If a delay of 1 second was required after each failed start attempt, would this make it take so long to roll through the codes as to make it too time consuming to do it? Or maybe after ten failed start attempts, force a 30 second wait?
The "bad guy" may have a laptop with a repurposed GPU just for cracking rolling codes, but if we slow his communication to a drunken stutter, he's going to have to wait a long time before he gets his reward - he'd come out better getting a job and buying the car outright.
I have a HP-CQ56-108WM( Wal-Mart ) bottom of the line laptop, but does what I need. Celeron. 2GB. I get about 6 to 8 honest hours on a 12-cell expanded pack ( 8800 mAH, 3S4P of 18650 cell ).
The saving grace is the batteries are not very expensive ( < $50, Amazon ), and it is easy to swap out a battery pack when I "hibernate" my machine.
The original battery pack that came with the machine had so little battery life that it was next to useless. I ended up repurposing its 18650 cells for other things.
If there is one thing I can say about the batteries, look for the ones made using 18650 cells internally, so if you find yourself having to toss a "bad" battery pack, there are lots of flashlights, head lights, and power converters out there which use 18650 cells on a cell-by-cell basis, letting you repurpose still-good cells in a pack for other things.
Both of you are quite right, as far as the lower frequencies being hard to resolve and knowing where the RF gizmos are.
I would have a hard time resolving anything in the AM band, but having high powered TV or WIFI routers around illuminates the area with known stable frequencies of wavelengths I can more easily resolve the phase differences as the multipath environment changes.
My intended application is a device to track whatever moves outside or inside my house, and make an intelligent decision whether such movement poses a threat. I do not want my system getting all excited over an unannounced trip to the bathroom, but I do want it to let me know if something is meandering about a window, or especially if it goes through a window. At that point, I want my tracker to tell me where this thing is.
It would probably be better to use optical technologies ( motion detector cameras ) for this, but for me, this is kinda a toy curiousity.
Ummm... the government already has this technology. It does not need your WiFi. Any radio or TV station does fine as a signal source to illuminate the area with an RF field.
I am sure you have noticed if you have ever used a rabbit ear TV antenna that your TV became quite sensitive to where people were in the room. Even changing your position on the bed was quite noticeable if you were trying to receive a weak signal.
By using multiple antennas, triangulation, and signal processing to correlate the signal each antenna received, it is quite do-able to triangulate onto anything moving in the RF field, and determine each moving things position, velocity, direction, and acceleration.
This is quite useful for "seeing" what's on the other side of opaque walls. Light does not make it through the wall, but RF does.
Its a fascinating thing to see these things work. I have a hankering to build a 3D version of one being 3D glasses are becoming available that do not require me to lug around a huge display screen.
Thats exactly what I have been expecting. Especially oil.
It puzzles me greatly why oil has not already become a currency and not running up in price far more than gold, because oil appears to be in finite supply, is critical to our way of life, and is consumed for both fuel and food production, while gold ( also a finite supply ) may be pretty to look at and feel, but is not an indispensable consumable.
I know we are playing the fracking card, and have no idea how much gas is down hole. One thing I do know is I pass a fart much faster than I take a crap, or in other words, I get the idea we may be able to make a lot of news by how much BTU/therms/joules per second of natural gas we can get up the hole today, but is that rate sustainable? Or is this nothing more than a bunch of hocking heads manipulating the market?
This whiplashing economy, no one knowing what our true energy/petroleum situation is, and no idea what our bankers are going to do next, has been the ruin of damn near every company that got into alternative energy. I feel we have a dire lack of leadership, and the whole world is basically running on inertia fueled by fiat money. A "faith based" economy, as the religious right would say, but to me its watching a family spend its inheritance on tomfoolery while their infrastructure goes to pot.
It would be interesting if a company named "XB" chemical company was marketing monopersulfate , which is also known as "oxone". "XB oxone" would be a perfectly logical name to call it.
I think in that case, it would be an interesting case to watch Microsoft try to claim domain rights... but from what I see, this is a pure case of domain squatting... just another business model much like tying up real property in order to collect rents, as well as diverting your income stream to something taxed more favorably than earning it. For some reason, our Congress really has something about punishing people's earnings with tax law. Its my belief they are just trying to force everyone onto the government dole.
We have so many laws on the books already, most unenforced, that everyone breaks on a daily basis as a routine part of life.
So you want to make life hard for someone? Just snoop on them and demand the law concerning some trivial thing be enforced. Did you do some home maintenance sans licensed contractor? Having a backyard barbeque? Having a few neighbors over? Are you harboring a stray cat? Did you trap a possom that was messing up your garden and getting to your veggies first? Have a sibling over longer than some HOA spec? Maybe you had a smoke outside - you never know, there may be some law about it.
I for one fear the police state we are evolving to, mostly because our law, like our tax code, is demeaning to a lot of us for the benefit of a few.
Its not like we think our Government wants to spy on us because they think we intend them harm.
I think its more down the line of : You just fixed your patio cover. Did you have a permit to do that (fee)? Did you have it inspected by the city inspector ( another fee ). We need to re-do your property tax!
And gee whiz, what if someone is hanging their wash in the back yard on a clothes line instead of using a dryer!
Sounds like the same conundrum Microsoft was in regarding Mike Rowe, except this time there is not only exact name spellings involved but also a bit of acrimony.
You were absolutely right... this one was a "3 in 1", which addressed everything. I have no problem with non-disclosure. It was mostly the total ownership of any IP come up with coupled with my attempts to build up "sweat equity" by agreeing to work for low rates that got me. I will work for low wages ( or if any ) just for the exposure to people who may need my services. If I can make the company I am with highly profitable, and they will share, why would I want to leave? But if their idea of loyalty is legal documents, they have obviously never owned a cat. I can tell you he will not care what you signed, even if you did it with a 24 karat gold pen, the cat's not gonna hang around if he's unhappy there.
Then I find out I can not go to work for someone else who may want me? I mean if I am to be made so aware that I am there "at-will", then it goes both ways. I feel that document is one of the best destructors of a sense of loyalty I have ever seen.
I told him I would sign the thing as long as I put one more subject in.... that everything agreed to took place unilaterally, that is the names of the parties could be swapped and the contract would read the same. That led to a lot of vitriol.
As far as I am concerned, this paper has destroyed my illusion that I was working to build a company, rather I now I feel I am a plumber called in to fix the toilet.
And can I be "understanding" and work for less than going wage so money can be freed up to hire my replacement.
He tells me he is looking for someone else for what used to be my desk. Someone who is more of a "manager". I am relegated to a workbench. I cannot do my research there. No place for my books or files. Now, I access the internet mostly at McDonalds. I could be working on lithium battery chargers for him, power converters, inductive tap switchers, refrigeration systems, and here I am whining about some lopsided loyalty document on a laptop in a fast food joint.... while businessmen go to the government saying people aren't available.
There comes a point where its no longer work... its prostitution.
And I feel I am just being used.
I felt small companies would be immune to this kind of stuff, as it is so destructive to morale. Having to sign a document acknowledging how "at will" I am and how everything I have tried to build up with them is lost. I wonder why they call it a "loyalty pledge", to me it was only an acknowledgement of how replaceable I am and how futile it would be to try to build anything here.
I honestly do not know what to make of this. I have just done my state and federal tax. I owed the feds nothing. I owed the state $57. I do contract engineering work in things like analog and microprocessor control.
I have been working with one small company trying to build it up. I have been working there for six months now, and have been paid a little over $2000. Just yesterday the owner gave me an agreement (NDA) he wanted me to sign, which transferred any and all IP I come with to the company along with a commitment from me I will not work for any of his customers or competitors for 24 months after termination.
I refused to sign the damned thing.
It read like a prenup, making sure no alimony can be claimed, yet commitment not to take another partner for two years assured through legal means..
My sentiments are that any obligation to him cease along with any obligation he has to pay me if this is indeed the case of a true "at will" legal environment. If he wants my continued obeyance of something after termination, it is my belief he should also be obligated to reimburse me for the opportunity cost I forfeited to obey his wish.
I realize my Congress is not there to help me, even though they are there in full if I should succeed in making a taxable income. They will shut down Napster if a business claims they are violating copyright, They will shut down online pharmacies if they go around regional pricing algorithms set by the drug companies, but they will also hold lawful offshore tax havens. The wonders of a lobbied congress.
I do not know what to do, but from all I see, it is pointless to try to do anything at this stage of the game. I have a few more years to go before I am on full social security. I feel foolish trying to invest my savings on trying to maintain employability by agreeing to every pre-nup out there, agreeing to give the businessman all of any IP I come up with, and gracefully accept "at will" termination when I have given all I have.
This software does have its faults, as it is hindering the posting of links by some of our most informative posters. A blogsite's "good folk" need to be whitelisted so they can post links unhindered. More often than not, the most informative content of a post is a link.
Anyone else having a blogsite overrun with crap might want to look into this. I do not think its the ultimate solution, but its a start.
I am all for holding the credit reporting agencies liable for reporting *correct* data.
If I have something, say - a car, and unknown to me, my brake system was in error, and as a result someone else suffered a loss, am I liable? I would say I am. Criminally liable? I would not think so, but still I feel I am responsible for the loss to the other party.
If I knew the brake system was in error, yet I continued to drive the car, should I then be criminally responsible for my damages to others? I would think so, not much different from my driving with cognitive error from drugs or alcohol.
My own feeling is if anyone is reporting on my reputation, I have a right to get a verbatim copy of whatever they are reporting to anyone else. I feel I should have a right to challenge any item on that report, and they should have to either prove it or remove it. Immediately. If this report is changed as result of the challenge, retractions should be issued to anyone receiving the challenged data.
RIAA lobbied Congress for hefty fines for violating their copyrights be issued personally; I would like to see the responsible person for issuing erroneous credit report also take personal responsibility for its accuracy. That would insure a registered letter sent to the company regarding a defamation issue is taken seriously, just as the RIAA has lobbied to make their copyright violation letter be taken seriously.
To me, an individual's career is a helluva lot more serious than a copied song, but does our Congress think so? This is the kind of things voters should see when the red, white, and blue bunting is out is which Congressmen will go to bat for them, and which ones simply cozy up to the lobbyist.
I used to go through 500MB easily in one surfing session before NoScript. Webmasters using modern tools think nothing of sending you whatever you will accept, such as a ten megabyte video streaming file to open up and play on the side as an ad for cars or some movie trailer...
Once people begin being charged for this, they are apt to adopt technologies which block ads, and webmasters-paid by the ad transmitted-will do all in their power to send anything only after they have confirmed the ad streams are transferring. Many business sites have already adopted such technology, and they will be very expensive to visit.
I would almost like to see NoScript start flashing a dollar sign next to sites which need to be enabled. Then load the executive computers with NoScript so the executives who hired the webmaster will see what their customers are seeing. One of the biggest problems we have had on the internet is the executives are generally running on high-speed local networks using a monolithic browsing system and do not get a true "customer experience" when visiting their own site.
But it can also be argued that the CEO of large corporations time is too valuable to be wasted having a customer experience.
I wonder if the next big wave of lawsuits will be over people "stealing" content from the web because they adopted ad-refusal technologies.
I have already lived long enough to see lawsuits where unauthorized access to as little as a song invoked thousands of dollars in legal fees, while tax havens specifically crafted to avoid tax collections, operating in the Caribbean and Indonesian islands, continue to operate. This one-sided law is wearing heavily on my respect for law - its seeming more and more like organized muggery every day.
I would hate to have to build the pressure vessel that would hold a swimming pool full of water. That would be a good question for a pressure vessel engineer that designs reactor vessels for oil refineries. When I see how much CO2 I used to carbonate my bottle of soda pop, I extrapolated the ratio and that is the rough approximation of how much water 20 pounds of CO2 would carbonate.
I guess you could carbonate the pool by drawing a continuous stream of water, pressurizing it to 70-100 PSI, injecting CO2, slowly release the pressure, then release the water back into the pool. It would have to be a cold pool, though... warm water will not carbonate worth a hoot. ( as anyone who has left a carbonated beverage at room temperature can attest to ). Basically, you have just made a huge soda fountain.
Incidentally, CO2 is not the only gas that dissolves in cold water. Methane will too. Forms something called "Clathrates". Methane Hydrate crystals. Burning rocks. One can find these in deepwater cold areas and amongst permafrost. One of the fears of climatic scientists is that as the earth warms up, these clathrates will lose the methane back to a gas which will accelerate the greenhouse process. I understand the Japanese are already going for clathrate mining to fuel their industry.
It never hurts to know how to use commonly available everyday items for other purposes.
I highly envied MacGyver for his insight to use what he had.
Slashdot is one of my choice reads because a lot of you guys here post extremely insightful observations. Sometimes I have to read through a lot of chaff to get to the gems, but some of those gems are real winners.
I find it quite interesting you are repurposing tampons as a dessicant. Thanks! I have had problems with water in the wrong place in some of my electronic stuff. I had been using cloth bags filled with minute rice. I will get a box of these and experiment.
You ain't kidding about the air compressor. Mine is so oily it makes a mess to "clean" anything with it, but the pneumatic tools it was designed to power love the oil in the airstream. Its often the only lubrication they get.
My favorite cleaning tool is the 20-pound cylinder of CO2 and regulator I bought primarily to carbonate home made soda pop. I used a standard stainless-steel screw-in tire valve mounted in the cap of a PET 2-liter soda bottle as a carbonation vessel. 70 PSI. The tire fitting also lets me fill car, bike, and other tires from the cylinder. A modified basketball needle ( end ground off ) lets me direct a concentrated flow of 70PSI CO2 to clean out electronic things, and it does a damm good job.
You get a LOT of CO2 for your buck. CO2 is a liquid in the state it is sold. By my calculations, I bought enough CO2 to carbonate a swimming pool full of water. That's several years worth of soda-pop for me.
I paid around $14 for 20 pounds of it ( not including the tank ). Contaminant-free CO2. From what I understand, the companies out there are condensing this from CO2 rich sources. If I did not buy any, it just gets released into the air anyway, so whether or not I pay them to condense some for me makes no difference in the grand scheme of things. Now, if I had bought freon for this purpose, I would be making a market for a deliberately manufactured gas currently suspected of causing destruction of the ozone layer. For my purposes, the CO2 works every bit as good.
Do it outside.
You don't want to risk a CO2 leak in the shop. Its quite an asphyxiant, and there is a lot of gas by volume in a cylinder ( the cylinder is full of liquid CO2 at around 500 to 1500 psi depending on temperature ).
You can get CO2 at welding supply shops, as welders like to use this stuff to keep oxygen away from their welds ( especially around things like fuel tanks. A fuel tank purged with CO2 during a nearby weld is a helluva lot safer to weld around... ).
I think its great to try to head off malicious code as best one can, however some crap always seems to sneak in and there is a lot of ignorance out there on how to deal with it.
Case in point - I have been hit with some system anomaly I have no idea what it is. I note I am having a helluva lot of internet activity as reported by Resource Monitor and WireShark. I have NO internet applications running. I note everything is being routed through a process "svchost.exe". So what's going on? I run Windows Defender, and the TDSS rootkit detector and nothing seems amiss, but still what's taking up all my cpu cycles, memory, and substantial bandwidth? Why is wmpnetwk and wmpnscfg having internet activity when I do not have windows media player or any browser object open?
Its times like this I wish I could show a judge what kind of insecurity we face when we have no idea of what is going through our system. For all I know, some joker has uploaded some sort of rogue code to me which has me proxy servering for him. I keep seeing here on Slashdot where the immense financial resources of the media companies are being used to hound little guys into the ground. I would love to see some judges themselves witness the frustration of seeing unknown stuff streaming through their machine, helpless to stop it, then rule that until software vendors start releasing truly trusted code, its gonna take a lot more than just proving the content routed through an IP address to prove a copyright infringement case. Vectoring the immense financial strength of media giants to encourage secure computing platforms would go a long way to evolving trusted computing platforms.
Only God and the entity who designed the code running in my machine knows what is in those packets streaming in and out of my machine. I am not sufficiently trained to do deep packet inspection with WireShark to know what is in those packets. All I know is they are going to my local router address and it seems to be forwarding them somehow.
In all likelihood, this is nothing more than some tunneling protocol put in from Microsoft for their software to phone home on... but I do not know that for sure.
I do not like being ignorant, but more and more law is being passed to keep people ignorant under the guise of copyright protection.
I guess I rue the days of working on my simple little car - that is when something goes wrong, its quite obvious, just fix it, and go on.
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If a delay of 1 second was required after each failed start attempt, would this make it take so long to roll through the codes as to make it too time consuming to do it? Or maybe after ten failed start attempts, force a 30 second wait?
The "bad guy" may have a laptop with a repurposed GPU just for cracking rolling codes, but if we slow his communication to a drunken stutter, he's going to have to wait a long time before he gets his reward - he'd come out better getting a job and buying the car outright.
Another data point for comparison.
I have a HP-CQ56-108WM( Wal-Mart ) bottom of the line laptop, but does what I need. Celeron. 2GB. I get about 6 to 8 honest hours on a 12-cell expanded pack ( 8800 mAH, 3S4P of 18650 cell ).
The saving grace is the batteries are not very expensive ( < $50, Amazon ), and it is easy to swap out a battery pack when I "hibernate" my machine.
The original battery pack that came with the machine had so little battery life that it was next to useless. I ended up repurposing its 18650 cells for other things.
If there is one thing I can say about the batteries, look for the ones made using 18650 cells internally, so if you find yourself having to toss a "bad" battery pack, there are lots of flashlights, head lights, and power converters out there which use 18650 cells on a cell-by-cell basis, letting you repurpose still-good cells in a pack for other things.
Both of you are quite right, as far as the lower frequencies being hard to resolve and knowing where the RF gizmos are.
I would have a hard time resolving anything in the AM band, but having high powered TV or WIFI routers around illuminates the area with known stable frequencies of wavelengths I can more easily resolve the phase differences as the multipath environment changes.
My intended application is a device to track whatever moves outside or inside my house, and make an intelligent decision whether such movement poses a threat. I do not want my system getting all excited over an unannounced trip to the bathroom, but I do want it to let me know if something is meandering about a window, or especially if it goes through a window. At that point, I want my tracker to tell me where this thing is.
It would probably be better to use optical technologies ( motion detector cameras ) for this, but for me, this is kinda a toy curiousity.
Ummm... the government already has this technology. It does not need your WiFi. Any radio or TV station does fine as a signal source to illuminate the area with an RF field.
I am sure you have noticed if you have ever used a rabbit ear TV antenna that your TV became quite sensitive to where people were in the room. Even changing your position on the bed was quite noticeable if you were trying to receive a weak signal.
By using multiple antennas, triangulation, and signal processing to correlate the signal each antenna received, it is quite do-able to triangulate onto anything moving in the RF field, and determine each moving things position, velocity, direction, and acceleration.
This is quite useful for "seeing" what's on the other side of opaque walls. Light does not make it through the wall, but RF does.
Its a fascinating thing to see these things work. I have a hankering to build a 3D version of one being 3D glasses are becoming available that do not require me to lug around a huge display screen.
Rudimentary ones can be built with little more than the business end of the 10.525 GHz microwave source commonly used for supermarket door sensors.
Thats exactly what I have been expecting. Especially oil.
It puzzles me greatly why oil has not already become a currency and not running up in price far more than gold, because oil appears to be in finite supply, is critical to our way of life, and is consumed for both fuel and food production, while gold ( also a finite supply ) may be pretty to look at and feel, but is not an indispensable consumable.
I know we are playing the fracking card, and have no idea how much gas is down hole. One thing I do know is I pass a fart much faster than I take a crap, or in other words, I get the idea we may be able to make a lot of news by how much BTU/therms/joules per second of natural gas we can get up the hole today, but is that rate sustainable? Or is this nothing more than a bunch of hocking heads manipulating the market?
This whiplashing economy, no one knowing what our true energy/petroleum situation is, and no idea what our bankers are going to do next, has been the ruin of damn near every company that got into alternative energy. I feel we have a dire lack of leadership, and the whole world is basically running on inertia fueled by fiat money. A "faith based" economy, as the religious right would say, but to me its watching a family spend its inheritance on tomfoolery while their infrastructure goes to pot.
It would be interesting if a company named "XB" chemical company was marketing monopersulfate , which is also known as "oxone". "XB oxone" would be a perfectly logical name to call it.
I think in that case, it would be an interesting case to watch Microsoft try to claim domain rights... but from what I see, this is a pure case of domain squatting... just another business model much like tying up real property in order to collect rents, as well as diverting your income stream to something taxed more favorably than earning it. For some reason, our Congress really has something about punishing people's earnings with tax law. Its my belief they are just trying to force everyone onto the government dole.
That is my first concern. If they eat wood, its bad news... really bad news. If they eat other bugs, I am gonna leave them alone.
If they like termites, where can I get some?
Your second paragraph nailed it.
We have so many laws on the books already, most unenforced, that everyone breaks on a daily basis as a routine part of life.
So you want to make life hard for someone? Just snoop on them and demand the law concerning some trivial thing be enforced. Did you do some home maintenance sans licensed contractor? Having a backyard barbeque? Having a few neighbors over? Are you harboring a stray cat? Did you trap a possom that was messing up your garden and getting to your veggies first? Have a sibling over longer than some HOA spec? Maybe you had a smoke outside - you never know, there may be some law about it.
I for one fear the police state we are evolving to, mostly because our law, like our tax code, is demeaning to a lot of us for the benefit of a few.
Its not like we think our Government wants to spy on us because they think we intend them harm.
I think its more down the line of : You just fixed your patio cover. Did you have a permit to do that (fee)? Did you have it inspected by the city inspector ( another fee ). We need to re-do your property tax!
And gee whiz, what if someone is hanging their wash in the back yard on a clothes line instead of using a dryer!
http://www.aliexpress.com/item/Presell-Teclast-G18-8-dual-camera-tablet-pc-with-3G-SIM-card-slot-GPS-bluetooth-MTK8377/750423859.html
Willard?
Sounds like the same conundrum Microsoft was in regarding Mike Rowe, except this time there is not only exact name spellings involved but also a bit of acrimony.
Thanks for the advice, Jane.
You were absolutely right... this one was a "3 in 1", which addressed everything. I have no problem with non-disclosure. It was mostly the total ownership of any IP come up with coupled with my attempts to build up "sweat equity" by agreeing to work for low rates that got me. I will work for low wages ( or if any ) just for the exposure to people who may need my services. If I can make the company I am with highly profitable, and they will share, why would I want to leave? But if their idea of loyalty is legal documents, they have obviously never owned a cat. I can tell you he will not care what you signed, even if you did it with a 24 karat gold pen, the cat's not gonna hang around if he's unhappy there.
Then I find out I can not go to work for someone else who may want me? I mean if I am to be made so aware that I am there "at-will", then it goes both ways. I feel that document is one of the best destructors of a sense of loyalty I have ever seen.
I told him I would sign the thing as long as I put one more subject in.... that everything agreed to took place unilaterally, that is the names of the parties could be swapped and the contract would read the same. That led to a lot of vitriol.
As far as I am concerned, this paper has destroyed my illusion that I was working to build a company, rather I now I feel I am a plumber called in to fix the toilet.
And can I be "understanding" and work for less than going wage so money can be freed up to hire my replacement.
He tells me he is looking for someone else for what used to be my desk. Someone who is more of a "manager". I am relegated to a workbench. I cannot do my research there. No place for my books or files. Now, I access the internet mostly at McDonalds. I could be working on lithium battery chargers for him, power converters, inductive tap switchers, refrigeration systems, and here I am whining about some lopsided loyalty document on a laptop in a fast food joint.... while businessmen go to the government saying people aren't available.
There comes a point where its no longer work... its prostitution.
And I feel I am just being used. I felt small companies would be immune to this kind of stuff, as it is so destructive to morale. Having to sign a document acknowledging how "at will" I am and how everything I have tried to build up with them is lost. I wonder why they call it a "loyalty pledge", to me it was only an acknowledgement of how replaceable I am and how futile it would be to try to build anything here.
I honestly do not know what to make of this. I have just done my state and federal tax. I owed the feds nothing. I owed the state $57. I do contract engineering work in things like analog and microprocessor control.
I have been working with one small company trying to build it up. I have been working there for six months now, and have been paid a little over $2000. Just yesterday the owner gave me an agreement (NDA) he wanted me to sign, which transferred any and all IP I come with to the company along with a commitment from me I will not work for any of his customers or competitors for 24 months after termination.
I refused to sign the damned thing.
It read like a prenup, making sure no alimony can be claimed, yet commitment not to take another partner for two years assured through legal means..
My sentiments are that any obligation to him cease along with any obligation he has to pay me if this is indeed the case of a true "at will" legal environment. If he wants my continued obeyance of something after termination, it is my belief he should also be obligated to reimburse me for the opportunity cost I forfeited to obey his wish.
I realize my Congress is not there to help me, even though they are there in full if I should succeed in making a taxable income. They will shut down Napster if a business claims they are violating copyright, They will shut down online pharmacies if they go around regional pricing algorithms set by the drug companies, but they will also hold lawful offshore tax havens. The wonders of a lobbied congress.
I do not know what to do, but from all I see, it is pointless to try to do anything at this stage of the game. I have a few more years to go before I am on full social security. I feel foolish trying to invest my savings on trying to maintain employability by agreeing to every pre-nup out there, agreeing to give the businessman all of any IP I come up with, and gracefully accept "at will" termination when I have given all I have.
Another board I frequent, using the Drupal blogging software, is currently being overwhelmed with spam.
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Our beloved webmaster is experimenting with Mollum spam retarding software
This software does have its faults, as it is hindering the posting of links by some of our most informative posters. A blogsite's "good folk" need to be whitelisted so they can post links unhindered. More often than not, the most informative content of a post is a link.
Anyone else having a blogsite overrun with crap might want to look into this. I do not think its the ultimate solution, but its a start.
My observation is the people who work for the TSA are from a class of people that have been picked on their whole lives.
Our government has empowered these folks to give someone else hell for a while if they want to.
I am all for holding the credit reporting agencies liable for reporting *correct* data.
If I have something, say - a car, and unknown to me, my brake system was in error, and as a result someone else suffered a loss, am I liable? I would say I am. Criminally liable? I would not think so, but still I feel I am responsible for the loss to the other party.
If I knew the brake system was in error, yet I continued to drive the car, should I then be criminally responsible for my damages to others? I would think so, not much different from my driving with cognitive error from drugs or alcohol.
My own feeling is if anyone is reporting on my reputation, I have a right to get a verbatim copy of whatever they are reporting to anyone else. I feel I should have a right to challenge any item on that report, and they should have to either prove it or remove it. Immediately. If this report is changed as result of the challenge, retractions should be issued to anyone receiving the challenged data.
RIAA lobbied Congress for hefty fines for violating their copyrights be issued personally; I would like to see the responsible person for issuing erroneous credit report also take personal responsibility for its accuracy. That would insure a registered letter sent to the company regarding a defamation issue is taken seriously, just as the RIAA has lobbied to make their copyright violation letter be taken seriously.
To me, an individual's career is a helluva lot more serious than a copied song, but does our Congress think so? This is the kind of things voters should see when the red, white, and blue bunting is out is which Congressmen will go to bat for them, and which ones simply cozy up to the lobbyist.
And how do you TAX something that you do not and can not control?
I used to go through 500MB easily in one surfing session before NoScript. Webmasters using modern tools think nothing of sending you whatever you will accept, such as a ten megabyte video streaming file to open up and play on the side as an ad for cars or some movie trailer...
Once people begin being charged for this, they are apt to adopt technologies which block ads, and webmasters-paid by the ad transmitted-will do all in their power to send anything only after they have confirmed the ad streams are transferring. Many business sites have already adopted such technology, and they will be very expensive to visit.
I would almost like to see NoScript start flashing a dollar sign next to sites which need to be enabled. Then load the executive computers with NoScript so the executives who hired the webmaster will see what their customers are seeing. One of the biggest problems we have had on the internet is the executives are generally running on high-speed local networks using a monolithic browsing system and do not get a true "customer experience" when visiting their own site.
But it can also be argued that the CEO of large corporations time is too valuable to be wasted having a customer experience.
I wonder if the next big wave of lawsuits will be over people "stealing" content from the web because they adopted ad-refusal technologies.
I have already lived long enough to see lawsuits where unauthorized access to as little as a song invoked thousands of dollars in legal fees, while tax havens specifically crafted to avoid tax collections, operating in the Caribbean and Indonesian islands, continue to operate. This one-sided law is wearing heavily on my respect for law - its seeming more and more like organized muggery every day.
I would hate to have to build the pressure vessel that would hold a swimming pool full of water. That would be a good question for a pressure vessel engineer that designs reactor vessels for oil refineries. When I see how much CO2 I used to carbonate my bottle of soda pop, I extrapolated the ratio and that is the rough approximation of how much water 20 pounds of CO2 would carbonate.
I guess you could carbonate the pool by drawing a continuous stream of water, pressurizing it to 70-100 PSI, injecting CO2, slowly release the pressure, then release the water back into the pool. It would have to be a cold pool, though... warm water will not carbonate worth a hoot. ( as anyone who has left a carbonated beverage at room temperature can attest to ). Basically, you have just made a huge soda fountain.
Incidentally, CO2 is not the only gas that dissolves in cold water. Methane will too. Forms something called "Clathrates". Methane Hydrate crystals. Burning rocks. One can find these in deepwater cold areas and amongst permafrost. One of the fears of climatic scientists is that as the earth warms up, these clathrates will lose the methane back to a gas which will accelerate the greenhouse process. I understand the Japanese are already going for clathrate mining to fuel their industry.
It never hurts to know how to use commonly available everyday items for other purposes.
I highly envied MacGyver for his insight to use what he had.
Slashdot is one of my choice reads because a lot of you guys here post extremely insightful observations. Sometimes I have to read through a lot of chaff to get to the gems, but some of those gems are real winners.
I find it quite interesting you are repurposing tampons as a dessicant. Thanks! I have had problems with water in the wrong place in some of my electronic stuff. I had been using cloth bags filled with minute rice. I will get a box of these and experiment.
Posts like yours is why I read Slashdot.
You ain't kidding about the air compressor. Mine is so oily it makes a mess to "clean" anything with it, but the pneumatic tools it was designed to power love the oil in the airstream. Its often the only lubrication they get.
My favorite cleaning tool is the 20-pound cylinder of CO2 and regulator I bought primarily to carbonate home made soda pop. I used a standard stainless-steel screw-in tire valve mounted in the cap of a PET 2-liter soda bottle as a carbonation vessel. 70 PSI. The tire fitting also lets me fill car, bike, and other tires from the cylinder. A modified basketball needle ( end ground off ) lets me direct a concentrated flow of 70PSI CO2 to clean out electronic things, and it does a damm good job.
You get a LOT of CO2 for your buck. CO2 is a liquid in the state it is sold. By my calculations, I bought enough CO2 to carbonate a swimming pool full of water. That's several years worth of soda-pop for me.
I paid around $14 for 20 pounds of it ( not including the tank ). Contaminant-free CO2. From what I understand, the companies out there are condensing this from CO2 rich sources. If I did not buy any, it just gets released into the air anyway, so whether or not I pay them to condense some for me makes no difference in the grand scheme of things. Now, if I had bought freon for this purpose, I would be making a market for a deliberately manufactured gas currently suspected of causing destruction of the ozone layer. For my purposes, the CO2 works every bit as good.
Do it outside.
You don't want to risk a CO2 leak in the shop. Its quite an asphyxiant, and there is a lot of gas by volume in a cylinder ( the cylinder is full of liquid CO2 at around 500 to 1500 psi depending on temperature ).
You can get CO2 at welding supply shops, as welders like to use this stuff to keep oxygen away from their welds ( especially around things like fuel tanks. A fuel tank purged with CO2 during a nearby weld is a helluva lot safer to weld around... ).
I think its great to try to head off malicious code as best one can, however some crap always seems to sneak in and there is a lot of ignorance out there on how to deal with it.
Case in point - I have been hit with some system anomaly I have no idea what it is. I note I am having a helluva lot of internet activity as reported by Resource Monitor and WireShark. I have NO internet applications running. I note everything is being routed through a process "svchost.exe". So what's going on? I run Windows Defender, and the TDSS rootkit detector and nothing seems amiss, but still what's taking up all my cpu cycles, memory, and substantial bandwidth? Why is wmpnetwk and wmpnscfg having internet activity when I do not have windows media player or any browser object open?
Its times like this I wish I could show a judge what kind of insecurity we face when we have no idea of what is going through our system. For all I know, some joker has uploaded some sort of rogue code to me which has me proxy servering for him. I keep seeing here on Slashdot where the immense financial resources of the media companies are being used to hound little guys into the ground. I would love to see some judges themselves witness the frustration of seeing unknown stuff streaming through their machine, helpless to stop it, then rule that until software vendors start releasing truly trusted code, its gonna take a lot more than just proving the content routed through an IP address to prove a copyright infringement case. Vectoring the immense financial strength of media giants to encourage secure computing platforms would go a long way to evolving trusted computing platforms.
Only God and the entity who designed the code running in my machine knows what is in those packets streaming in and out of my machine. I am not sufficiently trained to do deep packet inspection with WireShark to know what is in those packets. All I know is they are going to my local router address and it seems to be forwarding them somehow.
In all likelihood, this is nothing more than some tunneling protocol put in from Microsoft for their software to phone home on... but I do not know that for sure.
I do not like being ignorant, but more and more law is being passed to keep people ignorant under the guise of copyright protection.
I guess I rue the days of working on my simple little car - that is when something goes wrong, its quite obvious, just fix it, and go on.
I do not think you understood what Russotto was referring to...
"Some of his battles, though successful, cost him heavy losses, from which the term "Pyrrhic victory" was coined".
I thank Russotto for presenting such a fine example of what is meant by that phrase.