, which makes a brute force search very time consuming, and no doubt subject to the DMCA, damn that thing!
Of course if we did figure it out, and get by the DMCA too, then there is the little matter of getting our version suitably certified before law enforcement would entertain the idea of using a linux based version.
Bitching at Canon for locking out the next generation of operating systems would probably be a more prroductive use of our time.
Scuse me, but the last release is 8.5 cd's worth. A couple of cd's will get you going, but theres a lot more than just getting going IMO.
Cheers, Gene There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order. -Ed Howdershelt (Author) 99.22% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly Yahoo.com attornies please note, additions to this message by Gene Heskett are: Copyright 2004 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.
That sure seems like an awful lot of trouble to go to just to keep a winderz box running nominally.
Dude, it would be so much easier to just format c: and install the linux of your choice. Then its no problem at all, and your machine won't be the source of a ddos unless you put some of the scripts that have floated by here to work.
My eddy-cated guess is that this was in fact written by a coder who knows just enough windows to get it done. And then he reboots to linux so he can laugh while the worlds windows users do the dirty work. And linux catches more hell from the nitwits that write the news for the rest of the world because there is no way in hell you can convince most of them that windows is almost a virus all by itself. It just fails the viri test according to their private version of Gorp and that list way back up the logbook here.
Sigh... Such is human nature, the "everyone is guilty except me" syndrome. Only I've lived long enough to know we're all guilty of *something*:)
Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author)
You'd think someone could build a friggin' slightly stronger tuner for a TV!
Tv tuners today are "state of the art" except maybe in the 99 dollar specials. To get a usable signal on ears from a full power station 20 miles away, please understand that your rabbit ears are not up sufficiently high to have any effect on the local manmade noises, and the thermal noise thats going to accompany the weak signal.
If you want a decent signal, you are going to have to remove the ears, and place an outdoor antenna at a sufficient height, which will result in a quite a bit stronger signal, and do the reception at a distance that is going to be somewhat removed from most manmade noises, like the computer you are using to post your message. Its not the antenna (rabbit ears vs rooftop) but the signal to noise ratio. Moving 30 feet to get away from local noise can make a heck of a difference, particularly when that 30 feet is up.
Well, for one, I doubt that my posting to slashdot will get me 47 megs of spam in my inbox within a days time. 30.2 megs of which are pecker growers & the rest probably phishers or 419's or yet another copy of the latest windows worm/virus. swen runs to about 15 megs a day by itself. Being a linux user, none of this crap bothers me in the least except the wear and tear on my mouse or finger deleting it. That does have an effect when the fingers running them are arthritic. Repetitive motions and all that crap.
It may also get me a message from some other/. poster telling me go fuck off, but thats how discussions are carried on in a free society.
Get used to it. Its a fact of life, as I've observed for nearly 70 years. Only the medium delivering the message changes as each new generation of communications gets cheaper by 100x than the last one was.
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ARexx is nothing like a basic IMO. More like a higher level of C thats interpreted rather than compiled. And I've written stuff in ARexx that couldn't be done near as easily in any other langage I've found so far, simply because ARexx isn't a subset of Rexx, its a superset. No other language has a similar concept of an "arexx comm port", where any arexx program can talk to and therefore control or exchange data with, any other arexx program that makes use of this feature.
I have some scripts I wrote in '97, running yet today on an amiga, simply because I haven't figured out a way to do them in any other language that doesn't have this feature. They generate the news archives for wdtv.com's web site by extracting the prompter/CC text from the newsrooms newsserver NT box, and html formatting it for your reading pleasure.
Lots of the amiga's arexx scripts can be run by regina, but the minute you bring in the ports functions, regina is tits up and dead in the water. And when the regina list was asked about "ports", and I tried to describe them, their response was to play dumb. They couldn't envision the utility it represented at all, and couldn't see any usefull reason to even consider adding them to the language.
Now, if William (Bill) Hawes, who wrote arexx, had been paid by commode door, he might have been interested in porting his version to other platforms, but as far as I have been able to find out, he never was able to collect a penny for his efforts in doing it. The only money collection he ever did was by his own marketing efforts, selling it to amiga users whose OS version didn't come with the freebie. I know, we bought 2 copies of it ourselves. I also personally bought a copy of an arexx compiler called rexxplus that turned the scripts into standalone binaries that ran much faster on less cpu.
Yes, arexx had its warts with its typeless data, but they were entirely tolerable considering what it could do.
Cheers, Gene
but shouldn't we just let it go ?
If you are asking that question honestly, then its obvious to the scientists among us that you have little or no appreciation for the information that this great instrument has brought us, and will continue to bring us for quite some time if its maintained. That instrument has single-handedly multiplied our knowledge of the universe we live in by a factor of at least 100, and refined some of our +- 50% guesses down to +- 5%, simply by being beyond the reach of the limitations in optical bandwidth that our planets atmosphere places on all the ground based scopes. Its done things that all the active optical stuff we've put on mountains so high that they are run by remote control still couldn't do.
The "next generation" telescope everyone is drooling over is designed to do an entirely different job, and is in no way capable of overlapping what the Hubble can do in the visible and near infrared spectrum. And it will be like the Hubble in terms of delays, so I don't see it going up in my remaining lifetime since I'm 69 now. Yes, it will also do good science when it goes up, but it cannot do what the Hubble is doing in the wavelength range between visible light and near infrared, say an octave either way from yellow/green as our eyes see color. IIRC its designed to work in the far infrared and into the microwave, where its resolution at best will be 1/10th that of the Hubble. But it will see thru dust clouds the Hubble can't too. We won't know what the region around Sag A really looks like until it does go up, Sag A IIRC, is supposedly very near if not the black hole this galaxy spins around.
As far as a manned mission to mars is concerned, thats where I feel that the remoteness and generally inhospitable conditions which combine to make it a one way trip preclude using anything but prisoners already sentenced to death for such a mission.
Considering the intelligence level of someone dumb enough to have gotten themselves in such a predicament in the first place, I'm not too sure that we would gain much in the way of scientific knowledge by following that distastefull to many path.
I look at it as political posturing, an attempt at giving NASA a "reason de terre", as opposed to fireing that whole bunch and starting all over again. Thats something we should have done when the first one blew up. This new shuttle loss just confirms that the old boy network that covers their ass MOST of the time by sheer luck alone, is still in place.
Human nature being what it is, I'm not even 75% sure that a total housecleaning would even fix it now. But I think a wholesale fireing, and maybe even a highly public manslaughter prosecution of the decision maker who passed on the loose foam problem might have a sobering effect on all the pie in the sky folks NASA seems to have collected down thru the decades. Nobody learned anything about common sense safety after the fire in Houston (and the test admin who ordered that test should have been prosecuted for murder) nor from Apollo 13 when there was a clear indication of a problem with the tank heaters thermostat before they launched, the only thing actually fixed was the booster seals after the late 80's blowup, and this time the loose foam was known, and had been known for at least the last 20 launches, possibly for much more time than that. But nobody has stepped forward to actually admit that doing the launch was a bad idea, "after all, it hasn't been a problem before now, why should this time be any different?"
IMO that attitude will not change until someone actually does some hard time. The agency needs the same accountability as you and I would get in a prosecution for no less than manslaughter in 3 of these 4 "accidents".
Cheers, Gene
The Maytag, made in Newton Iowa, 20 some miles east of where I was born in 1934, had one big disadvantage, it like to kick back when you were starting it.
It could do it violently enough to break bones, and did in fact break my grandmothers ankle in about 1942.
Grandpa said that was it and went to town on that one, and came back with enough stuff from the Windcharger folks to get started with a "Delco" 32 volt electrical system on his farm, eventually expanding it to include our "house" a couple of hundred feet away.
But the real idea was to get the washing machine electrified, so we had the first electric washing machine in Madison County Iowa, home of all those bridges they made the movie about, by about 5 or 6 years because it wasn't till 47 or 48 that the REA came thru. It was the same old maytag wringer machine of course, but with a 1/4 horse electric motor replacing the old kickstart maytag put-put.
I ran a hand thru the wringer when I was about 6 and still wear the scars of that as it tore up my middle finger on the right hand rather badly. The ligaments survived, so its been 100% usable even now as Arther Itis has taken up residence.
Trivia:
The county seat town of Winterset in Madison County is also the home of one Mr. Marion Morrison, whom you know as the movie star John Wayne. I've been in the house he was born in, playing tourist, a couple of times. John also had a habit of posting his wats line number on the base bulletin board at North Island, and at the Naval Yards in Vallejo, so I've talked to my kids on his nickle several hours worth back when they were doing their military thing. That bit of his patriotism wasn't well known, and it occasionally ran him out of funds till the next movie started paying off, but he did it with a smile.
My, I seem to have drifted off topic, must be time to shut up.
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
99.22% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly
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Chuckle...
Serves 'em right.
Cheers, Gene
--
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
99.22% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly
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by Gene Heskett are:
Copyright 2004 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved
Have you taken note that the latest shipment doesn't even have the spindle locators in the case, making it worthless except as a puzzle if you pull the label that says to "open here"?
It might make the kids keep quiet for 10 seconds...
--
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
99.22% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly
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We aren't slaves to the Microsoft Empire, just sharecroppers.
'scuse me, but I don't even share the same dirt with that monopolistic bunch of jerks.
There isn't ANY windows in this house that aren't made out of transparent silica sand and held in either wooden or polyvinal(sp) frames, good for keeping out the cold (or hot) breezes of the outdoors.
Linux keeps me comfortable in the presence of 200+ copies of the latest windows-centric worm de-jour a day in my inbox, and deleted on sight.
IMO, AOL, like windows and microsoft, will be nothing but a footnote in judicial history in another 10 years.
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
99.22% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly
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Well, haveing had several of them in my nearly 70 years, (and the other responder is correct in that Dometic is the maker,) I can relate that no one ever actually serviced those things by any method other than ordering a complete, new, factory sealed, plumbing system which could usually be adapted by small amounts of bending to fit the existing box. This was a several hundred dollar item for both the coilset and the labor. That made it very cost effective to just have the dealer order a new fridge that would fit the hole in the cabinetry. Either way, by the '70's, a failed unit could be expected to lighten your wallet by around 900 1979 dollars.
No one ever serviced them since once they leaked, so much moisture got into them that it was hopeless to attempt finding and fixing the leak and recharging the system with fresh sulpher dioxide. Those who tried found they leaked anew in weeks from the moisture now in the systems.
If someone made the ammonia cycle work in a small box for RV's, then I'm not aware of it. My last one however, was a 1975 30 foot Pace Arrow, and the box had to be replaced twice during my 5 year tenure at the wheel of that 2.7 mpg monstrosity.
I finally called it quits with the bitch that was in love with the RV idea, and lifes been a whole lot simpler since. Rather like the neurosurgion friend of mine (Dr. Roy Crowder) whose wife left, taking his Rolls with her. He celebrated the loss of the Rolls as it was costing him $265 every few weeks for a new generator, and had been for years. Unforch, he was one of the 272 victims of the June 9, 1972 Rapid City S.D. flood.
Cheers, Gene
like the type you see in RV's that are powered by propane.?????????????
Ammonia????????
WhatRU smoking?
Those things don't run on ammonia AFAIK, and never have.
RV fridges, are powered, generally speaking, by a small boiler heated by a somewhat largish "pilot light" type flame, the active gas in those is sulpher dioxide.
Its quite efficient since it runs full time, and is the same process that powered all those 700+lb Servel brand refrigerators sold all over before the electrically driven compressor/evaporator types replaced them in the late 40's as electricity became available thanks to the REA and friends after WWII.
Its one disadvantage is that it requires a totally sealed environment within the "coils" of the system that is absolutely devoid of even a single water molecule, or any oxygen in any form if its to have a useable service life.
Sulpher dioxide is a very active gas, extremely unstable in that it will borrow an atom of oxygen from ANY available source and become sulpher trioxide, which is the proper name for sulpheric acid, C.P., with a specific gravity of 1.85 or more.
This includes, if the system leaks, and you are "in range" of breathing the leakage, the moisture in your lungs as you breathe, leading to severely chemically burnt, and non-functional (thats quickly fatal by the way) lungs. One diluted whiff of it and I guarantee you'll remember that smell the rest of your life.
The life of such a device is inversely proportional to how dry it was made before the gas was pumped in. Really dry and it can sit there and run for a hundred years, but generally, they weren't that dry and I've known them to leak from the internal corrosion from the self generated acid in 5 years time. I almost lost an aunt and her family when one of them let go about 3am back in the 50's, it was months before they could get a decent breath, playing particular hell on the aunt who had already had a session with rhuematic fever.
This type of refrigeration has been relegated to only being made by one Swedish company whose name I do not recall ATM, but I'm sure your favorite motor home dealer can tell you.
Today I expect them to be getting rare, since the average motor home now comes with a generator, and a quite useable small fridge with a mini compressor and whatever passes for freon 12 as the working gas can be had for a hundred or so at Wally World.
I'd like to know where that howstuffworks site managed to translate the ammonia systems normally used for really huge industrial refrigeration systems, like Con-Agra at their meat packing plants, into something used in an RV. That plumb boggles the mind with its sheer stupidity...
Cheers, Gene
Yeah, I can see it now. Some poor schmuck gets convicted of sub-vocalizing "Wow!, you could plug one of them into each ear & hear your gun go off better" in front of a well endowed female who definitly isn't interested.
Some thoughts are better kept silent... But one really should pay attention to the body language and pheremones being broadcast if one wants the maximum "action". They don't lie near as much as the mouth.
Cheers, Gene
I think these people who intend to make money from the good name of Project Gutenburg should be drawn and quartered. Thats inexcusable.
I hate to see the real project folks have to waste money on attornies to kick these jerks where it hurts, but I don't see a real, usable, alternative to doing just that.
Maybe its time we found a place to submit donations if the real PG site doesn't have such a facility available. I don't have very deep pockets as I'm on SS as I approach my 70th birthday, but surely there are folks out there with deeper pockets than mine, and equally committed to shooting back instead of being mugged by the likes of these low lifes.
We need the literary equivalent of a CWP, and a posse comitatus. To paraphrase Willy Nelson & friends, "whiskey for my men, and beer for our horses" when the job is done seems like a hell of a good idea.
Cheers, Gene
And don't forget Thor, the single most integrated combination email and newsreader ever.
But I'd have to give the real nod to arexx. That was, even with its warts (and it had a few), the damndest language ever for a budding programmer to cut his teeth on, making it possible for the likes of Jim and I to write a real cron (EzCron) and a home automation program called EzHome.
Sadly a drive crash took most of the sources years ago, but I'd really like to do an EzCron for linux some day and see how long it would take to make vixiecron a footnote in linux history. EzCrons ease of configuration would win even the diehards over in time I think, but then I'm an optimist WRT the amiga.
Cheers, Gene
That you are correct!
Many years ago, the color of the paint we were required to use on tall towers for daytime aviation visibility contained rather large amounts of red lead oxide and other such obnoxious chemical dyes. Some of it was so bad that tower painters had skin cancers 2" across on their arms from the constant, getting dripped or rubbed on them, contact. Some of them were so gung ho that they used those big shaggy car wash mitts, and dipped their whole arm in a 5 gallon bucket to paint towers with. My thoughts were, yeah its fast, but at what cost to you personally. I never got the point across to any of them. I presume that it eventually killed them because I never saw the same painters 2 paint jobs in a row until the paint itself was changed.
Even though that paint has been supplanted now with alkhyde resin stuff with a slightly different orange color that is twice as brite due to self flourescense, the same effect that makes your white shirt really really bright white, and now lasts 2 to 3 x longer, the amount of that old paint that leached off into the ground around those towers means that it will be another 40 years before we can actually have good grass growing there. At one tower I'm familiar with, the grass on the downwind side is now about 10 feet closer to the tower than it was 20 years ago. With another 20 feet to go. And yes, we've repeatedly seeded the area.
The whole point of this story is that when that went up back in the 60's, the required by the FAA paint was indeed some ugly fscking stuff when looked at environmentally. Considering the sheer amount of it in that structure, I'm not in favor of continueing the insult to what is already a somewhat fragile piece of real estate I've been able to look at personally, particularly when its inside a designated wild life zone. Let the recyclers worry about how to remove that paint safely before its stuffed back into the furnace polluting the hell out of the neighborhood the recycler has to live in. Just make sure the recycling contract has such safe paint (and the galvanizeing under it) disposal written into it.
--
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
The 3 words are of course, get a lawyer.
If you cannot afford the lawyer, then reject the job unless they change it to be equitable, not you.
Its really that simple IMO, based on about 70 years of living. You absolutely must be able to look yourself in the mirror and see somebody you'd like to shave rather than cutting the throat you see in the mirror.
--
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
I don't believe I had a premise since I was not making any type of argument, just stating fact.
Humm, fact as you choose to interpret it, but I don't believe that will pass the simmer test. If congress has to approve that budget, its taxpayer dollars they are spending. If they simply set the rules they operate under, with no input to the money details one way or the other, then I'd soften my stance. The chances of that happening are, as another engineer friend of mine once said:
Thats real small, somewhere between point double ought shit and nothing.
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
I'd draw the line in defining self funded by asking if they can keep the profits, or if it goes back into the general fund, and likewise, will the government make up for the losses should there be any?
I haven't actually checked, but it would be a write it on th town water tank first for a government agency to actually get to keep, and to re-invest as that agency see's fit, any profits they might accrue.
If they cannot, but are run by financial rules such as the FCC operates under, (all those sometimes considerablke fines they levy against broadcasters and which you read about in the papers? That check, when it does come in, is forwarded to the treasury for deposit into the general fund, the FCC can't keep a cent of it.) then by my definition they are indeed a taxpayer funded agency. There may be lots of used male bovine feed in the official agency description, but thats what it all boils down to if you simmer that pot long enough.
This is what I claim must cease, putting that agency on the same financial and legal page as any other publicly held enterprise, with equally severe or even enhanced penalties for missing the point of their real job, the proper administration of our patent system.
I like the idea of a reverse auction, where the one claiming they can run it for the lowest per customer fee gets to run it for one calendar year, renewable if their performance was satisfactory. Blow it, and the thing goes up for auction at the end of the contractual year.
Or, congress could, and this is unheard of to the point of being blasphemous here in the states, shade of the Bundestags method of maintaining the autobahn and all that, where the job still goes to the lowest bidder, but inherent and implicit is a 5 year warranty on the work you do. If it cracks again, you fix it for free, and the 5 year warranty is still in force. If you wanna build a 1/2 year road, thats fine, but you get paid once even if you have to go back and redo it every 6 months to fullfill the warranty. ISTR there is a final payment of 20% to the contractor at the end of the warranty period if the work was satisfactory, this to guarantee that the warranty will be performed. Yeah, we build a mile of interstate for the price of maybe 300 meters of the autobahn. But its smooth enough to run at 220+ mph if you have sufficient training and balls and the vehicle is safely capable of it.
Their fatality rate per mile driven is about 85% of what we achieve on our 75 mph maximum interstate system that falls apart every winter, so we spend the summer in 30 mph construction zones.
The safety difference isn't the speed, its the quality of the road, and driver training. A german drivers licensee often has 1500-2000 dollars invested in training to get that license. One DUI and its all gone for the rest of your life too, automaticly. Me, its a 10 dollar bill every 4 years plus an eyeball check for us old farts.
But back to our broken patent system. We're not having fun with our patent system, so to me, its patently (ick) obvious we aren't doing it right.
Any patent ought to have a warranty, say 5 years, and if a legal action results that invalidates it, then all legal fees on both sides of the suite to adjudicate it again should be born by the USTPO.
And your premise was?
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
If you get sued by someone with a patent, and the patent is found to be invalid. The Patent Office should have to pay your legal fees, as well as other punitive damages.
Where do I sign up to vote for this? I'm gonna make sure that everyone in all the local cemetaries is also registered and votes for it.
Seriously, this, if it weren't for the USTPO being paid for by taxpayer dollars in the first place, and therefore any punitive action against them translates directly to a punitive action against the public at large, while they are still insulated from the results of their usually brainless actions. This has got to stop, and do so without allowing politics into the picture.
So the first step is to privatize the USTPO, making someone at the top responsible for the agencies continued financial viability, maybe even with jail time for a proven in the courts failure. If damages were against them for granting a bogus patent, you can bet your ass that efficient means of searching for prior art would be just a perl script away from reality.
As it exists today, it appears that the USTPO has no real incentive to "waste time on all that folderol".
So yes, I'm in favor of a large, smoking, hole in the ground where the present agency resides, but we also have a very very real need for something that actually works.
We'd have to pay the top person well enough to make the job appealing even while holding that person punitively responsible for failures. That would go a long ways toward assuring that a granted patent in indeed a patentable idea, unclouded by any possible tainting by prior art.
Fees for fileing a patent would of course have to go up, way up to the point that the only way I could afford to file one is if I sold 90% of myself to somebody in the VC business. As thats often the case today anyway, I don't see that as all that huge an impediment if the idea itself is a valid, patentable idea. That would make the VC people do some real investigations themselves, which cannot help but be a Good Thing(tm).
There would of course have to be severe criminal penalties, including hard time in the federal ass pound for VC's who betrayed that trust by attempting to steal the idea after the inventor has revealed enough to them to generate their interest and help. The inventor deserves to be protected from such pond scum.
And what do you call 3 empty seats on that bus? A crying shame...
It will only get worse from here.
I feel sorry for the kids mostly, because unless they really like to read, and have unlimited access to the internet, they will not see the effects of the pendulum swing until its too late, and they have a head full of knowledge only marginally usefull in their future job market.
The pendulum is indeed swinging, and it certainly isn't toward M$.
That un-named educator should be relieved of his post and salary, he is doing his students a dis-service, the roots of which are buried in his unwavering belief that M$ will rule forever. They won't...
They (M$) will use every means at their disposal including buying a few more lawmakers than they have already wined and dined. But when that pendulum has the whole planets IT weight behind it, and many governments too, rest assured, the swing will take place. Where it comes to rest if ever I have no idea. But I do have faith that within my remaining lifetime of maybe 10 more years if I'm real carefull, the forces of economics 101 combined with the buying populaces feelings of demanding their freedom instead of pledgeing their firstborn in the EULA that comes with the latest service pack to fix a security hole thats over a year old, will have reduced M$ to the niche marketplace category. A place where M$ will be forced to produce secure, user-friendly and stable code just to survive another year. A not very pretty footnote to american history for what was once the driving force behind the productivity of america IMO.
Is your un-named educator prosecutable for the dis-service he is doing to his students? Probably not, but he certainly needs wined and dined with his further political education being the main topic of discussion. Email him everytime a story link can be found that shows the swing of that ficticious pendulum away from M$. In short, get political yourself.
If you can afford the wineing and dining, then by all means you do it. If you have fears that it might hurt a little, well some fights are worth the pain of the effort, and the future of our childrens (my great grandchildren) education does seem to be worth taking the chance of collecting a bruise or 3 to ones ego.
I make my views known locally about this to anyone who'll listen, and folks can take me or leave me, but at least I can say I tried.
Can you?
--
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap,
ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
The courses of action defined in my sig used on emails is getting closer and closer to the last option I fear. I mean, just how much longer is the american public actually going to tolerate what nearly 100% of us see as justice for sale to the highest bidder?
:
As Harry Truman once said about the buck stopping here, there will come a point when enough of us have had enough, and the passing of the buck will come to a screeching halt, with much of our constitution restored to its original meaning.
My sig?
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap,
ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
I take it you are one of those to whom Benjaman Franklin was refering when he made the comment about "he who would give up a his liberty for a bit of security deserves neither" Or words to that effect.
Sorry. Our constitution's appended "Bill of Rights", aka the first 10 amendments to that grand old document, serve as the guarantee that we *will* stay a free country.
Go and read it, particularly the 1st and 2nd. The 1st guarantees your right to say anything you please as long as its not libelous. Recently amended by the non-patriot act part 2 and the campaign finance reform law to specifically enjoin anyone from saying something factual but detrimental about a currrent office holder within 60 days of a general election.
That, in and of itself, is unconstitutional according to the 1st amendment, but the supremes have somehow managed to warp their version of the first amendment around to protect the incumbents.
The 2nd guarantees the citizens rights to the tools to change that government back to a constitutionally constructed one should it deviate from that path and the need arise.
Some states, and some feds are hell bent on nibbling that right away like a flock of ducks.
Funny thing is that as of right now 32 states have signed onto some sort of legislation affirming that right, with another 1 or 2 coming on-board every year. Fortunately, I live in one of those states, so yes, if they come knocking on my door, they had better have a duely sworn and signed by a judge known to me, notarized search warrant in hand and readable by me else the ultimate weapon will be used to defend my home. Without that document in hand, they have no more standing than the average burglar. That my erstwhile friend, is my constitutional right.
As Thomas Paine, whose signature is on that grand old document, once said, "the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
This is interesting, particularly since Canon has seen fit to only make it work on an XP system.
I think it behooves the open source crowd to determine if their so-called validation code might in fact be the md5sum of the image.
If that was the case, or even some other not so commonly used large number of bits crc was done, it still possible that we could do it. For crc's of course, you would have to be privy to the seed number, which makes a brute force search very time consuming, and no doubt subject to the DMCA, damn that thing!
Of course if we did figure it out, and get by the DMCA too, then there is the little matter of getting our version suitably certified before law enforcement would entertain the idea of using a linux based version.
Bitching at Canon for locking out the next generation of operating systems would probably be a more prroductive use of our time.
Cheers, Gene
These days you need a couple of CDs for Debian.
Scuse me, but the last release is 8.5 cd's worth. A couple of cd's will get you going, but theres a lot more than just getting going IMO.
Cheers, Gene
There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order.
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
99.22% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly
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That sure seems like an awful lot of trouble to go to just to keep a winderz box running nominally.
:)
Dude, it would be so much easier to just format c: and install the linux of your choice. Then its no problem at all, and your machine won't be the source of a ddos unless you put some of the scripts that have floated by here to work.
My eddy-cated guess is that this was in fact written by a coder who knows just enough windows to get it done. And then he reboots to linux so he can laugh while the worlds windows users do the dirty work. And linux catches more hell from the nitwits that write the news for the rest of the world because there is no way in hell you can convince most of them that windows is almost a virus all by itself. It just fails the viri test according to their private version of Gorp and that list way back up the logbook here.
Sigh... Such is human nature, the "everyone is guilty except me" syndrome. Only I've lived long enough to know we're all guilty of *something*
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
You'd think someone could build a friggin' slightly stronger tuner for a TV!
Tv tuners today are "state of the art" except maybe in the 99 dollar specials. To get a usable signal on ears from a full power station 20 miles away, please understand that your rabbit ears are not up sufficiently high to have any effect on the local manmade noises, and the thermal noise thats going to accompany the weak signal.
If you want a decent signal, you are going to have to remove the ears, and place an outdoor antenna at a sufficient height, which will result in a quite a bit stronger signal, and do the reception at a distance that is going to be somewhat removed from most manmade noises, like the computer you are using to post your message. Its not the antenna (rabbit ears vs rooftop) but the signal to noise ratio. Moving 30 feet to get away from local noise can make a heck of a difference, particularly when that 30 feet is up.
Cheers, Gene
Well, for one, I doubt that my posting to slashdot will get me 47 megs of spam in my inbox within a days time. 30.2 megs of which are pecker growers & the rest probably phishers or 419's or yet another copy of the latest windows worm/virus. swen runs to about 15 megs a day by itself. Being a linux user, none of this crap bothers me in the least except the wear and tear on my mouse or finger deleting it. That does have an effect when the fingers running them are arthritic. Repetitive motions and all that crap.
/. poster telling me go fuck off, but thats how discussions are carried on in a free society.
It may also get me a message from some other
Get used to it. Its a fact of life, as I've observed for nearly 70 years. Only the medium delivering the message changes as each new generation of communications gets cheaper by 100x than the last one was.
Cheers, Gene