Skype is dying. Their reluctance to play nicely with everyone else in the VoIP market (i.e., Asterisk) is their undoing, and their arrogance (disguising the code against standard debugging tools!) is breathtaking. You can't be in the communications business and refuse to communicate.
The moment someone releases a suitably blingy IAX software phone client that Windows-using chavs can download to say "am I bovvered, though, she was dissin' me bigtime, innit" to their mates across the street is the moment Skype lose the reset of whatever little relevance they ever had.
IAX is the alternative. The Inter-Asterisk eXchange protocol. It is an open standard; the "reference implementation" is the GPL version of Asterisk.
There are many software telephones supporting IAX, and many telephone companies around the world offering IAX-to-POTS gateways (and the reverse; often with non-geographic, "low rate" STD codes for a monthly fee or "high rate" STD codes for nothing [the calling party pays]).
You can link proprietary code (such as the nVidious driver) to GPL code (such as the Linux kernel) -- that is an example of what Copyright law calls Fair Dealing or Fair Use.
What you cannot do is distribute the two together, because the GPL then requires you to do something that the proprietary licence does not allow.
You only need a grid-tie inverter in one of two sets of circumstances:
If you plan to export electricity
If you don't plan to generate enough to service all your needs and still require back-up power from the mains.
Grid-tie inverters need type-approval, which is part of what makes them expensive. If you just want 230 volts and 50 cycles a second, and you don't care much whether your crests and troughs align precisely with the local electricity board's crests and troughs, then just use an old UPS (or several). These can be had dirt-cheap when the old batteries are no longer capable of holding a charge, but your local scrap metal merchant will buy them off you for the lead they contain. It's simple to modify a UPS to make it into a straightforward inverter; all you need to do is disable the charging circuit and trick the mains-sensing circuit so it always converts DC from the batteries into AC at the output (you probably want to leave the low-battery-voltage cutoff in place, though). Just never plugging mains into it might even do all this for you.
Begin by counting your watts, checking the ratings plates on all your appliances. For lighting, you only need something like 42 watts per occupied room (20W in the ceiling rose and perhaps one or two 11W lamps). A refrigerator needs another hundred or so. Water heating, when solar power is not sufficient, probably is still best done by the mains.
Once you have decided what you can safely run from your UPS (and by the way, it's not a bad idea to under-run it: ordinarily, a UPS will only run from batteries until a generator can be plugged in instead of the mains, or for long enough to do a clean shutdown. The real limiting factor is your auxiliary generating capacity) then you can split your circuits as follows.
Install a second consumer unit and two contactors, one of which must be fitted with an auxiliary N/C contact. Wire this auxiliary N/C contact in series with the coil of the other contactor, so only one of the pair can be energised at any time (this gives you, in effect, a big change-over switch). Consumer Unit One feeds your heavy-duty circuits (water heater, shower, cooker and so forth) straight from the incoming supply from the street, and also supplies the inputs of contactor number two (the one) via a suitably-rated MCB. The coil is fed by the aux contact of contactor number one. Consumer Unit Two feeds your lighting circuits and everything else that's to run on locally generated power, from the outputs of the two contactors joined together. The input to contactor number one, and its coil, is fed from the UPS.
When the UPS is running, contactor 1 pulls in and supplies power from the UPS to consumer unit 2. The auxiliary contact in contactor 1 prevents contactor 2 from pulling in. When the UPS is off (perhaps because its batteries have run out of juice), contactor 1 drops out. The coil of contactor 2 is now fed from the mains, via the aux contact in its closed state, and supplies power from the mains to consumer unit 2.
I promise, it will all look much less complicated if you draw a diagram.
By the way, if you have central heating: A water-cooled diesel (i.e., cooking fat) engine can be plumbed in place of (or in series with! The boiler's thermostat will prevent it from firing up as long as the engine is heating the water enough. But if you do this, add a 3-port valve to short-circuit the engine when not running, so it doesn't sink heat from the boiler when that is running. The boiler shouldn't sink too much heat from the engine since its heat exchanger has a lower heat capacity and anyway, you aren't paying for the waste cooking oil) your boiler and used to spin a hefty alternator for battery charging. (Arrange it so the valve is normally short-circuiting the engine, but moves over to allow circulation when the engine is running. Diverter valves only need about 6 watts maximum, so you probably can use a separate, small inverter to power it; note that
Depends who is whose preferred partner. If you submit ripped-off code to the rip-off artist's own preferred partner, you'll have to pay them more to get them to do anything about it than they are paying them.
Example: Suppose I am a malware creator, and I am paying McAfee to turn a blind eye to the malware I create. I copy a piece of malware you wrote. You pass on an example of this to McAfee. They aren't going to do anything about it, unless you pay them more than I am already paying them.
Really, if you follow the money, it's all Microsoft's fault. It was their bad design decisions (i.e. not building-in privilege separation from the ground up, from day one) which led to this situation. Since then, a whole generation of self-taught wannabees with knocked-off copies of Visual Studio (which Microsoft never stopped them from making, probably because "hey, at least they weren't using a competitor's development environment") have been writing applications with no regard for proper techniques. As a result, "legitimate" software has been taking advantage of the exact same bad programming in Windows that allows malware to propagate.
Windows is essentially beyond repair. Bodged-on attempts at artificial privilege separation won't block malware if it's easy to get around them, nor if they have to be turned off to allow "legitimate" software to function. Real, ground-up privilege separation (as found in operating systems which cost much less than Windows, but are not backward-compatible with existing Windows software) will break backward-compatibility with existing Windows software.
The roof was leaking, so we put in a floor drain so the water would have somewhere to go; but the drain got blocked and started to smell, so we installed plug-in air fresheners so we wouldn't have to smell it; but one of our best people was allergic to the air fresheners so we had to let her go, and then they ran out anyway; so we lit a load of joss sticks, but the joss sticks kept setting off the smoke alarms..... and the roof is still leaking!
Well, successful malware authors are already paying bakshish to their "preferred partners" in the anti-malware industry (which is by no means above this sort of thing) in order to allow their product to evade detection by specific products. It's possible that a mere code sample submitted by a rival malware gang would have to be accompanied by a bigger bribe than the original author paid in order to have any effect.
It's the same with taking out a contract for a hit. The person who wants you out of the way pays a hitman to off you, but you can still get to keep your life -- if and only if you pay the hitman more than the original hirer. In fact, pay enough, and when the hirer later meets up discreetly with the hitman to "see the proof that the job was done", he's in for the surprise of his life.....
You need to know what people really mean when they call the police.....
"A man in a black Ford Escort wound his window down and offered to sell me some crack". Translation: I paid some money to a man in a black Ford Escort for some dope, and he drove off laughing.
"They're serving under-age kids in the Lion". Translation: The barmaid in the Lion asked me for ID, which I haven't got because I'm under-age, but she served someone else who is younger than me.
It may well be invalid anyway, if it attempts to diminish your statutory rights (which is illegal: your statutory rights are sacrosanct) and doesn't have a severability clause.
Something will give in 5 ... 4 ... 3 ...
on
EULAs For Malware
·
· Score: 1
Malware creators already have "preferred partners" in the AV industry (i.e., those to whom they are paying cash bribes in order not to have their products detected by that particular brand of AV software) -- don't make the mistake of thinking the anti-malware industry is any less corrupt than the malware industry.
Now, their preferred partners will be offered money to detect certain malware.
It's all going to turn ugly. Very ugly..... I'm just glad my OS of choice is immune by design to the most common forms of malware and I'm smart enough not to fall victim to the rest.
Considering that you can licence Exim 4 (server) and Evolution (client) for an indefinite number of users for £0 which includes full Source Code audit and modification rights, why would anyone use an expensive, proprietary solution?
It just needs to be explicit that the temporary copy made in the memory of the CD player or the computer to play the music does not infringe copyright.
Exactly.
TTBOMK, nobody has ever been sent down for taping LPs to listen in the car (which is what used to be the canonical example; nowadays yes it's more likely to be cdparanoia -B; for i in *wav; do lame -h $i && rm $i; done) -- though a few piracy rings have been busted. OTOH I am sure that more than one villain has been nicked on the strength of evidence uncovered following the execution of a search warrant, authorised on the basis of one or more "illegal" tapes found in his car.
A legal precedent which legalised media-shifting (and it would; there aren't eleven people alive who have never format-shifted) could potentially block all such fishing trips. For this reason alone, it's unlikely to happen.
Note also that at least in the UK, the labels "criminal" and "law-abiding citizen" are generally assigned at an early age and have little-to-no correlation with whether or not you have actually broken any laws.
They were more likely to be using OTP chips for production. These are electrically identical to UV EPROM but are encapsulated in a standard plastic envelope with no glass window, so you can't sun-tan them. You can, however, file off most of the plastic and remove the rest with solvents; or you can wipe them with a suitable gamma or X-ray source. This admittedly is beyond the capabilities of most Fred-in-the-Shed types, but it's genuinely amazing what some Freds keep in their sheds.
You can read them with a standard EPROM programmer..... something like a Dataman S3..... they're probably up to S5 or S6 by now, but the S3 is the one I remember. The S3 also had some built-in RAM with its own power supply, so you could load it up with data and use it in a circuit in place of a real EPROM. Nice hacker tool, back in the days.
Note that if you try to use a standard 2732 or 2716 EPROM in an Atari 2600 cart, the chip enable (on pin 20 -- driven by A12) needs to be inverted. (The OTP parts used by Atari had this inversion logic built in.) Just use a BC547 and a couple of 4k7 resistors (one in series with the base and one as a pull-up from collector to +5V). If it seems a bit temperamental, drop the collector load down to 3k3 or 2k2.
You can use bigger chips eg. 27512 to hold several ROM images -- just attach 4k7 pull-up resistors to each of the high-order address lines, with switches to pull them to 0V.
Carts with ROMs > 4K need some extra logic to switch the high-order address lines, dependent on values being written to some address somewhere. Carts with integral RAMs (yes, they existed; all of them TTBOMK were static RAM which at least makes it simpler, no need for refresh logic..... it'd hafta be async refresh anyway, lovely, there goes your MW radio, unless you pulled some weirdy stunt with a phase-locked loop and gotta watch what you're asking that poxy little PSU for) need the RAM mapping to two distinct address blocks; one for write and one for read, because the R/W line isn't brought out on the 2600's cartridge port.
An exclusive-OR gate is not useful by itself, because there are an equal number of ways of getting a one out of it as a zero.
Any logic function can be built up with just NAND, just NOR, or NOT and either (AND or OR). There's also an odd logic function, BUN (= BUt Not; output is 1 when A=1 and B=0, 0 otherwise) which is sufficient (you can make it into NOT by tying A to logic 1, AND by inverting B or NOR by inverting A). These properties, though, depend on asymmetry in the truth table -- and the EOR function has a highly symmetrical truth table.
I have always used postal orders, made out to CASH, when paying for goods bought from eBay. I feel this is the safest form of payment because of all the gaps in the trail. The seller doesn't need to know any more about me than where to send the goods, and I only need to know where to send the money. The clerk at the post office where I bought the postal order doesn't know where I am going to send it, and once the PO is in the post, there is nothing to link it back to me. The clerk at the post office where the seller cashes the PO doesn't know where it came from; and once the goods are in the post, there is nothing to link them with the seller. If any unauthorised party intercepts either transaction, the recipient can reasonably say they know nothing about it. After all, I have no control over some stranger who decides to put something in an envelope and write my address on it! Sometimes, that level of plausible deniability is very important.
If they start insisting on PayPal, I will cease using eBay. I do not want my transactions monitored so closely, thank you very much. Part of me is even surprised that eBay have not started a delivery company {or bought up an existing one} and started trying to strong-arm people into using that.....
This is no good -- it's been done before. What I really, really want is a real live robot orchestra, all playing actual real full-size instruments, and with some kind of wireless interface for uploading MIDI files. And the robots should have some form of vision system, so that they can be conducted!
I'd settle for a string quartet first, though.....
I can see the scale on this remote lie detector now..... it would have to have a nice big round dial labelled in words (in big serif type) and a black arrow-tipped pointer pivoted on jewelled bearings which, thanks to a well-crafted damping vane, would sweep smoothly and hardly oscillate at all.....
"TRUE"..... "MILDLY DISINGENUOUS"..... "FIB"..... "STRETCHING CREDULITY"..... "MARKETING"..... "WHOPPER"..... "SOFTWARE MARKETING"..... and in big, red letters over at the far end..... "YOUNG EARTH CREATIONISM"
The second idea (using existing mains wiring in a building to support a network) works well in countries where biphase power is delivered from an individual transformer outside each dwelling, because the transformer blocks the high-frequency carrier used by the ethernet-over-power system.
In countries where triphase power is delivered to each group of three dwellings from a big transformer at the end of the street (so each individual house is on single-phase power) it works reasonably well. The combined inductance of the electricity meter and the length of cable between other houses on the same phase (3 doors in each direction) is weakening the signal just enough to prevent interference. (Also, the chances are good that people in different buildings will have different IP ranges -- it might be fun to try #ping -b 255.255.255.255 sometime, though.)
In countries where triphase power is delivered to each dwelling from a big transformer at the end of the street, and each house is on three-phase power, it may not work at all: adjacent rooms may well be on different phases.
The whole point is that you can't modulate a carrier wave with a frequency greater than half the carrier frequency. And power lines are carrying 50Hz. So the most you could modulate onto a power line would be 25Hz. And since you need two full cycles to transmit a single bit, your maximum bit rate using the 50Hz mains as a carrier would be 12.5 bits per second -- or one megabit per day.
To get more bandwidth, you have to modulate a high-frequency carrier onto the power line first. This gets over the problem that the impedance of all the electricity company's generators in parallel is low enough to annihilate any signal you tried to modulate onto the line; a generator is inductive, so its impedance rises with frequency. But without a properly-matched impedance on the far end, the power lines will act as transmitting antennas. They may not be terribly efficient; but the unwanted RF emissions will be everywhere the power lines run.
Broadband over power lines is an extraordinarily bad idea.
It might just about work in a country where there is no radio or TV broadcasting or mobile telephony to interfere with, and no panic about the effects of stray RF waves on the human body.
"Windows 7 will be a from-the-ground-up packaging of the Windows codebase; partially source, but not binary compatible with previous versions of Windows."
As opposed to GNU/Linux, which already is partially source but not binary compatible with Windows (and almost-fully source compatible with Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, SCO, all the BSDs and to a lesser extent both the VMSes). Linux also has no per-processor or per-user licencing costs, no vendor lock-in, and never will have.
What do you think people are more likely to do, given the choice between (a) spending much money and having almost none of your software from before still work, or (b) spending no money and having almost nothing from before still work?
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Skype is dying. Their reluctance to play nicely with everyone else in the VoIP market (i.e., Asterisk) is their undoing, and their arrogance (disguising the code against standard debugging tools!) is breathtaking. You can't be in the communications business and refuse to communicate.
The moment someone releases a suitably blingy IAX software phone client that Windows-using chavs can download to say "am I bovvered, though, she was dissin' me bigtime, innit" to their mates across the street is the moment Skype lose the reset of whatever little relevance they ever had.
IAX is the alternative. The Inter-Asterisk eXchange protocol. It is an open standard; the "reference implementation" is the GPL version of Asterisk.
There are many software telephones supporting IAX, and many telephone companies around the world offering IAX-to-POTS gateways (and the reverse; often with non-geographic, "low rate" STD codes for a monthly fee or "high rate" STD codes for nothing [the calling party pays]).
You can link proprietary code (such as the nVidious driver) to GPL code (such as the Linux kernel) -- that is an example of what Copyright law calls Fair Dealing or Fair Use.
What you cannot do is distribute the two together, because the GPL then requires you to do something that the proprietary licence does not allow.
Grid-tie inverters need type-approval, which is part of what makes them expensive. If you just want 230 volts and 50 cycles a second, and you don't care much whether your crests and troughs align precisely with the local electricity board's crests and troughs, then just use an old UPS (or several). These can be had dirt-cheap when the old batteries are no longer capable of holding a charge, but your local scrap metal merchant will buy them off you for the lead they contain. It's simple to modify a UPS to make it into a straightforward inverter; all you need to do is disable the charging circuit and trick the mains-sensing circuit so it always converts DC from the batteries into AC at the output (you probably want to leave the low-battery-voltage cutoff in place, though). Just never plugging mains into it might even do all this for you.
Begin by counting your watts, checking the ratings plates on all your appliances. For lighting, you only need something like 42 watts per occupied room (20W in the ceiling rose and perhaps one or two 11W lamps). A refrigerator needs another hundred or so. Water heating, when solar power is not sufficient, probably is still best done by the mains.
Once you have decided what you can safely run from your UPS (and by the way, it's not a bad idea to under-run it: ordinarily, a UPS will only run from batteries until a generator can be plugged in instead of the mains, or for long enough to do a clean shutdown. The real limiting factor is your auxiliary generating capacity) then you can split your circuits as follows.
Install a second consumer unit and two contactors, one of which must be fitted with an auxiliary N/C contact. Wire this auxiliary N/C contact in series with the coil of the other contactor, so only one of the pair can be energised at any time (this gives you, in effect, a big change-over switch). Consumer Unit One feeds your heavy-duty circuits (water heater, shower, cooker and so forth) straight from the incoming supply from the street, and also supplies the inputs of contactor number two (the one) via a suitably-rated MCB. The coil is fed by the aux contact of contactor number one. Consumer Unit Two feeds your lighting circuits and everything else that's to run on locally generated power, from the outputs of the two contactors joined together. The input to contactor number one, and its coil, is fed from the UPS.
When the UPS is running, contactor 1 pulls in and supplies power from the UPS to consumer unit 2. The auxiliary contact in contactor 1 prevents contactor 2 from pulling in. When the UPS is off (perhaps because its batteries have run out of juice), contactor 1 drops out. The coil of contactor 2 is now fed from the mains, via the aux contact in its closed state, and supplies power from the mains to consumer unit 2.
I promise, it will all look much less complicated if you draw a diagram.
By the way, if you have central heating: A water-cooled diesel (i.e., cooking fat) engine can be plumbed in place of (or in series with! The boiler's thermostat will prevent it from firing up as long as the engine is heating the water enough. But if you do this, add a 3-port valve to short-circuit the engine when not running, so it doesn't sink heat from the boiler when that is running. The boiler shouldn't sink too much heat from the engine since its heat exchanger has a lower heat capacity and anyway, you aren't paying for the waste cooking oil) your boiler and used to spin a hefty alternator for battery charging. (Arrange it so the valve is normally short-circuiting the engine, but moves over to allow circulation when the engine is running. Diverter valves only need about 6 watts maximum, so you probably can use a separate, small inverter to power it; note that
Depends who is whose preferred partner. If you submit ripped-off code to the rip-off artist's own preferred partner, you'll have to pay them more to get them to do anything about it than they are paying them.
Example: Suppose I am a malware creator, and I am paying McAfee to turn a blind eye to the malware I create. I copy a piece of malware you wrote. You pass on an example of this to McAfee. They aren't going to do anything about it, unless you pay them more than I am already paying them.
Desperate situations call for desperate remedies.
..... and the roof is still leaking!
Really, if you follow the money, it's all Microsoft's fault. It was their bad design decisions (i.e. not building-in privilege separation from the ground up, from day one) which led to this situation. Since then, a whole generation of self-taught wannabees with knocked-off copies of Visual Studio (which Microsoft never stopped them from making, probably because "hey, at least they weren't using a competitor's development environment") have been writing applications with no regard for proper techniques. As a result, "legitimate" software has been taking advantage of the exact same bad programming in Windows that allows malware to propagate.
Windows is essentially beyond repair. Bodged-on attempts at artificial privilege separation won't block malware if it's easy to get around them, nor if they have to be turned off to allow "legitimate" software to function. Real, ground-up privilege separation (as found in operating systems which cost much less than Windows, but are not backward-compatible with existing Windows software) will break backward-compatibility with existing Windows software.
The roof was leaking, so we put in a floor drain so the water would have somewhere to go; but the drain got blocked and started to smell, so we installed plug-in air fresheners so we wouldn't have to smell it; but one of our best people was allergic to the air fresheners so we had to let her go, and then they ran out anyway; so we lit a load of joss sticks, but the joss sticks kept setting off the smoke alarms
Neither, it's pronounced as though it was four separate letters.
..... as in "evangelism" (from "eu" [= positive] . "angel" [= messenger] . "ism") = spreading good news.
Or you could turn the U into a V
Well, successful malware authors are already paying bakshish to their "preferred partners" in the anti-malware industry (which is by no means above this sort of thing) in order to allow their product to evade detection by specific products. It's possible that a mere code sample submitted by a rival malware gang would have to be accompanied by a bigger bribe than the original author paid in order to have any effect.
.....
It's the same with taking out a contract for a hit. The person who wants you out of the way pays a hitman to off you, but you can still get to keep your life -- if and only if you pay the hitman more than the original hirer. In fact, pay enough, and when the hirer later meets up discreetly with the hitman to "see the proof that the job was done", he's in for the surprise of his life
You need to know what people really mean when they call the police .....
"A man in a black Ford Escort wound his window down and offered to sell me some crack". Translation: I paid some money to a man in a black Ford Escort for some dope, and he drove off laughing.
"They're serving under-age kids in the Lion". Translation: The barmaid in the Lion asked me for ID, which I haven't got because I'm under-age, but she served someone else who is younger than me.
It may well be invalid anyway, if it attempts to diminish your statutory rights (which is illegal: your statutory rights are sacrosanct) and doesn't have a severability clause.
Malware creators already have "preferred partners" in the AV industry (i.e., those to whom they are paying cash bribes in order not to have their products detected by that particular brand of AV software) -- don't make the mistake of thinking the anti-malware industry is any less corrupt than the malware industry.
..... I'm just glad my OS of choice is immune by design to the most common forms of malware and I'm smart enough not to fall victim to the rest.
Now, their preferred partners will be offered money to detect certain malware.
It's all going to turn ugly. Very ugly
Considering that you can licence Exim 4 (server) and Evolution (client) for an indefinite number of users for £0 which includes full Source Code audit and modification rights, why would anyone use an expensive, proprietary solution?
TTBOMK, nobody has ever been sent down for taping LPs to listen in the car (which is what used to be the canonical example; nowadays yes it's more likely to be cdparanoia -B; for i in *wav; do lame -h $i && rm $i; done) -- though a few piracy rings have been busted. OTOH I am sure that more than one villain has been nicked on the strength of evidence uncovered following the execution of a search warrant, authorised on the basis of one or more "illegal" tapes found in his car.
A legal precedent which legalised media-shifting (and it would; there aren't eleven people alive who have never format-shifted) could potentially block all such fishing trips. For this reason alone, it's unlikely to happen.
Note also that at least in the UK, the labels "criminal" and "law-abiding citizen" are generally assigned at an early age and have little-to-no correlation with whether or not you have actually broken any laws.
Since 95% of new music is crap, that probably isn't such a bad thing as you make it out to be.
They were more likely to be using OTP chips for production. These are electrically identical to UV EPROM but are encapsulated in a standard plastic envelope with no glass window, so you can't sun-tan them. You can, however, file off most of the plastic and remove the rest with solvents; or you can wipe them with a suitable gamma or X-ray source. This admittedly is beyond the capabilities of most Fred-in-the-Shed types, but it's genuinely amazing what some Freds keep in their sheds.
You can read them with a standard EPROM programmer ..... something like a Dataman S3 ..... they're probably up to S5 or S6 by now, but the S3 is the one I remember. The S3 also had some built-in RAM with its own power supply, so you could load it up with data and use it in a circuit in place of a real EPROM. Nice hacker tool, back in the days.
..... it'd hafta be async refresh anyway, lovely, there goes your MW radio, unless you pulled some weirdy stunt with a phase-locked loop and gotta watch what you're asking that poxy little PSU for) need the RAM mapping to two distinct address blocks; one for write and one for read, because the R/W line isn't brought out on the 2600's cartridge port.
Note that if you try to use a standard 2732 or 2716 EPROM in an Atari 2600 cart, the chip enable (on pin 20 -- driven by A12) needs to be inverted. (The OTP parts used by Atari had this inversion logic built in.) Just use a BC547 and a couple of 4k7 resistors (one in series with the base and one as a pull-up from collector to +5V). If it seems a bit temperamental, drop the collector load down to 3k3 or 2k2.
You can use bigger chips eg. 27512 to hold several ROM images -- just attach 4k7 pull-up resistors to each of the high-order address lines, with switches to pull them to 0V.
Carts with ROMs > 4K need some extra logic to switch the high-order address lines, dependent on values being written to some address somewhere. Carts with integral RAMs (yes, they existed; all of them TTBOMK were static RAM which at least makes it simpler, no need for refresh logic
An exclusive-OR gate is not useful by itself, because there are an equal number of ways of getting a one out of it as a zero.
Any logic function can be built up with just NAND, just NOR, or NOT and either (AND or OR). There's also an odd logic function, BUN (= BUt Not; output is 1 when A=1 and B=0, 0 otherwise) which is sufficient (you can make it into NOT by tying A to logic 1, AND by inverting B or NOR by inverting A). These properties, though, depend on asymmetry in the truth table -- and the EOR function has a highly symmetrical truth table.
I have always used postal orders, made out to CASH, when paying for goods bought from eBay. I feel this is the safest form of payment because of all the gaps in the trail. The seller doesn't need to know any more about me than where to send the goods, and I only need to know where to send the money. The clerk at the post office where I bought the postal order doesn't know where I am going to send it, and once the PO is in the post, there is nothing to link it back to me. The clerk at the post office where the seller cashes the PO doesn't know where it came from; and once the goods are in the post, there is nothing to link them with the seller. If any unauthorised party intercepts either transaction, the recipient can reasonably say they know nothing about it. After all, I have no control over some stranger who decides to put something in an envelope and write my address on it! Sometimes, that level of plausible deniability is very important.
.....
If they start insisting on PayPal, I will cease using eBay. I do not want my transactions monitored so closely, thank you very much. Part of me is even surprised that eBay have not started a delivery company {or bought up an existing one} and started trying to strong-arm people into using that
This is no good -- it's been done before. What I really, really want is a real live robot orchestra, all playing actual real full-size instruments, and with some kind of wireless interface for uploading MIDI files. And the robots should have some form of vision system, so that they can be conducted!
.....
I'd settle for a string quartet first, though
I can see the scale on this remote lie detector now ..... it would have to have a nice big round dial labelled in words (in big serif type) and a black arrow-tipped pointer pivoted on jewelled bearings which, thanks to a well-crafted damping vane, would sweep smoothly and hardly oscillate at all .....
..... "MILDLY DISINGENUOUS" ..... "FIB" ..... "STRETCHING CREDULITY" ..... "MARKETING" ..... "WHOPPER" ..... "SOFTWARE MARKETING" ..... and in big, red letters over at the far end ..... "YOUNG EARTH CREATIONISM"
"TRUE"
The second idea (using existing mains wiring in a building to support a network) works well in countries where biphase power is delivered from an individual transformer outside each dwelling, because the transformer blocks the high-frequency carrier used by the ethernet-over-power system.
In countries where triphase power is delivered to each group of three dwellings from a big transformer at the end of the street (so each individual house is on single-phase power) it works reasonably well. The combined inductance of the electricity meter and the length of cable between other houses on the same phase (3 doors in each direction) is weakening the signal just enough to prevent interference. (Also, the chances are good that people in different buildings will have different IP ranges -- it might be fun to try #ping -b 255.255.255.255 sometime, though.)
In countries where triphase power is delivered to each dwelling from a big transformer at the end of the street, and each house is on three-phase power, it may not work at all: adjacent rooms may well be on different phases.
The whole point is that you can't modulate a carrier wave with a frequency greater than half the carrier frequency. And power lines are carrying 50Hz. So the most you could modulate onto a power line would be 25Hz. And since you need two full cycles to transmit a single bit, your maximum bit rate using the 50Hz mains as a carrier would be 12.5 bits per second -- or one megabit per day.
To get more bandwidth, you have to modulate a high-frequency carrier onto the power line first. This gets over the problem that the impedance of all the electricity company's generators in parallel is low enough to annihilate any signal you tried to modulate onto the line; a generator is inductive, so its impedance rises with frequency. But without a properly-matched impedance on the far end, the power lines will act as transmitting antennas. They may not be terribly efficient; but the unwanted RF emissions will be everywhere the power lines run.
Broadband over power lines is an extraordinarily bad idea.
It might just about work in a country where there is no radio or TV broadcasting or mobile telephony to interfere with, and no panic about the effects of stray RF waves on the human body.
But can you run MinGW under WINE?
What do you think people are more likely to do, given the choice between (a) spending much money and having almost none of your software from before still work, or (b) spending no money and having almost nothing from before still work?