Well, it looks like the 'Justice' system is no longer about 'innocent until proven guilty.' In fact, it's looking more like guilty of your crime, and several others, until who-knows-when. You're going to have to prove there was malicious intent to lock this guy up. And even then, not the PATRIOT act, oh please not the PATRIOT act. Like was said, criminal mischief would be more accurate. His intent seems noncriminal, just stupid, shining a laser on aircraft. Well, if stupidity were a crime, much of the country could be locked up. There was a definite danger, as is often the effect of stupidity, but already on this board I've seen this guy labeled as an attempted murderer. That's a possibility. But it seems a little harsh to judge his intent without having any idea what it actually was, or even an examination. That sort of judgement sounds vaguely like the press rap and charges filed against him. This seems to fall more into the 'don't fire guns into the air' that gets spread around at New Year's and such. You shouldn't have to tell anybody. But people are stupid, so you do. Frankly, the danger posed by guns in the air seems to supercede the danger of lasers in the air, what with decompression, fuel tanks, etc. Ahh, witch-hunting. We are now a much more paranoid nation. I may have said too much, and I meant no offense, but maybe it will be the Thought Police at my door next. Terrorist-sympathetic message board postings will not be tolerated by the regime!
See http://www.usfirst.org/ for FIRST Robotics, a nationwide (possibly larger) scale robotics competition with a new theme each year. Students and mentors build full size (130-ish pound) robots to complete a specific task (more accurately, play a specific game). My school is team 422, the Mech Techs, and we are already excited about the robotics season coming up in January. We are also trying to secure funding (entry fees run high) but it is absolutely worth it.
I take a list of HTTP port 80 proxies, Firefox, several 64k, 4k, and 256b demoscene demos (i.e. Farbrausch), copies of 7-zip and UPX, a hex editor, SectorSpy, another data recovery tool,a couple of alternative file explorers, Dr. Delete and DSdel for deleting files, puTTY, a bunch of NirSoft apps, Media Player Classic, Paint Shop Pro 6, a ramdrive app, some process and services viewers, some gimmicky little password finders/revealers (i.e. stores password viewer and some asterisk-revealers) various other programs, a directory, and a little tool for changing the resolution through command line (indispensable), as well as a few other porgrams. It fits in around 40 megs, or will after I import my Firefox profile, and get it to run directly from the thumbdrive without creating a mess on the c drive. I plan to put some more stuff on there, but the secret to getting all that stuff into 40 megs is compression. Play around with settings. All the programs are UPX-ed, all the folders/archives are 7-zipped. I may change this later, but it works pretty well for now. (Caveat: Simply 7-zipping an exe will result in a lower filesize than first UPX-ing and then 7-zipping, however, you have to deal with a large decompressed filesize.) Also, remember to delete useless files, like install logs (you won't be uninstalling anything from your thumbdrive) help files (if you don't need them, they can be bulky) etc. Remember to keep a hard copy on your hard drive of the programs you put on your thumbdrive, in case you mess it up, which has happened to me a couple of times. I'll have to watch this thread to see what you guys are putting on yours. I'll be adding more stuff, mine's a 128MB, but I'm trying to pack it as tight as possible.
Seems like enough people are looking for junk on eBay that one could very cheaply dispose of an item there, only need to worry about shipping. Apart from that, there is a chance for a porfit, however, in the event of actual junk, listing fees would quickly bog one down, especially in cases where they have a lot of junk to rid themselves of. Other than that, it's a great idea, but it seems like a bit of an irony that it's offered for free, instead of offering a rebate with a return or something, as with cars, and just about everything else. If it weren't free, we'd see a lot more CRT's in the dumps, poisoning the water, etc. It seems like the program shouldn't be a net cost for the companies involved, if they are actually recycling (as in reusing components) instead of disposing (as in, CRT's in the dump... or in a hazardous materials dump, which would cost more money).
I'm not sure if this would be practical for you, especially considering that small form-factor cases like the iPaq are hard to manuever inside anyway, but there may be a way to rewire the PS/2 port so that it is shorted into thinking that there is a keyboard there. That may be too permanent for you, but I work on a robotics team, and we have some plugs that we have shorted temporarily with a paperclip. That might look a little weird, and isn't necessarily the best or safest idea, but it is dirt cheap. Finding which pins to jam it in would be the hard part, best to check a wiring diagram for PS/2 ports on Google, rather than the ol' guess-and-check on a computer.
Good point. It would have to be choice based, similar to how poeple can choose to donate blood, or in a more extreme case, something like a kidney. You can survive without it, but it is beneficial. Your point also brought up another idea, which is the possibility that these cells may not work outside the mother. In which case, I guess we just have to call the whole thing off. Either way, there will be people for and against it, and though, like you said, it is taking away something beneficial, it's (probably) not 'hurting' anyone, per se, and it might receive more support. It is, though "an improvement but not a replacement" for this ethical delimma.
It seems to me as though this debate could possibly end a long-standing conflict about whether fetuses should or should not be harvested for valuable stem cells, which have various and sundry medical applications. This debate has been similar to abortion, but it seems now as though these cells that are produced might be able to be harvested alone, with no harm to the child, the mother, or the pro-life lobbyists.;) It seems like a bona fide solution which would allow for stem-cell-like research without need to harvest fetuses. The only problem now remaining is how to extract these cells.
Simply outlawing the development of P2P programs seems ridiculous. There are many legal applications for these programs (a la Bittorrent) and crushing their development is not attacking the source of the problem. Programs don't break the law, people break the law. If someone really wants some file, they'll look on IRC or another such service, and get it anyway. This movement seems to be simply attacking casual use further, by making software unavailable. Most casual users have already quit, what with the RIAA scare, and this seems to be trying to (along the 80-20 rule) stop the 80% of the people doing only 20% of the sharing. The 'teaching children to steal' part is funny though. Congress is not just Big Brother anymore, it's also Mommy and Daddy, policing evildoing youngsters and tackiling childrearing themselves.
You could even get a USB enclosure for a hard drive (standard or laptop) and plug it in like that, for pertty cheap. (Dunno if drivers complications might come up.) Or, just stick the hard drive in the laptop. Also, thumbdrives can go up to about 4 gigs for those endowed with $2,000 or so.
Holy crap. Actually, i have to clean out my case. My MX440 SE (PCI) just wet itself. I've heard talk that U3 will want 1 gig of VRAM for full detail, which needless to say, doesn't really exist (for mortal consumers) yet.
After spending a load on a video card for a retrospectively lousy game, a lot of frustration, driver corruption, a necessary reformat, etc, I called Dell tech support. Ow. One guy was able to help me doing a bit of complicated business in the reformat, which I couldn't ahve done myself, but I received answers of: 1. I need to disable onboard video/flash my BIOS to do so 2. I need to re-install my USB drivers (which were shot) 3. A new video card will not work in my system at all. Then I called nVidia. The guy spoke perfect English and had me up in 15 minutes, with it configured as a second display. So there's a happy ending, but I can't say it justified all the suffering in the middle. I'm actually inclined to call nVidia (or the manufacturer) again if and when I upgrade video cards. And not Dell.
I tried to install a PCI video card. (which cost twice as much as the game [Enter the Matrix]that I was buying it to play) My BIOS didn't have an option to shut off onboard video. After installing, I noticed my taskbar had been removed. Undable to retreive it, I reinstalled windows over my old copy. It turns out I'd already corrupted drivers by installing the video cards, and this just made things a lot worse. USB devices, networking, almost everything just quit on me. For a while, that game was, I joked, the only thing on my computer that worked. Thankfully my ASPI layer was in good enough shape to burn my current school project to a CD. Eventually, I backed up onto a stack of CD-R's and reformatted, re-installing. After that, I broke doen and decided to call NVidia's tech support, instead of Dell's, which had told me that I had to disable onboard video, delete my USB drivers, reinstall any various items, reformat, and that it would not work. I spent countless hours trying to work with people with little English training to solve my futile crusade. NVidia's tech support guy had the whole thing done with me in under 30 minutes. (Disable onboard video by configuring it as a separate monitor.) And he spoke English. I also had a nice clean HD to work with. I nearly lost my mind, and I have never been able to recover the scanner drivers I lost in that reformat. But elsewise, my computer works great. In retrospect, the game in question was the most expensive game I ever bought, counting that hardware ($120 in total) and I was, come to think of it, not too impressed. Thankfully, I moved on to other games that can make good use of the card.
I personally own an iPaq, and I'm very happy with it (good price, refurbished off eBay) Complaints = Backlight has a mind of its own, I've hard the stylus latch is not to quality, but I losy my stilii, so no problem. As far as both CF and SD, I have a CF expansion pack and my 3835 has onboard SD. Wi-Fi finder? I really don't know; I haven't tried a Zaurus out. However, my device driver/manager has a signal strength checker bult in, but a utility called WINC is also available; it's more powerful, but costs money, and I'm not sure it would work on a Linux device. As far as the cards are concerned, i use a Pharos 802.11b card thet I found for around $40 on eBay, but most tend to go for more. I've had no problems with it yet. External antenna? Goodness, man get a laptop! Or just move closer to the signal! It's portable! Haha, well I've yet to see one. You'd likely have to mod it yourself, and considering that these are expensive and small, I'm unwilling to try it on mine. Maybe a weekend project? Also, keep in mind that at least one SD WiFi card exists, even a combo with storage, too, but they are very expensive (a little less than I paid for my whole device) na di"m not sure how well it would work. The other disadvantage is thet you'd be hard pressed to find a used one.
Heh, the stsndby for middle and high-school students everywhere... You need a (free) 3rd partymapp for Reverse Polish Notation, but its a good but, and they're good, solid, reliable machines.
I walked into Staples one day, (I'd been wanting some rechargables for a while) and lo and behold, I found a pack of 2 AAs on the opened merchandise shelf for much less than normal, less than $4 at least, possibly much less, I forgot... I don't use a charger; my CD player has a built in charger, as do several devices nowadays. I found these betteries to work very well, and certainly worth what I paid for them. I can't figure out why the person who bought them in the first place returned them... maybe they didn't know that rechargables are sold without a charge in them. Heh; not my problem...
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Well, it looks like the 'Justice' system is no longer about 'innocent until proven guilty.' In fact, it's looking more like guilty of your crime, and several others, until who-knows-when. You're going to have to prove there was malicious intent to lock this guy up. And even then, not the PATRIOT act, oh please not the PATRIOT act. Like was said, criminal mischief would be more accurate. His intent seems noncriminal, just stupid, shining a laser on aircraft. Well, if stupidity were a crime, much of the country could be locked up. There was a definite danger, as is often the effect of stupidity, but already on this board I've seen this guy labeled as an attempted murderer. That's a possibility. But it seems a little harsh to judge his intent without having any idea what it actually was, or even an examination. That sort of judgement sounds vaguely like the press rap and charges filed against him. This seems to fall more into the 'don't fire guns into the air' that gets spread around at New Year's and such. You shouldn't have to tell anybody. But people are stupid, so you do. Frankly, the danger posed by guns in the air seems to supercede the danger of lasers in the air, what with decompression, fuel tanks, etc. Ahh, witch-hunting. We are now a much more paranoid nation. I may have said too much, and I meant no offense, but maybe it will be the Thought Police at my door next. Terrorist-sympathetic message board postings will not be tolerated by the regime!
See http://www.usfirst.org/ for FIRST Robotics, a nationwide (possibly larger) scale robotics competition with a new theme each year. Students and mentors build full size (130-ish pound) robots to complete a specific task (more accurately, play a specific game). My school is team 422, the Mech Techs, and we are already excited about the robotics season coming up in January. We are also trying to secure funding (entry fees run high) but it is absolutely worth it.
I take a list of HTTP port 80 proxies, Firefox, several 64k, 4k, and 256b demoscene demos (i.e. Farbrausch), copies of 7-zip and UPX, a hex editor, SectorSpy, another data recovery tool,a couple of alternative file explorers, Dr. Delete and DSdel for deleting files, puTTY, a bunch of NirSoft apps, Media Player Classic, Paint Shop Pro 6, a ramdrive app, some process and services viewers, some gimmicky little password finders/revealers (i.e. stores password viewer and some asterisk-revealers) various other programs, a directory, and a little tool for changing the resolution through command line (indispensable), as well as a few other porgrams. It fits in around 40 megs, or will after I import my Firefox profile, and get it to run directly from the thumbdrive without creating a mess on the c drive. I plan to put some more stuff on there, but the secret to getting all that stuff into 40 megs is compression. Play around with settings. All the programs are UPX-ed, all the folders/archives are 7-zipped. I may change this later, but it works pretty well for now. (Caveat: Simply 7-zipping an exe will result in a lower filesize than first UPX-ing and then 7-zipping, however, you have to deal with a large decompressed filesize.) Also, remember to delete useless files, like install logs (you won't be uninstalling anything from your thumbdrive) help files (if you don't need them, they can be bulky) etc. Remember to keep a hard copy on your hard drive of the programs you put on your thumbdrive, in case you mess it up, which has happened to me a couple of times. I'll have to watch this thread to see what you guys are putting on yours. I'll be adding more stuff, mine's a 128MB, but I'm trying to pack it as tight as possible.
Imagine, getting a free DVD, download, file, or whatnot in your bottle of milk. Mmm; pasteurized, digitized, 1% milk!
Seems like enough people are looking for junk on eBay that one could very cheaply dispose of an item there, only need to worry about shipping. Apart from that, there is a chance for a porfit, however, in the event of actual junk, listing fees would quickly bog one down, especially in cases where they have a lot of junk to rid themselves of. Other than that, it's a great idea, but it seems like a bit of an irony that it's offered for free, instead of offering a rebate with a return or something, as with cars, and just about everything else. If it weren't free, we'd see a lot more CRT's in the dumps, poisoning the water, etc. It seems like the program shouldn't be a net cost for the companies involved, if they are actually recycling (as in reusing components) instead of disposing (as in, CRT's in the dump... or in a hazardous materials dump, which would cost more money).
I'm not sure if this would be practical for you, especially considering that small form-factor cases like the iPaq are hard to manuever inside anyway, but there may be a way to rewire the PS/2 port so that it is shorted into thinking that there is a keyboard there. That may be too permanent for you, but I work on a robotics team, and we have some plugs that we have shorted temporarily with a paperclip. That might look a little weird, and isn't necessarily the best or safest idea, but it is dirt cheap. Finding which pins to jam it in would be the hard part, best to check a wiring diagram for PS/2 ports on Google, rather than the ol' guess-and-check on a computer.
Good point. It would have to be choice based, similar to how poeple can choose to donate blood, or in a more extreme case, something like a kidney. You can survive without it, but it is beneficial. Your point also brought up another idea, which is the possibility that these cells may not work outside the mother. In which case, I guess we just have to call the whole thing off. Either way, there will be people for and against it, and though, like you said, it is taking away something beneficial, it's (probably) not 'hurting' anyone, per se, and it might receive more support. It is, though "an improvement but not a replacement" for this ethical delimma.
It seems to me as though this debate could possibly end a long-standing conflict about whether fetuses should or should not be harvested for valuable stem cells, which have various and sundry medical applications. This debate has been similar to abortion, but it seems now as though these cells that are produced might be able to be harvested alone, with no harm to the child, the mother, or the pro-life lobbyists. ;) It seems like a bona fide solution which would allow for stem-cell-like research without need to harvest fetuses. The only problem now remaining is how to extract these cells.
Simply outlawing the development of P2P programs seems ridiculous. There are many legal applications for these programs (a la Bittorrent) and crushing their development is not attacking the source of the problem. Programs don't break the law, people break the law. If someone really wants some file, they'll look on IRC or another such service, and get it anyway. This movement seems to be simply attacking casual use further, by making software unavailable. Most casual users have already quit, what with the RIAA scare, and this seems to be trying to (along the 80-20 rule) stop the 80% of the people doing only 20% of the sharing. The 'teaching children to steal' part is funny though. Congress is not just Big Brother anymore, it's also Mommy and Daddy, policing evildoing youngsters and tackiling childrearing themselves.
You could even get a USB enclosure for a hard drive (standard or laptop) and plug it in like that, for pertty cheap. (Dunno if drivers complications might come up.) Or, just stick the hard drive in the laptop. Also, thumbdrives can go up to about 4 gigs for those endowed with $2,000 or so.
Holy crap. Actually, i have to clean out my case. My MX440 SE (PCI) just wet itself. I've heard talk that U3 will want 1 gig of VRAM for full detail, which needless to say, doesn't really exist (for mortal consumers) yet.
After spending a load on a video card for a retrospectively lousy game, a lot of frustration, driver corruption, a necessary reformat, etc, I called Dell tech support. Ow. One guy was able to help me doing a bit of complicated business in the reformat, which I couldn't ahve done myself, but I received answers of:
1. I need to disable onboard video/flash my BIOS to do so
2. I need to re-install my USB drivers (which were shot)
3. A new video card will not work in my system at all.
Then I called nVidia. The guy spoke perfect English and had me up in 15 minutes, with it configured as a second display. So there's a happy ending, but I can't say it justified all the suffering in the middle. I'm actually inclined to call nVidia (or the manufacturer) again if and when I upgrade video cards. And not Dell.
I tried to install a PCI video card. (which cost twice as much as the game [Enter the Matrix]that I was buying it to play) My BIOS didn't have an option to shut off onboard video. After installing, I noticed my taskbar had been removed. Undable to retreive it, I reinstalled windows over my old copy. It turns out I'd already corrupted drivers by installing the video cards, and this just made things a lot worse. USB devices, networking, almost everything just quit on me. For a while, that game was, I joked, the only thing on my computer that worked. Thankfully my ASPI layer was in good enough shape to burn my current school project to a CD. Eventually, I backed up onto a stack of CD-R's and reformatted, re-installing. After that, I broke doen and decided to call NVidia's tech support, instead of Dell's, which had told me that I had to disable onboard video, delete my USB drivers, reinstall any various items, reformat, and that it would not work. I spent countless hours trying to work with people with little English training to solve my futile crusade. NVidia's tech support guy had the whole thing done with me in under 30 minutes. (Disable onboard video by configuring it as a separate monitor.) And he spoke English. I also had a nice clean HD to work with. I nearly lost my mind, and I have never been able to recover the scanner drivers I lost in that reformat. But elsewise, my computer works great. In retrospect, the game in question was the most expensive game I ever bought, counting that hardware ($120 in total) and I was, come to think of it, not too impressed. Thankfully, I moved on to other games that can make good use of the card.
I personally own an iPaq, and I'm very happy with it (good price, refurbished off eBay) Complaints = Backlight has a mind of its own, I've hard the stylus latch is not to quality, but I losy my stilii, so no problem. As far as both CF and SD, I have a CF expansion pack and my 3835 has onboard SD. Wi-Fi finder? I really don't know; I haven't tried a Zaurus out. However, my device driver/manager has a signal strength checker bult in, but a utility called WINC is also available; it's more powerful, but costs money, and I'm not sure it would work on a Linux device. As far as the cards are concerned, i use a Pharos 802.11b card thet I found for around $40 on eBay, but most tend to go for more. I've had no problems with it yet. External antenna? Goodness, man get a laptop! Or just move closer to the signal! It's portable! Haha, well I've yet to see one. You'd likely have to mod it yourself, and considering that these are expensive and small, I'm unwilling to try it on mine. Maybe a weekend project? Also, keep in mind that at least one SD WiFi card exists, even a combo with storage, too, but they are very expensive (a little less than I paid for my whole device) na di"m not sure how well it would work. The other disadvantage is thet you'd be hard pressed to find a used one.
Heh, the stsndby for middle and high-school students everywhere... You need a (free) 3rd partymapp for Reverse Polish Notation, but its a good but, and they're good, solid, reliable machines.
I walked into Staples one day, (I'd been wanting some rechargables for a while) and lo and behold, I found a pack of 2 AAs on the opened merchandise shelf for much less than normal, less than $4 at least, possibly much less, I forgot... I don't use a charger; my CD player has a built in charger, as do several devices nowadays. I found these betteries to work very well, and certainly worth what I paid for them. I can't figure out why the person who bought them in the first place returned them... maybe they didn't know that rechargables are sold without a charge in them. Heh; not my problem...